ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 1 ARTICLE INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav www.sagepublications.com Volume 13(1): 1–17 DOI: 10.1177/1367877909348537 Consuming European identity The inconspicuous side of consumerism in the EU ● Ksenija Vidmar-Horvat University of Ljubljana, Slovenia ● This article investigates consumerism in post-socialist Slovenia with respect to the formation of the shared European Union (EU) commodity market. It asks how, through forms of consumption, Europe is made present to the EU citizens in the post-socialist states and how political imaginaries of the ‘new Europe’ are being formed. It is argued that consumerism presents a cultural site on which the meaning of citizenship acquires its symbolic positioning. This positioning is then illuminated with respect to the emergence in post-socialist Slovenia of public discourses of ‘two Europes’, ‘two markets’, ‘first- and second-class’ EU citizens, which evolve around the perceptions that, after the two enlargement waves in 2004 and 2007, commodities in the EU differ in their origin of production and quality between the West and the East. The perceptions are linked to memories of socialism. However, this inconspicuous side of consumerism is also discussed as a selective mechanism by which the imagined community of the EU citizens is being constructed. ● ABSTRACT KEYWORDS ● ● post-socialism ● consumerism ● culture Slovenia ● socialism ● EU ● Europe ● identity I want to begin this article with a personal testimony. I live in a small Slovenian town that has witnessed, in the past two decades, an impressive development of shopping centers. Despite the skyrocketing growth of consumers’ meccas at the outskirts of the town – a growth which in fact has made the town the leader in the country in terms of square meters of shopping space per inhabitant – I still prefer to shop in a small store in the vicinity of my home address. In addition to getting easily tired of oversized shopping centers, I appreciate the luxury of 1 ICS348537:Layout 1 2 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 2 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) being able to access my market on foot. Once a month, however, I sit in the car and drive to a more distant shopping mall. There, I pay a visit to a chain drugstore, where I buy only one item, washing powder; if the shelf with the product of my choice is empty, more often than not, I leave the store without buying anything else. The reason for this behavioral disorder in my shopping routine is that the washing powder – which I could buy in any of the other stores, including the little one in my neighborhood – has a label that tells me that the powder was produced in a Western European country. The label glued to the box in other stores lists an Eastern European country as the birthplace of the powder. This peculiar behavior of mine should be of no special scholarly interest if it were not accompanied by a sense of intellectual guilt. That is, the belief lying behind my efforts invested in an otherwise bothersome shopping detour is that the other variants of the same brand fail in quality – not because they were not produced in the West, but because they are produced in a former Eastern bloc country. As hard as it is for one who lectures in critical theory to admit this discriminatory reasoning, the apparent prejudice against the ‘Eastern’ commodities calls for inspection. More so because it surpasses individual idiosyncrasies; I have observed other people reading labels, have shared this attitude with my friends and family, and ever since Slovenia became a member of the European Union (EU) in 2004, the theme of the ‘hidden agenda’ as far as national markets in the shared EU economy are concerned has been a frequently articulated topic of Slovenian public debates. To be sure, reading product labels is not a consumption habit limited to post-socialist cultures. With the growth of ecological awareness, it may become a steady feature of contemporary global ‘geographies of consumption’ (Jackson and Thrift, 1996). Yet, in the contexts of post-Yugoslavian Slovenia, the inspecting practice carries an additional connotation: while the Slovenian consumer may share an ethics of conscientious consumption with other consumers in the EU and beyond, overt demonstrations of responsible citizenship are accompanied also with a less ubiquitous side of cultural ‘readings’. In this article, I argue that the prejudice against the consumer goods produced in Eastern European countries should be read as a site of assertion of European identity, whereby the resistance against buying goods ‘made in Eastern EU’ connotes a form of popular, everyday claim of belonging to the EU: it is a popular political articulation of the resistance to clustering European consumers into different classes of citizens and, by means of segregating markets between the (former) West and the East, reassigning consumers in post-socialism to the category of the ‘other’ (of) Europe. In brief, this article investigates how, through forms of consumption, Europe and European identity are being produced and how, populated with memories of past borders and divisions, Europe is made present through consumer goods to the EU citizens of post-socialist states. More specifically, the article asks how, through inconspicuous sides of consumption, political imaginaries of the ‘new Europe’ are being formed. ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 3 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity European identity between production and consumption In social theory, for some time now, European identity has been conceptualized in ambiguous terms of both impossibility and possibility, as fiction as well as cognitive social reality (Balibar, 2004; Delanty and Rumford, 2005; Morley and Robins, 1996; Pieterse, 1993; Shore, 2000; Stråth, 2002). On the one side of the spectrum of theorization, authors like Anthony Smith and Cris Shore have questioned the feasibility of generating a European identity in a sense that will be meaningful to the peoples of Europe. In Smith’s view, such a project has a weak potency of mobilizing people’s identifications, in particular due to fact that, in contrast to national collectivity, a supranational community lacks a shared cultural fiber, as embroiled in memories or a sense of continuity between generations (Smith, 1992). Cris Shore (2000, 2006), too, has shared the view that, as a politically manufactured project, European identity can hardly yield a new, supranational state of belonging. In contrast to both, Gerard