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4 | 2013
No 4 | 2013
CENTRAL EUROPE
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THE END
OF BIPOLARITY
25 Years After the End of Communism
Leonidas Donskis, Frank Furedi, Jiří Pehe, Brendan Peter Simms, Jan Sowa, Tatiana Zhurzhenko
Cultural Isolationism Has Prevailed
An Interview with Lev Gudkov
Hungary and the EU
Jan-Werner Müller
W W W . A S P E N I N S T I T U T E . C Z
POLITICS
Europe – the Forgotten Little Thing U. Guérot | Occupy or Monitor? P. Pithart
The Beginning of a Lost Decade V. Inozemtsev | Europe Needs Protectionism J.-L. Gréau
The West in Crisis K. Šafaříková | The Mysterious Death of Bohumil Hrabal A. Kaczorowski
ECONOMY
CULTURE
No 4 | 2013
Advisory Board
Walter Isaacson (co-chairman), Michael Žantovský (co­‑chairman),
Yuri Andrukhovych, Piotr Buras, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Josef Joffe, KaiOlaf Lang, Zbigniew Pełczyński, Petr Pithart, Jacques Rupnik, Mariusz
Szczygieł, Monika Sznajderman, Martin M. Šimečka, Michal Vašečka
Editorial Board
Tomáš Klvaňa (Chairman), Luděk Bednář, Adam Černý, Martin Ehl,
Roman Joch, Jan Macháček, Kateřina Šafaříková, Tomáš Vrba
Editors
Aleksander Kaczorowski (Editor In Chief ), Maciej Nowicki (Deputy
Editor In Chief ), Robert Schuster (Managing Editor)
Tra n s l at o r s
Tomasz Bieroń, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Julia Sherwood
Published by
Aspen Institute Prague o. p. s.
Palackého 1, CZ 110 00 Praha
e-mail: [email protected]
www.aspeninstitute.cz
Year II
No 4/2013
ISSN 1805–6806
© Aspen Institute Prague
The ideas expressed in the articles are authors’ own and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board or of the Aspen
Institute Prague.
Content
F O R E W O R D Radek Špicar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
E D I T O R I A L Aleksander Kaczorowski. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
C O V E R S T O R Y 25 YEARS AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM
The Authority of Democracy Exposed—Frank Furedi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Consequences of German Unification for Europe—Brendan Peter Simms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lost in Transition: Struggles over Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus—Tatiana Zhurzhenko . . . . . . .
From Communism to Democracy without Democrats—Jiří Pehe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Quarter-Century of “Really Existing” Capitalism—Jan Sowa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C O M M E N T Leonidas Donskis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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THE INTERVIEW
Cultural Isolationism Has Prevailed. An interview with Lev Gudkov by Filip Memches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
C O M M E N T Petr Pithart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
POLITICS
Europe—the Forgotten Little Thing in the New Coalition Agreement?—Ulrike Guérot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hungary and the EU—Jan-Werner Müller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Look Back in Prudence! Civil War Legacies and Crisis in Greece Today—Iannis Carras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Old Friends, New Leaders: Poland and Turkey in the Early 21st century—Adam Balcer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Personal Is (Again) Political—Ivaylo Ditchev. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C O M M E N T Michal Hvorecký. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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ECONOMY
The Beginning of a Lost Decade—Vladislav Inozemtsev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Europe Needs Protectionism—Jean-Luc Gréau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Steering Wheel Stuck on the Left—Mojmír Hampl. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Why is Eastern Europe Backward—Anna Sosnowska. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
How to Trade Economic Independence for Political Sovereignty—Eva Maurina. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C O M M E N T Anis H. Bajrektarevic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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C U LT U R E
The Mysterious Death of Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997)—Aleksander Kaczorowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Oscar Bronner: A Life in Defiance of Austria and Its Situation—Robert Schuster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
The West in Crisis—Katerina Šafaříková. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Revisionism and Resurrection—Peter Jukes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Ukrainisation of Urbanisation—Sociology of the City in the Ukraine—Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin. . . . . . . 105
Noble and other Kolkhozy—Wojciech Stanisławski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
3
Dear readers,
Puzzle, the Commissioner proposed establishing
a body that would bring together the heads of
EU and US regulatory agencies. This idea did not
go unnoticed even by the biggest media outlets,
such as The New York Times.
Two panels featured experienced businesspeople from both sides of the Atlantic, including
the American Automotive Policy Council President Matt Blunt; the Czech Institute of Directors President Kamil Čermák; the Founder and
Member of the Board of the Aspen Institute
Prague Ivan Hodač or Peter Stračár, the CEO of
General Electric for Central and Eastern Europe.
All guests contributed to a very vivid debate,
which you can watch on our website.
In November, together with the nationwide
weekly Respekt, we held a public debate entitled
Crowdfunding and Entrepreneurship as part of
Global Entrepreneurship Week. The panel hosted
four experts—Aleš Burger (Hithit.cz), Martina
Jakl (SwissCzech Technology Transfer), Martin
Hanzlík (ATRET Consulting), and Martin Strnad
(Havel, Holásek & Partners, attorneys at law)—
who discussed the practical, economic and legal
aspects of alternative forms of supporting innovative business ideas. Even more attention will be
I am happy to present the new issue of our quarterly, commemorating the milestone events that
took place in Central and Eastern Europe 25 years
ago. The focus is on how the fall of Communism
has affected global politics as well as the region’s
economies and societies.
Transformation in Central Europe will also be
the main topic of the 2014 Aspen Annual Conference in June. We will follow up on the discussions
we had during last year’s annual event—Overcoming Barriers to Growth. The conference was
held in October 2013 with the support of our
strategic partner PRK Partners, attorneys at law.
Recalling the collective achievements and failures of the past two decades, the conference
hosted distinguished guests such as entrepreneurs Michaela Bakala, Gabriel Eichler and Zbyněk
Frolík, writer and lyricist Michal Horáček, manager
Libuše Šmuclerová or the Czech Olympic medalist
Martin Doktor.
The second day sessions looked at barriers
in the wider context of the transatlantic marketplace, with a keynote delivered by the European
Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht. In his
speech, Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP)—Solving the Regulatory
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devoted to this topic under our 2014 i­nitiatives.
Within the project Crowdfunding Visegrad,
supported by the International Visegrad Fund,
we will assess the state of play in crowdfunding
throughout the Visegrad countries. The resulting
analysis will be published in the autumn.
Our Institute closed its 2013 agenda with
a Christmas party for all partners, supporters,
Friends of Aspen members, and our program
alumni. The diverse mix of guests, coming from
different walks of life, be they business, the arts,
politics, or the media, best illustrated the Aspen
idea, which is to promote interdisciplinary cooperation. This theme will also recur in the second
edition of the Aspen Young Leaders Program
this February in the Slovak Tatras, supported
by VIGO Investments. Much like last year, it will
bring together about thirty emerging leaders from
Central Europe, who will take part in workshops,
seminars and discussions on the varied aspects
of leadership, including motivation, ethics, decision-making, team-building and media management.
Meanwhile we held the first public event this
year—an international debate entitled What did
we learn from the economic crisis? Three econo-
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mists: Lord Meghnad Desai, Professor at the London
School of Economics, Jacek Rostowski, former Polish
Minister of Finance, and William White, former
Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, will offered
views on the post-crisis financial world.
Lastly, let me inform you that as of this issue
the Aspen Review will be published only in English.
This decision reflects not only the language preferences of our readers, but also our progressive
regional expansion throughout Central and Eastern
Europe, which calls for using a common language.
Enjoy reading, and have a great 2014!
RADEK ŠPICAR
Executive Director
Aspen Institute Prague
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Photo: Aspen Institute Prague
5
EDITORIAL
Drang nach Westen
Aleksander Kaczorowski
The west is the best / Get here, and we’ll do the rest
J. Morrison, “The End”
A quarter of a century after the downfall
of communism is a good moment to ask how
our region will look like in another twenty-five
years. The question if Poland will be a member
of the eurozone (and if there will be any eurozone, European Union, NATO, etc.) should be
left to fortune-tellers. They cannot complain of
lack of demand for their services, just in Poland
used by a hundred thousand people a year.
Predictions of demographers are much
less sought after, which is a pity. If politicians
asked them for advice, they would learn that
if the current demographic trends persist,
in 2050 one in three Polish citizens will be
a pensioner and the population will shrink to
30 million. Already In 2030 there will be just
1.5 potentially working persons (against the
current 2.6) per one pensioner. As early as 2020
it will be impossible—because of shortages of
labor—to maintain the growth of the GDP on
a level necessary to save public finances from
bankruptcy. For most countries of the region,
the prognoses are even more dramatic. It is
estimated, for example, that due to low birth
rate and high emigration the last citizen of
Bulgaria will die in 2134.
Why do young Poles, Lithuanians or
Bulgarians flee to the West in their masses?
One of the reasons is that peripheral, backward economies of Eastern Europe base their
competitiveness mainly on low labor costs
(even the Chinese press reports that Chinese
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ALEKSANDER KACZOROWSKI
Editor in Chief of Aspen Review
Photo: Jacek Herok
capital starts to invest in Poland, drawn by low
labor costs). So, just like a century ago, to many
young people emigration to Western large
cities seems to be the most promising strategy
of personal advancement. Other enticements,
beyond the strictly economic ones, are the
Western lifestyle, the quality of public services
and civil society, efficiency of government
institutions, transparent rules of the game,
clear paths of career advancement—in short,
all these things they cannot count on in their
own countries.
This should not surprise us. The essence of
the post-1989 transition was, after all, to draw
ourselves out of the Soviet sphere of ­influence
and “find a different way of f­ unctioning
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countries altogether (with a total population
of approximately 65 million people, equivalent
to that of France), became exactly as important
as France in German exports (101 billion EUR
in 2011) and since 2001, they even exceeded
France in German imports—reaching 98
billion EUR in 2011, which is 51 percent
more than French products (65 billion EUR)”
(P. Rusin, op. cit.).
Does that mean that Poland in particular
or the V4 countries in general may become
“the New France for Germany”? (see Ulrike
Guérot, Konstanty Gebert, “Why Poland is
the New France for Germany,” Open Democracy, 17.10.2012). Not necessarily. First, Polish
economy is still five times smaller than the
French one (and just fractionally bigger than
the Belgian one). Second, it is not clear if
Germany needs any “new France” (and what
it needs the “old” one for now). Third, the V4
does not speak in one voice—it is an economic
bulldog but a political dachshund. Fourth, see
under “demography.”
A comparison with the former East
Germany, rather than France, will be a measure
of Eastern European success. The V4 countries
more than fulfilled the hopes placed twenty­
‑five years ago in the GDR by the advocates
of unification. But it is difficult to say if in
another quarter century these countries will be
more similar to today’s West Germany or East
Germany. Shall we ask a fortune-teller?
in the international division of labor that
an even deeper dependence on the Soviet
Union” (J. Staniszkis, “Polskie dylematy,” Aneks
48/1987). Gorbatchev provoked communist
elites in Poland or in Hungary to support
the changes desired by the most active
sections of Eastern European societies when
it turned out that a necessary condition of
internal reforms initiated by him in the USSR
is the deepening of economic dependence
of the region. And no one from the generation
of Lech Wałęsa (1943), Leszek Miller (1946)
or Leszek Balcerowicz (1947) relished such
a ­prospect.
Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and
Hungary found a better “way of functioning in
the international division of labor”: they “had
become a hinterland for German industry—to
the benefit of both sides.” (P. Rusin, “Warsaw
and Berlin from the French perspective,”
Visegrad Insight 2/2013). In 2012 the Polish
economy—yes, the notorious Polnische
Wirtschaft of old—became the eighth
largest economy of the EU-27. Germany, just
a decade ago “the sick man of Europe,” became
a “­geo­‑economic power” (H. Kundnani)—
thanks not just to the creation of the eurozone
(currently receiving less than half, namely 40%,
of German exports) but also to moving a significant part of industrial production to the east:
to China, the Czech Republic or Poland. Twenty
years after the German unification “the V4
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COVER STORY
The Authority
of Democracy Exposed
Frank Furedi
The fall of communist regimes had the unintended
consequence of forcing Western societies to confront
their own divisions and internally generated problems
The fall of the regimes in East Europe in 1989
followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union had
a devastating impact on the credibility of communist and socialist ideologies. That is why for a very
brief moment the collapse of these authoritarian
systems was greeted with a tone of triumphalism
by Western commentators particularly those of
right wing and a conservative disposition. They
could look back upon the demise of their traditional opponents on the left and conclude that
their marginalization represented the vindication
of the Western way of life.
However, the tone of triumphalism very
rapidly gave way to a mood of anxiety about the
future. At the time, a handful of astute observers,
such as George Kennan, the influential author of
the strategy of containment counseled caution.
He warned that the celebration of victory was
premature since the collapse of the Soviet bloc did
not mean that the West had actually triumphed.
As it turned out the fall of communist regimes
had the unintended consequence of forcing
Western societies to confront their own divisions
and internally generated problems. Until the late
eighties and early nineties the precarious unity
that prevailed during the days of a highly-charged
ideological superpower conflict allowed Western
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societies to avoid confronting the problem of
developing a positive account of themselves.
But once the external focus of unity was removed,
the fragile state of the social and moral consensus
prevailing in the West stood exposed.
The end of the cold war served to expose
the relatively fragile normative foundation on
which authority in Western society was based.
Almost immediately after the previous disintegration of the Soviet Union the reliance of Western
governments on values and institutions generated through the Cold War became evident. All of
a sudden the world looked to be not only a more
unpredictable but also a more dangerous place.
Observers nostalgically bemoaned the erosion of
stable global patterns and feared that the post
Second World War global institutions would not
be able to deal with the eruption of new nationalist and culturally motivated conflicts.
“Historical change is happening in a way it
was not meant to happen,” observed an anonymous American defense expert at NATO headquarters in Brussels in April 1990. By this time the
triumphalist tone gave way to the realization that
compared to the certainties of the Cold War the
new world was a confusing, unpredictable and
dangerous place. Already in the early 1990s there
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was a perceptible mood of nostalgia towards the
certainties of the Cold War years. The suspension of Cold War rivalries brought to the surface
the divisive issues surrounding the question of
legitimacy, which were suppressed during the
ideologically driven global conflict.
In retrospect it was soon evident that for the
West, the Cold War represented an era of stability,
legitimacy and relatively high level of trust.
In January 1991, The Financial Times reported
that the “West’s relief at the ending of the Cold
War is history.” Instead of relief the predominant
reaction was now one of fear of “political instability and the awareness that integrating Eastern
Europe, not to mention the Soviet Union, into the
world economy poses difficulties of a hitherto
unimagined complexity.”
An even more pressing matter confronting
societies in the post-Cold War era was the necessity to develop a positive account of their way of
life. During the Cold War the effectiveness of the
anti-communist crusade meant that this challenge could be evaded and postponed. However,
with the disintegration of the Soviet Union the
quest for norms and values that could help define
a way of life became more pressing. The negative validation of authority provided by an anti­
‑Soviet and anti-Communist narrative had lost
its capacity to legitimate. As the political analyst,
Zaki Laidi argued, “to define oneself by contrast
with communism no longer has any meaning.”
One reason why the defeat of the Soviet
Union did not lead to the strengthening of the
normative foundation of liberal democracies
was because the West did very little to develop
a positive account of it during the Cold War. Aside
from the rhetoric of freedom versus enslavement and good versus evil, the West was almost
entirely dependent on the appeal of its economic
success during its ideological confrontation with
the communist world. In other words people
were drawn towards the West in the Cold War
mainly because of its economic superiority and
its promise of prosperity. Arguably it was not
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enthusiastic approval and support for liberal
democracy but pragmatism that underpinned
the calculation of citizens on both sides of the
East-West divide. After the end of the Cold War,
Western governments could no longer rely on
the legacy of economic efficiency and prosperity
to spare them of the responsibility of validating
their way of life in the language of politics and
culture. In any case by the 1990s the era of the
long post-war boom had given way to that of
global economic insecurity and instability.
For all its limitations Cold War ideology at
least provided policy makers and society with
an explanatory framework for interpreting
global events. Its loss, which led to the rapid
disintegration of assumptions, conventions and
practices associated with the Cold War order has
led to what Laidi has characterized as a “world
crisis of meaning.” This crisis of meaning is the
outcome of the incapacity of public institutions
and conventions to provide clarity of purpose
for the conduct of policy.
During the 1990s commentators on both side
of the Atlantic had to acknowledge the unpleasant
fact that their societies lacked moral clarity and
consensus and were experiencing an unprecedented decline in public trust in most of the key
institutions. The absence of a vision of a common
good was most strikingly demonstrated by a steady
decline of public confidence in the performance of
representative institutions in Western Europe, North
America and Japan. The post-Cold War “good-feel”
factor soon gave way to a new era of mistrust and
alienation from public life.
With the termination of the Cold War domestic
problems could not be easily externalized. That
was why the military historian Michael Howard
warned in 1991 that the long-term challenge
facing the West was that of “maintaining cohesion in increasingly heterogeneous societies.”
He alluded to the escalation of social tensions
and cultural conflicts and claimed that mass
immigration had “eroded the cultural cohesion
of older communities.”
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The exhaustion of the politics of ideology
and the threat of communism served as the
prelude to the emergence of a new peril—the
politicization of culture. The eruption of the
so-called Culture Wars in the United States in the
1990s indicated there was little agreement on
what constituted the foundational norms of
society. In Europe, competing claims about
national identity, social cohesion, multiculturalism, immigration, family life and marriage speak
to a society that is far from at ease with itself. In
these societies conflicts about group identity
and the lifestyles through which they are
expressed are rarely suspended in the interest
of a wider form of national unity.
One symptom of the post-Cold War malaise
is the inability of Western societies to forge
the consensus and unity of the previous era.
The problem of galvanizing public support
around a common objective became evident to
policy­‑makers in the years following the so-called
war on terrorism. One study of British public diplomacy concluded that it is far more difficult to
convince citizens to back the official line on the
war on terror than it was during the Cold War.
This loss of Cold War certainty was coupled with
the awareness that society’s capacity to integrate its citizens had become seriously compromised. So a study published in 2008 about the
security threat facing Britain reported that “we
are in a confused and vulnerable condition.” It
­indicated that one reason for this sense of insecurity was because “we lack the certainty of the
old rigid geometry” of the Cold War. Confronted
by what it perceived as the “loss of confidence”
and the absence of an overarching moral purpose
in British society, the authors could not but mourn
the loss of the Cold War. The acknowledgment
of the loss of Cold War certainty is paralleled by
the emergence of a sensibility of vulnerability on
both the domestic and external fronts.
Cold War ideology was always more than
empty rhetoric in service of a public relation
exercise. The narrative of the Cold War provided
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western societies with a language through which
they could define themselves and validate their
institutions. Anti-Communism proved to be an
extraordinarily powerful vehicle for providing
disparate groups on the centre and the right with
a counter-ideology that validated their way of life.
In effect, during the Cold War, anti-communism
served to endorse the claims that conservatives
and centrists made about the moral superiority of
their society’s way of life. Once anti-communism
lost its immediacy and relevance its capacity to
validate a way of life was also severely weakened.
One symptom of
the post-Cold War
malaise is the inability
of ­Western societies
to forge the consensus
and unity of the
­previous era.
At a time when conflicts over values within
Western society threatened to weaken domestic
consensus, cold war ideology provided a unique
resource for minimizing its effects. Consequently,
the influence of cold war ideology was not simply
confined to the governing of East-West relations
it also guided policy makers in the domain of
domestic policy. One of the unexpected outcomes
of the end of the Cold War was that it deprived
Western governments of one of the most effective
instruments of legitimization. That is why time
and again, politicians and policy makers have
acknowledged their yearning for the certainties
of the Cold War years. As Dick Cheney, the former
Vice-President of the US recalled in February 2002,
“when America’s great enemy suddenly disappeared, many wondered what new direction our
foreign policy would take.” Confusion about the
future direction of foreign policy was by no means
the only outcome of the demise of the Cold War.
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A similar pattern of disorientation is evident in
relation to domestic affairs.
Once the Berlin Wall came down and the
Soviet Union followed it onto the scrap heap of
history, thus ending the Cold War, the Western
elite was faced with the fundamental ­questions
that it had evaded for so long. The question
of what society stands for could no longer
be answered by the statement “its hostility to
communism.” It was at this point in time that
policy makers and their intellectual consultants
unleashed a quest for a “big idea” to replace the
now irrelevant anti-Communist crusades of the
Cold War. What President George Bush described
as “that vision thing” in 1987 continued to elude
policy makers to this day.
During the Cold War the West did not need
a vision thing because as against the negative
example of the Soviet bloc it could enjoy moral
authority. During this period, Western parliamentary
politics could live off its historic legacy and there
was no serious attempt to develop an account of
liberal democracy that could motivate and inspire
the public in the post Cold War world. And then
it all came to a sudden end! The most significant
unintended consequence of the fall of communism
was to expose the fragile normative and intellectual
foundation for contemporary liberal democracy.
Today, the questions forced on the agenda through
the fall of communism demand answers.
Democracy remains an ideal in search of
conceptual clarification, intellectual validation
and meaning. After the bitter experience of
a century of ideological conflicts tackling the
question of how to ensure that popular consent
serve as the foundation for authority remains the
question of our time. FRANK FUREDI
is the author of Authority:
A Sociological Introduction,
Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Photo: Matthias Haslauer
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The Consequences
of German Unification
for Europe
Brendan Peter Simms
German unification has produced the best of all
Germanies historically, but the worst of all the possible
outcomes envisaged by the main western protagonists
in 1990
The reunification of Germany in 1990
was widely hailed as a revolution in Europe.
It marked the end of the more than forty-year
division of the continent into two rival ideo­lo­
gical blocs, epitomized by the liberal democratic
capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)
on the one side and the communist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
on the other. The absorption of the latter by
the former was also seen as a tectonic shift
in the European territorial and geopolitical
order. Already the continent’s largest and most
populous state outside of the Soviet Union,
the Federal Republic was given a huge territorial and demographic boost. This increase in
size and population was accentuated by the
disintegration of the Soviet Union itself a year
later, and the manifest economic distress of
its Russian successor state, which left the new
Germany in a relatively much stronger position
still. In that sense, the unification of Germany
was potentially an even more seismic event
than the creation of the original Second Reich
in 1871, given that Bismarck’s progeny was
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balanced by the continued existence and in
some cases growth of the Austro-Hungarian,
Tsarist, British, French and Ottoman empires.
All this prompted many analysts, commentators, and not a few politicians to predict the
revival of German assertiveness in Europe. Conor
Cruise O’Brien famously foretold a statue of Hitler
in every German town square. The British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Nicholas Ridley
notoriously suggested that European Union “was
a German racket” designed to take over the
­continent. His boss, Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher believed that Germany “would once
again, dominate the whole of Europe.” She even
convened a special conference of experts to the
prime minister’s country residence of Chequers
in the summer of 1990 to brief her on whether
a united Germany could be “trusted.” Mikhail
Gorbachev, the Soviet leader feared that the
“rejection of the post-war realities, that is the
existence of two German states,” threatened
“destabilization... not only in Central Europe, but
on a larger scale.” The new democratic
­g overnments in Poland and Czechoslovakia
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fretted about demands for territorial revision, or
the return of refugees expelled in 1945. At the
very least, “realist” international relations scholars
such as John Mearsheimer expected a return to
the past patterns of multipolar great power rivalries, in which Germany would play an important,
perhaps even a dominant role.
she correctly blamed primarily on Serbian nationalism, and thus her decision to press ahead on
Slovenia and Croatia, was eventually endorsed
by the international community. Indeed, it was
German restraint rather than German activism,
which irritated her allies. Kohl stood on the
sidelines as the international coalition ejected
Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. When
Germany did eventually intervene, over Kosovo
at the end of the decade, it was very much within
the framework of the NATO alliance.
There were three reasons why German unification did not produce the hegemonic tendencies
that many had feared. First, after a short boom,
the German economy stagnated for more than
a decade as the Federal Republic struggled with
the integration of an eastern half wrecked by
forty years of communism. Other European economies surged ahead, especially the British and
the booming states on the western and southern
periphery, Ireland, Spain, and Greece. Secondly,
a new and more radical wave of European inte­
gration—in large part driven by concern to
manage unification—succeeded in embedding
Germany within a framework of common institutions and shared norms. Margaret Thatcher’s
warnings that the European structures designed
to contain Germany would ultimately empower
her, were ignored. Primarily at French insistence,
the euro replaced the mighty Deutschmark and
the power of the Bundesbank appeared to be
superseded by that of the new European Central
Bank. At the same time, Germany and the United
States pushed the eastward expansion of NATO
into the new democracies of the former Soviet
Bloc. These measures were not accompanied,
however, by a sustained push for a matching
political union, even though this would then
have been welcomed by the German elites, and
perhaps by the population at large.
Thirdly and in relation to that, the Germans
themselves showed no signs of wanting to dominate, or even to lead in Europe. The experience
of Nazism, the Second World War and of allied
In the end, however,
Germany did not really
start to throw its weight
about in Europe.
Initially, some of these concerns seemed to
be vindicated. Chancellor Helmut Kohl took his
time about recognizing the Oder-Neisse border
with Poland once and for all. When Germany led
the charge to recognize Slovenia and Croatia in
late 1991, this was widely interpreted as a bid
for hegemony in the Balkans on the basis of
alliances dating back to the Third Reich. On the
economic front, the costs of integrating the
former GDR had a profound impact on the European Exchange rate Mechanism (ERM) by which
most currencies in the European Community—as
it was then—were supposed to fluctuate only
within predetermined “bands.” German interest
rates were kept up by the Bundesbank, forcing
the British treasury to intervene to support the
pound against the more attractive Deutschmark
at a time when the country desperately needed
lower exchange rates for exports as recession
loomed. When Britain eventually crashed out of
the ERM, the Germans were blamed for encouraging speculative attacks on sterling. It was
widely believed that the Bundesbank was, to
use David Marsh’s phrase, “The bank that ruled
Europe.”
In the end, however, Germany did not
really start to throw its weight about in Europe.
Her analysis of the conflict in Yugoslavia, which
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and self-re-education had wrought a fundamental change in the character of the people.
They r­ itually affirmed and genuinely believed
in a commitment to “work together” with their
European “partners.” Indeed, the long pre-1871
tradition of federalism under the Holy Roman
Empire and the German Confederation, together
with the experience of the Federal Republic after
1949, made the Germans uniquely well suited to
life in the European Union. Far from seeking a military role commensurate with its new diplomatic
and economic weight, the Germans remained
reticent about the use of military force. They
preferred to think of themselves, in Maull’s phrase,
as a “civilian power,” which transcended traditional
geopolitics and played to their economic and
cultural strengths, through conflict prevention,
post-conflict reconstruction, and the spread of
peaceful norms. The marked improvement in
German economics after the turn of the millennium only accentuated the belief that the country
put traditional power politics behind it.
This is reason why US hopes that Germany
would become an active partner in managing
European and global problems were gravely
disappointed, not because Washington and Berlin
differed on what needed doing, though they
sometimes did, but because the Federal Republic
remained structurally and culturally incapable
of “stepping up to the plate.” In the 1990s, US
policy makers were disappointed by German
refusal to engage more robustly with Saddam
Hussein’s territorial aggression, or Serbian ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia. “War—that is something we
lave to the Americans”—this phrase from a RAND
study on German public opinion summed up the
prevailing attitude. Washington’s irritation turned
to fury in 2002–2003, when Chancellor Schroeder invoked the “German way” against “playing
around with war and military intervention.” After
Barack Obama’s election in 2008, fresh hopes that
the new wind from Washington would produce
greater German engagement in Afghanistan were
quickly dashed. Neither German unification, nor
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the growth of the German economy a decade
later, in other words, led to an increased assertion
of political and military power.
The real consequences of German unification
for Europe lie elsewhere, and not all of them
are well recognized, even among policy-makers.
The introduction of the euro, with its one size fits
all interest rates, and the consequent tsunami of
cheap mainly German capital created an unsustainable boom on the periphery of the currency
union, which spectacularly unraveled from 2008.
Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus have
all been driven into various forms of international receivership, in which Germany—as the
principal creditor—calls the shots within the
common currency. The result has been to cast
Berlin, very much against its own instincts in
a leadership role, while increasingly sidelining
an economically—and especially fiscally—ailing
France. Without wishing to, the Bundesbank has
once again become the bank, which controls
Europe. And because German unification took
place without a subsequent European federal
political union, Berlin’s economic power now
threatens to undermine the democratic will of the
populations under her supervisory arrangements.
All this is well known, even if the responsibility
for this state of affairs, and the way ahead, are
both furiously debated.
What is much less widely understood is
the huge geopolitical change wrought by the
eastward enlargement of the European Union
and particularly of NATO during the 1990s. Ever
since the Franco-German rapprochement after
the Second World, Germany has faced no threat
from the west; now the admission of Poland and
the Czech Republic provides her with a vital
buffer against the revival of Russian power.
This marks the end of the Mittellage, as traditionally understood, the central location which
has sometimes been a blessing but more often
a curse, as the country grappled with predators
on every side: the Ottoman Turks from the 15th
to the 17th centuries, the France of Louis XIV
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and Napoleon from the 17th to the early 19th
centuries, Stalin’s Russia and the Soviet Union in
the 20th century, and so on. To be sure, Germany
remains at the heart of the continent, but of
a pacified, almost sedated, Union rather than of
the ferocious cockpit of old. “For the first time
in its existence,” Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz the
state secretary at the foreign office pointed out
as the enlargements got underway, “Germany
is surrounded by allies, not enemies, who don’t
see us as a threat anymore.”
This holiday from history dulls German senses
of emerging dangers to the south, from terrorism
and failing states, and the east, from the resumption of Russian great power ambitions in Eastern
Europe, the Baltic and the Caucasus. Thus it was
Germany, more than any other power, which
put the brakes on a stronger response to the
Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Germany
is among those stalling on the Ukraine’s admission to NATO. It was Germany, which surprised
Washington, London and Paris by staying aloof
from the NATO coalition of the willing in 2011.
Germany also rejected the aborted intervention
in Syria two years later before it had even started.
This military reticence goes hand in hand with
a robust defense of economic concerns, be it
interest rates in the common currency or the
privileging of export sales over human rights
in the EU’s relations with dictatorships such as
Red China. The result, Hans Kundnani observes,
has been to turn Germany into a “geo-economic
power,” which is hardnosed enough when its vital
commercial interest are involved, but which takes
refuge in its ‘civilian’ status when the military
going gets rough.
German unification has thus produced the
best of all Germanies historically, but the worst
of all the possible outcomes envisaged by the
main western protagonists in 1990. America
gave the green light for unification, but did
not reap the dividends of global partnership it
expected. Deeper European integration at French
insistence did away with the franc, while facili-
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tating continued German economic dominance
through the common currency. The broadening
of “Europe” wanted by Britain to slow down the
Franco-German drive to closer union, and dilute
German power, has rendered the Federal Republic
safer, and thus more strategically selfish, than
ever before. In other words, it was not so much
the unification of Germany which transformed
Europe, and empowered Berlin, but the measures
designed to manage it. BRENDAN PETER SIMMS
is an Irish historian and Professor
of the History of International
Relations in the Department of
Politics and International Studies
at the University of Cambridge.
He is the author of Europe: The
Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to
the Present (Allen Lane, 2013)
Photo: Ede and Ravenscroft
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Lost in Transition:
Struggles over Identity
in Post-Soviet Ukraine
and Belarus
Tatiana Zhurzhenko
The year 1989, marked by the fall of the communist
regimes in East Central Europe, has meanwhile become
a new lieu de mémoire. But it does not work for the whole
of Eastern Europe.
In Ukraine and Belarus, as in other former
Soviet republics, it was only in 1991 that the end
of communist rule finally arrived hand in hand
with national independence. This delay is not just
a matter of the commemorative calendar. Being
part of the same chain reaction, political changes
in Ukraine and Belarus differed from the “Velvet
Revolutions” in East Central Europe at least in
one crucial point: they were not a home-grown
phenomenon, but rather a result of the collapse
of the imperial center.
With the exception of Western Ukraine, there
was no mass opposition movement in these countries and the end of the communist rule brought
no change of the ruling elites. Hopes for democracy, freedom and prosperity soon drowned in
a wave of Soviet nostalgia. Even if the declaration
of state independence in 1991 entered the official
calendars, the myth of a national revolution that
would be comparable to the “Velvet Revolutions”
in East Central Europe is largely lacking. Moreover,
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in Belarus the Lukashenka regime is stressing its
continuity with the Soviet era, while in Ukraine
the “national democratic” opposition to president
Yanukovych denies the post-Soviet Ukrainian
state any national character, as it is allegedly
captured by pro-Russian oligarchs and the former
communist nomenclatura.
Divided Societies
That Ukraine is divided into East and West
has become a commonplace knowledge to
everybody who reads newspapers. Indeed, the
religious and cultural peculiarities, the heritage of the Russian and Habsburg empires, the
different mass experiences of World War II and
other events of the 20th century are reflected in
the political attitudes and electoral preferences
of the Ukrainians in the respective regions. The
discourse of “two Ukraines” (Mykola Riabchuk), so
popular among Ukrainian cultural elites, reflects
and at the same time perpetuates this division
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opposing the pro-European, national-minded
West and the pro-Russian, denationalized, still­
‑Soviet East. This cultural and political cleavage
is often essentialized as a clash of two different
civilizations in one country. Although “East and
West together!” was one of the slogans of the
Orange Revolution, it unfortunately strengthened the discourse of “two Ukraines” and further
polarized the Ukrainian society. Playing “West”
against “East,” “Galicia” against “Donbas”—and
vice versa—has become a universal electoral
strategy in absence of new ideas and political
projects. Frustrated by Yanukovych’s politics, even
prominent Ukrainian intellectuals do not hesitate
to speak about a “civilized divorce” as the best
solution for the divided country.
