Imagine two points that can, for some reason, not be connected by a straight line. And imagine a third point equidistant to both initial points and connected to each of them. This third point might be regarded as the centre of a circle which is determined by the location of this centre and the length of its radius. The two points I started with share an obvious property: both are situated at the periphery of the circle just defined. Politically speaking, peripheral status could - somewhat loosely - be defined as pertaining to regions which cannot be accessed from different regions, albeit by passing through a central node. Having to establish a connection between Vienna and Budapest via New York is a clear indication of life on the periphery.
I had, on a previous occasion, written on Austro-Hungarian relations. The spatial patterns that were involved at that time were quite different from those suggested by my browsing session. This was in preparing for the ``World Exhibition 1995'', which was supposed to be jointly organised by Budapest and Vienna. The envisaged motto had been ``Bridges into the Future'' and I spent some time trying to dissuade the organising committee from adopting what seemed to me to be an outdated, shallow slogan. Evoking impressive technical achievements of the late 19th century in order to direct the imagination into the next millennium seemed ridiculous from a philosophical point of view in 1989. Needless to say, this intervention was received with mild astonishment and disinterest by politicians and architects, busy to exploit any cliché whatsoever in promoting their interests. Those interests were clearly articulated for the Hungarian side by Peter Palko, at that time director of foreign relations of the city of Budapest.
Die Weltausstellung kann als Anlaß und Möglichkeit dazu dienen, daß wir anfangen, die Fundamente des gemeinsamen Hauses Europa zu legen: wo jedes Volk über sein eigenes Zimmer verfügt, dieses nach eigenem Geschmack einrichten kann und sich dabei an die gemeinsam geschaffene Hausordnung hält. Diese Art von Großveranstaltungen bietet den kleinen Völkern - wie es Österreich und auch die Ungarn sind - eine einmalige Chance dazu, ihre eigene Identität zu bewahren und zu zeigen, ihre Zukunftsvorstellungen darzustellen (Enquete zur Weltausstellung 1995, Wien 1989, S.16)
One should not put too much weight on up-beat pronouncements of this kind. But the frame of mind exhibited by Peter Palko's contribution can serve as a useful reminder of an extremely powerful set of images that is - up to now - only marginally disturbed by electronic networks. Looking back at the failure of the joint project a p.r. insert tries to make the best of it as late as 1996:
Wir konnten schon viel früher als geplant diese Brücken bauen, massive, einsturzsichere Brücken, die uns vielleicht zur Jahrtausendwende, dem nächsten Millenium, schon in ein neues, größeres Europa führen werden. (Wiener Journal Nr.194, November 1996, after p. 24)
As the prospect of Hungary's joining the European Union takes over from nostalgically celebrating the Habsburg-axis a certain pattern reasserts itself. A strange mixture of images taken from traditional craftsmanship and a pseudo-visionary outlook is at work in such pronouncements. Let us analyse the metaphors more closely.
The ``common house of Europe'' with its multiplicity of rooms and its ``rule of the house'', mutually agreed upon, is an impressive, albeit archaic metaphor of considerable political weight. It lacks, however, the minimum amount of precision that it would need to function as a starting point for serious political discussion. What sort of house is being referred to? Households of the Greek and Roman city-states, a noble estate and a bourgeois multi-flat condominium follow completely different organising principles. It seems utterly naive to look at the political map of contemporary Europe and simply envisage it as an architectural blueprint with the various countries figuring as so many rooms. There is some superficial spatial analogy, I'll grant that. But it is a serious defect of the domestic imagery that it completely omits the rules according to which this ``building'' is supposed to function. Prisons can, after all, be called a ``common houses''. (Remember the Habsburg monarchy being denounced as a ``Völkergefängnis''?)
What is lacking from this metaphor is, obviously, any mention of the relations of power that have to be in place for any ``common house'' to work. Such relations cannot, moreover, be based on traditional ideas about ``neighbourhood'' as the image of adjoining rooms naively suggests. The infra-structure of the Internet to which I referred to at the beginning serves as a reminder that European politics is operating under conditions that are increasingly removed from the familiar patterns of neighbourhood across border-lines. It is difficult to change deeply entrenched pictures. Here are some attempts to deconstruct this particular application of the language of highway systems.
Constructing a motorway (actually building bridges) is an activity that is reasonably close to traditional spatial patterns and I do not want to deny the continued importance of such patterns. But consider the failure of the Austro-Hungarian exhibition-project. Even though it could not have been stopped by philosophical scepticism concerning its motto, some ``cunning of Reason'' brought it down. The confident promise of progress by means of a linear extrapolations from existing circumstances was widely perceived as having lost its punch. Due to political developments that almost no-one had envisaged the notoriously strained alliance between Enlightenment utopianism and political pragmatism rapidly began to unravel.
