The Globe of War

Two years ago, we had begun planning special PAJ issues to highlight the contemporary situation of performance and the visual arts in New York and in European culture in its new era of cooperation on the continent. The events of September 11 compelled us to refocus our plans. Now there was an urgency in confronting more profound social and political issues circulating around art and its public and the very meaning of culture in a time of social crisis. How would artists react to this event? What forms of cultural experience would audiences need now? Where would cultural liberalism position itself in the ensuing dialogue?

Since that time world events have taken a tumultuous turn in the response to the Bush administration's declaration of war on Iraq. Not the least among them are the new conflicts with our European allies in the sharp division in attitudes towards the war, reflected in Europe and in America. Donald Rumsfeld created the designation of the "Old Europe" and the "New Europe" in an ironic tactical maneuver. But, as at least one commentator has pointed out, Poland of the New Europe is actually older as a country than Germany of the Old Europe. Isn't it really the case that Bush and his advisers are the Old America?

Beyond the Western frontiers, new political and economic crises and heightened terrorism have cast all current events in a global frame. Everywhere people feel themselves caught in a shifting web of governmental and economic forces beyond their control. Established forms and institutions of cultural life are being transformed, even dismantled, by the juggernaut of the marketplace. Today, the jubilance over the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the heralded Asian economic miracle, and the hoped for settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict have been overshadowed by the ongoing desire to comprehend the horror and violence of the 20th century. We have not yet understood that century and the diabolical complexities of modernity.

World War II and its aftermath are still at the center of contemporary thinking about the human condition. That war continues to serve as a reference point for the acceptance or revulsion of violence in wars elsewhere around the globe. Several recent books have led to reconsiderations of war and its effect on civilian populations and their cultures, indeed the nature of suffering itself, including W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, Günter Grass's new novel Crabwalk, and Susan Sontag's study of the iconography of war and spectatorship, Regarding the Pain of Others. These books have revised long-held positions on war, its victims, and victimizers. In addition, the journalists "embedded" with the troops in Iraq brought the war into real time as it had never before been experienced. And, lastly, the war produced an unusual amount of coverage about the destruction of the cultural legacy of shared human history in the loss of ancient artifacts looted from museums in Baghdad, as Sebald's book had pushed the subject of war to its ecological implications. Other, more political writings, such as Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, offered a blueprint for how the world might be constructed in our immediate future.

Ironically, in 1989, we were preparing an issue of PAJ when the Berlin Wall fell and all of Eastern Europe brought down the Iron Curtain on the Soviet drama. We delayed our issue until we could bring out a special volume (PAJ 35/36) which, alas, featured in boldface on the cover: "The New Europe" and "Marriage of World Cultures." From that vantage point, the world was settling into an optimistic era of international understanding and cooperation. The enormous changes that were ushered in by this historic transformation necessitated rethinking ideas about cultural identity, nationhood, utopia, revolution, democracy, nationalism. Back to back we published that volume...