Delanty claims that Europe does have a cultural existence. The problem with the view that argues to the contrary, Delanty writes in his critique of Shore, is that it is ‘based on a limited view of cultural identity as a community of fate and thus it is easy to prove it does not exist beyond national contexts’ (2005: 409). In fact, Delanty goes on to argue: ‘Europeanization has now reached [this] critical threshold of constituting itself through the articulation of a cultural model’ (Delanty, 2005: 410; see also Delanty and Rumford, 2005). Moreover, it is even possible to say that this model is borne on the development of a new ethics of commemoration. In Delanty’s words, in today’s Europe, ‘an ethics of memory has become a major site of public discourse on the nature of peoplehood’ (2005: 410). While a main concern of social theory of Europeanization has been how European identity can be produced, the theoretical concern of this article is rather how European identity has been consumed. As can be seen from the arguments above, memory figures as an important and decisive part of the success of the politics of European identity. However, in social theory and political discourse alike, the pair European identity/memory is still often conceived and/or refuted predominantly in terms of the (im)possibility of reiterating the modern elite project and transcending it on supranational European levels; popular experiences and everyday life remain largely invisible in their potency to create ‘banal’ (Billig, 1996) as well as more epic modes of supranational claims. Yet, an examination of mass consumption in a post-socialist EU member state may reveal that memory plays an important role in the construction of European identity, while, figuratively and literally, this identity is also being consumed. As will be shown below, consumption practices of the transition society have been imprinted with memories, biographic and collective, of consumerism in socialism. These include recollections of shortages of goods, consumer encounters with the West in the form of tourist shopping (Švab, 2002), illegal trafficking – and intimate semi-ecstatic states when holding in hand a pair of 3 ICS348537:Layout 1 4 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 4 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) jeans ‘made in Italy’ after safely passing through the customs control. Especially for the generation that began its consumer biography under socialism, fantasies, expectations, disappointments and, again, new dreams underlie consumer experiences in post-socialist Slovenia. Concurrent with this contemporary and, one might argue, culturally unique flow of dream worlds of mass consumption (Williams, 1991) in post-socialism, another economy of desire is being articulated whereby memory plays a role also in how the imagined community of Europeans is being formed within the context of post-Cold War Europe. Indeed, it is intriguing that, given its mass dimensions of a daily practice, consumerism is a neglected site of public and theoretical discussion on integration and Europeanization. In cultural theory, consumerism and practices of shopping have long been recognized as carrying complex social, political and cultural dimensions, ranging from emotional dynamics of everyday private and family life (Miller, 1998) to complex individual and group identity formations. Feminist research, in particular, has brought to attention the manifold ways in which sexual and gender identities are formed, as Williamson so aptly describes in her discussion of her daily dressing routines (see Williamson, 1986, quoted in Miller et al., 1998); anthropological accounts of ‘protest shopping’, as discussed, for instance, by Mary Douglas, provide an ample argument against the notion of ‘mindless consumerism’ and can also be used to argue for an understanding of the political meaning of ‘people’s tastes and preferences’ (Miller et al., 1998: 23) as far as consumption is concerned. This article, however, as the title suggests, returns to an earlier account of the social significance of consumerism, namely, to Veblen’s theory of ‘conspicuous consumption’. In his Theory of the Leisure Class (1994 [1899]), Veblen writes about vicarious consumption, shared across classes, which derives its pattern of imitation from the ‘leisure class scheme of life’, and of which accumulation of wealth in commodities stands as a visible marker and the norm of reputability. In contrast to Veblen’s emphasis on conspicuousness, this analysis investigates the inconspicuous sites of consumption; in particular, it raises questions about the invisible symbolic contents contained within the goods on the transnational markets of the EU. The mode of emulation invokes Veblen’s observation how, in the context of US society at the turn of the century, the source of fascination lay in Western Europe and the cultural styles of its aristocracies. While today’s cultural imitations of nobility and taste may have shifted in meaning, Western Europe continues to figure as an important point of reference around which cultural hierarchies of identity and belonging are ordered in the contemporary, ‘new Europe’. Consumerism between the East and the West To properly address the dynamic of the formation of European identity through consumption in post-socialist Europe, it is necessary first to deconstruct the ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 5 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity ruling (Western) myth of Cold War socialist culture. Consumerism (or the lack thereof) figured as an important part of collective identity formation in socialism. Contrary to the popular beliefs of younger generations in both the East and the West, ‘Cinderella did go to the market’, to re-phrase the title of one of the publications demonstrating the recent rich feminist scholarly interest in the former socialist Europe (see Einhorn, 1993). Moreover, she went there dressed in different national, and contentious cultural, ways. With respect to socialist Yugoslavia, consumerism was indeed a hidden story behind its political economy and official state ideology. A different scholarly interest, which is beyond the purview of this article, might in fact uncover the scope and the importance of the antagonistic interlacing of the promises of consumer society and political structures in the enduring power of the socialist state and its hegemonic operation. It should be noted that, in this sense, the cultural histories of consumerism in Slovenia and Yugoslavia are quite unique with respect to the socialist countries forming