Postsocialism

We publish here a shortened version of the paper ordered by IDEA International to the author for the round table «Democracy and Development in the Globalized World», held in New Delhi on the 17^th and 18^th of June, 2008. 

The interferences between historiographical procedures and the personal memory of the historian are a familiar problem for the historiography of the present time. The two cases of such interferences analysed in the present text are interesting in that, as contemporaries, they remember more than their scientific apparatus is capable of integrating. The incapacity to integrate into their presentations and historiographical analyses certain processes and practices that are nevertheless important in their time (and for that reason well remembered by the historian as subject), exposes the historian to the risk of suffering the effects of spontaneous or manipulated politics of memory, arising from the epoch in which he writes his narrative. Starting from the “excess of memory” in the texts of two eminent historians, we hope to be able to tackle some difficulties in the history of Yugoslavian socialist self-management.

The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen was the only regime in the Arab world that genuinely identifying itself as Marxist. During its short existence, from 1970 to 1997, it became a base for Soviet influence in the region and the capital for Arab liberation movements, most notably those of Palestine and the Arab peninsula, and for Middle-Eastern communist organisations. Aden, its capital, which Westerners associate most readily with the myth of Rimbaud or the figure of [Paul] Nizan, author of Aden-Arabie, thus gave up its status as a free zone so as to become a laboratory for socialist experience in the poorest country on the peninsula.

Nous avons visité le Dhofar à l’invitation du Front Populaire de Libération du Golfe arabe occupé ; le but de cette visite était de faire connaître au monde la révolte, et d’écrire sur le Yémen et le Dhofar un livre pour lequel mon collègue Fred Halliday et moi avions signé un contrat avec la maison d’édition Pinguin. Abdallah al-Achtal, un compagnon d’étude et de lutte de l’époque de l’université américaine de Beyrouth, se joignit à nous ; à sa sortie d’université, il était devenu l’un des leaders du Front National dans la région du Hadramaout, foyer de l’aile gauche du Front. Quand les fedayin commencèrent à pratiquer les « confiscations » pour financer le combat armé (les appareils égyptiens leur avaient coupé les aides financières), le commandement de la branche du Hadramaout décida d’utiliser l’argent volé à une banque britannique pour acheter des livres de formation au marxisme-léninisme.

Modernity, a trigger to much opening to extra-European continents, was also the big historic rift which made translation almost impossible by making many concepts normative, and particularly that of the political. Concepts and terms of “european” origin, through a process of universalization (a “westernisation”), assumed a genealogical and etymological continuity, imposing a corresponding discontinuity on those originating in other regions and languages.