VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
391
gets pathological. Colonized nations do need national pride as an incentive
in their struggle for liberation. But once the old colonial bounds have been
broken, civic virtues must be considered as part of the new national ethos.
Otherwise, these countries will continue to experience suicidal adventures
and cyclical waves of patriotic hysteria. This is the type of tribal self-cen–
teredness Eugene Ionesco analyzed in the aftermath of World War
II
when
he wrote that Romania's tragedy had been nationalism.
No term of abuse is sufficient for the promoters of the new mytholo–
gies of envy and ressentiment when it comes to denouncing the evils of
liberal society. Pluralism is by definition a plot allowing the profiteers to
make it under the new regime. Parliamentarism is inept, effete, divisive.
Homogeneity is perveived as a sacred value, and any fragmentation is con–
ducive to defeat. Organic community has been destroyed by the invasion
of bourgeois modernity. The theme is not new. French nationalist writer
Charles Peguy wrote at the beginning of this century: "We'll never tire of
repeating it. All the evil comes from the bourgeoisie. All the aberration, all
the crime. It is the capitalist bourgeoisie which has infected the people.
And it has infected it with a bourgeois and capitalist spirit." Indeed, for
the intruder to be the poisonous factor, the mythological "people" must
be imagined as pure, untouched by the evils of industrial, mercantile civi–
lization.
Language itself corrupts, as Rousseau claimed in his famous dream of
a community stripped of language ("on
chante~a
au lieu de parler"-peo–
pIe will sing instead of speaking). Modernity is noisy, envenomed, corrupt
and corrupting. Bourgeois values, with their soulless, artificial, mechanic
connotations, destroy the Ur-community, the brotherhood of origins.
Nostalgia for the Russian
zadruga
(pre-capitalist agrarian community)
motivates Solzhenitsyn, as much as yearning for village values inspires
nationalists from Serbia, Romania, or Hungary. These myths have accom–
panied the rise of modernity in Europe and elsewhere, but they tend to be
particularly poignant in times of crisis. And the post-communist era is
such a period of fracture, of interruption in the existential cycle of indi–
viduals. Anguish and frustration, malaise and insecurity dominate
existence.
It is like a return to Rousseau 's dream of the perfectly unified com–
munity, in which the individual finds perfect shelter, being finally protected
agains t the pi tfalls of soli tude. Good ins ti tutions, this view holds, are the
ones that allow the ego to lose identity in transcendent collectivity. Once,
such a community had been the "Party" with its "oceanic" mystique of
fraternal solidarity. The Nation, in turn, is the substitute for the total com–
munity, for the lost father 'figure: in the nation one finds solace and
security, a refuge from the vicissitudes of wild competition and ruinous