the Eastern bloc, first and foremost because of Tito’s break with Stalin, which set the country on the path of non-alignment, and, second, and related to the former, because its independence from the Soviet area of influence attracted the political sympathy of the West and brought the society not only geographically but also culturally closer to the capitalist ‘enemy’ (Vidmar-Horvat, 2007). To illustrate the point with only one example, which has been deemed prestigious until now, Yugoslav public television was a member of Eurovision TV and held only the status of a member observer in the Eastern European association of TV stations Intervision. This enabled Yugoslav TV stations to distribute Western films (like Peyton Place and Little House on the Prairie of my youth) to their national audiences, while already in 1960, Ljubljana TV broadcast championships in ski-jumping in the world famous Planica for its Western European partners. Geographical position was equally crucial to the Yugoslavian ‘brand of socialism’. In addition to the country’s turn to more liberal social and economic policies already in the 1960s, the proximity of the border with the West contributed to the spread of a consumer mentality and brought the Western consumer lifestyle closer to the people than was the case on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Tourist shopping became a national pastime practiced in various legal and illegal forms (Luthar, 2006; Švab, 2002; Vidmar-Horvat, 2003). Although the local and federal governments occasionally intervened and tried to restrict the scope of consumerism, which traveling abroad brought with it, it was also quietly endorsed by state powers. Domestic consumerism enhanced the official narrative of the prosperity of socialist society as a whole; tourist shopping softened critical popular observations of the differences in the standard of people living on opposite sides of the border. Therefore, whereas the Stalin-style promises of ‘future bounty … in return for suppression of the appetite to consume in the present’ (Crowley, 2000: 27),,,, especially in the early post-war years can be seen as shared across the socialist hemisphere, in 5 ICS348537:Layout 1 6 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 6 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) Tito’s Yugoslavia consumerism was gradually imbued with contradictory political and ideological functions. On the one hand, the official political discourse of the early post-war era used the narratives of the ‘rotten capitalist West’ as an ideological means of countering the effects of the socialist state economy, which created thrift and imposed restrictions on people’s spending. On the other hand, it was the same ‘rotten West’ that gave material evidence and credence to the dream of the prosperous society in the making by the socialist state. However, as already mentioned, with the onset of liberalism in Slovenia, starting in the mid 1960s and embodied in the Slovenian political dissident Stane Kavčič, consumerism took on a new force in shaping the cultural landscape of the country while other contradictions emerged. Progressing more slowly than the West, Slovenian society nevertheless witnessed an improvement in living standards and the spread of consumerism; the country and its households moved: … from thrift family flats with shared toilets to houses with bathrooms, washing machines and TV sets; from bicycles and motorbikes to cars; from storage rooms to refrigerators and ice chests, from brooms to hoovers, from local grocery shops to markets. (Repe, 2002: 9) In my recollection, it was this wave of consumerism that intensified consciousness of the origin of consumer goods and their quality. Foreign, mainly Italian, washing powders, for instance, were deemed better quality and cheaper (not to mention their mass availability) than the Yugoslavian ones. In contrast, some Western goods produced by local food factories were considered tastier than their original; the Swiss chocolate Milka produced in Slovenian food factory, for instance, still figures in my own and my friends’ memory as the best there was, better than that purchased in either neighboring Italy or Austria. In post-socialism, when grocery stores are again filled with imports, this time also with Milka from Eastern Europe, my chocolateloving friends and I are unanimous that now Gorenjka, a local Slovenian brand of chocolate, surpasses in taste both the imported product available in Slovenia and the original Milka across the border in Italy and Austria. On the other side of the spectrum of consumer tastes, a generational conflict was being played out. Erica Carter (1993) has provided a powerful discussion of girls’ street culture of post-Second World War Western Germany to show how, in the hybrid culture of socialist thrift and bourgeois family morality, a pair of nylon socks could carry pockets of female youth subversiveness directed against their mothers. I vividly remember my mother’s smirking at the poor quality of the textile bought at the famous Italian Ponte Rosso market in Trieste and my anger at her killing off my joy with endlessly repeated remarks: ‘You will wash this pullover only once and it will never be the same again [a prophecy that in most cases turned out to be true]; why don’t you go and buy here [in Slovenia]?’ Today, with global consumerism, the pejorative notion of ‘bad quality’ of textiles has traveled from engulfing ‘made in Italy’ ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 7 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity to ‘made in China’; however, given my experience, for me, the disqualifying rhetoric would never echo such a strong ring of emotion were it not connected to these early memories of my mother’s attempts to assert cultural superiority through consumerism. The above-mentioned vignettes attest to the slippery cultural signification of the commodities in socialism which exchanged political meanings with cultural values more indeterminately than is now popularly remembered; not all commodities produced by the socialist state economy were considered to taste bad, nor were they embraced or disqualified because of their socialist origin. By the same token, not all Western products gained prime attention and endorsement; to the contrary, socialist culture produced citizens who were both loyal and disloyal to the state – in both cases not necessarily because of political beliefs but because they acted as pragmatic consumers indulging in the vices of spending and consumption beyond immediate ideological considerations of their ‘political