Ovidiu łichindeleanu

Decolonizing Eastern Europe: Beyond Internal Critique

Published in Bogdan Ghiu (ed), Performing History, Idea arts + society, Catalogue and Supplement to the
Romanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennial 2011.

The social and cultural history of the "postcommunist transition" has been marked
throughout the region by the return of two dominant phenomena of modernity: capitalism
and coloniality. The fall of the Iron Curtain meant to a significant degree the re-
absorption of the socialist bloc into larger and long-durée structures of world history. In
this sense, the "postcommunist transition" has been a process of structural and segmented
integration of the former socialist bloc into Western or Western-lead formations of
political, economic and military power such as the European Union, World Bank and
IMF, and NATO. Accordingly, I proposed elsewhere conceiving the meaning of
transition as the top-to-bottom alignment of East European governmentality into the order
of Western governmentality, of local economies into the world system of capitalism, and
of local knowledges in the global geopolitics of knowledge, at the cost of the general
population.1
If this is the case, then the possibilities of developing a critical theory of postcommunism
depend logically on movements and critical reflections on capitalism and coloniality,
coming from as different a body of critical theory as Marxian studies and decolonial
thought. Marxism does not suffice to open an option, and neither does postcoloniality, but
both are relevant. However, the power of capital and the coloniality of power took on
specific forms in Eastern Europe, given its recent history of seeking modernity
differently, and such powers were countered during the transition by particular forms of
resistance. Moreover, without giving currency to the ubiquitous theme of the "stolen
revolution", one can argue that the process of transition itself instituted a radical change
in the horizon of expectations, placing in a different frame the historical experience and
aspirations of the popular movements that brought the revolutions of 1989.

1
See also Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, "Towards a Critical Theory of Postcommunism?", Radical Philosophy
#159, 2010, and "Vampires in the Living Room. A View of What Happened to Eastern Europe After 1989,
and Why Real Socialism Still Matters," in Corinne Kumar (ed.), Asking We Walk. The South As New
Political Imaginary, Vol. III, Bangalore: Streelekha 2011.

1
One can thus identify a crucial and unique task for critical post-communist thought and
artistic practices: the continuous public creation of an epistemic space of resistance and
alternatives to both capital and coloniality, articulated from the location of Eastern
Europe, which could be based or could fortify a form of regional internationalism and
solidarity. In other words, I propose a sort of Pascalian wager on the historical experience
of Eastern Europe, by way of a project that gives epistemic dignity to expressions of
resistance and difference towards both capitalism and coloniality. The goal is moving
towards a philosophy of transition, a border epistemology that embraces the specificity of
Eastern Europe as location of thought for critical visions, with the hope that such a space
of criticality will avoid the pitfalls of both internal critiques of Western modernity, and of
externalist critiques of hegemony, imperialism, and domination. Here, the problem with
internal critiques is not as much that they are not right, but of where they stand, when
they are right. To give an example, even in the case of a committed philosopher like
Foucault, one can point to the lack of a theory of resistance complementing his great
studies of power formations; one can also argue that Foucault's model of the specific
intellectual "recognizes structures but fails to confront them."2 An additional and very
different precaution, related to the political potential of internal critiques, can be observed
in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Romania, where prominent anticommunist
dissidents renounced the pursuit of resistance after 1989, becoming supporters or direct
partners of new governmental and capitalist powers. As for externalist or dominationalist
critiques, particularly poignant in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements, my issue
is with the recurrence of a certain failure to recognize the interconnectedness of struggles
and oppressions and the constant fallback to the nation-state as the fundamental
framework of the political. Therefore, the practical issue is not the "abandonment" of
European critiques of Western modernity, and neither the legitimation of some judgment
that everything about Europe is bad, but the ethical concern for speaking truth to power,
articulated here by giving epistemic dignity to a major transformation and considering it
in its own immanence or concrete historical forms.

2
See George Ciccariello-Maher, "European Intellectuals. and Colonial Difference. Césaire and Fanon
beyond Sartre and Foucault," in Jonathan Judaken, ed, Race after Sartre. Antiracism, Africana
Existentialism, Postcolonialism, Albany: State University of New York Press 2008.

