To the New Opposition

To my previous and present students,
whose courage exults me.
I am proud that I was lucky
to be your teacher.

Many commentators of March events in Belarus started talking about The Event, which at last happened in Belarus. In other words, they started talking about the end of the era of “bonelessly tolerant locals” (pamiarkounasci tutejsych), about emergence of Politics and Public Area in the country, about the birth of modern Nation. I agree with that. I think March 19-25 started a new count in the history of the country. Something like September 11, only with a different label and contents. The events that happened don’t fit in ordinary political and theoretic schemes, which are still utilized by our analysts and politicians. The Event must, at last, give a start to rethinking our social being, something that I had to say more than once, analyzing Belarusian situation.

Once I have already written about upcoming “social suicide”, which was constructed by those who govern Belarusian society. March 19-25 it happened. The power could offer nothing to outweigh the argument thrown at it by free people – and the government finished itself off, making up a very appropriate metaphor for its demise, just as if it was according to Freud – “a crushing victory”. Likewise, the Belarusian “System of Justice” killed itself: does one really think that these judges can still judge? They are corpses! Belarusian educational system killed itself after taking upon the responsibility of police: what can those professors and doctors teach, after signing false protocols? They are corpses. Belarus according to “Belarusian Ideology” is dead, although it is still moving. It is a zombie; therefore such dead body can bring a lot of harm. I assume, that many people saw one of the most dreadful photographs of March events: lines of black, hidden behind helmets, figures, what do they call them there, OMONovtsy, SOBRovtsy or whatever else. They were brandishing batons. It made an impression as if they were non-humans, who crawled out from another world, filled with some alien purely mechanical force. A masque became a face. They appeared to be strong, while in fact, they were powerless, for they will disappear with the first ray of sun. Like an aspen stake, the strength of spirit, new consciousness, is already prepared. March 25 showed that the plague did not take over the city, after all.

So what really happened during those cold March nights on the Square? Which power became more powerful? What happened, in my opinion, something extremely important – a new political Entity was born, an entity that responds to the needs and tendencies of developing modern global society, or new opposition. I use a term “opposition” not only in a political sense, but as a definition of state of civic consciousness of an individual who belongs to the global world. An man, who takes a critical reflective position toward all sorts of boundaries and limitations, a person who tolerates another person’s difference and is looking for the ways of to build a harmonious life with it, a man who understands that he always has many projections of imagined future, and that we need to combine them, basing on the principle of inclusion, not exclusion. The epoch of the old opposition, which was acting according to usual party schemes of national-bureaucratic establishment, and was guided by such logic went to the so-called elections, is now ended in Belarus. It is the time of birth of New Opposition; it is similar in a way to the new social movements of the last third of 20th century. Those were movements that lead to restructuring of the world. The opposition of the era of free flow of information, mobility, nomadism and Internet, the opposition of wide network society with its diversity of identities that challenge any stupid “governing way”. The Square went beyond all borders, national, linguistic, and other divisions – it went out to the World, and the world recognized it. In it and through it, a new world started to materialize, that world does not form itself in the party meetings, but on the net. New groups were materialized, which were the product of unique worldview. And that is the major work of the modern world. Belarus, although decades later, is finally catching up. Old opposition, as one can see from its reaction, understands badly what to do with it, and again drags its tune about

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The power could offer nothing to outweigh the argument thrown at it by free people

necessity of congresses, meetings etc. It seems that only Aleksandar Milinkievic felt intuitively the change of epochs. Certainly, a net may have a traditional leader. The government does not know what to do with it either, whose “crushing victory” turned out to be a defeat. Revolution, which Belarusian State TV Company was talking about, in fact occurred. It seems the government itself starts realizing that. Isn’t it why an unquestionable victor hid somewhere for a long time “to work with the documents”?