At first glance Belarus, united by the authoritarian hold of Lukashenka, seems to be rather
different in this respect. Rather than being
a divided nation, Belarus appears as a “denationalized nation” (David Marples): the weakness of
the Belarusian national self-awareness is usually
seen as the main reason for the failure of democratization in the 1990s. However, according to
Belorusian scholar Nelly Bekus post-Soviet Belarus
is not about failed nation building but about the
ambiguities of the Belarusian national identity.
In her recent book, Bekus focuses on the ongoing
“struggle over identity” between the authoritarian
state and the marginalized political opposition.
She demonstrates how the different concepts and
visions of Belarusianness, promoted by the official
authorities and represented by the political and
intellectual opposition, compete for the souls and
minds of the Belarusians. This competition is by no
means fair, however: The state tries to monopolize
the public sphere and denies the opposition the
very right to use the word “Belarusian”; in turn,
the marginalized opposition considers the current
political regime not only anti-democratic but
also anti-national. The opposing sides do not
seek dialogue and use different national symbols,
historical narratives and systems of cultural references. And as opinion polls show, at least half
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of the population supports nation building à
la Lukashenka and has already internalized the
symbols and narratives of official “Belarusianness.”
The “de-nationalized nation” appears rather as
a divided nation, in some ways similar to Ukraine.
From the Ukrainian perspective, this diagnosis
does not leave much hope for a happy end to
the Belarusian identity troubles even after the
collapse of the authoritarian regime.
Upsurge in Memory
In the late 1980s the “right to memory”
claimed by writers, journalists and public activists undermined the ideological monopoly of
the Soviet regime. But the society’s hunger for
truth about the recent past did not transform into
a public demand for historical justice. In Belarus,
some kind of selective amnesia has been imposed
by the Lukashenka’s regime, which builds on
symbols and narratives of Soviet Belarussia.
Moreover, some dubious memorial projects are
officially supported in Belarus. One of them is
the reconstruction of the so-called “Stalin line,”
a fortification line that had been built before WWII
and is now reconstructed and turned into an
amusement park. Lukashenka is still drawing on
the Soviet myth of Belarus as a “partisan republic,”
which heroically resisted Nazi occupation, but
today even an autocratic regime does not possess
an ideological monopoly. The alternative narrative, supported by the Belarusian oppositional
intellectuals, uses the language of postcolonialiy
and presents the nation as a victim of both Hitler
and Stalin.
In Ukraine, the narrative of collective victimhood has meanwhile become the mainstream.
Recent opinion polls show that more than half of
the population considers the famine of 1933–34
a genocide of the Ukrainian nation deliberately
organized by the Bolshevik regime in Moscow.
At the same time, the notion of the famine as
genocide is denied by the ruling Party of Regions,
and still not popular in the East and South of
the country. Even more controversial is the new
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heroic narrative of the OUN-UPA, which presents
the Ukrainian nationalist underground and anti­
‑Soviet armed resistance as the only legitimate
national heroes. This narrative is eagerly instrumentalized by the right wing nationalists of the
“Svoboda” party, which is meanwhile represented
in the Ukrainian parliament. Banners with the
portrait of Stepan Bandera, the icon of Ukrainian
nationalism, and the red-black flags of the UPA
can be often seen on the tribunes of football
stadiums along with neo-Nazi and extremist
symbols. On the other extreme of the political
spectrum, portraits of Josef Stalin are used in
public by Communists and Soviet war veterans,
sometimes also during official commemorations.
faded away, it became clear that Ukraine had
failed to escape its geopolitical fate and will not
join the EU and even NATO in the midterm future.
A part of the Ukrainian society and the political
class perceives this situation as a geopolitical
marginalization, an exclusion or even isolation
from Europe, which might result in an increasing
political and economic dependency on Russia.
Moreover, the lack of consensus on such issues
as language and history exposes Ukraine to
Russian cultural influences: its unfinished nation
building perpetuates the country’s “borderlands”
status. These tendencies are experienced and
perceived differently in the different parts of
Ukraine: while in the West the feeling of marginality is related to the failed EU membership aspirations and the new Schengen border, in the East
it is caused by the disintegration of the Soviet
empire.
A Borderland Identity
Belarus and Ukraine, however in different
ways, demonstrate the limits of the concept of
“post-communist transition.” After more than
twenty years of reforms, they have not arrived
at the final destination—Western-style liberal
democracy, the rule of law and well functioning
market institutions. It has become increasingly difficult to speak about these countries
as “post-Soviet” and “transitional”: The transition seems to be over, but it has ended in the
nowhere land and the reasons for this failure
cannot be reduced to Soviet heritage only.
Instead of temporal categories of transition,
we are inclined now to use spatial ones, such as
marginality, periphery or borderlands.
In Ukraine, the “borderlands” discourse is
omnipresent, and it is easy to see why. Most territories of contemporary Ukraine belonged over
centuries to the historical borderlands of Poland,
the Muscovite state, the Russian and the Ottoman
Empires; moreover, the very term “borderlands”
actually constitutes the name of the country.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of
the Soviet Union independent Ukraine found
itself in the borderlands again—this time between
the enlarged EU and post-Soviet Russia. After the
hopes connected to the Orange Revolution had
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After more than twenty
years of reforms,
­Belarus and Ukraine
have not arrived at
the final destination—­
Western-style liberal
democracy, the rule
of law and well
functioning market
institutions.
At the same time, re-imagined in post­‑colonial
terms the concept of “borderlands” turns emancipatory and even affirmative. Polish sociologist
Tomasz Zarycki pointed to the fact that the new
paradigm of “borderlands” so popular today in
cultural studies tends to ignore power relations
and the centre-periphery hierarchy and that the
borderlands are idealized as a free space, where
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traditions of various cultures meet and subjects
have freedom to choose their identity. Even more
so, conceptualizing a region in terms of borderlands, ascribing it multiculturalism, diversity
and hybridism often leads to its exotization and
orientalization. This discourse plays a compensatory role, as it promises symbolic and moral
advantages in compensation for geographic
and economic marginality. A Belarus reinvented
as “borderlands” by local intellectuals such as
­Vladimir Abushenko and Igar Babkov evades strict
definitions imposed from outside, be it from the
West or from Russia. The “borderlands” discourse
represents a new politics of identity, alternative
to traditional nation building which seems to
have failed in Belarus.
current events in Ukraine show that the European
integration can become a mobilizing or even
a consolidating idea and that society and especially the younger generation can exercise significant pressure on the corrupted elites forcing
them to democratic changes. If this pro-European
enthusiasm in Ukraine is simply situational or if
it testifies some deeper societal shifts is still an
open question.
TAT I A N A Z H U R Z H E N K O
is a political scientist at the University
of Vienna and currently a Research
Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute,
University of Helsinki. Her most recent
book is Borderlands into Bordered
Lands: Geopolitics of Identity in
Post-Soviet Ukraine, Stuttgart 2010.
Photo: Archive Tatiana Zhurzhenko
A European Future?
While I am finishing this article, hundreds
of thousands of Ukrainians are rallying in the
center of Kyiv and in other cities protesting
against the government’s decision to suspend
the signing of the Association Agreement with
the EU. The protests increasingly turn against
the corrupted government and a president
safeguarding the interests of his family and
a few oligarchs. At the moment, the European
idea seems to represent a real alternative to
the Ukrainian society which is frustrated, de­‑­
motivated and divided by the failure of the
Orange Revolution. For the first time in Ukrainian
history, EU flags dominate square and streets
along with the national blue-yellow flags. It seems
that both the Ukrainian government and the
EU politicians have been surprised by such an
outbreak of the pro-European feelings.
In the last years, Lukashenka’s anti­‑Westernism
and Yanukovych’s manipulative oscillation
between the EU and Russia gave little hope
that the political elites in Belarus and Ukraine
will embrace European values. It seemed that
the EU’s transformative power, which worked
so well in East Central Europe, has come to its
limits in the “Eastern neighborhood.” However, the
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From Communism
to Democracy
without Democrats
Jiří Pehe
Czech democracy, just like other new European
democracies that emerged after the fall of communism
in 1989, has undergone an unprecedented institutional
modernization in the last 25 years, yet it still shows
significant democratic deficits
years of political independence. After 1620, when
the Czech protestant nobles were defeated by the
catholic Hapsburgs in the Battle on the White Mountain, the Czech lands were ruled for 300 years by
the Hapsburgs, mostly from Vienna. Independent
Czechoslovakia, created in 1918, survived for only
20 years, followed by six years of Nazi occupation.
And from 1948 to 1989 the country was essentially
controlled by Moscow as one of its satellites.
This political history created a deep-seated
mistrust of the state among ordinary Czechs as an
institution controlled by powers outside the Czech
borders. Czech political elites were decimated after
1618, and their reconstitution during the Czech
national revival movement in the 19th century was
slow. In fact, cultural elites were ahead of political ones in expressing Czech national interests.
A culture of subverting the state and political elites
that are “not ours” profoundly shaped the Czech
national mind-set in the 19th century.
Moreover, the state in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire—a patriarchal constitutional monarchy
with centralized and inefficient bureaucracy—was
a rather archaic institution. Its modernization
A majority of Czechs are highly dissatisfied
with the state of Czech democracy, do not trust
traditional political parties, and complain about
rampant corruption.
The general elections in October 2013 saw
a spectacular rise of anti-system movements and
parties. The ANO movement, preaching anti­
‑politics and running under the slogan “we are
not like politicians,” finished second, and a stable
government could not be formed without it.
The reasons for this sorry state of affairs
are numerous, but several stand out, including
a problematic economic transformation in the
1990’s, a weak civil society, the building of political parties from above by small elite groups, and
a historical tendency, which philosopher Václav
Bělohradský describes as a proclivity among
Czechs to form opposition against politics, rather
than building a political opposition.
The State as a Czech Trauma
One specific issue is the Czechs’ mistrust of
the state. It stems partly from the fact that in the
last 400 years, the Czechs enjoyed only roughly 50
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lagged significantly behind developments in
Western Europe.
The way this state has been portrayed in
the works of Jaroslav Hašek or Franz Kafka was
unfortunately not much of an artistic license.
It can be argued that most Czechs perceived the
state at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
as a corrupt institution, controlled by the police
and inefficient bureaucracy.
The First Republic lasted for only 20 years,
which was not long enough for most Czechs
to change their perception of the state as an
alien body. Moreover, political elites of this new
state showed, perhaps understandably, a lack of
political skill in critical moments, contributing to
the end of the state in the humiliating Munich
dictate trauma.
The traditions of a bureaucratic police state,
prone to corruption, were later only strengthened
by the era of Communism. While democracy in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire left much to be desired,
there was, after all, a budding multi-party system
and genuine efforts to build “Rechtsstaat.” The
communist regime destroyed even these fragile
traditions. The state was there to be cheated or
beaten, the slogan of the era being “He who does
not steal from the state steals from his family.”
The era of democracy building after 1989
was thus from the beginning saddled with the
popular notion that the state is corrupt, inefficient, and oppressive. The new political elites,
unfortunately, did not understand the need to
rehabilitate the state and thus create conditions
for people to identify with the new democratic
regime as “theirs.”
On the contrary, the state was portrayed by
the political elite—mesmerized by the notion of
“an invisible hand of the market”—as an essentially
hostile institution that is to be as small as possible.
One could argue that even a small state could
be efficient, but the traditions of the deep public
distrust of the state, in combination with neoliberal
philosophy (preferring the privatization of some
important state functions to simply modernizing
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the existing ones) conspired to maintain the kind
of state that most Czech do not identify with even
24 years after the fall of Communism.
Democracy without Democrats
Democracy-building was impeded not only
by the misunderstanding of the state’s role in
modern societies, but was also complicated by
the gap that lies in the space between the two
levels at which to judge the quality of democracy:
institutions and culture.
The institutional modernization was to some
extent accelerated by assistance and expertise
from international organizations, such the
­European Union. However, developing a democratic culture takes much longer and has to
do with the quality of a civil society.
Democratic behavior, rooted in active
citizenship, cannot be instituted from above.
The creation of a truly democratic environment is
tied to people’s ability to internalize democratic
values, which, in turn, is closely tied to the growth
of a civil society.
Tomáš G. Masaryk, the first president of
Czechoslovakia after 1918, was well aware of this
dilemma, when, after the creation of independent
Czechoslovakia, he remarked: “Now we have
a democracy, what we also need are democrats.”
Unfortunately, most politicians after 1989
did not realize that the institutional modernization needed to apply to the state as much it was
directed at creating a political democracy and
a market economy. And that democracy is not
just mechanisms, procedures and institutions,
but also a culture, which, in turn, is dependent
on the quality of a civil society.
Unlike Czechoslovakia between 1918 and
1938, Czechoslovakia and later the Czech
Republic, were surrounded by countries and
international organizations eager to assist with
democracy-building and usher them into supranational organizations like the European Union
and NATO. Both Western Europe and the United
States engaged in a massive transfer of know-how.
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Judged solely as an exercise in institutional
transformation, the results have been spectacular. Arguably, never have so many countries
burdened with backward and authoritarian political i­nstitutions changed so quickly into essentially modern democratic regimes with market
economies and the rule of law.
But the speed of this institutional transformation, culminating in NATO and EU accession,
has had drawbacks. It created an even larger gap
between the new institutional reality and democracy understood as culture. In other words, the
very rapid institutional modernization intensified
Masaryk’s old problem of democracies without
democrats.
The new Czech democracy, just like other
democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, suffer
from a highly confrontational and sharply polarized political environment. There is little culture
of dialogue and compromise.
Mental stereotypes originating in the communist era are still strong. Some analysts speak of
a “Bolshevik mentality” that echoes communist-era attitudes. Political opponents are not
to be listened to and worked with; they are to
be destroyed.
historical political parties, such the Social Democrats, were reestablished as elite projects, basically.
In combination with a high level of mistrust
among citizens in partisanship after more than
40 years of one-party rule, the creation of parties
as elite projects has caused parties to be small
and weak. There are no mass parties, to speak off.
In fact, the Communist Party, which inherited
a large membership base, remains the largest
party in Czech politics.
The fact that such small and weak parties
presided over an extensive privatization process
caused the parties themselves to be “privatized.” In
other words, while leading parties played a crucial
role in creating new entrepreneurs and powerful
economic groups that dominated the newly privatized economy, they—due to their internal weaknesses—were becoming not only intertwined with
these new economic actors but dependent on them.
Today, political parties in the Czech Republic
often act more as business entities that trade with
political influence than defenders of public ­interests.
The high levels of corruption have to do with the
fact that political parties are often controlled by
behind-the-scenes economic i­nterests.
When the privatization process, which was
a source of major corruption, ended, many of the
newly created business interests used their close
contacts with political parties to manipulate state
tenders. According to conservative estimates,
some 100 billion Czech crowns, out of some 600
billion the state spend annually on public tenders,
disappear in kind of this systemic corruption.
The influence of big money on political parties,
has, of course, been a problem in all democratic
societies, but mass parties with long traditions that
still exist in the West have been able to resist the
dictate of big money better than weak, “privatized”
parties in the Czech Republic.
Czech democracy has further been deformed
by the fact that the creation of a market economy
has heavily depended on foreign capital, mainly
foreign direct investment by large multinational
companies. In comparison with established
Liberal Democracy as a Moving Target
The transition to liberal democracy in the
region, including the Czech Republic, has taken
place amid the accelerating process of globali­
zation, which calls into question the very notion
of the nation-state—the foundation upon which
liberal democracy first developed. The Czechs are
thus struggling not only with internally generated
problems but with dilemmas created by supranational integration, and by changes in the very
paradigm of liberal democracy—the declining
role of traditional political parties, for example,
and the growing influence of the media on the
democratic systems’ functioning.
As noted above, the most important Czech
political parties were created after 1989 by small
groups of newly-born elites. Even some of the
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Western democracies, domestic capital played
a relatively small role in the new market economy.
If we take into account that market entities,
such as small and mid-size businesses, played
a crucial role in the creation of civil societies in
traditional democracies, the relative absence of
this segment of the market economy in post­
‑communist countries has been an obstacle in
building vibrant civil ones.
The public space that Jürgen Habermas saw
as one of the pillars of modern democracies has
not developed to the extent known from established ones, and may, in fact, never fully develop.
Economic policies dominated the process of
democracy-building, with the unfortunate result
of diminishing the importance of anything “public.”
As a result, wherever public space began appearing
it came quickly under the pressure of markets and
was often colonized by private interests.
What impact this development will have on
liberal democracy is not yet certain. What is clear,
however, is that the pressure that globalization
puts on the very concept of the nation state
combines with the traditional Czech distrust of
the state to create an explosive mix. In other
words, the Czech state is not only under pressure of globalization but also under pressure
from a number of traditional prejudices against
the state.
In this context, it is perhaps no surprise
that the Czech state is, 24 years after the fall of
communism, not only inefficient, but in some
ways a failed project. The Czech Republic was,
at the end of 2013, the only member of the EU
that did not pass a civil service law.
The state was seen by most people not only as
incompetent and corrupt, but also prone—once
again—to spectacular police actions, resulting
in little or no success in fighting real corruption.
Although several parties successfully ran in the
October 2013 elections with promises of modernizing the state, it is questionable whether the
Czech political elite, now threatened with a wave
of anti-politics, can achieve that in an environment infused with systemic corruption and a lack
of trust in anything that has to do with the state
among the public.
Combined with the traditionally strong antielitist sentiments in Czech society, which, in turn,
are come from plebeian traditions and provincialism of a country that did not have its own
political elites for centuries, these are potentially
dangerous trends. The jury is still out on whether
the Czech post-communist era will be replaced
in the end by a fully functioning democracy and
a state that people trust and identify with. The Unclear Future
If we take into account the positive influence
of external factors, such as membership in the
EU and NATO, it seems natural to argue that the
Czech Republic has a better chance than Czechoslovakia before WWII of succeeding in maintaining
and developing a democratic regime. Given this
­seemingly benign international context, it seems
easy to agree with Masaryk that the country could
be safe as a democratic regime in 50 years if it
lived in peace.
However, global developments make such
arguments somewhat tentative. Liberal democracy’s
roots in the Czech Republic began in the context of
revolutionary global changes fueled predominantly
by globalization, which itself was largely fueled by
revolutionary changes in communication technologies and science. In other words, the democratic
paradigm may be changing globally.
Though the nation-state gave birth to the
concept of liberal democracy, the idea itself has
come under increasing pressure in this globalised world. Liberal democracy’s viability at the
supra-national integration level remains unclear.
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JIŘÍ PEHE
is director of New York University’s
center in Prague.
Photo: Archive Jiří Pehe
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A Quarter-Century of
“Really Existing” Capitalism
Jan Sowa
The French, the Germans, the English and Americans
wandering about the future course of their countries
should study the recent history of Central and Eastern
Europe and look at the current state of the region
Déjà Vu
There is an anecdote saying that in 2004 in
the United States a man woke up after more
than a decade in a coma. He recovered fairly
quickly and generally had no problems with
understanding what had happened to him. But
one thing caused his bafflement and disbelief:
that after so many years Bush was still president
and that the Gulf War was still going on.
I have similar feelings when I hear reports
on sovereign debt crisis in the south of Europe.
For was it not debt which brought the Soviet
Bloc to its knees, ending the failed experiment
with introducing “communism”?1 The debt of this
block and the accompanying economic collapse
achieved more than the Pope, Wałęsa and Reagan
put together. After all, there were many revolts
against the ruling regimes in the post-war history
of Central and Eastern Europe (Poznań, Prague,
Budapest, Gdańsk, etc.). None of them resulted in
political change. When debt tightened the noose
around the neck of the “communist” regime, the
system proved easier to dismantle than it had
seemed even to the oppositionists themselves.
From my childhood in the 1980s I remember
the subject of government debt recurring in the
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media and in private conversations (I was growing
up in a politically aware and dissident family, and
I was initiated early: as a 10-year-old I knew the
slang terms for samizdat, communists, security
police and so on). It was a different debt, taken
in the late 1970s in foreign banks, not counted
in percentage of the GDP but in billions of
dollars, nevertheless its economic weight was
similar. The system was going bankrupt, just as
Greece and a few other South European countries are standing on the verge of bankruptcy
today. Remarkably, there was a similar neoliberal
discourse of reforms, which, like today, was to
serve as a remedy for the crisis. It follows the
three main recommendations of the so-called
Washington Consensus: liberalization, privatization and cuts in public expenditure. Just as they
did in Poland in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
experts from international financial institutions
recommend reforms, which result in the growth
of inequalities, poverty and social exclusion.
A Fluent Passage
The analogy between the current debt crisis
and the one which a quarter century ago led to
the political, economic and social reconfiguration
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of Central and Eastern Europe has a more than just
anecdotal meaning. The downfall of the so-called
communism can be looked at from many perspectives. You may talk about it as a clash between
democratic movements and an oppressive and
authoritarian regime, you may point at the failure
of the planned economy model and victory of
liberal capitalism or you may treat the whole
process as a triumph of national liberation efforts
(after all the Soviet Bloc was also an embodiment of Russia’s imperial ambitions). The point of
view I would like to propose in my text is slightly
different and focuses above all on external issues.
Although I will be also interested in internal transformations in the region, their contribution to
the global triumph of neoliberalism will prove
more important.
The year 1989 functions in the collective
memory as a powerful symbolic watershed. It is
constituted above all by two events: Polish elections in June 1989, not fully controlled by the
Party, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the
autumn of the same year. Concentrating on these
spectacular events, we are ignoring changes of
lesser symbolic import, which had taken place in
the second half of the 1980s. If we include them
in the transitional narrative, it will turn out that
the passage from “communism” to capitalism was
much more fluent that it is commonly believed
and that it had begun before 1989. I will demonstrate that on the example of Poland but in this
period similar processes appeared also in other
countries of the region.
In the twilight years of the People’s Republic,
roughly from 1986, a slow but consistent change
in economic policy occurred. Many reforms,
which were fundamental for later transformations, had been launched then, introduced by
the last “communist” governments of Messner
and Rakowski. I mean here such decisions as
a liberalization of currency trade, making the
life of businessmen easier, tax reforms and so
on. In 1986, Poland re-entered the International
Monetary Fund.
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These changes reflected the evolving outlook
of the Party leaders. Although official propaganda
remained almost the same and still proclaimed
the necessity of “building socialism” (of course
without the “deviations” and “with a human face”),
the habitus of Party elites was evolving towards
more liberal and pro-market positions.
In the twilight years of
the People’s Republic,
roughly from 1986, a slow
but consistent change
in economic policy
occurred. Many reforms,
which were fundamental
for later transformations,
had been launched
then, introduced by
the last “communist”
governments of Messner
and Rakowski.
At the same time, very importantly for the
neoliberal transition of the early 1990s, the attitude of the dissident elites also changed in the
1980s. Before the introduction of Martial Law
the most authoritative voices of the dissident
intellectuals were supporting social and poli­
tical changes but in the name of leftist ideals.
The best example of that was the open letter to
the Party written by Kuroń and Modzelewski in
1964. Social movements shared this left-wing
character. “Solidarity,” today wrongly interpreted
as an anti-socialist and pro-liberal movement,
is the best illustration of that. In its most elaborate policy statement developed in the autumn
of 1981 we will not find demands for privatiza-
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tion or introducing a free market. And this was
not because “Solidarity” was afraid of radicalism.
Both the demands and actual actions of this
movement were bold and radical. “Solidarity”
really was not a pro-capitalist and pro-market
movement. It was a socialist movement in the
purest sense of the word: created by workers
and fighting for social justice. In the policy statement I spoke about the word “social” appears
more than 160 times on about 60 pages and
the demand for social ownership of the means
of production is directly articulated. In this sense
“Solidarity” may be called the greatest success of
Polish “communism.”2
But this attitude changed fundamentally
in the second half of the 1980s. Martial Law
played a significant role in this process. One
could jokingly say that Polish Communist Party
did a great favor to the capitalist world, successfully destroying a movement, which might have
introduced a self-governing or even anarcho­
‑syndicalist version of socialism. After the Martial
Law “Solidarity” was a quite different movement,
much less grass roots, with a stronger and more
centralized leadership and a different ideological
message. A powerful position in this new movement was acquired by liberal circles, previously
having a weak impact on the mainstream of
the opposition. They included liberals from the
Krakow Industrial Society (with such members
as Mirosław Dzielski, in that period an influential philosopher, admirer of Hayek and ultra-liberal capitalism, and Tadeusz Syryjczyk, industry
minister in the crucial period of the transition,
that is late 1989 and early 1990) and from Gdańsk,
centered around the journal Przegląd Polityczny
(Donald Tusk and Jan Krzysztof Bielecki came
from this group).
So the late 1980s brought a political and ideological configuration which was favorable for
a neoliberal transition. Advocates of socialism not
only were sidelined within the opposition but they
also went missing among the party elite, which
started taking over state property towards the
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end of the decade and in the 1990s they became
businessmen (this process was ­thoroughly investigated by Jadwiga Staniszkis). The biography of
Leszek Balcerowicz looks interesting against this
background. He joined the Party in 1969 (that is
a year after the anti-Semitic purge in the Party,
which forced such people as Zygmunt Bauman
or Leszek Kołakowski to leave Poland). At the
turn of the 1980s, Balcerowicz worked in the
Institute for Problems of Marxism-Leninism and
headed the board of economists advising the
prime minister. In the 1980s, he travelled to the
West, to such places as Sussex, Marburg or New
York. It was there that he came in touch with
neoliberalism, then the vanguard of the theory
of turbo-capitalism. When in 1989 two American
economists—David Lipton and Jeffrey Sachs—
came to Poland with an IMF mission, Balcerowicz
turned out to be an ideal candidate for selling
their plan of a radical free-market economic transition to the Polish public. Labeling this plan with
Balcerowicz’s name is a marketing success of the
Polish economist but is does not reflect the true
situation and does not give justice to the actual
authors of the reforms program.3 In its general
concept, it is difficult to discern anything original
or attributable to Leszek Balcerowicz. Its solutions
are in line with the Washington Consensus and
are based mostly on the experiences of market
reforms in Latin America (for example in Chile,
Bolivia and Argentine).
Towards a Neoliberal Universalism
The reforms of the 1990s, introduced
after the downfall of the Soviet Bloc, mark an
important moment in the history of neoliberalism
as a ­practice and as a set of ideas. They mean
for neoliberalism what the revolution in Haiti
meant for the French Revolution two centuries
before—a repeat opening neoliberal orthodoxy
to universalization. For the first time neoliberal
reforms were implemented in European countries,
peripheral but for more than a millennium living
in a more or less the same social and cultural tradi-
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tion as France, Germany or England. What is more,
capitalism thus triumphed over its iconic rival—
the Soviet Bloc. It was a spectacular success, for
societies of the former Soviet Bloc were subjected
to a shock therapy much more drastic than
anything that Thatcher or Reagan had attempted
to do in the West. This of course did not escape the
attention of today’s Hegelians. Fukuyama’s End
of History from early 1990s is an answer to these
events. Roughly in the same period the French
philosopher Alain Badiou published a short book
called Of an Obscure Disaster: on the End of StateTruth, where he comments on the collapse of
the Soviet Bloc in a much less enthusiastic way:
(…) the fact that the Stalinist mode of politics
was saturated and moribund—these are all excellent things [...]. But instead of opening the path
to an eventuality from which the deployment of
another mode of politics would proceed, another
singular figure of emancipation [...], this collapse
occurs under the aegis of the “democracy” of
imperial owners. That the supreme political
adviser of the situation is Bush; that the desire
flaunted is that of inequality and ownership, that
the measure of all things is the IMF, that “thought”
is only the vain reassessment of the most basic
and most convenient opinions. If this were really
to be the course of things, what melancholy.4
further inside the door which neoliberalism
opened in Central and Eastern Europe in the early
1990s: for the first time neoliberal advisors can
so extensively format the economy and society
of a country belonging to the group of the most
developed countries in the world (Greece is
a member of the OECD, the European Union and
the eurozone). It is difficult to rejoice, knowing
that the crisis we are mired in since 2008 to a large
degree results from previous “successes” of neoliberal globalization.
Twenty-five years
have passed but the
recipe of the IMF for
Greece is the same as
the recommendations
for Poland then:
privatization,
liberalization and cuts
in public expenditure.
The whole process shows an interesting new
pattern, which is worth noting in conclusion.
For the most part of the second half of the 20th
century discussions on social and economic
development were dominated by various versions
of the modernization theory, proclaiming that
developed countries demonstrate to the developing ones what their future will be. This principle
was behind the reasoning of Francis Fukuyama
in his book I mentioned above, published 25
years ago.
The recent history of neoliberalism and the
trajectory of its universalization (from exotic Latin
American peripheries through the less distant
Central European peripheries to the peripheral
areas of the European core in Greece) shows that
the pattern is exactly opposite: we are living in an
Today, in 2014, we can look at this “dark and
melancholy disaster” in the context of the crisis
in the south of Europe. Twenty-five years have
passed but the recipe of the IMF for Greece is the
same as the recommendations for Poland then:
privatization, liberalization and cuts in public
expenditure. After three years of such therapy
the public debt to GDP ratio rose by more than
a quarter, wages fell by almost 30%, unemployment is twice as big and privatized companies are
bought out by foreign capitalists. The situation is
very similar to what was happening in Poland in
the early 1990s. Welcome to the club!
But this is not the most alarming thing. The
Greek case means pushing the neoliberal foot
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era of de-modernization and it is the crisis-stricken
countries, which tried to develop but failed in that
endeavor, that demonstrate to the developed
ones what their future will be. The French, the
Germans, the English and ­Americans wandering
about the future course of their countries should
study the recent history of Central and Eastern
Europe and look at the current state of the region,
where, paradoxically, quite good macroeconomic
indices (low inflation, GDP growth, stable capital
markets, good foreign trade balance, and so on)
are coupled with a disastrous social situation
(high inequalities, a bankrupt pensions system,
demographic calamity, mass emigration, deficient public infrastructure, low quality of and
limited access to the health service, low level of
professional activity, unstable working conditions
and so on).
It would be difficult to imagine a more ironic
turn of events: a region for centuries lagging
behind global history, always catching up and
imitating, a region haunted with unfulfilled ambitions, a sense of backwardness, unoriginality and
peripheral character, all of a sudden becomes
a vanguard of social and economic changes.
I do not think it is that kind of success that the
neoliberals had in mind but well, as the familiar
saying warns, be careful what you wish for, it
might just come true. J A N S OWA
sociologist, essayist, associate professor
at the Institute of Culture at the
Jagiellonian University, member of
the world anti-globalist movement
Photo: Iwona Bojadżijewa
1 Here and below I put “communism” in inverted commas or precede it with a qualifier, as I do not believe that the system which prevailed
in Central and Eastern Europe for the most part of the 20th century had anything to do with the communism which can be imagined
after reading the works of Marx. There is no room here to develop this argument and I can only refer the readers interested in this issue
to the chapter on Polish People’s Republic in my book Ciesz się, późny wnuku! Kolonializm, globalizacja i demokracja radykalna
[Rejoice, late grandchild! Colonialism, globalisation and radical democracy], Kraków 2007 (the book is available in PDF format online:
http://otworzksiazke.pl/ksiazka/ciesz_sie_pozny_wnuku/).
2 More on that see Majmurek, J., Mikurda, K., Sowa, J., Un événement dans la glacière : le Carnaval de Solidarnosc (1980–81)
comme jaillissement de l’imagination politique, [w:] Badiou, A., Žižek, S. (ed.), L’Idée du communisme, 2 , Paris, 2011,
3 See Jeffrey Sachs, David Lipton, “Skok w gospodarkę rynkową” [A leap into market economy], Gazeta Bankowa no 36 (4 September
1989). The dates are worth noting. Sachs’s and Lipton’s text was published in early September and contained claims presented to the
American Senate’s Economic Committee in the summer of 1989. Balcerowicz announced “his” plan in early October.
4 A. Badiou, Of an Obscure Disaster: on the End of State-Truth, Maastricht 2009, p. 6.
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LEONIDAS DONSKIS
From Politics of Fearlessness
to Politics of Fear
Twenty-five years passed from the
collapse of communism in Europe.
Much time has elapsed and much
has changed in Europe beyond
recognition. Therefore, it is quite
legitimate to ask: Where are we
now? And what is to be done?
L
et me start by saying that one of the paradoxes of political change is that the less
power you have, the more committed in
the moral and political sense you can be. Eastern
European dissidents have never exploited hatred
and fear, those two precious commodities of
modern politics. Instead, they have stressed
responsibility for humanity and commitment
to human rights. Self-victimization, deliberate
and joyful powerlessness, willful disengagement,
celebration of one’s own victimhood, and comparative martyrology with its question as to who is
suffering the most—as if to say that somebody is
more equal than others in his or her suffering—
were still to come.
Twenty-five years after the fall of ­Communism,
we are tempted to exploit our victimhood as
an aspect of foreign policy: Once we do not
have power, then powerlessness and suffering
becomes the passport to the Heaven of Global
Attention. Sometimes we even go so far as to
explain away our political failures and low points
of recent history as something that inevitably
comes from our powerlessness or infinite manipulations around us. Although it appears as quite
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LEONIDAS DONSKIS
is a Member of the European Parliament (2009–2014). He has
written and edited over thirty books, fifteen of them in English.
Among other books, he is co-author (together with Zygmunt
Bauman) of Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid
Modernity (2013).
Photo: Jolanta Donskien̈e
a trendy maneuver of power games nowadays,
which allows us to get more moral legitimacy
through the mechanism of more attention for
more suffering and powerlessness, things were
very different in those days when Communism
was defeated.
By and large, this is an awkward tendency
in present Eastern and Central Europe, since it
springs from a global tendency to seek attention
at any cost in exchange for popularity, publicity,
and power. Heart-breaking stories, abolition of
privacy, and self-exposure have become the
means to achieve prestige and power for those
who possess the high art of translation of the
private into the public making their private
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and intimate stories a public property or even
breaking news—the art in great demand now.
