Slovakia has enriched the world with the fourth way of moving historical time – the passage of banality
The author is a historian and political scientist,
University of Vienna/Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva
Time and its passage. The prominent French historian Fernand Braudel in his three-volume work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world at the time of Philippe II (The Mediterranean Sea and the Mediterranean World during the time of Philip II.), which was originally published in 1949 and has seen several re-editions and translations (in either Czech or Slovak), distinguishes three levels of the flow of historical time.
The basic historical pace is the so-called long flow – longue durée – that is, how the geographical configuration of the Mediterranean affected and participated in the formation of social processes and economic relations in this region. The second level then represents the medium-term flow –moyenne durée – that is, the level of the social and economic structures themselves and the movements and changes within them. Finally, the third short-term flow – Courte Durée – it was run at a rapid pace of change at the political level.
Braudel began work on the book in 1927 and completed its initial draft during the war in the Lübeck POW camp (Oflag XC). This camp was reserved by the Nazis for politically exposed and unreliable Allied officers. Braudel found himself in the camp for Gaullist agitation, while his fellow prisoner, the Dominican and theologian Yves Congar, who later played a key role in the reform of Catholicism during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), was reassigned for repeated escape attempts.
Braudel’s story offers several lessons. One of them is that high-quality science, which fundamentally pushes the boundaries of knowledge, needs years, sometimes even decades, of thinking and reevaluating the acquired knowledge. But I didn’t want to talk about that. I am rather glad that Braudel did not write his book during the last years in Slovakia. He would probably have to add a fourth to the three time planes mentioned first, which he could call the flow of banality – durée banale.
It is already known what topics politics in Slovakia lives on and what it solves. At a time of deep geopolitical and economic changes and pressures that cause this movement at the level of social and economic structures even in much more developed countries like Slovakia, these “a bacchanalia of collective insanity” they only further erode the pro-democratic and pro-Western direction of society and strengthen authoritarian tendencies.
It is far from a matter of whether those who wish for the victory of Russia prevail in Slovakia, or those who wish for the victory of Ukraine, or