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Energy security is indeed a grave issue. But is it the most important one? Isn't there a much more ominous threat looming over us – an existential one?
“Lithuania reminds me of a drop of water on white-hot iron, even though we could say much the same about almost all the senior European states – old, senile, bereft of any self-preservation instinct, effete, perverted by luxury and excess.
“The globalisation mill will doubtlessly grind Lithuania into cosmopolitic dust, but also Germany or England, even though they, of course, will stand out longer than our country,” philosopher Arvydas Šliogeris writes.
Even Vytautas Landsbergis has admitted that Šliogeris' essay “On one or two threats to Lithuania” shows unease of a true patriot.
The essay is included in a recently published book “Unease” (“Nerimas”). In it, Šliogeris and four more academicians – literary critic Viktorija Daujotytė, economist Aleksandras Vasiliauskas, lawyer Valentinas Mikelėnas, and archeologist Vladas Žulkus – reflect on genuine threats to Lithuania.
Each of them take their own trajectory to arrive at the same conclusion that sounds particularly ominous in Šliogeris' lips: “Throughout the last twenty years, we have seen persistent, methodical, and cynical effort to undermine the emergence of a genuine upper class – responsible, aristocratic, with true civil consciousness, high intellect, noble spirit, capable of statesmanlike thinking, possessing a code of honour – that no nation, nor a community, can do without. In no place on earth and at no time has there been a state successfully ruled by hoi polloi, the so-called people, or the uneducated masses.”
Daujotytė seconds him: “We are in desperate need of people capable of independent thought. Moreover – we need to stop fearing them; when we keep hiring “experts” from foreign countries, it does not mean we do not have them here, we simply do not trust them and sometimes even fear, because we already know their biting opinion.”
This unease of the academicians should be called the issue of demographic and cultural security. Yet this problem has not so far made it to the official rhetoric. The “Lietuva 2030” strategy, drafted by PM Andrius Kubilius, is hardly to be called guidelines for the country's future, rather a Brussels-adjusted nationalistic utopia about an idyllic Lithuania. It falls apart like a house of cards, once one raises simple questions: how many people will be living here in 2030? What will be the ratio of retired people and children?
Professor Vasiliauskas writes that, for the first time in Lithuania's history, elderly population exceeds the number of children. Every fifth resident in the country is middle-aged or old. This begs an inevitable conclusion: our society is ageing at an extremely fast rate.
Here's the demographic snapshot of 2010: born – 35,626; died – 42,120; emigrated – 83,157; immigrated – 5,213. It is noteworthy that both the literary critic and the economist put an identical phrase: “Lithuania is a country of dwindling human resources.”
The appearance of such a book is laudable. The bad thing is that it comes ten years too late. The last census – it could only count 3 million residents in the country – provided the authorities with a chance to recognize that it is not only emigration that is draining our human resources. “But it seems that the census shock was only followed by a few feeble moans,” Vasiliauskas notes. He captures the situation in the state with painful irony: “Seeing blatant gaps in strategic political-economy thinking, one phrase comes to mind: 'Lithuania with strategies – Lithuania without future'.”
In order for a country to have external existence, it must have sufficient internal content, made up of people who are more or less content with their lives and jobs, of culture, of certain cross-section, says Daujotytė.
Šliogeris stresses that the content has never even existed: “The twenty years of independence has revealed our total helplessness in all spheres of life: economy, technology, administration, politics, culture, and intellectual life.” He adds: “We laugh at Greeks, but we are doing, more speedily and successfully, the same thing they are doing – we are using euroelectronic money that is not backed by any material or intellectual value – we produce like Papua New Guinea while we consume (or are convinced that we can consume) like Sweden.”
“Easy money is dangerous,” says Daujotytė, adding a quote from a story by Šatrijos Ragana: “Beware of easy money, beware of someone else's wealth. Beware of easy life.”
There will be many who will dispute Daujotytė and particularly Šliogeris' theses that empty currencies give birth to parasites: “This kind of business is thriving in Lithuania – through direct and indirect mechanisms of corruption, through so-called projects, various non-governmental organizations, municipalities, and even through so-called businesses.”
“Weak politics operates by politicizing, by proliferation of enemies,” Daujotytė says. The more mistrust abounds (in each other, political parties, the Parliament, the Government, business partners), the weaker the state is. Society that is antagonized and mistrustful of itself cannot act selectively – to vote to power people able to work, to distinguish what is important collectively and individually.
Even though belatedly, the five academicians have voiced their unease about the future of the state. This unease can be summed up thus: death's triumph over life in almost every step. And now, let's compare it to issues that the Parliament and its special committees have been breaking their lances over for the last six years.
Several years wasted on 12 State Security Department warrants. No less time on who's going to build a nuclear plant and with whom (Daujotytė says that the decommissioning of our old nuclear power plant is like a litmus paper of our condition – so how can we build anything?). They spent half a year searching warehouses for secret CIA prisons. The oratory stroke the supreme heights in scrimmages over two FCIS chiefs. And not a word on things that really matter.
What should a common Lithuanian feel faced with the academicians' unease, who previously though that the only thing standing between him and a good life was some SSD warrants and a new nuclear plant?
Time is running out, but there are several grains of sand left in the hourglass. Besides, according to Daujotytė, we are in a house that is difficult to rebuild, since we must start from the very foundations, but at the same time we cannot tear it down and build anew. “Let's always remember and remind others of the year 1940.”
