Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In their wake, we see the disintegration of countries, regions, and communities, and citizens leaving behind their homes and turning into migrants. Such a future is becoming the lot of Tesla and Krleža’s compatriots today. Krleža’s generation had wanted to mobilise citizens to a national development vision and make the attractions of emigration redundant. However, the legitimacy of post-war Yugoslavia was undermined by the scale of citizens becoming foreign guest workers, and Croatia’s legitimacy was founded on reversing these historical patterns of emigration (Salt and Clout 1976: 147–54). Symbolically, the Velebit Mountain region of Tesla’s birth and the migratory corridors between Bosnia and Slovenia are among the areas which the European rewilding movement want re-established as wildernesses. The optimistic Faustian vision of a free land enjoyed by free people has receded in our New Europe. An increasingly marginal migratory existence is now the fate of many across the continent, and newcomers arriving to its shores, pinning their hopes on the past promises of Europe. Even Croatia, as the EU’s newest member is marked by Euro-pessimism (Krastev 2017; Žižek and Horvat 2013).
International development has long been circumscribed by European cultural antipathy towards industrialisation. In the face of this antipathy, there has been a renaissance of economic development in Asia and Africa, suggesting Faust the Developer is active outside Europe. Goethe’s Faust has been reported as a favourite work of the Chinese President Xi Jin Ping. China’s spectacular national industrial development of the recent decades has taken a Faustian industrialising path, ignoring the prevailing international non-industrial development models. This industrial development allowed China and the world to reach key Millennium Development Goals, raising millions more out of poverty than the prevailing international development approaches were achieving (UNDP 2015: 15, 21). China’s economic growth has been a catalyst for growth elsewhere outside of the international sustainable development framework (Sörensen 2010; Lai and Seng 2007). Its Belt and Road Initiative is conceived as a New Silk Road, establishing international commercial land and maritime routes from Asia to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe (Frankopan 2018; O’Trakoun 2018). While facilitating closer relations, the initiative has been accused of being a grand strategy expanding Chinese power with echoes of the European imperial East India companies. For there are strategic implications of foreign infrastructure projects having potential dual security uses (Rolland 2017). China’s economic rise is reshaping the international order, and its expanding economic and political role in Asia and Africa has been greeted ambivalently with accusations of neocolonialism and ‘debt diplomacy’ (Bräutigam 2018; Green 2019). Certainly there are problems with the Chinese Faust the Developer, as with earlier Faustian developments, characterised by ‘pro-growth authoritarianism’ and potential coercive debt restructuring relations (Kwan and Yu 2005; Lai 2010; Wang and Zheng 2013). The Western spectre of a Chinese grand strategy, though, is sometimes overplayed, and reflects West’s own sense of stasis, although China’s position on non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs is weakening (Jones and Zeng 2019; Zou and Jones 2019). Accusations of new colonialism among European development circles do not only concern external exploitation but are also linked to European cultural alienation from its own Faustian industrial modernity. If Faustian enlightened dictatorship is prevailing in Asia, post-Faustian dictatorship prevails in Europe, wary of political and individual freedom in its own way. Today’s Europe is estranged from Faustian ideas of self-determination and freedom from material necessity. Yet there is a new political restlessness in Europe among those frustrated with a stunted puppet condition and the continent’s prevailing political and economic settlement (Anderson 2009; Apeldoorn et al., 2009; Bieler and Morton 2018).
The Faustian spirit and European humanism’s future
Our study offers an account of changing European development and disaster thinking inspired by this key work of European literature. Goethe’s Faust offered a vision of humanity enjoying freedom and prosperity through the transformation of nature. Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air invoked Faust:
to develop a series of visions and paradigms that could enable people to explore their own experience and history in greater detail and depth [… towards writing …] a book that would be open and stay open, a book in which readers would be able to write chapters of their own. (Berman 1988 [1982]: 9)
Taking Goethe’s Faust as its starting point, our study offers some chapters of our own, exploring changing European disaster and development approaches and people’s strivings to be subjects of modernity and secure a home in the world (Berman 1988 [1982]: 5). Ambitious Faustian development visions to eradicate natural disasters have been replaced by anti-Faustian risk cosmopolitanism. Yearning for human freedom is being replaced by scepticism of human freedom, a theme Berman wanted to pursue further (Berman 1988 [1982]: 10). Goethe’s 1774 poem Why was deep insight given to us? feared humans losing meaning in their existence (Goethe 2005: 30–33). If Goethe’s Faust captures the European spirit of earlier centuries, what is the European spirit today and what future does it offer for humanism? This book re-engages with its vision of a establishing a free land and free people towards contributing to rekindling European humanism.
Our approach is loosely ‘understanding which consists in “seeing connections” ’ (Wittgenstein 1953, para 122: 49). We make historical cultural connections to explore the rise of humanist modernity and its demise in Europe. Wittgenstein’s philosophical ‘seeing connections’ was a plea for humanist philosophising and the humanities. His thinking was influenced by Goethe and Spengler’s writings on morphology (Beale 2017: 59–80; Monk 1999). He questioned attempts to model the humanities or government on the natural sciences. The humanities had distinct concerns related to human meaning which the natural sciences could not address. Here we follow what has been described as an interpretivist approach concerned with human meaning, endorsing plural methods and diverse sources of knowledge. In this at least, we sympathise with Mephistopheles’ advice to Faust’s student warning against absolutist theories or methods:
To docket living things past any doubt
You cancel first the living spirit out:
The parts lie in the hollow of your hand,
You only lack the living link you banned.
(Goethe 1808 ‘Faust’s Study’ iii in Wayne 1949: 95)
Our historical interpretivist approach, an approach concerned with cultural meanings and values, addresses the hollowing out of European humanism and humanist modernity (Berman 1988 [1982]: 5). We are interested in how matters crystalised in particular ways eroding humanist belief in human agency and jeopardising people realising a home in the world (Arendt 1953: 78; 1968 [1950]: xv; 1994b: 328–60). Here our approach differs from an influential strand of interpretivism, which is sceptical towards human freedom; emphasises language, culture, environment, and social norms over people; and downgrades individuals as active creators of, and actors in the world. Historical developments and individual acts are not inevitable, and predetermined by certain causes, but contingent upon a range of factors, including the understandings and interpretations of leading actors in the unfolding of events (Jaspers 1997 [1913]: 537–8). Humans escape being imprisoned in life processes wholly determined by biological necessity through their capacity to make things, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition explored (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 236). As toolmakers, humans not only ease their labour and enhance their security but create enduring objects and a humanised world. Yet human labour and human creation require validation that is more than utility; our activity needs to be meaningful. We give value and derive meaning in our lives and communities from the myths or narratives we tell of our hopes and fears, our successes and failures (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 236). Meaningful stories of our words and deeds help us make sense of the course of our lives. Moreover, we have the possibility of history-making, that is, some possibility of acting freely together and acting anew beyond received patterns of behaviour and renewing or establishing new forms of political community. We are not condemned to natural history simply following biological cycles of life and death or closed cycles of violence and revenge, notwithstanding our mortal biological existence (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 9, 96–97). Meaningful individual stories and collective histories give us the courage to act without certainty