correctness’. Post-socialist consumer ethic and border imaginaries With the move to market economy and political democracy, post-1991 Slovenia experienced a massive ‘transition’ towards the culture of consumerism and spending. The turn is best exemplified by the rapid growth of advertising, as reflected in the increase in the number of advertising agencies: from a single company dominating advertising space since 1973 to more than 100 large agencies and small studios that came on the scene in 1991 (Vidmar-Horvat, 2003). The spread of advertising agencies has been accompanied by a quantitatively and qualitatively new cultural landscape of imagery borrowing from both local and global media production. In the early years of transition, political and cultural reconstitution and redefinition of the Slovenian collective identity drew from the culture of consumerism and, as argued elsewhere (Vidmar-Horvat, 2003), used new public displays of the iconography of consumerism, particularly openly sexualized ones, to lay claim to a cosmopolitan and Western character for Slovenia. The country’s accession to EU membership, prior to and after 2004, unleashed a fresh batch of popular political narratives regarding the European-ness of Slovenian national and cultural identity. This sentiment reached a new peak when Slovenia became part of Schengen Europe in December 2007. Expectedly, the event, staged as the prime media spectacle of becoming a fully European state, was populated with memories of past borders and zones of division. In an intriguing way, however, the moment – meant as symbolic confirmation of ‘our’ shared European identity and belonging – was consumed in public through remembering consumerism in socialism. In this section, three accounts published in one of the two leading national dailies in Slovenia, Dnevik, which were produced for the occasion, are analyzed and used as an illustration of the implications of memories of socialist consumption in the formation of the Slovenian post-socialist, European identity. 7 ICS348537:Layout 1 8 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 8 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) The collapse of the Italian/Slovenian border, the most potent of the four Slovenian borders in terms of its symbolic prestige, was an occasion not only for a celebration of the end of administrative obstacles; the by-now invisible divide gained in power as new narratives about the meaning of the past emerged. Enmeshed in the battle for the meaning of the border, memories of consumerism in socialism and post-socialism contributed to its hegemonic outcome. Several public figures reflected on the historical moment and its symbolic and political dimensions. While the accounts differed in their ways of seeing the past, the unifying theme binding them together was the notion of illegal trafficking (the popular ‘šverc’ in the broad Yugoslavian use of the term) of petty consumables. This past figure of the ‘švercer’ became a privileged site on which clashing interpretations with regard to the socialist subject of consumerism were being articulated; as will be argued, it is through memories of this figure that the collective subject, by and large, has been constituted in post-socialist Slovenia. In the first article included in our analysis, ‘From “Šverc” at the Šentilj Border to Tuš Pastes’,1 Marko Crnkovič, a publicist who contributes columns to the national daily Saturday supplement, protests about the fact that the opening of the borders in Slovenia triggered an especially strong avalanche of reminiscences of the past prohibitive obstacles to consumerism as if ‘we, of all, were the most firmly placed behind the Iron Curtain’. In the same sentence, the author further substantiates his doubts over the collective memory with the fact that ‘nostalgia for past times is alive with us more than elsewhere’. Crnkovič goes on to argue that in socialist Yugoslavia we were allowed to travel freely, which, in his view, was the smartest of Tito’s strategies, by which he maintained his regime and covered up the actual lack of freedom in the country. However, the author sees the freedom of movement for cross-border shopping also as a by-product of fostering ‘primitive consumerism’ among the masses. Today’s consumerist frenzy, Crnkovič writes: … enveloping both sellers of food and merchandise of the lower price range (which this is all about anyway) and buyers – originates from those times. As I felt sick back then when I was watching the ‘švercerji’ at the Šentilj, still and again I feel the same today as I watch the TV ads selling me [meat] paste or something like it for 0.49 Euros. (Dnevnik, 29 December 2007: 9)2 When making consumer choices, Veblen wrote over 100 years ago, the leisure class makes sure that, in its selection (according to his observation, most notably the selection of intoxicating beverages and narcotics; Veblen, 1994 [1899]: 44), it maintains distinctions by which the alleged cultural superiority of the upper class can be catered to. At the beginning of the 21st century, a superior place on the consumer scale of reputation is not secured mainly by the ‘clothes of certain designer names and pretty male shoes’, which, if one is to believe Crnkovič, we are still chronically lacking in Slovenia; the position is perpetuated by the absence of participation in mass consumerism as such. While such an attitude may be assigned to the new ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 9 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity urban elites across the globe, in its post-socialist variant, contempt for mass shopping and mass tastes is burdened with the socialist repressed: as can be seen from the author’s writing, the conspicuously crass manners of the masses are dragging us collectively back to the low-brow, style-less culture of the past. In this projection, the whole nation is assigned to the inferior place of ‘Easterners’, whose patterns of consumerism distance us irreversibly from the cultured collective (Western) European subject. The end of the article is telling in this regard. Crnkovič concludes his lament with a socialist ‘border anecdote’ from JFK airport in New York where, to his disbelief, even then, he was placed together in a room ‘with Africans in bathrobes’. Tired of being harassed, according to his testimony, Crnkovič stepped forward to the customs officer and explained to him, ‘You know, I am from Europe and am not used to this kind of long waiting’, which apparently worked as he was instantly let go. But, of course, waiting for hours in long lines was precisely what socialist borders trained us for collectively as citizens. Crnkovič’s censored memory, therefore, lets into the public space as much the struggles to rewrite history as it speaks of the desire to be let in, to be recognized as part of Europe – that is, the other Europe, the cultivated, noble and reputable Europe. To be let in, however, may be described as a shared trauma, replete with individual stories of denial and exclusion. Traces of this can be found in Ervin Hladnik-Milharčič’s piece ‘Temporary’. Socialism, Hladnik-Milharčič, a weekly column writer for the same journal, recapitulates: ‘in many ways was an educative project, teaching you how not to get what you want.