2
As Walter Mignolo and other collaborators emphasized, decolonial thought brings a
necessary challenge to contemporary critical social theory: moving from internal critique
– such as it has been practiced in many forms of Marxism, postmodern theory and
poststructuralism, but also in liberal human rights and technocratic feminism – to what
could be called an "actually existing transformative knowledge". To paraphrase one of
Giovanni Arrighi's teachings: internal critique only criticizes the weakness of a certain
power structure: the point, however, is to counter its strength. Thus, the unfolding vision
of decolonial thought is not one of alternative modernities (reaching the same goals
through other means), but of an "other modernity,"3 as it can be glimpsed also from the
World Social Forum slogan, "another world is possible." If Eurocentrism, North-Atlantic
universals and neoliberalism tend to eliminate all options, the horizon of criticism of
decolonial thought is based on the intellectual commitment for a transcultural and
pluritopic ecology of knowledges, and the principle that political resistance needs to
premised on epistemic resistance.
Much in this sense, I propose the elaboration of a critical theory of post-communism at
the intersection of decolonial thought and what I would call epistemic materialism. The
historical experience of actually existing socialism, the revolutions and fall of socialist
regimes, and finally the post-communist transition to capitalism compose such a radical
history of collective transformation and opening of differing paradigms, accompanied by
such quick enclosures of possibilities, that in light of these major changes, the ongoing
and slowly unfolding crisis of the world, together with the political rise of the Global
South, could be seen as an immense and immediate site of opportunity. Instead of seeing
in the new-found postcommunist situation of dependency a throwback to the 1970s, and
thus yet another retrograde and predictable devolution of Eastern Europe, I propose
considering the recent transformations as a movement that raises questions and brings to
visibility crucial directions taken from the 1970s by global capitalism and global political
powers, to the effect of limiting the direct dialogue and relations between socialist and
decolonization movements.

3
Walter Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica: Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y
gramática de la descolonialidad, Ediciones del signo, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2010. See also Walter
Mignolo, "Delinking", Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2-3, March/May 2007, pp. 449-514.

3
However, defining the locality of one's thinking is no easy task. After two decades of
postcommunist transition, "Eastern Europe" is disappearing as a category of analysis,
becoming simply "New Europe", a "part of Europe" or a "semi-periphery" of global
capitalism. Brian Holmes recently deconstructed the binarity of Donald Rumsfeld's
famous distinction between "Old" and "New" Europe, bringing in the same time an
update to Wallerstein's categories of the world-system (core, semi-periphery, periphery):
he proposed conceiving the process of expansion of EU as a new hierarchical distribution
of citizens between Core Europe (Germany, France, etc), New Europe (Poland, Czech
Republic etc.), and Edge Europe (Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey etc).4 In this sense, one can
argue that an integral part in the constitution of the new European identity was assumed
also by Libya, whose new-found postcommunist identity can be glimpsed from Colonel
Gaddaffi's reported words from Rome, on August 30, 2010, about Lybia's role as a
"defense for an advanced and united Europe," a bloc against the "barbaric invasion of
starving and ignorant Africans."5 In direct relation to this, the official disappearance of
borders, as part of the process of EU integration, has also meant the unprecedented rise of
an international web of European policing, a gigantic industry of confinement and control
whose size is visible even in the imposing headquarters of FRONTEX, the European
Union agency for exterior border security, situated not accidentally in Warsaw, Poland.
One can further refine the sense of East European locality by referring, as Marina Gržinić
proposed, to the "former Eastern Europe," namely a region subjected to reduced identity
or epistemic relevance, transformed into a borderland of Europe, or more generally a
borderland of "the Western world,"6 both in the sense of a buffer zone to non-European
territories and as a territory defined by the condition of border-crossing and checking
points. In this sense, one can notice that the differences between New Europe and Edge
Europe are overdetermined by Core Europe.

4
Brian Holmes, " Invisible States. Europe in the Age of Capital Failure," in Simon Sheikh (ed.), Capital (It
Fails Us Now), b_books/NIFCA 2006.
5
Hama Tuma, "Of Gaddafi and Arab racism towards Blacks", The Other Afrik, Friday 3 September 2010.
6
Marina Gržinić, Communication in the workshop Critical and Decolonial Dialogues Across South-North
and East West, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 7-9 July 2010.