We all need to try think through this phenomenon seriously. Among many reasons is giving this new opposition, or a new nation, a language, or more exactly, to form it, because it is being born today, for example, among the multitude of wonderful narratives of the Square’s events. Reading those texts, I see, how literally we are witnessing the trembling of the traditional social science with its predicates, for new stories are being told, they establish a different world, a world, which consequently will exist instead of the rotten social reality. Belarusian “way”, for which people are nothing more but feeding and copulating creatures (a Marxist rudiment, so to speak), cannot give an appropriate answer to those who question its validity, except for syringes, vodka bottles, porn magazines (a bright symbol of reasoning – naked legs sticking out from the tent, and all that in a freezing night on asphalt) in order to discredit the participants of The Event. A real Society goes into a different dimension.

How to understand this new dimension? For such analysis one needs a text of different genre and volume. Therefore for this discussion I will indicate only one sujet, based on Ulrich Beck. I mean his concept of cosmopolitan society and methodological cosmopolitism.

Cosmopolitization, according to Beck, means inner globalization, globalization that comes out from inside of national societies. It transforms considerably daily consciousness and identity. Everyone who lives here and now truly becomes a world citizen. Global problems, integrates into everyday local experience and “moral daily worlds” of people. All that breaks down traditional social science, which, as a rule, is based on “container like theory of society”, i.e. it interprets society, by essentially, putting it into a “container” of nation-state, which does not allow it to find precise means of description of new reality. Beck calls such approach a “methodological nationalism” with a typical to it “monologue imagination”. Politically that means cramming of any social and political activity into traditional party-state frames that today become more and more washed away. This is the spirit that guides the actions of government and traditional opposition in Belarus, which are rooted exclusively in the formulations of the past, either of the Soviet one, or of nationalistic, or of unconceivable mixture of “Skaryna in St Petersburg” type. This is the source of failure for both projects of constructing of new Belarusian identity, since it was imagined in a way of monologue.

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Those young people, in cold tents, they are the sign of that birth, the declaration that country has future in global world.

Such approach is juxtaposed by Beck with a “methodological cosmopolitism”, which is based on “imagination by way of dialogue”. Under later Beck understands “the clash of cultures and nationalities” inside of every individual’s life. In other words it is an experience of “internationalization within” (??). Dialogue imagination corresponds to existence, in an individual, of life images that compete with one another, which makes it essential to have an ability to compare, to reflect, to think critically, and trying to understand something different. It requires a place for imagining alternative ways of life and alternative rationality, which develops along with pluralization of boundaries. If one uses the language of methodological nationalism the boundaries converge, in the language of methodological cosmopolitism they diverge. Cosmolitism, as Beck supposes, is that one big idea, which substitutes communism and neo-liberalism, which inevitably become past. And what is the most important – cosmopolitan consciousness does not come from the past, but from imagining of the future, common future.

That’s why cosmopolitan social science induces us to put questions differently, regarding those national and local phenomena, which otherwise would not be identified. Then we will not constantly go around the question of language etc., not thinking about us living in an entirely different society, where the most important factor is not a native tongue, but multilingualism. In political dimension it means leaving the boundaries of rigid political divisions. Intuitively, new Belarusian opposition is exactly that phenomenon that started growing from the “bottom”, and expressed modern tendencies of politics by adopting global perspective on the world, freedom, esteem of individual, which are not bonded by linguistic or national frames, i.e. adopting perspective of the future. By being a beginning of cosmopolitan civic society in Belarus it became more understandable to the world, and it will grow in such development. Not incidentally, such consciousness of new opposition, turned out to be a power that despite all efforts of state media, stood out as a source of destroying a zombie consciousness.

According to Beck, one can say, that society becomes cosmopolitan only when, it starts to reason (and to imagine) not only about the past, but strives to understand its place in common collective future. Belarusian society is still just learning to think in such a language. It is yet considerably in the past, whether pre-soviet or soviet. Yet, on the Kastus Kalinouski’s square, despite freezing nights, the sprouts of future consciousness started growing. Those were the sprouts of real nation whose citizens have the sense of dignity.

Those young people, in cold tents, they are the sign of that birth, the declaration that country has future in global world. They did not wait for party midwives; they were born on their own…