… At best, it allowed you the choice between Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane, but never to have both.’ In contrast, in the ‘multiple choice society’ across the border, the temptation got too hard to bear. Faced with ‘Lou Reed and Velvet Underground, the Grateful Dead and the Doors … and going home only with the Jefferson Airplane [record] was too frustrating for a normal person to accept this impossible system [i.e. socialism] as the world order’ (Dnevnik, 20 December 2007). However, as he also conveys in the article ‘Farewell, the Red House’ (Dnevnik, 27 December 2007: 16), Hladnik-Milharčič’s family background is the border town of Gorica. Reading his memories, I thus find myself reviving my own. In particular, I remember being at a party in the same border region a long time ago, when I first heard Lou Reed’s song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. As the needle handle went over the grooves of the hit song again and again, I remember feeling jealous of the people in the room, whom I saw as utterly privileged because they lived only a few minutes away from the Western consumer wonderland. Already back then, the border was not only a line of demarcation between an Eastern and a Western state; its influences reached inland, where, by the measure of their proximity to the Western, mainly US popular and consumer culture, the border stratified regions within the socialist state. Finally, in ‘Do You Still Remember, Comrades, We Were All “Švercarji”?’, Simon Tecco, a Chilean journalist who immigrated to Yugoslavia in the 9 ICS348537:Layout 1 10 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 10 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) 1970s, provides yet another reading of the socialist border and its marrying with consumerism. Tecco writes: The 1970s and the 1980s which I lived through in Yugoslavia were the times of daring, resourceful creativity and the capricious-mindedness of the stubborn people, who back then, as today, did not blindly trust their leaders and rather crossed the border in search of answers to social questions, suppressed for them by the regime. Importantly, Tecco refutes the collective amnesia which has permeated postsocialist culture precisely by revisiting the meaning of consumerism in socialism. He counters the present-day ideology, arguing that it was not a matter of money to obtain what you desired; the ‘švercerji’, which we all were, went separate ways, some of them actually getting rich, while others turned their past skills into political careers, selling us new wisdom and views of history. Most of the ‘švercerji’ continue to live as ordinary citizens, Tecco ends his article, ‘quiet and minding their own business as they know’ (Dnevnik, 29 December 2007: 31). Claiming European identity in post-socialism As can be seen from the analysis above, the three stories, each told from a different angle and subject location, meet in the figure of the ‘švercer’, the emblematic embodiment of the consumer in socialism. While the three accounts differ in the meaning ascribed to the figure – from distancing contempt to protesting distance and, finally, to political identification – a perplexing question arises from reading these publicly articulated memories, namely, how to account for the desire to situate the figure of the socialist consumer into the present-day perspective? To put it differently, in what way do the conflicting narratives embroiled in the ‘švercer’ from the past resonate with the clashing discourses in the present? In what way does the image of the socialist consumer overlap with the identity of the consumer in post-socialism? So far, it has been argued that, in its political meaning, consumerism was an important terrain on which socialist citizenship was semi-autonomously created, negotiated and contested. The argument can be expanded to state that, in the present, individual and collective memories of the past not only manifest themselves in the way commodities are meaningfully consumed; acts of consumption struggle against these memories to claim new forms of collective identities and citizenship. Before providing evidence to substantiate this claim, two additional episodes, taken from the transnational arena of the constructions of post-socialist imaginaries, may throw a preliminary light on the complexity of the issue. The first story relates to the award-winning film, The Czech Dream (Český sen, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, 2004). A first impression after watching the film is that it is meant to illustrate the spread of collective hysteria unfolding ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 11 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity beneath the turn to post-socialist consumer culture in the former Eastern bloc country. In the film, which was directed by two young Czech students as their final film school project, a team of alleged marketing specialists set up a hoax advertising project in which they announce the opening of a new hypermarket. For their project they manage to get the help of advertising and PR agencies, which launch a massive street campaign involving large billboards on highways and leaflets distributed in Prague. Basing their plot on the negative campaign slogans ‘Don’t come’ and ‘Don’t spend’, the film-makers nonetheless succeed in attracting more than 3000 shoppers for the grand opening. Gathering in front of a huge wall, behind which the shopping heaven is supposedly hidden, they infuse the atmosphere with expectation and excitement until the very last moment when the two directors, performing the role of the ‘managers’, cut the ribbon. The wall is pulled down to show the heaven to be but an empty space of dreams. Pulling off a practical joke worthy of attention of a Freudian analyst mass psychology, the film conveys the message of the stupefying effects of consumerism supported by the deceiving strategies of the advertising and