Full version - Aspen Institute Prague

No 2 | 2014
2 | 2014
Index: 287210
CENTRAL EUROPE
Aspen Institute Prague is supported by:
CENTRAL EUROPE
REENTERS HISTORY
Marek Cichocki, Robert Cooper, Tomáš Klvaňa, Luuk van Middelaar, Peter Pomeranstsev, Emmanuel Todd
Ukraine Can Be a Neutral State
An interview with Roman Szporluk
Right in Ascendance or Mainstream in Decline?
Frank Furedi
W W W . A S P E N I N S T I T U T E . C Z
POLITICS
Exit Politics I. Krastev | Russian Minority in Estonia after Crimea M. Ehala
Czech Export J. Bureš | Eurasian Commonwealth V. Inozemtsev, A. Barbashin
Another Code of Nabokov L. Engelking | Hašek in Galicia A. Kaczorowski
ECONOMY
CULTURE
No 2 | 2014
Advisory Board
Walter Isaacson (co-chairman), Michael Žantovský (co -chairman),
Yuri Andrukhovych, Piotr Buras, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Josef Joffe, Kai-Olaf 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 director)
Tra n s l at o r s
Tomasz Bieroń, Julia Sherwood, Nicholas Furnival
Published by
Aspen Institute Prague o. p. s.
Palackého 1, CZ 110 00 Praha
e-mail: [email protected]
www.aspeninstitute.cz
Year III
No 2/2014
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
COVER STORY
The Shock of Ukraine—Robert Cooper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
Why Enlargement Brakes?—Marek Cichocki. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
We Live in a World of Ailing Powers. An Interview with Emmanuel Todd by Maciej Nowicki. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
What Does the Russian Elite Really Believe in?—Peter Pomerantsev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Europe: the Return of Politics—Luuk van Middelaar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
C O M M E N T Tomáš Klvaňa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
THE INTERVIEW
Ukraine Can Be a Neutral State. An interview with Roman Szporluk by Filip Memches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
C O M M E N T Ivan Krastev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
POLITICS
A Plan for NATO—Grzegorz Kostrzewa-Zorbas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Russian Minority in Estonia after Crimea—Martin Ehala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Post-Soviet Central Asia: The Changing Politics Of Leadership Transition—Luca Anceschi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Europe and the Problem of Force—Wojciech Przybylski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Right in Ascendance or Mainstream in Decline?—Frank Furedi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C O M M E N T Leonidas Donskis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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ECONOMY
Czech Foreign Trade in Healthy Condition—Jan Bureš . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Eurasian Integration: Putin’s Futureless Project—Vladislav Inozemtsev, Anton Barbashin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Social Role of Business in Central Europe—Katharina Bluhm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Africa Wrapped in—Genetically Modified—Cotton—Tomáš Nídr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C O M M E N T Aviezer Tucker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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C U LT U R E
Another Code of Nabokov—Leszek Engelking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Two Recapitulations and One Stocktaking—Václav Burian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
A Broken Trail—Wojciech Stanisławski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Hašek in Galicia—Aleksander Kaczorowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
3
Dear readers,
debate “Central Europe: fit for the future”
assessed the first ten years of the EU membership, reviewed the region’s record in the EU
and the challenges for the next decade. Participants also discussed the eponymous report
drafted by a 15-member High Level Reflection
Group, including a member of our Supervisory
Board, Jiří Schneider.
The content of the new Aspen Review
Central Europe embraces the inauspicious
situation in Ukraine, and thus engages into the
debate on EU position in the world. We find
ourselves at the historical crossroads, where EU
member states are challenged to re-think their
relations with neighbors and political involvement in the region. Reflecting the complexity
of the situation, our cover story section
brings you different viewpoints analyzing the
Ukrainian crisis. Sir Robert Cooper addresses
the redefinition of the EU´s foreign policy
vision and role in global politics, Marek
Cichocki looks at the EU through the lens of
a non-member state such as Ukraine, while
the interview with French historian Emmanuel
Todd points out to the importance of demographics that will define the future balance of
power in Europe. In this issue you will also find
Katharina Blum’s assessment on the standing
of Corporate Social Responsibility environment
in Central Europe as well as interesting insights
on the recent European Parliament elections
from Frank Furedi and an ex-Member of the
European Parliament, Leonidas Donskis.
Last quarter was an immensely busy
period for us at the Institute. In early April, we
organized the first event commemorating this
year’s triple anniversaries: the end of Communism, and the Central European countries’
accession to NATO and the EU. The expert
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A real commemoration of the democratic
transformation came with the Aspen Annual
Conference. The two-day event “The Big Bang.
25 Years Since Annus Mirabilis”, held in the
beginning of June, was the highlight of this
spring. The conference gathered eminent
guests such as the Estonian President Toomas
Hendrik Ilves, former U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Senator
Joe Lieberman, Slovak ex-Prime Minister
Iveta Radičová, Ukrainian journalist Mykola
Riabchuk, Professor Péter Balázs, Slovak
diplomat Martin Bútora, Professor Cameron
Munter and many others. Keynotes, debates
and panels were structured so as to look
ahead rather than only to reminisce. The
positive feedback both from the national and
international media and the engaged audience convinced us that it is crucial to foster
and support debates on the future of Central
Europe. During the event we also hosted
a gathering of the International Committee,
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events are part of our regionalization strategy
and the efforts to establish the Aspen brand in
the Central European region.
composed of presidents and directors of all
Aspen Institutes, and convened a meeting of
the Aspen International Advisory Board. These
and other side-events of the conference helped
us strengthen the Aspen network and endorse
our activities.
In the midst of celebration mood however,
we did not neglect other fields of interest.
Following our focus on the digital agenda and
Internet economy, we held an expert meeting
titled “E-commerce as a Driver of Competitiveness” in April. The participants from e-business
background shared their professional views
on the actual state of e-commerce in Central
Europe. Subsequently in June, with Platform for
Internet Economy and Google Czech Republic,
we co-organized an informal breakfast
meeting with a Hungarian entrepreneur Adam
Somlai-Fischer, the co-founder of Prezi. The
event was focused on countless opportunities
of the Internet entrepreneurship for Central
European start-ups. Another topic we have
been devoting our attention to is the concept
of creative placemaking, which is the process
of deploying art and cultural activities as tools
to economically and socially revive localities,
cities and regions. In May, we organized a public
debate on that issue in the framework of the
European Economic Congress in Katowice,
Poland, another one took place at the music
festival Pohoda in Slovakia in July. These two
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Cementing the network of supporters and
collecting feedback from them is essential
for us. For that purpose, we gave a BBQ party
for the Friends of the Aspen Institute Prague in
May, at the beautiful setting of the Vítkov Hill.
Besides introducing the Institute´s activities to
new members, it was a great opportunity for
networking among the members themselves
as well as with the AIP staff and representatives
of the Board of Directors. If you are interested
in joining the group, please contact me or my
colleagues via a form available on our website.
There, you will also find information about the
upcoming events this fall, such as the presentation of the crowdfunding study or the Creative
Placemaking Festival in November.
I wish you a great summer and an inspiring
reading.
RADEK ŠPICAR
Executive Director
Aspen Institute Prague
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Photo: Aspen Institute Prague
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EDITORIAL
Central Europe Re-Enters history
Aleksander Kaczorowski
The specter of post-totalitarianism is again
hanging over Central Europe.
This term was coined years ago by Václav
Havel. The author of The Power of the Powerless
(1978) realized that the system prevailing in his
country was a completely new socio-political
phenomenon, the essence of which was a combination of dictatorship and consumer society.
The post-totalitarian system survived wherever the citizens were content with the status
of consumers: in the shape of the monarchy of
Putin, Lukashenko’s state-owned farming estate,
or the post-nomenclature oligarchies of Ukraine.
Their fate was not determined by Huntington’s phantasms, but by the lack of a real
perspective for a democratic integration (not
only in terms of capital, production or trade)
with the West.
More than twenty five years ago Mikhail
Gorbachev provoked communist elites in
Central Europe to support the changes desired
by the most active sections of the societies
when it turned out that a necessary condition
of internal reforms initiated by him in the USSR
was the deepening of economic dependence
of the region. At the same time, he himself
encouraged them to act by ruling out military
intervention in the region. He probably
imagined that it would be possible to combine
a relative democratization (glasnost’) and the
consolidation of society around the Communist elite, allowing economic reforms to be
carried out (perestroika).
But it did not happen. The drive for freedom
of the nations of Central Europe and the
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ALEKSANDER KACZOROWSKI
Editor in Chief of Aspen Review
Photo: Jacek Herok
Soviet Union in the years 1989–1991 led to the
greatest geopolitical changes since the Second
World War. In the area between the Adriatic Sea,
the Baltic and the Black Sea, the best remedy
for the challenges of globalization, structural
backwardness of the region and lawlessness
was seen in a “return to Europe.”
Perhaps history is repeating itself now.
Perhaps the post-totalitarian regime of Putin,
trying to preserve its influence in Ukraine,
provoked some local oligarchs to support
the libertarian and pro-Western aspirations of the most active segments of the
Ukrainian society. If so, the best remedy for
the post-totalitarianism of Ukraine is a “return
to (Central) Europe”.
This is how Central Europe re-enters
history.
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COVER STORY
The Shock
of Ukraine
Sir Robert Francis Cooper
The EU needs to look again at its relationship with Russia.
A relationship is unavoidable; but it should be treated
exactly like that: an unavoidable necessity, to be handled
witha certain coolness.
If President Putin wanted to shock us, he
succeeded. The Russian seizure of Crimea is
shocking on four counts. First it breaches of
one of the basic principles of international law;
second, the discovery that the Russian view of
the world is that force and power are the things
that count is shocking; third, the Russian lied, and
spread their lies in propaganda broadcasts to an
extent we have not seen for years; and finally,
the Russian policy of promoting instability and
chaos in Ukraine is perhaps most shocking of all.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea is without
a precedent not just in the post-Cold War period,
but in the whole post-war period. Crimea has
not been a disputed territory, though its special
relationship with Russia has always been understood. This was recognized in the agreement with
Ukraine on the naval bases; but this agreement
also made clear that Russia accepted Crimea as
a part of Ukraine. The Russian action is in breach
of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the
Budapest Treaty as well as its bilateral agreements
with Ukraine. The basis of international order
is territorial, and the acquisition of territory by
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force was something we believed in Europe had
been banished to the history books.
States break up, sometimes by negotiation
as Czechoslovakia did, sometimes in bloodshed
like Yugoslavia. Sometimes incorporation has
never been fully accepted as in East Timor. But it
is hard to think of another case where one state
has taken over some of its neighbor’s territory in
the post-war period; this was after all something
we fought a war over in the Persian Gulf in 1991,
with Russian support.
Mr. Putin, as usual, quotes what he claims to
be precedents—the tribute illegality pays to the
law. He mentions Iraq (2002) and Libya. I have
sympathy with those who say that it would have
been better to stick more closely to international
law. But in neither case was the acquisition of
territory involved. The precedent he gives most
space to is Kosovo. Here too neither the US nor
anyone else added to their national territory. And
the Kosovo declaration of independence came
eight years after the military action, following
a period under UN supervision, and a multilateral
process involving the UN and many countries.
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The Kosovo story begins in fact long before the
military action, and includes many years in which
the Albanian-speaking people were treated as
second-class citizens. All this is different from
Crimea.1
What does this action mean? It tells us that
the world that Russia wants is one of power and
not of law. Power and law are not incompatible—
power may be used in accordance with the law
and in support of the law. But in the Russian
view—it now seems—power decides. Might is
right. But it is not. Once you have decided that
only power matters there is no longer any sense
in talking about right and wrong.2
In this world, there are no rules, and power is
limited only by opposing power. This is familiar as
the classical “realist” position in international relations, a well-established theory, which applied
in practice is capable of producing a nightmare
world.
Given these shocks, it is time that we—and
this applies especially to Europe—awoke from
the dream that Russia is going to become like us
in any foreseeable timeframe.
We have become used to a world in which
things got better. Almost all of us are more free,
more secure, more prosperous than at any time
in our history. The tensions of the early days
of the Cold War, with the regular crises over
Berlin, gave way to the negotiated stability of
the Berlin agreements and the Austrian State
Treaty. The Soviet Union continued to enforce
its will in the Warsaw Pact through armed forces,
but kept to its sphere of influence. The state
was oppressive, but there was stability. Then
came 1989 and we seemed to have a chance
for stability with freedom. We hoped that the
intelligent and humane policies of Gorbachev
would continue, and that little by little Russia
would join our world, a more prosperous world
in which the basic concepts were legal and
economic: contract not conquest. This world is
governed by law; and the power that enforces
the law is jointly owned, and the society that
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results is open. Freedom, prosperity, security:
they all come from rules.
It turns out that the Russian state does not
need to join this world. Russia’s state, like Saudi
Arabia’s, is funded by revenue from natural
resources, and it does not need to be a part of
the capitalist/democratic world.3 The dominant
mode of thought in the Russian state is pre-capitalist; exploitation of natural resources is a form
of conquest—you tear wealth from the earth as
from the hands of your enemies. In such countries,
revenue is collected from exported resources.
Taxation, and therefore democracy, are less necessary. The idea of empire can still be rational for
a country that functions in this way.
This action tells us that
the world that Russia
wants is one of power
and not of law. Power
and law are not incompatible—power may be
used in accordance with
the law and in support
of the law. But in the
Russian view—it now
seems—power decides.
Over the years since Putin arrived in power we
should have taken better note of Russia’s return
to bad habits. Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Aslan
Maskhadov, Anna Politkovskaya (killed, mafia
style, on Putin’s birthday) Alexander Litvinenko,
Sergei Magnitsky, and many more should have
taught us the sort of state we were dealing with.
The EU needs to look again at its relationship
with Russia. A relationship is unavoidable; but it
should be treated exactly like that: an unavoidable
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necessity, to be handled with a certain coolness.
The terminology of “strategic partnership” was
always ridiculous. (The EU has only one strategic
partner—the USA). Even “partnership” applies
only in a limited number of fields, such as Iran or
commercial relations—though here too Russia’s
record of keeping its commitments is poor—
in the WTO, on overflying rights, or in its abuse
of health regulations as a weapon against this or
that member state.
Doing business with those who lie and break
their word requires, at the minimum, continuous skepticism. The benefit of the doubt should
be systematically withheld. Whenever we find
ourselves drifting towards thinking that Russia
is trustworthy or predictable, we should pinch
ourselves and wake up. Now Russia has arrears
to make good; and they will need a track record
before they can be taken seriously as partners.
Most shocking is Russia’s active destabilization of a neighbor. It is wrong to think in terms of
a return to the Cold War—nothing ever returns
in the same form—but this nonetheless recalls
Stalin’s approach to Europe in the first years
after the war, when his policy was to wait while
Europe fell deeper into crisis, making it into
material for a Communist takeover. This is how
George Marshall saw Stalin at a meeting with
him following six weeks of fruitless negotiation
on the future of Germany. Stalin doodled wolf’s
heads on a note pad, showing no sign that he
thought it urgent to put Germany or Europe
back on its feet. On his return to Washington
Marshall set in hand the work that became the
Marshall Plan—which meant rebuilding Europe
without Russia.
The situation today is not the same. In one
respect it is worse. Stalin’s policy was passive; but
he was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist, and the
previous decade had provided support for the
idea that capitalism was doomed to collapse and
that conflict between capitalist countries was
written into the laws of history. So Stalin was in
no hurry. Mr. Putin’s policy includes the active
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promotion of chaos. Perhaps he understands the
West better than Stalin. Perhaps he understands
that free and successful countries across the
border from Ukraine make people there want
the same for themselves; and he fears what would
happen if, one day, something similar appeared
on his own borders.
Most shocking is Russia’s
active destabilization of
a neighbor. It is wrong to
think in terms of a return
to the Cold War, but
this nonetheless recalls
Stalin’s approach to
Europe in the first years
after the war, when
his policy was to wait
while Europe fell deeper
into crisis, making
it into material for
a Communist takeover.
In its dealings with the EU, Russia has
contested the terminology “common neighborhood.” For the EU side, this was inexplicable;
but it may be the Russians disliked the implication that our relations with the countries in
between were on a similar footing. It is true that
Russia’s history and cultural links with Ukraine
go back a long way—but so do those of the
Habsburg Monarchy. That there was some kind
of contest over Ukraine was apparent from the
(failed) Orange Revolution onwards. But the
contest was a strange affair because the EU was
only half-heartedly engaged. Some EU member
states are opposed even to the thought that
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Ukraine might one day apply for membership
(hence their refusal to admit that Ukraine is
a European country). The real contest is not
between the EU and Russia but between Russia
and those in Ukraine who would like a closer
association with the EU. The European view has
always been that we should not ask Ukraine to
choose between Europe and Russia. In spite of
everything this remains correct.
Here is another difference in philosophy
between the EU and Russia. The EU thinks of
countries as equal, free to choose their own
future.4 Russia seems to believe in a hierarchy
in which strong countries do what they want
and weak countries do what they are told. The EU
wants strong, well-governed states on its borders;
Russia wants weak states, which it can dominate.
If the Eurasian Union is based on this logic—an
economic version of the Warsaw Pact—it will
probably not do well. The test of power in the
long run is peace, not war. The men in balaclavas
are unlikely to be good at administration.
Our response to all this matters. The threat
posed by Russia to an order of law and security
needs a response. We need to give Russia incentives to restore legality; and disincentives to go
further. Whatever we do should be sustainable
over a long period; since it is unlikely that these
policies will be reversed quickly.
In the post-war period, Moscow’s policies
targeted points of weakness. They all failed:
Truman sent assistance to Greece and Turkey
where Stalin was helping the civil war in the one
and threatening the other. The Berlin was countered by the Berlin blockade—plus a retaliatory
ban on trade with the Soviet Zone. The US and
others responded with armed force in Korea.
And over the time Soviet attempts to incorporate
the countries of Eastern Europe into their sphere
of influence also failed. Some of the failure was
built into the policies: ordinary Germans did not
want chaos, and by end of the blockade, they
were convinced that the allies, especially the
Americans, were their friends. But without the
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Western, mostly American, response Stalin’s policies might have succeeded.
We have our own weaknesses, of which the
most important is our dependence on Russian
energy. Much has been done to improve the
position of many EU members, but also much
remains to be done still.
The most important weakness, however, is
the weakness of Ukraine, which has been badly
governed ever since it left the Soviet Union (and
even worse while it was inside). Borderlands are
difficult places. Belgium has been the scene of
more battles per hectare than anywhere else
on the earth5; Alsace-Lorraine (and the Saar)
was a problem for centuries before it became
the cornerstone of a solution, and a cause of
war before it became a cause of peace. Alto
Adige was subject to battles through a thousand years and terrorist attacks until late in the
20th century. And borderlands are all the more
difficult when relations between the bordering
powers are contested.
Ukraine will need financial help. This will
be useless unless Ukraine has a legitimate
government that unites the country. Financial
conditionality is not enough. If politics remains
corrupt, assistance will be wasted. If Ukraine is
to be strong, its government needs to respond
to legitimate local interests. It may be right too,
for the EU to assist with security and justice as
well as with economic management. A purely
technocratic program will be money wasted;
the weakness in Ukraine is political and like the
Marshall Plan our response needs to be political.
These programs should also be accompanied
by a major media effort. Not propaganda, but
reliable reporting.
Whether this can work will depend on
finding leaders in Ukraine with courage and
vision. Unhappily, post-Soviet Ukraine has been
governed in ways that are not so different from
post-Soviet Russia. Unless this can be changed,
that is where they will end up. Mr. Poroshenko
says many of the right things, and he is rich
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enough to have no excuse for corruption himself.
He has a strong mandate. But turning a corrupted
state around is one of the most difficult tasks
in the world. His job is to re-found the state.
For this he will need the courage of a lion and
the cunning of a fox.
To repeat, this is not the Cold War. Putin is not
Stalin, and Russia is not the Soviet Union. Oil and
gas is a big part of the government budget but
a decreasing part of GNP. The names of Magnitsky,
Khordorkovsky and Politkovslaya should remind
us that there is a free society waiting to get out.
Therefore, we should not cut ourselves off from
Russia, nor from the Russian people, but we
should be careful, skeptical, and less starry eyed
in dealing with its leaders.
One final difference from the beginning
of the Cold War needs attention. In 1945, the
Soviet Union was a world scale power. The threat
of a Communist takeover in Europe was real.
Communism was strong in many European
countries. Today no one believes in Communism; Russia is rather second rate, and has little
to offer the world except gas. Putin’s Eurasian
Union looks like a further step in retreat. Russia
is now a regional nuisance rather than a global
threat. It is no longer a serious threat to the
USA—though it now challenges the order that
America has built. But with Western Europe an
established ally, and most of central Europe
secure, Washington’s interest in Ukraine is not
of the same order as its interest in Western Europe
seventy years ago. Europe’s interest however is
unchanged: this is to have well governed neighbors. Europe must therefore be ready to take
more of the burden. If we do, we can be sure of
American support. We will also need courage
and vision.
PS: This is a bad moment for Britain to question
its own EU future.
SIR ROBERT
FRANCIS COOPER,
KCMG, MVO (born 1947
in Essex, United Kingdom)
is a British diplomat and
advisor currently serving
as a Special Advisor at the
European Commission with
regard to Myanmar. He is also
a member of the European
Council on Foreign Relations
and is an acclaimed publisher on foreign affairs.
Photo: Archive of Robert Cooper
1 One might accuse Mr. Putin of being inconsistent: if he wants to quote Kosovo as a precedent for the legitimacy of his actions, he should
recognise it. But inconsistency is the least important of his faults.
2 “Force should be right. Or rather right and wrong, between whose endless justice resides, should lose their names, and so should justice
too.” Troilus and Cressida
3 A question for the future is whether China, which is closer to being a normal capitalist country, will in the end also need a more normal
legal system.
4 Having equal rights, that is. This is not the same as having equal influence.
5 Belgium was contested at different times by France, Spain, the Netherlands—at one time a considerable power—the Empire/Germany,
and Britain.
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Why Enlargement
Brakes?
Marek A. Cichocki
The case of Ukraine and the European reaction on it
proved once again a general truth about the enlargement.
Without this most effective soft power weapon in the EU’s
arsenal, the European project remains helpless towards
the external world.
For a long time enlargement was estimated
as the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of
the EU’s foreign policy, a symbol of its unique
effective soft power. It was even something more
because enlargement was also taken as the proof
for EU’s ability of strategic thinking and acting
vis-à-vis its nearest neighborhood. Thus, there
was a substantive link binding the political will to
extend the borders of the European unity project
with the strong European self-confidence.
