Nationalist Sentimentality: Ideology of the Crowd
- Nationalist Sentimentality: Ideology of the Crowd
Theatre, Nationalism, and Disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia
To begin with, let me say that I do not have any kind of national sentiment. For me the idea of a nation is something abstract because a nation does not have any value in itself. In fact, it is Berdyaev’s idea of nation as a culture which is very close to my understanding of that word. Culture, for me, is self-affirmation and self-confirmation. But since we are speaking here about national sentiments, culture, then, depends on the situation in a given nation. Adam Michnik once said that he has national sentiments only when he is ashamed of what his own nation has done to others. He also said that the day when Warsaw Pact troops entered Prague he was ashamed that he was a Pole. Today, we also have many reasons to be ashamed of what our nations do. We must be ashamed of this madness.
If you see someone inaugurate and defend a policy of the crowd, accept destructive principles, support ideas of revenge, inflame hate against other nations, oppress minorities, call for arrests and lynchings, make calls to arms, endanger the freedom of others, uncritically applaud the “leader”—then, if you are a wise and bright person, you will have to react. As Enzensberger would put it, you will have to ignore the fact that you are a member of that certain nation gone mad. But that is not enough today. The bright and wise minority has to do more today when we see a nationalistic hysteria surround us. And that is not easy at all because if you are in opposition to the governing order and ideology, then you are a good target for the police, for the praetorian journalists, and for the “loyal” citizens. That is to say, you are an excellent target for that homogenous brotherhood, because nationalism is intolerance. . . .
I would rather say that this strange alliance between the bureaucracy and our writers has inaugurated, administered, and enforced the rule of state nationalism. That ideology has not brought any good to any one so far, and I don’t believe it will bring any good to our people now. Nationalism idealizes the nation, creates a false picture of reality, and leads to disaster. . . . Nationalists are in general everywhere unsympathetic, but what horrible creatures they are when we see them as nationalists/communists. Their forthcoming, totalitarian state is not going to be a pleasant place to live in at all. Energy and time will be wasted on inter-ethnic conflicts and confrontations. There is a serious danger of approaching anarchy in [End Page 18] which criminal deeds will be justified and defended as in the national interest, and will be seen as heroic. And that can last for a long time because the ammunition chamber of nationalism is enormous. . . .
I do not dare to predict anything. Intolerance is here among us. It rarely subsides, and very often it is fatal. Are we going to witness days in which people are going to die for their nation, that metaphysical fact—that is something I don’t know at this moment. But I am sure—there is no doubt about it—the reconciliation and healing are going to be very hard, very slow, and very long.
(Excerpted from an interview in the independent
magazine STAV [Standpoint] on April 6, 1990)
Mirko Kovac, novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, was a leading literary figure in the former Yugoslavia. In such acclaimed novels as A Door of the Womb and European Decay he had anticipated the horrors that were to engulf Yugoslavia. As a Croat living in Belgrade, it became impossible for him to stay there after the nationalists took over. Today he lives and writes in Paris.