We do not need global visions in order to sort out traffic jams at Austro-Hungarian border checkpoints any more. This is the element of truth contained in the advertisement quoted above: ``Durch den Fall des Eisernen Vorhangs hat sich das EXPO-Projekt jedoch selbst ad absurdum geführt!'' (loc.cit.) We have, however, become increasingly aware of the fact that there are numerous profound obstacles blocking easy transfer of goods and ideas between neighbouring countries. The worn-out imagery of ''bridges'' offers little help in this respect. The example discussed in the first section of this paper is intended to throw some light on one particular set of constraints. Helping myself to the housebuilding metaphor I could express it in the following way: In electronic terms Austria and Hungary are two adjacent rooms that can best be traversed by taking a detour through New York. The opportunities afforded by the Internet directly affect the meaning of ``neighbourhood'' of agents that used to be thought of as residing in classical space. Their relationship is thoroughly changed by the rearrangement induced by the Net.
This, obviously, raises the question whether it still makes sense to use the term ``detour''. There has to be a criterion of directness in order to give meaning to this term. Counting kilometres cannot provide such a criterion under the present circumstances. Imagining a geographical connection, for example along the River Danube, is a nostalgic enterprise when electronic signals from Passau to Vienna - and hence to Budapest - travel via Paris. Network routing defines a new matrix of ``neighbourhoods''. Vienna, as well as Budapest, are ``closer'' to any city in the US than to each other.
It could be objected that I am relying on a single browsing session to make my point. There are, indeed, direct cable connections between the two Central European cities and they carry the main load of the electronic traffic within a rather conventional topology that closely matches geographical circumstances. And when a segment of those cables is removed and stolen (because it is made from copper, a valuable material), the promise of ``Cyberspace'' is rapidly deflated. My claim is, nevertheless, that those prosaic cables have lost most of their importance within the discourse of ``neighbourhood''. Roads might still be said to facilitate exchange between countries bordering on each other. Electronic exchange does not care about the route it takes. Its main determinants are the routing programs, the capacities of the respective service providers and the shifts in supply and demand of information, advertisement and entertainment.
To be very blunt, Austro-Hungarian relations carry little interest compared to most offerings within the global Net. Whereas Peter Palko still entertained the phantasy that a huge international exhibition could serve to consolidate Austrian and Hungarian identity, the truth of the matter - and the dimly perceived reason behind the public rejection of the project - is clearly in evidence on the Internet. National identities (in this medium) are secondary, reactionary constructs imposed upon digital exchange routed through gateways that are to a large degree independent of any governmental, historical and regional authority. This new topology of power manifests itself in simple, yet decisive facts like our common use of the English language. And it leaves an authoritative imprint on anything exchanged via the Net.
Adapting the imagery of motor-ways the p.r. managers offer a pathetically inadequate picture of things to come: ``Die Städte überlegen also, sich zu einem Verkehrsknotenpunkt auf dem Datenhighway zusammenzuschließen.'' (loc.cit.) This is their fancy way of proposing to establish a common homepage for Berlin, Budapest and Vienna. ``Österreich und Ungarn, Wien und Budapest könnten hier gemeinsam und vielleicht auch beispielgebend für Europa neue virtuelle Brücken zu bauen beginnen.'' This use of ``virtual'' is virtually meaningless. ``Virtual Bridges'' supposedly are point-to-point constructs lacking the physicality of the actual edifice, yet preserving its internal logic. But transfering the imagery taken from actual bridges to the realm of electronic networks is a spectacular failure as a ploy to refresh the traditional meaning of the term ``bridge''. As my remarks indicate, its core content dissolves as soon as one attempts to apply it.
So, what is the purpose of discussing Austro-Hungarian relations from the point of view of electronic networks? Is it more than the nursing of pious memories? I want to propose two answers. As a first approach I recommend to concede the utter contingency of such enterprises viewed from within the context of global information exchange. An Austro-Bulgarian or an Hungaro-Australian project could have done just as well. This concession, however, does not imply that co-operative projects like the present one are without merit. Its just that it cannot straightforwardly depend on geographical proximity. My point is that a certain attitude should be avoided, if we do not want to trick ourselves into sentimental, pseudo-historical solidarity. ``Building Bridges into the Future'' is a painfully compromised slogan, in particular with regard to networking. I fail to get any inspiration by extending a common heritage of our two countries into ``Cyberspace''. If gulyas is to meet Mozartkugel, let it happen on TV. Yet, I am not particularly pessimistic. My second answer tries to take up the challenge of the altered circumstances by substituting hypertext-links for bridges.