coalition to run for mayor. As one notices with surprise what has happened to California after the takeover of Conan the Barbarian superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger, many Central European spectators, commentators, and politicians are still wary as to what the East may bring. They tend to prefer the Austrian barbarian to the hordes from Turkey. On Saturday, November 26th, 2005, the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina unveiled a bronze statue of Bruce Lee. The life-sized statue is meant to symbolise solidarity in the ethnically divided city. ‘Building civil society never seemed so weird: here was a life-sized bronze statue of a topless American immigrant paid for by the German government and christened by a Chinese diplomat, erected at the behest of a dysfunctional community of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims’, writes Alexander Zaitchik in Reason . 4 Similarly, in the village of Zitiste in Serbia, a bronze and concrete statue of Rocky Balboa was erected in the central square. In Cacak, near Belgrade, plans are under way to build a statue of a former topless British model Samantha Fox. The Serbian artist Milica Tomic calls these statues ‘a dangerous joke in which history is being erased and replaced by Mickey Mouse’. But the lowest common denominator that this new post-war-generation – relentlessly searching for politically correct role models – comes up with lies elsewhere: somewhere between Hollywood, MTV and late night soft-porn advertisement via satellite television – identities beyond locale. Jacques Rancière argues that the West is no longer in a comfortable position to praise the benefits of democracy by contrasting it with the terror of totalitarianism. In fact, what we see today is that some states, such as Dubai, have managed to develop alternative modes of totalitarian rule, benevolent dictatorships in which things seem to develop in a parallel universe. Many countries in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf, entire societies have been peacefully forced through modernity in less than two decades. Coevally, this development performs a double-function: it acts as a mirror facing the ‘West’ with its own accelerated image. This trend fosters hard-edged resentment and suspicion in the west. In The Violence of Participation 5 , critic Shumon Basar writes, ‘Post-Fukuyama, the alleged teleology of free-market democracy as a world-picture of world peace should only make us laugh, or cry. Democracy as an unimpeachable paradigm is as assiduously questioned today as it is fought over for’. While the West is in a serious crisis of identity, economies such as the Gulf hijack the notion of ‘culture as etiquette’ and make sure that its capital output proliferates with velocity. Similar to the craving for the (western) new prior to the fall of the Wall, Dubai’s major real estate developers have managed to turn western images into high- speed and high-rate commodities. Consequently, the ‘One Legend – One Tower’ project in Dubai (spearheaded by Niki Lauda, Boris Becker and Michael Schumacher) was fully sold out two weeks after the official start of promotion.
As outlined in the School of Missing Studies project proposal, East Coast Europe does not attempt to do too many things at once. One could argue that in fact all it does is to stimulate one’s curiosity, accelerating – hopefully – the wish for more and alternative types of knowledge about rapidly occurring change and the cross-fertilising effects of cultural production. In the past, foreign policy consultant Mark Leonard argued that Europe will run the twenty-first century and told us what China thinks 6 ; novelist Ingo Niermann confirmed that China is calling us. 7 Every other cover of The Economist has an image of either China or the Middle East visually screaming at us. Is Europe really passé? Is the real ‘coast’ even further? We like to think of Europe as an open question, a rendezvous of question marks as Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist would call it. The fact that Europe needs to determine what it really stands for could also be understood as the reverse of the often-proclaimed trap of Europe. Usually, the moment that an identity crisis is resolved is also the time in which things start to stagnate. It is this stagnation that Europe should be most fearful of, and therefore constantly pursue, transform and reassess an open and ongoing search for a definition-in-the-making of its distinctiveness. C
1 ‘Europe as Archipelago. Markus Miessen and Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Karl Schlögel’ The Violence of Participation . Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007 2 Niermann, Ingo. cover text. The Violence of Participation . Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007 3 Markus Miessen, editor. East Coast Europe . Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008 4 Zaitchik, Alexander. ‘Mostar’s Little Dragon’. Reason. April 2006 5 Miessen, Markus, editor. The Violence of Participation . Berling: Sternberg Press, 2007 6 Leonard, Mark. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. London & New York: Fourth Estate, 2005; Mark Leonard. What Does China Think? London: Fourth Estate, 2008 7 Niermann, Ingo. China ruft Dich. Berlin: Rogner & Bernhard, 2008 Any other unacknowledged quotations come from East Coast Europe . This essay is a slightly modified version of the forward to East Coast Europe , very kindly made available for this issue of On Site by Markus Miessen.
Markus Miessen is an architect, spatial consultant and writer migrating between Berlin, London and the Middle East. In 2002, he set up Studio Miessen, a collaborative agency for spatial practice and cultural analysis, and in 2007 was founding partner of the Berlin-based architectural practice nOffice. www.studiomiessen.com
36 On Site review 22: WAR
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