4
At the Frontier of Change

In the process of European integration, what actually disappeared is the articulation of

knowledge from a position of non-ethnocentric locality or epistemic autonomy. During
the Cold War, the differences between Western and Eastern Europe referred to two
radically different epistemic spaces, relatively autonomous in their own right, and which
could not be reduced to a difference between nation-states. As opposed to that situation,
the European integration coincides with the tendential reduction of differences to a mode
of colonial difference, which draws distinctions between what is modern and what is non-
modern, resting on the overarching image of thought of Western universality. Simpler
put, in the workings of the postcommunist transition, the European identity of East
Europeans is lesser than the European identity of West Europeans. Against this prejudice,
by articulating knowledge from the location of the European borderland, Eastern Europe
can also be understood as a crucial space of transformations of the meaning of European
identity itself. Thus, contrary to the fears of ethnic-nationalists, who came to fore
throughout the region immediately after 1989, the process of integrating states from
Poland to Bulgaria into the European Union did not shatter as much the nationalist
identity and national symbols, as it did with the regional sense of the former socialist
bloc. After the integration into EU, racist ethnocentrism has been on the rise throughout
Eastern Europe, but instead of being directed against neighbors of different ethnicity, as it
was the case in the 1990s (Romanians vs. Hungarians, Serbs vs. Croats etc.), it currently
tends to be expressed in forms reproducing the global, eurocentric idea of race,7 namely
in expressions of radical disaffection towards African, Asian and Arab peoples and
individuals. Such gestures range from intellectual dismissals of multiculturalism and
political correctness in favor of "objective European values," to blatant offense and
abuse. The negative disposition against the global "non-Europeans" is accompanied in the
public sphere by racist resentment (and policies) against the local Roma people, who are
subject to systematic portrayal, in the postcommunist culture industries, as the local

7
For the idea of race see Aníbal Quijano, "Colonialidad del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina", in
Edgardo Lander (ed.), Colonialidad del Saber, Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires:
CLASCO-UNESCO 2003. Translation in English by Michael Ennis, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism,
and Latin America," Nepantla: Views from South 1.3, 2000, Duke University Press, pp.533-556.

5
model of "non-Europeans."8 These model dialectical images are integral dimensions of
postcommunist racism, that is, of a specific phenomenon situating the emergent
postcommunist middle-class within the global matrix of the coloniality of power.
Fundamental to this construction of white identity is the idea of passing, the assumption
that East-Europeans can "become European" or are "essentially European" because they
can pass as white - as opposed to Roma, blacks or arabs. For East Europeans then,
passing overdetermines integration (which I consider the operative concept of transition),
which means both that local whiteness is continuously subjected to tests of passing, and
that the postcommunist subjective identities are open to experiments of passing.
However, on the dark side of such transformations, postcommunist racism, through its
construction of image of the self, entitlement and the racial Other, provides a particular
sense of the open world for East-Europeans, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, defined by
the idea of social domination at global scale, where the process of "becoming European"
through "integration" is the royal road of subjectivity.
It can be said that a parallel phenomenon traverses Western Europe, where the figure of
the immigrant worker, especially from Eastern Europe or Africa, has emerged during the
postcommunist transition as a category informing the vision of the European Union itself,
as a negative presence which justifies the return to the model of fortress-Europe, to a
Europe of the master/subject relation and of many ethnocentrisms. In this sense, one can
point not only to the rise, during the postcommunist transition, of populist right-wing
politicians in the West, united in their hatred for immigrants (Jean-Marie Le Pen in
France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter in
Belgium, Nick Griffin in England), but also to what Okwui Enwezor called the "official
disappearance of immigrants in Europe from its cultural institutions," as well as the
established policies of "integration" viewing immigrants and native black people as a
"them" who must become "like us," such as the color-blind French modèle d'intégration,
which stresses the individual over community, race or culture, placing thus subjects in

8
For more details see the series of articles on the Romanian online journal Criticatac: Cristina Rat,
"LocuinŃe anti-sociale à la Cluj. Nu se ştie cină dă şi cine primeşte," Criticatac 25 March 2011; Iulia
Haşdeu, " Sexism, rasism, naŃionalism – privire dinspre antropologia feministă", Criticatac 24 February
2011.