Normally, this is a function of celebrities, although
intellectuals and politicians cannot survive
otherwise than becoming celebrities or victims,
as Zygmunt Bauman wittily noticed.
Whatever the case, things were standing
not in this way twenty-five years ago. Our part
of Europe became famous for its fearlessness
and engagement, rather than fear and disengagement. The Solidarity movement in Poland,
the very climax of Eastern and Central European
courage and sporadic powers of association,
was anticipated by the Helsinki groups in the
former USSR, the Memorial group dissidents in
Russia, and other units of dissenting minds and
naysayers. In those days, almost nobody spoke
about suffering and victimhood, as people were
concerned with how to win back their sense of
self-worth, dignity, and self-confidence.
Needless to say, we are talking here about
rather small groups of fearless individuals; yet
it was they who made it possible to smash
­Communism from the face of Europe by translating their individual courage into popular
fervor, and also into a strong belief in the right
cause. Courage, instead of fear and hatred,
was behind the miracle of Eastern and Central
Europe’s liberty, both in the Annus Mirabilis of
1989, and in the years of dissent that preceded
and anticipated liberation and emancipation of
Yet Another Europe, as it was called by Czesław
Miłosz and Milan Kundera. This especially goes
in sharp contrast with hatred and fear that were
thoroughly exploited by the Soviet regime and
its satellites as a means of political mobilization
and social control of the masses.
Contempt for fear is deeply grounded in
Eastern and Central European thought and
politics of dissent and freedom. If we are to
grant George Orwell the title of Honorary
Eastern E­ uropean, which the Russian poetess
and dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya strongly
suggested we should do, his 1984 also exposes
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this characteristically Eastern European moral
concern. The main character of 1984, Winston
Smith, and his lover Julia despise fear, which
they try hard to confront and wipe out from
themselves.
Courage, instead of fear
and hatred, was behind
the miracle of Eastern
and Central Europe’s
liberty, both in the Annus
Mirabilis of 1989, and in
the years of dissent
that preceded and
anticipated liberation
and emancipation of Yet
Another Europe, as it was
called by Czesław Miłosz
and Milan Kundera.
Before George Orwell’s dystopia written
in 1948, the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, in
his novel The Master and Margarita (written
in 1928–1941, and published, severely censored,
in 1966–1967), depicted fear as the source of evil.
According to him, fear is the reason of betrayal
of a friend, our disloyalty to and rejection of
a mentor, our amoral failure to take the responsibility for human individual’s life, even if she
or he has established an eye contact with us
and captivated our attention and imagination.
Fear is what Pontius Pilate despises in himself
the most after he washes his hands and allows
Joshua (the name of Jesus Christ in Bulgakov’s
masterpiece deeply influenced by Manichaeism
and Joseph Ernest Renan’s version of the history
of Christianity) to be crucified.
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Eastern Europe fulfilled the silent promises
and moral obligations of its towering thinkers and
eminent writers by overcoming hatred and fear.
In 1989, Communism fell in Eastern Europe as
a consequence of courage, resolve, fearlessness,
and solidarity. To reiterate a subtle point made
by Michael Ignatieff, the human rights discourse
was the outcome of Eastern courage and Western
organization. How ironic that some politicians and
public figures in present Eastern Europe tend to
describe human rights solely as a West European
invention with which they supposedly control us
imposing on us their “alien” values of secularism
and respect for minorities. This is especially the
case when it comes to defend ludicrous legislation on what is called “traditional values” or
“genuine family” or other pearls of homophobic
and anti-European wisdom.
What happened to us? Milan Kundera wrote
in his essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” that
all Central European revolts and revolutions were
essentially romantic, nostalgic, and, in effect,
conservative and anachronistic. Out of our idealization of Europe, especially its early modernity,
we firmly identified freedom and democracy
with Europe shaping our emancipation policies
as a return to Europe. We thought with good reason
that the Soviet version of modernity was the most
brutal one, and, therefore, we sought to replace
it with Europe—yet a drama was that that kind
of Europe we envisaged and identified ourselves
with did not exist at the time of our upheavals.
It did not become any better or worse; it simply
became something radically different from what
we imagined and thought it would and should be.
Our singing revolutions were about how to
arrest social change. Yet we ourselves became
hostages of rapid social and political change
transforming our part of Europe into a laboratory of historically unprecedented acceleration
of life with its uncertainties and insecurities.
For example, over the past twenty five years, more
than half a million people left Lithuania settling
in the USA, the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, or
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elsewhere. This is hardly a specific Lithuanian
phenomenon as Poland and Slovakia are facing
similar challenges. Striking social contrasts and
endemic corruption frequently led Eastern
­European countries to disenchantment even
with was their most impressive achievements,
including their accession to the EU.
And here comes a pivotal point. Populism
came to our countries firmly establishing itself
as a major political trajectory. What is populism
then? Is it a genuine concern with well-being of
the nation expressed in an exaggerated form
of patriotism? In fact, it is not, since the real
substance of this phenomenon lies elsewhere.
Populism is a skilled and masterful translation
of the private into the public with an additional
ability to exploit fear to the full. Fear and hatred
are twin sisters, as we know quite well. One never
walks alone without the other.
Yet this time it is not organized hatred, which
was something out of Orwell’s Two Minute Hate,
or the séance of collective hysteria and group
orgy of hatred, orchestrated by the Party and
practiced in the Soviet Union and other People’s
Democracies. Instead, it is the real fear of a private
person elevated to the rank of public concern or
sometimes translated even into mass obsession.
The question arises as to fear of what? The
answer is quite simple: It is fear of someone who
comes as personification of our own insecurities
and uncertainties, who get their first and last
names of facial features due to excessive sensationalist media coverage, tabloid editorials, and
conspiracy theories. Fear of Islam and Muslims,
fear of immigrants, fear of gays and lesbians,
fear of godless pinkos, fear of new Jewish world
conspiracies. You name it.
We became the same kind of Europe that
we thought would never accept us as part of it.
We adopted all their phobias and stereotypes
that earlier worked against us. Or the world has
become a Global Single Eastern and Central
Europe. If that is the case, the change could be
irreversible.
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Cultural Isolationism
Has Prevailed
In the past, the world was afraid of Russia and today
the Russians are afraid of the world. In 1989 13%
of the society said “yes” to the question if Russia
had enemies. Today 78% of Russians believe so.
This is an incredible change—says Lev Gudkov
in conversation with Filip Memches.
Does the Soviet past have any meaning for
Russians 23 years after the collapse of the
USSR, does it define their identity?
There is a strong nostalgia for this era. The
Brezhnev period is often perceived as the most
prosperous time in our 20th-century history. But
most Russians also believe that there is no return
there. For the USSR does not exist anymore, which
means that Soviet Russia also does not exist.
Does this nostalgia breed social divisions?
Of course. There are two factors defining the
divisions: the first is generational, the second is
connected with where you live and hence to
which social group you belong. Market-based
infrastructures have emerged in big cities. A new
class has appeared…
LEV GUDKOV
sociologist, director of the Yuri Levada Analytical
Centre, author of many books and articles on sociology
of literature, ethnic relations and problems of political
and economic transition in the post-Soviet society
and other matters
Photo: Archive Lev Gudkov
The middle class?
The description “urban class” is more adequate.
It is to a lesser degree dependent on government and to a greater degree oriented towards
European values, democracy, political reforms.
In contrast to that, the countryside and smalltown Russia preserved relics of uncompe­titive
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Soviet economy, such as the military­‑industrial
complex. In such places there is a demand for
state paternalism, economic planning, social
security. Among older or less educated people
there is a pronounced desire for social privileges
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from the Soviet era. Such people believe that
market reforms destroy the foundations of their
existence. And for that reason they are susceptible to conservative, anti-Western sentiments
and form the social basis of the authoritarian
regime—Putinism.
executing power provided by great leaders. The
very greatness of such a ruler absolves the
governing elite from responsibility for the crimes
they commit.
We are rather dealing
with using the past
as an argument
against the present,
mainly against social
contrasts. In this
sense people have
forgotten the Soviet
epoch, characterized
by shortages of goods,
lack of prospects,
a sense of ­stagnation.
That would mean that the majority of Russian
population is like that, for inhabitants of big
cities are in a minority...
This is the dramatic reason for the absence of
democratic and modernizing changes in Russia.
Does the post-Soviet nostalgia encompass
only the Brezhnev period or does it extend
to earlier decades?
The situation is of course quite complex. The
Brezhnev period was different from the Stalinist
period. Repressions were not on such a massive
scale. They generally assumed the form of
pre-emptive measures targeted at specific
groups, such as dissidents, nationalists, some
religious communities. But the basic material
needs were satisfied, which was an effect of a kind
of Gleichschaltung. But it does not mean
a genuine nostalgia for the Brezhnev past. We are
rather dealing with using the past as an argument
against the present, mainly against social
contrasts. In this sense people have forgotten
the Soviet epoch, characterized by shortages of
goods, lack of prospects, a sense of ­stagnation.
And now an idealized picture of this era serves
the inhabitants of conservative peripheries as
a source of accusations against the current
regime. As for the Stalinist period, in the late
1980s and early 1990s it was subjected to a sharp
although superficial criticism, which did not touch
upon the essence of the totalitarian Soviet system.
The whole problem was reduced to mass murders.
In fact Stalin ceased to be a significant figure for
Russians. But with Vladimir Putin becoming president in 2000 and starting to build an authoritarian system, the dictator gained in importance.
For authoritarian regimes need models of
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So against the official position of the Russian
state a vindication of Stalin took place?
It could be noticed in the media, especially
in television. First of all, an image of Stalin as the
victor in the Great Patriotic War was created. This
is why two contradictory pictures of this politician appeared in the social awareness. On the
one hand, 65–68% of the population believes
that Stalin is responsible for mass repressions,
which they find completely unjustifiable. On the
other hand, a similar number of people perceive
this dictator as a great leader, without whom
the Soviet Union would not have won the war.
And such contradictions in the social awareness
cannot be successfully resolved. For there are no
authorities and bodies which could adequately
interpret the Stalinist period. As a result, there is
no moral reflection on the Soviet past. It is telling
that during the twelve years of historical policy
promoted by the Kremlin there has been an
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increase in the number of people who are simply
not interested in such issues and choose forgetting—this percentage rose to almost 50%. And for
me this is the fundamental problem—I call it the
lack of moral independence of Russian society.
the Caucasus, the neighboring countries, the USA,
and there are expressions of xenophobia, both
inward and outward-looking. In 1989, 13% of the
society said “yes” to the question whether Russia
had enemies, and the majority—47%—held the
opposite opinion, so the sources of our problems
should be sought in ourselves, in Russians, in our
past, in our lifestyle. Today, 78% of the population
believe that Russia has enemies. And this leap
took place mostly in the period after Putin first
became president.
So the Soviet superpower status is being
separated from communist ideology, Putin’s
regime tries to associate it with right-wing,
conservative values...
In this case, Western political categories may
be of no use, for in the 1990s liberal reformers
such as Yegor Gaidar regarded themselves as
right-wingers. To be more precise, today the
government is promoting a kind of Orthodox­
‑nationalist fundamentalism. It is a completely
artificial neo-traditionalism, invoking something,
which has never existed. We are dealing with an
imitation of the glorious past but only the style
or form of this past is important rather than its
essence or content.
Russian nationalism,
in contrast to Central
European nationalism,
has a defensive
and compensatory
character. It is suffused
with the trauma of the
Soviet Union’s collapse.
But is there no conflict between the imperial
discourse and nationalism? You can often hear
that there is no room for nationalism in Russia,
as it used to be an empire, that is a multinational polity.
The imperial identity is slowly ceasing to be
relevant. And Russian nationalism, in contrast to
Central European nationalism, has a defensive and
compensatory character. It is suffused with the
trauma of the Soviet Union’s collapse. It is accompanied by frustration and a collective inferiority
complex. This favors shaping identity on the basis
of defining and pinpointing an enemy rather
than invoking, also in historical terms, a positive
image of ourselves. The sense of national pride
is supposed to compensate for poverty and the
chronic feeling of humiliation provoked by illegal
actions of the government. The following notion
was present in the Soviet mass consciousness: we
are poor but respected and feared in the world.
And now Russia is not a great power, so there is
a resentment against immigrants, especially from
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Is this hostility spread only by the regime?
Such politicians from the anti-systemic opposition as Alexei Navalny or Eduard Limonov
also do not shrink from nationalist rhetoric
and use anti-immigrant slogans...
This is true, the problem also regards the
opposition. But xenophobic feelings are incited
by the regime, which provokes the opposition
to use them for its own purposes. The government scares the public with immigrants, whom
it accuses of taking jobs away from native
Russians. And the public is alarmed with such
messages. At the same time the government
understands that without immigrants, Russian
economy could not function. Because for various
reasons—including demographic ones—there is
a shortage of labor in Russia. So we are seeing an
ambiguity in the government’s behavior. And in
the sphere of ideology nationalism itself is the
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only theme in Russian politics. Of course, we have
various nationalist tendencies, from the liberal
current, opting for the creation of a nation state
and civil society based on the Western model,
through Russian communism to Russian Nazism
or Orthodox fundamentalism, which is almost
Medieval in its nature. This broad spectrum of
conservative, dark concepts will affect social
awareness in the coming years.
consider themselves Europeans. On the other
hand it does not mean that a growing number
of people consider themselves “Eurasians.” There
is a common belief that Russia has its own, separate—but only vaguely defined—development
path. We are dealing here with a kind of cultural
isolationism.
On the one hand, the Russian political elite
scares the people with the West and on the
other hand it enters into various forms of
cooperation with the same West...
In Russian foreign policy pragmatism trumps
over other considerations. Putin’s bureaucracy is
aware that its current strong domestic position is
not guaranteed to last forever. So to maintain it,
the regime requires legitimization from the West.
And this calls for a certain caution and restraining
from brandishing conspiracy theories. Is there a tension within the ruling elite
between perceiving Russia as a European
country and perceiving it as a separate civilization? One of the key projects of Putin’s
third presidential term is to create a Eurasian
union, a form of reintegrating Soviet space.
It harks back to the concept of Eurasianism,
where Russia appears as a “Eurasian civilization” different from the West.
If we look at the public opinion, we will
observe that all these discussions on Eurasianism
and friendship of nations do not fall on fertile
ground. These are conservative projects of the
highest echelons of power—they are an unproductive response of Putin’s regime to the problem
of not being approved by the West. Hence the
reorientation towards China and other Asian
countries. But all these tendencies have a slightly
phantom nature. They do not influence the collective awareness. The majority of Russians want
to live a normal and quiet life, they do not want
to make sacrifices for the sake of restoring the
empire. This breeds divisions between the society,
forced to listen to swaggering pronouncements
by politicians, and the feelings within the regime.
FILIP MEMCHES
is a columnist of the Rzeczpospolita
daily
Photo: Archive Filip Memches
Does the society identify itself with Europe?
It did in the period of Perestroika and the early
years of Yeltsin’s presidency. Russians believed
then that the history of their country had come
to a dead end and they felt the need to integrate with Europe. However, the hardships of
economic transition and falling standards of living
caused a reaction. Today less and less Russians
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PETR PITHART
“Potato Soup” or “Kaleidoscope”?
Occupy or Monitor?
I
n the wake of last October‘s early parliamentary
election, few things are clear and definite in
the Czech Republic. One thing that is clear
though is that the Left has not won a victory that
would enable two parties (Social Democrats and
Communists) to form a majority government.
This was to be expected.
The other thing that is clear is that the two‑­
-decade long domination by two large parties
(a left-wing and a right-wing one) is over.
This is because the Czech Social Democratic
Party’s victory was far from a landslide. The election triggered an immediate leadership struggle
within the party. It is now trying to put together
a coalition government.
ANO, the runner-up, is not a party but
a movement. Its leader, the businessman
Andrej Babiš, would like to run the country
as a business. Nobody, least of all the leader
himself—a food processing and chemical
industry magnate with ties to StB (Státní
bezpečnost—State Security, the communist
secret service)—knows what his constituents
want except that they are fed up with absolutely
everything: political parties, the parliament,
the electoral system…
The third party that might join the coalition
is the almost century-old Christian Democratic
party, KDU-ČSL. Following the 2010 election,
which cost them all their seats in the parliament
for the first time in history, the party has changed
its leadership, rejuvenated itself, started to pay
off its debts and may now be the only healthy
and normal party in the country.
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PETR PITHART
Petr Pithart, Czech politician, political scientist and essayist,
signatory of Charter 77. Prime Minister of the Czech
Republic between 1990 and 1992. Member of the Senate
of the Czech Republic in years 1996–2012, being chairman
thereof in periods of 1996–1998 and 2000–2004.
Photo: Archive Petr Pithart
The Right suffered a heavy defeat. Václav Klaus’s
former party, the ODS, seems to be on the brink
of extinction while Karel S­ chwarzenberg’s urban
right-wing but non-nationalist and pro­‑European
party TOP 09 is licking its wounds but will most
likely survive.
From the eastern part of the country comes
the light of salvation—Tomio Okamura’s Dawn of
Direct Democracy—a party of one man and one
idée fixe: a general referendum on anything and
anytime, to dismiss anyone at once. It is a party
of cheerfully chaotic minds.
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The respectable Greens did not pass the
five per cent hurdle and the rather unpleasant
anti-European and nationalist Hlavu vzhůru
(Head Up) proved a complete flop.
The worrying thing is that over a third of the
voters supported populist or non-mainstream
parties. On the other hand, it is quite reassuring
that both „presidential“ parties—Václav Klaus’s
Head Up and Miloš Zeman’s Party of the Citizen’s
Rights—have bombed completely. In a country
that has a long tradition of revering presidents
as a royalty, they mustered fewer votes between
them than the marginal Pirates party did!
To complete the picture, Czech Communist
Party—the only party in the post-communist
world that has not dropped the word “communist”
from its title—has maintained a steady 15 per
cent for nearly quarter of a century. In this period,
no other party was prepared to form a coalition
with them, certainly not at the national level.
neither has it been defined in terms of interests
(since we have traditionally lacked an upper class).
For a long time the country has had a flat social
structure and the entire political scene has gradually shifted to the left.
Right from the start of political life in this
part of the world, dating back to the 1860s,
political parties have been primarily defined
by opposition to the local Germans and Vienna.
Politics was not so much about ideas, values and
interests as an arm-wrestling exercise, a competition to be the first to open a school in a town in
the border region. Between the two world wars
maintaining a Czech majority in parliament at
all costs was a priority. Any change in the upper
echelons of power was regarded a “luxury” we
could ill afford as the opposition challenged
the very existence of the state. Political parties
were reduced to playing the trade unionist role
and defending the interests of various professional groups. During the Munich conference
parliament was not even convened. Czechoslovakia’s representatives in exile—in London,
and especially in Moscow—agreed under the
influence of President Edvard Beneš that only
four parties would exist thenceforth: the ones
that had agreed to recognize one another. Due
to this “closed pluralism,” subsequently blessed
by the nation (i.e. the “National Front’’), by May
1945 C
­ zechoslovakia was well on the way to the
communist takeover of February 1948.
In November 1989 the celebrated Civic Forum
triumphed with its apolitical slogan, Parties are
for politicians, Civic Forum is for everyone!, which
back then appealed not only to Havel but also
to Klaus. But soon afterwards, after the Civic
Forum split up, it was Klaus’s grouping, which
was well organized along party lines, that went
on to win a resounding victory. Václav Havel’s
defeated supporters were mockingly dubbed
“truth lovers” (a term based on Havel’s casual
declaration, from a balcony in the heady days
of the Velvet Revolution, that Truth and love will
prevail over hatreds and lies…). However, Klaus’s
***
Is there some logic or a tendency to be
divined from all this? The question on everyone’s
lips is whether what we have here is a kind of local
“potato soup,” the result of some traditional Czech
malaise, or something springing from a general
confusion shared by all globalization processes,
which are said to have distorted the classical leftright (lib-lab) axis all over the world, replacing it
with an intangible, unpredictable “kaleidoscope.”
So either we are still haunted by the nationalist
19th century or we have become a plaything in
a post-modern game.
If the latter is the case, there is not much to
discuss. It would mean that the bizarre patterns
of non-political flowers that have bloomed in this
election—ANO and Dawn—are just the random
outcomes of the broken axis.
I believe, though, that it is more likely
that what we are seeing are the ramifications
of a prolonged illness. The population of this
country has never clearly defined itself in terms
of ideology or values (conservative vs. liberal) but
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dogmatic neo-liberalism led the country into
an economic slump that continues to this day.
Nowadays both the honorable though impractical supporters of Havel and the overly practical
supporters of Klaus have become spectators rather
than actors. It is tempting to say that it serves them
right. Meanwhile the only major party that has
kept its own house in order are the communists!
So is this potato soup or a kaleidoscope?
of the totalitarian regime. Since November 1989
it has not managed to recover. There have been
several waves of heated protest movements,
mainly involving students, intellectuals and dissidents, but they were all short-lived and ended in
exhaustion and general disillusionment.
Having said that, only just over a third of
Dahrendorf’s sixty years have passed so far.
It is too soon to despair: civil society may not
have grown in terms of quantity but the quality
of its leadership has definitely begun to change.
Several initiatives, organized as civic associations
or foundations and focusing on targeted monitoring and factual critique of (party) political
life in this country, have been operational for
quite some time now. They have come up with
very specific suggestions, often with solid legislative underpinning. An example is Rekonstrukce
státu (State Reconstruction), a platform uniting
some twenty initiatives, including Veřejnost proti
korupci (The Public Against Corruption) Vraťte
nám stat (We Want Our Country Back), Oživení
(Revival), Ekologický právní servis (Environmental
Legal Service), Inventura demokracie (Democracy
Stocktaking), and others.
The coalition that is being formed at the time
of writing of this article has been ticking off individual points of the coalition agreement based
on nine appeals. These are anti-corruption draft
bills tabled by the “largest lobby in the country,”
as State Reconstruction calls itself—which
propose very specific changes in legislation. The
majority of newly elected members of parliament
have signed a pledge to support these changes.
A list of MPs who do not support the appeal is
available on the State Reconstruction website,
through the page featuring its campaign “Blah
blah I’m not voting.”
This is something entirely new. It turns out
that political life, political parties and parliament are influenced not so much by constituents or by organizations that resemble the
thrilling and spectacular yet short-lived movements such as Occupy or Indignez vous but by
***
In the early 1990s, Ralf Dahrendorf estimated
that under favorable conditions the former
communist countries could change their political
system within six months; economic transition
could bear fruit within six years; but the most
vital thing, civil society, would take sixty years
to mature.
However, it is only the thick, entangled and
thus indestructible fabric of civil society that
provides a fertile ground for healthy and relatively
stable political parties based on value preferences and interests, without systemic corruption,
cronyism, election fraud and the dominance of
party machines.
Even back in the 19th century Czech civil
society was not really up to doing its real job,
i.e. being a counterweight to government.
Instead, like the political parties, it focused
mainly on opposing the local German civil
society. For decades both party politics (i.e. parties
competing for power) as well as its prerequisite
(civil society that is independent of government)
were reduced to nationalist squabbling.
As we have seen, the “potato soup” in Czechoslovak society evolved in a distorted way—both
in terms of party politics and non-political public
affairs—galvanized as it was by nationalist and,
later, ideological notions. The period from 1925
to 1929 was the only time between the wars
when both German parties and Slovaks were
part of the government.
In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s
what was left of civil society fell under the control
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professional international organizations like
Transparency International, Greenpeace, Amnesty
International or, in the Czech Republic, NGOs
such as State Reconstruction or We Want Our
Country Back.
What is needed now are well trained,
committed younger people with stamina, some
of whom have jobs elsewhere while others are
working for non-governmental organizations.
They do not expect immediate results. They
realize they are in for the long haul and that the
prerequisite of success is a roof over their head
and funding for basics and activities.
Instead of starting or sponsoring political
parties or movements, people who are concerned
about the present state of politics in the Czech
Republic should extend every possible support,
including financial, to this “new generation” of
civil society. They should support those who are
likely never to join political parties yet understand
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how parties work and are capable of setting them
­realistic tasks, monitoring their work and attracting
the attention of parties as well as the media.
They should support those who—instead of
showing their commitment by living for weeks in
tents in city squares and parks—will persistently
and expertly step on legislators’ toes.
This politically committed part of civil
society could gradually bring about change in
present-day politics, which still does not know
whether it is a regional potato soup or a random
pattern in a cylinder filled with beads. They are
likely to have more impact than pseudo-parties
that take ad hoc action based on opinion polls,
or their disoriented voters. The impact could
be amplified if their activities crossed country
divides.
Quite a few bright younger people now seem
to have what it takes. All they need is some help.
Including donations to their bank accounts.
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Europe—the Forgotten Little
Thing in the New Coalition
Agreement?
Ulrike Guérot
Germany cannot afford a continuation
of the past four-year’s policies. In the current
state of the European Union, Berlin has to take
responsibility.
One of the most ardently discussed things
of the coalition agreement was the question
whether or not “strangers” should pay for the use
of German highways. The “Maut” question—how
to install a system, which would make “strangers”
pay, but would be cost-neutral for Germans (and
whether administering such a system would be
more expensive than the fees collected through
a “Highway-Maut”) was one of the most effective
blackmailing issues the CSU, the Bavarian sister
party of the CDU/Conservatives, brought into the
coalition agreement and conditioned its signature. The German provincialism expressed in this
topic could barely be worse.
It could be an anecdote—and it surely is—
and yet: it comes with a peculiar aftertaste,
especially for international observers of the new
German coalition. It not only fills news headlines
and shapes the understanding of how Germany
functions these days: very self-centered, satisfied,
noble-gazing, and provincial. Germany is fine.
Conflicts in Germany these days emerge around
trade unions demanding extra work and Schichten
in the car industry around the Christmas holidays
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because books are bursting with orders: it feels
like the 60s, “Wirtschaftswunder”-days!
Little attention is given to the tense political
situation in France, concerns over the democracy
gap in Hungary and the rise of populism in the
Netherlands, as well as dreadful economic situation in Greece, Spain or in Ireland, where millions
are left with direct and indirect consequences of
the crisis. Germany focuses on itself; it has lost
sight of Europe, it seems.
The key policy the soon-to-be government
is facing is the Länderfinanzausgleich (federal
fiscal equalization mechanism). This policy,
in place since 1950, has undergone a first round
of substantial revision in the early 2000’s and is in
urgent need for further adjustment. This is going
to be tough: Actually, only three of the Bundes­
länder, Hessen, Bayern and Baden-Württemberg
(all more or less in the Southern part of Germany)
are net contributors to the system, all others are
net receivers. Hessen and Bayern have already
placed a plaint at the Constitutional Court in
Karlsruhe complaining about the structural imbalance and harm to their Land through durable and
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systemic spending for other German regions. They
question the entire system—nothing unusual
around elections. But this time the criticism
is more profound than in any other period of
post-war Germany.
When observing Germany over the next
months and years, two things will need to be
understood. First, the political (voting) constellation of the Bundesrat: here, the second chamber
is pivotal in the forthcoming years. Second, there
are multiple Germanys: The wealthy, sparkling
exporting Germany (the one international
observers focus on when reading economic statistics of Germany only) is the one of the South,
but only of the South. The Eastern part is still
poor (and by the way increasingly depopulated),
despite the Billions of financial aid after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Then there is the former wealthy
West of Germany, e.g. North Rhine-Westphalia,
now painfully lacking the money spent in the
German East: the lamenting status of public infrastructure is the big issue there, with bridges and
highways in desperate need for maintenance, and
schools, libraries and other public services threatened to close. In addition, most German towns
and local public entities are highly indebted,
partially because their public finance system
had to face huge credit losses or through high
liabilities for public services. The rosy debt to
GDP ratio of Germany is for the federal Bund
only. This is what citizens care for and this is
what drives the political discourse. How to sell
money for Greece or more money for Europe in
such circumstances? “Transferunion” is the word
that needs to be avoided at all costs. And so, the
coalition agreement did.
This explains why European policy makers
may be—in vain again—waiting for a German
decisiveness with respect to European integration
or a clear orientation, including the most ardent
topic: a banking union. This European attentisme
is obviously not new. One could already observe it
during Merkel’s overly cautious decision-making
throughout the past three years and its conti­
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nuance during the German election campaign
and in the coalition talks. And it does not imply
that nothing is happening at all either. Nevertheless, the wait for German clarity on what will
follow now is not over yet.
The wider implications of Germany’s inner
struggles are visible on the European level: both
parties, CDU and SPD, have long been working on
a joint understanding of what it is that they have so
delicately headlined “Germany’s political responsibility for Europe.” Paragraphs have been written
and pages filled: misunderstandings, differences,
and banalities were found—but there is no trace
of much innovative, progressive understanding of
Europe’s future and the role of its biggest member
country. But of course, to give the new coalition
some credit at least, Germany is not the only
country being hesitant on European politics and
on doing what is needed. In some countries, e.g.
France, the political situation looks even worse.
Hence, with a stable CDU-SPD majority
and a consequently rather weak group of euro­
‑skeptics, many expected Germany’s European
policies would dare to take bold steps, but
reading the agreement, this could be put into
question. While Germany’s partners hoped the
wait would be worthwhile and Berlin would finally
change gear towards motivated determination,
a first draft on European policy and banking union
presented on the 22nd of November proved disappointingly superficial, amounting to a simple
continuation of the past years.
If the current crisis is a symptom of institutional shortcomings, continuing with what has
brought Europe into trouble and revealed the
institutional flaws of monetary union, might not
be enough. Hence, the coalition agreement is
precisely about this: more of the same. Problem
solving should not be about lip-service and
generalities, but about concrete measures and
actions. The disconnectedness between what
should be done, e.g. with respect to deeper fiscal
integration and it’s political feasibility jumps into
the eyes, and is much less than especially the
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SPD has been asking for in its election program:
While the economic union and single currency
is in place, the political mechanisms to manage
them are still not. This crisis has exemplified that
a stable single currency must be accompanied by
a joint backstop and joint fiscal policies.
The final paper offered by the new coalition proved better than the first draft, but is still
incomplete. It is worth noting though that the
“community method” is said to be placed again
in the centre of European integration policy.1 And
some forward looking, concrete proposals, can,
indeed, be found, i.e. a single voting scheme for
the EP in all EU member states. Yet, many parts of
some 10 pages in total on Europe policy remain
vague, pick up the usual rhetoric about subsidiarity and remember the language from the past
years of the crisis management, which is the usual
commitment to promote growth, competitiveness
and innovation, and the strive for sound public
finances and fight against youth unemployment.
Hence, with respect to common instruments,
there is still a looming lack of precision: None of
the former projects which especially the SPD—
more or less openly—advocated for, i.e. creation
of an EU finance ministry, a redemption fund or
a full banking union, are mentioned in a really
clear and convincing wording, quite the opposite:
common liability is excluded2, the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) is not even mentioned.
Other pressing issues such as what position
Germany envisions to take on how ailing banks
can be stabilized through the ESM3, whether and
how to implement the financial transaction tax,
or how youth unemployment in the EU can be
decreased, are addressed in an equally vague
manner. Additionally, it seems that the current
draft entirely disregards the EU’s 2020 growth
strategy and the Commission’s advice. The
wording and semantics is again much more about
the self-responsibility of each member states
for its reform agenda, than about joint instruments, joint actions and appropriate E­ uropean
tools. With this, Europe is, with respect to schlock
absorption, heading at best for individual raincoats rather than for a strong and common
umbrella and transnational fiscal solidarity lays
way down the road.
Germany cannot afford a continuation of the
past four-year’s policies. Time is pressing for more
decisive action. While hesitation may have felt
safe at first, it is by now clear that it was too often
shortsighted and hence damaging long-term
prospects. In the current state of the E­ uropean
Union, where markets are poorly managed
because of political under-integration, Germany
has to take responsibility.
The upcoming weeks will challenge the
reluctant European hegemon in two ways: First,
Germany will have to overcome its inner struggle
and form a viable government. Second, Germany
not only has to find its place within Europe, but
it also must take an active role in re-designing it.
In short: Germany has to understand its political
responsibilities as the biggest and economically
strongest member state of the European Union.
The re-design with a goal of sound, democratically and socially balanced eurozone governance
starts in Berlin—or does not start at all!
ULRIKE GUÉROT
is a Senior Associate for Germany
at the Open Society Initiative
for Europe
Photo: Private Ulrike Guérot
1 Coalition agreement, p. 156
2 see page 159: „Nationale Budgetverantwortung und supranationale, gemeinsame Haftung sind unvereinbar“
3 With the deployment of ESM money being conditioned by a vote of the Bundestag
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Hungary and the EU
Jan-Werner Müller
Has the EU prevented the worst—or made Viktor Orbán
more powerful—or both? The challenge for democracyprotection by Brussels revisited.
in 2000 we were witnessing “sanctions against
Austria”—as opposed to bilateral measures
designed to express concerns about the ÖVP-FPÖ
coalition). The balance sheet here is not as bad as
some skeptics’ concerns about the EU’s capacity
to protect liberal democracy would lead one
to believe—though it needs to be added that
we have of course no real counterfactual and
that only future diplomatic historians might
be able to reconstruct the exact interactions
between Brussels and Budapest—and what
changed because of the EU and what might
have changed for reasons that had nothing to
do with “Europe.” However, the other challenge
is how to devise, for the long term, a new set
of institutions or “mechanisms” to respond to
deteriorations of democracy and the rule of law
in a Member State. The latter challenge has yet
to be addressed seriously.
So, on the first point, the EU’s actual record:
both the European Commission and, in particular, the European Parliament have kept up more
pressure than might have been expected; and
the European Court of Human Rights as well as
the Venice Commission have also clearly tried to
show the limits of what the Orbán government can
get away with. All have done so, I would argue,
without giving the impression that rules are simply
made up as they go along to make life difficult for
self-declared Hungarian “national revolutionaries.”