Now, a decade after its most successful
enlargement of 2004, the strategic impetus of
the European project has slowed down to such
extend that the whole process of enlargement
is in danger to brake entirely. This development
tells us a lot about the current state of the EU
and how much the world around Europe has
changed recently as well.
The EU of today doesn’t believe any more in
itself. The idea of enlargement has been always
accompanied by deep hesitation on Europe’s
ontological status, raising endless and inconclusive questions of the real borders of our continent. In a nutshell, the optimists and proponents
of the enlargement argued that the real borders
of the European project start always where reluctance to set and promote the European values
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occurs. The geography does not matter much
from that point of view which—being embedded
in a sort of European idealism—has reflected
a naïve but moving conviction on Promethean essence of the integration. The process
of integration has to maintain its open nature
as the founding fathers indicated in the Rome
treaty and the prosperity, peace and happiness
cumulated in united European countries cannot
remain an exclusive good and must be shared
with those who barely aspire to be members of
the club. This idealistic approach has revealed
in two recent decades to have quite practical
geopolitical consequences as it has provided
the basis for a powerful and attractive response
of Europe to the collapse of the Soviet Union
and changed entirely the fate of the Central and
Eastern part of Europe.
Jan Zielonka, a Polish scholar who analyzed
the impressive enhancement of enlargement
capabilities in Europe in the outset of 21st century,
argues in his book on The EU as Empire that this
strength and ambition encapsulated in the
enlargement project derives from the fact that
the EU turned into new form of a postmodern
empire, an internally highly complex but externally assertive political entity. If that was the
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case, this new empire had been in deep crisis
before it started really to exist. It is to imagine
that the process of enlargement has not been
driven by any deep strategic convictions but
by pure interests of a part of the EU members.
In short, it is quite conceivable and justified
to see the enlargement in terms of occasional
national interests rather than of strategic goals
and values. First and foremost it was German
unification that triggered the idea of eastern
enlargement to be on roll. It seemed a natural
next step in the wake of the fall of Berlin wall
and not by accident it was completely consistent
with economic and security interests of a big
Germany placed now in the middle of the continent. This development was in the interest of
the UK as well, which sought to water down the
political dimension of the Union and hoped to
reach that aim through enlargement. There was
an additional factor enabling the whole process
of enlargement. Russia was practically absent
from the international political stage in Europe of
the 1990s, and this fortunate situation facilitated
completion of the eastern enlargement.
Now the interests linked to the eastern
enlargement have been mostly satisfied, at least
in the German case, but the favorable international aura for new candidates has passed
definitively. The Europe’s failure in the Arab
Spring has shown the limits of the European
foreign policy and of its ability to influence positively the situation in North Africa and Middle
East. But especially in the East the EU has faced
the strong opponent to its further enlargement
policy—Russia, which has resolvedly refused to
accept any activities of the EU in its post-soviet
sphere of influence. The crisis on the Vilnius
summit in 2013, the refusal of Yanukovych to
sign the association agreement and the attempt
to suppress the civil protests in Ukraine with
the Russia’s support marked the turning point.
For the first time (with exception of Georgia in
2008—the warning never taken seriously in
Europe) the EU’s soft power exerted in order
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to widen the European influence in the neighborhood with rather modest promise of future
membership has met with violent response.
It was a shock for many in Europe and it has
confirmed many fears and prejudices that have
History accelerates
again and the lack
of strategic assertiveness
and strength of the
EU in times of
an unprecedented
upheaval in Ukraine
can undermine in turn
the European project
as such.
always accompanied the process of enlargement.
It is paradoxical that the most successful political and economic project, which enlargement
probably was in the whole postwar integration history of Europe, has become for many in
Western and Southern parts of the Union the
source of all evil. Immigration, unemployment,
confrontation with Russia have been indicated
as negative consequences of the enlargement
process and fueled the rising political power of
far right, anti-European parties in many of old
member counties, foremost in France and the
Netherlands.
One could currently doubt whether the idea
of enlargement is still present in the EU’s political
agenda. But history accelerates again and the
lack of strategic assertiveness and strength of
the EU in times of an unprecedented upheaval
in Ukraine can undermine in turn the European
project as such. It is not clear whether the societies and the political elite in old member states
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really understand the meaning of current challenge comprised by the future of Ukraine. France,
immersed in its own identity fatigue, seeks to
keep Germany as close as possible in the framework of a restored small Europe. The UK is on
the way to its deep splendid isolation from the
EU and European affairs. Germany, as usual, is
dramatizing the issue of its potential leadership
in the EU, which can never be realized partly
because of the historical identity problems partly
of the failed strategic choices (Russia first). If this
political uncertainty and instability correlates
now with the wide spread anti-European mode in
electorates, the EU’ external activities can become
blocked for a long time.
Finally, it is a question of the ability to provide
new political instruments in order to solve the
new political problems. If not enlargement, then
what? After the last successful rounds of enlargement, but simultaneously facing the growing
problems in accession negotiations with Turkey,
the EU failed to construct new political instruments for its political presence and influence in
the neighborhood to replace the enlargement
perspective, which the EU itself doesn’t believe
in any more. For a short time the concept of the
ENP gave some basis for rather modest hopes
which, however, were quickly frustrated after
the Europe’s failure in Libya and at the Vilnius
summit. There is a strong suspicion that Europe
would have probably left Ukraine on its own and
played it into the hands of Putin if it had not
been for the victims at Majdan and the strong
resistance of many ordinary Ukrainians, who
didn’t accept the fact that a new wall had been
built by Yanukovich between their country and
Europe. This confused the politicians and the
public opinion in the West and put them under
obligation to act, even if reluctantly and with
lacking self-confidence. The case of Ukraine and
the European reaction on it proved once again
a general truth about the enlargement. Without
this most effective soft power weapon in the
EU’s arsenal, the European project remains help-
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less towards the external world. But there is one
more, even more important lesson to be drawn
from the Ukrainian case: the EU without enlargement perspective loses its own compass, contests
its own values, and turns into an irrelevant selfish
club of members.
MAREK ALEKSANDER
CICHOCKI
is the Research Director of the
Natolin European Centre in
Warsaw as well as Editor-in-chief
of the magazine “New Europe.
Natolin Review”. From 2007 to
2010 Advisor to the President
of the Republic of Poland and
Sherpa for the negotiations of
the Lisbon Treaty. Since 2003
he is also publisher and Editor-in-chief of the “Teologia
Polityczna” yearly. Permanent professor in the Institute of
Applied Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw.
Photo: Archive Natolin
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We Live in a World
of Ailing Powers
The supernova shines with an extremely bright light, but
a moment later it falls apart. Today’s EU is a supernova—
says Emmanuel Todd in an interview with Maciej Nowicki
How do you assess the actions of the EU in
Ukraine?
The EU position on Ukraine is awfully vague
and chaotic. And little wonder: we do not know
whether the Union still exists at all. Europe today
is not a community. It has become a tool to pursue
national interests by individual states. This is
particularly true in the case of the economy—
Berlin imposed an economic policy on the EU,
which benefits only the Germans. And this is
what we also see in this case. Let us start from
the beginning—when Yanukovych’s rule was
collapsing, we saw Steinmeier, Sikorski and Fabius
in Kiev…
EMMANUEL TODD
But Fabius left after one day…
France is a completely confused country. It
has no goals in domestic and external policy.
It can do only one thing: adapt to the Germany
line. Let us be clear—it was Steinmeier who
took Fabius to Kiev—as part of his hand
luggage. Why should Fabius go to Kiev? For
the French, Ukraine means absolutely nothing.
Just as for the whole of Western Europe.
There are only three countries interested in
Ukraine, countries for which it is something
specific. I mean Germany and Poland, for historical and obvious reasons, and Sweden—for rather
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French demographer, political scientist, sociologist, historian.
An employee of the Paris Institute of Demographic Studies
(INED—Institut national d’études démographiques).
Author of much publicized books, including The Final
Fall (orig. La Chute final. Essais sur la decomposition
de la sphère Soviétique, 1976 ), which announced the
end of the USSR, and After the Empire: The Breakdown
of the American Order (orig. Après l’empire. Essai sur
la Decomposition du système américain, 2002).
Photo: Photo: Frédéric Sénard
puzzling reasons. Germany, Poland and Sweden
have used the EU to pursue a policy which suits
them. Initially, it was not a matter between
Russia and the EU. It became such as a result of
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the pressure of these three countries. And with
a disastrous effect. After the annexation of the
Crimea the EU sought to drive Putin into a corner,
force him to react. And it lost this battle. It was only
after the fact that the EU noticed that only Putin
had an army. Europeans were trying to do something historically new and certainly absurd—to
pursue a policy of expansion without military
resources. I think they took their illusions seriously
and came to the conclusion that in today’s world
the only thing that exists is the economy.
80 % of voters believe that Hollande is ridiculous.
Industry is in decline and unemployment is at
historical highs. European elections interest no
one. Europe is not associated in France with any
positive values. And it looks like this in most EU
countries. Citizens of Southern Europe have
become subhuman, and the whole Union is
a disgusting hierarchical machinery, in which
the stronger—today Germany—is always right.
The Union is collapsing. And the games
with Ukraine and bringing Yanukovych down
remind me of the supernova phenomenon. The
star shines with an extremely bright light, but
a moment later falls apart. Today’s EU is such
a supernova.
This policy of expansion without military
resources had been working very well for
Europe. For example in 2004.
In the case of Ukraine it somehow failed.
Ukraine does not have its own dynamics. It is
an amorphous zone, unable to modernize on
its own—modernization has always come from
the outside. Ukraine could slip out of the Russian
orbit only by leaping onto the orbit of another
power. But where? America is too far away. And
Europe is not a military power and has no money.
And even if it had, it does not intend to make
Ukraine its satellite, pumping billions of euro
there. As a result, the EU has achieved only one
thing through its recent actions: it has speeded
up the disintegration of Ukraine. Europe had
come with the same intentions as always: with
the dream of drawing another state into the
liberal, capitalist, harmonious space. And in fact
it destroyed the strained state, which had not
even have the time to hatch.
And Russia?
Russia is growing in strength. An extraordinary amount of time and energy was wasted to
convince everyone that Russia was in dire straits,
that nothing good was happening there, and
only a further decline is possible. Millions of articles have been written about how disgusting
Putin is. Of course, Russia is not a democracy—it
has always been a rather brutal country, where the
collective was more important than individuals
were. At the same time never in its history has
Russia been such a free country as it is today.
Under the tsarist regime and especially under
Communism it was much worse… That is not
all: in 1976, I wrote a book in which I predicted
the collapse of the Soviet Union, based on
demographic data. Mortality was increasing,
the number of births was falling etc. Today,
the opposite is true—mortality decreases, the
average life expectancy lengthens…
You accuse the EU. And Russia? After all, it is
the actions of Moscow in the east of the country which are aimed at dismantling Ukraine…
Let us get beyond anecdotal evidence. It is
time to understand that something more is at
stake. Let us go back to 1989. After the fall of
communism, Russia was incredibly weakened.
And the balance of power moved towards the
EU—Europe united and became a political actor.
But today we live in different times. Take France:
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It is still lower than in Mongolia. Not to mention
alcoholism or mental diseases—the statistics
are staggering…
That is true. But the situation is improving.
The number of acts of violence, killings and
alcoholics decreases. Fertility rate is at 1.65—
it is still not enough. But in Poland it is only 1.3.
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And how far will this go? You have always
insisted that the attempt to draw Ukraine into
the West would never work, because part of
Ukraine is too deeply rooted in Russianness.
But Putin has exactly the same problem.
Dimitri Trenin emphasizes that the absorption
of Ukraine would be very difficult for Russia,
stabilizing the east of the country would cost
more money than Moscow has, and they would
also have to separate the West, which is very
anti-Russian.
I do not think that the Russians want to divide
Ukraine. They know that Ukraine is not uniform,
that the western part desperately does not want
to be Russian. I think that Moscow would prefer
a federation and controlling Ukraine through
Russian-speaking provinces. It seems to me that
the Russian project assumes maintaining the
integrity of Ukraine…
The unemployment rate is 4 %. Added to all this
is a sense of pride in overcoming the terrible
20-years long crisis—because in the 1990s Russia
slid down incredibly low. This is a country where
today, there is hope. In short, on the eastern
border a power is reborn, which again becomes
attractive to its periphery…
And which says—Putin has repeatedly emphasized this—that Ukraine is just a pipe dream,
that Ukrainian people have never existed…
In Russia, we see an effective nation
building, and in Ukraine we see defeat.
Of course, there is such a thing as the Ukrainian
culture. Anthropological patterns are different
here than in Russia—much more individualistic, anarchic, closer to those in Poland.
But Ukraine has one fundamental problem. Russia
had existed before the rise of the Soviet Union,
while Ukraine practically never did. It was not
about recovering after a big change, after the
earthquake, which the collapse of communism
was. Here it was necessary to build the state from
scratch. And this project was completely unsuccessful. Ukraine is now a failed state. We were
constantly hearing about the demographic problems of Russia. So let me quote a number here—
since the fall of the Soviet Union, the population
of Ukraine has shrunk by 12.5%. And it is not just
an ordinary demographic crisis, as until recently
in Russia. A large-scale migration is superimposed
on that. Europe, Canada and the USA steal the best
part of the population from Ukraine: the young
and the educated. A society from which young
people with degrees are fleeing does not have
too much of a chance of success. And one more
thing: in 1991, Russian-speaking residents of the
east of Ukraine did not mind finding themselves
outside Russia. In the 1990s, everyone wanted to
dismantle Russia, even the Russians themselves.
Because then, Russia was collapsing. Today, Ukraine
is falling apart. Why do people want to go back to
Russia? Not because Putin has manipulated them
but because Russia becomes attractive again.
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But how do we know that Russia really has
such a plan? And even if it has, how do we
know that everything will go according to the
plan? Apparently Putin’s plan was to control
Ukraine through Yanukovych, but as we know,
Yanukovich was brought down…
It is true—we do not have any guarantee
that this will happen. The train of history may
be unable to stop. Perhaps Moscow will have to
take the Donbass Region, for Russian-speaking
population wants to go back to their mother
country at any price. Because for these people
it is the only way of regaining self-esteem. And
then a further breakdown of Ukraine will occur.
Because the inhabitants of Kiev and the inhabitants of Lvov are completely different species.
And they will be unable to live together in peace.
A further disintegration will happen.
And that is why I understand the concerns
of the Poles. Because what is happening today is
exactly what Poland wanted to avoid… I do not
forget Katyń or the fact that the Red Army stood
with its guns down during the Warsaw Uprising,
allowing the massacre of Poles. But Stalin also did
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their lost pride. How do we know what will
satisfy them?
Russians are nationalists. Nationalism is idiotic
but as they have been maltreated for the last 20
years, it does not surprise me at all that they want
to go on a rampage now. Besides all powers are
by nature unbearable. There is no such thing as
a very nice power. You need to find a balance
and learn to live in peace. Poland has no other
choice. You could at a pinch suspect Moscow
that it wants to regain the “new Russia,” of which
is Putin speaking so much. But I think that the
Russians have once and for all come to terms with
the fact that Poland is part of the West.
And one more thing: I would like to clarify
what I said earlier. It is true—Russia regains
strength. But this is not a return to the old empire,
it is not some incredible dynamics. The current
geopolitical balance was disturbed only because
Russia is coming back to relative health. We live
in a world of ailing powers.
What led to the disasters of the twentieth
century was the demographic dynamics. The
French, the Germans, the Russians were developing at a crazy pace and seeking territories for
expansion. Today, everybody is experiencing
a more or less serious demographic collapse.
From the Russian point of view, some great territorial progression makes no sense, because even
as it is now, Russia is too big for its population.
Therefore, we are moving towards a great disaster.
The demographic crisis also has its positive side.
In such a universe, it is easier to get along.
something good for Poland—he moved it, he
gave Poland boundaries which were geographically and ethnically flawless. The most important
problem for Poland after 1989 was whether the
Germans would question the border on the Oder
and Neisse rivers. It did not happen. But today the
boundaries are moving again: Ukraine exploded.
And this is just the beginning of a change—
because Russia is going up, and the EU is losing
its importance. And on top of it, chances that
Poland will behave sensibly here are less than 1
in 10. Because Poland is too accustomed to an
aggressive attitude towards Russia. It is unable
to get rid of this posture.
I have no doubt about the fact that Poland
has found itself in a bad situation. But I do not
quite understand your position. Poland recognized the borders of Ukraine and abandoned any revisionist leanings. We have not
claimed the right to, for example, Lvov, which
had been a Polish city. While Russia is practicing full-blown revisionism today, questions
the existing borders. Who is aggressive here?
Let me put it another way—today’s Europe
has nothing to do with Europe from the 1990s,
which was dynamic, full of optimism. If push
comes to shove, it will just leave the Poles to
their own devices. Because it is weak and full of
hypocrisy. In contrast, recovering the lost power
by Russia is a long-term phenomenon, with which
you will have to learn to live. I do not think that the
policy of confrontation with a resurgent power,
that is Russia, where the main ally of Poland is
supposed to be a power losing importance, that
is the EU, is a good policy. It is rather a recipe for
disaster and disappointment.
MACIEJ NOWICKI
is Deputy Editor in Chief of Aspen
Review Central Europe.
Photo: Maciej Nowicki
Well, what are we supposed to do? You assume
that the West and the Poles are full of resentment and negative emotions, and the Russians
are an embodiment of moderation and common sense. But the Russians are driven today
mainly by one thing—an attempt to recover
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What Does the Russian
Elite Really Believe in?
Peter Pomerantsev
In the Kremlin’s world view there is no such thing as
genuine political philosophy, there is only “political
technology,” a very post-Soviet term which defines all
political language as mere means
At a somewhat high-minded conference in
Kiev this May, the west’s (slightly self-appointed)
intellectuals, from Bernard Henri-Levi through
Leon Wieseltier, Paul Berman and François
Heisbourg, gathered to discuss “the meaning of
Ukrainian pluralism for Europe, Russia and the
world.” Most agreed about the importance of
what is happening in and over Ukraine, and that
today’s Kremlin poses a new authoritarian challenge. Many argued that Russia is the carrier of
a powerful ideology based on social and religious
conservatism, and that it was key for the liberals of
the world to unite and stand up to it. While I agree
that Russia is indeed a challenge to the global
order, I think it is a grievous mistake to believe it
a carrier of a genuine conservative message. The
danger is that after confronting a powerful, and
very real religious conservative movement in the
face of radical Islam, the west now misdiagnoses
Russia’s underlying, dangerous ideology, and thus
uses the wrong strategy to defeat it.
While religious conservative rhetoric has
become a staple in Russian propaganda, with
attacks on decadent gay-Europa contrasted with
invocations of Holy Russia, one should always be
careful at taking the Kremlin’s words at face value.
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The same Russian elites who now profess themselves religious conservatives were committed
democrats just a few years ago, and avowed young
Communists in their youth. They might now shout
about Holy Russia fighting the fallen west but the
vast majority, allegedly including Putin, have their
children and funds in the same west they so decry.
“The same people who used to be Komsomols
then became committed democrats and have now
transformed into patriots—and we’re meant to
believe them?” asked the dissident Alexey Navalny
at his rigged trial last year.
Indeed the claim that Russia is any sort of
religious bastion doesn’t stand much scrutiny:
only 3% of Russians who say they are Orthodox
(in itself only a certain amount of the population)
go to church often; many who say they are religious also say they don’t believe in God; divorce
and abortion rates are very high. Even Russian
homophobia has less to do with religious values
but more with the huge influence of prison culture
which sees passive gays as the lowest of the low:
it’s prison songs, known as “chanson,” rather than
hymns, which are Russia’s most popular musical
form, and Putin consciously models his language
to imitate a gangster rather than a priest.
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Whatever it is Russia, is not on the edge of
a religious revolution à la Khomeini.
So how to understand the mind-sets of the
Kremlin elite? What does Putin really believe?
To understand this generation of Russian
power-brokers one needs to go back to the
late Soviet period when they came of age.
The Soviet 1970s and 1980s were punctuated
with a very cynical attitude to the official, ruling
Communist ideology. “Perestroika came much
too late,” remembers Alexander Yakovlev, one of
Gorbachev’s mentors, “the years of social stagnation almost killed social idealism… sowing
cynicism, disbelief and social lassitude.”“Cynicism
and double think was the defining emotion of
the late USSR,” agrees Lev Gudkov, head of the
polling group Levada Center, “exemplified by
the joke “we pretend to work and they pretend
to pay us.” Homo Sovieticus learnt to live with
a split consciousness: a private world with one
set of values and a public one where lying was
ritual. To ask what any one person “believed” was
always the wrong question: Soviet citizens grew
up with several narratives in their heads, and
switched between them whenever necessary.
Now the people who grew up with this
mind-set have grown up they have created
a system which is always transforming itself
according to the latest need. The Kremlin regime’s
salient feature is a liquid, shape-shifting approach
to power: freed from the cumbersome body of
“hard” totalitarianism, the leaders of today’s
Kremlin can speak like liberal modernizers in the
morning and religious fanatics in the afternoon.
The regime morphs from monarchist to oligarchy,
from free market authoritarianism à la Pinochet to
sinister populism à la Chavez, its willfully contradictory slogans taunting any attempts at definition: “conservative modernization,” “managed
democracy,” “competition without change.” For
the past two years a “Holy Russia” versus “decadent west” message has been useful to rebrand
a new generation of domestic dissidents as “fifth
columnists.” Since hundreds of thousands began
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to protest against Putin’s regime in 2011/2012 the
Kremlin has managed to change the agenda away
from domestic corruption and economic stagnation to discussion about the “clash of civilizations.”
It has worked, Putin’s ratings are back up. But it is
critical to understand that this rhetoric is a case
of the Kremlin using the church and religious
language for political purposes, rather than the
church taking over the Kremlin.
In the Kremlin’s worldview there is no such
thing as genuine political philosophy, there is
only “political technology,” a very post-Soviet term,
which defines all political language as mere means
(if another political language works better at any
given time- one can switch to it). The “political
technologists” are the key figures of the Russian
system, modern viziers who control the political
process like Wizards of Oz, creating political parties
to set the agenda, scripting media and setting
up faux civil society organizations to drive the
national debate the way the Kremlin wants.
Perhaps the most famous political technologist
is Vladislav Surkov, who ran the inner Russian political system in the first decade of the 21st century,
is credited with inventing “sovereign democracy,”
and now helps Putin in controlling Russia’s near
abroad, including Ukraine. In a semi-autobiographical novel, “Almost Zero,” Surkov tells the story of
a rotten PR man, Egor. Having grown up in the sham
ideology of the late USSR, and then seen so many
political models, from liberalism through mafia
state, change with such blistering progression, Egor
feels himself a sort of post-Soviet superman who
can see through the fakery of all political language
“through to the heights of creation,” filled with
a triumphant cynicism, convinced all motivations
are corrupt. Though the novel’s satire of contemporary Russia might seem anti-establishment, it actually feeds into the underlying mind-set used to
buttress Putinism: reform in Russia, or Ukraine, is
impossible as democracy everywhere is a sham.