6
direct relation with powerful institutional structures.9 The pressure of such policies was
not met without resistance, and one can argue that the French revolts from 2005 were
preceded by the emergence, in the independent pop culture of the 1990s and 2000s, of a
manifold of multiracial political artists such as Islamic Force in Germany, Asian Dub
Foundation in England or La Rumeur in France.
Consequently, the expansion of the European Union with ten new members after 2004, a
collective postcommunist transformation that engaged together Western and Eastern
Europe, and institutionalized the disappearance of the latter, cannot be separated from a
global history of drawing hierarchies based on metonymic distinctions between
"Europeans" and "non-Europeans", understood respectively as "moderns" and
"primitives" who are following the same order of development, but in different rhythms,
either by natural necessity (unfortunate and passive long run) or through political
coercion (willed short run). In this sense, the "integration" of the former socialist bloc
into Europe re-actualized the assumption that "they" must become "like us", or that all
non-European peoples are in a sense pre-European, and brought, in the same time, the
category of the "internal other" to a new level of generality, which justifies the
extraordinary rise of internal security in the order of Western democratic governance.
The same process that transformed Eastern Europe into a borderland of the Western
world, brought also the border within the West, with the effect of heightening internal
security, but also resistance and the consciousness of new enclosures and marginality.

In relation to capitalism, East European governments have engaged after 1989 in a

"catch-up" game with the developed market economies. Capitalist power did not emerge
in the postcommunist transition only as a negative force of violence and repression, but
through spectacle, seduction and the productive colonization of the spheres of social life
and the inner lifeworlds. In the process, Eastern Europe emerged in reality, during the
two decades after 1989, as a new laboratory of neoliberal experiments, including shock
therapy, radical austerity, privatization of commons, flat tax, wage cuts, flexible
employment and forced vacation. Through the reforms of the EuroPact and the Stability

9
Fred Constant, "Talking Race in Color-Blind France: Equality Denied, 'Blackness' Reclaimed", in Darlene
Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, Stephen Small (eds.), Black Europe and the African Diaspora, 148-149.

7
and Growth Pact, some of these ideas are poised to redefine the meaning of the whole
European Union in the summer of 2011.10 The exceptional austerity measures against the
"temporary crisis" could be transformed thus into a permanent basis of economic
governance in EU, and in the process, more European citizens will be accommodated to
precarious conditions hitherto reserved to the immigrant worker and the borderland
European. Such a chain of events would confirm David Harvey's recent thesis on the flow
of capital, according to which capitalism never really resolves its major crises, providing
instead new roles within the system to the determinants of the crisis,11 while also
restating the role of colonial difference as a pillar of historical capitalism. As Salma
James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa have showed already in 1972, the politics of austerity
are based on pushing the exploitation of unpaid or underpaid labor, whether that of
women or immigrant workers or workers beyond the borders of colonial difference. And
indeed, capitalism does not to reduce all forms of labor to the wage-capital relationship,
but on the contrary, is a form of global power that works by integrating completely
different forms of labor, fragmented by imperial, colonial and gender differences. As
Boaventura de Sousa Santos put it, a society is not capitalist because all the social and
economical relations are capitalist, but because the capitalist relations are determining
how the economical and social relations existing in society work.
In this sense, East-Europeans should be understood if they profess a sense of déjà vu
upon hearing pleas for "austerity" and "a return to normal" coming from world leaders,12
as this is all they heard during the postcommunist transition, and even in the decade
before the Revolutions of 1989. In fact, with the global crisis of capitalism which
exploded in 2008, Eastern Europe is confronted with the third depression in three
decades, with barely any period of recovery, after the socialist slump of the 1980s and the
destructive market-reform years of the 1990s.13 Thus, in an ironic twist of the narrative of
transition, it would seem that instead of Easterners catching up with the West,
10
See "Business Against Europe", Corporate Europe Observatory, 23 March 2011.
11
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London: Profile Books 2010.
12
Brian Holmes, "Fault Lines & Subduction Zones: The Slow-Motion Crisis of Global Capital," Occupy
Everything, July 28, 2010.
13
In Romania, according to the very conservative measurements of the World Bank, during the austerity
poverty rose from an estimated 6% of the population in 1987-1988 to 39% in 1993-1995. Victor Axenciuc,
Introducere în istoria economică a României. Epoca modernă și contemporană, Bucharest, Editura
Fundația România de Mâine, 2000. See also World Bank reports on Romania from 1995-1996 retrieved
from http://www-wds.worldbank.org .

8
precariousness has caught up with the Western world. Considering such collective
transformations of Europe during the postcommunist transition, as seen from the
borderland of Eastern Europe, it appears that the struggle against capitalism cannot be
separated from resistances against the coloniality of power.

