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The Unofficial View of Tirana (99)

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Áron Birtalan, Church of Scientology – Advanced Saint Hill Europe, Department of BULGRAVIA, flag (2012)

by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Before Christmas I devoted a post to Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort, his streak of meetings here in Albania, and more particularly his concepts of “Decemland” and “Expert Dreamers.” Coming back at my desk from a family Christmas break, I discovered that Monfort had published two further installments on his blog on The Huffington Post, “A New Global Party,” and “Coup d’Establishment.” In these articles, except from recounting several meetings with people such as Crown Prince Leka II, former Deputy Prime Minister Kastriot Islami, and CEO of insurance company SIGAL Avni Ponari, he also announced the “post-political” J.P. Monfort Party as well as the “new fiction state” and “fairy tale” of “Balkanland.”

I make a promise today, a pledge to each and every human being, that I shall create chapters of The J.P. Monfort Party in every country and territory, that I shall devote the remainder of my lifetime on Earth to identifying The Expert Dreamers in every corner of the World. 4.500 Expert Dreamers from 197 countries and territories among the circa 10 Million Experts worldwide invited regularly have already joined in what has become History’s largest and most ambitious recruitment process. I speak onto you the Lovers who dream and the Dreamers who love. Let The Elegant Revolution begin.

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Áron Birtalan, Church of Scientology – Advanced Saint Hill Europe, Department of BULGRAVIA, public intervention (2012)

Monfort’s project of the “new fiction state” of Balkanland reminded me of the Scientology initiative to found a state in the Balkans under the name of Bulgravia in the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain (scans and translations of archival material were eventually incorporated in an art project by Áron Birtalan from 2012, leading to an article in Balkanist). His insistence on the importance of the imaginary and fiction in the creation of what he calls “post-politics” in Albania made me decide to contact him and arrange an interview, in fact, the first interview I have ever conducted for this series! We met last Monday at the Sheraton Hotel, and conversed about the force of the imagination in politics, a world without poverty or borders run like a giant social business, and the creation of supreme entertainment in order to take over the world with a global political party. Below are a few excerpts from that conversation, not necessarily in chronological order:

VWJ

Albania as a country quite often appears in projects that deal with an imaginary politics. Somehow the way that you think about Albania as a country fits that tradition. How do you see the work of the imagination in the project of Balkanland?

JPM

You talk about “imagination” but my equivalent term would be “fiction.” I’ve been a big fan of science fiction writers, Jules Verne in particular. I am inventing a long-term fiction. That’s why I use the term post-politics, because in the end everything must be articulated and consolidated – the idea is to create a global paradigm that is articulated around a narrative, with in each region an integrated narrative.

In this process, I have been contacting 9 million experts. Some say I am spamming them and maybe they’re right, I have been contacting these experts through two servers in the US that I am currently trying to recuperate. My response rate is about 1 in every 2000. Currently I have about 9 thousand contacts in Albania. The whole idea is to dissolve the nation-state, which clearly is not working at the moment. Moreover, integrating several states with each other, such as in the context of Balkanland, could lead to improvement of efficiency and facilitate the creation of new identities.

VWJ

The EU has tried to create such a new identity, while at the same time attempting to dissolve internal borders. However, we have seen only an increase in bureaucracy and a return of nationalism. How to avoid this?

JPM

My working assumption is that the current paradigm of party-political systems as a way of administering democracy in nation-states is obsolete. Parties left, right, and center are completely inefficient, with rhetoric that is not constructive. The idea is to bypass this system entirely by constructing a global political party. For that you need people and a program. The people become a high-performance team of Expert Dreamers and the program becomes a reality fiction. It is a narrative, like Harry Potter or Sesame Street, with which you can conquer and educate society and raise funding. Because a narrative can be sold and incorporate advertisement.

VWJ

But the difference between what you are doing and Sesame Street is that the latter always openly acknowledges its fictional status, whereas the way that I see you operating in Albania is that at least at some point there is some confusion whether the J.P. Monfort is a real party, and if so, in what way.

 JPM

Well it’s an imaginary party.

VWJ

What is the party aspect of it?

 JPM

The last few years I’ve met about 735 people face-to-face, but no one wants to join a real political party. The word party is only so that people know what it is about: an alternative to governance by political parties. But it’s not up to me, also to the people I have met and have featured as protagonists in this fiction.

VWJ

But at the end it is you who creates this fiction, and have the power to create these protagonists.

 JPM

Yes, like in a theater play. With these protagonists I create this global party, a narrative fiction of a world without poverty. So a fiction-state instead of a nation-state. Fiction-states are the result of integration. The people that engage in this fiction of Balkanland need to know that they need to embrace certain values, and integration is one of them. Some people say this is very ambitious, but…

VWJ

No one would ever think that creating an imaginary political system in the context of a novel or theater play is ambitious. The judgement that your project is ambitious shows that people still do not understand your project as fictional, post-political if you will, but interpret it within the parameters of current politics. So is saying that your project is ambitious not a misunderstanding of your work?