An offshoot of this cynicism is a conspiracy-laden
explanation of world affairs: if all motivations are
corrupt then hidden forces are behind everything.
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And this liquid approach to ideology poses
its own global dangers: it means the Kremlin
can reach out and build alliances with quite
different groups, finding the right message for
each. European right-nationalists such as Hungary’s Jobbik and France’s Front Nationale are
seduced with anti-EU rhetoric; the anti-globalist
left with anti-Americanism. The Kremlin’s propaganda news channel, RT (formerly Russia Today)
is a platform for the Kremlin’s efforts to attract
a contradictory kaleidoscope of ideological
friends: Julian Assange had a show on RT, 9/11
conspiracy theories are given generous space;
Nigel Farage of the right-wing non-parliamentary United Kingdom Independence Party is also
regularly featured. What all these groups have
in common is a hatred of the west, and Russia is
successfully maneuvering itself to be the leader
of the world’s resentment against “western hegemony,” whatever the source of that resentment
is. This is potentially a very large constituency.
China and India, for example, have been slow
to criticize Russia for annexing Crimea. RT is the
world’s most watched news channel on YouTube,
with over a billion hits. The anti-western alliance is
growing: and Putin is determined to be at its helm.
So how does the west respond to this new
threat? If one frames the conflict with the Kremlin
as “Russian religious-conservatism” versus “liberalism” one only strengthens the Kremlins
illusions, firming up sectors of its global alliances.
Instead, the west has to reveal Russian cynicism
for what it is, constantly showing how words
and actions do not match up. To counter the
underlying Kremlin message that no change is
possible because all motivations are corrupt, the
west should focus on positive examples of change
and support those who believe it is possible.
But the west’s ability to battle Russian cynicism is badly undermined by our own readiness to
launder and profit Russian money coming to the
west, and ignore our own money laundering laws.
Even the sanctions against Kremlin elites over
the Crimea were mild, stopping at anything that
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would damage the Kremlin system. Practically this
helps to strengthen the Kremlin system, allowing
its elites to manipulate western governments by
making them dependent on Russian cash, but just
as importantly it reinforces the Kremlin argument
that the west’s values are a sham.
This needs to change. If western governments are not prepared to squeeze the nexus
between Russian money and its recipients in the
west, then civil society needs to step in, investigating, naming and shaming corrupt flows and
those who profit for them. At present, UK anti-corruption NGOs such as Global Witness or Tax
Watch barely engage with Russia: an absurdity,
given that so much Russian money flows through
the UK. Ultimately, international networks of anti-corruption NGOs could play a similar role to
that of Human Rights campaigners played in
the 1970s and 80s. Russia has signed up to any
number of international anti-corruption initiatives and commitments. It has at least officially
pledged to fight corruption at home. It is up to
an international civil society push to make these
initiatives real and force both Russian and western
governments to “abide by their own laws.”
This is ultimately what makes the challenge of the Kremlin’s underlying ideology so
important. Two versions of globalization are at
stake. One based on corruption and cynicism,
which argues that all ideals are for sale and all
motivations are corrupt, and the other which
strives for a utopian global village. The most
committed utopians are now to be found in Kiev
and Moscow, prepared to risk their lives for what
they believe in. In this sense Ukraine is indeed
key, the theater where the clash of cynicism and
idealism is most urgent.
PETER POMERANTSEV
is a television producer and nonfiction
writer, the author of Nothing Is True
and Everything Is Possible: The
Surreal Heart of the New Russia
(2014). He lives in London.
Photo: Archive Pomerantsev
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Europe:
the Return of Politics
Luuk van Middelaar
The Union after the Euro-crisis
and in Ukraine Crisis
On New Year’s Eve 2011, a sober but moving
ceremony took place in the Estonia theatre in
Tallinn. Prime-minister Ansip withdrew his country’s first euros from an ATM outside the building,
walked back inside and delivered a fine speech to
the nation. “First and foremost,” he started, “what
the euro means to us is security. The euro is our
security that Estonia is really part of Europe.”
Those were the days when American
commentators were predicting the euro’s precise
end date, speculators were betting billions on
a Greek exit, and euro governments were struggling summit after summit to prevent “financial
contagion.” Even its friends joked that Estonia had
bought “the last ticket to the Titanic.”
Three years on, it seems the small Baltic
country was smarter than many Anglo-Saxon
pundits. Not only has the eurozone survived the
crisis, but due to a grave conflict with Russia, the
rest of Europe, too, is learning fast to appreciate
the political value of membership. Meanwhile,
Latvia adopted the euro too, Lithuania is next
in line and Poland could accelerate its bid. For
these countries, euro membership is not just
a matter of economics, but also of politics—
even security.
A crisis is a moment of truth. When the ground
under your feet is shaking, when an opponent
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suddenly knocks on the door, you discover what
inner strength you possess. An individual or political body can learn more about themselves in
such single moments than weeks or years when
time is just going by.
Two such moments of brutal clarification hit
the countries of Europe in a short time. The euro
crisis mercilessly tested the resolve of leaders
and peoples to save the single currency. The
geopolitical standoff around Ukraine forces
a joint response to a show of force. Both these
vital tests bring uncomfortable truths, but also
empowering clarifications. In both cases, it is
about the Return of Politics.
Four principles in particular can be seen
with new clarity. First: the European Union is
about politics, not just the economy. Second:
it works through power, not only with values
and rules. Third: it has become a daily reality
for all, not just a ”project” for a few. Fourth:
the Union is a club of states and peoples, and
bound to remain so.
To grasp their full significance, we must
resist the media temptation to simply move
the spotlights onto the next drama. As twitter
conversations move seamlessly from banking
policy priorities and Greek coalition puzzles to
Kremlin-watching and Maidan-support, one risks
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overlooking the powerful insights the euro saga
holds for the Union’s upcoming challenges.
Both in the euro crisis and now in Ukraine
questions of sacrifice and solidarity come to the
fore. Are we ready to help others to protect monetary stability and unity? Are we ready to inflict
pain on Russia, and face some in return, to stand
up for European interests and values? These tough
questions are perhaps the surest sign the Union
is moving into new political territory.
Unsurprisingly, Euro-skeptics watch the
contours of a more political Europe with suspicion
and are ready to exploit people’s fears for it in the
upcoming European elections. Marine Le Pen of
the Front National and Nigel Farage of British UKIP,
both cheering when the euro was in danger, are
today fully aligned with the Kremlin over Crimea.
More intriguingly, the euro-federalist camp
has its reserves too. The Return of Politics challenges some illusions and shakes the self-image
of the Brussels orthodoxy. Was the European
Community not supposed to be the avant-garde
of global peace, the forerunner of the End of
History or at least the supersession of the nationstate? Was “Europe” not the promise of an End to
politics-as-we-knew it? Hence perhaps the lukewarm welcome in federalist circles to its Return.
Let us look in more detail at these four political fundamentals.
to avoid bank runs or a Great Depression. But
mid-2012, once German and French banks had
reduced their exposure to Greek debt, it was felt
in some circles that a Grexit was financially manageable. What tilted the balance, also in Berlin, The
Hague or Helsinki, were political arguments. These
were related to such things as possible instability
on the Balkans, Europe’s image in the world, the
Franco-German relationship, even the survival of
the European Union.
Here lies the euro storm’s most important
political lesson. Whatever the divisions and hesitations on the way, the invisible political glue
that held the Union was much stronger than
anybody had foreseen. It is worth keeping this
in mind before panicking over future challenges.
2. Beyond Rules and Words
There is a limit to rule-based policies. That
European states gave themselves rules to pacify
interstate relations is historically the Union’s
greatest asset. But on fixed rules alone you cannot
base joint action when you are faced with unforeseen circumstances.
With Ukraine, Europe’s enlargement and
neighborhood policy is reaching its limits—
geographically and conceptually. Europe wants to
be a force of normative attraction for its neighbors
and at the same time to deny that it thereby projects power. This self-denial becomes untenable.
In the negotiations about stronger ties, the
EU side asked Ukraine to choose between signing
the Association Agreement with Europe or joining
the Customs Union with Russia. This was a truly
existential geopolitical choice—as it turned out,
a matter of war and peace!—so it was rather
light to justify it with bureaucratic rules (in this
case, of the WTO)… Events will push European
countries to acknowledge that, like it or not, they
are, jointly, a power-player.
Just as values and standards alone cannot
constitute a foreign policy, rules alone cannot
constitute economic policy. In the Greek emergency, member countries learned the hard way
1. Invisible Political Glue
The European Union was from the start
a political project. But with the economic dress
it chose—a market, a currency—this raison d’être
disappeared from sight. In emergency situations,
the underlying politics reappears. See today’s
debate on sanctions against Russia, where
security interests trump commercial interests.
But in the euro crisis too—although fought out
in the financial language of banks, deficits, loans
and “spreads”—political arguments outplayed
economic ones.
The economic costs and risks of a eurozone
break-up naturally played a role; all wanted
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that a monetary union cannot survive a shock
by relying purely on rules for debt and deficit.
It required not only better rule enforcement, but
also better crisis management. (The argument
in certain German and Dutch circles that if only
the Maastricht debt rules had been respected, all
would have been fine, is pure theory: it comes
down to saying that as long as nobody plays with
fire, you do not need a fire brigade.)
versa!). We are economically interlinked, but also
politically. In recent years, national elections in
the Greece, the Netherlands, Italy or Germany
have been intently followed across the rest of
Europe, and so will the 2015 UK elections and the
Scottish referendum—not out of exotic curiosity
but as the tremors and rumbles of a now common
political space.
This experience is radically new. As recently as
twenty years ago, “Europe” mattered to just a few
groups: big business, farmers, the first “Erasmus”
students… Today, through the currency and free
movement, it is a daily experience for all citizens.
It is normal that it should take time to digest this
discovery. It also explains that Europe is no longer
an uncontested ideal, but a matter of political
judgment.
As a result, Europe entered national politics.
More than ever, European politics is domestic
politics.
During the euro crisis, national political
leaders and parliaments played a central role.
It could not have been otherwise. The central
EU institutions did not dispose of enough
financial firepower and competencies, nor the
legitimacy to change the rules on which they
are built. Nevertheless, authoritative European
voices such as Jürgen Habermas or Jacques Delors
deplored the implication of national leaders in
the crisis management as a “renationalization of
European politics,” even comparing it to the 1930s.
They misread the situation. What we are seeing,
instead, is a “Europeanization of national politics.”
This can strengthen the common adventure.
Since 2010, people
experienced what it
really means to share
a currency. They
now know that what
happens with debts in
Italy, housing bubbles
in Ireland or banks in
Cyprus can have a direct
impact on their jobs,
their pensions, their
savings in Germany,
Portugal or Estonia
(and vice versa!). We are
economically interlinked,
but also politically.
4. The Nature of the Beast—Call it a Union
During the debt crisis, many American and
some European critics claimed the euro countries
stood before the fateful choice to “Unite or die,”
either to jump to a federal eurozone or to collapse.
A moment of truth, they said. Indeed. But had
they better grasped the Union’s nature, they could
have foreseen right away that European politics
is and remains a matter of in between. Eighteen
3. Daily Experience and Domestic Politics
The most crucial political discovery of recent
years is the degree of interdependence of our
countries. Since 2010, people experienced what it
really means to share a currency. They now know
that what happens with debts in Italy, housing
bubbles in Ireland or banks in Cyprus can have
a direct impact on their jobs, their pensions, their
savings in Germany, Portugal or Estonia (and vice
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states with one currency: perhaps unpractical,
but a political fact of life. The euro is here to stay
(as the markets have finally understood), and so
are the member states.
This latter clarification is crucial for people’s
trust in the joint enterprise. For too long the
history of integration has been portrayed as
a slow erosion of the nation-states by a new
centre, the Union as a half-baked provisional
entity on the way to a perfect federal future.
This view is historically wrong and politically
irresponsible. A political Europe cannot be built
against the states, only with the states.
In the debate, it is hard to get this view across.
The sterile opposition between a good “Community
method” and bad “intergovernmentalism,” between
true Europe and national politics, still holds sway.
Angela Merkel tried to break the conceptual deadlock when in 2010 she proposed the term “Union
method” to express the new political reality. But she
hit some nerves in Brussels and within her own
party and retreated from this semantic stand. A pity.
If the Union is to retain the support of its citizens
and member-peoples, it is urgent to fight the public
suspicion of a Brussels plot, while making clear we
do have a shared destiny.
Europe’s political life would be helped by
a proper self-understanding. The Union is not
a “normal” international organization (Look at
France during its referendum on the constitutional treaty in 2005, or the United Kingdom
today: would any country ever have such
a passionate public debate about its membership
of the World Health Organization or even NATO?).
Nor is it a US-style federation or becoming one.
Some enlightened minds keep hoping for
the “United States of Europe.” At every occasion,
they shout their disappointment that this is not
happening, thereby eroding further the trust in
the Union’s necessarily imperfect achievements.
The better is the enemy of the good.
A European public will not arise by asking
people to step out of their German, Polish, British
or Maltese cloths, but only by repeating time and
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again that it is precisely—and also as Germans,
Maltese etc.—that they are European.
The great French historian Jacques Le Goff
once pointed out that the idea of a common
European space gained ground at the same time
as the kingdoms of France, Spain and England
developed, in the fifteenth century. Le Goff:
“Europe was born as a federation of kingdoms.”
Today we are shaping the continuation of this
long, rich history of the peoples and states on
our continent.
The Return of Politics is not a ghost of the
past, nor a temporary anomaly, but the only realistic way to preserve Europe’s unity and liberty
for the future.
LU U K VA N M I D D E L A A R
political analyst and historian, is the
author The Passage to Europe: How
a Continent Became a Union (Yale
University Press 2013, paperback
released on 5 June), winner of the
European Book Prize 2012. He worked
in The Hague and Brussels and has
been the speechwriter to the European Council President since
2010. He writes in his personal capacity.
Photo: Sake Elzinga
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TOMÁŠ KLVAŇA
Decisions and Consequences
An Impossibly Beautiful Dream
I.
Essentially, there is a poor world, a rich world
and one world between the two. In the really
poor world you do not see stray dogs running
around the cities: even people there go hungry.
In the rich world, there are no running dogs
either: citizens tend to care about animals one
way or another. It is in the zone between rich and
poor where there are starving, exhausted dogs
with dangerous eyes roaming the metropolis.
It is not pleasant, living in the zone between,
yet much depends on the dynamics. You may be
on the way up. You may be on your way down. You
may be stuck, with no dynamics at all. The post-communist world abounds with the in-betweens.
The visuals of such places are unmistakable; the
decay of concrete structures covered in primitive
graffiti, the omnipresent kiosks and stalls on the
broken pavement of sidewalks, the stink of urine
in underpasses, the pawn shops and gambling
dens, the dilapidated buildings, the police occupied with crime in the wrong way, the dour faces
on buses and trams. On a bus, people dream of
utopia beyond their frontiers.
Utopia? Here is how I recently pictured
a utopia, going for a jog in one of those
in-between loci, Belgrade. It occurred to me on
a bridge over the Sava, a mighty—but, curiously,
not the largest—river in the city known for the
confluence of the Sava and the Danube. My
utopia goes like this:
In the distant future (because when else
than in the future do utopias happen?) there is
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TO M Á Š K LVA Ň A
Vice President of the Aspen Institute Prague, Chair
of the Aspen Review Editorial Board and a Visiting
Professor at New York University in Prague.
Photo: Archive Tomáš Klvaňa
a lottery. To save precious resources, it is organized as a mind game. The lottery manager
invites online participants to guess which
number (from one to one thousand) is on his
mind. Everyone has a minute to think about that
number. The manager then reveals his choice—
534. All of those who guessed the number will
claim the prize online. The manager will immediately transfer the amount in bitcoin to their bank
accounts. Yes, in the distant future we shall be
perfect. And we shall use bitcoin, the landless,
government-less currency without a central
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bank. How else can you describe perfection
than as a complete honesty and truthfulness?
Some people have no use for utopias. They
point to communism, a utopia of a kind, as
a source of immense suffering. Others sneer at the
idea of unified Europe and see in it a dangerous,
counterproductive way of provoking dormant
furies of Europe’s wars. That is unfair to utopias
because they have no say in how we use them.
They are best understood as impossibly beautiful
dreams against which we measure our aspirations. Just because we are incapable of telling
the truth does not mean that honesty should
not be taught to children.
towards the dream, is nowhere in sight, not even
in the face of the greatest energy crisis ever.
We have it exactly backwards. We treat our
current European institutions in a soft-hue
manner whilst the dream is substituted by
tangential technicalities. Take the Ukrainian
crisis. The reigning view holds that Europe
has failed to deal with it properly and Vladimir
Putin is laughing at us. Such criticism originates
in exaggerated expectations and unrealistic
demands put on our current institutions. One
swift, clear, smart and unified European foreign
policy towards Russia is simply not yet feasible.
The French, Italians, Poles and Fins just cannot
see eye to eye on all required variables. Seen in
that light the European—and American—game
in Ukraine is successful so far. Moscow is intimidated by the impact of the crisis on its economy
and by the prospect of an even bigger hole into
which it might be slumping. Putin was taken
aback by the strength of revulsion towards him
that he incited among politicians and citizens in
Europe, and despite the knowledge that the West
will not go into war over Ukraine, he seemed
to be backpedalling. Meanwhile Ukraine has
a legitimate president determined to rid the
country of the armed subterfuge in the east
and lead his people on their (admittedly long)
way to the EU.
II.
We need the unified Europe, the superstate,
the one Kissingerian telephone number to be
one such impossibly beautiful dream. In the
in -between places of Europe amidst urban
decay, surrounded by gloom and stray dogs,
we grasp more thoroughly the importance of
this dream. Political dreams, however, require
institutions and it is important to keep the two
concepts separated and approached differently.
This is a mistake we make here in Europe: while
in our euro-discourse we lack true vision, we
approach the EU institutions in an imprecise and
dreamy—rather than pragmatic and realistic—
manner.
There is no unified goal to European
politics. More accurately, the only vision to
be found there is among those who wish to
destroy the dream. They have advanced in the
recent European elections, albeit less than was
expected and feared. Still, subsidiarity does
not count as a vision and a tobacco directive
is no calling. Single-issue activists who wish to
throw regulation at everything they perceive
as problem have captured many bureaucratic
bastions in Brussels and we, the Europeans,
allow them to do so, because we just do not
care enough. On the other hand, the European
energy policy, which would be a useful step
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III.
With the advent of a strong adversary: Putin’s
Russia, Europe has reluctantly re-entered history
from which it took a leave in the magical year of
1989. People are often forced to make uneasy
geopolitical decisions in the course of history.
One cannot simply continue with the flow.
Europe and—to some extent—also Obama’s
America still refuses to acknowledge the depth
of the problem. There is no decisive agreement
regarding the obvious: for the first time since
the end of the Cold War we have a regime in
Russia that directly challenges core values of
the Western liberal democracy. Europe also
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houses a vocal political constituency looking
sympathetically at Russian mix of nationalism
and cultural bigotry. The challenge facing us is
extraordinary.
Let us recall the Cold War years. The West
knew its vision by heart and has rolled out policies adequate to the task, from strong military
forces to international financial bodies and
investing in research and development. Neither
the United States nor Europe is eager now to
be as strong as they were then, to revisit the
ethos of those years, but nothing less would
do. I am not calling for another Iron Curtain
and containment of Moscow, but hoping for
the best is no policy.
The lesson is clear: Let us dream big and
loud in Europe but approach our institutions
realistically. Let’s build them one careful step
after another. Let us pause in the federalist
drive lest we counterproductively strengthen
the demolition brigade. And let us instead focus
on the basics:
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Let’s finish the integration of the markets
Let’s advance and implement the free trade
zone with America
Let’s make NATO the zone’s stability guarantor.
It will emphasize defense as a cornerstone in
the current crisis and reinvigorate the Atlantic
military alliance’s mission. It may force the
Europeans to take defense seriously at last.
All political dreams require right political
decisions to be useful. In Belgrade, Chisinau, Kiev
and other post-communist capitals of the past
25 years people made different choices than in
Prague, Warsaw and Tallinn. It cost them dearly.
Once a bridge over the Sava River became the
casualty of a poor choice, next time it might
be worse. The decisions Europe needs to make
are large-scale, geopolitical, and they will have
momentous consequences. O
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Ukraine Can Be
a Neutral State
The people who took part in the revolution on the Maidan
were born after the downfall of the Soviet Union.
Therefore, the situation got out of control of the elites—
says Roman Szporluk in an interview with Filip Memches.
Was the revolt of the Ukrainian society, which
we saw on the Maidan, directed against the
Ukrainian power and business elite, or was
it an emanation of conflicts within the elite?
The initiators of the dramatic events in Kiev,
of this revolution—because this is how we
should call them—turned out to be people of
the younger generation, very pro-European in
their political outlook. The principal reason for
their coming to the Maidan was to oppose the
cancellation of the signing of the association
agreement with the European Union. And it was
the pressure of these people which caused the
split within the ruling camp. Some people around
Viktor Yanukovych made a turnabout. I think,
therefore, that what occurred was a real revolution rather than a conflict within the ruling clique.
ROMAN SZPORLUK
American historian of Ukrainian descent. He graduated in
law at the University in Lublin (Poland), defended a Ph.D. in
Russian history at the Stanford University. In 1965–1991 he
was professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and
in 1991–2005 at the Harvard University, for a time he ran
the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. His publications
include The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk (1981),
Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich
List (1988, second ed. 1991), and Russia, Ukraine, and the
Breakup of the Soviet Union (2000).
Photo: Archive of the Ukrainian Research Institute,
Harvard University
But still, even if we assume that the primary
causative factor here was a grass-roots protest, we cannot turn a blind eye to what was
happening with the political and business
establishment. A fairly widespread opinion is
that the oligarchs saw opportunities for themselves connected with the future integration
with Europe, so when Yanukovych decided to
stop this process in its tracks, they rebelled
against him…
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For people who came to the Maidan, the
Ukrainian regime—including the predecessors of
Yanukovych—is a continuation of Soviet power,
that is a corrupt and illegitimate system. At the
same time, the ruling circles and business—
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both among the oligarchs, and less influential
businesspeople—include persons who know
the West. They are the ones whose children are
studying in prestigious British universities, and
who have villas in the south of France. They also
want Ukraine to be a European, civilized country,
because they are aware that in a free and democratic country they can enjoy a much better life.
in which the Russians will feel safe, then Putin and
his companions will have cause for concern.
