Goodness is elsewhere: The rule of European difference

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 110-138

  Böröcz, József ^a,b  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b INSTITUTE OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE   (Hungary)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; POLITICAL HISTORY; RACISM;

EURASIA; EUROPE;

EID: 33645016309     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417506000053     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994), 364.
2. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Joan Pinkhaus, trans. (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 2000[1950]), 32.
3. See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, "Hungary," World Report 2001, http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/europe/hungary.html (last viewed 26 Feb. 2002)
4. U.S. Committee for Refugees, Country Report: Hungary, Worldwide Refugee Information, http://www.refugees.org/world/countryrpt/europe/ hungary.html (last viewed 26 Feb. 2002).
5. For the Hungarian original of the Letter, see Appendix 1; for the English translation, see Appendix 2.
6. The debate was initiated by György Péter, "Mai magyarok és mai magyar romák." (Today's Hungarians and today's Hungarian Romanies), Élet és irodalom, 4 Aug. 2001. http://www.es.hu/old/0031/publi.htm (last viewed 20 June 2003).
7. About this, see József Böröcz, "The Fox and the Raven: The European Union and Hungary Renegotiate the Margin of 'Europe," Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, 4 (Oct. 2000): 847-75.
8. In order to avoid the impression of reifying the various regions of Europe as essential, transhistorical facts, I refer to them, contrary to conventional English usage, without capitalising the adjectival part of the expression (e.g., eastern Europe), unless they appear in direct quotations.
9. See József Böröcz, "Dual Dependency and Property Vacuum: Social Change on the State Socialist Semiperiphery," Theory and Society 21 (1992): 77-104.
10. See Mahua Sarkar, "Looking for Feminism," Gender & History 16, 2 (Aug. 2004): 318-33
11. and József Böröcz, "Social Change with Sticky Features: A Central European Critique of Modernizationism," Innovation 10, 2 (1997):161-70.
12. Letter (Appendix 2), my emphasis.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. This is similar to the instance of struggles over the Hindu practice of sati where, as Lata Mani has pointed out, "women in fact became the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated." See Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," in, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 88-126, quote p. 118.
16. As Jerzy Jedlicki argues, this was very much a central theme of the modern history of political ideas in Poland, too (published in English as A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999). Manuela Boatcǎ's perceptive book, From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis: The Romanian Theory of "Forms without Substance" in Light of Modern Debates on Social Change, reveals much the same for Romania (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2003).
17. Appendix 3 presents the Hungarian original of the poem. Given that the literary translations take a number of poetic liberties over the wording of the original, much to my dismay I had to abandon the literary to a literal translation that of course has no literary value or ambition. Throughout the body of the text of this analysis I will use the latter. For a literary translation by Matthew Mead, see Adam Makkai, ed., In Quest of the Miracle Stag. The Poetry of Hungary. (Chicago: Atlantis-Centaur, 1996), 172.
18. The key element is not France per se, but rather western Europe. In some other instances of the idea, Britain plays the same role.
19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
20. See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
21. and Böröcz, "Social Change with Sticky Features."
22. Tarnai Andor (T.A.), "Batsányi János," in, Pándi Pál, szerk., A magyar irodalom története 1772-tol 1848-ig (Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, 1965), 148-62.
23. Of impoverished noble background, Barcsay served, through much of his active life, as an officer in Maria Theresa's Hungarian Guard, stationed in Vienna.
24. Appendix 4 presents the Hungarian original of the poem. For a literary translation into English, by Thomas Kabdebo, Adam Makkai, and Peter Zollmann, see Makkai, op. cit, 153, 154.
25. "The West" as a positive moral entity so deeply penetrates Hungarian intellectual history that even the title of the most important literary journal of the twentieth century - published from 1908 to 1941 - was called Nyugat (=West).
26. R. Radhakrishnan, "Postmodernism and the Rest of the World," in, Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds., The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 37-70, quote p. 55.
27. See the list of signatories in Appendix 2.
28. U.S. Committee for Refugees: Worldwide Refugee Information, http://www.refugees.org/world/countryrpt/europe/france.htm (last viewed 18 Feb. 2002).
29. Magyar Péter és Dobszay János, "Francia menedék zámolyi romáknak," Heti világgazdaság (2001/12, március 24): 7-10, quote p. 8.
30. To be added is that according to a recent report published on the online news service of the Hungarian Lawyers' Forum, by early February 2002, seven of the original petitioners had decided to move to Canada (where they received political asylum), and of the thirty-six still in France, four still had no legal status. http://www.jogiforum.hu/hir/ 101007916781861.php (last viewed 18 Feb. 2002). Since then, Canada has re-introduced a visa obligation for Hungarian citizens, claiming a large number of Romany asylum applications as the sole reason.
31. The refugees left Hungary for Strasbourg on 23 July 2001 (http://roms.acontrecourant.org/chrono-eng.html [last viewed 26 Feb. 2002]).
32. Magyar és Dobszay, op. cit.
33. Http://www.jogiforum.hu/hir/101007916781861.php.
34. World Development Indicators on CD-ROM, 2001 (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2001).
35. In the mid-1990s, France was a host to 170,247 refugees, fewer than. 65 percent of the over 26 million grand total for the world. Source: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Populations of Concern to UNHCR: A Statistical Overview (1997), http://www.unhcr.ch (last viewed 27 Feb. 2002).
36. U.S. Committee for Refugees, op. cit.
37. The rejection was made public in June 2001.
38. "Constitutional Watch: A Country-by-Country Update on Constitutional Politics in Eastern Europe and the Ex-USSR," East European Constitutional Review 10, 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2001), http://www.law.nyu.edu/eecr/vol10num2_3/constitutionwatch/hungary.html (last viewed 27 Feb. 2002)
