József Böröcz: Whitened Histories, Global Colours

Much of conventional social science regularly endows the West, and its key symbol, ‘Europe’, with lofty, indeed supposedly unsurpassable, moral qualities. Empiricist, extreme-idiographic modes of intellectual production—forms of knowledge that present themselves as transparent (i.e., objective and, hence, “scientific”)—are particularly characteristic of western scholarship, because maintaining the stability of such transparency claims requires a power differential in favour of the position from which the supposedly transparent narrator speaks. In contrast, the eastern-south-eastern half of geographical Europe is routinely left out of, tacked on to, or marginalised within, this distinguished “location,” posing a particular set of challenges to the politics of history written from this part of the world.

The end of the geopolitical defeat of state-socialism in Europe has produced a context in which a new, and remarkably vigorous, form of this west-centrism proliferates. This west-struckness whitens east-central and east European history in a triple sense of the word: /1/ It blanks out important elements of the state-socialist experience; /2/ it takes a White position on issues of the socialist revolution, producing at political discourses that are at least as biased as “scientific socialism” of the Red location they aim to “rectify,” and /3/ it inspires an image of humankind as normatively (west) European, i.e., colour-coded as white in the sense of the global whiteness that has dominated the modern world. Any deviation is, hence, typically re-read as insufficient whiteness. As a result of the political power inherent to this move, vast post-state-socialist populations, caught up in the politics of catching up with “real” Europe, try to re-imagine their histories as a carte blanche. This explains much of the general pause about socialism in the eastern buffer zone of NATO, the EU as well as along most other institutions of west European whiteness.

One way out of this morass is to re-think histories of state socialism in this marginalised part of Europe in a global critical frame. This paper proposes a reading of east(-central) European state socialist histories through the lens of three key global concepts: coloniality, empire, and ‘Europe’, and argues that much of the intellectual-political production in this part of the world, and especially the political pseudo-choice of “nationalism vs. liberalism,” can be interpreted as emerging in interaction with those global structures. Furthermore, the paper suggests that /1/ throughout the history of state socialism in eastern Europe, there existed genuinely “left,” non-autocratic, globally inclusive, non-racist critiques of state socialist practices, /2/ these critiques repeatedly manifested themselves in political ideas and movements, and that /3/ the suppression of these critiques has resulted in the current, narrow pseudo-choice set between the nationalist and liberal apologies of the same global capitalist-racist-imperial-patriarchal order.

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