Postcolonial Europe

Towards the end of the nineteenth century there appeared in Germany the idea of Mitteleuropa, a concept related in discursive terms to colonial expansionism, infamous in its intentions. It is worth recalling, however, that the word "colony" (and its derivatives) comes from the Latin colonia, where it meant: a peasant enclosure, a settlement, in order to enter later - via the French colon (one who tills the soil, a settler) - eighteenth-century European dictionaries in its current, rather pejorative, and in any case widely disputed meaning. In the discourse of colonial expansionism, however, it retained a certain heroic aura, since it preferred settlers to nomads, those who cultivated anything at all to ignoramuses. The Latin colonia coincides here with the closely related term "culture" (from the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation, husbandry, breeding) in its original, agricultural association with that which is stable,

The omnipresent, although invisible, shadow of empires has undoubtedly left its destructive, pernicious traces not only on the antipodes, but also on Central and Eastern Europe. Insidiously, day after day, it was shaping reactions and attitudes, ways of thinking and of perceiving reality, influencing not only all aspects of daily life, but also morality. The imprint of subjugation has been stamped everywhere on the region and is hard to erase. But can it be described?

Regardless of whether we are dealing with expansionism and exploitation (as in colonialism), or with overcoming their effects (as in postcolonialism), that is with the task of rebuilding of identity, it is politics that decides about culture. We abandoned long ago any illusions, if we ever had them (the philosophers of the Greek polis did not), that thought rules over itself. In the 19th century, Hegel proved that the modern state and its culture are a single entity, and in the 20th. Foucault states even more sharply, that governance (power) is the creator of knowledge. Therefore, there are no problems separate from life, and no writing beyond politics. The most abstract ideas are formulated within the most real of realities, and never without connection to it, even when thinking apparently takes its own course.