It has been more than three years since
­ russels and Budapest first clashed over the
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“national revolution” undertaken by Viktor Orbán
and his Fidesz party. The latter had won around
53 percent of the vote in the April 2010 election,
which, due to the peculiarities of the electoral
system, translated into a two-thirds majority in
parliament. Orbán used this majority—interpreted as a “revolution in the voting booths”—
for far-reaching changes in politics (a new constitution in particular), the economy, and, not least,
culture. Critics from the very beginning charged
that Orbán was creating a “Fidesz-state,” staffed
by party loyalists, and a nationalist “Fidesz-constitution,” which entrenched many of Orbán’s policy
preferences. Even if a party other than Fidesz won
an election, Fidesz, or so critics worried, would not
really lose power. Some of these critics happened
to be sitting in the European Commission. It is
time to take stock of how well the EU has been
doing in reigning in Orbán’s illiberal ambitions.
It is crucial to distinguish two challenges: one
is the question how the European Union should
or should not have responded to the actions of
the current Hungarian government (I insist on the
importance of choosing words carefully here: the
problem is not “Hungary,” but a particular set of
politicians and their disregard for the rule of law.
Remember how Wolfgang Schüssel and others
managed to convince practically everyone that
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The reasons for this relative success are somewhat contingent, however—and of course, we
do not at this point know the overall conclusion to the story. In particular, the Commission
has been so comprehensively sidelined in the
Eurocrisis that it has had every reason to re-assert itself as the proper guardian of the treaties.
Moreover, a lot—too much—has depended on
the interests and initiatives of individual Commissioners, in particular Viviane Reding, who, some
observers suspect, has also been trying to position herself as a plausible Commission President
in the future. Along with Neelie Kroes and Martin
Schulz she made herself extremely unpopular
with Hungarian nationalists, facing accusations of
being Europe’s “bulldog” in the conservative press
and worse insults by individuals who claimed
she was helping the opposition. If nothing else,
though, she created a sense that Europe was
watching and was increasingly trigger-happy with
infringement proceedings—and this, in itself,
might partly explain why Fidesz retreated at least
somewhat on the media and the election law.
Even those inclined to celebrate Brussels’
“soft power” in these matters have had to admit,
however, that the political and legal instruments
the EU has at its disposal are often not a good
match for the actual challenges in a Member
State. Infringement proceedings can, of course,
be based only on EU law—which often does
not cover the relevant areas of democracy and
the rule of law, other than in the very generally worded Article 2 of the Treaty on European
Union. This makes it harder to address systemic
problems and comprehensive efforts to undermine the liberal rule of law. The most striking
example here is the Hungarian government’s
de facto decapitation of the judicial system by
lowering the retirement age. The Commission
charged Hungary with age discrimination—
and won its case. But the judges were never re­‑
-instated and, despite its nominal legal success,
Europe appeared impotent in getting at the real
issue.
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Of course, there is an option already in the
treaties precisely to address specifically political challenges: Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, which allows for the suspension of
voting rights in the European Council for states
persistently violating basic European values. Yet in
the past few years academics no less than leading
political players—starting with Commission President Barroso—have repeated the mantra that
Article 7 is a “nuclear option.” In other words: it
is deemed unusable (making the mantra a kind
of self-fulfilling prophecy). Countries seem too
scared that sanctions might also be applied
against them one day.
That then has left few other options in dealing
with the Orbán government. It is highly probable
that some fellow European centre-right politicians
criticized Orbán behind closed doors—but none
of them ever spoke out publicly in a way that
could be classified as an effective form of “naming
and shaming.” A report by the Portuguese MEP
Rui Tavares—and approved by the European
Parliament this past July—broke important new
ground in suggesting the possibility of monitoring Hungary closely and also developing a new
“Copenhagen mechanism” to apply sanctions to
EU Member States violating the “Copenhagen
criteria”—once developed to ensure that only
full-fledged liberal democracies would enter the
EU. But neither the European Commission nor
the European Council has properly picked up the
ball that Tavares kicked into their courts. Time
is running out for this Commission and Council
action is highly dependent on who happens to
be in charge at any given moment. It seems fair
to say that the Irish presidency was significantly
more interested in questions to do with rule of
law protection than the Lithuanian presidency,
which succeeded it. In fact, the most remarkable
fact about the Tavares report might turn out to
be that it was actually the Parliament which overcame partisanship, since there was nominally
a centre-right majority in the legislature—and
yet the report passed.
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Before considering what else might be done,
let me say a few words about how EU actions
have been received in Hungary itself—which
also relates to the larger question whether
criticisms from the EU will necessarily always
lead to a “nationalist backlash” and rising anti­
‑Europeanism, as the Austrian example suggests.
Orbán himself clearly became very adept at
playing a certain game with the European institutions: two steps forward and one step back, after
having done what he himself called a “peacock
dance” for eternal consumption in order to
suggest proper compliance with European values.
At some points he even seemed determined
to start a pan-European Kulturkampf, pitting
conservative, Christian and nationally-minded
Europeans against a Brussels supposedly dominated by left-liberal, atheist Europhiles. At other
moments he flirted with the idea of leaving the
EU altogether, hinting at China and even Russia
as future partners and expressing admiration for
model democracies such as Azerbaijan.
For all these highly charged symbolic
confrontations and geopolitical gestures, the
results might actually not be what the Orbán
government would likely consider a strategic
success. For one thing, what has sometimes been
called Fidesz’s “war of independence” has not
proven popular within Hungary itself, beyond
a committed nationalist right (if polls are to be
believed). There is a more general lesson here:
yes, EU action will turn out to provoke anti­
‑Europeanism. But a government set on a course
that is likely to lead to violations of EU values
will preemptively stoke resentments of Brussels
anyway. In other words: Europe should have the
faith of its convictions; it will be attacked whether
it does so or not.
Second, if the EU in fact does nothing, the
outcome is by no means neutral. Failure by
Brussels will disillusion all those citizens of new
Member States who trusted that locking a country
into supranational institutions such as the EU and
the Council of Europe would make a return to
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authoritarianism impossible. Hence Brussels and
European elites in general should be much less
fearful about “nationalist backlashes”: they will
get one, no matter what; and those who actually
have faith in European institutions should not
be disappointed.
There is one other remarkable result of the
altercations between Brussels and Budapest, one
that has escaped many commentators’ notice. The
fact remains that Orbán, for all his talk of Brussels
as a quasi-colonial power and all his invectives
against the European Parliament, did in principle
accept both as legitimate interlocutors—and, in
particular, conceded the role of the Commission
as the guardian of the treaties. If one is at all
inclined to believe—with Machiavelli and Albert
Hirschman, for instance—that conflicts can also
help people to clarify what they really believe in
and what they consider the legitimate boundaries
of a shared political project, then the conflicts
between Brussels and Budapest might ultimately
help European integration.
On a less Panglossian note, however, it still
has to be asked what the EU can do beyond its
confrontations with Hungary to protect liberal
democracy in Member States more effectively.
One step would be to bundle infringement
proceedings to make systemic problems in
a Member State more visible, as Kim Lane
Scheppele has suggested r­ ecently—a proposal
which has the advantage of not requiring treaty
­revision. Another would be to strengthen
the role of the European Court of Justice
in addressing fundamental rights v­ iolations in
a Member State, even if the violation in question
does not immediately touch on EU law. Then
there is the idea of establishing an EU analogue
to the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission—
tentatively to be called Copenhagen Commission, as a reminder of the Copenhagen criteria.
In contrast to the Venice Commission, this body
would not just offer expertise, but could also
proactively raise an alarm and even trigger
a limited set of s­ anctions.
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As the Czech legal scholar Jan Komárek has
pointed out, this can look like a typical EU pattern:
when Europe cannot solve a problem, it invents
a new institution instead. However, a properly
designed Copenhagen Commission would
have the advantage of concentrating minds in
a highly fragmented political space and in a weak
pan-European public sphere. Europe, to put it
bluntly, suffers from a perennial political attention
deficit disorder. And to remedy that disorder at
least somewhat, there should be a clear sense
that when the Copenhagen Commission raise
an alarm, then something must really be going
wrong somewhere.
One might still object that the EU would be
duplicating institutions that have worked well—
especially the Venice Commission. Such a criticism
overlooks that the EU has reached a depth and
density of integration (and a level of interdependence) that finds no equivalent in the Council
of Europe. For instance, EU law is much more
specific in areas such as data protection, and the
Council and the Venice Commission could not
really comment on them. Second, the Council of
Europe is an even more fragmented political space
(with no shared public sphere at all); moreover,
one might say—to put it bluntly—that the Council
contains members who probably would have
a hard time meeting the Copenhagen criteria.
The problem of double standards—charges of
hypocrisy abound in virtually any discussion of
democracy-protecting interventions—would be
further exacerbated. Finally, Strasbourg can only
properly address individual rights violations—
whereas the Copenhagen Commission could
take a more holistic view; the Venice Commission cannot be proactive, whereas the Copenhagen Commission could routinely monitor the
situation in Member States and raise an alarm
without having to be prompted. It would thus
also build up an institutional memory that would
make it easier to prevent double standards both
in assessing an individual country over time and
in comparing different countries.
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To be sure, there might be a pragmatic worry
among some Member States that the EU is likely
to deepen its own legitimacy crisis if it were to
pass judgment not just on budget numbers, but
also on liberal democracy and the rule of law. To
deflect the blame, some Member State governments might think, it should delegate the unpopular work to the Council of Europe—just as some
of the blame for what Paul Krugman has called
“austerianism” might be laid at the doors of
the IMF, which was consciously brought in by
­European elites during the Eurocrisis. But if one is
serious about sanctions, then it would still in the
end have to be the EU who does the sanctioning.
So one might as well accept the responsibility
for forming judgments (and not just for implementing them), since, after all, there are also
enough EU citizens who precisely placed their
trust in the Union as a strong guardian of liberal
order (as opposed to the Council which can hardly
be said to have any “normative power” at all).
Contracting out might have some short-term
benefits, if Europeans will really only blame the
Council of Europe—but it might also have very
significant costs in further eroding the legitimacy
of the EU. JAN-WERNER MÜLLER
is a professor of politics at Princeton
University. His most recent books
are Contesting Democracy:
Political Ideas in TwentiethCentury Europe and Where Europe
Ends: Brussels, Hungary, and the
Fate of Liberal Democracy
Photo: Archive Jan-Werner Müller
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Look Back in Prudence!
Civil War Legacies
and Crisis in Greece Today
Iannis Carras
Whether as an irritant or as a balm, the Greek Civil War
of 1943–1949 is back
The Civil War, fought between the left and
sections of the centre and the right, followed on
from the Great Depression and the dictatorship of
Ioannes Metaxas (1936–1941). Over one­‑hundred­
‑thousand deaths in combat or by firing squad
have been calculated for a population of slightly
over seven million. Some one thousand seven
hundred villages were destroyed. Proportionally,
the population losses during the Greek Civil War
may have been three times those of the Spanish
Civil War.
many prisoners were tortured or subjected to
intense psychological pressure to confess, repent
of their crimes and renounce their past. Only
then could the prisoner be reintegrated into the
national body.
After the return to democracy, the 1981
victory of Papandreou’s socialists was presented
by PASOK as a victory of the “Great Democratic
Block.” Most refugees were invited back from
behind the iron curtain (the exception being
“Slav-Macedonians”), and the period of wars from
1941 on, was celebrated as a period of “national
resistance” embracing all of the left and most of
the right. Streets and squares renamed in the
1980s to commemorate the resistance constitute an ongoing reminder of this integration of
the left into the national story line. Nonetheless,
political identity continued to be determined to
a considerable extent by the Civil War.
It was the anti-Papandreou New Democracy­
‑communist coalition of 1989 that finally passed
a law stating that the conflict should not be
referred to as a “bandit war” but as a “civil war.” As if
to preserve the silences, however, the coalition
proceeded with the burning of relevant archives
Silent Voices
Both during the war and after its conclusion,
the left presented themselves as the democratic
party, whereas they were presented by their
opponents as “bandits” or, worse, as an alien body
serving the interests of the “Slavo­‑communists.”
After 1944, the very term “emphylios” translated
as “civil war” was shunned, respective opponents being viewed as alien to the national
body. Following the left’s defeat, at least eighty
thousand faced exile in Eastern Europe, Greek
citizenship and right of return to their homeland
denied. Others were imprisoned. In these camps,
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of the Greek intelligence services. This right-left
reconciliation of the 1980s and the early 1990s
was therefore based on a policy of don’t ask...
a Greece of protests on an everyday basis; […]
he is in favor of a Greece in which the words
nation and fatherland are outlawed.” Civil-war
talk reached such a pitch pro-government Kathimerini newspaper condemning the political use
of such rhetoric.
Equally, however, widespread usage of the
Civil War might be interpreted as a turning point:
the closure of a period of divided memory. With
the certainties of the post-Junta era questioned
and with the threat of violence omnipresent,
it is natural that Greeks should look back to
previous periods of trauma to interpret their
current predicament.
Rethinking Civil War
Connected, perhaps, to the gradual passing
away of the generation that lived through the
war and its aftermath, the last decade and a half
have seen important historical work on the topic
of Civil War. Both Athens and Thessaloniki Universities have research teams that focus on the Civil
War. A plethora of novels and films have also
engaged with the war from new perspectives.
From 2008 on, a whole set of slogans linked
to the Civil War has come into common usage, in
what has been described as “a civil-war syndrome”
correlated to the crisis. Politicians have added
their voice to this crescendo of noise. Only a few
characteristic examples, all of them from the
last few months, need be cited: A close advisor
to the Prime Minister remonstrating against left
wing histories of the Civil War, an (opposition)
SYRIZA MP ending a speech in parliament with the
trade-mark words of farewell of the communist
resistance fighter Aris Velouchiotis (1905–1945)
“we’ll meet again at the furriers”; the Mayor of
Athens using words that recall the persecution of
the left following the Civil War; the Prime Minister
expostulating “in the name of God, we are not on
the verge of a civil war”; and, repeatedly, Golden
Dawn MPs accusing their SYRIZA counterparts of
being civil-war era communists.
For the government, civil-war talk is
­expedient. The Civil War is used as an argument
against division, thus formulating a rationale
for agreement and cooperation. Further, the
threat of the left constitutes an effective tool
in New Democracy’s struggle to stem the drift of
its voters to parties of the populist and far right.
Such talk allows the Prime Minister to present
himself as a bastion of national stability against
the dual threats of the radical-left and fascism.
­Referring to Alexis Tsipras, leader of the opposition, Antonis Samaras said: “he is in favor of
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Threats and Deadlines
If the Civil War is back in the public sphere,
this does not mean that today’s crisis is a result of
the Civil War. At most the trauma of the Civil War
and its aftermath help explain certain features of
the Greek polity. Contrary to a number of versions
purporting to provide explanations of Greece’s
current condition, Andreas Papandreou was not
the beginning of all things evil, nor does modernGreek history commence with the fall of the Junta.
There are, as it should always be remembered,
systems of government that are worse than those
based on patronage and corruption.
Nor is Greece on the verge of another civil
war. For the left, the Civil War has often worked in
the past as a metaphor for resistance understood
as an existential stance. Nonetheless, SYRIZA is
doing all it can to capture the centre ground.
Alexis Tsipras is attempting to reach out to religious voters and to liberal democrats, and also
to all those who want Greece to remain integrated in a reformed European system. Far from
corroborating the rhetoric of two extremes with
a delegitimized left on one side and Golden Dawn
on the other, this has resulted in accusations
that SYRIZA is transforming into a repeat-version
of PASOK, striving, in other words, to present
itself as adept at combining radical rhetoric
with a realistic approach to exercising power.
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Civil-war talk has little appeal for SYRIZA’s
coveted centre ground.
The post-Junta consensus embodied by both
PASOK and New Democracy may be characterized
as a mutually reinforcing amalgam of democracy,
party-patronage and Europe. In the context of
a depression which is now deeper than that of the
US in the 1930s, with patronage in abeyance and
Europe turning toxic, it is not only the strength of
extreme parties that should surprise, but also the
robustness of the parliamentary and democratic
ideals which both SYRIZA and New Democracy
espouse. This democratic consensus is a direct
result of the role of both the left and the liberal
right in combating the Greek Junta of 1967–1974
and the legalization of the Greek communist party
KKE that followed. There is no left ready to take
to the mountains today, no faction waiting to
falsify election results, and no military prepared
to intervene in the democratic system.
At the same time, however, there should be
no room for complacency. Alongside economic
calamity, the threats to democracy are multiplying. One threat is the pressure applied by
the EU for governments of national unity, such
unity, enforced by an institution that is only
in the process of attaining democratic legitimacy by itself, being seen as the opposite of
pluralism. Apart from being unconstitutional,
attempts to ban Golden Dawn from participating
in the electoral process would also undermine
the democratic process that is serving as a major
bulwark against extremism in Greece. This is
exactly what happened in the 1950s when KKE
was banned. It is the racist practices and violent
methods of Golden Dawn members and the party
leadership that should be prosecuted, not the
party as a political entity in and of itself.
Another source of instability is the perceived
injustice of the privatization process, particularly
the privatization of the municipal water authorities of Athens and Thessaloniki that charge
reasonable prices and yet make a profit. Equally,
there is widespread resentment to new tourist
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land use regulations, which encourage the speculative construction of tourist homes, protected
areas included. Enforced privatization on the
scale envisaged engenders questions of social
relations, and, in the last resort, sovereignty. These
are questions that Greeks last confronted in the
context of German occupation and, later, of US
hegemony during and following the Civil War.
The post-Junta
consensus embodied
by both PASOK and
New Democracy may
be characterized as
a mutually reinforcing
amalgam of democracy,
party-patronage and
Europe.
It is in the context of such questions, that
the politics of identity is trumping the politics
of justice. Camps have once again been set up
throughout the Aegean, this time to remove
migrant-aliens from the EU. Hunger (last experienced, on an incomparably wider scale, in the
famine of the Second World War) is being colored,
Golden Dawn having arranged for the distribution
of food for those of Greek nationality. That the
mood is turning distinctly nationalist is evident
in calls for patriotism of the left.
Golden Dawn, for its part, is openly using
the symbolism of the Civil War and fascist past,
including the Greek version of the Nazi Horst­
‑Wessel­‑Lied. The connections between Golden
Dawn support and anti-communist collaborationist traditions in certain parts of rural Greece
have been much commented on. Faced with
a collapse in standards of living and a feeling of
being enslaved many Golden Dawn supporters
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seem to relish the party’s aggression directed
towards others. In a grave indictment of the
educational system, Golden Dawn support comes
preponderantly from the young, pointing, at least
in urban areas, to the breakdown of the family
as a bearer of memory.
In light of the government’s recent crackdown on Golden Dawn it is impossible to estimate
the party’s support come the May 2014 European
elections; the clamp-down may even contribute
to a degree of heorization, with certain circles
viewing the party as the only anti-systemic force
in Greek politics. With a strong result for SYRIZA
likely, these elections have the potential to lead
to a collapse in the legitimacy of the current New
Democracy-PASOK coalition. This leaves the EU
with a limited window of opportunity up until
April 2014 to restructure debt, create a framework
for the supply of affordable finance to companies
in southern Europe and, by extension, start the
process of reducing levels of unemployment in
Greece from the current 28%.
The Greek Civil War does not then constitute
a sufficient explanatory framework for the current
crisis. But it should serve as a warning. Greece’s
democratic consensus may be remarkable given
the magnitude of the downturn, but it is also
increasingly vulnerable.
been replaced with the rhetoric of competitiveness. And competitiveness has two characteristics:
firstly, it requires unequal sacrifices from different
sections of the citizen body, and, secondly, it is
directed against others, and therefore provides
the framework for a politics focused on questions
of identity, of “us against them.”
The Civil War has many uses in today’s Greece:
Some are banal and some moralistic. Many
serve narrow party-political ends. Not a few are
dangerous. But “cultural traumas” such as that
of the Civil War can also be put to work as lighthouses in a stormy sea. In a time when democracy
in Europe is showing signs of decomposition and
the contours of sovereign authority are being
reset, the examination of past wounds is essential.
Germany in particular has much to offer
Greece and the rest of Europe in this respect;
indeed it is in a unique position to deal with the
crisis, for the whole European project represents
a response to the trauma of the Second World
War of which the Greek Civil War constitutes an
extension. Any exa­mination of the past should not
then be considered an alternative to debt restructuring, on-going structural reforms and a return to
growth. Offered in a spirit of humility and forgiveness, however, c­ ritical understandings of the past
constitute a direct challenge to stereotyping and
the specter of identity­‑politics that are once again
haunting Europe. For if Europe is facing its most
serious challenge since the era of wars, it is to the
contested memories of that era that it needs must
return. Not in anger, but as an exercise in prudence
and the pursuit of justice.
History and Healing
It is precisely because the economic crisis
and the crisis of institutions connected to it
have destabilized identities throughout Europe
that critical re-examinations of the continent’s
recent past become so important. Debt, the euro,
the European project, even the phenomenon
of globalization as a whole, have undermined
state sovereignty; voting citizens feel increasingly distant from the centers of power where
the decisions that affect their lives are made.
As long as the standard of living of the
majority of European citizens was improving,
this was deemed acceptable. Throughout Europe,
however, the rhetoric of social inclusion has now
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IANNIS CARRAS
is an economic and social historian
of the 18th century Balkan and
Russian worlds. He is active in Greek
NGOs and has been a parliamentary
candidate in the Athens region for
the Greek Green Party.
Photo: Private Iannis Carras
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Old Friends, New Leaders:
Poland and Turkey in the
Early 21st century
Adam Balcer
The 600th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations
with Turkey offers a unique opportunity for Poland
to build a permanent strategic partnership with the most
dynamic neighbor of the EU
big and systematically growing influence in
After joining the EU and NATO Poland tries
to find its place on the economic and political
map of the world, where tectonic shifts occur,
such as the growing importance of China and
other emerging non-European powers, and the
shrinking influence of the West. Focusing our
attention on such giants as China and India,
we should not forget about a very significant
new phenomenon: the increasing role of countries, which could be called—to use the boxing
terminology—medium-weight players. Turkey is
a classic example of such a power.
Among medium-weight players, Turkey is
by far the most important for Warsaw, for the
following reasons:
the post-Soviet area (participation in trade
exchange, direct investments, construction
contracts, cooperation within regional organizations, development aid, grants, Turkish
education abroad, military cooperation,
tourism, cultural ties) NATO membership (one of the most powerful
armies) and EU accession process (important
consequences of the possible Turkish
membership for the EU; Turkey is the candidate with the largest potential since Great
Britain). The importance of Turkey for Poland will grow
in the coming decades due to its economic and
demographic prospects, much better than for the
EU and Russia. UN prognoses say that in 2050, the
population of Turkey will be 95 million, compared
to 120 million in Russia and 75 million in Germany.
In Germany and especially in Russia there will
be a significant increase in the percentage of
geography (a regional power closest to
Poland)
a key geopolitical position (a country to some
extent belonging to the Caucasus, the Black
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Muslims, mostly of Turkic origin or culturally
connected with Turkey. Their growing role can be
observed even today. The most striking example
of that is the career of Cem Özdemir, the leader
of German Greens. Thanks to its historical and
cultural ties with Russian and German Muslims
Ankara may acquire new possibilities of shaping
its relations with Germany and Russia.
Poland needs a comprehensive social and
economic strategy, one of its necessary elements
being migration policy. The experiences of
Western Europe and the demographic situation
in the European Neighborhood suggest that
Muslims will constitute a major part of “new”
Poles (because of its demographic prospects,
even worse than for Poland, Eastern Europe
cannot be a large immigration reservoir for our
country). Turkey (especially if it becomes an EU
member) and regions strongly connected with
it, such as Kurdistan or Turkic republics, seem to
be the optimum choice. Creating an attractive
offer for immigrants will of course be the key to
a successful immigration policy.
Polish-Turkish relations intensified in recent
years. Both countries mutually regard themselves
as promising markets. Poland is the only EU
country, which has been awarded such an official
status by the Turkish ministry of the economy.
Among Muslim countries, Turkey is Poland’s most
important trading partner (a share of about 1.5%
in Polish trade balance). In 2013, the volume of
trade will probably surpass 6 billion dollars.
In Polish exports to non-European markets, Turkey
occupies second place, right after the USA (about
15 %). In recent years Turkey doubled its share
in Polish exports. But if we take into account the
geographic position of both countries and the
dynamics of their growth, this exchange could
be much greater.
Poland is the second most important (after
Romania) construction market for Turkey in
the EU. In the period of 1989—2013, Turkish
building contracts in Poland amounted to
1.2 billion dollars. This sum will grow significantly
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when the largest urban construction investment
in Poland is completed, that is the second line of
the underground railway in Warsaw built by
a Polish-Turkish-Italian consortium. The investment is worth almost 2 billion dollars. In all probability, the same consortium will win the tender
for the extension of the second line, also worth
roughly two billion dollars.
Polish-Turkish relations
intensified in recent
years. Poland is the
only EU country, which
has been awarded such
an official status by
the Turkish ministry
of the economy.
About 400–500 thousand Polish tourists travel
to Turkey every year. If we compare it to the
number of Czechs, Slovaks or L­ ithuanians visiting
this country, we are tempted to conclude that
Polish tourists potentially could be twice as
numerous. Poland is the most popular destination
for Turkish students under the Erasmus program—
Poles form one of the most numerous EU student
communities in Turkey. There is a university
founded by the Turks in Poland—a rare phenomenon in the EU. As a result, we have 700 full-time
students from Turkey, more than from Russia or
Germany. A great opportunity for tightening the
relations with Turkey and for giving specific
substance to the strategic partnership from 2009
is offered by the 600th anniversary of establishing
diplomatic relations with Turkey, which will be
celebrated in 2014. The leading idea of cooperation between Poland and Turkey, two medium-weight players, should be the idea of a strategic partnership on a global scale, and in Eurasia.
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A new format for this cooperation should be
provided by the establishment of the High
Council for Strategic Cooperation (Ankara established it with a dozen countries in the world). Its
main purpose should be an intensification of
economic exchange (investments, building sector,
trade, tourism, joint ventures, energy), academic
exchange (universities, research centers), military
cooperation (joint projects for military equipment
production) and energy cooperation (building
LNG ports, interconnectors, drilling for shale gas,
clean coal, renewable energy, atomic energy) as
well as political cooperation.
be the Turkish company Gulermak, building the
Warsaw underground: in the closing months
of 2013, with Polish subcontractors, it entered
the last stage of the tender for the extension of
the underground in Copenhagen and building
a huge tunnel in Norway (at the time of writing,
the results of the tender were not announced yet).
A particularly important area for PolishTurkish cooperation should be the Black Sea
region. Its agenda should contain economic
exchange (investments, building sector, trade,
development of transport infrastructure),
academic exchange (research projects), military cooperation (joint training and maneuvers,
equipment production), energy cooperation (the
southern corridor: new gas-pipes, LNG ports and
drilling for deposits) as well as joint diplomatic
initiatives regarding frozen conflicts. Poland and
Turkey should draw Romania and the Ukraine into
these actions; in recent years, Ankara markedly
intensified its cooperation with these countries.
It is worth recalling that in 2012 Poland, Turkey
and Romania established trilateral consultations
of their foreign ministries.
Regional organizations should form one of the
areas of Polish-Turkish cooperation. In October
2013 the Turkish foreign minister for the first time
took part in a Visegrád Group summit. It would be
advisable to permanently include Turkey in the
Visegrád Plus formula. The Visegrád Group itself
established relations with the Organization of the
Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC)—with
the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland having
observer status—and with the Council for Cooperation of Turkic Countries.
A stronger support for the Turkish accession is necessary if the Polish-Turkish relations
are to intensify. Poland is now more active in
this matter than a few years ago. In June 2013,
we were one of the main European countries
successfully making efforts to avoid a crisis in
the negotiations. As a new EU member with fresh
experiences, Poland could support the process
of Europeanization of Turkey (implementation of
The leading idea
of cooperation between
Poland and Turkey,
two medium-weight
players, should be
the idea of a strategic
partnership on a global
scale, and in Eurasia.
An example to follow could be the strategic
partnership between Great Britain and Turkey,
providing the framework for close cooperation
between British and Turkish companies in third
countries. The list of non-European markets vital
for Poland is headed by Kazakhstan, with Turkey
having awarded the strategic market status
to Kazakhstan and the Ukraine recently. And
it is these markets that should become areas
for cooperation between Polish and Turkish
business.
Poland and Turkey are also interested in
expansion of exports to Russia. This means that
they should select a number of Russian federal
republics, for example Tatarstan, as Polish-Turkish
specializations. A source of inspiration here could
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the acquis communautaire, cooperation between
civil societies).
It is worth recalling that among the countries of the world, Poland belongs to those most
similar to Turkey. In the Global Competitiveness
Index of 2013, published by the World Economic
Forum, both countries had an almost identical
number of points (the main difference being our
poor demographic prospects but an adequate
immigration and pro-family policy could help
bridge the gap). Poland is also a natural “European
connection” for Turkey. A number of elements
contribute to that: The reform of local administration should
be a Polish export commodity (in the context of
the peace process with Kurdish guerrillas, started
in 2013, it has a fundamental importance for
Turkey). It would be very well received if Poland
presented ideas for solving the Cyprus problem
on the international and EU forum. It is also
extremely important to promote our historical
heritage, unprecedented in Europe (the Muslim
Tatar minority living in Poland since many centuries, few wars of Poland against the High Porte
compared to other Ottoman neighbors, the first
friendship treaty between the Ottoman Empire
and a Christian state [1533], a very significant
role of Poles in the 19th-century modernization
of Turkey and the perception of Turkey in Poland,
since the 18th century, as a potential liberator from
Soviet control). This common heritage provides
a very strong foundation for Poland playing the
role of the main EU partner of Turkey. successful transition, started 20 years ago and
still unfinished (a second modernization leap
is necessary, from an economy based on cheap
labor to an economy based on innovation)
a significant demographic and economic
potential (almost 40 million inhabitants and
over 800 billion dollars in purchasing power)
ADAM BALCER
lecturer at the Centre for East
European Studies of the Warsaw
University, consultant at the Polish
Presidential Office and the thinktank demosEuropa—Centre for
European Strategy
Photo: demosEuropa
average per capita income much closer to
Turkey than Germany
rapid economic growth—much faster than
in the countries of the “classic” West
position in the region (building coalitions
for specific issues within the EU, cooperation
within the Visegrád Group and the V-4 Plus
mechanism)
challenges (economic growth based on
savings lower than investments, dependence on short-term foreign capital, a large
economic grey area, a much higher level of
corruption than in the countries of Northern
Europe, low level of innovativeness, a large
agricultural sector, infrastructural deficits,
much lower levels of employment and productivity that in Northern Europe, a “dirty” energy
balance)
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The Personal is (Again)
Political
Ivaylo Ditchev
Personalized communication channels make it possible
for the politicians to express an opinion “off the record.”
They try to counter the unprecedented collapse of trust
in “the system.”
The title recycles a feminist slogan. In her
famous text, Carol Hanisch (1969/1970) opposes
the possible therapeutic strategies to overcome
individual traumas to the fight for changing
society, where personal emotions, passions, and
even sexuality become a political battleground.
Such need to replace the public persona by
a feeling body is usually seen at times of trouble in
the modern world: sentimentalism, romanticism,
nationalism, the radicalisms of the early 20th,
the hippie movement, etc. The rise of the digital
world, upsetting territorial belongings and social
hierarchies, has injected an even stronger portion
of emotions into public life. Being accessible,
human, passionate, and impulsive has become
a certificate for authenticity.
There are various ways to personalize politics through the new technologies. Let us start
with the famous Blackberry of Obama, through
which he was supposed to communicate with
ordinary Americans and which, after his election,
retained a purely symbolic function as, for
reasons of security, only a dozen of people are
allowed to be in direct contact with him (they
were supplied with special devices by the security services). In­‑between, the president main-
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tains a humble Facebook page in an informal
and elliptic digital style. For instance, a post
saying “Family” is followed by a relaxed picture
of him, hugging his two daughters. Comment:
“I wanna be like you, sir!” After a while in another
post the president will chose to promote real
political issues: a poster supporting #obamacare,
with the laconic appeal: “Share.”1 His wife’s page
seems less sophisticated. “How many smiles for
this beautiful smile?” over the photo of Michelle,
smiling beautifully.
Personalized
communication channels
make it possible
for the politician to
express an opinion
“off the record,” to
simulate truthfulness
by transgressing stiff
regulations of protocol.
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Of course, there are cultural variations.
­ igeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan congratN
ulates the national football team and passes on
good wishes to religious communities. Governor
Sarah Palin floods the followers of her page
with thanks, blessings, and various raptures.
Vladimir Putin, not unlike “The British Monarchy”
page, presents us dull press releases of official
activities. Nevertheless, if the Russian president
curiously provokes a 100% positive feedback,
the British Crown still allows for some spontaneous reactions on its wall like “would have been
there but had to go to the food bank…” after
the announcement of a royal dinner at Buckingham palace. As to Shashi Tharoor, referred
to as the “Twitter Minister” (of human resource
development), his tweet flow presents photos of
him at cultural tourism sites, followed by quotations from prestigious authors, then ideas on
India’s future. In short, he creates the character
of a cultivated, caring, and competent Indian
intellectual.2
Personalized communication channels make
it possible for the politician to express an opinion
“off the record,” to simulate truthfulness by transgressing stiff regulations of protocol. Thus Putin
spontaneously bursts out in indignation at some
US law, supposedly legalizing pedophilia, then
expresses undue human bias for the Olympics
in Sochi, that so many Russians, like himself, are
proud of.3 Of course, the simulation of personal
presence is a matter of sophisticated balances.