39. and Hell István és Törzsök Erika: "A zámolyi romák: A Francia Köztársaságtól magyarországi üldöztetésük miatt 2001. Márciusa után politikai menedékjogot nyert roma családokkal kapcsolatos események összefoglalása," Summary prepared by commission from, and publicized on the website of, the European Comparative Minority Research Program Office, October 2001: http://www.eokip.hu/html/hun/pub/muhelytran/hellzamoly.html (last viewed 3 Feb. 2002).
40. Note also that The Court does not reject petitions regarding east European Romanies ab ovo. For instance, in May 2000, it found that the Bulgarian government was "in breach of European Human rights standards" in a case of police brutality against Romanies (http://www.romapage.c3.hu/hir/hiren010.htm [last viewed 27 Feb. 2002]).
41. That Hungary's pending application for full membership in the EU is the background to the drama of the Romanies of Zámoly, of course, re-contextualizes the issue of the organizations thanked by the Letter for their support to the applicants' case. The list includes a number of bona fide human rights and immigrant support networks, but it is at least interesting to see that CGT, France's largest trade union association, is also among the signatories (Hell and Törzsök, op. cit.). Given the hostility with which trade unions within the EU have regarded 'eastern enlargement,' it is plausible to consider the possibility that, in addition perhaps to general concern with the plight of the oppressed and discriminated-against of the world, French trade unions may have supported this cause because they saw it as a possible block, slowing down in Hungary's eventual accession to full membership in the EU.
42. This reference to Hungary's questionable EU-worthiness is that element which elicited the angriest public response to the Letter in Hungary's by-and-large pro-EU public.
43. Synecdoche is that type of metaphors in which the part stands for the whole.
44. For analyses of the synecdoche in which the EU stands for 'Europe' in the context of the EU's official communication, see József Böröcz, "The Fox and the Raven";
45. and József Böröcz, "Introduction: Empire, Coloniality and the 'Eastern Enlargement' of the European Union," in, József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács, eds., The Empire's New Clothes: Unveiling EU-Enlargement, an e-book published by the journal Central Europe Review, 2001: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/eu/Empire.pdf.
46. The basic idea is summarized succinctly by a proud declaration made by a delegate from Spain at a plenary discussion at the 5th Conference of the European Sociological Association, held in Helsinki in 2001: "I am a European because I am a democrat!"
47. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1993.
48. Fabian, op. cit.
49. Op. cit., 11.
50. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1997 (1986-1987), 20.
51. Stuart Hall, "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power," in, Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1995) 184-227, quote p. 189.
52. Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge), 1989, 30.
53. Wolff, op. cit, 356.
54. Ibid., 357.
55. Ibid., 360.
56. Ibid., 358.
57. Maria Todorova, "The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention," Slavic Review 53, 2 (Summer 1994): 453-82
58. and Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
59. Christian Promitzer, "The South Slavs in the Austrian Imagination," in, Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 183-215.
60. Ibid., 194-97.
61. Attila Melegh, "East/West Exclusions and Discourses on Population in the 20th Century," Working Paper on Population, Family and Welfare, no. 3, Demographic Research Institute, Central Statistical Office, Budapest, 2002.
62. Melegh Attila, On the West-East Slope: Globalization, Nationalism, Racism and Discourses on Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005 [forthcoming]),
63. and "A kelet/nyugat lejto"," Élet és irodalom (2003) 47: 17.
64. Kristin Leigh Kopp, Contesting Borders: German Colonial Discourse and the Polish Eastern Territories, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2001 (Ann Arbor: UMI Microform 3019705).
65. Piotr Sztompka, "Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies," Zeitschrift für Soziologie (1993) 2: 85-95.
66. For a detailed demonstration of this, see Böröcz, "The Fox and the Raven";
67. and the studies included in Böröcz and Kovács, op. cit.
68. Christian Promitzer, "The Body of the Other: 'Racial Science' and Ethnic Minorities in the Balkans," paper presented at the conference Third International Conference "Hierarchies and Power in the History of Civilizations," Institute for Civilizational and Regional Studies, Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State Humanities University, 18-21 June 2003.
69. Milica Bakić-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Review 54, 4 (Winter 1995): 917-31.
70. I am indebted to one of this paper's CSSH reviewers for this formulation.
71. Todorova, "The Balkans," 7.
72. This defines the longue-durée, transcendental purpose of the European Union's "eastern enlargement."
73. Political ideologies that have made the non-Indo-European origins of the Hungarian language the basis for a romantic-nostalgic worshipping of the Hungarians' distant, "Asiatic" past have flourished during the right-wing authoritarian period of Hungary's history between the two world wars. Those ideas are, in today's public culture, entirely anathema as they are widely, and correctly, regarded as proto-Fascist idiocies.
74. Etienne Balibar, "Is There a Neo-Racism?" in, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (London, Verso, 1988), 17-28, quote p. 22.
75. Perhaps this is why several of the signatories have indicated their affiliation with west European or North American institutions - Academia Europaea, the Mannheim Opera, the Paris-based Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, the European Romany Rights Centre, or Central European University (an American private university in Budapest).
76. Partha Chatterjee, "Nationalism as a Problem in the History of Political Ideas," in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 1
77. and, The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii-181.
78. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 28. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press) 2000
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. David Scott, "Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places," Inscriptions (1989) 5: 75-84, quote p. 83.
82. Ibid.
83. Scott, op. cit., 81.