PR industries. Operating in the politically entrenched contexts of the post-Cold War Eastern Europe, however, the joke becomes the site of a traumatic encounter with the subject in post-socialism. For me, a viewer in post-socialist Slovenia, the film, together with the shots of people facing the disappointment with either anger or vague smiles, is hard to watch. I find it neither funny nor critical but rather deeply disturbing, for it plays (in a questionable ethical framework, in my view) with people’s desires. Moreover, in my reading, it imprints these desires with the ‘shadow of Eastern-ness’, as if this kind of frantic consumerism and collective irrationality is endemic to the former Eastern bloc and could not be triggered anywhere else, especially not in the consuming West. In a way, the film is a painful discursive gesture of mockery, according to which the cultural turn towards claiming European identity, based on the notion of consumerist abundance, has been carried out. It is also a cultural document of the act of selfcolonization of the collective subject, furnished with exactly the cartoonish images that the West has constructed for the (former) East, which has been unearthed more recently by post-socialist cultural studies (Borcila, 2004). How much is this self-colonizing image of an inferior culture a fiction, a product of a collectively traumatized spirit, and how much a vague, yet, painful recognition of the European reality that is actually being formed? To answer the question, consider the case of the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest scandal. To briefly recount the story, the winning song in Helsinki was ‘Molitva’ (‘The Prayer’), performed by the Serbian singer Marija Šerifović. Soon after the contest, in which, according to a Slovenian journal, the ‘Eastern bloc’ swept over the Eurovision Song Contest (Dnevnik, 14 May 2007: 16), a scandal erupted when the singer was accused of plagiarism, allegedly singing a version of the previously recorded Albanian song entitled ‘Ndarja’. In addition, the Maltese representatives at the Eurovision Song Contest claimed that the telephone voting was carried out incorrectly, with 11 ICS348537:Layout 1 12 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 12 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) the Eastern European states voting as a bloc, mutually rewarding each other’s contestants, while they also offered the Maltese team an improper deal, to award each other’s performers the highest score. Because 14 out of the first 16 songs came from Eastern European countries, a protest was also issued from Germany, namely, why should Western European states contribute most finances to the European Broadcasting Union (Dnevnik, 16 May 2007: 18). When Šerifović was reconfirmed as the winner after an investigation by the EBU, the proposal emerged to have two separate contests, one for Eastern and one for Western performers. Finally, in November 2007, Austria announced that it would not compete in the 2008 contest, to be held in Belgrade, which, Austria stated, had become nothing short of a ‘political kitchen’. Finally, a month later, the European Commission began an inquiry into whether the winning singer, being a supporter of the Serbian radical party candidate Tomislav Nikolic´ in the presidential campaign, was worthy of holding the title of ‘the ambassador of intercultural dialogue’ given to her on the occasion of the launch of the ‘European Year of Intercultural Dialogue’. The conflict surpasses the issue of the popular contest and its voting ethics. In his article ‘Visions of Europe’, Göran Bolin (2006) defines the Eurovision Song Contest as a media site of the construction of national identity. In one part of his discussion, Bolin focuses specifically on the cultural technologies used by ‘post-communist countries in aligning with Western Europe’. As can be inferred from the affair and the consequent public reactions, the pop media spectacle to be consumed by the imagined community of EU citizens has grown to the point of also carrying the power of symbolically structuring the cultural terrain of the new Europeans and their claim of belonging in the enlarged EU. Reflecting on the Eurovision Song Contest scandal, in the article ‘More and Less Valued’, a Slovenian commentator therefore wrote that, if the EU wants to serve the whole of Europe, then surely the idea of two Eurovision Song Contests should be stopped at the very beginning (Dobro jutro, 25 August 2007: 2). This comment invokes the fear of reviving an older vision of ‘two Europes’, the superior Western and the inferior Eastern one, while in fact, without considering alternative arrangements that may indeed be more practical or fair, the Eurovision Song Contest incident had already managed to mobilize the perception of the incommensurability of the Western and the Eastern European identities; the shift in the luck and success of Eastern European countries, as observed by the West, was employed to reproduce the cultural boundary, splitting Europe into two halves. Instead of being brought in line with the long legacy of voting cons associated with Eurovision Song Contest in general (the most frequent one of my youth was the ‘Scandinavian’ one), the alleged deceit was labelled with cultural and political meanings of the fraudulent ‘East’. European citizenship and consumer belonging In the context of European integration and the Europeanization of shared cultural space, consumerism presents a neglected side of how notions of shared ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 13 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity citizenship, belonging and loyalty are articulated. Because, in post-socialist Europe, memories of consumption under socialism (often unconsciously) govern the construction of the meaning of consumerism in post-socialism, while these memories frequently bring back traumatic experiences and recollections of denials of consumer desires, it is necessary to incorporate popular cultural pools of remembering in theoretical and political accounts when considering the project of the Europeanization of identity. This is more so when consumption is perceived as a tool of stratification, of the ordering of citizens into a ‘first’ and ‘second class’ of belonging, based on past imaginaries of cultural inferiority of the East – and historical superiority of the West. Several institutional and daily experiences attest to the public perception that there are indeed ‘two Europes’ that come to life through ‘two markets’, operating within the boundaries of the EU. Research in Slovenia