Confidences need to suit the temperament in
order to convince. Bulgarian right-wing opposition leader Boyko Borissov informs us about
the condition of his knee, contused during
a football match, then complains that doctors
will have to use splints to fix it (“How lucky
you have such a strong will, you will need it
to recover” comments a polit-fan).4 Obviously
such details would not act as “personal touch”
for a leader like Angela Merkel, who practically
never speaks of her personal life, God forbid her
body. It goes without saying that the hosts of the
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publications (i.e. his/her team manages) carefully
manage reactions by filtering and guiding of
the discussion.
It is pure outrage that
was at the center of
social movements in
the last couple of years:
small causes produced
almost civil wars in Sao
Paolo and Istanbul, or
pure destruction with no
demand whatsoever, as
in Paris and London.
What Are Those Politicians Reacting To?
They try to counter the unprecedented
collapse of trust in “the system.” Among the
reasons for the crisis: excusing of the paralysis of
political power by globalization. The rising social
differences at the expense of the middle classes.
The replacement of majoritarian democracy by
a sort of post-democracy (Crouch, 2004), where
small, well-organized, vociferous groups attract
media attention. The new revolt of the digital
masses that invade journalism, science, literature, public debate. The internet, wrote Pierre
­Rosanvallon, is not merely a tool for doing politics:
it is the shape that counter-democracy takes to
counter growing mistrust towards authorities
through a “spontaneous adaptation to the functions of vigilance, denunciation, and evaluation
by the citizens”; we can thus regard it as “a true
political form” (Rosanvallon, 2008: 70).
Trust is generated through opposing power.
Besides rational forms of “sousveillance” (surveillance from below, Fr.) like blocking of political
decisions, leaking of information, or signing
of petitions, the web has become a theatre of
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passions. The curious success of Stephane Hessel’s
pamphlet “Get angry!” (Hessel 2010) is telling:
it made millions of sales in over 100 countries
and influenced the Spanish “Los Indignados,” then
“Occupy.” Few people really entered deep into this
92-year-old diplomat’s arguments about resistance during WW2, or the plight of P
­ alestinians;
what mattered was the call to outrage. And it
is pure outrage that was at the center of social
movements in the last couple of years: small
causes produced almost civil wars in Sao Paolo
and Istanbul, or pure destruction with no demand
whatsoever, as in Paris and London. During the
series of anti-government movements in Bulgaria,
2013, protesters repeated that it was the absence
of leaders, programs and concrete grievances that
made them invincible, as it made it impossible
for the authorities to give in and thus quench
discontent. As in Spain and the USA earlier, this
naive idea made them last but not succeed; nevertheless the argumentation is worth considering.
A genuine social movement is one that does not
have a rational strategy (no “scenario”); it goes
back to the etymological link between “emotion”
and “emeute” (“uprising”, French, setting people
in motion).
For two years, I have observed the emergence
of a new type of cyber-agitator on the Bulgarian5
Facebook. The users I observed were selected
according to activity, considerable number of
fiends, and prevailing topics of public interest:
journalists, NGO-people, former or future politicians, academics, informed citizens, students;
their online activism has made them regularly
present in the traditional media and in some
new party formations.
The main genre of citizen’s indignation has
moved from public speech to editorial, from
manifesto to personal blog. At present, it seems
to be embodied in the Facebook post and Tweet,
where a link to someone else’s message is
forwarded, usually with a short, passionate
comment, intensifying the meaning, or else
turning it upside down, possibly with an attached
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photo, etc. (“convergence culture,” Jenkins 2006).
The comments and “likes” of other users act like
an objectively measurable applause: they also
help it survive the instant of posting, as every
new reaction is transmitted by a visual and sound
signal to those, who already liked or commented
it. Its viral quality to be resend or retweeted boasts
the digital ego of the author; at any stage of the
process he/she acquires new friends and
followers, which seems to be the ultimate goal
of the exercise, especially for users with public
ambitions.
The main genre
of citizen’s indignation
has moved from public
speech to editorial,
from manifesto
to personal blog.
Famous people that have a guaranteed
digital suite, tend to produce original content,
where as new pretenders tend to forward
content produced by others by adding personal
attitude. Thus they parasitize on prestigious
sources of information, but are also able to
produce more postings. Because, unlike the
traditional libraries, on platforms like Facebook or Twitter the last entry pushes into the
background the former ones, making it thus
necessary for the user to be present all the
time. Andrew Keen called this “the law of digital
Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most
opinionated” (Keen 2007: 15).
Impulsiveness, speed 6, passionate bias—
this makes the cyber-agitator seemingly
authentic, as the main suspicion we have about
the web (if not about the global world as such) is
that invisible players are pulling the strings behind
the stages. Emotional reactions forward you to
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the forestage, by replacing the plotting subject
by the feeling body. The style of posts adds to
the feeling of spontaneity with orthographic
errors made out of hurrying, emoticons, punctuations like five exclamation marks, but also
familiarity and rude group jargon (former PM
becomes “Pumpkin,” the present one Orecharsky
is renamed to “Oligarchsky,” a contested corpulent
deputy is represented as a pig...).
In fact, the proportion of positive to negative
messages, as counted by students of mine is less
than 1:20; attacking enemies is systematically
preferred to praising friends. On one side, this
seems to be due to the overall folklore-like aspect
of the web, where the new digital masses tend to
ridicule and reject elites of any sort. On the other,
there is a semiotic reflex that the media-world has
cultivated in us: positive messages tend to be seen
as ads, hatred is for free.7 I do not mean this in
terms of psychology, which distinguishes primary
from socially constructed feelings, but rather as
a sort of distinction between ways to generate
trust in different fields. When you speak of animals,
you are authentic if you show tenderness; of politicians say nothing unless bad. “The web demystifies
the hidden scenario, this is its primary function”
I was told by one digital leader.
The most intricate aspect of the new digital
leadership is the imperative of amateurism.
The influential cyber-agitators I observed are,
as I said, mostly professionals, nevertheless
they create their online character by avoiding
systematically overstating their expertise. One
of the NGO presidents observed had no more
than 1 in 10 posts informing about her concrete
projects, as she was afraid to put off here Facebook “friends” by instrumentalizing the network.
She also runs an institutional site with activities,
invitations, documents, etc., but it seems rather
dead. “Dynamics are different” she said, “personalized messages are much more influential.” The
fear to be identified as “professional citizens”
paid for by foreign sponsors is, in between, very
vivid in Bulgaria; in Russia a recent law obliges
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abroad-funded NGOs need to declare themselves
as “foreign agents.”
We trust amateurs because they are “digitalized version of Rousseau’s noble savage” (Keen
2007: 36), and one way to fake amateurism is
to spend more time and energy on matters of
personal interest, react naively outside of one’s
sphere of competence. But it would be wrong to
think that digital intimacy is something spontaneous. People are extremely conscious about the
image they produce—the music they will recommend, the sites they will follow. In the interviews
I conducted, this turned out to be a real problem,
especially for younger users, who were afraid
not to deceive their network. The generalized
surveillance in the digital world transforms the
tiniest lifestyle detail into a political statement,
the same way communist control over consumption transformed wearing blue-jeans into an act
of dissidence. You thus feel obliged to “like” the
type of music that fits your digital image (folklore
for a nationalist, opera for a hereditary conservative...) even if you do not actually listen to it
in real life.
The trust in the digital leader—your intangible friend who connects you to the daily information flow—can easily acquire a socio­‑political
dimension. During the nuclear referendum in
2012 those human hubs spontaneously (?)
changed their Facebook icons to “yes” or “no”;
in 2013 some adopted symbols of mourning
for the young person, who immolated himself
in protest against the political system, later, of
solidarity with the protesting students in Sofia.
Again, dosage is essential here, as the suspicion
of interested use of the web is what most radically destroys trust: real political engagement
should be seriously diluted by the stream of
digital consciousness made up of consumer
concerns, shocking pictures, congratulations
of friends, intriguing news articles, etc.
It is the specter of money that overshadows
public trust. The deinstitutionalized type of interaction, anonymity, distance, speed, they make it
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References
difficult to judge whether the interlocutor is paid
for what he/she says. According to estimations
between 10 and 35% of consumer evaluations in
the US are fake, the highest being in the sphere
of book sales, where the author can buy them
wholesale on specific sites. There is no reliable
data about political usage of fake postings, nevertheless it is an issue that is constantly debated in
Bulgaria.8 In fact, a constant suspicions accompanies even offline activities like demonstrations
or occupations: are those real citizens or are they
paid for by some backstage “script writer”?
One way to reestablish a minimum of trust by
cyber-leaders of public opinion is to put forward
the spontaneous, incontrollable, irrational private
“me.” Of course, the latter is but a cultural­
‑historical convention; as Arlie Hochschild wrote
“acts of emotion management are not simply
private acts; they are used in exchanges under
the guidance of feeling rules. Feeling rules are
standards used in emotional conversation” (Hochschild 2003: 18). The ascent of the digital leader in
pajamas seems to be, in this perspective, a new
standard that aims at making up for the decline
of public personae. Andrew Keen (2007) The Cult of the Amateur, Nicholas Brealey
Publishing: London.
Arlie Hochschild (2003) The Managed Heart. Commercialization
of Human Feeling, University of California press: Berkeley,
LA, London,
Carol Hanisch (1969/1970) The Personal Is Political, Notes from
the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited by Shulamith
Firestone and Anne Koedt, http://www.carolhanisch.org/
CHwritings/PIP.html
Colin Crouch (2004) Post-Democracy, Polity: London.
Henry Jenkins (2007) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New
Media Collide, New York University Press: New York.
Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) Counter-Democracy. Politics in an Age
of Distrust, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Stéphane Hessel Indignez-vous ! (2010) Indigène: Montpellier.
I V AY L O D I T C H E V
is a professor of cultural anthropology
at Sofia University, Bulgaria. He
has been teaching abroad, mainly
in France and the USA. He is also
an editor of the journal for cultural
studies “SeminarBG”
Photo: Online TV Garelov
1 https://www.facebook.com/barackobama?fref=ts. visited 11/2013.
2 https://www.facebook.com/jonathangoodluck?fref=ts; https://www.facebook.com/Putin.President?fref=ts ; https://www.facebook.com/
TheBritishMonarchy?fref=ts; https://www.facebook.com/sarahpalin?fref=ts; https://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor. Visited 11/2013.
3 Ibid., posted 20/11/2013.
4 Posted 20/11/2013, https://www.facebook.com/boyko.borissov.7?fref=ts.
5 Bulgaria is taken here as a language, not as a territory.
6 A post marked as being sent from a mobile device seems even more trustworthy, as this presupposes that the user does something else
and has had no time to think it over.
7 “I hate you free of charge”—this slogan, hoisted by the artist Pravdoliub Ivanov at the anti-government protests in Sofia, 2013, was
largely shared over the social networks. Profiting from his instant notoriety, he then put up an artistic exposition of slogans he designed
and carried.
8 “Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be
testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.” The Best Book
Reviews Money Can Buy, New York Times, 25/08/2012. Lack of serious control in the relatively generous subsidies for political parties
makes it possible to employ students to enter platforms and support the party’s positions and/or attack enemies. They are usually paid
according to number, length, variation, and efficiency of posts. Fake consumer reports seem less of an issue in this country, as industries
do not have enough know-how or funds for such sophisticated advertisement practices.
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MICHAL HVORECKÝ
Marián Kotleba: a Slovak
as Well as a European Problem
I
t is often said that the integration of the Muslim
diaspora will be of crucial importance for the
internal stability of Europe. For the countries
of Central Europe the basic and much more
important challenge will be overcoming the
exclusion of the numerous Gypsy community.
About 12 million people of Gypsy origin
are now living in the European Union. An overwhelming majority of them do not regard
themselves as Roma but usually they are not
accepted as members of the nations with which
they identify. Most of them live in Central Europe
and constitute a significant minority in Bulgaria,
Slovakia, Hungary and Romania (from 5 to 10 %).
This percentage will grow in the coming
decades, for they have a much higher birth rate
than the rest of the shrinking population of the
region. The most dramatic is the demographic
situation in Bulgaria and, to a lesser extent,
in Romania: the UN predicts that until 2050 the
population of Bulgaria will fall by 30 % and of
Romania by 20 %. The Gypsy population of the
EU will also increase by hundreds of thousands
of people due to the accession of Western Balkan
countries (especially Serbia). Consequently, we
can expect that the problem of exclusion of
the Gypsies, often separated by a social and
economic chasm from the rest of the citizens,
will be exacerbated.
According to a European Commission report
from 2012, entitled “The situation of the Roma in
11 EU member countries,” about 90 % of Gypsies
in Central Europe live in poverty or on the verge
of poverty. An overwhelming majority of them
live in ghettoes, which are slums located on
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MICHAL HVORECKÝ
is a Slovak writer.
Photo: Stanislav Jenis
the outskirts of cities. The average number of
persons living in one room is 2–2.5, while for
non-Gypsies it is one room for one person. Gypsy
districts are characterised by high incidence of
various social dysfunctions (family violence,
alcoholism, petty crime). EU research shows that
about 35 % of Gypsies in Slovakia and Hungary
and more than 60 % in Romania routinely experience hunger.
Unemployment among Gypsies is two times
higher than for the general population. According
to EU estimates, Slovakia has the highest difference in the region in this respect: Slovak Gypsies’
unemployment rate is five times higher than the
rest of the Slovaks. Poverty is inherited due to very
low level of education among the Gypsy population. In the 20–24 age group the percentage
of persons with secondary education among
Romanian Gypsies was six times lower than in
the general population. The educational situation
of the Gypsies is by far the worst in Romania and
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Bulgaria. From 15 % to more than 20 % Gypsy children in these countries do not go to school and
usually take up unregistered work. Also in terms
of social security the situation of Bulgarian and
Romanian Gypsies is the worst. Only 40–50 % of
them possess health insurance and just 25–35 %
have some prospects of receiving an old age
pension.
The very difficult social and economic situation of Gypsies in Central Europe is not markedly different from that of their kin in Western
Europe. But in the countries of Central Europe
they constitute a much larger section of the
population. Moreover, the countries of Central
Europe have a lower financial and administrative
potential to deal with integration of Gypsies. Their
integration is more difficult than integration of
Muslims in Western Europe, for the material and
social divide separating Gypsies from the rest of
the population is bigger, while their social and
cultural background (for example the very low
status of women or hostile attitude towards the
government) is less conducive to integration.
In addition, the dislike of the Europeans towards
the Gypsies, effectively leading to discrimination,
is more serious than towards Muslims.
Of course, Gypsies pose a less severe direct
challenge for European security than radical
Muslims (terrorism) do. Unfortunately, also
their degree of self-organization and social
mobility is significantly lower. Among Gypsies
in Central Europe, it is very difficult to find great
sportspeople, film directors, writers or leading
­politicians, while in the West it is becoming the
norm in the case of Muslims.
Central European Gypsies were the social
group most painfully affected by the downfall of communism. Since then their situation
improved to some degree but the prospect of
a growing population of young, poor, uneducated and unemployed persons of Gypsy origin
remains a great challenge for Central Europe.
It is not only an economic and social but also
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a political problem. In 2008–2009, a group of
Hungarian skinheads organized a series of attacks
on Gypsies, killing six of them. In 2010 Jobbik, the
extreme right Hungarian party gained an all-time
high 17 % of the votes in the general election.
The main preserve of Jobbik is East Hungary with
the biggest number of Gypsy inhabitants. And
in Bulgaria there have been numerous reports
on buying Gypsy votes (the currency is food,
alcohol or money; such methods were also used
by ­Vladimír Mečiar, the authoritarian ruler of
Slovakia in the 1990s). In the European Union
Bulgaria and Romania are, alongside with Greece,
the lowest-placed countries in the Freedom in
the World ranking. The Gypsy problem also has
an international aspect: in 2009–2010 Gypsies
migrating from Bulgaria and Romania to the West
created tensions in the relations of Sophia and
­Bucharest with France, which started to deport
them. The Gypsy migration also became an argument against accepting these two countries to
the Schengen zone.
In the coming decades the countries of
Central Europe face a whole range of economic
and social challenges connected to catching
up with the most developed Western countries, which requires a second modernization
leap (increasing competitiveness, creating an
economy based on innovation). The alternative is
falling into a trap of medium wealth and margina­
lization within the EU. For Bulgaria, Romania,
Macedonia, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary success
of the continued process of modernization will
depend to a large degree on strengthening integration of the Gypsies with the mainstream of
society.
There are no shortcuts here. Increased wealth
in the countries of Central Europe does not have
to mean assuaging the problem of Gypsy integration. An example of that is Greece from before
the crisis. The situation of the Gypsies there was
worse than in Slovakia or Hungary despite the
fact that Greece was much wealthier.
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The Beginning
of a Lost Decade
Vladislav Inozemtsev
How Russia slips into a new economic recession
In 2013, economic growth in Russia had not
exceeded 1.4 percent, and hopes it may accelerate in coming years look doubtful. Russian stock
exchange indicators remain at around 60–65
percent of their pre-crisis values. Why Russia,
the country that during the 2000s served as an
example of rapid economic development, came
close to a standstill these days?
In my opinion, the very comparison of
economic dynamics in recent years suggests that
the crisis now evolving in Russia has nothing to
do with the trends currently unfolding in the
global economy. Oil, which play a crucial role
in ensuring the country’s financial well-being,
trades well above US $100 per barrel; financial
markets continue to be flooded with money while
interest rates remain low; Russia’s export revenues
amount to around US $500b for each of the last
three years. Therefore, the roots of the problem
should be sought inside Russia—or rather in
the policies of its authorities, which are pursued
after President Putin’s return to the Kremlin in
May, 2012. Among the most important factors
explaining the current slowdown of economic
growth in the country I would mention just five
today.
First, in recent years Russia experienced
a steady increase of both budgetary incomes
and outlays at all levels. In 2013, overall budget
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revenues reached 37% of GDP—roughly the
same amount as in Austria, and bigger almost
by a third than in Poland. Tax increases happen
in Russia with surprising regularity, despite the
apparent feeling about its liberal tax policy, fueled
by a low 13 percent income tax; the social security
payments these days are as high as 30.2 percent,
the corporate profit tax stays at 20 percent, and
value-added tax at 18 percent. It should be noted
as well that about 50 percent of federal revenues
originate from customs duties, which corresponds
to the level more common in the poorest African
nations. Both rising taxes and employment of new
tough collection measures disregard investors
from starting new businesses and undermine
overall investment climate in the country. No
less important is the fact that big state-owned
companies, such as Gazprom, Rosneft, Russian
Railways and many others for many years in a row
have raised tariffs on their products and services,
thus making their clients increasingly uncompetitive. Thus, the first cause of the coming Russian
stagnation is the growth of the state’s involvement in the economy, manifested in different
forms. As a result, entrepreneurial activity slows
down while the capital flight from Russia becomes
a constant process (from 2009 till 2013 more
than US $320b were taken out of the country
predominantly by domestic investors).
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Secondly, the economic growth is derailed
not only by collection of excessive government
revenues, but also by highly inefficient budget
spendings. Back in 2010, the then President
Medvedev argued that around 1 trillion rubles
(US $30b) annually were unappropriately used
(read—stolen) by procurement of goods and
services for state needs. But even this is not the
most important thing. In contrast with the case
of the U.S.’ “New Deal” when the public funds
helped to bring the country out of the crisis, in
today’s Russia their use does not provide a similar
effect. On the first glance, the amount of investment is quite ambitious, but the use of funds is
either focused in the propaganda-related projects
(more than US $100b has been and will be spent
on the celebrations like those connected with
APEC summit in Vladivostok in 2012, G20 and G8
meetings, as well as the Winter Olympics in Sochi
in 2014 and the FIFA World Cup in 2018), or do not
produce additional economic activity (such as
modernization of the Trans-Siberian railway or
construction of high-speed railway from Moscow
to Kazan’—both projects are expected to take
about US $50b with no chance of a break-even
in less than 50 years). With a significant portion
of funds stolen or lost, the majority of construction workers being migrants from former Soviet
republics, and a substantial part of the equipment
and materials purchased abroad, such projects
are unable to give a push to the economy. So, the
problems arises from the fact that the increase in
tax collection slows economic growth and public
investment does not accelerate it.
Thirdly, an important problem becomes
the constant increase in costs. From 2001 to
2012, while the rouble/dollar exchange rate has
remained relatively the same, domestic gasoline
prices rose 11 times, natural gas prices—16 times,
and electricity tariffs—nearly 20 times. Today,
aluminum, copper and many other industrial
metals are more expensive in Russia than they
are traded in the world markets. Similar is the
situation with construction materials. Costs of
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connecting new enterprises to the grid in many
cases exceed estimated profits from their operations for two or three years. As a consequence,
a large number of goods and services produced
these days in Russia are offered at prices much
higher than those existing in the Eastern Europe
and in Germany. Of course, under such circumstances, neither the Russian nor the foreign
entrepreneurs have a desire to invest in a country
where the production factors are so overvalued.
Labor costs, which in the first half of the 2000s
were one of the factors of competitiveness, has
grown over the past years many times—but
without increasing either of the quality or the
efficiency of Russian workers.
Fourth, there is no demand for innovations
since the competition between private and public
enterprises will almost certainly be won by state
monopolies. In Russia today, there is a narrow
sector of high-tech industries (mobile communications and Internet providers for example), but it
attributes only 3–4 percent to the country’s GDP,
and even its rapid growth can not compensate for
stagnating industrial and resource sector, which
provided rapid growth from 2000 till 2008. Todays
Russia produces roughly the same amount of oil
and natural gas as the Russian Soviet Federative
Republic did back in 1990, while both ­Kazakhstan
and Azerbaijan exceed Soviet-time production
figures by 3 to 4 times. Commodity sector, which
is extremely competitive worldwide and therefore high-tech, is monopolized in Russia by
state corporations and does not spend money
on R&D—the result is the preservation of both
production structure and its technological base,
and, therefore, some extended prerequisites for
further stagnation of both resource and overall
economy.
Fifth, the history of recent decades shows
that the most successful in the global economy
are those countries which are actively involved
in the global division of labor and which attract
foreign investment and technology. In Russia,
we now see the reverse process: the country has
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become virtually the only one in the world where
a public company uses tens of billions of dollars
for buying foreign companies operating on its
territory (as it happened in the case of recent
TNK-BP’s acquisition by Rosneft) and thus substitute a foreign investment by a domestic one.
In addition, Russia becomes increasingly isolationist power and Putin’s foreign policy strategy
is clearly aimed at limiting Western economic and
political influence on the country. Meanwhile, as
is well known, autarky under modern conditions
almost always leads to a slowdown of growth like
the one we witness in Russia today.
One may note a number of developments
which are not of purely economic, but also of
political and social nature, and that also undermine the confidence of investors (both domestic
and foreign) in Russia’s economy. Nevertheless,
the main trend looks very distinct: Russia’s
economic growth these days is sacrificed to the
political ambitions of the ruling elite. In order
to run the country without any challenges, it
waives economic growth and competitiveness.
Instead of lowering of meaningless government
spending and introducing some aggressive tax
cuts, Kremlin increases the tax burden and focuses
on the administrative measures in handling the
economy, rather than on easing it for entrepreneurship. Dynamics of the last two years, during
which the quarterly growth fell from 4.9 percent
in the 1st quarter of 2012 to almost zero in the
4th quarter of 2013, shows that this choice is
wrong. However, it will not be revised, as Putin
and his aides are convinced that politics is more
important than economics, and “manual control”
may replace the market levers.
The result looks pretty obvious. While in
Moscow the government still argues economic
growth will accelerate to 3.0 percent in 2014
and to 3.4 percent in 2015, there is no reason
to assume this happens. It takes from one to
three years to change the trajectory of economic
development—and after such a noticeable deterioration of the business climate, it is difficult
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to assume for its sharp improvement in the
short run. Thus, it seems to me that what we all
should expect is a significant deterioration in
the economic situation in the country—most
likely marking the beginning of a “lost decade”
that will last as long as Mr. Putin remains in
charge of Russia. I am not talking here about
a recession or crisis; today Russia has enough
means to avoid a classical recession (if necessary
it may increase borrowing, cut some government
spending, appropriate a share of the profits of
state-owned companies) but there is no grounds
to bet on growth. During 2014–2016 we might
see Russian economy balancing on the brink of
recession, going from a small increase into small
contraction, and vice versa—but both within
the statistical error. This situation is familiar to
many developed countries, but quite unusual
for a country that has grown at a pace of 5–8
percent annually over the previous decade. The
question of how this economically “lost” decade
can trigger acceleration of political process in
Russia, cannot be answered today but Moscow’s
claim for the status of a fast-rising power can be
considered insolvent.
V L A D I S L AV
INOZEMTSEV
is the Director at the Centre for PostIndustrial Studies in Moscow and
the leader of “Civilian Force” political
party. He serves as Presidium member
at Russian International Affairs
Council and Council for Foreign and
Defense Policy.
Photo: Archive Vladislav Inozemtsev
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Europe Needs
Protectionism
Jean-Luc Gréau
Why haven’t the political and economic rulers of the West
decided to make a genuine diagnosis of the crisis, which
started in 2007?
Right after the Great Recession of 2008 and
2009, a debate was launched in the media about
the usefulness of protectionism. And it ended
almost as quickly. Advocates of “happy globalization”1 simply announced that protectionist policy
would be “retrograde and untimely.”
But the post-crisis reality does not abound in
successes. The economic sky cleared briefly in 2009
but this did not translate into a permanent and
strong economic rebound for which was everyone
hoping. Just two years later, Europe again came to
a standstill. The United States did not succeed in
filling the chasm produced by the liquidation of
almost nine million jobs. The BRICS, which were
supposed to take the baton of rapid growth, are
themselves in trouble. We are beginning to consider
the possibility of a Chinese crisis, which would be
a continuation of the American and European one.
quick profits was—it was this obsession, which
drove banks and investment funds to reach for
complex, unfamiliar and above all risky financial
products. But these practices would not have
developed on such a large scale (since the first
decade of the 21st century) without a deliberate
policy of stimulating the market of mortgages
and consumption credits.
This experiment achieved the largest scale
in the United States. It was also the American
case which showed us what the ultimate costs
were. And yet the brief success of the stimulus
policy, imitated in many other countries—
for example in Great Britain, Spain, Austria, Ireland
or Hungary—on the one hand allowed governments to proclaim the viability of neoliberalism
and on the other hand allowed economists to
declare that the model of open economies proved
to have been a great success.
It is undeniable that the political and economic
rulers of the West have not decided to make
a genuine diagnosis of the crisis, which started
in 2007—precisely in order to avoid the necessity
of changing the previously planned trajectory. But
the crisis made us aware of the huge significance
of wage deflation, a phenomenon which even
earlier—although in a concealed manner—led
A Crisis of Globalization
An error of judgment was made at the very
start. The violent shock which set many Western
banks atremble (or even toppled some of them),
focused the attention of the world on the very
risky practices of financiers on both sides of the
Atlantic. Of course there were good reasons for
that. We know how strong the obsession with
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to the breakdown of internal demand in economies based on free exchange.
The essence of wage deflation is obvious:
human labor, regardless of where it takes place,
is rewarded below what is deserved according to
the criteria of efficiency and quality. The policy of
stimulating demand with various means (above
all through encouraging people to go into debt)
produced a situation where the consequences of
wage compression had not been felt for many
years. 2 These consequences were indirectly
revealed through the debt crisis and the crisis
of the Western banking system. But these crises
concealed the original cause of the shock, that
is wage compression. As a result, we got mired
in an unending technical and moral debate on
new regulations governing the financial system,
imposed in order to avoid the return of the crisis,
but the issue of its most important and objective
cause is painstakingly omitted.
If it is true—and I believe it is—that wage
deflation hampers or endangers a harmonious
growth of the economies, then it unambiguously
follows that today’s crisis in its deep layers is
a crisis of globalization. Recent years prove that
we have maneuvered ourselves into a dead end.
It is impossible to build permanent growth on the
quicksand of competition between all laborers
of this Earth.
living standards of the workers precipitated progress. After the war Western countries, wiser thanks
to the experience of the Great Depression, institutionalized social and economic mechanisms
of regulation. For the first time class struggle was
combined with class cooperation—to the great
benefit of the economies.4
Recent years prove
that we have
maneuvered ourselves
into a dead end. It is
impossible to build
permanent growth
on the quicksand of
competition between all
laborers of this Earth.
In contrast to that, the neoliberal experiment
started in the 1980s in the West is based on an
unwritten assumption that wages are a random
variable dependent only on the macroeconomic
balance. This is reflected in the discourse of English
and American economists, organizations representing employees and managers of central banks.
The issue of wages never appears in their analyses,
unless in a negative sense—their only worry is the
inflationary effect of all wage raises, nothing more.5
As for the distribution of goods between various
categories of workers, they rely on the job market.
This resulted in a certain form of economic denial:
it ceased to be obvious that demand for labor on
the part of companies depends on demand for
products on the market of goods and services.6
Let us briefly consider two closely interconnected phenomena, which gave rise to this
historical change. They are, first, the growing
influence of large stock market shareholders
and second, borders more and more open to
When Capitalism Is Rejecting Its Own Roots
We just recalled the basic rule allowing for
stable development of competitive economies:
increasing productivity and quality of labor must
translate into increasing wages. Marx’s criticism
of capitalism was founded on the opposite claim:
he believed that exploitation by blinkered capital
owners would intensify. But history of economy
exploded the Marxist claims. Real wages started
to grow long before the period of prosperity, the
so called “Trente Glorieuses,” that is the thirty
glorious years of uninterrupted development
after World War II.3 Class struggle conducted in
the name of clichéd slogans of improving the
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the flow of goods, regardless of the conditions
in which they are produced. Stubborn sticking to
the principle that shareholders are to be the only
beneficiary weakens national economic systems,
threatened with repeated crises. These crises give
a second life to Marxist ideas. And yet corporations, asked to act only with the good of the
shareholders in mind, gained new opportunities
for development thanks to the globalization.
This process is twofold: locating companies on
emerging markets allows them to acquire new
markets for selling their products and the use of
cheap labor and cheap specialists allows them
to bring profit margins up.
These two elements of globalization are not
inseparable. What is more, we should contrast
them with each other. Acquiring new markets is
one thing and an opportunistic calculation aimed
at reducing costs of labor regardless of the consequences is quite another. And yet these issues are
deliberately interchanged in the propaganda of
the eulogists of globalization. They still speak only
about opening: let us take up the challenge and
use the opportunities offered by globalization—
this slogan is persistently repeated by economists,
media and politicians holding neoliberal views
(in a word, by everyone). The banal but crucial
question if ability and talent is still rewarded
with an honest wage is discreetly sidelined by
the ideological and moralizing appeal to open
to the others.
In this way the de-territorialized capitalism,
systematically emerging since the 1930s,
is rejecting the operating principles which
brought success to its territorial predecessor. It
also negates other founding principles of capitalism, as the examples of Foxconn and the Rana
Plaza complex show.
As we know, the Taiwanese company Foxconn
is a huge subcontractor of the American electronic industry. It built large production centers
in China, where it uses cheap labor lacking any
security but capable of reacting to sudden
increases in demand for products very liable to
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shifts of fashion. Production methods are not far
from slavery. But the cynicism of Foxconn and
its large customers, such as Apple, has another,
perhaps more important aspect: the customer
placing the order is separated from the factory
owner. Products are conceived in such a way that
the low cost of making them would limit the risk
of the commissioning company: the investment
will easily be recuperated, for it assumes the
use of cheap labor. Even if the introduction of
the product ends in a fiasco, the company that
invented it will not suffer any loses.
The Rana Plaza complex is another illu­stration
of the perversions of de-territorialized capitalism.
It is the name of a huge building close to Dhaka,
into which textile workers making cloths for
big Western brands such as H&M or Zara were
squeezed. When this structure collapsed, 1100
people lost their lives. Rana Plaza is the opposite of what we used to call a “factory.” For the
factory had been conceived as a place for labor
based on rational principles. The employer—
who was also the investor—tried to coherently
manage parameters of production: receiving and
processing materials such as raw materials and
parts, internal transport,7 heating the building or
quality control in the final stage of production.
Moreover, the factory was changing in order to
meet these parameters more efficiently. Even
the textile industry, although it often requires
only modest investments, was subjected to this
evolution from the very beginning. But Rana
Plaza was just a loose collection of workers and
machines, without any rational organization of
work or any concern for safety.
So we may formulate a claim that in its most
radical forms de-territorialized capitalism undermines its historical foundations, that is risk-taking
by the company and its shareholders combined
with full responsibility for physical investments
and labor force. Besides the obvious social regression, de-territorialized capitalism embodies
a fundamental regression of responsibility.
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What Kind of Protectionism?
Protectionist policy should be the answer to
the contradictions of capitalism without t­ erritory.
It is a mixed policy,8 which in contrast to the
increasingly radical free-trade policy should
combine opening borders with closing them.
I will name some of its elements.
The necessary condition is freedom of
investment in production. Every non-European
company wanting to start working in the territory of the EU in order to develop its know-how
should be able to do so, of course respecting legal
regulations which are in force on this territory,
including those regarding social security, sanitary conditions or environmental protection.9
Protectionism must—and there is no paradox
here—attract foreign investors.
Protectionism must be territorially defined
in such a way that it would overlap with great
regional blocks. The original Common Market
proved the viability of open trade space, relatively wide but to the minimum necessary extent
protecting companies from Western Europe.
This principle should be employed again, this
time in the extended space of today’s EU. Let
us assume that on the EU market, differences in
costs of labor may vary within in the one to three
bracket but not more.10
Protectionism must be subject to negotiations
as far as possible. Instead of reiterating to our
overseas competitors that we are taking up the
challenge of free exchange, we must announce
to them that we are always ready to start talks
on the conditions of access to markets—in the
informed interest of our societies.11 But we must
add that we reserve the right to unilateral actions.
