»We will declare war on all those who do not share our values.«Shortly after the monstrous attack on the World Trade Center, a senior U.S. politician made this »para bellum« statement on all channels.
It would appear that the political philosopher Carl Schmitt and the cultural warrior Samuel Huntington have replaced the economists Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek as the mentors of western desire for global power. Schmitt's hegemon no longer takes up arms against the »enemy«on its borders in a military and economic sense alone. For »become like us,« the leitmotif of western policies, which Dejan Jovic analyzes in this issue in connection with the transition of the former socialist nations of Eastern Europe, no longer calls wealth, welfare and democracy »our« values, but aims at another universal: culture. Jeff Derksen outlines in his essay the theoretical framework within which this culturalization of the economic and the social has developed.
The fact that the allied space-appropriation fantasies are irreconcilable with the realitiy of a western capitalist world plagued by ever more obvious social and political problems is evident. And a look at the prestige-political skirmishes in main centers in the cultural field makes it clear what illusion is behind the assumption of a global homogenization of the cultural. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's defence of multiculturalism on the American model also points up exactly this fact.
To be sure, the strategies and models of the global players in the culture industry à la Guggenheim are copied everywhere. Konstantin Akinsha's text in this springerin describes the inner contraditions inherent in precisely this museum model, and we see this article as our contribution to the opening of the new museum quarter in Vienna.
Many critics of the universal culturalization of the political conclude that every form of cultural work has lost its potential for political action because of it. This pessimism seems to us to be hasty and inappropriate in view of the large number of present-day practices.