 JPM

Probably. It is not very clear, not even for me. You’ve got the nation-state and the fiction-state, politics and post-politics, and real people such as Kastriot Islami and these individuals as protagonists in the narrative. Avni Ponari will remain the CEO of SIGAL, but in our narrative he is the next Prime Minister. Crown Prince Leka II is the new King. These are the easy examples…

VWJ

But does Kastriot Islami understand that he is fictionalized?

 JPM

Most people don’t understand what is going on, not even after three, four, five meetings. Maybe many of them haven’t even realized that they have a fictional equivalent.

VWJ

The medium in which you produce these fictions, namely the political imaginary, itself seems to be resistant to fictionalization. And the way in which you seem to over-identify with the fictional aspects of any political project perhaps makes it so confrontational. You yourself are also a protagonist in your own story, you fictionalize yourself. How can you become someone else through fiction?

 JPM

People want to identify with a fiction. While you are inside a narrative anyone could assign me or you a role.

 VWJ

But it seems that in the end the expectation is that the fiction-state at some point would overtake the remnants of the nation-state.

JPM

Right. In post-politics the concept is to focus on the narrative. You design a narrative that is so powerful, so extremely entertaining, that people leave the current politics behind. Even though we have many media channels nowadays, it remains very difficult to put together high-level narrative content, like HBO, National Geographic, or Canal+. I see politics as a narrative of poor quality, and our response is to turn it off, or to switch to football. But if you would have an extremely entertaining and powerful global narrative, people would be attracted to it. I try to learn, I try to improve. I watch Hollywood movies and Seinfeld, which I consider a model fictional narrative. If we could engage National Geographic or Discovery Channel this would bring in a minimal revenue to start, because sooner or later you will need funding. So to have the best possible entertainment narrative is also a funding strategy.

For Madagascar I created Decemland, but here we have Balkanland as the regional narrative, with its questions of the capital, the central bank, its currency – I am thinking to call it Balcoin, like Bitcoin. These issues become the work on the skeleton of the narrative. Then there are some notions of universal healthcare and education for all, no armies, no borders, and no passports. This is the direction in which we should be moving as a global society. There may be some people that are initially against this, but I it’s all pretty obvious. The skeleton of the long-term narrative I have already fabricated based on what I’ve read. The protagonists need to embrace this narrative and the fantasy; otherwise the audience is never going to get it. It’s not about fighting the political elite; that’s what you do in politics. It’s about designing a better narrative. The idea is that this is purely entertainment, and Albania will export this narrative, designed for the rest of the world. And we would only enter politics if we get an absolute majority. If you can’t get it, don’t enter. It’s a simple rule. But if we do get it, we wil become the Dreamers’ Republic of Albania.

VWJ

Don’t you think that the way in which your narrative is structured would resemble something like the Bible as – in its most positive interpretation – a giant fiction aiming at creating a global community or brotherhood of people that would transcend local differences?

 JPM

Yes. There are similarities between civil society and religious orders. There has got to be a common ethic that we share, that everyone needs to respect. What I cannot tolerate is for example people going to bed without access to basic necessities such as food. These things are out of the question.

***

Postscript:

Based on the articles that Monfort has written on his Huffington Post blog, it is very easy to write him off as a charlatan or a phantast. However, in the past few years, also through my work with the New World Summit, I have come to a better understanding of the enormous importance of the imagination in any political project. What makes Monfort’s honest and sincere attempts toward the creation of better world at first sight so confusing, is that he openly affirms this importance of the imagination. Many friends have told me there is something uncanny about his writing. On the one hand it seems to be a completely legitimate analysis of the Albanian status quo, but on the other it feels like written by a madman who has only temporarily appropriated the language of the external world of political analysis. It is my conviction that Monfort himself is also aware of this uncanniness; after all, especially in politics the line between the fictional and the real is notoriously difficult to articulate.

That Monfort has found such a resonance in Albania (and not in Spain or Madagascar) is an indication precisely of how far this line has been blurred already here. Proposals for Parks of Religious Harmony and Centers for Openness and Dialogue are only slightly better at masking the rich worlds of fantasy and imagination that lie behind them than the Ten Islands of Peace or Balkanland. What the former proposals do have, however, is the full backing of the bureaucracy and the police, which lends them an aura of legitimacy and “actuality.” But I, for one, prefer the person that affirms that thinking, fantasizing, being delusional, even, is an essential – if not the essential – part of any political project, over someone who hides their wild dreams and fantasies behind layers of party politics, shady advisors, corrupt henchmen, and a mistaken sense of superiority.


About the Author:

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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei is a philologist, director of project bureau for the arts and humanities The Department of Eagles, and runs multilingual publishing house Uitgeverij. For Berfrois he writes a regular series on the state and concept of Albania, where he lives and works most of the time.