And finally, protectionism must be based on
a catalogue of goods. This is a classic procedure.
There are thousands of products in hundreds of
sectors and subsectors. Regardless of any other
factors we must consider protecting all branches
of production in which we cope well. In my view
we should start with what is today regarded as
prospective sectors of industry: production of wind
turbines, solar panels, touch screens, led lighting.
We all understand that it is just the first stage. The
debate has to start from scratch, ignoring the savage
screams of the adherents of globalization.
JEAN-LUC GRÉAU
French economist, author
of La trahison des économistes
Betrayal of the Economists,
2008) and La Grande Récession
(The Great Recession, 2012)
Photo: Hannah Assouline
1 According to the time-honoured formula of the essayist Alain Minc.
2 France undoubtedly belongs to the small group of countries where labour is still rewarded in line with productivity but for the price of
massive unemployment, which is impossible to bring down.
3 For English workers wages started growing in 1840.
4 But sometimes the increase of wages was excessive—in the 1970s, during the period of stagflation, for the first time in history wages
were growing faster than productivity.
5 Minutes of the meetings of Fed’s monetary policy board show that since the 2008 crisis, its members have never discussed the wage
situation.
6 Keynes assumed that demand for labour is first felt on the market of goods and services.
7 Railway transport was born in the factory.
8 This is how economic theory defines protectionism—as a mixed trading policy.
9 Let us note here a huge change in the scheme of international division of labour as proposed by Ricardo, a scheme based on the
assumption of complete immobility of means of production. In Ricardo’s concept an entrepreneur sticks to his original territory.
10 Poland and the Czech Republic are within this bracket but Bulgaria or Romania are not.
11 Also of their societies, which are entitled to count on a rapid improvement of living conditions.
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“Steering Wheel
Stuck on the Left”
Mojmír Hampl
Some notes on the debate on the current economic crisis
The USA, (Central) Europe AndTheir
Intellectual Underpinning.
The liberal Slovak weekly týždeň has recently
published an interesting probe into the thinking
of a few local intellectuals. It examined the way
their views of the role of the market and the
state have shifted over the past 10 years. And
the result? Nearly all of those included in this
mini-sample felt closer to the ideological centre
today than they had a decade ago. Interestingly,
they had all converged towards the centre “from
the right.” In other words, their faith in the market
used to be greater or significantly greater than
it is now.
Should this finding surprise us? Probably
not. It’s just that in the post-communist world
the pendulum of intellectual debate continues
to swing to the centre or to the left following
the (unfortunately) unbalanced and inexorable—albeit quite logical, from a historical
­perspective—swing to the right immediately
after the end of communism.
Central Europe in particular and Europe in
general has clearly never been and probably
never will be a long-term paradise for liberal
economic policies since that does not correspond
to the long-term mentality of its population or,
indeed, its elites. In this respect, a glance at
Austria, the Czech Republic, Bavaria or Slovakia
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reveals quite a few rather similar details in support
of this argument.
This is natural, since it was precisely this
region that spawned the neo-Austrian school
of thought—the intellectually unsurpassed
shop window for the glorification of the market,
freedom and spontaneous order and for the
dismissal of the tyranny of the state and all forms
of deprivation of freedom—so these ideas ought
therefore to exert a stronger influence on practical politics in this part of the world. However,
this argument fails to pass muster. For the ideas
of such intellectual giants as Mises and Hayek
would never have emerged had it not been for the
day-to-day bureaucracy and etatism prevalent in
this part of the world at that particular time. Their
ideas were antithetical to the reality of the day,
the Realpolitik and to course of everyday events.
It is worth noting in this context that in the
United States things actually work the other way
round. Due to the often (and justly) tough reality of
spontaneous market forces—even though, admittedly, this can no longer be taken for granted in the
US either—universities, which usually generate
intellectual opposition to the established order,
tend to be strongly liberal in the American sense
of the word, i.e. left-leaning. In this kind of environment, the neo-Austrian school would have
been highly unlikely to emerge.
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1. The “Sheriff” and Economic Cycles
However, in terms of the debate as to what
constitutes a desirable intellectual, economic and
political response to the current crisis, all of the
above also means that nothing extraordinary or
exceptional is to be expected because, well, that
really does happen only in exceptional cases.
However uncomfortable a liberal may find this,
calls for state intervention and for “someone to
do something about it” tend to intensify in times
of crisis. And in public discourse “someone” often
means the government. It is, after all, a well-known
fact that wars and post-war periods also push the
majority towards more radically targeted and etatist
policies. Prolonged periods of weak economy are
only a mild variation on the same story.
So far, nobody has come up with a reliable,
convincing and definitive answer to the fundamental economic question, which is: why does
the normal market economy basically behave in
a cyclical manner? Why is it that manic periods
of shopping fever and bubbles alternate with
depressed periods of panic and hasty sell-offs?
To present the range of theories and hypo­
theses shedding a light on this question would
go beyond the scope of this piece, as would an
attempt at explaining how economic policies try
(or rather, are supposed to try) to moderate these
swings—since they are incapable of putting an
end to them. Admittedly, a liberal might object
at this point that it’s not the job of economic
policies to try anything or do anything, since the
most they can achieve is to make things worse
or, indeed, that they are in fact the very cause of
these cycles and upheavals.
Either way it holds true that in good times
people demand less from the state, require
less support and hand-holding and want more
freedom, whereas the minute crisis strikes and the
cycle changes, suddenly everyone, including some
tough market players, clamors for a “sheriff with
a gun” to bring the whole “saloon” under control
from one day to another, restoring “order” and
days of prosperity by firing his gun a few times.
Econ Journal Watch has recently conducted
an opinion poll of a sample of economics Nobel
Prize winners that was quite similar to the Slovak
poll mentioned above but with a rather different
outcome. But that does not, in fact, contradict
the argument about the intellectual underpinning
of the US and European debate. Quite the opposite. Most Nobel prize winners are US-based;
having started from markedly etatist and anti-liberal positions, in the course of their careers they
have come to champion the market, sometimes
even turning into classic liberals. This would
confirm the claim by the 1982 economics Nobel
Prize winner George Stigler, who said that studying
economics makes people naturally conservative
(as well as confirming the justified suspicion that
among social scientists economists are the most
pro-market oriented intellectuals), but it confirms
no more than this.
So far, nobody has
come up with a reliable,
convincing and
definitive answer to the
fundamental economic
question, which is: why
does the normal market
economy basically behave
in a cyclical manner?
In particular, it offers no additional arguments for the claim that it is easier for liberals
to discuss economic and political responses to
crises in some countries than in others, or that it
makes such discussion easier in general. All that
it demonstrates is that people living in different
countries might reach similar positions (a kind of
intellectual “center”) from very different starting
points and for very different reasons.
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2. The Misery of Liberal Revolutions
Given all the territorial, intellectual, historical
and cyclical limitations mentioned above, can
you really mount a reasonable defense of the
liberal, pro-market response (one that is favorably
inclined to spontaneous forces at that) to any
crisis, including the current one? Especially if you
are a central banker, i.e. a state employee? I still
believe that you can.
It is a sad and frequently overlooked fact that
the sheriffs—the governments—often behave
similarly to other players. And by taking part in
the pro-cyclical behavior, they tend to worsen
the problem. They impose additional restrictions
and regulation at the very time when that is most
harmful, thereby hampering the normal cleansing
market mechanisms or exacerbating existing and
already quite serious problems or, in the worstcase scenario, doing both. Moreover, this is often
applauded by an audience that is ultimately most
adversely affected by all this.
In the current, post-2008 crisis, central banks
appear to be an exception to this rule. As I have
often emphasized, we may have been foolish
enough to repeat the 1930s experience in many
ways (for instance, by repeating the mistake of
increasing the regulation of the financial sector
at this difficult time, we have managed not only
to weaken it but also weaken the entire real
economy) but the central banks have done a 180
degree policy turn, staying in a “permanent state
of emergency,” constantly ready to use quantitative easing to stabilize entire economies.
Is that a good thing? Let us consider a compa­
rison: the gold-standard currency policy during
the period of the so-called Great Depression
era required a radical and rapid elimination of
old debts and imbalances. As a result of this
policy banks collapsed, unemployment rose
and economic output shrank overall. Nowadays,
the impact of the crisis on the real economy has
been mitigated thanks to central banks’ interventions. However, rather than fundamentally
resolving the problem of debt burden, we have
only extended it in time and space. Nor have we
shut down failing banks either. What is better?
The choice is yours, as the history of economics
is still waiting for the definitive answer. However,
in the developed world the “sheriff” in the shape
of a central banker, unlike many others, at least
doesn’t do more harm than good, although this
claim is fiercely contested too.
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Nowadays, the
impact of the crisis
on the real economy
has been mitigated
thanks to central
banks’ interventions.
However, rather
than fundamentally
resolving the problem
of debt burden,
we have only extended
it in time and space.
First of all, it is evident that for decades the
entire developed world has been affected by
what we might call the “steering-wheel stuck
on the left” effect. So far every crisis, whether
economic or of any other kind, has resulted
in the economic and political steering wheel
being turned towards a greater state role in the
economy, towards more comprehensive regulation, the creation of new public institutions, and
frequently to higher taxation and eventually to
an increased redistribution via state budgets—
the last being the ultimate indicator of everything
listed above. However, once the crisis is over, the
steering wheel never fully returns to its original position, always remaining at least slightly
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stuck on the left. This tendency has been evident
for decades in every developed country of the
western world. For example, at the beginning
of the 20th century Belgium redistributed some
14 percent of the overall product via the public
purse, while comparable data for 2011 show
that the redistribution exceeded 54 percent. In
Great Britain, the figures are 9 percent and 47
percent respectively, in Germany 10 percent and
48 percent.
It is worth noting that no conservative
or liberal revolution has managed to make
a dent in this long-term trend. Although in
Great Britain Margaret Thatcher managed to
create a small temporary downward “ripple,”
even she wasn’t able to come anywhere near
significantly changing, let alone reversing, the
overall gradient of the curve. The pendulum
swung back again. In the US, Ronald Reagan
did not fare much better either. The only positive
exception in the developed world might be Switzerland, where redistribution has also increased
but markedly less so. However, the world is not
based on e
­ xceptions. What is evident is that
throughout the entire period the developed
world has not been gaining global significance
(except, maybe for the US for a while). Rather,
the share of its global economic product has
been slowly diminishing. We do not yet have
any reliable information that might help explain
why, after attaining a certain level of wealth,
people tend to be increasingly less concerned
about the fact that the state keeps shaving ever
larger layers off the additional wealth for its own
use. Nevertheless, this tendency does not seem
to positively affect the ability of the Western
world to generate wealth or to dominate in both
political and economic terms.
Certainly, we can say that we are sufficiently
wealthy to have to keep multiplying our wealth.
But that is quite a weak argument, one that makes
a virtue of necessity. After all, it is well known
that increased wealth generally helps to make
a country and its economic players more civilized.
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Thus what the anti-liberal trend in general
and in times of crisis in particular chiefly does
is that it destroys the very foundations that had
made the Western world an attractive, strong
and prosperous place. It destroys the motivation
to look for the best possible solution and best
possible course in spontaneous market forces.
By contrast, it encourages all the symptoms of
societies that are headed towards collapse in the
long term: excessive administration, continuously rising taxes, a growing proportion of society
dependent on others, a culture of fare-dodging or
seeking annuities instead of engaging in productive activities.
Of course, these long-term trends are not
visible in normal everyday life, hidden as they are
under the surface and working as the proverbial
subtle tightening of screws. That is what makes
them especially dangerous. In democratic and
open societies, these tendencies are to some
extent counterbalanced by normal spontaneous
market forces but they are made to carry an
ever-increasing burden and face an ever more
arduous struggle for survival. Nevertheless, it is
only their increasingly limited existence that
keeps the whole system going, even though the
etatists are successfully trying to convince all of us
(including the market forces themselves) that it is
the additional curbing of the remaining spontaneous processes that ensures the working of the
system. The car engine is treated as a necessary
evil rather than the very thing that makes the
vehicle move forward.
It is almost tempting to suggest that perhaps
one shouldn’t try to maintain the fragile balance
by fighting for liberal principles and instead let
the etatists carry their ideas to fruition as rapidly
as possible. There is a chance that hitting the
wall might facilitate a speedier change of course.
Nowadays these tendencies are most
marked in the European integration process. In
difficult times etatist and excessively regulatory
tendencies have grown quite strong in the European Union, both on the part of the European
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­ ommission, a body with a high concentration
C
of individuals who sincerely believe that the
world can be governed by decree (for example,
the Internal Market Directorate might as well be
renamed, more aptly, the Regulation Directorate),
and at the level of individual countries that are
often keener on integration the weaker they feel
in economic terms, trying to gain confidence
by “leaning on the others.” Incidentally, this is
the weakest of all arguments in favor of closer
integration, for it ultimately results in making
countries inward-looking and in cultivating
a sense of “greatness” based on membership and
population numbers rather than on the growth
of wealth based on principles that encourage
this kind of growth.
In fact, it has long been a proven fact that it
is not the largest and most populous countries
that are economically strongest in the long term
(the US may be an exception) but rather the small,
liberal, open economies that have to compete for
capital, taxpayers and investors. It is no accident
that global competitiveness and wealth rankings
tend to be dominated by the “usual suspects”:
Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Bermuda,
and so on.
If, therefore, anti-liberal intellectual tendencies
end up locking the European Union (and with it the
Czech Republic) into destructive thinking along the
lines that “what really matters is size,” never mind
gradual impoverishment, this, in addition to the
present crisis, will provide further confirmation of
the unfortunate trends outlined above. And that is
something that all, at least mildly liberal, thinking
people should be concerned about, regardless
of any mystical “naturalness” of the development
described above.
MOJMÍR HAMPL
is Vice-Governor of the Czech
National Bank
Photo: Czech National Bank
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Why Is Eastern Europe
Backward
Anna Sosnowska
The countries of Eastern Europe—except for Bohemia—
are economically weak while historically they are nonWestern and peripheral
Research by Marian Małowist (1909–1988)
and Witold Kula (1916–1988) was introduced
into the global academic circulation by a star
of economic history, the Frenchman Fernand
Braudel, and the controversial but still adored
patron of Marxist sociologists of globalization,
Immanuel Wallerstein. The picture of Eastern
Europe shaped by these researchers dominates
in the global economic history. Eastern Europe
from the 16th century to the 20th-century interwar
period is presented as one of the first peripheral
regions of the world capitalist economy with the
centre in North-Western Europe. Weak economically and oppressive politically, it unsuccessfully
attempted to pull itself out of backwardness.
Social inequalities were running deep here and
the relations between the lord and the serf were
more despotic than in Western Europe.
In Poland this picture was and is treated by
historians, such as Jerzy Topolski (1928–1998)
and Andrzej Wyczański (1924–2008), as highly
controversial. Among experts on social sciences
and the general public it is virtually unknown.
I promote Kula’s and Małowist’s studies
among researchers and commentators as useful
for understanding Polish social and economic
history, including the most recent one after 1989.
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It seems very valuable to me that they open the
history and present of Poland to comparisons with
other peripheral countries—usually non-Western
and often postcolonial ones, undermining our
attachment to our self-image as Europeans.
Latinos of the East
The ideological message of both Kula’s and
Małowist’s interpretation is clear. First, economies that come in touch with more developed
economies—through international trade—
succumb to a dependence on imports. Such
cheap products as unqualified labor, grain, coal,
cotton or tomatoes can be also delivered by
other peripheries, so countries dependent on
exports of raw materials have a limited impact
on prices and in the long term they become
subject to exploitation.
Second, since the times of the expansion of
capitalism from North-Western Europe to the
peripheries, social classes acquired an international character. The majority of global lower
classes are located on the peripheries and global
elites are concentrated in the countries and
metropolises of the capitalist centre: in
Amsterdam in the 16 th and 17 th century, in
London and Paris in the 18th century, in New
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York in the 20th century. On the peripheries, the
higher rungs of this global social structure are
virtually non-existent. International merchants,
and today managers of global corporations,
arrive only for brief stays. Upper middle class
that is the richest bourgeoisie and today’s local
managers of global companies, come from the
center or try to copy the lifestyle of their bosses
from the main headquarters.
pre-socialist Eastern Europe, for the countries
composing this region are “agricultural countries
with strong feudal relics, a strong landowning
class and great overpopulation of the countryside.” They were characterized by “insularity and
exterritoriality of means of industrial production
owned by foreign capital as well as by great social,
technological and cultural contrasts.” In the 1960s
Kula was convinced that had it not been for state
socialism, Eastern Europe would recall Southern
Europe and Latin America—poor, with authoritarian rule and social contrasts. “If you have any
doubts if such a structure would have a permanent nature, look at Portugal, Spain, Greece or
Latin American countries.”
In the 19th and
20th century, Southern
Europe and Latin
America were
supposedly similar
to pre-socialist Eastern
Europe.
The West, the East and Russia
Significant features of the geographic area of
Eastern Europe emphasized by Kula were serfdom
lasting up to the 19th century and unsuccessful
attempts at industrialization undertaken later
than in Western Europe but earlier than in other
parts of the world. Therefore Kula placed both
Poland and Russia in Eastern Europe.
This constitutes the important difference
between the concepts of Eastern European character proposed by Kula and Małowist. In the works
of the later, serfdom does not belong to the
essence of Eastern Europe, in contrast to exports
of raw materials (corn from Poland, ores from the
Balkans, stock animals from Bohemia and
Hungary), which in late Medieval period led to
an international division of labor which was unfavorable for Eastern Europe and to a dependence
on markets in developed countries. In Małowist’s
interpretation the burdens of serfdom, growing
since the 16th century, form an important factor
of the emergence of this mechanism but just one
of many possible such factors. This is why in the
East of Europe, best characterized in the book
Wschód a Zachód Europy. Konfrontacja struktur
społeczno-gospodarczych [The East and the West
of Europe. Confrontation of Social and Economic
Structures] published in 1973, Małowist includes
Witold Kula presented elaborate comparisons between Eastern Europe and the Americas in the colonial period as well as between
Eastern Europe and Latin America in the period
of “unsuccessful industrialization” in the 19 th
and 20th centuries, as he called it. Despite the
geographic liberties he took, which sometimes
irritate historians, these comparisons are interesting. Comparing the relations between Eastern
Europe and American colonies with the West,
Kula created such analogies as serf-slave, nobleman-señor, farm-plantation, grain-cotton: “If,
despite low productivity and the cost of long
sea transport, the products of these »colonies«
(Eastern Europe on the one hand and American colonies on the other) win and are sold for
good money on English and Dutch markets, it is
possible only thanks to paying less to the labor
force, which is cheap because of being not free:
in servitude in Europe, in slavery in America.”
In the 19th and 20th century, Southern Europe
and Latin America were supposedly similar to
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areas between the Baltic and southern Adriatic,
that is both north of the Danube, where serfdom
persisted until the 19 th century, and in the
Ottoman Balkans, where it had never existed. But
the servitude-based Russia did not belong to this
region, for in the 16th century its despotic state
structures banned trading contacts between
Western merchants and local gentry, with the
government controlling this trade.
16th to the 18th century, international trade had
no significant influence on the development of
any country and supra-local national economies
were only starting to appear. The growth of some
economies and failure of others depended on
internal factors, also non-economic ones, such as
population density, wars and epidemics.
In our times, a similar position is taken by
Markus Cerman, the author of the book Villagers
and Lords In Eastern Europe 1300–1800 published
in 2013. He points out that the division into the
Western European land of liberty and the Eastern
European land of subjugation and serfdom was
not so clear, for personal subjugation was less
common than the feudal duty of working for the
lord. At the same time serfdom was exchangeable
for rent, therefore, generally speaking, it was not
so different from the duties of peasants towards
their overlords in Medieval and Early Modern
Western Europe.
The countries of
Eastern Europe are
economically weak
while historically they
are non-Western and
peripheral, and in
contrast to non-Western
peripheries they lived
under the influence of
economic, ideological
and cultural contacts
with the West.
Modernisation on the Peripheries
The main participants of the Eastern European
debate have long been dead. Economic history
is asking different questions than in the 1960s
and 1970s. But the works of Kula and Małowist
and the debate on backwardness conducted
forty years ago seem still relevant and inspiring
to me, for they remind us that:
1. The countries of Eastern Europe (excluding
Bohemia, industrialized early, dominated by the
bourgeoisie and more prosperous) are economically weak while historically they are non-Western
and peripheral, and in contrast to non-Western
peripheries they lived under the influence of
economic, ideological and cultural contacts with
the West;
2. The post-1989 transition was another
attempt at a peripheral modernization imposed
from above, similar to other peripheral roads to
Modernity;
3. Like in the case of previous attempts at
modernization in Central and Eastern Europe, it is
imposed from above and motivated by the desire
In a slightly similar vein as Małowist, Kula
explains Eastern European backwardness not only
through domestic socioeconomic structures but
also through “external influences,” for the course
of development in a backward country cannot
be explicated without a reference to international trade relations. Both scholars assumed
that a strong influence of this kind was present
in Poland as early as in the 16th century, when
grain trade with the West started flourishing.
They were criticized for that by Andrzej Wyczański
and Jerzy Topolski: their detailed calculations
showed that only a small part of farms and grain
production was exports-oriented. They argued
that in the early modern period, that is from the
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of local elites to achieve the lifestyle of Western
elites and be culturally recognized as Europeans;
4. As usual, attempts at modernization on
the peripheries are accompanied by a fervent
ideology. Kula’s argument that ideological
­intensity is proportional to the lateness of
modernization is convincing. While the pioneers
of industrialization espoused a liberal ideology,
in Prussia and Germany it was nationalism and in
Russia—communism. Europeanization—accompanied by the “return to Europe” slogan in the
1990s and “being European” after the 2004 accession—is another modernization ideology, that
is, as Karl Mannheim defines it, a justification for
the political and social order being what it is;
5. Wage migrations, typically taking place
from Eastern European villages to Western
industrial centers and big cities, form an under­
estimated element of our social history as well as
our regional and national identity. Migrants from
our region, together with the Irish and emigrants
from Southern Europe, at the turn of the 20th
century were pioneers of wage migrations. In the
20th century, this response to backwardness
became common on the remaining peripheries.
In the memory of the most industrialized nations
of the West we are like Sicilians or Greeks, remembered as cheap laborers (we repress this element
of our identity and are ashamed of it);
6. Arguments, political and even partisan
divisions in Central and Eastern Europe can be
interpreted as arguments about how to treat
our peripheral status. The main line of division
runs between those accepting this status and
those who feel humiliated by it. The former see
opportunities for development within the existing
international order, while the latter rebel against
it from nationalist or anti-capitalist positions;
7. Condemnation for the supposedly lazy,
frivolous and financially dissolute Greeks,
­Spaniards and Italians, common in the Polish
public discourse, means assuming the German
perspective in looking at the crisis and at the division of “old Europe” into the German centre and
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Mediterranean peripheries. Geographic analogies
proposed by Kula remind us about the similarities
in the economic situation of Eastern and Southern
Europe on the eve of Modernity. Understanding
these peripheral European identities may be
cognitively and politically more p
­ rofitable than
focusing on the studies of Germany, France and
England.
So what are the ideological options for us,
representatives of Eastern European middle class,
who work with words and ideas, also in the West?
The attitude which I regard as beneficial for the
region, cognitively honest and psychologically
bearable is as follows: let us recognize (following
Kula) backwardness as a permanent feature of
regional economies and confront it—intellectually and in terms of identity—recognizing what is
Central European in us but also cultivating what
we share with other European and non-European
peripheries. ANNA SOSNOWSKA
scholar, University of Warsaw,
author of Zrozumieć zacofanie.
Spory historyków o Europę
Wschodnią (1947–1994)
Photo: Nikola Jordanovski
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How to Trade Economic
Independence for Political
Sovereignty
Eva Maurina
Example of the former Soviet Union country Latvia
The Republic of Latvia is a small country situated on the Baltic coast, in Eastern Europe. The
estimated population of 2012 slightly exceeds
2 million. 60% of the population is ethnic
Latvians, while a significant part, i.e. 27.3%, is
Russian, demonstrating the legacy of the past
(Eurostat, 2012).
Just slightly over 20 years ago, Latvia was
under the Soviet rule and Communists were the
ones who had the power to make decisions. The
nation itself experienced the Soviet economic and
political system. Even though the productivity of
the agricultural sector was high, all harvest was
transported to other Soviet territories. Nevertheless, industrial capacity was significantly
improved, employment was high, education
was for free, and most of the basic needs of the
nation, such as housing, were satisfied.
Latvia’s de facto sovereignty was recognized
in 1991, and the first years of independence were
spent developing a functioning state. When
a political stability was reached and reforms
initiated, the nation became increasingly
concerned about the preservation of its statehood, so in 1995 the Latvian authorities adopted
a statement defining foreign policy goals. They
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argued that the sovereignty can be strengthened
through early integration into the European and
world-wide security and political and economic
structures. Latvia became a member state of
the UNO in 1991, and joined the EU and NATO
in 2004.
However, clear existence goals for the country
were absent for the first decade of independence.
While political sovereignty was at the top of the
agenda, the majority of the society believed that
the continuous increase of average human wellbeing and a long-term conservation of cultural
heritage and Latvian language should be the
goals. Even though the initiated reforms increased
individual freedom and protected rights, many
question whether these reforms improved human
well-being only.
The Human Development Index, published by
UNDP, assesses the long-term progress of human
development regarding a long and healthy life,
access to knowledge and a decent standard of
living. The overall human development value
in Latvia has been positive as the HDI value has
risen from 0.693 (1990) to 0.805 (2011). Hence, the
statistics rank Latvia among other high human
development countries.
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The majority of indicators, compared from
1990 through 2010, have followed a positive
trend. Very often, the development was slow
during the first years of independence when
the reforms were launched. Years later, in the
21st century, especially after Latvia’s accession
to the EU, human well-being improved more
rapidly until the crisis in 2008, which resulted in
its decrease. Nevertheless, improved absolute
numbers should not be overestimated.
The previously centralized health sector has
experienced notable reforms in the last 20 years;
thus, the health condition of the inhabitants of
Latvia has improved. At the same time, more and
more people are unable to afford the health care
services due to the growing prices.
Despite advancements and reforms in the
health care system, demographics are in recession, which is a serious threat to the country’s
succession. A natural decrease of population due
to lower fertility rates and a considerable migration outflow (especially within the first years of
the collapse of USSR and after Latvia’s accession
to the EU) has contributed to the fact that the
population has decreased from 2.67 million in
1990 to 2.24 million in 2010. As a consequence
of a smaller number of new-borns and rising
life expectancy, the population is aging, which
imposes an increasing burden to the economically active part of the population to finance the
retired people.
Unfortunately, not only is financing the
retired people a serious issue, but also a complete
burden to costs of primary goods, which have
increased. Even though the absolute income has
increased, the amount of people earning less than
the subsistence minimum is rising, especially
in the rural areas. It has to be mentioned that
the content of Latvia’s subsistence basket has
not been revised since the first year of renewed
statehood; thus, in reality, it does not contain all
goods and services required for living decently.
Furthermore, since the accession to the
EU, prices have risen rapidly. For instance, total
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housing costs have increased significantly—
in the USSR the rent and public utilities were
highly subsidized by the government, whereas
in 2005 the average housing costs amounted to
80 US dollars and 170 dollars in 2009. The situation is even worse, considering the fact that the
proportion of overcrowded households is one
of the highest within the EU.
The EU has provided significant advantages
to the Latvian population, especially the youth,
which is now eligible to study permanently or
temporarily at foreign universities, enjoying the
same terms and conditions. Also, to the people
who are entrepreneurial, open-minded and have
a certain understanding of how to take an advantage of new business opportunities. The EU has
also contributed to the modernization of hospitals, schools and the infrastructure. On the other
hand, the Soviet government paid for housing,
education and health care thus more resources
were available for food items, leisure time,
clothing, and also the employment ratio in the
Latvian SSR was close to 100 percent- compared
to the 16 percent unemployment level in 2009
Therefore, there are people who believe that the
communism times ensured better well-being.
Lessons from the past should be learned.
One of the main arguments for Latvia entering the
EU was the economic advancement. Nonetheless,
skeptics argued that not every person residing
in Latvia would benefit. Citizens who benefited
the most would be young people, as they would
enter better-paid jobs, whereas the pensions of
retired people would not increase as rapidly as
the prices of goods and services. Latvian farms
would face serious hardship due to a surplus in
the market resulting from foreign competitors
that are subsidized by their own governments.
They were right. The EU has suppressed the
Latvian economy as a result of shutting down
industrial plants, uncontrolled FDI inflows,
enabling cheap credits, a significant inflation and
price increase, and foreign companies creating
a competition which small Latvian companies
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and farmers cannot defeat. The smaller economy
led to an increasing budget deficit, external
borrowing and, finally, budget cuts demanded
by the IMF and the EU, which have harmed the
population as their adjusted income is not as high
as living costs. One can say that Latvia traded
a part of its economic sovereignty in order to
ensure its political independence and the population is paying the price.
However, the people living in Latvia have
been willing to pay this price for the sake of
Latvia’s sovereignty. In a survey, carried out by
the national news portal TVNET in 2004 it was
asked what the biggest threat to Latvia’s sovereignty is. 53 percent of the 5311 respondents
indicated Russia and unknown money influx as
the biggest danger. On the contrary, just seven
percent perceive integration into the EU and
NATO as imminent danger to Latvia’s independence. On one hand, if Latvia had not joined the
EU, the threat imposed by a money influx would
have been limited, but political independence
would have been significantly less insured.
If Latvia had not joined the EU in 2004, it could
have taken its time to develop the industries,
which correspond to the society’s interests, not
to the EU regulations. In addition, the migration outflow would have been smaller; therefore,
people who are desperately needed in Latvia to
cultivate the economy would have been available.
In this case, Latvia would have experienced a slow
and stable economic and social welfare growth.
However, at some point in time, say 10 years later
than the original accession date, Latvia should
have joined the EU, as it is too small to be acting
alone on the global stage. Latvia does not have
significant raw materials or highly developed
industries; thus, it lacks international power.
Its needs and ideas are heard and pushed forward
only in cases when stronger partners share the
same interests. The EU is a platform where Latvia
can find like-minded countries; therefore, it can
find “allies” and together strive for developments
and economic and political stability.
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As for the Latvia’s situation in the EU, in 2014,
opinions whether the country really needs to
adapt the euro vary. In September 2012, the
public opinion on the euro adoption was all-time
low, as only 13% of Latvians support the idea.
Being a member of eurozone would further
disable Latvia to control its monetary policy and
raise the prices, which would not correspond to
the income earned by a less productive workforce
and industries compared to the ones in other EU
states. Therefore, many experts believed that
Latvia should postpone its adoption of the euro
until the future of the eurozone is clearer and
Latvia recovers from the economic recession and
advances its production regarding productivity
and value added. E VA M AU R I N A
is a CFO in an Austrian smarthome company and a Master
student of the Vienna University
of Economics and Business.
Photo: Farah Tashin Alam
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ANIS H. BA JREK TARE VIC
From EURO Back to Europe
E
urope’s redemption lies in the re-affirmation of the Lisbon Strategy of 2000 (and of
Göteborg 2001), a ten-year development
plan that focused on innovation, mobility and
education, social, economic and environmental
renewal. Otherwise a generational warfare will
join class and ethnic conflicts as a major dividing
line of the EU society in decline.
Back in the good old days of the Lisbon
Strategy (when the Union was proclaimed to
be the most competitive, knowledge-based
economy of the world), the Prodi and Barroso
Commissions have been both repeatedly stressing
that: “at present, some of our world trading partners compete with primary resources, which we
in the EU/Europe do not have. Some compete
with cheap labor, which we do not want. Some
compete on the back of their environment, which
we cannot accept…”
What has happened in the meantime?
The over-financialization and hyper-deregulations of the global(-ized) markets has brought
the low-waged Chinese (peasant converted
into a) worker into the spotlight of European
considerations. Thus, in the last two decades, the
EU economic edifice has gradually but steadily
departed from its traditional labor-centered
base, to the overseas investment-centered
construct. This mega event, as we see now with
the eurozone dithyramb, has multiple consequences on both the inner-European cultural,
socio-economic and political balance as well
as on China’s (overheated) growth. That sparse,
rarefied and compressed labor, which still resides
in the aging Union is either bitterly competing
with or is heavily leaning on the guest workers
who are by definition under­represented or
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A N I S H . B A J R E K TA R E V I C
Professor and Chairperson Intl. Law & Global Political
Studies, Vienna. Author of the book Is There Life After
Facebook?—Geopolitics of Energy and other Foreign
Policy Essays (Addleton Academic Publishers, New York,
2013), and the forthcoming book No Asian Century.
Photo: Crans Montana Forum
silenced by the “rightist” movements and
otherwise disadvantaged and hindered in their
elementary socio-political rights. That is how the
world’s last cosmopolitan—Europe departed from
the world of work, and that’s why the Continent
today cannot orient itself (both critically needed
to identify a challenge, as well as to calibrate
and jointly redefine the EU path). To orient, one
needs to center itself: Without left and right,
there is no center, right?!
Contemporary Union has helplessly lost its
political “left.” The grand historical achievement
of Europe—after the centuries–long and bloody
class struggle—was the final, lasting reconciliatory compromise between capital and labor (e.g.
tightening the “financial screws” while unemployment kept its sharp rise, was a big mantra
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85
of the French, British, German and Italian political center-right in late 1920s and early 1930s).
It resulted in a consolidation of economically
entrepreneurial and vibrant but at the same time
socially just and beneficial state. This colossal
civilizational accomplishment is what brought
about the international recognition, admiration,
model attraction and its competitiveness as well
as inner continuity, prosperity and stability to the
post WWII Europe.