But Kiev is now making a mostly geopolitical
choice. It did break the umbilical cord tying it
to Moscow, it set a course towards the West.
However, in internal politics you cannot see
any radical steps. The oligarchs, who have
been capitalizing on the existing economic
situation, continue to play a key role.
When it comes to geopolitics, realists came to
the fore in Ukraine. They are not planning a rapid
NATO accession, they are not preparing a military
agreement with the West against Russia. The challenge is, rather, a geo-economic or geo-cultural
transformation. Ukraine can be a neutral state.
And joining the European Union can take place
no earlier than in ten, maybe twenty years. And
when it comes to the oligarchs, they are much
impressed with the West, and they are also fed
up with pathologies such as corruption.
The events on the Maidan were not the first
revolt of the Ukrainian society since the Soviet
Union collapsed. In late 2004 and early 2005
the Orange Revolution broke out. But then the
tragedy which took place nine years later had
been avoided. There was no bloody internal
confrontation. Why?
The answer is very simple: almost ten years
had passed. As a historian, I am keenly aware
of the importance of the passage of time. One
generation goes, another comes. This is a very
important issue. The people who took part in
the revolution, which broke out recently, were
born after the downfall of the Soviet Union.
The Orange Revolution ended in a compromise,
a deal between various factions of the establishment. And in February this year it seemed
that a second installment of the Orange Revolution would come to pass: that Yanukovych
would remain President, opposition MPs would
be co-opted to the government of the Party of
Regions and somehow things would drag on
until the next election. But the situation got out
of control. Yanukovych was forced to flee, and
thus there has been a radical change.
Except that the oligarchs, assuming that the
government will not try to discipline them, are
so wealthy that even without any reforms they
can live at a level which is beyond the reach of an
average Ukrainian. Such pathologies like huge
corruption are most painful for ordinary citizens.
Of course, the oligarchs do not have to
bribe traffic policemen leaping on drivers from
behind a tree and demanding a fine. But the
general mood is changing, especially among
more educated segments of the public or those
who have direct contacts with Europe. And if you
talk about oligarchs, we have an open question
here. Time will tell if the pro-European masses
will manage to persuade them. In fact, this will
decide if the revolution of 2014 could be considered victorious. By the way, the oligarchs feel at
home in the West.
During the Orange Revolution Russia did not
intervene. This year it attacked Ukraine annexing the Crimea…
Moscow was terrified that Kiev could begin to
make serious European reforms. Vladimir Putin feels
threatened because of the fact that the revolution
of 2014 will have a strong impact on Russia. Because
it is not an anti-Russian revolution, but an anti-Soviet one. If Ukraine becomes a democratic country
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Was the overthrowing of President Yanukovych necessary? Immediately after that,
Russia took Crimea.
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All revolutions are unexpected, and when
they already occur, it turns out that they are also
inevitable. No one expected what happened in
France on 14 July 1789, but then it was clear
that something had to happen. To use Marxist
language, a qualitative rather than a quantitative
change took place in Ukraine. In February this
year negotiations between President Yanukovych
and the parliamentary opposition were still going
on in Kiev, also involving foreign ministers of
other countries. But the protesters on Maidan
vetoed the outcome of these negotiations. And
now a fundamental question appears: whether
this qualitative change is the first act of a grassroots process of a civil society emerging? And
as for Putin, he does not think of the Ukrainians
as a separate nation. For him the creation of
the Ukrainian state meant carving out a piece
of Russia. By annexing the Crimea he began
to implement a program of reconstructing the
Russian empire. In the visions of Putin there is no
place for a democratic Russia. But to have a guarantee that Russia does not become a democracy,
he must prevent the democratization of Ukraine.
And he can achieve it only by annexing Ukraine
or transforming it into a larger version of Belarus.
the family. Therefore, he does not want to let
Ukraine become a European country, because it
would mean it would distance itself from Russia.
Besides, if the Ukrainians are also Russians only
If one of the greatest
disasters of the
twentieth century was
the collapse of the
USSR, as Putin famously
said, the current host of
the Kremlin considers
the reconstruction of
the empire as his task.
more crazy ones, they—following Putin’s line
of thinking—can give a bad example to other
Russians, the ones living in the Russian Federation. For if it turns out that in Odessa and
Kharkov you can freely use the Russian language,
then this situation will give the lie to Kremlin’s
propaganda about the persecution of Russian
speakers in Ukraine.
But that would mean that Vladimir Putin actually never recognized the sovereignty of the
Ukrainian state…
Once, when George W. Bush was the U.S.
president, Putin told him in a private conversation that Ukraine was not a real country. This
is the authentic view of the Russian President,
but of course Putin does not express it openly.
If one of the greatest disasters of the twentieth
century was the collapse of the USSR, as Putin
famously said, the current host of the Kremlin
considers the reconstruction of the empire as
his task. Although of course he does not say it
out loud. It should also be stressed that Putin
sees the Ukrainians as a nation much closer to
Russians than Georgians or Kazachs. For him
the Ukrainians are brothers who have betrayed
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And here we come to historical policy. The
Kremlin, which likes to emphasize the role of
the Soviet Union in the victory over the Third
Reich, is trying to tarnish the image of Ukraine
by attaching a fascist label to current authorities. At the same time Banderovite emblems
appeared on the Maidan…
On the current Ukrainian political scene,
there are some elements considering themselves
as ideological descendants of radical, extreme
right-wing forces present in the Ukrainian society
in the twentieth century. These elements,
however, are probably weak. It is true that in the
interwar Poland the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists was very influential among Ukrainian
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youth. However, in elections to the Sejm the
majority of Ukrainians voted for democratic,
moderate, progressive parties, etc. When it comes
to today’s Ukraine, we are dealing with relics of
the old nationalism. Of course, you should not
underestimate them. However, historical arguments used by Moscow are fakes. Please note
that among the demonstrators on the Maidan
there were Russian speakers considering themselves Ukrainians and Russian speakers considering themselves Russians. In Ukraine there is at
the moment no Ukrainian-Russian ethnic conflict
Balkan style. Moscow, however, would want such
a conflict.
Russians are still struggling for their country
to become democratic. They do not want to
be subjects in an empire. Nevertheless, Putin
has managed to fool the Russian society. Television controlled by the regime says outright
lies about Ukraine and the West. However, if the
Ukrainian political events inspire the Russians,
it may form the basis for a Ukrainian-Russian
reconciliation. Because it must be emphasized
that the Ukrainian democratic movement is not
anti-Russian, but anti-Putin.
And perhaps it was for this reason—not feeling
any hostility towards the Russians—that the
Ukrainians gave them Crimea practically without a fight?
Kiev wanted to avoid a situation in which
Moscow would use force on a mass scale.
The peaceful surrender of Ukraine in the Crimea
saved the lives of many people, and Putin has lost
this excuse to undertake much more dangerous
anti-Ukrainian steps.
If the Ukrainian political
events inspire the
Russians, it may form
the basis for a UkrainianRussian reconciliation.
Because it must be
emphasized that the
Ukrainian democratic
movement is not antiRussian, but anti-Putin.
Or maybe he really got the green light, which
emboldened him and led to the destabilization of the situation in the Donetsk, Luhansk,
Odessa districts?
But the Crimea scenario was not repeated.
It seems that the annexation of the peninsula
was not the first act of an annexation of other
regions of Ukraine.
Or maybe the point is that the Kremlin fears
a repeat of the 1990s and interprets events
in Ukraine as an anti-Russian offensive of the
West?
There are two Russias. Putin persecutes
Russia too. He abolished free elections and
local government. Russian intellectuals are
censored. Even in the Soviet era I thought that
the most important ethnic issue in the USSR was
the Russian question. People laughed at me.
They said that there were other issues, such as
Jewish, Ukrainian and Estonian. It seems to me
that the question has not lost its relevance. The
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You said that besides Putin’s Russia there is
a more democratic and anti-imperial Russia.
Where do you see it? After all, the vast majority
of Russians support the current president.
The history of Russia in the twentieth century
is very sad. The February Revolution, which was
to lead to democracy, failed. In October 1917 the
Bolsheviks seized power. The Russian democratic
emigrants described the Bolshevik Revolution
as national suicide. In this sense, it cannot be
compared to the French Revolution. Then it
seemed in the period of perestroika that Russia
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was moving towards democracy. But under the
presidency of Boris Yeltsin democracy lost again.
Dreams, ideals, positive sentiments must be
translated into specific political solutions which
would be convincing for the public. And here
the West may help, not only by providing
various loans, but also by sending experts who
would offer appropriate advice. But it is also
a challenge facing the young generation of
Ukrainians. They must be aware of the fact that
in the immediate future they may have to give
up some comforts for the sake of long-term
investments.
Is it a condition for democracy emerging in
Russia that it would not be an empire, but
a nation-state?
Yes. And in the early 1990s it seemed that
events were moving in that direction. For one
thing, Yeltsin was responsible for Russia’s secession from the Soviet empire. It was Russia, which
rebelled against the Kremlin and announced
its own independence. And then it signed agreements with Belarus and Ukraine concerning the
dissolution of the USSR. Later, however, there
has been a regression. In the history of Russia
the scenario has always been that when
controlling ethnically non-Russian areas, the
government has done it through undemocratic
measures and applied them also in the ethnically Russian centre of the country. In this way,
the Russians themselves become victims of
colonial violence.
And the structure of the Ukrainian society
itself? Does it not constitute an obstacle on
the road to political consolidation? This structure is determined by the borders of Ukraine.
Historically speaking, they extend from the
Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Crimean
Khanate. So we are dealing with a very culturally diverse society.
In various lectures I liked to repeat: imagine
a country in which one district capital is Bakhchisaray, former capital of the Crimean Khanate;
imagine a country including the once Hungarian
towns of Transcarpathia; imagine a country in
which there are both Lviv and Donetsk, Kharkiv
and Ternopil. A very significant fact is that the
most pro-Western areas of Ukraine are those
belonging to Poland in the past, even before
the era of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. At the opposite extreme is the Donbas. It is located in an
area, which in the tsarist times was politically
backward. Donetsk was founded in the nineteenth century. Its name was once Yuzovka from
the name of its founder, the Welsh industrialist
John Hughes. There were no universities there
at the time, only metallurgical plants and coalmines. Indeed, given such diversity of the country,
some people claim that Ukraine must decide
what is to be the key to its integration—should
Donetsk be the “future” of Lviv or the other way
round. But, in my opinion, it is Kiev which should
provide a model acceptable both for Donetsk,
for Odessa, and for Lviv.
The West may help,
not only by providing
various loans, but also
by sending experts who
would offer appropriate
advice.
Is the ruling camp governing Ukraine, now
preparing for reforms, not facing a certain risk?
My point is that the reforms may prove to be
very costly for the broad masses of Ukrainian
society and hence very painful, so the public
opinion may rebel against the pro-Western
course.
This is a very serious problem. Poland struggled with it in 1989 and later. And Ukraine is
now in a worse situation than Poland was then.
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And what about the Crimea?
Today, of course, chances for recovering it are
very small. But also without it Ukraine can democratize, especially that a considerable support
for undemocratic forces is coming from there.
At the same time it must be emphasized that any
initiatives aimed at forcing the Russian-speaking
citizens of Ukraine to use the Ukrainian language
are inexpressibly stupid.
Maybe the source of these problems is that
when in 1991 Ukraine gained independence,
the Russian language dominated there? So for
the past 23 years the aim was to somehow
strengthen the position of the Ukrainian language.
It is true. The Ukrainian language was discriminated against in the Soviet times and in a sense
it is sometimes also discriminated against today.
In Kiev, it happened to me several times that
I addressed restaurant waiters in Ukrainian, and
they responded in Russian, claiming that they did
not know Ukrainian. There is a need for affirmative action, but certainly not at the expense of
Russian-speaking citizens. There must be a real
equality. Therefore, public sector employees in
Ukraine should be bilingual: so that they would
be able to deal with Ukrainian-speaking citizens in Ukrainian, and with Russian speakers in
Russian.
FILIP MEMCHES
is a columnist of the Rzeczpospolita
daily
Photo: Archive Filip Memches
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IVAN KRASTEV
Exit Politics
In 2011, Adbusters magazine released the
now famous poster in which a ballerina danced
over the symbolic bull of the New York Stock
Exchange, calling on activists to occupy Wall
Street. At the top of the poster, one reads the
line: “What is our one demand?” In a democracy
without representation, all political movements
have the right of a single demand. It might be
very concrete—say, lowering the bus fare in San
Paolo or dispensing with plans to rebuild the
Stuttgart railway station. In such cases, there
is a fair chance that the demand will be met.
Or the demand can be grandiose and symbolic,
as in ending capitalism, and then the meaning
becomes the demand itself. In order for the
protest to be successful, it should be either
concrete or symbolic. The middle level—messy
space of actual politics that cannot be addressed
by crowds huddled in public squares—has disappeared.
In many respects, the current revolt against
political representation resembles the situation in
ancient Rome, when plebs (Rome’s middle class)
decided to leave the city, separate themselves,
“go away,” and thus demonstrate their collective rejection of the status quo. Beginning 453
BC, the plebs would occasionally exit the city,
evacuating Rome and encamping on one of the
neighboring hills as an explicit expression of their
civic anger. “They are without any leader,” wrote
Titus Livy, the great chronicler of ancient Rome,
“their camp being fortified with a rampart and
trench, remaining quiet, taking nothing but what
was necessary for sustenance, they kept themselves for several days, neither being attacked,
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I VA N K R A S T E V
is a Bulgarian political scientist. He is president of the Center
for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Permanent Fellow at the Institute
for Human Sciences in Vienna and a member of the European
Council on Foreign Relations.
Photo: Center for Liberal Strategies
nor attacking others. Great was the panic in the
city, and through mutual fear all was suspense.
The people left in the city dreaded the violence
of the senators; the senators dreaded the people
remaining in the city, uncertain whether they
should prefer them to stay or to depart; but how
long would the multitude, which has seceded,
remain quiet? What were to be the consequences
then, if in the meantime, any foreign war should
break out?”
This secession was nothing more than
an appeal for the re-founding of the political
community around principles dear to its rebellious citizens. As Livy indicates, the plebs agreed
to return to the city only when the senators
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succeeded in fashioning a narrative that recognized the plebs’ significance to society as well
as their power.
The institution of the tribunes—the ones
who have the power to veto the decisions of the
senate—was born out of the secessions. Secessions were different from conspiracies and civil
wars. They were not about changing those who
govern. They were about the principles according
to which power is exercised. In a society that
believed in the cyclical nature of history and
where the future was simply another name for the
past, they were truly revolutionary. The secessions
did not hope to bring change; they demanded
the restoration of cosmic order.
Today’s mass protests, in many respects, are
acts in search of a concept; they are praxis, if you
will, without theory. They are the most dramatic
expression of the conviction that the elites do not
govern in the interest of the people and that
the electorate has lost control over the elected.
They stand for an insurrection against the institutions of representative democracy but without
offerring any alternatives (or even an openness
to endorse nondemocratic replacements). This
new wave of protests is leaderless not because
social media made leaderless revolutions possible
(last we checked ancient Rome was not wired),
but because the ambition to challenge all forms
of political representation has made political
leaders unwelcome.
In my book, In Mistrust We Trust, I argued
that while globalization has empowered the
middle-class individual, it has disempowered
the voter. Once upon a time, a voter’s power
derived from the fact that he was a citizen- soldier,
a citizen-worker, and/or a citizen-consumer.
The citizen- soldier was important because the
defense of the country depended on his courage
to stand against his enemies. The citizen-worker
was significant because his labor made the
country rich, and the citizen-consumer mattered
because his consumption drove the economy.
But globalization liberated the elites from their
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dependence on citizens. When drones and professional armies replace the citizen-soldier, elites
lose interest in the views of citizen-soldiers. The
flooding of the labor market by low-cost immigrants or outsourced production reduces the
elites’ willingness to cooperate. As a result, the citizen-worker gets detached from the citizen-voter.
During the recent economic crisis, it became
evident that the performance of the American
stock market no longer depended on American
consumerism. The general strike had lost its
political power. At the same time, elections fail
to evince either the drama or the capacity to
solve social problems that they once did, while
rebellion from below has become unconvincing.
Capturing the government is simply no longer
a guarantee that things will change. Voter power
is constrained today not just because the voter
has lost his additional capacities that derive from
his other social roles and participation in stable
social groups but also because the voter does
not know whom to blame for his misfortunes.
The more transparent our societies become, the
more difficult it is for citizens to decide where to
direct their anger. We live in a society of “innocent
criminals,” where governments prefer to claim
impotence rather than power.
In her classic mystery Murder on the Orient
Express, Agatha Christie tells the story of a very
unusual murder in which all twelve suspects are
guilty of committing a crime, and the police are
forced to either acknowledge it or pretend that
a stranger who exited the train is the culprit. Our
angry citizen finds himself in a similar dilemma.
He is angry at power but he does not know who
to blame—those in government, those behind
the government, the very idea of a government, the market, Brussels (for those who are
EU members), and so forth. If a citizen today seeks
to criticize, say, rising inequality, to what should
he turn to find those responsible? The market?
The government? New technologies? Could any
government succeed in reducing inequality on
its own without destroying his country’s compet-
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itiveness? The futile attempts of several leftist
governments to increase taxes on the superrich
are the most powerful demonstration of the
constraints that governments face in an era of
global markets and international capital flow. It
is unclear if it would make more sense to topple
the government or pity it.
Voters feel helpless today because the politicians they choose are candid about their lack of
power. It is up to citizens to decide whether to
trust that the politicians do in fact have their hands
tied or to treat the cries of powerlessness as the
ultimate power grab. “I am tired of austerity, I want
promises,” reads a graffiti in Brazil. The author of
the outcry captures something fundamental. In
a democratic politics without alternatives, politicians make a virtue out of promising nothing.
But a stance of “no promises” translates to even
less power for the voters. Democracy is nurtured
by promises because politicians who fail to fulfill
them can be held accountable. When there are no
promises, there is no civic responsibility. “I didn’t
promise you anything” is a line out of a cheap
romance novel.
After hearing it, the only thing the jilted lover
can do is run away and cry. It is through this prism
that we can apprehend the meaning of the wave
of protests that have rocked the world in recent
years. The prism also enables us to ponder the
political changes they may bring. The protests
are a rejection of a politics without possibility,
but they are also a form of acceptance of this
new reality. None of the protest movements
emerged with a platform for changing the world,
or even the economy. In this sense, they are not
anti-capitalist revolution. In fact, they might be
seen as capitalism’s safety valve. Karl Marx would
probably tell today’s rebels that anti-capitalist
protest is essential for the relegitimation of global
capitalism.
Neither are the protests examples of
Fukuyama’s revolution of the global middle
class—at least not in the sense of them being
a demonstration of its empowerment. After all,
it was during these protests that the middle class
proved its own loss of political strength. But if
the protests do not signal a return of revolutionary politics, neither will they represent an
effective strategy of citizen empowerment in
the age of globalization. Where governments
are less powerful than before, corporations are
more mobile, and political parties bereft of the
capacity to build a political identity around visions
for the future, the power of citizens derives from
their ability to disrupt.
From “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics of Protest,” University of Pennsylvania Press 2014.
Published with the gracious permission of the Author and Publisher.
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A Plan for NATO: Central
Europe Indistinguishable
from Western Europe
Grzegorz Kostrzewa-Zorbas
NATO must demolish the remains
of the Cold War border of the Eastern Block
Europe—a great strategic zone, from Estonia in
the north through the Visegrad countries in the
middle to Bulgaria in the south—is contrary to
the legal, political and strategic foundations of
the Alliance. NATO remains incoherent, which
weakens its unity. It encourages NATO’s opponents to test the ability of the Alliance to deploy
collective defense. Lack of cohesion and unity
provokes war.
The Iron Curtain partially survived and tempts
Russia with hopes of returning to Central Europe.
It is one of the reasons for President Vladimir
Putin’s attempts to restore the lost tsarist and
Soviet empire. The Eastern Bloc and the Soviet
Union do not exist, but on maps of forces and
resources, in organization charts and many key
NATO documents you can see a sharp difference
and boundary between the area of the North
Atlantic Alliance before the eastward enlargement, and the territories of all states admitted
after the Cold War. All that despite the fact that
the expansion began—from the Czech Republic,
Poland and Hungary—more than fifteen years
ago, in 1999, in the previous century and
millennium.
But the most important documents—the
North Atlantic Treaty and the accession protocols,
or in the current NATO Strategic Concept from
2010—there is no foundation for maintaining
differentiation or boundary. The Treaty and the
Concept do not divide the member states into old
and new, Eastern and Western, better and worse,
more defended and less defended. So the NATO
practice of investing more, both in terms of quality
and quantity, in Western Europe than in Eastern
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“But Russia Would Never Agree to That!”
The ongoing incoherence of the North Atlantic
Alliance represents the achievement of a permanent goal of Russia. The first decade after the
accession of the three Visegrad countries was
an era of excessive caution and appeasement
to Russian demands and prohibitions for NATO.
Russia imposed on the alliance an impassable
limit to its real presence. Russia psychologically
and politically invaded the heads of the people
running NATO and planning its future. The Alliance
claimed that nobody from the outside could have
vetoing power, but at the same time, it recognized the Russian veto. Any idea for a significant
strengthening of the potential of the multinational alliance in Central Europe was countered
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by the headquarters in Brussels and the capitals
of Western member states with a firm response:
“But Russia would never agree to that!”
The dogma of the primacy of the interests
and wishes of Russia, repeated like a mantra,
usually ended any discussion and killed the
will to meet the challenges. Therefore, only in
2009—after the Russian invasion of Georgia in
2008—the first contingency operational plans
were created regarding the introduction of multinational allied forces to Poland in the case of
mounting a collective defense. And only in 2010
the contingency plans included Lithuania, Latvia
and Estonia—the remaining Central European
member states directly bordering with Russia.
Developed hurriedly after a lost decade, the plans
quickly proved inadequate. As a result of the
events of 2014 in Europe they are being urgently
revised and strengthened.
But contingency plans—even revised and
expanded—are not enough. It would be best if
they never had to be applied. But to achieve this,
NATO has to deter potential aggressors effectively. Deter not only with nuclear but also with
conventional forces. NATO must organize and
deploy its resources in such a way that no one
could find a weak point to attack. Therefore, the
allied Central Europe must change to a large
extent, even if “Russia would never agree to that!”
