- The main question in my book is about the future of Europe. One of my theses is that there is no European language per se, and that none of the national European languages can take over this role. But how can a Europe, which wants to unify, communicate in future? What common language – which is necessary, if Europe wants to be truly democratic – should the European public speak? The language of Europe can only be understood as a kind of translation practice, a linguistic communication that takes place as a process of constant reciprocal translation. At present there is no real awareness of this challenge. But in the future neither intellectuals nor politicians will be able to avoid this problem.

- The main thesis of my book is that in our post-modern era all spheres of social life but above all the political one are translated into culture, or, if you prefer, into the language of culture. Today culture has become a kind of ultimate translation. We can no longer manage to escape the all-embracing notion of culture. This is the point where it must become clear that, unlike what some people believe, we cannot expect global emancipation through cultural translation alone. The "new beginning", which Žižek calls for, means nothing less than a re-politicisation of our historical experience and the economic sphere. The first step towards this new beginning is the recognition that there is also experience lying outside of the field of culture and that this experience can only be made as a result of practical change. Previously this change was called revolution, but today we have to reinvent it.

- Of course Europe is on the wrong track if it believes that cultural development alone can decide its destiny. This belief is even very dangerous, as it makes us blind to political contradictions and the new, as yet unknown, antagonisms that the project of European unification will inevitably bring with it. My book is directed precisely against this political blindness. Or, to put it more precisely, against the naïve belief in a new cultural identity, an identity that is supposed to develop outside of the old concept of the European nations' fundamental identities, as a kind of "cultural hybridism". This is supposed to spare us giving an answer to the equally decisive question about Europe's future, i.e. whether Europe should develop into a kind of federal nation state. Sooner or later the sovereignty of the existing nation states will have to be abolished, or, contrariwise, Europe must try out a completely different form of democracy.

- It could be something that refers back to the tradition of the European revolutions or, to be more precise, to the experiences of the revolutionary soviet republics.

- I myself don't feel so badly in this kind of perennial dispute – out of which my book too developed. But, to put joking aside: what we are talking about here is a different experience of democracy, an alternative concept of democracy. Just as my own cultural identity, if I have one, no longer fits into the conceptual framework of a national culture. But precisely this can no longer be translated into the political realm and there is, as yet, no democracy outside of the nation state. In this area I am both politically and culturally a nobody, a wage-earner, whose rights are far fewer than those of the working classes a hundred years ago, I am, as a Croatian nationalist once said about a nation without a state, "like a piece of shit in the rain".

- As we know the civil society, the subject of an epochal renewal of democracy, is an Eastern European invention or, to put it more accurately, an invention of the masses and the dissidents that fought against communist totalitarianism and brought about the collapse of so-called real socialism. But a great deal has changed in the meantime and many of the hopes of the democratic revolutions of 1989 have turned out to be illusory. Instead of democratic renewal global capitalism came along, bringing with it unemployment and criminal privatisations. This development was also accompanied by ghosts from the past (long declared exorcised), above all the spectre of nationalism.

- The civil societies of Eastern and South-eastern Europe have almost completely lost the normative value they had before 1989. Veterans of the fascist movements from the time of the Second World War, or former Nazi collaborators, anti-Semites and chauvinists of every kind, clerical conservatives, pro-life fanatics, skinheads, cultural racists, nationalists etc. are in many places the most active elements in the respective civil society. A number of people such as myself have attempted to escape from this kind of civil society by emigrating. This historic experience is awaiting translation into the political realm. In as far as culture and art are aware of this task, they can also positively influence present-day civil societies in Eastern and South-eastern Europe.

- Croatia is today still dreaming of its area of cultural sovereignty and is consequently working towards the self-isolation of its culture. Although the Croatians have essentially the same language as the Serbs and the Bosnians they are attempting to radically distinguish their version from the other two. This means that they are doing their own language untold damage. The consequence of this linguistic autism is a situation reminiscent of the position in the 19th century, when Croatia was still part of the Habsburg monarchy. At that time most of the elite studied in Vienna and spoke German, the language of knowledge, intellectual communication and sophisticated culture. The mass of the people had to make do with their completely autistic native tongue, Croatian, which was incapable of serious cultural and intellectual production.

- The language of the elite nowadays is English. This elite studies abroad, mostly at American or British university faculties, where intellectual communication takes place primarily in English.

- The French philosopher Etienne Balibar has pointed out that English is "more or less" the European language. But English is also the language of global communication and exists in many different forms. On the other hand English is the language of only two of the European nations. Why should this language in particular take on the role of the language of Europe?

- Russian was never really a “lingua franca“ in the eastern areas of Europe. Although for ideological reasons and due to political pressure people in the former Soviet block did learn Russian, in cultural terms the Soviet Union never succeeded in establishing hegemony in the former East Block. Of course this doesn't apply to those countries that were formerly part of the USSR, where today Russian is still understood and spoken everywhere.

- The idea of a homology between language and culture, which ultimately implies that there can be no European culture per se, or that European culture is only a kind of summation of European national cultures, is based on Humboldt's understanding of language as a self-contained totality and the expression of a self-contained community.
The nations of Eastern and South-eastern Europe also experienced the romantic phase of nation building, mostly in the 19th century. This happened although most of them did not immediately succeed in crowning this cultural "revival" with the founding of their own nation state. If their aim today is to bring this process to its final conclusion by political means, then this seems a kind of anachronism

- Here one has only to think of all the institutions of so-called national culture that still continue to enjoy official support, both in Eastern and Western Europe, and which dominate cultural life in the whole of Europe. Therefore institutionally European culture and the educational systems of the European peoples (that are based on national languages) still remain at the same stage of development as in the 19th century.

- This kind of compulsion is contra-productive. And furthermore it is motivated by the same conservative historical perspective, i.e. the conviction that national culture forms the ultimate horizon of modern culture and whoever doesn't possess it is without culture or primitive. Etienne Balibar, whom I referred to earlier, believed that the future of European culture lies with those people who have gone beyond the horizon of national culture.

- I would not call them mixed languages; in fact they are a kind of hybridisation. This is not just a mixture of different languages but can also be understood as a continuous, reciprocal translation of the respective languages. The most important thing here is that the confrontation with the notion of foreign, involved in translation, does not contaminate a language
but enriches it.

- I can't answer this question. But one thing should be emphasised: translation is increasingly more than a merely linguistic process. It is always also a cultural, political and social examination of what is foreign. As I see it the so-called linguistic or literary translation is only a part of "translation practice".

- Yes, even if we don’t talk and understand them perfectly, we should use them and savour the taste of them in our mouths.