The Historical Experience of Communism

Eastern Europe is an epistemic borderland between communism and capitalism, and it

was defined as such also prior to 1989, when the state-socialist regimes devised their
policies and five-year plans in order to complete the transition from capitalism to
socialism. In fact, in so far as official ideology goes, no Eastern European socialist
regime ever reached the level of Chapter 40 of the Polecon, the soviet textbook of
Political Economy, namely the transition from socialism to communism. However, after
1989, the fall of the socialist bloc was widely interpreted from Western standpoints as a
proof of the "death of communism" and definitive confirmation that there is only one
option for development: the 1990s were, more so than Thatcher and Reagan's 1980s, the
great years of TINA, There-Is-No-Alternative. It would be hard to find another moment
in history when capitalism was identified with democracy to such an extent.
For leftist thinkers, the only way to keep alive other options, including the "hypothesis of
communism," was to state that whatever happened in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union was not communism, and neither socialism. The predominant views brought up to
date C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya's thesis on state capitalism and the
abandonment of workers' councils. Different forms of the same argument repeated that,
since the workers councils lost control already from 1923, whatever followed in the
Soviet Union and the socialist regimes was basically irrelevant for a positive renewal of
leftist theory. However, a side effect of this direction of criticism, developed in different
directions by theoreticians such as Perry Anderson and Alex Callinicos, was to accept the
idea of failure as a framework and thus to abandon in final instance Eastern Europe as a
valid category of positive analysis. Furthermore, through the incessant efforts of
attaching an appropriate name for the recent history of Eastern Europe (state capitalist

9
regimes, Stalinist socialism, national-communism, centrally-planned economy or even
centrally-managed consumerism etc.), the focus was moved away from the people, and
towards a debate focused on superstructures and arts of governing. After the fall of
socialist regimes and the conservative aftermath of the Revolutions of 1989, the
irrelevance of the experience of Eastern Europe for Marxist, post-Marxist or other form
of critical social theory, in any positive sense, tended to be generally accepted. There is a
big difference in the way in which, for instance, the concept of class has ceased a long
while ago being the master concept of Marxism, but retained great importance in theory
and movements alike, while the unique experience of Eastern Europe ceased being a
reference at all (except as a negative illustration). Whereas the concept was de-
essentialized but kept its weight in connective frameworks such as the analysis of
intersectorial oppressions, the location of experience was simply demoted of epistemic
dignity and abandoned. Could it be that this happened because the locus of enunciation of
most critical social theory is still subject to a logic of discovery rather than connection in
the colonial matrix of power?
Meanwhile, in Romania and other parts of the former socialist bloc, anticommunism
emerged as a dominant and institutionalized cultural ideology of transition. The
postcommunist anticommunism was generally pronounced from the right, ignored leftist
social theories and ideology critiques, but focused equally as much on superstructures
and arts of governing. Thus, the meaning of "ideology" tended to be reduced to the
ideology of the Communist Party (implying that the age of ideologies has ended in the
present), and even oral histories tended to be reduced to histories of government abuse
and representations of totalitarianism. In this sense, one can argue that the established
anticommunism failed as a project of social justice: by defining history through the
experience of trauma, and by accepting that the lives of people were simply "lost" or
"sacrificed", what was actually lost and sacrificed was their epistemic relevance and
dignity. Anticommunism emerged thus in the cultural history of transition as the main
cultural ideology that tried to radically change epistemic references, by reducing the past
to a homogenous totality identified as a bad deviation from the "normal" course of
history. Through the cultural practices of its supporters, anticommunism also assumed a
sort of proto-political role in the postcommunist public sphere, working as a principle for