In any case, Russia does not agree to the territorial integrity and inviolability of the borders
of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. Thus, it does
not agree to one of the fundamental principles
of the Charter of the United Nations and the
entire international order since the end of World
War II. The North Atlantic Alliance must stop
succumbing to the Russian veto and psychological warfare.
of the Alliance in Europe, a potential opponent
or another external observer should see one and
single—without any distinguishable parts—area
from Iceland, Norway, Great Britain, Spain and
Portugal in the west to Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria,
Turkey and other member states to the east.
On the map of the world, rather than just Europe,
there should be no differences—on the Western
side—up to Alaska and Hawaii, in accordance
with the North Atlantic Treaty.
NATO assets must be distributed uniformly or
concentrated where they are most needed now,
not where they were most needed in the era of the
Warsaw Pact and the German internal border. Some
types of resources should be located well inside
Without the Iron Curtain
NATO must demolish the remains of the Cold
War border of the Eastern Block. Looking at the
network of headquarters, bases, schools,
installations, infrastructure and all other resources
Land, Sea, Air, Special and Cybernetic Forces
In Central Europe multinational bases should
be established, serving the co-stationing and
developing comprehensive cooperation by any
kind of armed forces of NATO member states:
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NATO must organize
and deploy its
resources in such a way
that no one could find
a weak point to attack.
or even in the center of the European part of the
Alliance. This is where the highest institutions of
political and military command should be placed,
as well as installations using space technology,
centers of strategic planning and analysis, NATO
schools and other resources used equally by all
member states. But the combat forces, command
centers below the highest level and most of the
intelligence, observation and logistical resources
require deployment closer to the outer borders of
NATO and the potential battlefields. This means
mainly the countries of Central Europe and the
Mediterranean.
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land, sea, air, special, and cybernetic. The process
of forming separate cyber forces is only starting
in many NATO countries, but close cooperation at
this stage can be extremely valuable and speed
up the process. What is needed is at least one base
for each type of armed forces. For the Navy we
need two bases on two different seas. The bases
should be placed in as many countries as possible.
No base has to be limited to one type of force,
but every type of force needs a host base.
Naval bases are needed on the Baltic Sea and
the Black Sea. Only Poland has non-freezing military ports on the Baltic: Świnoujście and Gdynia,
as well as the great deep-water commercial port
in Gdańsk. Romania occupies an important
strategic position on the Black Sea coast, in the
immediate vicinity of Ukraine.
Unique opportunities for maneuvers and
training of ground troops and special forces with
air support are offered by the Drawsko Pomorskie training ground in north-western Poland
near the Baltic Sea and the German border—it
is the largest training ground in the European
part of NATO. It is already extensively used by
many countries of the Alliance. It could become
a permanent multinational center for enhancing
the Allied combat readiness.
in Europe will be the base in Poland, with even
more advanced anti-missile rockets, but combat
readiness is predicted for the distant 2018. For
the sake of NATO the United States may bring the
deadline forward to 2017 or even 2016.
Both in Western and Central Europe—without
distinction—the European NATO countries should
soon start creating a multinational second layer
of the shield, defending against shorter-range
missiles, aircraft and large spy and combat drones.
To increase the credibility
of the transatlantic bond
a small portion of the
U.S. nuclear arsenal is
deployed in four Western
European countries and
Turkey, to be used by
the Alliance as a whole
in the event of war.
The United States should
offer a similar solution
to at least one country in
Central Europe.
We Should Work Faster on the Anti-missile
Shields of the U.S. and NATO
For the first time installations essential for
the entire North Atlantic Alliance are placed not
in Western Europe, but in Central Europe. Domination in European airspace means domination
over Europe. The ability to attack or blackmail
European countries with missiles and aviation
means enjoying a decisive strategic advantage
on the continent. A significant strengthening of
the integrity and safety of NATO will therefore
be ensured by the American missile defense
base in Romania, created for the needs of the
U.S. and the entire Alliance. Its construction has
already started and combat readiness is planned
for 2015. A complement to the U.S. missile base
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Nuclear Weapons
“The supreme guarantee of the security of the
Allies” is, according to the Strategic Concept of
NATO, nuclear weapons. To increase the credibility
of the transatlantic bond a small portion of the
U.S. nuclear arsenal is deployed in four Western
European countries and Turkey, to be used by the
Alliance as a whole in the event of war. This policy
and strategy contributed to the success of the Alliance—no one has ever launched a regular attack
on the territory of a member state. The United
States should boldly cross the Iron Curtain, offering
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a similar solution to at least one country in Central
Europe. The transatlantic bond cannot stop at any
impassable line drawn by Russia.
A uniform treatment of the entire area of
NATO in nuclear policy and strategy is the best
and only way to avoid any new national programs
for the development of nuclear weapons. Ukraine
gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for the
Budapest Memorandum signed in 1994, to ensure
respecting its independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of borders by
Russia and the Western powers. And then it lost
the Crimea for an indefinite period. The Ukrainian
decision from ten years ago is now widely considered to be a historic mistake. Only the Atlantic
Alliance can ensure a collective rather than an
individual nuclear deterrence.
on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security
between NATO and the Russian Federation.” The
document stated: “In the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry
out its collective defense and other missions by
ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration and capability for reinforcement rather than
by additional permanent stationing of substantial
combat forces.” It also said: “The member States
of NATO reiterate that they have no intention, no
plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons
on the territory of new members, nor any need
to change any aspect of NATO’s nuclear posture
or nuclear policy—and do not foresee any future
need to do so. This subsumes the fact that NATO
has decided that it has no intention, no plan, and
no reason to establish nuclear weapon storage
sites on the territory of those members, whether
through the construction of new nuclear storage
facilities or the adaptation of old nuclear storage
facilities.” In return, Russia has committed itself to
substantial self-limitation in the field of conventional forces. In 2014, it all lost its validity.
Cohesion must be added to the NATO Strategic Concept, or introduced as a principle and
goal of the Alliance through a special document
at the next summit. A similar goal—geographic
cohesion—is pursued since 2009 by the European
Union. The North Atlantic Alliance should adapt
the idea from its neighbors in Brussels.
Command Continental or Global
In a chosen country of Central Europe NATO
should create a new—corresponding to new challenges—headquarters with tasks covering the
whole of Europe or the world. It should be a battle
command directly subordinated to the Allied
Command Operations, ACO, in Mons, Belgium.
The most justified choice would be a European
missile and air defense command or a global
cyber-war command.
Rebus Sic Stantibus
Rebus sic stantibus—circumstances have
changed. Russia changed them using aggression
and threats. The North Atlantic Alliance should
announce—to avoid dangerous misunderstandings and miscalculations—that the declarations
from before the enlargement to the east, differentiating the status of the member states, now
only have a historical character. In any case the
declarations were not treaties and were not
legally binding. They were totally unrelated to
collective defense or peace support missions
(for example, in Ukraine).
The main declaration was the document
signed in 1997 and called the “Founding Act
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GRZEGORZ
KO S T R Z E WA - ZO R B A S
a political scientist and specialist in
American studies, graduated from the
Georgetown University and the Johns
Hopkins University in Washington,
DC, where he defended his doctoral
thesis on strategy and nuclear policy
under the supervision of Eliot Cohen
and Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was the chief negotiator of the
agreement on the exit of the Soviet Army from Poland. He
is a Professor at the Military University of Technology and
commentator of the w Sieci weekly.
Photo: Archive Grzegorz Kostrzewa-Zorbas
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Russian Minority in Estonia
after Crimea
Martin Ehala
The Crimean Anschluss has raised security concerns in
the neighboring countries of Russia. Having a relatively
large Russian speaking minority, Estonia certainly needs
to analyze the situation and take appropriate measures.
According to the 2011 census, there are 1.29
million people in Estonia, roughly 70% of whom
are ethnic Estonians and the remaining 30%
Russian-speakers. The vast majority of Russianspeakers are ethnic Russians, but this category
includes also Ukrainians, Belarusians, and representatives of dozens of other ethnicities who
speak Russian as their home language, but may
still value their heritage in the form of “symbolic
ethnicity.”
Historically the Russian speaking population
has largely been formed after the annexation of
Estonia to the Soviet Union in 1940. During the
Soviet period, immigration of Russians and other
Soviet ethnicities into Estonia was encouraged by
the Soviet authorities. As a consequence, the share
of ethnic Estonians in the population dropped
from 93% in 1940 to 61% in 1989. After regaining
the independence in 1991, the trend reversed,
partly due to withdrawal of Soviet troops and
their families from Estonia in mid-1990s.
Currently, about a half of the Estonian
Russian-speakers live in the capital Tallinn area
where they constitute nearly 50% of the population. Residentially, most of them are concentrated
into a few ethnic suburbs. About 30% of Russianspeakers live compactly in industrial cities in East
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Estonia, near the border of the Russian Federation.
The proportion of Russian speakers in these cities
is around 90%. The region is strategically crucial
to Estonia, as it has the mines of oil shale, fuelling
the largest national power plants. The remaining
20% of the Russian-speakers are scattered in other
cities and towns of Estonia where they are a small
minority.
Currently, about
a half of the Estonian
Russian-speakers live
in the capital Tallinn
area where they
constitute nearly 50%
of the population.
As Russian was the official language in the
USSR, the Russian speakers of Estonia had little
or no motivation to learn Estonian. After the
collapse of Soviet Union, the language status
was reversed: Russian lost its official position
and Estonian was re-established as the only state
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language. Since most of the Russian speakers
were monolingual, one of the main goals of Estonian language policy during the last 25 years has
been establishing Estonian as the main language
of communication.
quite different interpretation of world events,
particularly of those in Ukraine.
Because of the large proportion of Russian
speakers in Estonia, their segregated pattern of
residence in the border areas, and their adherence
to the Russia’s channels of mass media there is an
inclination to see them as a potential threat to
Estonia’s internal security and territorial integrity,
especially after the annexation of Crimea. While
such potential may be present in principle, its
possible realization also depends on several other
crucial elements.
According to the social identity theory,
the interethnic stability is contingent on three
social psychological factors—the perception of
legitimacy of the interethnic power relations,
the perception of ethnic deprivation; and the
perception of the strength differential between
the competing groups. For example, the Russian
separatism in Ukraine actualized its potential
after all three conditions became satisfied. First,
the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich enabled to
construct the perception of the Kiev government
as illegitimate. Second, the subsequent withdrawal
of the official status of the Russian language by
Ukrainian parliament strengthened the perceptions of deprivation. Third, the strong support
of Russia for the pro-Russian powers and the
weakness of the pro-Ukrainian powers in Crimea
made the idea of changing the status quo realistic.
To analyze the situation in Estonia, the perceptions
of legitimacy, deprivation and strength need to be
taken into account, too.
What concerns legitimacy, there is no doubt
that the status of Estonia as an EU and NATO
member is perceived legitimate amongst the
Estonian Russian speakers. Ethnic Russian politicians run for seats in the European Parliament,
Estonian Riigikogu, and at municipal level.
It must also be noted that the vast majority
of Russian speakers support ethnically mixed
major parties, such as the Centre Party, the
Social Democrats, and to a lesser degree the
liberal Reform Party. These parties provide
What is certain is that
at present, no Russian
politician or community
leader in Estonia denies
the need to learn and
know Estonian, and this
opinion seems to be
shared by the majority
of Russian speakers, too.
This enterprise has been followed by some
success: in 1990, as many as 85% of Russian
speakers did not know Estonian at all; by 2013
this has fallen to 25%. Those figures reflect self-assessment, which may not be fully accurate.
What is certain is that at present, no Russian politician or community leader in Estonia denies
the need to learn and know Estonian, and this
opinion seems to be shared by the majority of
Russian speakers, too.
Despite increased language knowledge,
there are still little personal contacts between
the members of the main linguistic groups in
Estonia. Roughly a half of Russian-speakers live
in a virtually monolingual Russian environment
where there is little contact with Estonians, and
about 45% of Estonians have no daily contact with
Russian speakers, either, according to a recent
survey. The phenomenon is often characterized
as living in parallel worlds, the more that the
Russian speakers mainly follow the TV channels
of Russia while Estonians prefer Estonian and
Western channels. Obviously these media provide
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a legitimate path to power for politically active
part of the Russian speaking community—most
of the opinion leaders of the Russian speakers
are the members of these large parties. On
the other hand, the support for ethnic Russian
parties has been for many years extremely low,
just below 3%.
Furthermore, the participation activity of
Russian speakers at the EP and local elections
is the same as amongst Estonians, while it is
somewhat lower at the national parliamentary
elections. All this indicates that the Russian
speaking community seems to be politically well
integrated to Estonian society and participates in
democratic processes, recognizing its legitimacy.
However, it must be taken into account that
differently from local elections, not all Russian
speakers can participate in national and EP elections. These are restricted to citizens of Estonia,
but only 54% of the Russian speakers have Estonian citizenship, while a quarter has Russian citizenship and a 20% is still stateless.
This brings us to the ethnic equality issue
where Estonia is the most vulnerable. While in
objective terms, the Russian speaking minority
is by no means culturally threatened; such
perception is quite widely held. It has two main
sources, the issue of citizenship and the issue of
Russian-medium schools.
Estonian citizenship policy is grounded on
the fact that Estonia was annexed by the Soviet
Union in 1940 as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. People of the Russian-speaking
minority—that formed during the Soviet period—
were seen as immigrants who had to apply for
citizenship requiring Estonian language examination. While in the first 10–15 post-Soviet years,
they applied to citizenship in large numbers, it has
considerably slowed down in recent years. This
may be partly due to rational choice: a stateless
permanent resident of Estonia has the advantage
of travelling visa free to both the EU and Russia,
while Estonian and Russian nationals need a visa
to Russia and the EU, respectively.
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Even if it is profitable to be stateless instrumentally, the sense of being a “second class
citizen” is the strongest drawback of this status.
This is annoying to the people who have been
born and lived all their lives in Republic of Estonia,
but are still not recognized as its citizens. Some
of them have taken a principal stand not to apply
for citizenship because they believe that they
have a moral right to have it by birth. Some have
even stated that they would not take the Estonian
citizenship even if they were given to them as
a gift, since it is too little and too late.
The other major issue is the reform of the
Russian-medium schools that started 2007.
According to the plan, in the last three grades
of the secondary school, 60% of the subjects
must be taught in the Estonian language. Before
the reform, the Russian-medium schools had the
right to teach all subjects in Russian. The goal
of this reform is to increase the knowledge of
Estonian amongst Russian speaking youth.
While there is a public consensus about the
need to know the Estonian language, there is
disagreement on methods how this goal should
be reached. Quite clearly, the reform has made
many Russian speakers worried, because of the
fear that learning in Estonian would weaken the
overall learning results, particularly if the teachers
themselves were not native speakers of Estonian.
Reducing the Russian-language education has
also increased fears of linguistic and cultural
assimilation.
The third factor influencing interethnic
stability is the perceived strength differential.
The ease of the Crimean annexation showed that
if the population welcomes the external intervention, separatism would be hard to counter.
So, Russia’s bold willingness to support its diaspora’s separatist sentiments certainly increased
the perceived strength of the Russian speaking
minorities in the nearby countries.
However, as the subsequent developments
have showed, the power balance has remained
quite constant compared to the pre-Crimean
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time. First, the West has assured its unity by
economic sanctions and by increasing its military presence in the Baltic Countries, countering
power with power. And second, Russia has failed
to show clear and easy success in the eastern and
southern regions of Ukraine. Instead of finding
unanimous popular support, it has only managed
to raise a small fraction of separatists to an armed
confrontation. Thus, the stalling of the conflict
in Eastern Ukraine is a cautionary example for
everybody who dreams of a miraculous return
of the USSR. Most likely any such attempts would
turn into a lose-lose situation for all sides. Considering this, the question that the Estonian Russian
speakers might ask in their hearts is whether
their deprivation is really of such magnitude,
and the Estonian state so illegitimate that taking
the separatist cause would be preferable to any
other option.
Some answer to this question was aired at
the latest celebration of the victory in the WWII
in Estonia on May 9th. In the last years, these celebrations have been massively decorated by the
orange-black Georgian ribbons. Many Estonian
Russian speakers liked to display them in their
cars permanently as an identity sign. This year,
the display of Georgian ribbons was considerably
decreased. As the Ukrainian separatists use this
ribbon as their identification, the symbol has
acquired aggressive imperialist connotations.
A notable drop in the use of this symbol in Estonia
might be a sign of disassociation from the sentiments characterizing its wearers in Ukraine.
There is no doubt that the Russian speakers
feel somewhat deprived in Estonia, because of the
citizenship and educational policy. The positive
thing about the Ukrainian crisis is that perhaps
the first time ever the Estonian mainstream political discourse has started to realize that the only
long-term security guarantee against Russia’s
imperialistic ambitions would be the welfare
of all people in Estonia, notwithstanding their
home language. This has already led to some
positive steps—the ministry of justice has started
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translating Estonian legislation to Russian, it
has promised that the consumer information
of medical products needs to be also printed in
Russian; and that the school reform needs adjustments. Thus, at present it seems that the lesson
of Ukraine might have an improving rather than
obstructing effect on the interethnic relations in
Estonia.
MARTIN EHALA
Professor of Literacy Education, Senior
Research Fellow, University of Tartu
Photo: Eva-Maria Truusalu
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Post-Soviet Central Asia:
The Changing Politics
Of Leadership Transition
Luca Anceschi
The entrenchment of authoritarianism in Central Asia
might survive the demise of the first generation of leaders
Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populated
state, is due to celebrate its next Presidential
election in 2015. The biggest question mark
surrounding the Uzbekistani consultation is
related to the incumbent’s decision to participate: should Islam A. Karimov, first (and only)
President of post-Soviet Uzbekistan, opt to file
a candidature, there will be very limited room
to end his tenure at the helm of the Uzbekistani
state. No alternative candidate—coming from
within or, less likely, beyond the regime ranks—
will have a chance to unseat Uzbekistan’s longterm president. Karimov, in other words, is most
certainly expected to remain president for life.
This latter proposition captures in full the
fundamental conundrum that, in the last five
years or so, has come to characterize the political landscape of the Central Asian republics
(Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). To date, no regional state
has established a viable procedure to ensure
the smooth completion of political transitions,
leaving the fate of leadership change in the hands
of incumbents. This failure has come to compromise, in the medium term, the effectiveness of
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regional governance, as the ageing authoritarian
leaders have preferred to engage in conservative policies rather than introduce much-needed
socio-political change.
This conundrum has virtually frozen the political landscapes of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—
the key constituents of Central Asia’s political
community. Throughout the post-Soviet era,
the two republics have been dominated by the
figures of I.A. Karimov (Uzbekistan) and Nursultan
A. Nazarbaev (Kazakhstan). The careers of Central
Asia’s elder statesmen, interestingly, unfolded in
parallel trajectories: both appointed at the helm
of their respective republics in the Gorbachev
years, Karimov and Nazarbaev carefully managed
the transition to independence to establish the
consolidated authoritarian regimes over which
they continue to preside in the mid-2010s.
The Kazakhstani political discourse is currently
dominated by speculations on the presidential
succession. The ageing president (b. 1940) has
entered another term in office in April 2011, when
he won yet another election. Interestingly though,
Nazarbaev’s electoral triumph—even one of his
opponents did apparently vote for the incumbent,
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who was re-elected with a stunning 95.5 percent
of votes—opened a phase of inexorable decline
for the Kazakhstani regime: although Nazarbaev
is firmly at the helm, his age and (reportedly) poor
health have encouraged the spread of rumors on
the presidential succession.
has been subjugated to the logic of power personalization established by the incumbent president.
A pre-arranged, extra-familial succession, in this
sense, appears to be a very likely outcome for the
post-Nazarbaev transition. Interestingly though,
this scenario is contested by the (small) internal
opposition, which is timidly pointing out to
Kazakhstan’s republican nature when outlining its
preferred tool to engage with the post-Nazarbaev
transition: a free and fair election.
To a very similar extent, the “democratic”
option seems an unlikely outcome for leadership transition in Uzbekistan. In this context, the
highly authoritarian nature of Uzbekistani politics prevented the establishment of any form of
internal opposition: the leadership transition, in
other words, will be almost certainly orchestrated
from within the regime ranks.
Recently, however, an increasing number of
international observers advanced relevant doubts
in relation to the president’s actual capacity of
appointing a successor, arguing that the Karimov
regime is more fragmented and unstable than its
Kazakhstani counterpart. There is no better way
to elaborate upon the latter proposition than by
focusing on the many misfortunes experienced
by one of the president’s daughters, Gulnara
Karimova. A successful pop star, a globally recognized twitterata, and a wealthy businesswoman,
Gulnara has recently fallen from favor: having
lost most of her assets, the once-successor-inwaiting is now under house arrest, with virtually
no prospects of rising to the top of Uzbekistani
politics. Gulnara’s brutal treatment might be an
indicator of Karimov’s limited influence vis-à-vis
the choice of his own successor: other forces,
internal to the regime but not totally aligned
with the president, might have orchestrated the
marginalization of the president’s daughter. This
context, ultimately, offers a relevant perspective to make sense of the recently announced
constitutional reform that enhanced the powers
of the Uzbekistani prime minister. With Gulnara
under arrest, no opposition allowed to operate
An increasing number of
international observers
advanced relevant
doubts in relation to
the president’s actual
capacity of appointing
a successor, arguing
that the Karimov regime
is more fragmented
and unstable than
its Kazakhstani
counterpart.
Nazarbaev himself has refused to publicly
announce a successor, and, in his later years in
power, opted to focus on legacy-building rather
than engaging openly with the issue of leadership
change. Inevitably, this perceived vacuum paved
the way for many speculations on Kazakhstan’s
future leadership. A significant number of élite
members have been jockeying for positions of
power in the lead-up to the inevitable leadership
change. The focus of the international community,
on the other hand, remained firmly concentrated
on Nazarbaev’s immediate family, and particularly on daughters Dinara and Dariga, who are
nevertheless unlikely to take the lead after their
father’s demise. Focus on the “First Family” does
ultimately reveal the peculiar nature of power
diffusion in Nazarbaev’s Kazakhstan, where the
Central Asia’s traditional tendency for dynasticism
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freely in the country, and a big question mark
hovering over Karimov’s health, long-term Prime
Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev might somehow
appear as the current front-runner in Uzbekistan’s
relatively imminent transition. The lessons learned
throughout the only orchestrated transition experienced in Central Asia to date, however, indicated
that, when it comes to relatively unexpected
leadership change, unpredictable outcomes are
not to be ruled out.