In the country of origin of the very word
dēmokratía, the President of the Socialist
­International (and the Nation‘s PM) has recently
introduced to his own citizenry the most drastic
cuts that any European social welfare system
had experienced in the last 80 years. The rest
of official Europe (and the rest of “unofficial us”)
still chews the so-called Greek debt tirade as if
it is not about the very life of 12 million souls,
but a mare technical item studied at secondary
schools’ crash-course on macro economy.
The present-day Union, aged but not
restaged, is (in) a shadow of the grand taboo
that the EU can produce everything but its own
life. The Old Continent is demographically sinking,
while economically contracting, yet only keeps
afloat. Even the EU Commission, back in 2005,
fairly diagnosed in its Green Paper Confronting
Demographic Change—a New Solidarity between
Generations that: “...Never in history has there
been economic growth without population
growth.”
The numbers of unemployed, underemployed
or underpaid/working–poor are constantly
growing. The average age of the first labor market
entry is already over 30 in many MS—not only
of Europe’s south. The middle-class is pauperized and a cross-generational social contract is
silently abandoned, as one of its main operative
­instruments—the Lisbon strategy—has been
eroded, and finally lost its coherence.
To worsen the hardship, nearly all European
states have responded wrongly to the crisis by
hammering down their respective education and
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science/R&D budgets. It is not a policy move, but
an anti-visionary panicking that delivers only
cuts on the future (generations). No wonder that
our cities at present—instead of blossoming with
the new technologies—are full of pauperized
urban farmers: a middle class citizenry, which
desperately turns to mini agriculture as the only
way to meet their nutritional needs.
The numbers
of unemployed,
underemployed or
underpaid/working–
poor are constantly
growing. The middle­
‑class is pauperized and
a cross-generational
social contract is silently
abandoned, as one
of its main operative
­instruments—the Lisbon
strategy—has been
eroded, and finally lost its
coherence.
Currently, the end game of the so-called
euro-crises seems to reveal that the financial
institutions are neither under democratic control
nor within the national sovereignty domain
(e.g. 20 years ago, the value of overall global
financial transactions was 12 times the entire
world’s gross annual product. By the end of
2012, it was nearly 70 times the size). How else
to explain that the EU—so far—prefers the unselective punitive action of collective punishment
on the entire population’s (e.g. of Greece, Italy,
Portugal, Spain, Ireland, etc.). So far, Iceland
remains the only country that indicted and
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sentenced its Prime Minister in relation to the
financial crisis.
From the democratic, transparent, just,
visionary and all-participatory, a holiday from
history—model of the European Community,
the EU should not downgrade itself to a lame
copy of the Federation of Theocracies—the late
Ottoman Empire.
This authoritarian monarchy is remembered as a highly oppressive and undemocratic
although to a degree liberal and minority-right
tolerant feudal state. The Ottoman Federation
of Theocracies was a simple functioning system:
with the Sultan’s handpicked Grand Porta (verticalized/homogeneous monetary space of the
EMU and ECB, moderately restrained by the
Council of the EU) that was unquestionably
serviced by the religious communities from all
over the vast Oriental Empire (horizontalized/
heterogeneous fiscal space of the EMU, in which
every state freely exercises its sovereignty in
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collecting taxes and spending), unless otherwise
prescribed off-hand by the Sultan and his Porta
(ECB and IMF).
Ergo, negotiating on the coined “eurozone
debt crisis” (debt bound economies) without
restaging the forgotten Lisbon strategy
(knowledge­‑based Community), while keeping
a heavy tax on labor but constantly pardoning
financial capital, is simply a lame talk about form
without any substance. Clearly, it is a grand
bargain of a tight circle behind the closed
doors about control via austerity, not a cross­
‑generationally wide-open debate about vision
of prosperity.
Despite a constant media bombardment with
cataclysmic headlines, the issue is not what will
happen with the EURO or any other socio­‑economic
and political instrument. The right question is what
will happen with us—as means are always changeable and many, but the aim remains only one: the
self-realization of society at large. O
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87
The Mysterious Death
of Bohumil Hrabal
(1914–1997)
Aleksander Kaczorowski
“So what actually happened to Hrabal? Did
he fall out of the window, or did he jump?”
Many people have asked me that question,
and when they see the dismayed look on my face,
they answer it themselves with great confidence.
I wish I could do that too, but I can’t. After all,
I wasn’t there with him, when at a few minutes
after two pm on 3 February 1997 he leaned out
of the window of his room on the fifth floor of
Prague’s Bulovka hospital. There was no one there
with him whose warnings to be careful not to
lean out too far (and ultimately to get the idea of
suicide out of his head) he might have heeded.
It was already eight years since the death of
Karel Marysko, his dear friend and the first reader
of his youthful poems, jotted down in green ink on
sheets of company headed paper in the deserted
office of the brewery at Nymburk whose manager
was František Hrabal, the future writer’s father.
Not long before Marysko, Hrabal’s wife Eliška had
died, his beloved Pipsi (Marysko was the speaker
whose tears of emotion prevented him from
uttering the final words over her coffin). A few
months earlier Hrabal’s brother, Břetislav (known
to his family as Slávek) had passed on to the other
world. The writer’s parents and his beloved Uncle
Pepin had long since led a posthumous existence
on the pages of his books, just like the waste
paper packer Jindřich Peukert (the prototype
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for Hanta, the hero of Too Loud a ­Solitude) and
the painter and graphic artist Vladimír Boudník,
who took his own life (though once again one
could argue that it was an accident).
On 3 February 1997 there was no longer
anyone left in this world whom Hrabal would
have care about enough to want to live for them.
Apart perhaps from his cats. But what do they
matter, when never before had there been so
many people who thought of Hrabal as a teacher
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of life? Could a man like that take his own life?
The doctors and the police ruled out the idea of
Hrabal’s suicide. Jiří Kolář, his contemporary and
mentor from the start of his creative work, also
thought it unlikely. But Susanne Roth, Hrabal’s
translator into German (to whom he left the
rights to foreign-language editions of his books)
published a violent protest in the Czech press
against the media’s version of the writer’s death
as an accident suffered by a decrepit old man.
A few months after Hrabal’s death Susanne
Roth died of cancer. Perhaps her awareness of her
own inevitable death was what made her express
such a categorical opinion? But other translators
and experts on Hrabal’s work are convinced he
committed suicide too.
From his books, one can source arguments in
support of this theory by the handful, including
those written in his declining years as well as his
earliest works. The heroes of Hrabal’s books make
up a veritable suicide club: old Hanta doesn’t want
to live in the new times; perhaps it is purely by
accident that the hot-headed Vladimírek strangles
himself; and the trainee Pipka punishes himself
for losing in love. But at the very beginning there’s
Cain, the title hero of an early story by Hrabal
(written in 1949), who tries to kill himself, as
a substitute for the author himself.
But does this mean that half a century later
the writer completed the task bungled by his alter
ego? Being well versed in modern French literature since before the war, he became engrossed in
the existentialists just after it. His Cain is a literary
exercise on a theme put forward by Camus: after
the war I couldn’t get enough of Camus’ “The
Stranger,” which affected me so much that under
its patronage and inspiration I wrote “Cain,” he
recalled years later. For his hero “the stranger” is
himself; he turns the blade of his cold passion on
himself. Once rescued, he comes to terms with
life—only to be killed after the war by a stray
bullet.
This theme reappears fifteen years later in
Closely Observed Trains: After the failed suicide,
Pipka is killed just at the moment when he wants
to live the most. Maybe it is this sequence of
events, the way Pipka’s desires fail to be realized
(how true to life!), that causes the naive hero to
sink so deep into the readers’ memory.
Suicide attempts by the main characters are
a powerful theme in the dramatic development of
many of Hrabal’s works. This is the case in Closely
Observed Trains, Too Loud a Solitude and Tender
Barbarian. But does this mean he himself had
suicidal tendencies?
Have you ever thought of suicide?
As a writer? I’m always thinking about it.
As a writer, I’ve been right on the edge of it. But
to make up my mind to do it myself and go off
to a riverbank somewhere—what an idea, no.
Never, he told the Hungarian journalist László
Szigeti in the mid 1980s.
So what did happen to him?
My life has reached its culminating point, he
said in an interview a few years before his death.
I must surely have lived and written purely in
order to write “Loud Solitude,” he said as early
as 1989. Hrabal had a long wait for his readers.
Time and again the printed stock of his earliest
volumes of poetry and collections of short stories
got lost in the twists and turns of his country’s
history; he did come to land, but only at a minor
railway halt, or at the waste-paper depot. But such
was the history of his country—it had indeed
gone off the rails, such was the fate of everything
he loved—sentenced to be put through the mill.
On this rubbish heap he discovered a wonderful
antidote to history; in ordinary, everyday life he
found a remedy against getting stuck in a rut
and growing apathetic. Not immediately, and
maybe without even meaning to, because he did
not spend his life at odds with his era, or even
anywhere close to it; his time ran in the opposite
direction. In the 1950s when his country was
hurrying towards the bright future, he found his
world in a suburban bar; in the 1960s when it was
busy building socialism with a human face, he was
writing about closely observed trains; and after
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the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 when
Czechoslovakia became one great “suburban
hospital,” in spirit he was living at the brewery—
the same one where he spent his childhood and
youth. Later on, in the autobiographical trilogy
he wrote in the mid-1980s, The Weddings in the
House, he trod the same path once again, but in
the opposite direction, going backwards. Just in
time to catch up with history in 1989—and this
time with the entire country too.
Only then, in his declining years, did he try to
keep pace with it, to be a chronicler of modern
times. He sent letter after letter, first to the
Ame­rican specialist on Czech studies April Gifford
(Dubenka), whom he had met at the Golden Tiger
inn, then to his beloved cat Cassius (named after
the famous boxer Cassius Clay—alias Muhammad
Ali), and finally to himself. But how long can you
go on writing to yourself?
His readers adored him, but rather in the way
we adore an ancient grandfather who cheers
us up with anecdotes about the good old days.
But he wasn’t at all in the mood for laughing.
At that time he wrote: One day the regulars will
finally throw me out of the Golden Tiger, because
I’m always telling them to go to hell, I’m always
calling them cretins, and talking about them and
about humanity in general as an evil, stupid and
criminal brood. Though people are also soberminded and ingenious (.) Because I myself am
a cretin, I’m evil, stupid and criminal. I’m also
a Czech writer, the heir to Jaroslav Hašek, and I’m
simply not able to behave myself, I behave just like
that hysterical McEnroe, when he gets furious on
the tennis court, because he thinks the linesmen
and the referees are picking on him, even the
audience, especially when he’s not winning. But
in Andy Warhol’s photograph, McEnroe is a sensitive, likeable young man, just like I was before
I began to surround myself, before I began to be
surrounded by a personality cult. And thus I was
left like the Aurora. High and dry. I’m fine like that!
His readers believed he was the person he
invented—Bohumil Hrabal, the hero of the books
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he wrote. Maybe that was the only sort of existence he wanted for himself now, and like a child
who lets his body drop without fear, because
he knows the swing will send it flying up again
a moment later, he joined company with Hanta
and Vladimírek?
It came suddenly, almost overnight: I couldn’t
drink. Just as if my body and soul were rebelling,
agreeing that from now on they would refuse
their daily bath (.) One way or another, I discovered that even the tiniest drop of alcohol, just
one little sip of wine, caused my liver to rebel and
shout out “Stop, stop!” (...) Suddenly vanished, the
great ally which for so long had kept my demons
at bay was no longer there to prevent those
demons from swarming through the subconscious, and I was emotionally naked, vulnerable
as I had been before (.) Depression caused by
sudden abstinence.
No, that is not from an essay by Hrabal. He
noted down this quote from William Styron’s Darkness Visible in the summer of 1993, and added
a comment of his own: Every day I think about
suicide (.) It’s Saturday, I’ve postponed suicide
until tomorrow.
Hrabal’s final writings bear witness to everdeeper depression. His spiritual suffering came
along with the pains he felt in his entire body,
and his legs refused to obey him (they seem
a bit far away from me, like the wooden legs of
a puppet. He could only move about with a stick.
This morning, as always after a delirious night,
I shaved (sitting down, because I have trouble
standing), and thought Dr Rypka may be right—
after all, he did discover it from an X-ray—I’ve
got degeneracy of the inter-vertebral cartilage,
so sooner or later I’ll be in a wheelchair.
In December 1996, he fell over outside his
summer home in Kersko. Partially paralyzed,
he ended up in Bulovka hospital, where he had
already spent the previous winter. Week after
week went by, the Christmas holidays and then
the New Year. January went by. His friends came
to visit him, including Tomáš Mazal, translator
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Monika Zgustová and others; several of them
got the impression that he was saying goodbye
to them forever. They tried to keep up his spirits
and talk about plans for the future, but Hrabal
just waved them aside.
But several years earlier he wrote the
following words about his friend, Professor Jaroslav Kladiva: To my friend Jarulínek, the man who
led the funeral procession and spoke over the
coffin of Jan Palach, to Jarulinek for making the
funerary oration over Palach’s coffin, the heavens
repaid him by letting him die of cancer, but all
the same, in defiance of the heavens he renewed
his fishing license, although he was already lying
in the hospital on Charles Square, chained to the
bedpost by death.
In January 1969 philosophy student Jan Palach
set fire to himself in Prague’s Wencelas Square.
He sacrificed his life to shake the consciences
of his compatriots. Instead he shocked them so
much that they ended up resigning themselves
to the Soviet occupation. On the twentieth anniversary of his death Hrabal wrote: I’ve thought
about jumping from the fifth floor so many times,
because I’ve seen my wife (.) but I’ve postponed
the jump; if I had the strength I’d buy a can of
petrol too and set myself alight, but I’m afraid,
I’m not brave. To him, the true champions were
people like Mr Ruziczka, who after an acrobatic
display jumped into an empty swimming pool in
Moscow, broke his spine and cannot walk; he uses
his arms like fins, but he has a beautiful wife, and
above all, Mr Hrabal, he has the courage to live,
a zest for life! But damn and blast, to hell and
damnation, go and get stuffed, Mr Hrabal, with
all your oy-oy-oying and searching for a reason
not to live. You’re a walking reproach, Mr Hrabal!
He wrote that almost six years before his
death, on 3 March 1991.
So where are we to find the key to the riddle
of his death? In his books or in his biography?
He mystified his own life story so much that there
is no way to tell truth from fiction. Did he, in
a moment of weakness, go against the grain of
his own work, which was a non-stop apology for
life, a testimony to the will to live at any price?
After all, in his most famous works the theme of
suicide acts as a counterpoint to a eulogy of life;
throughout his time as a writer, he was only ever
playing with the idea of suicide, first that of his
heroes and later his own. That is a cruel game,
but so is life itself. For as long as he was playing
this game, Hrabal was always a writer. But once
his eighty-three-year-old body refused to obey
him, once his own organism had betrayed him
and made it impossible to perform his daily ritual
of casting a spell on death, once he could no
longer write, the literature was at an end. Now
he was nothing but a lonely old man, who could
only expect one more thing from life—a slow
and gradual death.
As Uncle Pepin used to say: This world is
madly beautiful. Not that it really is, but that’s
how I see it. If Hrabal did commit suicide, it was
for one reason only: to spare himself the fate of
Uncle Pepin, his “Muse in maltster’s clothing,” who
ended his life in an old people’s home, wetting
himself and recognizing no one, not even his
beloved nephew. To spare himself the fate of his
wife Pipsi, who spent months and months dying
of cancer before his very eyes. To spare himself
the fate of Karel Marysko, his brother Slávek,
Professor Kladiva and many others.
Was that really what happened? Every time
I reach for his books, Vladimírek will hang himself
on the door handle, Bondy the poet will stamp his
feet in rage in his tiny shoes, Uncle Pepin will let
us in on another secret of Mr Batista’s sex manual.
But Hrabal will never let us in on the secret of his
death.
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Robert Schuster
Oscar Bronner:
A life in Defiance of Austria
and Its Situation
JM Stim, Eva Weissenberger:
Trotzdem. Oscar Bronner. Eine
Biografie, [In spite of. Oscar
Bronner. A Biography] rde—
redelsteiner dahimène edition,
Wien, 2013, 326 pages
In October 2013 the Austrian daily Der Standard marked a quarter of a century of its existence
in grand style. These days the newspaper, printed
on distinctive pink paper, is taken for granted as
an integral part of the Austrian media world. So
much so that it is hard to believe how difficult
the process of its establishment in 1988 had been
and, in particular, how hard it was for it to maintain its position on the market. This is just one
of the stories covered by the biography of Oscar
Bronner, the paper’s founder and its publisher
to this day. However, Bronner has left a much
deeper mark on Austria’s media space/world, as
the driving force behind two other media titles
that had significantly affected the media scene
in Austria—the economic monthly Trend and the
political weekly Profil.
The title of Bronner’s biography, co-authored
by Austrian journalists Eva Weissenberger a JM Stim
(aka Klaus Stimeder) is “Trotzdem“ which translates as “In spite of.“ In fact, much of what Bronner
has achieved over the past forty years came about
in spite of the existing, mostly unwritten, rules;
in spite of the advice of his close friends or busi-
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ness partners. For he aspired for nothing less
than to make at least a small contribution to
overcoming the parochialism that allowed Austria
and its inhabitants following 1945 to enjoy quite
a good—and especially comfortable—lifestyle.
This was because after the war, unlike Poland
or Czechoslovakia, Austria had found itself on
the “right side” of the Iron Curtain. From the mid
fifties Austria slowly ceased to be the West’s poor
relative, joining countries which the so-called
economic miracle put on the path to prosperity.
However, the gradual material rise of broad
swaths of society and their growing confidence
went hand in hand with silence regarding the role
Austria played from 1938 to 1945. The country
had been declared “the first victim” of Hitler’s
politics by World War II victorious powers as early
as 1943. This premise served not only to underpin
the argument for the country’s restoration in
1945 but also helped to pass the buck of the
emerging Austrian identity. Asking your parents
and closest people about their past was not the
“done thing,” that was the general consensus.
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Those who offended against it had to expect
being pushed to the margins of society or, to be
on the safe side, chose to leave Austria of their
own accord.
That is why many Jews who had managed
to flee Austria after the 1938 Anschluss or who
had survived the Holocaust, did not come back.
They realized that not only was anyone likely to
welcome them with open arms but they might
face fresh affronts and bullying as those “responsible for starting the war.”
In this respect, Oscar Bronner’s Jewish family
was an exception. Although quite a few of their
number fell victim to the Nazi rampage, after
1948 they returned to Vienna, the hometown of
Bronner’s father Gerhard. As a fifteen-year old he
fled to Palestine and made a living as a cabaret
actor an pianist with the local British military
band. Eventually he made it to the head of music
programming of the BBC Palestinian studio and
after the war was offered a job at the London
head office.
Growing up between Germany and Austria
Oscar Bronner soon became aware of the differences between the two countries in terms of the
relations between politics and the media. What
struck him in particular was the fact that the
Austrian public often treated politicians as demigods, of whom no critical questions may be asked.
Instead of presenting a critical point of view,
mass media limited themselves to polite court
reporting. It was the Bronner father and son who
helped to launch the first great postwar scandal in
Austria. It involved personal continuity between
the reconstituted democratic republic and the
Nazi regime, whereby there were quite a few individuals in key positions who had not only been
committed and active Nazis before the war but
often continued to espouse the same views. This
particular case concerned Taras Borodajkewycz,
professor at the Economics University in Vienna,
whose lectures abounded in anti-semitic statements and who was well connected with top
ranking Austrian politicians. A student of his, the
future finance minister Ferdinand Lacina, had
secretly recorded his lectures and the recordings
reached the Bronners. Gerhard Bronner used
the recording on his satirical show on Austrian
TV, adapted into a fictitious interview. A huge
scandal erupted, leading to violent clashes in
Vienna between Borodajkewycz’s supporters
and sympathizers and eventually, nevertheless,
forcing the anti-Semitic professor into early
retirement.
In his journalistic career, Oscar Bronner
covered similar issues for several Austrian dailies.
His texts and reports frequently provoked heated
debates and the targets of his criticism often
went to courts demanding the entire printrun be
seized. That was when Bronner came to realize
that Austria sorely lacked a critical media outlet,
similar to the German weekly Der Spiegel, willing
to publish similar texts on a regular basis, advocating for a change of the situation in the country.
He was convinced that Austrian readers were
ready for a publication of this kind. As a first step
towards an investigative magazine he envisaged
an economic journal that would attract potential
advertisers.
However, the question of funding was
of key importance. Asking Austrian banks for
credit would have amounted to becoming part
of their economic empire and it would result in
a complete loss of independence. That is why
Bronner approached his good friend, the Czech
aristocrat Karl Schwarzenberg, at the time living in
Austrian exile. Schwarzenberg had made available
half of the start-up capital for the publication of
an economic monthly, even though his advisers
insisted that he withdrew support for the project
later, at the last minute, although this was not
made public.
Bronner‘s economic monthly, Trend, was
a breath of fresh air not only in terms of substance
but also in terms of form. It was in full color, individual texts were illustrated with graphics and
cartoons and the ads were also in full color. Full­
‑color ads were very expensive at the time and
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Bronner assumed that potential advertisers would
welcome the possibility of having the same ad
appear in two media outlets at the same time.
That is why the first issue of Trend, published in
January 1970, was followed by the first issue of
the political weekly Der Profil in September of
the same year.
Although Schwarzenberg withdrew from the
role of active co-publisher before the first issue
had come out, he promised his help, should Der
Profil find itself under political pressure. That is
why for the next few years the aristocrat would
start every telephone conversation with Bronner
by asking: “Do you need any help?” A situation
like this arrived quite soon, in 1971. The weekly
Der Profil published a series of articles exposing
the abuse of office on the part of Vienna’s then
mayor, the socialist Felix Slavik. Slavik succeeded
in the court issuing an injunction and having
the entire printrun of the journal impounded
twice. In spite of that, Bronner had the relevant
issue published for the third time, in its original
form. While the issue sold really well, the ancillary
expenses required to print it three times were
reflected in the publisher’s financial situation.
He was short of money to pay staff writers‘ salaries
and Schwarzenberg had to step in. Not by intervening with those who held power in Austria or by
a financial injection but by giving an impassioned
speech to the incensed staff who were owed their
salaries. Although the financial situation of the
publishing house later stabilized, Oscar Bronner
had to sell his shares in both magazines in late
1973 and early 1974.
Bronner subsequently used the money from
the sale to finance several years in New York,
having originally decamped there for six months.
While in New York, he socialized with the local
intellectual elite and took to painting, even
organizing several exhibitions of his paintings.
It was here that Bronner became aware of his
Jewish roots, and realized how much richer his
native Vienna would have been if it had not lost
its Jewish population during the war.
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Oscar Bronner only followed the events at
home from the distance. On his return 13 years
later, he found Austria hotly discussing the controversial election of former UN Secretary General
Kurt Waldheim the country’s president. The presidential campaign, which had aroused a great
amount of attention abroad, at times included
openly anti-Semitic rhetoric since Waldheim’s
supporters believed the resistance to his candidature was directed by the “US East Coast and
the World Jewish Congress.”
The situation in Austria at the time seemed
conducive to the founding of a liberal daily along
the lines of the New York Times. The original
concept of the paper was to be similar to that
used with the monthly Trend: it was meant to be
a daily for CEOs offering exclusive economic information and strictly distinguishing between news,
analysis and commentary. It was supposed to be
a genuinely new kind of newspaper, at the same
time making the readers feel they are holding
something that has always been around since,
to quote Bronner, a newspaper is “an intimate
affair, almost a family member.”
Just like in 1969, the main issue was getting
started and raising the funds for the project.
Again, the publisher’s first point of call was Prince
Schwarzenberg. However, unlike on the previous
occasion he turned Bronner down claiming there
was no room in Austria for a daily of this kind.
Since by then Bronner had the reputation of
a successful founder of two magazines, very soon
a bank consortium emerged willing to fund the
launch of the new daily. However, when it came
to detail, the banks withdrew from the project
from one day to another, possibly bowing to the
pressure of the publishers of other dailies that
felt threatened by the new project.
The reason was that while Bronner lived in
New York, Austria had gone through a marked
concentration of media, printers and especially
newspaper distribution. Any new newspaper
project would thus had to either develop the
entire infrastructure from scratch or accept the
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conditions set by established publishers, something that was a priori unacceptable to Bronner
as it would have jeopardized his main goal of
creating a daily that would be completely independent of all the existing media and political
structures in Austria. However, Bronner found
unexpected support when he offered a share to
Springer, the German publisher. This was quite
ironic given the atrocious reputation German
publishers, who were behind the tabloid Der
Bild and the conservative daily Die Welt, enjoyed
in left-leaning liberal circles, i.e. among the
planned daily potential readership. To a large
extent, this was because of the negative role
the Springer group media had played during the
1968 student riots, their irreconcilable attitude to
communism as well as their distinctly pro-Israeli
stance. Bronner, however, took a rather pragmatist
view. He also rightly anticipated that the foreign
owner would be primarily interested in economic
indicators of the project’s success rather than
the context of the Austrian social and political
discourse. In addition, it soon became clear that
betting on a foreign partner paid off right from
the start: when the new daily was in danger of
not finding printers because the negotiations
had failed at the last moment, the Springer group
leadership did not hesitate a second and simply
dispatched a printing press to Austria, saving
the paper.
Quite predictably, rival media reacted to
the new arrival on Austria’s media market by
commentaries questioning the viability of the
new daily. Nevertheless, exactly fifty years after
the country’s invasion by the Nazis it was rather
unexpected to see some journalists resorting
to traditional anti-Semitic clichés familiar from
the presidential campaign when they felt it was
necessary to remind the readers that Bronner had
spent several years living in New York where he
had “managed to garner the support of moneyed
‘East Coast’ circles” and so on.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that
the project of Der Standard, a liberal daily, has
firmly established itself in Austria, as witness by
the growing readership figures. It even survived
when its original foreign strategic partner withdrew when, after an initial euphoric expansion
into Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990
the Springer group began to focus on consolidating its business activities in the reunited
Germany. Bronner had to raise money quickly
to pay off his partner. His rivals on the Austrian
market saw this as another—possibly the last—
opportunity to gain control over the daily through
affiliated banks.
Of course, nothing has to last forever,
including a media project success. However, in
his life publisher Oscar Bronner has already
proven three times that he can realize his visions
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Managing Editor
Aspen Review Central Europe
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Kateřina Šafaříková
The West in Crisis
Petr Drulák, Politika nezájmu:
Česko a Západ v krizi. [The Politics
of Indifference: the Czech Republic
and the West in Crisis] SLON, Praha
2012.
Petr Drulák’s book explores the direction in
which the Czech Republic is headed now that it
has returned to Europe.
“Czech society lacks a binding agent. It exists
solely as a vast group of individuals interconnected
by private interests, language and institutions,
whose purpose and effectiveness are generally under
question. Czech society lacks the concept of public
interest which could make public engagement by
citizens meaningful, pointing the way to further
development. This has resulted in a total lack of
interest in public affairs and an escape into the
private sphere. In many respects this lack of interest
and escapism are reminiscent of the impact of the
communist normalization regime in the 1970s and
1980s, complete with moral devastation in the form
of indifference and corruption.”
It is paragraphs like the one quoted above
that make Petr Drulák’s book The Politics of Indifference: the Czech Republic and the West in
Crisis essential reading. More attentive observers
of Czech affairs will not find this quotation
shocking since it contains nothing they have
not already suspected. What makes the book
attractive is the author’s ability to encapsulate,
in a few lines, the basic facts and offer an immediate interpretation.
Drulák’s publication may well be read as
a textbook in that it follows the logic of a textbook rather than that of an essay: it begins by
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defining a problem, goes on to analyze the
selected variables and their transformation over
time, and then offers a synthesis followed by
a recommendation for the future. The author’s
starting proposition is that by joining the
­European Union in 2004 the Czech Republic
has completed its return to history and is now
in need of a new narrative. Unlike after 1989,
however, this narrative is not to be found in the
geopolitical West, which is in the grip of the same
crisis as the Czech Republic itself.
Long Live the Invisible Hand of the Market
The first, theoretical part of the book examines liberal democracy as the dominant concept
of Euro-Atlantic civilization, providing a basic
blueprint for the unfettered organization of individual states. The reader soon realizes that the
author’s first message amounts to the following:
what we lack is fraternity—the third essential
component, in addition to liberty and equality,
of any community based on the ideals of the
Enlightenment—and our present-day crisis both
derives from, and is amplified by the absence of
fraternity as a binding agent of society.
Petr Drulák does not call for the dismantling of the liberal concept and redefining the
paradigm. Rather, he notes that by reducing
human freedom solely to its economic value in
the free market economy and by emphasizing
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the m
­ aximizing of individual personal profit we
jeopardize solidarity and social equality and thus
also society as a whole.
It is hard to argue with this conclusion against
the backdrop of the bursting of various economic
bubbles, the financial crisis and bailouts of institutions deemed too big to fail and Drulák is certainly
not the first to reach it.
At the same time, already the introductory
chapter hints at the author’s general conclusion
since, following the logic of his argument and
logic in general, self-preservation dictates that
Western societies, including that of the Czech
Republic, must above all strive to renew fraternity.
Czech readers, who have lived through the
1990s—a time when the mantra of “capitalism
without modifiers” and of the all-embracing “invisible hand of the market” was more prominent in
this country than in any other post-communist
state—will find some unexpected retro humor
in this chapter, too.
long-term process of disintegration of the glue
that bound societies. All that is left are atomized
individuals whose “materialism [is] focused on
the struggle for the greatest possible consumer
opportunities,” says Drulák.
Present-day Czech society mirrors all these
problems. As Václav Klaus’s notion of society
prevailed over that of Havel, and privatization
acquired the status of a universal remedy in the
modern Czech Republic, everything communal
has become pointless and public interest has
fizzled out. In Drulák’s words, Czech politics is
now tantamount to nothing but “servicing the
oligarchs.”
Servicing the Oligarchs
The second part of the book applies the
theoretical approaches to historical practice.
The author presents a typology of the communities that the West has passed through since
emerging from the ruins of the Western Roman
Empire—from Christian and dynastic communities, through various forms of nationalism,
right up to current liberal market society. This is
followed by an analogous survey of the Czech
historical development with its moments of
glory, from the Great Moravian Empire to 1968
or, indeed, 1989.
He then presents a synthesis focusing on the
current state of affairs: the disintegrating and
fumbling Western stage. Drulák believes that the
geopolitical West began to lose self­‑confidence as
early as 1945 as a result of the rise, and success,
of communist ideology. Later, following the
decline of the USSR, it also lost its external glue.
The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent financial
and economic crisis have only deepened the
What Is Missing
Although in the early parts of the book there
are some major generalizations that do not always
necessarily apply, they create the expectation that
the author will supply a possible solution for all
these problems. Nevertheless, in one particular
respect, he does not quite succeed.
In a brief passage Petr Drulák tries to come to
terms with the “dysfunctional European fraternity,”
i.e. the repeated negative outcome of referendums held by the founding countries of the EU
in an attempt to provide common institutions
with new legitimacy. He lays the blame for this
largely on the European political elites, on the
grounds that they do not treat the European level
with the same amount of solidarity and “love” as
the national one.
“The eurozone crisis provides a good illustration of this,” says the author. “By imposing
its solutions on countries that are experiencing
serious problems Germany is forgetting that, as
its chief architect, it carries responsibility for the
eurozone and that in the past it profited from it
substantially (…) thereby deepening the crisis
and destroying the already incomplete and fragile
web of European fraternity.”
This step aside seems inappropriate. For
one, we lack sufficient distance to reach this
conclusion since the eurozone crisis is not yet
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over and the roles of the individual players as
well as their assessment of the situation is still
subject to change.
But first and foremost, by now readers have
come to expect a more profound analysis of
­European fraternity, one that would go beyond
the current election cycle. Particularly since Drulák
regards the absence of European fraternity as the
main reason why Western Europe is currently in
free fall. This raises a number of burning questions
that the book should have dealt with.
Naturally, the reader might ask which of the
elements listed by the author are present in the
existing EU community and which ones are not,
particularly since Petr Drulák regards the outlines
of the present-day European Union as the basis for
a new incarnation of Western Europe. Is it “love”
that is missing in an EU that is strictly secular, technical and based on regulation of commodities?
Or is it rather the nation, the oft-invoked single
European demos that is missing? Here, too, the
book does not go deep enough.
Love Us, Angela
At the very least, it raises the question of
whether a purely instrumental European fraternity symbolized by the EU is a project that has
a chance to survive in the long term. Especially
in a space formed and reformed on the basis of
the nation state—or an even narrower identity—
and where the last supranational binding agent
was provided by Christianity and royal dynasties which, unlike the EU, involved a mystical
link between human beings and the infinite, in
other words, emotions? To put it simply, would
­European fraternity be truly functional if only
it was more ardently championed by political
elites? Is this the case and if not, why not?
Since Petr Drulák’s claim that the reset of
the West and the Czech Republic alongside it
depends on its “spiritual renewal that will, in turn,
revive fraternity,” the absence of answers to the
above-mentioned questions fails to prepare the
reader for the final chapter.
A renewed fraternity, the book reads, must
not neglect the following elements: “Love, as we
know it from Christianity; nation, as developed
by the patriotism of the modern era; and liberty
and equality of individuals, as the main focus
of various currents of liberal ideology.” Drulák
suggests that we should look for an underpinning
of this renewal at the supranational level since
a “purely national concept of a future community
does not meet the requirements of present-day
reality.”
When Will the Turning Point Come?
Nearing his conclusion Petr Drulák adds that
a “renewed fraternity can grow from a narrative or
narratives” in which the essential elements of the
potential glue mentioned above are cultivated
in a new way and which grapple with the need
for a mystic union between the individual and
society on the one hand and God or the universe
on the other.
This, however, adds even more complexity
and generates more questions than answers.
