Nation: The Strange Entity that Refuses to Disappear from the Discourse of the Humanities

Dariusz SKÓRCZEWSKI

Abstract

East Central Europe has for long been dismissed in various ways by Western politicians and scholars, both of which groups continue to perceive it through Hans Kohn’s misleading yet prevalent dichotomy between two types of nationalism: a «good» Western and a «bad» Eastern nationalism. Discursive practices resulting from Kohn’s reductionist and fundamentally wrong approach,
examples of which are briefl y discussed in the paper, are considered indicators of Saidean «orientalism» that “failed to identify with human experience” and are held responsible for the duplication of a paternalistic descriptive style predominant in contemporary Western discourses on East Central Europe. Postcolonial theory as developed by Said provides an illuminating explanatory context for the complex phenomena resulting from the current hegemony of the «West» over ECE, such as inferiority complex, subaltern status, incapacitation, and the powerful feeling of dissociation from the community of sovereign political and cultural entities. Drawing upon postcolonial conceptual framework, the paper offers a different perspective on the question of nationalism, one that does «accept» the concept of nation. Through the analysis of Frantz Fanon’s and Leszek Kołakowski’s two seminal essays, nation is viewed as a positive factor
in the process of recovery of the collective subjectivity of postcolonial society, and by no means as an anachronism in the contemporary world that is supposedly «postnational.» The paper concludes with a proposal that the East Central European historical experience, alongside the emerging postcolonial studies in East Central Europe, be deemed an impulse for a reconsideration of the «antinationalist» attitudes of modern humanities, thus aiding the dominant Western discourses in disposing of their pernicious orientalist clichés and stereotypes of ECE.