On 21 December 2006, official sources
announced the death of Saparmurat Niyazov,
Turkmenistan’s long-term president and Central
Asia’s most eccentric leader. During his later
years in power, many observers connected the
wider stability of Turkmenistan with Niyazov’s
permanence in power. In this sense, the authoritarian stability ensured by Niyazov’s mercurial
rule was expected to come to a more or less
abrupt end at the very moment of the leader’s
demise. The transition to power instigated
by Niyazov’s relatively unexpected death did
however unfold in a surprisingly smooth trajectory. In less than 24 hours after the leader’s
death, the regime had proceeded to arrest the
constitutionally mandated successor, Parliament
speaker Ovezgeldy Atayev, to regroup around
the figure of Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov, one
of Turkmenistan’s Deputy Prime Ministers and
a relatively unknown élite member. Berdymuhamedov’s accession to power was sanctioned
by an orchestrated multi-candidate election—
the first in Turkmenistan’s history—that saw
him emerging as the dominus of post-Niyazov
Turkmenistan on 14 February 2007.
There are two major conclusions that can
be drawn by this cursory analysis of the post-Niyazov transition. First, Berdymuhamedov’s
rise to power was smooth, but not entirely legitimate, as the regime marginalized the mandated
successor to shape the transition in line with the
internal power play. Interestingly, the eventual
winner has to be considered as an outsider in
Turkmen politics: Berdymuhamedov was never
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listed amongst Niyazov’s likely successors, and
he maintained a low profile in the Cabinet while
occupying a relatively marginal ministerial
position (Health and Pharmaceutical Industry).
Despite the many unconfirmed rumors, there is
no substantive evidence to conclude that Turkmenistan’s second president was endorsed by
the late Niyazov: Berdymuhamedov’s accession
to power, in this sense, has to be considered as
the function of his alliance-making skills.
The 2006–2007 transition, furthermore, did
not have any significant impact on the quality
of Turkmen governance. Although it failed to
replicate the brutality and many of the eccentricities experienced under Türkmenbashi,
post-Niyazov authoritarianism did ultimately
remain quite extreme. To date, Berdymuhamedov has continued to rule Turkmenistan
in non-democratic fashion, crashing internal
and external opposition, exerting an oppressive control over the media, and even venturing
into the launch of a cult of his own personality.
In this sense, the Turkmen transition witnessed
a change in the state’s leadership, but not in its
governance methods. Ultimately, it cannot be
linked to a process of regime change, insofar as
no liberalization of the domestic political landscape has followed the demise of Niyazov and
the emergence of a new leadership.
And this is exactly the risk that we might incur
in if we are to equate regime change to leadership
change when reflecting upon the impending
transitions in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: there
is no certainty to suggest that future leaders in
Astana and Tashkent will endeavor to liberalize
their respective political landscapes. In this sense,
the entrenchment of authoritarianism in Central
Asia might survive the demise of the first generation of leaders, as the political experience of
post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan has somehow indicated.
The Kyrgyz Republic remains to date the only
Central Asian state to have experienced multiple
changes of leadership. Inaugural president Askar
Akayev was toppled by a popular revolution in
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March 2005, when demonstrations erupted all
over the country to protest against the unprecedented level of corruption reached by the regime.
The accession to power of Kurmanbek Bakiyev did
the abandonment of a strongly presidential electoral system. This was perhaps the only instance
of regime change that Central Asia has experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary era is currently
making its (relatively) initial steps, with President Almazbek Atambayev governing over an
increasingly unstable and fragmented system.
While there is certainly no recipe to improve
the quality of governance after a change in the
leadership, the political experience of post-Soviet
Central Asia seems to indicate that local leaders
have failed to identify even the most rudimentary
praxis to ensure smooth, constitutionally
enshrined transfers of power. The political
transitions emerged to date in the region
( Turkmenistan in 2006–2007, Kyrgyzstan in 2005
and 2010) did all take place after traumatic
events. This systemic failure might indeed explain
why Central Asia-watchers (and perhaps the local
population too) are taking a long, big breath
before venturing in the cloud of uncertainty
surrounding the impending transitions in
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
There is no certainty
to suggest that future
leaders in Astana and
Tashkent will endeavor
to liberalize their
respective political
landscapes. In this
sense, the entrenchment
of authoritarianism
in Central Asia might
survive the demise of
the first generation of
leaders, as the political
experience of postSoviet Kyrgyzstan has
somehow indicated.
LUCA ANCESCHI
Lecturer in Central Asian Studies,
University of Glasgow. His book
Turkmenistan’s foreign policy—
Positive Neutrality and the
Consolidation of the Turkmen
regime (Routledge 2008) represented
the first book-length account of
Turkmen foreign policy published in Western languages
Photo: Archive Luca Anceschi
not however bring about more transparent governance, as the post-Akayev regime soon began to
imitate the diffused practices of nepotism and
state-capture that its predecessor implemented
during the 1990s and early 2000s. Ultimately,
Bakiyev’s extremely corrupted regime was also
the victim of popular discontent, as a second
revolution erupted in April 2010 to topple the
leadership in Bishkek. The 2010 Kyrgyz Revolution, after the brief interim presidency of Roza
Otunbayeva—the only Central Asian leader to
have willingly relinquished power in the post-independence era—led to a complete revision
of the state’s constitutional infrastructure and
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Europe and the Problem
of Force
Wojciech Przybylski
The recent events in Ukraine have laid Europe’s inability
to act in the face of hostile Russian action bare. Faced with
military intervention at its doorstep, it has reached for
the traditional toolkit of diplomacy—declarations and
consultations. By renouncing the use of force or war, is
Europe giving in to anyone who will not hesitate to use
those in pursuit of their goals? If so, it may soon have to
surrender the European way of life, which is so attractive
that many people already risk their lives in order to
achieve it.
A brute, naked force has an edge over
talks. Violence remains the essence of power.
In economic terms, Europe is undoubtedly a big
fish; yet if it is to cease being small fry in political
terms, it needs to understand the following lessons.
Only through the joint construction of military
potential will we be able to bolster European standards around us as well as globally. It is appropriate that we do this only in the name of liberal
principles: freedom, human rights, and the rule
of law. On the one hand, these principles require
that we condemn the use of force, including war.
On the other, they require us to be prepared for
war. Thus far no attempt to rebuild European military strength has been successful. However, the
world had never seen such peaceful process as the
creation of the European Union. Yet, the EU exists.
The essence of politics in modern-day Europe
is deteriorating. While it is true that the world has
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changed dramatically in the past few centuries, this
change has not been so profound that military force
would have ceased to play the deciding role in the
creation of the political order—quite the contrary.
The sincere intentions of Europeans have done
nothing to limit the level of violence in the world
over the last few decades. Devastating conflicts
on the scale of world wars have been avoided, but
clashes are occurring with great frequency, even
in our immediate neighborhood. Syria is currently
a site of conflict, Russian forces have occupied part
of Georgia, and it was not so long ago that blood
was spilled in the Balkans. Europe is mindful of its
historical tragedies and it is not so much reluctant
to use force as it is unwilling to admit that force
remains at the center of politics, and that the use
of violence is the essence of political power.
A bitter pill to swallow is the fact that even
as a continent we still are a small fry in political
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terms. In modern political thought, however,
there is no resolute answer as to how violence
may be placed at the heart of power and how
it may be harnessed. This is why the leaders on
our continent compensate for their own sense of
weakness by developing diplomatic instruments
that they deem “o be our y.” They are unwilling to
face the fact that the power of European countries
is based on the same law as that of global communities, namely, that it is necessary to be prepared
to use force not only in the name of one’s interests
but also in the name of shared values. At times the
European countries make limited, and thus pitiable, attempts at armed intervention, as was seen
during the recent conflicts in Libya and in Mali.
We should, however, remember the Balkans and
ask ourselves how many human lives were saved
by all that pathetic prattle about human rights
and by our inability to intervene. Do we truly
believe that tragedy will remain at bay because
we can defeat aggression through words alone?
We live by the conviction that the European
community can survive only if we renounce
violence. The memory of the tragedy of war
provides a warning, although its power fades as
violence remains at the heart of political action.
How else can we characterize the pressure that,
for example, Germany and the International
Monetary Fund put on Greece where it had to
accept the conditions of financial aid against its
better judgment and common sense? Fortunately,
in this case, those actions did not lead to armed
conflict, but allusions were made to wartime
violence and occupation in many statements.
European Union leaders used a kind of force
against one of its member states.
means other organizations have at their disposal;
corporations, media giants, individual pressure
groups, and even individual people often control
a country’s agenda to a greater extent than its
parliament. The influence this power has on the
lives of communities is enormous but incidental.
They appear sporadically and do not institutionalize themselves so much as state organizations do. Nevertheless, regardless of who these
new “strongmen” are, their activity is straightforwardly political. They use the power of words
and sometimes money to shape the world order
and eliminate the monopoly on power held by
governments and states.
We should, however,
remember the Balkans
and ask ourselves how
many human lives
were saved by all that
pathetic prattle about
human rights and by our
inability to intervene.
The discord between power and force is best
illustrated by comparing Europe and the United
States. In his 2002 article “Power and Weakness,1
Robert Kagan demonstrated this by use of two
metaphors. He compared Europe to the stance of
Venus, which is closer to the peace-loving philosophy of Immanuel Kant. America was compared
to Mars, the god of war, and closer to Hobbesian
ideas. The text caused great controversy at the
time, in part due to the fact that George W. Bush
was also using similar rhetoric in declaring war on
terrorism. Ten years on, Kagan explained that the
text was published earlier and was not intended
to be a justification for the policies of the White
House. It had, however, been in part inspired by
Europe: A Power without Force
We will attempt to make use of two terms in
order to describe how communities choose the
direction they take: power and force. It is possible
today to be sincerely convinced that power—
political power in particular—is nothing more
than braggadocio when held up against the
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the notorious essay that British strategist Robert
Cooper had written on the weakness of Europe.2
In his essay, Robert Cooper echoed his countryman, historian Michael Howard, who had
noted the significant weakness of a Europe that
is convinced of the primacy of liberal values and
yet is not prepared to take up arms to defend
them: the civilized countries have given up the
position that had given them strength. This is of
course not always true. There are, nevertheless,
few significant exceptions to the rule. No one
would seriously claim that the power held by the
president of the United States is mere braggadocio. We may add the leaders of Russia, Pakistan,
and China to the list of the powerful, but not the
peaceful and prosperous Switzerland, Germany,
or Denmark. Nobody suspects Russia, Pakistan, or
China of harboring liberal tendencies. Nevertheless, soon enough, other countries outside Europe
may join the group of Western/liberal powers.
Lately, even Brazil has been arming itself in order
to defend its wealth of natural resources and its
modernization project. It is countries such as
Brazil and India who will join America in shaping
the free world.
of course impossible to compare the numbers of
fatalities, as every human life lost is a tragedy.
Nevertheless, in considering the evil that armed
conflict may potentially bring, it is worth bearing
in mind that in times of peace we witness events
both bloodier and crueler.
It would not be entirely perverse to ponder
the social benefits of warfare. What strength lies
in war-readiness? As strange as it is to say, war
is above all an instrument of social change and,
despite appearances to the contrary, progress.
Why then should not liberalism support wars
on the understanding that participation in an
armed conflict is a driving force of change in
society? Robert Nisbet, a major American sociologist, described in his 1988 pamphlet The Present
Age3 how America’s participation in the wars at
the start of the 20th century pushed it toward
progress: equal rights, new technologies, and
social change. This came about at the cost of
tradition, the strength of local communities, and
religion. Nisbet, a staunch conservative, naturally
bemoaned this. Should liberals—not to mention
socialists—seriously consider their stance in light
of this?
Regardless of where one’s ideological sympathies lie, it must not be forgotten that every war
brings change with it, at times a radical one. Could
we envision the 20th century economic and social
dynamism of Warsaw, or even Poland, had the war
not ploughed through the fabric of cities and,
in doing so, leveled social status? The People’s
Republic of Poland was not responsible, as the
Soviets oversaw the rebuilding of hierarchies
and dependency structures. With reference to
the wartime memories of Ksawery Pruszyński, it
is difficult to deny that war and the catastrophe
of the Warsaw Uprising created an entirely new
society in Poland.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not
calling for war to be declared in the name of
progress in the style of 19th century Marxists. I am,
however, drawing attention to the fact that wars
in principle are responsible for fewer fatalities
War, or Being Prepared for Change
The consequences of a political decision
always ultimately decide someone’s existence
or lack thereof. The failure to take action can place
decisions about human existence into the hands
of others. In extreme situations, this applies to
conflicts that cost human lives. This also concerns
crime, but above all war. We must remember,
however, that the essence of war is not death, but
the achievement of a defined political goal. Many
armed conflicts naturally spiral out of control and
leave casualties in their wake, yet those armed
conflicts are less lethal than road accidents and
we are almost as indifferent to them as to detective shows. Traffic accidents claim over one million
lives worldwide every year. Armed conflicts from
the second half of the 20th century and the present
day have claimed ten times less lives annually. It is
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than assumed and that their purpose is not to kill
an enemy but to achieve political goals. Secondly,
it is precisely warfare that is the main driving force
of the change that liberals are eager to achieve,
particularly in democracy, and which involves an
element of social awareness even in participation
in a distant combat mission.
the certainty of this that provided the catalyst for
democratic changes in Central Europe. Václav
Havel’s concept of “the power of the powerless”
made sense of the odd situation in which the
leadership in fact lacked the necessary strength
to lead, and thereby it lost. That strength was
harnessed by the democratic social movements.
It was they who replaced the old leadership. Their
weakness, however, was and still is the fact that
they turn their backs on the essence of politics
and thereby on the scene of potential conflict.
The fate of democracy and the European
social model is dependent on whether we will
be able to rise up and take advantage of force to
create order in the name of liberal values. Violence
and dictatorship are nevertheless written into
every level of state institutions, no matter how
democratic they are. We do not have to use them.
If, however, we rule out the use of force, we pave
the way for those who will not hesitate in their
use of uncontrolled, unlimited force. In other
words, if Europe does not take common stance
against Russian imperial ambitions to the point
of even risking a war, then the European way of
life will hardly be as attractive in the future so that
one hundred people at another square would be
willing to die for it.
Force without Power
What are the consequences of a policy that
rules out the possibility of warfare? If we are not
convinced that strength—including physical
force—creates political power (and the countries
of Europe do after all aspire to that power), we
are destined to become an antique relic, moved
from shelf to shelf by rising powers that will not
look favorably upon our civilizational model. This
may be our undoing in the long run. We cannot,
however, frantically build up our armies and
demonstrate our readiness to fight. It is necessary
to arm ourselves until Europe becomes a great
power, or we must use the tactics of a weak
player who is indispensable to everyone but who
threatens no one. That strength can also bring
about positive effects in the right circumstances, if
current leaderships weaken and lose the power to
set the agenda. The strength of conviction which
mere conversation represents only occasionally
wields this power. In general, it must be backed
up by force, as it is traditionally understood.
Even in Poland, we tend to prefer to use the
word “power” to represent the concept of force
in political discussions. However, understanding
of the modern world is only possible with the
recognition that it is force that creates power and
infuses it with meaning. Political power is at times
toothless but, in the social world and especially in
the world of politics, force can always bite. It was
WOJCIECH PRZYBYLSKI
is Editor-in-Chief of Visegrad
Insight and Res Publica Nowa.
Photo: Piotr Bekas
1 http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7107
2 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/07/1
3 Robert A. Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, Liberty Fund 2003.
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Right in Ascendance
or Mainstream in Decline?
Frank Furedi
The main reason why the old mainstream parties
have failed to contain the rise of populist movements
is because they stand discredited in the eyes of sections
of the electorate. They not only lack the political
arguments to reverse this state of affairs but also the
political language to communicate across the cultural
divide.
Commentaries on the spectacular rise of
right-wing populist parties throughout Europe
often shift between the postures of incomprehension and moral condemnation. During
the past two decade (and especially since the
Eurozone crisis) such reviews are often drawn
towards providing a diagnosis of a political
pathology, where supporters of populist parties
are represented as patients who don’t quite
know what they are doing. Some of the characteristics attributed to their behavior are that
of resentment, an impulse to protest or to lash
out against the political elites or against globalization or against change, an act of political
helplessness or a reaction to multiculturalism.
Supporters of these parties are always characterized as suffering from a powerful and irrational fear—fear of others, fear of immigrants,
fear for their national identity, fear for their
way of life. They are typically condemned as
narrow-minded bigots or racists—embarrassing
reminders of the prejudiced culture of the bad
old days.
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The tendency to portray supporters of populist parties as simpletons is invariably coupled to
an analysis that depicts these political organizations as ones that set out to cynically exploit and
manipulate people’s grievances. At best these are
protest movements that represent the negative
impulse of a backlash. The possibility that for
many people voting for a right wing populist
party is a positive choice and not just a gesture of
protest is rarely considered. Yet for many voters of
nationalistic populist parties the decision to reject
the old established pro-EU mainstream parties
represents a positive affirmation of a way of life.
They Don’t Talk to Us
Once upon a time the north-eastern Hungarian
city of Miskolc used to be a socialist stronghold. In
the recent years the far right and fascist-inclined
Jobbik party has displaced the Socialists as the
party of the poor and the dispossessed in Miskolc.
After a few conversations with people from Miskolc
it becomes all too evident why they switched
their allegiance. Gyuri and his wife Zsuzsi used
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to vote for the left but now feel cheated by the
corrupt politicians who “lied and betrayed them.”
They hope that Jobbik will stand up for ordinary
Hungarian people. Janos, an elderly former steel
worker provides a compelling explanation of
a political world turned upside down in Hungary’s
second largest city. He claims that “they don’t talk
to us.” By the word “they” he means the established
mainstream parties. A recent analysis of Jobbik’s
success in provincial Hungary echoes Janos’s point.
According to a fascinating commentary in the
Magyar Narancs , people in the countryside opted
for Jobbik because the Left appears to be only
interested in their votes.1
Hungary represents an extreme example
where a significant section of the electorate—
whose voice has been ignored and marginalized—has sought to defend their interest by
voting for a far right chauvinist and racialist
movement. Jobbik did not have to fight off
political parties competing for the allegiance
of the people who voted for them (20 percent
of the electorate). The other parties—especially
the Socialists—were either not interested or not
able to find a language for communicating with
the socially and culturally insecure people of
provincial Hungary.
Janos’s words, “they don’t talk to us,” resonate
with the British experience. Former Prime Minister
Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” moment is paradigmatic in this respect. During the 2010 General
Election he was overheard denouncing a 65-year
old lady who asked him about his views on immigration as a “bigoted woman.” That Brown was not
prepared to have a conversation with people who
are concerned about immigration is testimony to
the psychic distance between the Westminster
elite and the working class pensioners uncertain
about their place in the world. “They are bigots
and there is nothing to discuss” is a sentiment that
spares politicians from the challenge of discussing
some very difficult issues.
This time I am talking to a group of self-employed artisans in the Kentish town of
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Sittingbourne in England. They are all going to
vote for UKIP in the EU elections. Their decision
to support UKIP is at least in part motivated by
the negative impulse of giving the old parties
a bloody nose. But they also have positive reasons
for embracing UKIP. As far as they are concerned,
UKIP speaks their language and addresses their
concerns. When I inquire to find out just what it is
about their lives that UKIP is able to address their
response suggests that it is their sense of cultural
insecurity what is at issue above all.
UKIP’s outlook, which is a mixture of traditional Toryism, conservative Liberalism and Little
England patriotism has very little in common
with that of Jobbik. But then the parties to
which the generic label right wing populist is
applied—Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Party
for Freedom, the French National Front, the Greek
Golden Dawn—often have very different policies
and aspirations. Outwardly what they share is
a common hostility to the EU and immigration.
Inwardly what animates their supporters is their
estrangement the cultural values promoted by
the political establishment that dominates the EU
and member societies. In a world where culture
has become politicized they regard their identity as being under threat by governments who
regard old traditions with scorn.
They Are Not Like Us
European media outlets have become
obsessed with the rise of EU skepticism and
populism. What such reactions often express is an
apprehension that the prevailing institutions of
society have lost touch with a significant section
of the public. What is at issue in the numerous
disputes between the political establishment
and its populist opponents is not simply political
differences but ones that are also profoundly
cultural.
It is evident that in the current post-ideological era the differences between Left and Right
have lost much of their political significance. Even
questions like the role of the welfare state or
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economic strategy are rarely the topics of serious
debate. Instead what divides Europe are issues
of culture. Recent protest and controversy over
subjects like family values, gay marriage, genderequality sex education, abortion, circumcision of
boys, multiculturalism or immigration indicate
that cultural issues have become politicized to
the point that they deeply divide societies.
The origins of Europe’s culture war lie with
the shift in focus of governmental activity in the
post-ideological era. Since the 1980s mainstream
parties have lost much of their political baggage
and identity. They have displaced the language
of ideology with that of technocratic governance. As technocrats they are in the business of
managing—rather than leading—public opinion.
Instead of arguing and convincing the electorate
they prefer to “nudge” and manipulate them. They
justify their existence through assuming that
they possess knowledge, values and insights that
are in short supply among the electorate. Hence
they are continually in the business of “raising
awareness,” of “changing attitudes” and of social
engineering. The pursuit of this social engineering
project is expressed through scorn for a way of
life best forgotten and for identities not wanted.
The sentiments are most systematically expressed
by the EU technocracy which believes that it is
entitled to displace traditional cultural attitudes
with its own “enlightened” sentiments. From this
perspective the traditional family values and
the old-fashioned sentiments appear as a prejudice that people need to be educated out of.
They continually contrast their enlightened and
healthy lifestyles to the bigoted outlook of those
who refuse to adapt to the new Europe.
What is significant about this conflict of values
is that its protagonists inhabit two very different
worlds. The urbanized, university-educated and
highly mobile political establishment has virtually
no point of contact with those whose lives they
scorn. In turn from the perspective of those who
inhabit a traditional way of life, the world of their
elites looks alien and culturally distant. From the
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standpoint of a UKIP or Danish People’s Party
voters, these are not just people who “don’t talk
to us” they are also not “not like us.”
Sometimes cultural conflicts can appear petty
and even bizarre. Take the issue of pork. After
reports that in some nurseries in Copenhagen,
children were no longer served pork products,
the Danish People’s Party decided to campaign
against what it interpreted as a blow against
the nation’s cultural identity. After its vociferous
campaign provoked widespread indignation and
concern, the Social Democratic Prime Minister,
Helle Thorning-Schmidt was forced to acquiesce
to the mood of the people and publicly affirm that
the eating of pork is integral to Danish identity.
“We have to stick with the way we eat and what
we do in Denmark” she stated before adding
“there should be room for frikadeller [meatballs].”
At first sight the politicization of meatballs
appears absurd. But on closer inspection this is
an instance of an “enough-is-enough” reaction.