shows that 62.5 percent of people agree with the statement that ‘for foreign markets, multinational corporations use ingredients of a lower quality than those used for their own markets’. Consequently, if given a choice between the same product of a domestic and foreign brand producer, 93 percent would put their trust in the domestic product. While this last figure may speak of a certain naïveté invested in the national ‘captains of production’, read together with the previous one, it conveys an important message about the value put on consumer equality and democratic treatment of consumers’ desires. Moreover, according to the Consumer Association of Slovenia, ‘it is a fact that, in different markets, products are different’, but there are no ‘concrete proofs that the products sold in the East are of lower quality’ (‘Two Markets?’, Nika, 17 Setpember 2007). Yet the suspicion has arisen, to the point of becoming common knowledge, that, as one daily’s supplement’s title reads, in Slovenia, the consumer markets are populated with ‘second-class goods, first-class price’ (Ona, 13 February 2007). A journalist writes of her consumer experience, as a housewife, of a ‘dangerous discrimination’: It is about the quality of goods from the Western European market. I am not sure whether you have noticed or not, but some products of the same brand on our shelves are of a lower quality than those you can buy in any of the Western European countries. For instance, the washing powder bought in Austria or Italy will have a slightly different packaging and you will find instructions written in Western European languages whereas with ours, the instructions will be in Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Polish or some other ‘Eastern’ language; and the washed laundry will be less white than if you bought the powder across the border. (‘More and Less Valued’, Dobro jutro 25 August 2007: 2). I began this article with the question of my own petty obsession with reading product labels and locating goods’ place of origin. The points of departure were a puzzling self-confession that, unconsciously, my consumer ethics makes cultural distinctions between the EU labels distinguishing ‘made in the West’ and ‘made in the East’; and the observation that, despite 13 ICS348537:Layout 1 14 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 14 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) an awareness of the globalization of economy, consumers in post-socialist Slovenia in general tend to associate the uneven distribution of goods on the EU markets as a marker of their status as second-class consumers and, in effect, also second-class EU citizens. When I read the lines above, I again struggle with memories of my own consumer racism. However, while both my own and the reporter’s testimonies of perceptions of quality of goods are equally troubling for their lack of scientific evidence; they convey the message that the sentiment passes into a collective frustration, which should be studied regarding its impact on how Europe is being imagined. Memories of consumption – consuming memories It has been argued that, to understand the relationship between consumerism and European identity in post-socialist cultures, it is necessary to account for the memories of the socialist past, which circulate, in omnipresent as well as repressed forms, in collective consciousness in the present. These memories have to do with the actual experiences of thrift and restrictive spending and consuming; the fear resembles the precautionary measures of the war generations and their daily practices of recycling and keeping things in stock just in case a crisis may arise. The recycling culture of socialism, so aptly described by Slavenka Drakulić in the book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1993), marks the generations who have lived through both preand post-war years of shortage. Abundant spending, which I observe in the generation of our parents, may in this regard be sustained by irrational impulses to counter the memory of denial and the suppressing of desires. Campbell writes that the goal of the search for pleasure is not to have but to desire to have (1987: 132). Excessive buying and participation in consumer culture may be a way of reclaiming the decency denied by the socialist state’s intrusion into privacy through restrictive measures. In this regard, encountering the products which, with their origin of production, connote Eastern-ness could be read as a resistance to socialist consumerism, its imposed rule of conduct, which made us all ‘švercerji’ and robbed us of daily acts of choice. The fact that, in another connection, the supra-state apparatus of the EU has already been popularly compared to Belgrade and its repressive machinery in terms of Yugoslavian history, lends credibility to speculation that a sense of enforced identity is at stake. It is an unconscious gesture against being grouped as Eastern Europeans by the EU and global market forces; and an act of resistance to be returned to the other side of the Iron Curtain by its emerging, transnational consumer culture. What is the theoretical relevance of studying popular memories with regard to European identity and citizenship? Moreover, what conceptual grounds can emerge from analyses focusing on, and isolating from the multiplex body of consumption in Europe, those instances of cultural memories that are specifically post-socialist? It has been pointed out that social theory ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 15 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity has been inconclusive in reflecting upon the processes of the Europeanization of collective identities in the EU. An important missing element, necessary to make such a project feasible, has been located in the realm of memory; according to this view, a shared European identity cannot be successfully fashioned because it lacks grounding in common narratives of the past and the ways the past is remembered transnationally. While Delanty has argued to the contrary, namely, that common memory is possible and, indeed, that it is necessary to open up and pluralize the ways memory has been conceptualized in social theory, our analysis shows that memories already exist and, in their existence, are already producing a European identity. An important part of the dominion of this memory is in popular culture, which remembers, reinterprets and redefines the official narratives of the European ‘shared tradition’ and ‘common past’, so rightly problematized by Shore (2006) and others. However, as they are articulated in daily