[SIGNATURE – RADONJIĆ (Vukolaj)]
Signing an act with international repercussions (in modern terminology: sign down) is as old as international politics. In fact, the circumstances under which the signature is given are decisive, and they, all together, can be called a moment, momentum. Epistolary diplomacy - the literary and non-literary in it - what else is a signature, a momentum (an action that is measured by its consequence)?
The signature of a poet is a gift to the people, language, tradition, meaning of life, while the signature of a diplomat is something completely different. In Petrović's diplomacy, both signatures have infantile, twin, indistinguishable strength. Diplomatic and creative consciousness in one point - what else is Petrović's specialty if not that? - that's her entire charisma, which in one heart brings together awareness of the problems of being (poetry) and awareness of the problems of the people (politics). All countries and all peoples have their tribe of alchemists, small and large, healthy and leprous, and at least in our country you should ask which tribe it is.
Why is Petrović's perspective closer to the modern generation than others? Because they were masters of the dual spheres. They wove on two looms. Or, in Rilkeian terms, in Sonnets to Orpheus, they placed their consciousness in a double sphere where the voice becomes soft and strong (Erst in dem Doppelbereich/werden die Stimmen/ewig und mild). Petrović's correspondence is poetry in slow motion.
Vukolaj Radonjić, the last Montenegrin governor, Njegoš's rival in the election for ruler, on October 31, 1831, in Cetinje, actually signs his resignation. The election of Peter II is urged by Mojsije Zečević, a church diplomat, Sima Milutinović Sarajlija, "Secretary of the Montenegrin People", Senator Stevan Perkov Vukotić and Pope Vukota Čelebić. In addition to them, says Zlatko Zlatar, a professor of European intellectual history at the University of Sydney and in Paris, the young Njegoš was signed as a successor by Archimandrite Josif Pavićević and finally, reluctantly, by Vukolaj.
Governor of Montenegro, Vuko Radonjić, hotly opposed the election of Rade Tomov, and argued that the successor was Đorđije Savov”, continues Zlatar in his monograph on Petrović's diplomacy, Poetics of Slavs, which he titles in the direction of the symbiosis typical for that era, ruler and poet, which makes Petrović somewhat different from statesmen in the Slavic world.
The 'governor of Montenegro and the Brda' put his signature last (cf. Zdenko Zlatar: The Poetics of Slavdom: The Mythopoetic Foundations of Yugoslavia - Volume II, Peter Lang, 2007, 455).
The Vatican diplomatic maxim, which can be connected with the above, at least per negationem, suggests, on the other hand, refraining from an official signature wherever possible. It reads: think a lot, say little, never sign anything (Think much, say little, sign nothing).
[CUSTOMS – DANILO (prince)]
Modern diplomacy is born on the border of customary, old and written, new law; here, as everywhere, after all, diplomacy is closely connected with law. Law is its source, origin, episteme. Danilo I Petrović, as is known, published his Code of Obschi Montenegrin and Mountain in 1855, and the law was soon translated into French, German and Czech, and also had its own diplomatic character, as Valtazar Bogišić testifies:
The German translation was published in Vienna by Manz in 1859 under the title: Gesetz Daniel's I Fursten und Gebieters von Montenegro und der Berda; French and Czech translation was published in Prague by Mr. 1864 at Greger (see Valtazar Bogišić: Written Laws in the Slovenian South, ed. Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb, 1878, 89).
Danilo, his reign, law, diplomacy, correspondence, and even his death, all came out of the aura of common law. Common law, in diplomatic communication, has been known since ancient times - perhaps nothing else in diplomatic-legal knowledge dates back earlier - and it still figures in the etymology of one of the greatest fathers of the Western Church, the "founder of the Middle Ages" Isidore of Seville (patron of the Internet). .
"Every right is a matter of law and custom (mores)," says Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (V, 3, 3). "The difference lies in the fact that the law is written, while mores is a custom, which people have followed since ancient times and is recognized precisely because of its tradition. Custom is the unwritten law.”
With Danilo, there lies the paradox that he was forced to come out of his dreary mores. He had the idea of modernity, the state as a system and consciousness, law (written), diplomacy (turned to the Western pattern) and modernity as a whole. This brought him against customs, in the sense that he changes, modifies and removes them faster and more sharply than domestic conditions allow. Whoever is looking for an epistemology of his tragic speed will find it there.
Everything about him, in diplomatic correspondence, is speed and sharp opinion. He doesn't think, he fights. Among the diplomats from this area, it seems, according to the pen, according to what they left behind, he has the most haste and urgency. A diplomat who writes with steel in his hand - that's how he works. He made decisions quickly, changed the world around him quickly, wrote quickly. Not to mention death (assassination). The nature of assassination is such that the victim's death seems faster, more hasty, than it is, and it is the same with him.
The word revolution (the violent end of the old for the sake of the new) was not yet domesticated in Mr. Knjaz's time, but it goes with him, familiarly, more closely than with any name from the South Slavic areas of that time, except, perhaps, with Vuk in the language. Even his nickname, Zeko, is somehow sharp and fast, quick, as if there is no time to pronounce the biblical name Danilo.
"I, too, am going to war, with a jacket in my hand, to set an example to the people of how to resolutely defend against the enemy," he wrote to JP Kovaljevski at the beginning of 1853, "because I sacrificed everything I have, including my own life, on the altar of fatherhood." . Danilov's complete correspondence, which places him in the Petrović literary tribe, is intoned with the language of action. In this regard, in concreteness, within a wider political radius, he acts with the anger of creativity, the anger of a man driven against the wall, the anger of one who steps forward with a firm decision not to stop.
