open access

https://doi.org/10.14943/jbr.12.33

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/85034

Between the East and the West: The Third Position in Post-Socialist Czech Republic

英語

2022-03-31

Eurasia Unit for Border Reaseach (Japan)

JAPAN BORDER REVIEW

12

33-54

The purpose of this paper is to show how a moment to de-territorialise the post-socialist spacetime that emerged on the border of the East and the West with the end of the Cold War in 1989 is latent and manifest in this space-time. This paper regards the 1990s and 2000s as a period of postsocialism, the 2010s as a period of transition from post-socialism to post-post-socialism, and the 2020s and beyond as a period of post-post-socialism. The post-socialist period in the 2000s and the transition from post-socialism to post-post-socialism in the 2010s are the main focus of this paper. Based on the aforementioned period classification, the first part of this paper (Chapter 1 and 2) examines the reception of the film “Pelíšky,” which retrospectively depicts the ordinary life of people during the socialist period. The aim is to use the reception of the film to examine the structure of the ideological struggle in the cultural sphere of the Czech Republic in the 2010s between the “pro-Western group,” the political forces responsible for the “democratisation” of the country’s political and economic system under the banner of a return to the West, and the “pro-Eastern group,” the political forces that, in the eyes of the “pro-Western group,” were suspected of having links with the “pro-Eastan group.” In Chapter 1, I analyze the characteristics of “Pelíšky” as a nostalgic film by comparing it with the film “Goodbye, Lenin!” In the following chapter, I focus on the controversy over a scene in the film, which had been going on for more than a year since 2017 in the comments section of YouTube, and analyze the structure of the ideological struggle in the cultural sphere of the Czech Republic in the 2010s. I argue that the post-socialist space-time has been organised in a complex of three dichotomies: the East and the West, “the Past and the Present,” Socialism and Capitalism. In the second part of this paper (Chapter 3), I take up two documentary films released in 2004 and 2016 to show that, in the midst of the post-socialist ideological struggle, a moment to objectify the struggle itself has emerged. In addition, I point out that such a moment not only undermines the framework of the struggle, but also has the potential to nullify the conditions for the establishment of a post-socialist space-time. Specifically, I firstly argue that the documentary filmmaker Filip Remunda, together with his co-producer Vít Klusák, satirised the overheated consumerism in their 2004 film “Czech Dreams,” as well as the “West-free-market” trend behind it. I secondly argue that in his film “Krtek a Lao-C’,” released almost a decade later, Remunda satirised President Miloš Zeman as a politician with suspected links to former Eastern powers such as Russia and China. I then argue that at the time of the making of “The Czech Dream,” Remunda had already secured a position that was neither the East nor the West, that is, a third position, neither advocating nor condemning the socialist system of the past or the capitalist system of the present, but objectifying both equally. Finally, the third position, which takes an equally cynical attitude towards the two orders, the old and the new, is not only a moment that has the potential to invalidate the conditions for the establishment of post-socialism by evoking the baselessness of the three-way binary opposition between the East and the West, the Past and the Present, the Socialism and the Capitalism, but also a moment to promote the transition from post-socialism to post-post-socialism. Finally, I affirm that the significance of this paper in two ways: firstly, it presents a moment to de-territorialise the space-time of post-socialism in contrast to previous studies that have focused on the conditions that make post-socialism possible, and secondly, it provides a starting point for understanding how the paradigm shift from post-socialism to post-post-socialism is occurring in the political and cultural sphere of the Czech Republic.

紀要論文

Version of Record

2185-6117

AA12497681