practices of consumption, these memories are not only sites of unification but also points of division and conflict – particularly in former socialist countries which, through the ways the West remembers them, struggle to exit the vicious circle of defrosting and refrosting (Borcila, 2004) in the symbolic image of the cultural ‘other’. In conclusion, to counter the pressures of the ‘democratic deficit’ that accompanies the project of Europanization, it is necessary to take into account different levels of social life at which European citizenship and belonging are being formed and formulated. Consumerism represents an important area of study and, especially when theorized in relation to traumatic experiences of consumers in the former socialist states, provides a fruitful ground for studying the processes of trans-European identity construction. A crucial point is to develop an understanding of how, by structuring the field of consumption through the realms of belonging and exclusion, and a real or perceived denial of the role of the EU consumer regardless of whether they are from East or West, collective identities are being negotiated. This is indeed a major challenge if the new, trans- and postnational loyalties to European social order are to be formed. Notes 1 Tuš is one of the three chain grocery stores holding the monopoly in Slovenia. 2 All the newspaper quotes are from the electronic archives; all translations by the author. References Balibar, Étienne (2004) We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Billig, Michael (1996) Banal Nationalism. London: SAGE. 15 ICS348537:Layout 1 16 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 16 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 13(1) Bolin, Göran (2006) ‘Visions of Europe: Cultural Technologies of Nation-States’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(2): 189–206. Borcila, Andaluna (2004) ‘How I Found Eastern Europe: Televisual Geography, Travel Sites, and Museum Installations’, in Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Elena Gapova (eds) Over the Wall/After the Fall: PostCommunist Cultures Through an East–West Gaze, pp. 42–66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Campbell, Colin (1987) Romantična etika in duh sodobnega porabništva (The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Slovenian edition). Ljubljana: SH. Carter, Erica (1993) ‘Alice in the Consumer Wonderland’, in Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (eds) Studying Culture, pp. 104–21. London: Edward Arnold. Crowley, David (2000) ‘Warsaw’s Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw’, in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (eds) Style in Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, pp. 25–47. Oxford: Berg. Delanty, Gerard and Chris Rumford (2005) Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London: Routledge. Delanty, Gerard (2005) ‘The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe: On a Cultural Significance of Europeanization’, International Review of Sociology 15: 405–21. Drakulic, Slavenka (1993) How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. New York: HarperPerennial. Einhorn, Barbara (1993) Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe. London: Verso. Jackson, Peter and Nigel Thrift (1996) ‘Geographies of Consumption’, in Daniel Miller (ed.) Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, pp. 204–37. London: Routledge. Luthar, Breda (2006) ‘Remembering Socialism: On Desire, Consumption and Surveillance’, Journal of Consumer Culture 6(2): 229–59. Miller, Daniel (1998) A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, Daniel, Peter Jackson, Nigel Thrift, Beverley Holbrook and Michael Rowlands (1998) Shopping, Place and Identity. London: Routledge. Morley, David and Kevin Robins (1996) ‘No Place like Heimat: Images of Home(land) in European Culture’, in Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny (eds) Becoming National, pp. 456–78. New York: Oxford University Press. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (1993) ‘Fictions of Europe’, in Ann Gray and John McGuigan (eds) Studying Culture, pp. 225–31. London: Edward Arnold. Repe, Božo (2002) ‘Č lovek, ki je zavrnil Tita’ (‘The Man Who Turned Down Tito’), Delo 26 October: 8–9. Shore, Cris (2000) Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge. Shore, Cris (2006) ‘“In uno plures”(?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe’, Cultural Analysis 5: 7–26. Smith, Anthony D. (1992) ‘National Identity and the Idea of European Union’, International Affairs 68: 55–76. ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 17 Vidmar-Horvat ● Consuming European identity Stråth, Bo (2002) ‘A European Identity: To the Historical Limits of a Concept’, European Journal of Social Theory 5: 387–401. Švab, Alenka (2002) ‘Consuming Western Image of Well-being: Shopping Tourism in Socialist Slovenia’, Cultural Studies 16(1): 63–79. Veblen, Thorstein (1994 [1899]) The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications. Vidmar-Horvat, Ksenija (2003) ‘Žensko telo, globalno potrošništvo in slovenska tranzicija: sociološki fotoesej’ (‘Female Body, Global Consumerism and Slovenian Transition: A Sociological Photo-Essay’), Teorija in praksa 40(5): 839–59. Vidmar-Horvat, Ksenija (2007) ‘The Globalization of Gender: Ally McBeal in PostSocialist Slovenia’, in Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel (eds) Feminist Television Criticism, 2nd edn, pp. 288–301. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Williams, Rosalind (1991) ‘The Dream World of Mass Consumption’, in C. Mukerji and M. Schudson (eds) Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, pp. 198–235. Berkeley: University of California Press. ● KSENIJA VIDMAR-HORVAT is associate professor at Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is the author of the books Introduction to Sociology of Culture, Global Culture and Women’s Genres (an edited volume). Her most recent work includes ‘Globalization of Gender: “Ally McBeal” in Post-Socialist Slovenia’ (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2005; reprinted in Lynn Spigel and Charlotte Brunsdon [eds] Feminist Television Criticism, Open University Press, 2007); and (with Denis Mancević) ‘Global News, Local Views: Slovene Media Reporting on 9/11’ (in Tomasz Pludowski [ed.] Global Media Reactions to September 11, Marquette Books, 2007). Address: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Askerceva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. [email: ksenija.vidmar@ff.uni-lj.si] ● 17 ICS348537:Layout 1 9/23/2009 2:44 PM Page 18