At least a significant minority of Danes perceive
that what they could previously take for granted
is now regarded as negotiable by their political
masters. That so many people reacted so strongly
about the non-availability of pork in their children’s nurseries indicates that what’s at issue
is their identity as Danes, which they believe is
challenged and redefined by forces beyond their
control. Some commentators have classified this
response as a simply xenophobic reaction to
Muslims. No doubt, in some cases it is. However,
this manifestation of cultural insecurity represents
a demand for the affirmation of a way of life that
is no longer deemed as special by the ruling elites.
The Politics of Bad Faith
Until fairly recently the European political
establishment felt relatively confident about its
authority. It could easily dismiss the occasional
challenge from populist movements as simply
a temporary manifestation of a backlash and
protest. However, in recent years the European
political elites have become increasingly
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anxious and defensive. Despite their influence
over the media and EU institutions they have
not succeeded in neutralizing the appeal of
populist movements. Media campaigns waged
against right wing populist movements have
proved singularly ineffective. Despite the fact
that virtually all British media have mobilized
their resources against UKIP, the party continues
to retain its political support. What the failure of
this propaganda campaign against UKIP indicates
is that the political influence of the British media
has become seriously compromised.
Frequently the success of UKIP or the Danish
People’s Party is attributed to the charisma or the
political trickery of their leaders. Populist parties
are often accused of manipulating people or
scaring people or lying to them. The constant
attempts to expose their real agenda is inspired
by the naïve conviction that it is their trickery
rather than their political outlook that attracts
support. The main reason for this patronizing
response is because the European political establishment finds it difficult to acknowledge that its
populist opponents actually speak for a section of
the electorate. To acknowledge this reality would
require that the mainstream parties face up to
the fact that it is they who are out of touch with
a significant section of public opinion.
The main reason why the old mainstream
parties have failed to contain the rise of populist
movements is because they stand discredited in
the eyes of sections of the electorate. They not
only lack the political arguments to reverse this
state of affairs but also the political language to
communicate across the cultural divide. Instead of
engaging in democratic dialogue they outsource
their authority to media-trained consultants and
experts. In some cases mainstream parties have
almost given up on attempting to influence
groups such as elderly working class pensioners.
They are written off as irredeemably prejudiced
bigots whose outlook on the world can be safely
ignored. Take the example of one video commissioned by the EU Information Centre, and released
recently in Denmark. The video, featuring an
oral sex loving superhero Voterman, sought to
mobilize young people to vote in the EU election
presumably to offset the votes of their prejudiced
elders. Public outcry led to humiliating withdrawal of the video. This incident demonstrated
just who is really out of touch with public opinion.
What the current EU elections expose is the
unraveling of the world-view and authority of
the political establishment that manages the
destiny of most European societies. That a variety
of populist movements are the beneficiaries of
this state of affairs is not surprising. Their success
was not so much of their own making as the result
of the moral disorientation of the mainstream
parties. What we see is not the triumph of the
populist right but the implosion of the traditional
governmental parties in many parts of Europe.
Whether these populist movements have the
capacity to transcend their minority status is
an open question. However, the (irreversible?)
decline of the old mainstream EU oriented parties
is not in dispute.
FRANK FUREDI
is the author of Authority:
A Sociological Introduction,
Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Photo: Matthias Haslauer
1 http://magyarnarancs.hu/kismagyarorszag/a-baloldal-csak-a-szavazatvasarlasban-erdekelt-videken-ezert-akarjak-a-jobbikot-89596.
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LEONIDAS DONSKIS
A Heavy Hangover
after the 2014 EP Elections
W
e are coming,” says Nigel Farage, the
leader of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), and Co-Chair of the
Europe of Freedom and Democracy group in the
European Parliament. As if to say that this is just
his time, Farage comes up with the punch line
directed straight to Martin Schulz, President of
the European Parliament: “Please don’t pretend
that nothing has happened. You know perfectly
well that it has. And the day is nigh when all your
EU institutions will be plain dead. We are coming.”
I am paraphrasing his phrase, yet I can vouch for
its credibility and content.
So the message is clear—if we are to believe
the most theatrical and eloquent political clown
I have seen over the past five years that I spent as
his fellow Member of the European Parliament
(2009–2014)—that’s the beginning of the end
for the EU. Needless to say, the news about the
oncoming death of the EU is slightly exaggerated.
Christian Democrats, Socialists, Liberals, and Greens
will outweigh an increasingly visible minority of far
right led by Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. When
the time comes, conventional and pro-European
groups will easily achieve a decisive and crucial
majority over pivotal issues of the EU.
Yet on one point we—willing or not—have to
agree with Nigel Farage. The 2014 elections to the
European Parliament did make a difference. We
cannot pretend any longer that far right voices
and Euro-skeptics are still a tiny minority that is
easily to relegate to the margins of EU politics. The
shocking victory of UKIP in the UK (27% of votes)
coupled with the triumph of Le Front National
(FN) in France (one fourth of all votes) and with
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LEONIDAS DONSKIS
was 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 Donskiene
genuine fascist parties, such as the Golden Dawn
of Greece, and Jobbik of Hungary, the far right
and anti-immigration parties, such as UKIP, FN,
and Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, will make up quite a noisy minority of
around 140 voices in the newly elected European
Parliament.
First and foremost, these forces are not only
strongly anti-EU oriented—they are essentially
anti-European and overtly pro-Kremlin. One only
has to recall how they praised Vladimir Putin up to
the skies as a supposed defender of the conservative, family, traditional values, as it allowed
Farage and Marine Le Pen to close ranks with
Jobbik—a miserable and disgraceful alliance,
to say the least. Even worse was the moment of
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self-exposure when Farage in one of his recent
interviews went so far as to suggest that the two
grave mistakes made by the EU were the adoption
of Euro and the accession of Eastern European
countries to the EU with all the social mobility and
dignity they got (not being embarrassed anymore
by Western European immigration officers with
their intrusive questions and poorly concealed
disdain for Eastern Europe, I would add).
Well, what can you say after this? First and
foremost, not only do Poland or the Baltic States
appear as the stronghold of Europe-oriented
values as opposed to the pro-Kremlin and
Putinesque farce of UKIP and FN; in this context,
Ukraine and its anti-criminal revolution with
the EU on the lips of Maidan protesters come
as a powerful antidote against the political
grotesque of populism in EU countries.
At the same time, it becomes increasingly
obvious that the times when the Kremlin had its
useful idiots in the West primarily among leftist
intellectuals with all their misguided politics
and self-imposed moral and political blindness
are gone; instead, the new useful idiots of the
Kremlin come straight from far right—these are
people who choose to believe that Vladimir Putin
is the hope of European neo-conservatism. I have
already described elsewhere this phenomenon
in terms of the new Fascist International with its
headquarters in Moscow.
However tempting, we cannot reduce the
entire analysis of the 2014 elections to the EP to
a moral shock. True, it is something like a heavy
hangover and a wake-up call for the EU, yet this is
the right time to find the answer to the question:
What happened?
What happened was easy to expect, especially
in the light of a difficult rivalry between JeanClaude Juncker and Martin Schulz over the post
of President of the European Commission where
Juncker’s high profile of a confessed Federalist
made it impossible for the UK to back him. Add to
these domestic nuances the fight between British
conservatives and UKIP (as the latter tries to fish
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in the same waters of British Euro-skepticism
and exceptionalism), and you will have if not
a cul-de-sac, then at least a difficult predicament
of British politics.
Juncker may be blocked or strongly rejected
by the UK, much in the same way once his rival
Guy Verhofstadt, leader of ALDE (Alliance of
Liberals and Democrats for Europe), was blocked
for the same sin: his overt federalism, which tells
us something disturbing about the moral and
political void of the EU, rather than the sheer
triumph of Euroskeptics. Yes, the articulate,
eloquent, ambitious, and dynamic Verhofstadt
has many chances to become President of the
European Parliament (I would bet on it), yet the
maneuvering between the EU Council, as an
intergovernmental club, and the EP, as the only
democratically elected political institution of
the EU, exposes the principal weakness of the
Union: lack of vision, and the resulting reliance
on technocratic, instead of democratic, recipes.
The 2014 elections should serve as a wake-up
call and a reminder that Euroskepticism is far from
being a force majeur or natural disaster: instead,
it is a collective sentiment of European citizens
that got skillfully exploited by populist parties
and translated into a battle cry, a quasi-program, and a pseudo-vision for the future. It is
now enough to beat the drums of doom and
portray the EU as a specter of velvet totalitarianism or else demonize Brussels, and behold
the mandate—you can win the elections to the
despised European Parliament, an institution
which Mr. Farage hates and holds in contempt,
even refusing to attend the meetings of his
committee, yet this does not prevent him from
being well paid by it. No program or vision is
needed—just an imagined monster onto which
you project all your dissatisfaction and worries
caused by modern politics and life.
The EU is at crossroads, and the time is up.
We have to act. Otherwise, we will fail, leaving
Europe in tragedy. If we needed a clear signal,
we got it in these elections.
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Czech Foreign Trade
in Healthy Condition
Jan Bureš
The current orientation of Czech foreign trade has proved
relatively effective in crisis. The question is whether
a stronger orientation of the country’s economy towards
countries outside Europe would be desirable or indeed,
whether it should be actively encouraged.
The onset of the US financial crisis and
the Eurozone crisis that followed once again
brought to the table the recurrent question: is
Czech foreign trade too focused on developed
markets, particularly the Eurozone ones? Is it not
too dependent on the crisis-prone automotive
industry? At that point the answer was obvious.
Yes, we do need to expand our exports to the fastgrowing new markets of China, Russia, India and
Brasil. Yes, we do need to diversify our exports.
Five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers,
however, quite a different analysis seems to be
in order. Czech foreign trade, with its orientation towards European countries and the auto
industry, has coped really well. Foreign trade
proved to be one of the main assets of the Czech
economy, making a positive contribution to the
growth of GDP almost throughout this period.
This is partly because the focus on Western Europe
is not, in fact, as significant as the gross foreign
trade figures suggest, since a growing proportion of Czech goods exported to Western Europe
ends up in developing markets. The question
is whether this process could be speeded up
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by government policies and if so, whether that
would really be beneficial. The fact is that the
emerging markets seem to be past their peak,
their role changing from the workhorse of the
global economy into its Achilles heel by 2014.
The Russia-Ukraine crisis is another reminder
that investors can often underestimate political and security risks in economies that appear
to portend, at first sight, substantial and rapid
revenues…
Czech Industry and Its Changing
Orientation over Time
Over the past ten to fifteen years Czech
foreign trade has come a long way. While in
2000 the Czech Republic’s trade in commodities recorded a 100 billion crown deficit, by 2013
this turned into a surplus of nearly 400 billion
crowns. This was largely due to the accession
to the European Union and continuous integration into the common European market.
The country has enjoyed a huge influx of direct
foreign investment, particularly from Germany.
German multinational corporations used their
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investments in the Czech Republic and in Poland
(as well as these countries’ more liberal labor legislation) to expose the German workforce to more
competition than that faced by employees in
France or other West European countries. Central
European economies have helped Germany to
keep a tight rein on real wages and thus to maintain its share of global exports over the past ten
years. By contrast, France’s share of global exports,
and Italy’s, has declined considerably.
equipment. By comparison, the Czech Republic’s
long-term dependence on imports of oil and gas
from Russia and Azerbaijan remains unchanged.
A Distorted Picture of Dependence
on Germany and China
However, the picture presented above
is distorted, as it artificially inflates both the
dependence of Czech exporters on the German
consumer market as well as that of Czech households on Chinese products. This is because
a number of goods that feature in the gross
import and export statistics are only semi-finished products destined for final consumption
on other markets. For example, many Czech
companies in the automobile industry supply
components to German car manufacturers who,
in turn, use them in manufacturing aimed at
further exports. Czech factory production is
thus less dependent on German demand than
on the demand in a number of other countries
with whom the Czech Republic—at least at
first sight—has no substantial trade relations.
Import figures are similarly distorted. The marked
increase in the imports of office technology and
electronics from China and Korea is not simply
a function of Czech demand. Rather, it reflects
the fact that the Czech Republic has become
a factory or assembly shop, which companies
such as Foxconn use to assemble imported Asian
components, turning them into machines for the
rest of Europe. An OECD project provides a useful
key for decoding these relations. The project aims
to map the global streams of added value that
builds up as a product travels from one country
to another before ending up in a consumer’s
shopping basket. The reason is quite simple:
gross statistics reflect value added to imports
and exports of multiple countries. The OECD
aims to discover the country where the value
added really originates and the country in whose
shopping basket it ends up. In other words, it
aims to disclose real economic relations and
dependencies between individual economies.
While in 2000 the Czech
Republic’s trade in
commodities recorded
a 100 billion crown
deficit, by 2013 this
turned into a surplus
of nearly 400 billion
crowns.
Germany’s export successes have been, to
a large extent, propped up by Central European
economies. As a result, the Czech Republic’s trade
surplus with Germany grew significantly between
2000 and 2013—from 54 billion to nearly 300
billion Czech crowns. The trade surplus with
Germany currently contributes over 70 percent of
the country’s overall balance of trade (compared
to roughly 50 percent in 2000). The exporters’
growing reliance on Germany has gone hand in
hand with growing dependence of the importers
on China and some Asian countries: South Korea
and Thailand in particular. In 2013 the trade deficit
with China was approximately the same as the
country’s trade surplus with Germany. The trade
surplus with Germany consists, to a large extent,
of net exports of machinery and vehicles—the
backbone of Czech industry. On the other hand,
imports from China and Korea mostly comprise
electronics, telecommunication devices and office
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What the OECD analysis shows for the Czech
Republic in 2009 is that the gross export and
import figures tend to inflate the significance of
foreign trade. While the gross share of exports
and imports in GDP amounts to roughly 80 and
roughly 70 per cent respectively, once you strip
these figures of the added value of re-exports the
results are considerably more modest. The value
added produced in the Czech Republic that ends
up in foreign shopping baskets contributes some
35% of the Czech GDP. At the same time, the
value added produced abroad which ends up
in the shopping baskets of Czech households,
companies and government, amounts to around
30% of the GDP.
The current orientation
of Czech foreign trade
has proved relatively
effective in crisis.
The question is whether
a stronger orientation of
the country’s economy
towards countries
outside Europe would
be desirable or indeed,
whether it should
be actively encouraged.
The answer is most
likely: No.
from China to be three times bigger than that
from the US. However, when only those imports
that actually end up in Czech shopping baskets
are considered, the share of imports from China
and the US is almost equal.
Gross statistics thus inflate the significance of
Germany as the main market for Czech producers.
While gross figures indicate that German exports
amount to some 30% of all Czech exports, in
the stripped off version they only amount to
around 20%. Slovakia is another similarly overrated export destination for Czech companies.
The US and China, on the other hand, are underrated. Gross statistics rank the US and China
respectively as the tenth and thirteenth most
important destination for Czech products. Yet
the picture is quite different in terms of demand
at the point of sale: the US ranks in joint fourth
place, while China ranks tenth. This is because
many Czech products reach the US and China
by a detour, for example, via Germany. Furthermore, China and Russia are among the destinations whose significance for Czech exporters has
grown considerably over the past decade: OECD
statistics show that the importance of these two
countries has almost doubled since 2000 (albeit
from a relatively low base). Concurrently, the
importance of the French and Italian markets has
also grown, approximately by a quarter. Relative
to this, the importance of the German market
has decreased, also roughly by a quarter. This
would confirm the hypothesis that Germany is
increasingly significant as an interchange for
Czech products that end up primarily in Eurozone countries and subsequently in Asia’s big
emerging markets—Russia and China.
Another interesting revelation is that the
gross figures overestimate our import dependency on Germany and China. Many imports from
these countries are merely processed in the Czech
Republic before being exported elsewhere in the
world. Gross figures show the volume of imports
Czech Foreign Trade Has Weathered
the Crisis
Although the dependence on exports to
Germany remains high, the trend is decreasing
and the actual figures are lower than those
reflected in the gross figures for foreign trade.
Meanwhile, the relative importance of Germany
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as a stopover for Czech products on their way to
other Eurozone countries and to Asia has risen.
During the crisis the Czech Republic did
rather well with this territorial export structure.
From mid-2009 to 2013 the balance of trade in
the foreign commodities market has made an
almost continually positive contribution to the
GDP. In 2011 and 2012 it basically amounted to
the only component of the GDP that was growing
and helped to prop up the entire economy as far
as was possible under the circumstances.
Czech exports to Europe have been significantly boosted by an increased share in key
markets, particularly in the auto industry.
The entire automobile market has declined
significantly since 2007, with registrations of new
cars remaining over 20% below the pre-crisis
level. However, over the same period the Czech
producers have increased their share in both
Škoda Auto and Hyundai markets.
The Czech economy has received a timely
boost from its increasing orientation towards the
Asian market, which—especially in the immediate
wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse—grew at
a much brisker pace than many Western European
markets. This, however, wouldn’t have been
much use by itself without a marked downturn
in domestic consumption and with investments
reining in imports. Without lower imports the
foreign trade results wouldn’t have been quite
so impressive.
China, there are indications that the domestic
economy, particularly the financial sector, is not
ready for any further growth of domestic demand.
Moreover, the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the
growing political tensions in Turkey are a reminder
that during the US-European financial crisis
investors were apparently quite oblivious of the
security and political risks inherent in doing
business with emerging economies. On the one
hand, the growing orientation of European
exporters towards Asian markets is, to a large
extent, a natural process that cannot be
prevented. On the other, trying to actively speed
up this process at this point would not make
much sense either. What is far more important
now is for Czech exporters to strengthen their
position in multinational chains of supply, i.e.
they must demonstrate that they are capable of
providing greater value added and that they are
not easily replaceable. The best way to achieve
this is by means of a highly qualified labor force.
This is the only key to a long-term prosperity of
the Czech economy, regardless of whether most
of our products are exported to Western Europe
or to Asia.
JAN BUREŠ
is the Chief Economist at Poštovní
Spořitelna (Postal Savings Bank).
Photo: Archive Jan Bureš
Should We Push for Structural Change?
As we have seen, the current orientation of
Czech foreign trade has proved relatively effective in crisis. The question is whether a stronger
orientation of the country’s economy towards
countries outside Europe—particularly the
emerging markets in Asia—would be desirable or
indeed, whether it should be actively encouraged.
The answer is most likely: no.
Since the early 2014, the heyday of the
emerging markets has been slowly but surely
coming to an end. In some countries, including
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Eurasian Integration:
Putin’s Futureless Project
Vladislav L. Inozemtsev & Anton Barbashin
Since the October of 2011, when Vladimir Putin has
announced his plans for the creation of the Eurasian
Union, Russia has walked the path from a doubtable
integrator to a status of a state that values submission
rather than cooperation. The proposition to unite
Eurasia’s economies today is viewed as a stillborn
revanchist idea that was never meant to succeed.
Tracing back the routes of the latest Eurasian
integration attempt proposed by Russia, we
find economic synergy and growth promise as
the cornerstone of Putin’s vision for the region.
Indeed, any integration, whether in Europe, Asia
or in this case Eurasia in theory holds economic
dividends as the first and most undeniable argument for closer ties and unification of economic
capabilities. Thus, when calling for Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members
to come forward and join Russia, Moscow drew
a picture of a prosperous new fellowship of
nations that would aggregate wealth faster and
more abundant that any state could hope for
individually. The frontrunner of the Eurasian
economic integration—the Customs Union, functioning since July 1st 2011 was supposed to be
a fine example of how Eurasian economic synergy
works. Its success was supposed to trigger the rest
of the doubting nations like Ukraine to join in.
From the very beginning Customs Union
of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan had a limited
capacity for synergic effect. First of all, Russia’s GDP
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of $2,015 billion constitutes for 88.5% of cumulative Customs Union GDP and thus the addition of
Belarus and Kazakhstan did not allow for creating
a sizeable entity that could challenge or even be
compared to world’s leading economies. Locked
between EU (GDP $17 trillion) and China ($13.4 trillion), Customs Union could not have been a center
of economic power by definition. Even when you
consider the addition of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan, Russia’s GDP receives no more than
17% increase and is a few hundred billion short
of a German economy. And in the case of creating
an economic center of attraction, size does matter.
Secondly, the structure of the economies, especially when comparing Russia and
Kazakhstan, are quite similar and both export
oriented. Russia’s exports are 77% resource
focused and in the case of Kazakhstan the
numbers are even higher—91%. The customs
regime liberalization that the Union implied did
not affect countries export orientation and left
only minor parts of the economy to be boosted by
the new regulation rules. Obviously, it would have
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been unwise to predict a great gain in trade, when
most of the economic capacities were focused on
trade with third countries. That is why by the end
of the Customs Union pilot year, Russian trade
with Union members increased comparably to its
gain in trade with the rest of the world: the overall
gain of 31.2%, Kazakhstan—30.6% and Belarus—
37.7%. In 2012, Customs Union members represented only 7.7% of Russian trade, and in 2013
the numbers slightly dropped to 7.5%. In 2013,
out of all CIS members Ukraine was still Russia’s
primary trade partner accounting for 33% of CIS
Russia’s trade, when Belarus represented 29%,
Kazakhstan—25%; candidates to Customs Union
inclusion Kyrgyzstan—2%, Armenia and Tajikistan
both accounted for 1%. Despite the fact that
Ukraine refused to join Customs Union, trade
structure and orientation remained more or less
the same as before the integration circa 2011.
As for now, the sole winner of the Customs
Union trade liberalization is Belarus; its trade
with Russia and Kazakhstan grew more than
10%, when Russia’s trade increased only by 0.5%.
Kazakhstan on the other hand received additional
taxes, when several thousand Russian businesses
reregistered in Kazakhstan, due to better legal
and tax conditions.
Thirdly, the levels of economic development
of the Eurasian nations vary quite drastically.
Russia’s GDP per capita is $14,037 which is almost
equal to Kazakhstan’s, but more than twice
the amount of Belarus, 4 times greater than in
Armenia and more than 13 and 17 times greater
in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan respectively. Such
inequality does not pan out well for the inclusion
of the latter two, which would undeniably call for
considerable economic support, donations and
subsidies. Considering that the positive economic
effects of the inclusion of the Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan may be evaluated as vain, there is no
economic sense for Customs Union to expand
southward.
