LIETUVIŲ TAUTOS DELOKALIZACIJOS TRAUMA

Abstract

The paper develops the insights laid out in the chapter The Trauma of Nation’s De-localisation in the book Dramaturgy of National Identity (2005). In the contemporary world, delocalisation of nations is unavoidable and, in that sense, it represents a natural process of civilisation which reproduces national identity in a transnational form both in the country of emigration and of origin. However, for the nations with an incomplete story of territorial consolidation, the opening up to supra-nationalisation, emigration, and globalisation in general was unexpected and seemed infinite and destructive for the nation. The Lithuanian nation was affected by delocalisation, among other things, primarily by especially large-scale emigration. The nation is losing the feeling of integrity. Just 25 years ago, the ideal of the localisation of the nation – its concentration on a sovereign territory – prevailed. Global life economization, European supra-nationalization, and the failure to successfully complete the post-communist transformation dealt a blow to the national ideal that actualised “one’s own state”. The “breaking up” of the nation was so unexpected that even nationalism did not actualise ethnocentrism. It was expected to be just temporary costs of post-communist transformation. However, presently, we have increasingly more arguments to prove that the post-communist transitional period has expired, therefore, the current trends have long-term prospects. The de-localization of the Lithuanian nation takes place not really as a natural process of civilisation, but rather as a response to the mainly unsuccessful end of post-communism in Lithuania. The situation is to be characterised by the metaphor of trauma. Trauma is experienced at unexpected “discovery” of one’s own ethno-social disability (the term by R. Grigas) when one clings onto the traditional ethnocentric ideal of the nation and is unable to evaluate and project the delocalisation of the nation as a natural process of civilisation. The trauma implies the threat of a break in the building of national identity and the decline of the nation. For the Lithuaniannism to survive, it is necessary to “incorporate” a perspective of the network of its agents, open to transnationalism and stretching all over the world, into the content of the nation.