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Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Peter S. Rogers and Richard Golsan, University of Nebraska Press, 1999, 229 pp.; $30
The main body of Alain Finkielkraut's book was originally published in French under the title "How Can One Be Croatian?" I am a Croatian. During the war in the former Yugoslavia (1991-95) I was often faced with Finkielkraut's question, almost always only implicitly but nonetheless forcefully. It came in two versions, which together sum up the reaction of many Westerners to the war. The first version: "The whole of Europe is uniting" (my friends from Germany would urge on me), "but Yugoslavia is falling apart because (you) Croatians want to separate from the rest of Yugoslavia." The second version: "I just can't imagine how people can go after each other with so much hatred; they must be possessed by some inexplicable madness!" (which is what I was told by a stranger in a Jacuzzi at an American ski resort after I told him the land of my origin). Croatians are erecting boundaries. Croatians are involved in what amounts to a "pub brawl." How can you, a civilized person living at the end of the twentieth century, consider yourself a Croatian? The main thrust of Finkielkraut's book is to interrogate the questioner, to turn the criticism around. What kind of cultural sensibilities would make one read the struggle of a small people to gain political and economic independence and preserve its cultural identity as a fall into barbarity? Are the sensibilities of the self-satisfied cosmopolitans as humane as they suppose?
Though I continue to be critical of the way in which we Croatians engaged in our struggle for cultural identity and political independence, on the whole, I think that it is a good thing that Croatians and Croatia exist. So I was grateful that Finkielkraut took up our cause from the beginning of the war, long before the barbarity of Milosevic's regime be came patent to everyone. But a defense of Croatia's right to be born is not the primary purpose of these occasional pieces written about various stages of the "Balkan war." By taking up the cause of a small nation, Finkielkraut's aim is to question a dominant form of contemporary cosmopolitanism and the discourse about otherness that accompanies it.
In The Real American Dream (1999) Andrew Delbanco traces the diminution of hope in America from God to nation and finally to the naked self concerned primarily with the gratification of its own desires. Something analogous, argues Finkielkraut, has happened to freedom. The freedom of a citizen with ties to a particular place and time is being replaced by the freedom of a "consumer without qualities," floating with the help of networks of communication above all concrete places and "equally situated in relation to everything." A longer quote from the central chapter entitled "Indifferent Memory" captures well both the nature of "global cosmopolitanism" and its peculiar prejudices:
Modern man is thus a man of the entire world, but this does not mean he has no prejudices. The global village is his village. The videosphere is his fatherland. Detached, at the outset, from his natural surroundings, he tends to naturalize the environment without borders that progress has fashioned for him. Far from opening up his mind, his wings obsess him. Hardwired today as he was rooted, he cannot conceive that one can humanly live outside the networks of communication and consumerism in which he evolves. This is why he looks at the autochthon as a peasant and at this peasant as the bizarre and disturbing reminder of a prehuman species. Since everything, in his view, exists here and now, and since all identities are, under the name of difference, exchangeable, available, and offered for consumerism, people from some other place, the wogs, the 'unhealthy,' are, for him, those who do not play the game of exchange and who claim to be attached to a history, a land, and a community.
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