For where is this development supposed to come
from and what form will it take?
The author believes that it will grow out of
the “discontent of the people” with the state of
their societies and that it will take the form of
a “protest movement.” Such a movement can
have the chance of making its mark in history
only if it represents as many social and professional groups as possible and, while having
its national epicenters, only if it involves the
entire West, is based on inclusive discussions
and grapples with the human desire for the
infinite. And—that’s all. By the end of the book,
the reader is left with the impression that he
or she doesn’t have any idea how the West and
the community to which he or she belongs can
be salvaged.
However, it would be unfair to blame the
author for this. The turning point is not easy to
predict and is often impossible to recognize as
such, even as and when it happens and even
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if it is very clearly outlined. Who would have
thought that the self-immolation of the Tunisian
street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi would spark off
a revolution throughout the Arab world?
Petr Drulák is right to say that many decisive
events depend on forces nobody can control.
That is why his book does not provide for a fast
and easy step-by-step renewal of the West recipe.
After all, providing this kind of exit for today is
not the job of an academic, since specific recipes
are pre-eminently a task for politics, rather than
political science.
It is just a pity that the author has not
expanded this section of the book by adding
a few pages covering the protest movements that
have recently emerged in the West, the Occupy
movement in particular.
Occupy has met the requirements of
a supranational movement motivated by
popular discontent: it has involved several
social groups and elements of positive democracy (active and selfless interest in public affairs
on the part of most participants and their willingness to give the movement the “gift” of labor,
time, etc.) and possibly, in a wider sense, also
love, as defined by Petr Drulák. That is why
an analysis of this type of protest movement
through the author’s optics might help the
reader anticipate a future “grand narrative” and
assess future political recipes.
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Students Who Haven’t Been
In my introduction, I said that this publication
can be read as a textbook. Its strength lies in the
fact that, as opposed to many textbooks, it is
not sterile in spite of the occasionally excessively
encyclopedic style. This is because it uses “live
matter”—our present—and that gives it an
urgency. Its weakness consists in the fact that it
is most likely to miss its key “student” audience.
The Politics of Indifference: the Czech Republic
and the West in Crisis will be read mostly by
people who are already interested in the issue
whereas, in fact, it ought to be read mainly by
those who long to be our leaders and want us
to enable their ambitions. Most of these people
are unlikely to read it. That, however, is hardly
Petr Drulák’s fault. K AT E Ř I N A Š A FA Ř Í K O VÁ
is a Czech journalist who covers mostly the Czech foreign
policy and the EU matters. She now works for Česká
Pozice, an online investigative media.
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Peter Jukes
Revisionism
and Resurrection
Laima Vince, “Journeys Through
the Backwaters of the Heart”,
Amazon 2012
In at least one instance, the book ends up
romanticizing a Lithuanian resistance leader who
has been accused of participating in one of the
most notorious pogrom in Kaunas in June 1941,
when thousands of Jewish civilians were killed
by Lithuanian nationalists in the days before the
Germans had set up their administration.
Much of the book is uncontentious, and serves
as a well-timed reminder of what happened to
individual Lithuanians who suffered three rapid
invasions; the USSR’s annexation of the country
in June 1940 as a Soviet republic; the German
invasion of 1941 to free them from “Bolshevik
bondage”; and then the return of the Soviets
in 1944. By then, around 96 percent of Lithuania’s long-established Jewish population had
been annihilated, the highest percentage of any
­European country during the Holocaust.
Though Lithuania ended up being enlarged
as result of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
(the city of Vilnius was transferred from Polish
control), the Stalinist terror played out with
terrible but familiar logic. As with the Katyn
massacres, Stalin was determined to liquidate senior Lithuanian officials, intellectuals
or professionals who could lead some kind of
opposition. Vince claims that at least a quarter
of those executed and deported in 1939 were
Jewish (though this probably relates to Vilnius)
and maintains that, during the next decade or
so, a third of Lithuania’s population would be
killed, imprisoned, dispossessed or deported.
These are hard numbers to verify, unless they
While filming a re-enactment of a battle
between Lithuanian nationalists and their Sovietbacked NKVD persecutors, Jonas ­K adzionis
(a survivor of the ‘Forest Brothers’ partisans)
warned the author Laima Vince: “Don’t get lost
in the forest, and don’t lose your conscience.”
Unfortunately, in her book “Journeys Through
the Backwaters of the Heart” Vince has managed
to do both.
There are few more treacherous journeys in
history than through the forests and cities that
Tim Snyder charted in his book Bloodlands: that
triangle of land from Eastern Poland, Belarus,
Ukraine and the Baltic states which was multiply
ravaged by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany from
the mid-thirties to the early fifties, during which
at least 14 million civilians died.
With initially admirable intentions and
some affecting narratives, Vince tries to navigate a personal path through wartime L­ ithuania,
concentrating on the “stories of women who
survived Hitler and Stalin.” In her apparently
random encounters, it’s the emotional connections and recommendations that form of the bulk
of the historiography.
But are the voices representative? And though
poignant and heartfelt, are the fading recollections of those in their 80s and 90s the same as
historical facts?
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include all the victims of farm collectivization.
But there’s little doubt that Lithuanian society
suffered in Stalin’s attempt to create a “Homo
Sovieticus,” shot through with a Russian-centric
form of “ethnic cleansing”: the widespread terror
and dislocation being the main reason Hitler’s
invading troops were welcomed at the outset
of Barbarossa.
An early target of the NKVD were elementary
and high schoolteachers who defiantly sang the
national anthem during the first Lithuanian Soviet
Teacher’s congress in 1940. Within days, teachers
and their families were arrested and sent—
in summer clothes and no supplies—to exile in
the remote arctic wastes around the Laptev Sea
where a large number perished. Ryte Merkyte
was a child of this mass deportation. Though her
father died of starvation, Ryte refuses to cling to
resentment or a victim mentality. “Your body can
barely hold on,” Ryte told Vince: “so you gather all
your strength and focus on one thing—to live.
You throw away all the negative emotions, all the
anger, the hurt, the jealousy.”
That women figure largely in Vince’s narrative
is partly because, as partisan Jonas Kadzionis
observed “When times are hard, women are
stronger.” Like Anna Akhmatova outside prison
in her poem Requiem, women had the duty to
care, bear witness, and survive. Whether hiding
anti-Soviet partisans, or acting as emissaries and
message bearers, Lithuanian women suffered
torture, deportation, and up to 25 years hard
labor in the Gulag, but they were also less likely
than the men to be shot in the forest, and buried
in some unmarked grave.
Many of the stories Vince has collected are
compelling and vivid. Eleonara who spent six
months with her Green Partisan husband Bronius
before he was killed (“After that time, we only
spoke in dreams”), she was arrested, and tortured
for months—on one occasion by being locked
in a tiny cubicle with hundreds of hungry white
rats. Or Grazina, who saw her father disappear
into the forest, and still dreams he will emerge
from the trees one day, although she knows he
was buried in the swamps. Or Konstancija, who
was rewarded for rescuing two Jewish children
from the Shoah by being deported to a gulag
on the principle: “If you resisted the Germans,
you will resist us too.” Or the cardiologist Laima,
who was deported to Siberia twice, and then
targeted in a KGB “romeo trap” by her lover, Ayas,
who betrayed, denounced, and literally broke
her heart.
With these memorable personal accounts
of resistance and survival, there is little doubt
that these women kept alive stories of national
pride and personal independence long after the
military struggle for Lithuanian autonomy had
collapsed. But how accurate are the wider claims?
How many of these self-sustaining narratives
have become self-serving since independence?
And has history become the ultimate victim of
the myth of national sacrifice?
Nearly all Vince’s interviewees describe
the pre-War Lithuanian state in tolerant terms,
where there was no ethnic tension between
the various Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Russian
and German minorities. Paulina Zingeriene, who
survived both the notorious Kovno (Kaunas)
ghetto and the SS Death Marches says “I did not
experience anti-Semitism personally before the
War.” Juliana Zarchi, born to a German mother
and a Jewish father, also managed to survive
Kaunas ghetto, and rushed out to greet the
incoming Soviet troops in April 1944 only to
be deported to Kazakhstan as a “enemy of the
state” even though she was only seven years
old: “First I was hated for being a Jew, now I’m
hated for being German.”
“I hate ideas,” Zarchi laments to Vince; “I hate
idealism. Where there are ideas there is no space
for the human, for the individual.” Zingeriene also
finds the hatred inexplicable: “You can analyze
the war for a million years,” she says “and you
will never be able to make sense out of what
happened to the Jews, to the Lithuanians, to
the Russians.”
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Herein lies the problem. Zingeriene’s equation
of the persecution of Lithuanians and Jews—
the Double Genocide premise– risks a glaring
false equivalence. There are virtually no Jews
left across the entire swathe of these Eastern
borderlands, where abandoned synagogues and
neglected graveyards show they were once very
populous. And the attitude of mystification risks
obfuscation. Just as the Former Yugoslavia in the
nineties, portraying the carnage of the bloodlands as some irrational explosion of ancient
ethnic rivalries obscures the real perpetrators:
­imperial powers with carefully prepared programs
of expansion. But on this, the Soviets and Nazis
differed. Stalin used mass killing as a means to
subjugate and dominate the populations of
Europe. For Hitler extermination was an end
rather than a means. Following on from his final
solution, he planned to destroy the Slavs through
a “hunger plan”, and thereby clear the bloodlands
for German colonization.
Accuracy about this past is not just a histo­rical
question, but still relevant to judicial i­ nquiries and
criminal investigations (though not in Lithuania
where war crimes trials have been few and far
between). While modern day Germany has largely
extirpated the psychopathology of national
victimhood through the courts and documentary
inquiry, the Lithuanian past—on the evidence
of this book—still seems mired in sentiment,
nostalgia and tragic myth.
Published by Amazon, Vince’s book has
not been edited, and retains many typos. More
worrying, it gets many key dates are patently
wrong. Sloppy chronology might not matter in
normal books of reminiscence, but on the contentious terrain of the bloodlands a lack of factchecking can be fatal. At one point one of Vince’s
interviewee’s claims that while 7,000 Lithuanians
were involved in the killing of Jews during the
war, another 7,000 ran to their rescue. There’s
no footnote or questioning of this assertion.
A convenient statement is allowed to stand as
an unquestioned truth.
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And so we come to the most shocking misdirections of all—where emotion and affection
leads to a form of Holocaust apology, if not
outright denial.
One of the most lengthy interviews is with
Nijole Brazenaire, who was married to the “resistance hero” Juozas Luksa. Photos of the handsome
couple honeymooning in occupied Germany
dominate the central part of her book. The
couple escaped from the Russian re-invasion
before Luksa was smuggled back into Lithuania
as part of a CIA plan to discover Soviet plans for
attack. From there Luksa writes long letters to
Nijole in which he declares he loves her more
than anything in the world—except his homeland. After hiding out in a bunker in the house
of Eleonara (see above) Luksa is betrayed and
shot by the NKVD in 1951. His grave has never
been found. Sixty years his widow Nijole declares:
“Every day when I awake my first thoughts are
about him.“
It is an affecting love story, especially as the
book also follows a fruitless attempt to find the
last resting place of this “national hero.”
It’s also a complete whitewash. Luksa was
undeniably an active member of the Lithuanian
Action Front which instigated pogroms and mass
killing of Jews in late June 1941, before the Nazi
troops had arrived or taken control. He is accused
of being one of the ringleaders of the Lietukis
Garage massacre in Kaunas where, in front of
a large cheering audience, dozens of Jews were
beaten to death with irons bars, or had high pressure hoses inserted into their mouths or anuses
until they died of a burst stomach or rectum.
The well-recorded atrocity was so shocking that
several German soldiers present photographed
it and complained to their senior officers. Luksa
himself is accused, by the Society of Lithuanian
Jews, of participating in the decapitation of Rabbi
Zalmen Osovsky, whose head was placed in the
shop front window below.
For all the evocative telling, the other stories
in this book are tarnished by a­ ssociation with
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this grievous oversight. If such a big ­allegation
is omitted, what else are we missing? How
reliable are those figures about ­L ithuanian
non­‑collaboration with the Holocaust? How
reliable are any of the other facts scattered
throughout the book? The whole project
becomes mired in uncertainty.
By putting sentiment above compassion,
selective memory over communal record, Vince’s
journey to the backwaters of the heart is soon
bogged down in the morass of subjectivity, until
it is swamped by suspicions of revisionism and
obfuscation. PETER JUKES
is an English author, screenwriter, playwright, literary
critic and blogger. His most recent nonfiction book is
The Fall of the House of Murdoch (2012)
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Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin
Ukrainisation of Urbanisation—
Sociology of the City in the Ukraine
Галина Боднар, Львів. Щоденне
життя міста очима переселенців
із сіл (50–80-ті роки ХХ ст.),
Львівський національний
університет ім. Івана Франка, 2010;
Анатомія міста: Київ. Урбаністичні
студії, Смолоскип, 2012.
Halyna Bodnar, Lviv. Everyday
Life of the City in the Eyes of Rural
Immigrants (1950s-1980s), Lviv
2010; An Anatomy of a City: Kyiv.
Urban Studies, many authors,
Smoloskyp, Kyiv 2012.
side, as it was before) and its organization by the
civil society, which started to emerge after the
collapse of communism. The city as a subject of
study intrigues Ukrainian researchers, for it has
not been investigated in this way. As for Western
scholars, the Ukrainian city attracts them with the
problems which in other regions of Europe were
either solved long ago or did not appear with
such an intensity and power as in today’s Ukraine.
The thing is that the history of urbanization of
the Ukraine not only starts later than in other parts
of Europe but its beginnings lack the Ukrainian
national element, that is—as Bohdan Kravchenko3
notes—Ukrainians as an ethnic group experienced a kind of exclusion from “urbanity,” from
urban culture. “When in Europe the new city was
becoming [in the early 18th century—JKS] a source of
market economy, national awareness and national
culture, Ukrainian society did not manage to cross
the threshold of urbanization.”4 The reasons for
that—both in the 18th century and later—are still
waiting for their researcher. Explanations proposed
by Kravchenko put too much emphasis on psychological factors, as the author himself seems to be
aware, and the above-quoted Jaroslaw Pas’ko is
content to conclude that the “culture of colonial
To an average inhabitant of Poland the Ukraine
and Ukrainian culture is associated—if he or she
knows anything about it—above all with folk
culture. “Average Ukrainians” have a similar perspective: asked about elements distinguishing Ukrainian
culture, they usually name embroidered costumes,
traditional song, sometimes the cuisine,1 that is
they invoke products of rural culture. And this
despite the fact that a significant majority, almost
70% of Ukrainian population, lives in the cities.2
They live in the cities today but their parents or at
best grandparents arrived from the countryside.
The consequences of this state of affairs can be
perceived in various areas of Ukrainian social life.
This new and constantly emerging urban
community attracts researchers, sociologists and
social psychologists as well as architects, landscapers, urban planners and managers. In a word,
conditions are being created for the development
of Ukrainian urban sociology, at the centre of
its interest placing urban lifestyle (rather than
differences between the city and the country-
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dependence and lack of both vertical and horizontal
structural mobility prevented the emergence of
Ukrainian middle class, blocked the appearance of
Ukrainian civil society and Ukrainian high culture.”5
So Ukrainian identity was not shaped in the city, for
Ukrainian cities were centers of completely different
influences: Russian, Polish, Austrian and later Soviet.
Looking with Halyna Bodnar at the everyday
life of post-war inhabitants of Lviv, we are
witnessing the formation of an urban community
practically from scratch: Poles and Jews dominant
in 1939 are replaced not only with migrants from
neighbouring villages and small towns—although
they are in the majority—but also by Russians
and representatives of other Soviet nations, previously absent in these regions. The latter arrive
and immediately assume management positions
in government administration or industrial plants
and become academic lecturers.
The book Lviv. Everyday Life of the City in the
Eyes of Rural Immigrants (1950s-1980s) is a reliable
research report preceded with a presentation of
statistics showing the dynamics of demographic
changes within the Lviv population. These data
are juxtaposed with the demographic situation
of the whole Ukraine and its largest cities. They
allow us to follow not only the changes in ethnic
structure we spoke about earlier but also the age
and sex of the new arrivals. We observe how in the
early post-war years, several dozen thousands of
people arrived annually in the city, mainly young
persons. In the record-breaking year 1946, the
population of Lviv increased by almost 56 thousand. It is as if a medium­‑sized district capital in
today’s Poland moved to Lviv in one year. In later
years, migration streams weakened and stabilized
but were still significant. It is enough to recall that
in the period from 1959 to 1989, on which the
author concentrates, the population of Lviv almost
doubled (from 410 thousand in 1959 to 786.9 thousand in 1989). Migrants from surrounding villages
form such a large part of the urban community
that they essentially become both its creators and
building material.
Halyna Bodnar’s book is not the first work on
Soviet Lviv. The informal social experiment, which
is still going on in this city, could not have remained
unnoticed: Bodnar includes a complete bibliography of studies on Lviv. But she was the first to
give the floor to the main protagonists of these
changes—the migrants themselves6—attempting
to show both how the city changed under their
impact and how they, its new inhabitants, themselves changed.
Incomers from Galician villages dominated the
social structure of Lviv but they still did not feel
completely at home in this city. Interviewees of
Bodnar speak about a sense of superiority demonstrated by other migrants—Russians, who, as the
author writes, assumed social positions occupied by Poles before the war, and migrants from
eastern regions of the Ukraine, who in their own
mind arrived to teach culture to those “peasants.”
The antagonism was exacerbated by language
differences: those who believed themselves superior used Russian while the “peasants” spoke only
Ukrainian. And these linguistic and social divides
persist until today: descendants of migrants from
Russia and the east of the Ukraine who were born
in Lviv rarely speak fluent Ukrainian and even more
rarely try to change this. So how is it possible that
Lviv became and still remains the centre of Ukrainian
identity? The author hardly ever considers this question, perhaps thinking that the answer is obvious.
And this is slightly disappointing, for identity themes
recur in the narratives of the respondents. But in
the book we can find many stories which help us in
reconstructing this process: stories about a double
life imposed by the Soviet reality, when you said
different things at home and outside (in your workplace or at the university), about the attachment to
Ukrainian traditions, which were easy to cultivate
in private, for most people knew them very well,
and finally about “illegal sources of information”
and Western culture owed to the location of the
city close to the border.
A sense of lacking roots and not being quite at
home, often mentioned in the book, seems to be
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still present for many inhabitants of Lviv, former
rural migrants. This is why the book is engrossing,
although I am tempted to criticize the author for
the fact that having such an ample empirical material at her disposal she devoted too little space to
analyses and conclusions. When you lack roots,
it is difficult to think about furnishing your city,
about civil society. After all a citizen is a person
who is at home in his or her city.
The city as a social institution, as a space for
action—so far not very effective—by the citizens
is presented by the second book reviewed here,
concerned with more recent times and with another
city, no less important for the history and present of
the Ukraine—Kyiv. The title “an anatomy of a city”
reflects the structure of the work: from a general
presentation of the complex organism, which the
city is, and of its basic functions to a presentation
of its selected elements/organs in their functioning.
The book is supplemented by interviews with
Ukrainian and Western specialists on urban space.
The Ukrainian capital is undergoing its transformation on our eyes—this transformation is perhaps
more difficult to extract from official data than what
happened in post-war Lviv but its consequences
were no less significant. In 1991 Kyiv became the
capital of an independent state and almost immediately was cast in the role of a testing ground for
capitalist property laws, competition for space, the
conflict between various needs and ideas.
In the process of adapting the socialist Kyiv
to the spatial patterns and architectural forms
of post-socialist urbanism we observe raising of
so-called “monsters”—buildings violating the
normal urban planning practice. The “monsters”
spring up in historic districts, parks and other
places where they have no right to be, where their
external appearance destroys the cityscape. Such
designs are possible thanks to corruption and lack
of an organized planning process.
This fragment comes from one of the first
chapters in a book by Roman Cybrivsky and
provides the most concise characteristics of the
main problems the Ukrainian capital (and probably
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also other big cities in this country) is struggling
with. In this context it is not especially surprising
that the Soviet system of urban planning is still
remembered with nostalgia. “It was more or less
effective—says Henrich Filvarov interviewed by
Natalia Kodel-Perminova—but at least it was
understood that there was some documentation,
some program of urban development, modest,
perhaps even inadequate but to be respected. […]
There was a basic control of rational, functional use
of the territory in line with the functions defined
by a general zoning plan or other documents.”
The phenomenon of appropriating space by
the rich and influential is well described by the
concept of “spatial justice” introduced by Johannes
Fiedler. The author describes a situation where
spatial justice is missing, that is he shows how
growing social inequalities find their reflection
in urban infrastructure. Another expression of
its absence is when an urban community loses
once liked and often visited places in the urban
space—parks, squares, buildings and other facilities appropriated by institutions or private persons,
or being destroyed. As Fiedler concludes, harmful
changes in Kyiv have one cause: a corrupt regime,
which cannot resist the power of money.
The imbalance between the regime on the
one hand and business and inhabitants on the
other has many more aspects. Ludmila Males
points at centralisation as an important element
of the organisation of the Kyiv community and
the communities of other post-Soviet cities.
Its significance is greater than that of traffic jams
and crowded public transport.
Overestimated symbolic value of the centre
reproduces itself and the resultant centralization of
urban life cannot be reverted with the use of simple
means: the prestige of a central address encourages employers to locate their activities in the city
centre. Cultural institutions, clubs or restaurants
also gravitate there. One consequence of that is
a vicious competition for space, the winners being
those who have the biggest amount of power and
other resources. Inhabitants of distant districts
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spend several hours a day commuting to and from
work or university (the author estimates it at 2 to
4 hours). The remaining time is hardly sufficient
to rest and completely lacking for public matters
or a simple participation in the life of the city.
They live in their dormitory districts but they
do not feel at home there, they live in the capital
but they do not use this fact for self-fulfillment
or personal development. Males paints a very
suggestive picture of a “conserved centralization”
becoming a source of a general stagnation in the
social sphere. This may contain an at least partial
answer to the question as to why the growing pressure on limiting public space liked by Kyiv citizens
meets with such a feeble resistance on their part.
Citizens’ activity may be effective, as we can
read in the last part of the book—a story about
a fight for one street. When Andriyivs’kyi uzviz was
renovated, its inhabitants established a consultation board of experts and forced the investors
to cooperate with this body. This allowed them
to prevent the commercialization of this unique
fragment of the city’s public space.
“An anatomy of a city” is a book worth recommending to all those interested in the processes
of interactions between society, government and
business in the post-Soviet area. It seems that
the problems described there also affect other
big cities of the former socialist camp but in the
Ukraine the weakness of the government, or rather
its direct ties with business, produce a situation
where the citizens’ interests are in potential conflict
with the interests of the regime and business seen
as one single agent.
This fusion of government and business may
be partly responsible for the distrust towards capitalism as a system directly or indirectly expressed
by most of the authors reviewed here, which is
a reminder that sociology of the city in its classic
form originated from the tradition of leftist
thought. On the other hand the authors, when
formulating their generalizations, seem to ignore
the fact that in today’s Ukraine we are dealing with
a peculiar system, that is “oligarchic democracy,”7
and capitalism not always assumes such a form.
The power of the money of Ukrainian oligarchs
and new rich could be counterbalanced by democratic institutions—social organizations and local
government bodies acting in the interest of the
citizens. But they are neither sufficiently strong
nor active in their local efforts and this is why the
“monsters” more often win than lose. But their
arrogant builders unwittingly give rise to a type
of social involvement previously unknown in the
Ukraine—urban movements. And this is a path
leading to the formation of an enrooted identity,
the absence of which makes it difficult for the
Ukrainians to build a democratic state.
J O A N N A K O N I E C Z N A - S A Ł A M AT I N
Ph.D. in sociology, lecturer at the Institute of Sociology,
University of Warsaw
1 This is confirmed by opinion polls (conducted, among other institutions, by GfK Ukraine), usually published by the press before various holidays.
2 Urban population 68.9%, rural population 31.1%—as of May 1, 2013 (www.ukrstat.gov.ua).
3 Bohdan Kravchenko [Богдан Кравченко], Socialni zminy i nacyonalna swidomist’ w Ukraini XX st. [Соціальні зміни і національна
свідомість в Україні ХХ ст]., Кyiv 1997, p. 110.
4 Jaroslaw Pas’ko [Ярослав Пасько], “Istorychni aspekty urbanizatsii,” in: Sotsyologiya mista [“Історичні аспекти урбанізації,
в: Соціологія міста], Donetsk 2010, p. 36. translated by JKS.
5 Jaroslaw Pas’ko, op. cit., p. 38.
6 A slightly similar task but on a significantly smaller scale, was undertaken by Aleksandra Matyukhina in a book W sowieckim Lwowie.
Życie codzienne miasta w latach 1944–1990 ([In Soviet Lviv. Daily Life of the City in 1944–1990] Kraków 2000), based on her own
experiences (she is a Russian, who came to Lviv as a child) and on interviews she conducted.
7 Sławomir Matuszczak, Demokracja oligarchiczna. Wpływ grup biznesowych na ukraińską politykę, Seria Prace OSW no 42, Ośrodek
Studiów Wschodnich, Warszawa 2012.
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Wojciech Stanisławski
Noble and Other Kolkhozy
Anna Engelking, Kołchoźnicy.
Antropologiczne studium tożsamości
wsi białoruskiej przełomu
XX i XXI wieku [Kolkhozniki.
An Anthropological Study of the
Identity of Rural Belarus at the Turn
of the 21st century], Wydawnictwo
Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja
Kopernika, Toruń 2012
“Kolkhozniki,” an 800-pages-long volume
awarded the Przegląd Wschodni Prize for 2012,
belongs to the most often bought monographs
published by the Polish Academic Foundation.
One factor behind this success may be the
legendary Polish nostalgia for the “Borderlands,”
free from any revisionist desire to change the
established borders but strong and painful. The
area described—western and eastern Belarus—
is the heart of the former “Great Duchy of the
Nobility,” the seat of a thousand manors and petty
gentry hamlets, from which a major part of Polish
pre-war intellectuals originated and their Arcadian style descriptions compose a significant part
of 20th-century Polish fiction.
An additional appeal—an appeal for Polish
readers but an ordeal for future translators—of
the book is due to the diligence of the researcher,
who quotes the statements of her interviewees
verbatim. So from the pages of “Kolkhozniki” we
hear, thanks to quotes longer than in a standard
monograph, an extraordinary, familiar “eastern”
language. “Eastern,” although in the majority of
cases it can neither be called Polish, nor Belarusian nor Russian: it is not so much a collection of
dialects but an amalgamation or perhaps mixture,
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produced by the pressure of history, an Eastern
European pidgin, where Polish, Russian and
Lithuanian words co-exist within one typically
Slavic grammar. And, it should be added, Soviet
words: bureaucratic jargon, technical terminology
and horrible abbreviations covered the peasant
tongue like verdigris covered a field of rye and
accompany it ever since.
Anna Engelking and her team pricked their
ears for verbal variations but this extraordinary
transcript is just an “added value” of the book.
The task they undertook was to describe the
rural community of today’s Belarus, a country and
region which, always poor but once bucolic and
unchanging, so painfully experienced history in
the 20th century.
First there was World War I and later struggle
accompanying the break-up of the Russian Empire
and the emergence of new states, going on up
to the Riga Peace concluded in March 1921.
Then we had the fiasco of state-building aspirations and the division of the country which,
as it seemed for a moment, had been crystallizing on the map, between two hugely different
states: the Polish Second Republic, lame, poor,
not free from nationalism, Polonising ambitions,
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t­ riumphalism and democracy deficits but in the
last analysis ­European, and the Soviet Union,
initially pro­mising for many progressives and
peasant activists but more and more openly
revealing its atrocious nature.
It was in the Soviet Union that the nightmare
of collectivization took place. The former petty
gentry hamlets, settlements, yeomen farmsteads
and manorial properties—a patchwork of ownership and human relations going back to Medieval
settlement—into “state-owned,” that is nobody’s,
collective farms (kollektivnoye ­k hozyaystva,
­kolkhozy). In the east of the country, which came
under the Soviet rule in 1921, collectivization
occurred in the early 1930s, while in the east in
the late 1940s. Two generations later this gap of
two decades no longer plays a significant role.
It was here, between the Bug and the Berezina,
that the epicenter of Timothy Snyder’s “bloodlands” was located. The folk awarded—somewhat
patronizingly—the role of protagonists of idylls
by romantic poets half a century ago found itself
in the Central European heart of darkness.
Talking for years with inhabitants of Polesie,
Vitebsk, Grodno and Homel regions, Anna
­Engelking’s team was looking for the truth about
identity (“an identity narrative”) of Belarusian
villagers. Of course, the researchers were not after
a simple answer to the question, “who they are”
or “who they regard themselves as.” They wanted
to recreate the categories used by the kolkhozniki
to describe the world, their hierarchies of values,
mechanisms they see as explaining the events
of the previous century.
When we reach for such a book, we usually
have some knowledge about the subject, even
if limited and fragmentary: we are aware of the
“long lasting” of social and especially mental
structures, of the power of the “peasant ethic.”
We also understand that the researchers had
decided to listen to people with usually poor
formal education (the limitations and fallacies of
the Soviet curriculum were superimposed on the
weaknesses and faults of village schools), often
elderly (rural Belarus is experiencing a demographic collapse and wage migration of the
young) and simply tired with their uneasy life
and hard physical toil.
Reading a description of the state of rural
awareness in the early 21st century, in areas often
lacking a good road but equipped with TV sets
and computers, you could expect a radical change
in comparison to what we have had an opportunity to learn about—in various forms and through
various testimonies—as the practices of “Slavic
peasant cultures from the borderland of Latin
and Bysantine Europe.” For in so many places of
the world local cultures have not resisted the
temptations and pressures of modernization
and globalization. All the more so in the lands
within the Soviet Union, which were modernized
in a particularly brutal way and where previous
social structures, forming the foundation of all
beliefs and projections, were crushed—first with
the disappearance of the Tsar and Court and then
with collectivization.
And yet. Engelking’s volume offers an
astounding knowledge, its meaning going beyond
Polesie and the Vitebsk region: ­knowledge about
an incredible vitality of categories composing the
core of “Christian peasant culture” or “pre-modern
mentality.” Inhabitants of the villages described
are above all “locals.” They are defined by working
the fields—it is the only honest labor, juxtaposed
to the passivity or ephemeral occupations of the
“masters,” to “Jewish” cunning or possessiveness
of “strangers.” But they are also defined, very
strongly, by religion—which is perhaps significant
first of all as a sign of belonging to the community,
of a social rather than metaphysical bond but still
explaining the world both on the historical and
cosmological level. As some scholars claim, this
is the true “Belarusian neo-feudalism” with its
basic oppositions (your own vs. stranger, master
vs. serf, peasant vs. Jew) helping to comprehend
the world.
This way of understanding the world was
preserved in the descriptions and praises of
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working the land, of the toil of simple and hardworking people; in both distrust and recognition
of the role of the “city”, “manor”, “intellectual”;
in the description of the war, communism and
the Holocaust. There is a strikingly strong belief,
so characteristic for pre-modern peasant cultures,
in sacred antagonisms constituting the order of
the world and leaving you with just one option:
to bear, suffer and wait out all the hardships.
The permanence of this vision—and its incompatibility with our rationalizing understanding
of historical changes—is perhaps most clearly
revealed in the chapter on the perception of the
situation of religious communities in the Soviet
Union and later, up to the present times.
But even more important for understanding
not only post-kolkhoz villages but in my view also
the astounding stability of Lukashenka’s Belarus—
an increasingly incomprehensible wilderness
between Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine and even
Russia—are the notions on social order, on the
relations between the “estates” and on the relations with local authorities.
First, the memory of pedigree is preserved:
whether your ancestors stem from “petty gentry”
or from “serfs.” Moreover, this distinction is
very important and must be cultivated even
if it demands offending some taboos. “And no
nobleman will marry a peasant woman, of simple
folk, Orthodox or whatever. […] If she not noble—
no way.” This is how a respondent describes the
local relations and his perspective is by no means
unique.
Second, and it is difficult to say which of
these two phenomena is more flabbergasting—
the current local elites of power, that is usually
former low-ranked communist officials who took
over state property, managed to fit perfectly in
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this patriarchal and feudal vision of social order:
they are perceived as good or bad “masters.” All
possible ingredients of this vision find their use:
the dream of Saturnalia and temporary role
switching, longing for a profitable marriage,
a dream of revolt somewhere in the back of the
head. Old “benefactors” were seamlessly replaced
with predsyedatsiel—perhaps often well-meaning,
caring as befits a good master, perfectly ignorant
of the pressures and calamities suffered by these
lands. There is, of course, some great bitterness in
that but perhaps also the key to the “royal secret,”
the puzzle of Alexander Lukashenka holding
power for almost twenty years. If gentry and
peasant villages still bow down to their old-new
overlords, now touring their properties not in
a kalamashka [a small horse-drawn buggy] but
in a 4WD Toyota, it is the students, democrats,
journalists and demonstrators protesting against
the Bachka who try to destroy the foundation of
the cosmic order.
“Kolkhozniki” teach humility—precisely
because they show the great permanence of
identity narratives and visions of the world order
even in those places where, it would seem, wars
and totalitarianisms must have blown everything
to smithereens. The epigram of the Parisian
commentator Jean-Baptiste Karr “plus ça change,
plus c’est la même chose”, often quoted in support
of the voluntaristic vision of Prince Salina, is never
completely true but in Belarusian kolkhozy turns
out to be astoundingly accurate.
W O J C I E C H S TA N I S Ł AW S K I
historian of Russia and the Balkans, commentator of the
Rzeczpospolita daily
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Price: 20 PLN
Index: 287210
4 | 2013
No 4 | 2013
CENTRAL EUROPE
Aspen Institute Prague is supported by:
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