10
the selection of new cultural elites and thus as a condition of visibility. Anticommunism
was also the main orientation justifying the introduction of a new official history,
sanctioned by state institutions such as the Presidency. Finally, one can understand
anticommunism as the local instantiation and reconnection to the coloniality of power, in
so far as it proposed considering communism as an essentially pre-modern past,14 it
introduced the idea of a lesser humanity of the "communist man"; instituted tribunal-
thought (as in "the condemnation of communism" and "lustration" projects) as the
undisputed way of considering the historical experience of Eastern Europe; and opened
the way for the other two dominant cultural ideologies of transition, Eurocentrism and
Capitalocentrism.
What both Western critics and Eastern anticommunists, either ignored or reduced to a
secondary role, was the actual historical experience of the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Both gestures, from left and right, reproduced thus a central tenet of coloniality: the
historical experience of people is irrelevant. The actual lives of people have been
generally subsumed to negative frameworks of analysis (such as “totalitarianism”),
undermining the epistemic relevance of practices and knowledges emerged in their own
right behind the Iron Curtain as well as during the postcommunist transition.
The historical experience of real socialism then, and not simply Marxism, should be the
point of departure for the development of an epistemic materialism. In fact, this is a way
of answering to Marx's early question: "Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical
needs? It is not enough for thought to strive for realization, reality itself must strive
towards thought."15 The Revolutions of 1989 turned conservative, and the term
"revolution" itself may be contested, but in reality the main forces of revolutionary
pressure have been without doubt the workers from industrialized cities. Outside the
worker movements, it is hard to find "organized resistance", but oral histories abound in
recollections of people who were not resigned to the status quo or intimidated by the
powers, and of real acts of resistance without infrastructure, which cannot be simply
reduced retrospectively to forms of anticommunism or anti-totalitarianism. The regime
may have acted like the owner of production units and labor force, but people developed

14
See Red Tours (2010), film by Joanne Richardson and David Rych.
15
See Karl Marx, Introduction, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843).

11
independently a plethora of non-capitalist forms of economic activity: informal markets
(bazaar, video market etc.), sustainable food and living systems (family and group
gardens), friendship economies, long-term investments (house building and reparation,
etc.), long-term savings, workplace exchange, barter economies of services, collectible
values, gift economies, "gypsy banks", and so on. The immanent field of such alternative
economies cannot be reduced to an undeveloped form of market economy or capitalism,
since they reverse the basic order of institutions of capitalism, subordinating economy to
social life. Similarly, the regime may have reproduced patriarchy, the bourgeois idea of
nuclear family through mass urbanization and absurd reproduction policies, but life in
real socialism abounded in non-bourgeois and non-nuclear forms of socialization and
cultural exchange, of women networks and solidarity collectives that cannot be reduced
to the state/civil society dichotomy. These are just a few examples of concrete forms of
the historical experience of real socialism that have been subject to intense pressures by
the new formations of postcommunist power, being either colonized and/or commodified
(postcommunist anticommunism for resistance, pawnshops and micro-credit banks for
friendship economies etc.), or reduced to forms of non-existence in the postcommunist
transition and annihilated as social practices and basis of cultural memory.
Considering the epistemic dignity of such concrete forms of reality as they strive for
thought in a process of radical transformation is the first step towards a positive epistemic
evaluation of real socialism. At its turn, the latter is vital for achieving a sense of social
justice and a healing reconciliation with the past that includes all its traumas, and which
could offer collective self-confidence and a vision for future transformations. This is the
first condition for a movement beyond internal or reactive critique.
The further development of epistemic materialism is important in a wider sense for the
renewal of critical thought, since an actual transition beyond capitalism and coloniality
can only start from alternative concrete historical experiences, only by considering the
real lives and stories of people as a relevant epistemic site, worthy of an other modernity,
whose sense emerges only in their interconnectedness. Resistance only stems from the
past, and more precisely from the cultural memory of radically different historical
experiences, and real socialism provides an abundance of such instances, which could
only gain from being placed in relation with other global experiences of resistance. This

12
would be the condition for gaining an internationalist and non-ethnocentric sense of
Eastern Europe as a region, beyond paradigms of dependency.
The establishment of anticommunism and the dominant cultural ideologies of transition
gravitated in the direction of capturing, museifying or destroying the cultural memory of
real socialism, leaving people with no other cultural life than the one offered through
television, workplace and the new culture industry. The postcommunist colonization and
capitalization changed minds and bodies, alienated existential territories and shattered the
staying power of local epistemologies. However, there is also a resistant side of
transition. By acquiring a sense of the evolution of concrete forms of resistance and
alternative historical experiences, from real socialism to the postcommunist transition,
one can start glimpsing the real possibilities of decolonizing Eastern Europe. And thus, as
one can already get from this brief coup d'oeil, in spite of the forlorn affection of recent
great transformations, what emerges is an enormously generous field for research,
experimentation and creative change, which opens firstly to perhaps the last remaining
generalist disciplines: philosophy and contemporary arts.

13