"The eternal ruin or the liberation of Montenegro hangs in the terrible balance," he wrote on June 23, 06. S. Gopčević from Cetinje; Mr. In 1853, he sent a memorandum to the European rulers with demands that, obviously, are many times more complex in terms of the time and practice of international relations than the urgency allows: that the border with Turkey be established as with Austria, first, that the borders be expanded at the expense of the Turkish ones in Herzegovina and Albania, secondly, to join the Republic of Montenegro, thirdly, and, finally, to diplomatically recognize the independence of Montenegro (cf. V. Popović: Policy of France and Austria in the Balkans at the time of Napoleon III, 1856, 1925).
Compared to Njegoš's correspondence, whose tone tends towards passive states (desperation in emotion and contemplation in thought), Prince Danilo swings while writing. He sharpens his words in an irrevocable tone: "Montenegros have always fought with the sword, which is why odium falls on us; they accuse us because of our timid restlessness, but hunger and displaced land accuse our enemies even more who pushed us to extremes" (D. Vuksan: Prince Danilo/Peta godina vlade, 73).
[FORMAT – DANILO (prince)]
In discussions about small states, current today in every corner of the globe, on every continent, especially in the multilateral level, when the Balkan tradition is taken into account, it seems that the name of Prince Danilo is the closest to this discussion. He is the one who most naturally, in a historical and personal format, illustrates the format of Montenegro as a small state. Although, of course, all our diplomats and rulers are called, inevitably, to represent the same thing, a small country among empires, it is the most small of all, or, rather, the most powerfully small, if I may say figuratively.
Why - because, during his reign, the need for bread for autonomy was emphasized the most, independence was essential, resistance to forces in the sense of one's own diplomatic choice and historical consciousness. (There were, of course, two Daniels; the one from the XNUMXth century is in everything: in the idea for independence, the vision, the hell of isolation, the decision, and even more by his example, he is worthy of the state, which becomes the people's consciousness, because he is the real the patriarch of state independence, the arch of the state, but I am talking about the new age here, and there is the younger Danilo, the episteme of today's Montenegro). In a word, a diplomat and a ruler, who at the same time represents the minor, geographical format of his country, the courage to overcome it at any cost, on the battlefield and at the green table, and achieve that the people's consciousness can reach where the sound of the country leads.
"Small countries have always fascinated the world because they are associated with adventure, isolation, darkness and obscurity, and on the other hand with dreams, brightness and paradise on earth, especially small island states. And these small countries have been studied from various angles," says contemporary political theorist Naren Prasad in his work on small countries in the global world. He calls them small but wise, which is indeed a consolation, if so, if the people take wise steps from small shoes.
Historians and political scientists have studied small states as a group of countries in their international relations context including aspects related to foreign affairs, security, power relations, diplomacy, peace and war, continues this author (cf. more extensively The Diplomacies of Small States, Macmillan, New York, 2013, 42). Small countries, says Prasad, started appearing, all of a sudden, in the XNUMXs.
Prince Danilo, as he emerges from this, is a revolutionary with a vision of one hundred and fifty years.
Montenegro was not so small, as, in fact, its ambitions lay high and how unbearable its burden was, formatted. Overweight (Das Schwerste Gewicht), to return, through Rilke's language, to the music of the state. This applies on a personal level, just as suggestively and concretely, to Danilo as a diplomat. Among the seven Petrovićs, writers and rulers, i.e. diplomats, he is the least of the former, and the latter, perhaps, the most. But, as a whole, he not only does not disrupt, but also formats, the image of a tribe, a diluvial literary village, in which he was born and which understands the written word as a state secret weapon.
Momentum is the right word for his diplomatic thought and setting. Small, and tall, as he was, and a determined husband, with the vision of a man who knows his goal and steps in anger, he diplomatically fits into the pro-Western, prematurely terminated campaign, the first to start from these areas "where the sun sets". Fate, which speaks so much about the format of meanness, at a given moment, among the big ones, in politics, casts a small shadow that, fortunately, spreads across the country in an aura.
Everything that Danilo planned and did oscillates, like some kind of leaden pendulum, either in a large or a small format. The Balkans, the one five hundred, three hundred, two hundred or one hundred years ago, or this Balkan today, chronically lacks people who will analytically understand Western thought. South Slavic consciousness relatively late came into complete contact with the West, into consequent complete contact, with consequent state-cultural realities, and, in the given context, diplomatic thought is its truly revolutionary episteme.
Morality is unprovable without a situation, without a chronotope
[MORAL – PLAMENATZ (John)]
Jovan Plamenac, an English student, an island genius by intellectual technique, at work Marx's philosophy of man it does not consider morality autonomously as something already given. It is, in fact, impossible, except at the level of speculation. He approaches morality with something without which ethics as a system, in fact, does not exist, or, at least, is unprovable, and that is the context. He had to de facto, something chronotopic, given, but given in an unconditionally concrete frame, frame, tone, color, taste. Morality is concrete, valid only in the chronotope of circumstances. Morality is unprovable without a situation, without a chronotope, without a concrete example. Otherwise, in a non-chronotopic, fact-free, context-free sense, morality, Plamenac thinks, is a mere theory, utopia, speculation. Let the word be carried by the wind.
(The other possibility of which Rousseau took to account is that men might live comfortably together even though they had different and yet firmly held principles, that they might learn to be tolerant of differences firmly held principles, that they might learn to be tolerant of differences in moral standards as well as in matters of religion, that they might learn to distinguish between standards which they had all to accept if they were to live together peacefully and amicably, and standards, just as firmly held and just as important to those who held them, which could be allowed to differ from group to group and even from person to person. It is his failure to take account of this possibility, in spite of the high value he placed on what he called moral freedom, that most sharply distinguishes Rousseau from the nineteenth-century liberal-form, say, John Stuart Mill.)
(John Plamenatz: Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man, Oxford, 1975, 413).
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