Fourthly, the uneven size of the economies
constitutes for a highly misbalanced regula-
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tion system, in which Russia’s dominance and
aggressive stance would only progress in time, as
Russia’s economy loses firm stance and becomes
depleted of financial resources that could be used
to subside smaller partners. As of May 2014, Russia
faces certain economic turbulence due to Western
sanctions and exhaustion of the current economic
paradigm. Despite the fact that the prices of oil
and gas—main source of Russia’s financial growth
in 2000s have been consistently high for the last
7 years, the economy had significantly slowed
its growth to 0,5% (0,2% GDP growth according
to IMF). Capital flow in the first quarter of 2014
exceeded $50 billion, and may reach $100 billion
by the end of the year according to official prognosis by the Ministry of Finance. Russian private
companies and corporations are facing complications of credit extension from western financial
institutions. And the consumer demand—one of
the last remaining sources of economic growth
may plummet as the result of national currency
devaluation, tax increases and negative economic
expectations by the population.
Russia’s economic troubles are already
affecting Customs Union trade. In the first
quarter of 2014 it shrinked by 13%. In fact,
Belarus and Kazakhstan mutual trade flow has
increased by 12.8%, but as it accounts for only
1.5% of the overall Customs Union trade volume,
it does not affect general tendency. Russia’s
trade with Kazakhstan shows 13% decrease,
with Belarus—7.3%.
The Social Limitation
Eurasian integration, whether Customs Union
or proposed Eurasian Union face certain social
limitation dictated by the Russian society. Growing
xenophobia and religious and cultural differences
that only expand in time are causing many complications for potential integration. The only problem-free state in this regard is Belarus, being the
most culturally close, ethnically similar and historically being part of the Russian state longer than
others. Originally part of the Kievan state, territo-
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ries of the contemporary Belarus were included in
the Russian Empire in XVII-XVIII centuries. Kazakhstan, although predominately a Muslim state,
has a unique status of the most culturally close
non-Slavic state to Russian Federation among
CIS members. Territories of the contemporary
Kazakhstan were integrated into the Russian
Empire in 1868, and were populated by ethnic
Slavs more than any other colonial territory of
the Russian Empire or Soviet Union states. By the
end of 1989, ethnic Russians accounted for 44.4%
of the population of Kazakhstan SSR, today that
number dropped to 26.2%, being by far the most
Slavic populated state in the Central Asia. But
the key to Russia’s positive reception of Kazakhstan and its integration with Russia is low work
migration volume. Due to the comparable living
standards, Kazakhs are the least likely export work
force to the Russian Federation, which could not
be said for Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan that account
for more than 1.7 million legal work migrants and
at least the same amount of the illegals. Considering that Russia scores 3rd most xenophobic
nation according to World Economic Forum in
2013, possibility of open borders and increase in
numbers of foreign migrants cause nation-wide
negative feedback and is a factor with which integration plans have to be reckoned with. During
the last mayoral elections in Moscow, the question
of limitation of migration from Central Asia and
Caucuses was one of the most controversial and
yet key questions discussed by all of the candidates. According to Levada Poll agency more than
65% of Russians support the idea of “Russia for
Russians” and up to 84% favor visa regime with
Central Asia and Caucasus republics.
of the political nature of the Eurasian integration
are derived from Putin’s personal belief that “the
collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the 20st century” and
that Russia is the Soviet Union, just with a different
name. Such explicitly stated nostalgia for imperial
past converted into decisive actions directed to
re-establishment of the former political dominance in the Eurasia. But, up to annexation of
Crimea, Putin only stressed Russia’s role as a state
in the process of integration, rather than cultural
or ethnic superiority of Russian people. Indeed, the
rhetoric behind the annexation of Crimea changed
the proposition that Russia offered to the nations
of Eurasia. Instead of the common home of many
nations, like the Soviet Union used to be, Putin
and his assets stressed the crucial role of Russian
civilization and its cause as a key motivation for
outward expansion. The annexation of Crimea
clearly proved that for Vladimir Putin economic
reasoning has lesser importance than restoring
what he considers historical justice, reunification of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers
throughout the near abroad and advancement of
conservative values as the opposition to the liberalism of the West. One of the key roles in Putin’s
rhetoric plays Orthodox Church that supports
traditionalism shift and reunification of historically
orthodox territories. Obviously, other nations of
Eurasia, especially Muslim Central Asia must be
confused and feel out of touch with Putin’s new
vision for the Eurasian integration. Practically
speaking, all non-Slavic nations are expected to
assume secondary roles and follow Moscow’s
lead. Indeed, such a new turn must cause certain
discomfort among Russia’s own Muslim region of
Northern Caucasus, Tatarstan and Bashkiria that
are seemingly labeled less Russian that the rest
of the country.
Russo-centric Eurasian Integration
Despite the fact the Putin stressed in 2011
that Russia will build upon European experience
of ethnically and culturally blind integration,
that promotes equal participation of all nations,
Russia’s Eurasian integration has drastically shifted
towards Russo-oriented integration. The routes
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Ukraine and the Eurasian Integration
Russia-Ukraine conflict has a crucial importance for the demise of the Russia’s Eurasian
integration plans.
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First of all, Russia’s inner policies of the past
few years, especially with regards to political
and civil freedoms is a reconstruction of a quasi-soviet system that is past focused and intolerable
to progressive ideas and practices. The Maidan
revolution of February 2014 was an anti-Soviet
act, focused on bringing of a new governmental
and societal paradigm based on European values
and practices. The majority of Ukrainians moved
forward into a new political reality, leaving soviet
traditions behind and thus shifting even further
away from the majority of Russians, still tied up
with their soviet past. This new Ukrainian reality is
a decisive “no” to Russia’s political paradigm and
the possibility of a joint future under Russia’s lead.
Second, historically the importance of
Ukraine for Russia could not be underestimated.
Contemporary Ukraine is a birthplace of Russian
statehood and cultural roots. Throughout the
last 400 years Russia was constantly fighting
for the inclusion of Ukraine and Ukrainians in
Russia’s state, fulfilling Pan-Slavic idea of unity
and brotherhood. Russia was able to deal with
Serbia’s aspirations to join the EU, but Ukraine’s
historical shift away from Russia is the last single
most important blow to face of Russia’s Pan-Slavic
vision. Without Ukraine, any Russian imperial
project would be half-baked and dysfunctional.
Third, Russian political elite has been pressing
the idea of the unique Russian civilization (and
Ukraine as an integral part of it) that is unreceptive of European values, political practices
and civil traditions. If Ukraine is able to achieve
a certain level of success and transform into
a capable European state with vital economy it
would destroy Russian conservative postulates
and open up clear possibility for a successful
Russian transformation into a true European state
in the long run. Ukrainian success as a state is the
greatest threat to Russian imperial aspirations.
Fourth, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and
its actions in the eastern Ukraine calls for a wide
spread concern and anxiety among potential
Eurasian Union members, as well as the Russia’s
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closest allies—Belarus and Kazakhstan. In fact,
both Minsk and Astana had voiced their concerns
about the future of Eurasian integration even
before the Ukrainian crisis, but now their worries
grew stronger. Ukrainian crisis gave great cause
against Eurasian integration among all Eurasian
nations, where opposition to the project now
only gains support. No matter how Ukrainian
crisis will resolve, the point of no return for the
Eurasian integration was crossed, marking a new
reality for the region where there is currently no
place for EU-type integration and cooperation.
Fifth, the Ukrainian crisis has alerted the West
over Russia’s true intention for Eurasia, its nature
and goals, making a limited contagion a new
policy of necessity. It would be just to assume
that both the EU and the US will be alerted to
withstand any attempt by the Russian Federation
to integrate its neighbors into a new empire-like
structure.
V L A D I S L AV
L. INOZEMTSEV
is Professor of Economics, Chair of the
Department of International Economy
at Moscow State University’s School of
Public Governance
Photo: Archive Vladislav Inozemtsev
ANTON BARBASHIN
is a fellow at the Center for PostIndustrial Studies (Moscow) and
Deputy Director of “Modernizatsya”
expert center (Novosibirsk)
Photo: Archive Anton Barbashin
For future reading, see: Wladislaw Inosemzew
und Ekaterina Kusnezowa. “Putins unnütziges
Spielzeug” in: Internationale Politik, 2012, № 1
(Januar-Februar), SS. 78–87 and Anton Barbashin
and Hannah Thoburn. “Putin’s Brain” in Foreign
Affairs, March 31st, 2014 [http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ 141080/anton-barbashinand-hannah-thoburn/putins-brain
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The Social Role of Business
in Central Europe
Katharina Bluhm
The ongoing moralization of business has
led to a broader understanding of corporate
responsibility since the privatization
in East Central Europe
For the last fifteen years, business in Europe
has been the subject of increasing moralization—often seen either as part of the ongoing
weakening of collective regulation and welfare
state provisions, or as a means of correcting this
development. In 2001, the European Union (EU)
launched a Green Paper to promote European
framework for Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) as part of its strategy of “soft regulation.”
Since then, CSR initiatives have flourished in the
“old” and “new” EU member states, with the “old”
member states just a couple of years in front. Yet
the institutional and cultural settings in which
the CSR movement took seed vary from country
to country. In Germany, for example, it meets
a relatively strong corporatist and welfare tradition which shapes the understanding of companies’ responsibilities to the society. Companies
of post-transition member states, in contrast,
abandoned most of the social function that they
had to fulfill under state socialism, and now they
have relatively weak corporatist arrangements
and welfare provisions.
In the ever-increasing literature on CSR in
Europe, the focus is mainly on the diffusion of
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CSR practices. How business leaders perceive
their social role in society and how this fits with
their actual behavior is under-researched, in
the West as well as in the East, and comparing
the two led to a research project on “Business
Elites in Enlarged Europe” conducted by an
international research group1 among business
leaders in Poland, Hungary, and East and West
Germany. We asked whether the different business environments and legacies are reflected
in executives’ perceptions. Since a hegemonic
neoliberal discourse holds sway not only in East
Central Europe but also in Germany—or at least
did until the financial crisis—the answer to this
question is far from obvious.
The data was gathered during 2009/10. We
differentiate between medium-sized companies
(45 to 249 employees); large companies (250 to
999 employees); very large companies (1,000
employees and more); banks and insurance
companies. In total, 165 companies in Poland,
169 in Hungary and 523 in East and West Germany
were considered. The target persons for data
collection were members of the top company
hierarchical level.
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Cognitive Concepts of Responsibility
In the new moral discourse on corporate
responsibility, the positions range from “narrow”
to “broad” understanding. A narrow position
is that of Milton Friedman’s famous dictum,
“the responsibility of business is to increase its
business.” The broad position is reflected in the
definition of CSR as voluntary activities beyond
what is required by law. This understanding can
be practiced in two ways: 1) companies claim
individual “authorship” and reject collective
binding, which is associated with liberal institutional settings; 2) companies bind themselves to
collective regulation typical for more corporatist
environments. Based on these considerations we
operationalized the three cognitive concepts of
responsibility: a minimalist concept; a neocorporatist concept that combines the acceptance
of a need to do more than just business with
social partnership and collective bargaining;
and a liberal concept that prefers an individualist,
firm-specific approach and refutes collective
binding. We also operationalized a set of ideas
as etatist, assuming that Friedmanites but also
adherents of our “liberal” concept of responsibility reject the idea of strong state intervention.2
We expected to find more “neocorporatists” in
the German sample (especially in large West
Germany companies) and more “minimalists”
in Poland and Hungary. Keeping the neoliberal
discourse in mind, we also expected widespread
skepticism about state-based market regulation
and redistribution in all three countries.
126 respondents belonging to this group.
Neocorporatists are in general more widespread
in larger companies and even banks, indicating
that across countries the acceptance of social
partnership and unions grows with company
size (least so in Poland), while managing owners
and family firms also in West Germany disagree
more with this.
Etatists, too, are more
often to be found in
Polish and Hungarian
companies than in
German firms. Although
they represent only
11 percent of the entire
sample, it is more than
twice as likely that they
are from Hungary or
Poland than from West
Germany.
Apart from size and ownership effects,
clear country variations were detected. While
a neocorporatist approach to CSR is clearly
underrepresented in Poland and Hungary, we
find significantly more minimalists in the two
countries. Being from Poland doubles the likelihood of belonging to the group of minimalists. Interestingly, size effects are not significant here, indicating that a minimalist position
is not simply related to market positions. Yet,
our minimalists cannot easily be equated with
Friedmanites. While 112 business leaders agree
with profit maximization as a company’s only
goal, only 53 respondents clearly reject the
statement “companies have to do more for the
community than what is required by the law.”
Findings
The four theoretically distinct concepts—
minimalist, liberal, neocorporatist and etatist—
cover slightly more than one half of the respondents (386 out of 749). The other half of the
sample disagrees with the minimalist concept
of companies’ responsibility, but did not fit in
any of the other categories. As expected, neocorporatism is significantly more frequent among
West Germans, who represent 25 percent of all
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Moreover, 23 of these 112 respondents even
support a strong role for the state in regulation
and redistribution. Hence, we conclude that
true adherents of Friedman’s perception of the
state-company division of responsibilities are
rare in all three countries.
Etatists, too, are more often to be found in
Polish and Hungarian companies than in German
firms. Although they represent only 11 percent
of the entire sample, it is more than twice as
likely that they are from Hungary or Poland than
from West Germany. East Germans take a middle
position. Like Poles and Hungarians they have
a little more minimalists and less corporatists in
their ranks compared to West Germans; at the
same time, they reject etatist ideas almost as
strongly as West Germans do.
The liberal concept of responsibility produced
the weakest results. Just 66 respondents agreed
with this position; this set of ideas is even less
coherent and none of the countries or company
categories are significantly more likely to belong
in this group. In terms of CSR activities, companies run by adherents of a liberal concept do not
perform better than the average of the sample.
Neocorporatists, in contrast, are more than twice
as likely to perform better.
What is even more striking is the neocorporatists’ optimism regarding the social outcome of
the market economy, which distinguishes them
from the other groups. Respondents who agree to
the statement “free entrepreneurship and social
justice are mutually exclusive” are less likely to be
neocorporatists and more likely to be minimalists and etatists. Business leaders who consider
competition and social justice mutually exclusive are also more often found in the two latter
groups. Here we detect strong country effects
for Poland and Hungary. In simple percentages,
almost 26 percent of the Polish respondents show
concerns about the social outcome of the market
economy, 18.4 percent of the Hungarians, 10.7
of the East Germans, and only 1.3 percent of
the West Germans.3 This finding indicates that
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a vast majority of West German business leaders
still assume that the “social market economy”
actually works.
Studying attitudes, we expected that in addition to objective variables (such as country, size
and ownership), respondents’ subjective features
would show an effect. Especially age, social origin
and the international experience are plausible
independent variables. Regarding age, we
differentiated between those who started already
under the old regimes and those who made their
entire managerial career under market conditions,
i.e. who were 45 and younger. In 2009/10 the
percentage of the “pre-socialist generation” was
still high in Hungary and East Germany, while in
Poland more than 60 percent belonged to the
“new generation.” Contrary to our expectation,
however, the dichotomized variable does not
explain the significant variation in concepts of
responsibility.
Business leaders who
consider competition
and social justice
mutually exclusive are
also more often found
in the two latter groups.
Here we detect strong
country effects for
Poland and Hungary.
The same holds true for the social origin of the
respondents. We classified social origin according
to Goldthorpe categories for fathers and mothers,
revealing other interesting variations. While more
than 50 percent of all three countries’ business
leaders stem from the highest social ranks (of
the fathers), the percentage in Poland and West
Germany is the highest. Yet, also 54.3 percent
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of the mothers in Poland climbed to the higher
social ranks on their own (44.4. percent of the
Hungarian mothers but only 13.4 percent of the
West Germans).
Comparing the older and younger “generation” the percentage of upper-class fathers
increases for the latter (the highest increase is
in East Germany, which lags behind the others
in this respect, followed by Poland and Hungary).
The upper classes across all three countries apparently have better chances of getting top positions
in companies, and faster.4
The only subjective feature that exerts some
explanatory power on the attitudes in question
is the internationalization of careers, but in an
unexpected way. Business leaders who studied
abroad are twice as likely to be minimalists than
those who did not, while only Polish respondents
who have studied abroad are more likely to be in
the liberal group than Germans and Hungarians.
International experience is therefore a weak
predictor for ideas that are usually associated
with CSR.
superficial.” For it to be a part of business culture,
it needs cognitive underpinning. In spite of the
limits of a quantitative survey, our findings reveal
that many respondents in all three countries
lack a clear concept of corporate responsibility,
especially in smaller companies. At the same
time, we detect national differences that speak
against a simple convergence of ideas into one
model, due to different experiences and institutional settings. The social reproduction of executives and managing owners from the upper
social classes is high in all three countries and
social closure is increasing. Differences in this
respect can be explained mainly by legacies and
ownership structures, and they contribute less to
explaining the variation than country and organizational effects do.
K AT H A R I N A B L U H M
Professor of Sociology at the
Institute for East-European Studies,
Freie Universität Berlin
Photo: Osteuropa-Institut FU Berlin
Conclusion
The ongoing moralization of business has led
to a broader understanding of corporate responsibility since privatization in East Central Europe.
This change comes from a mainly western-induced CSR movement, which observers often
consider a new “fashion.” One of our Polish interviewees states: “Later it will become an integral
part of our entrepreneurial culture, (…) but at
first, our handling of CSR is going to be rather
1 The survey in Hungary was conducted by György Lengyel, the Polish survey by Krzysztof Jasiecki; and the German survey by the author
together with Bernd Martens and Vera Trappmann. Funding of the empirical research by the German Research Foundation (DFG) is
gratefully acknowledged.
2 For details see Bluhm, K. and V. Trappmann 2014, “Varying Concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility: Beliefs and Practices in Central
Europe” in Bluhm, K.; B. Martens and V. Trappmann (eds) Business Leaders and New Varieties of Capitalism in Post-Communist
Europe. London: Routledge, 148–175.
3 Bluhm, K.; M. Bernd and V. Trappmann 2011, “Business Elites and the Role of Companies in Society” Europe-Asia Studies 63 (6), 1027.
4 Cf. Bluhm K. and B. Martens 2014, “From ‘Deputy Revolution’ to Markets for Executives? Social Origin, Careers and Generational
Change of Business Leaders Twenty Years after Regime Change” in Bluhm et al., 109–133.
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75
Africa Wrapped in
—Genetically Modified—
Cotton
Tomáš Nídr
Having welcomed genetically modified cotton with much
enthusiasm, many farmers in the West African country
of Burkina Faso now regret that decision as the revenues
haven’t met their expectations.
Doh Yezouma walks past a fluffy mound. From
afar it looks a pile of snow. Is this a mirage at high
noon under the scorching tropical sun? No, it’s
just the past few days’ cotton crop. The fortyyear-old waves a greeting to two men further
down the field, the plant just above their waist.
He walks down a narrow path between cotton
plants with pristine fluffy balls of white poking
out of their pods. Mr. Yezouma, a spokesman for
a group of growers near the town of Houndé in
the West African state of Burkina Faso plucks
a fruit from each plot. At first sight, the “cotton
wool” growing on either side seems exactly the
same. However, the plants growing on the right
are ordinary, while those on the left have been
genetically modified.
The farmer shows me clusters of round seeds
the size of peppercorns concealed among the
tangled threads. “The Genetically modified cotton
has more light threads but the seeds are also
considerably lighter. This is to our disadvantage
because we sell by weight,” says Mr. Yezouma.
His neighbours nod their approval. They regret
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that they have let the government talk them into
growing the modified crop.
Another farmer, Loudon Yaya, tells me that
in 2013 he sowed a quarter of his eight hectare
plot with genetically modified cotton and the
rest with the conventional variety so that he
could compare the yield. “There’s no difference.
Except that sowing is a lot more expensive,” he
says, pointing out that the cost of seeds and crop
spraying of the modified variety costs a quarter
more per year. “That’s despite the fact that they
promised us much greater profits. I’m switching
back to ordinary cotton next year,” grumbles the
unhappy farmer.
“There Have Been No Complaints.”
However, a spokesman for SOFITEX, the
government-owned company that has
a monopoly on purchasing the soft commodity
in the west of the country, tells a rather different
story. Gilbert Kaboré, who insisted on responding
in writing, claims in a lengthy e-mail: “Not a single
farmer in Burkina has complained about gene-
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tically modified cotton. Quite the contrary,
farmers’ demand for modified seeds has been
growing.” To support this he attaches a rather
confusing table which shows that since his
country embraced the genetically modified
plants in 2007, overall production has increased
from 355,000 to 417,000 tons. Most of the exports
go to Asian markets.
Speaking on the phone, the former head
of the Czech Academy of Science’s Centre for
Biology backs Kaboré’s view, albeit with the
proviso that he is not familiar with the details
of the situation in Burkina Faso. “There might
be three reasons that could prevent it from
thriving in sub-Saharan conditions. Firstly, there
may be different types of parasites or, secondly,
some cheating may be going on with the seeds.
And thirdly, the farmers may not follow the
instructions to the letter, which is the most
likely explanation. Do you think they would
keep growing it in the US if the results were
not convincing?” asks the scientist who makes
no secret of being a fan of enhancing farming
by genetic modification.
The government of
Burkina Faso believed
that since cotton is not
ingested it is an ideal
candidate for the role
of a “pioneer” that
could diminish African
suspicions of genetic
modification.
Filling the Empty Stomachs in Frankenstein
Fashion
The question of whether genetic modification should be embraced is rife with controversy. For its opponents it represents Frankenstein-like experiments that can get out of
mankind’s control and may be detrimental to
human health. Its supporters regard it as a chance
to ensure that the stomachs of a constantly
swelling global population can be filled once
the limits of expanding farmable land have been
reached. Europeans have been most vocal in their
concern about genetically modified products. For
example, the Czech Republic has so far approved
only one type of lab-enhanced corn. European
concerns have had a major impact on Africa,
whose agricultural exports are aimed primarily at
the old continent. That is why they can’t afford to
grow plants that might not be wanted in Europe.
On the other hand, the Western hemisphere,
under US leadership, is enthusiastic about genetically modified agriculture, particularly soy and
corn. The only country that has banned it is Peru.
Mr. Kaboré lists a number of advantages of
genetically modified cotton. It is more resistant
to worms and other pests and this, in turn, results
in bigger crop yields. As opposed to conventional
cotton it has to be sprayed with pesticides only
twice a year rather than six times a year as in the
past. This means less work for the farmers and
reduced health risk.
Although Mr. Kaboré claims there is no difference between growing the genetically modified
plant and the traditional variety, a few answers
later he mentions that a smaller crop can occur
but only if a farmer doesn’t follow the instructions
to the letter: “Some farmers have such confidence
in the productivity of genetically modified cotton
that they don’t spray their crops at all. A fragile
boll casing might be another problem, which can
occur if the farmers cheat on fertilizers. Genetically modified cotton needs more fertilizers
because it produces more fruit.”
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The government of Burkina Faso believed
that since cotton is not ingested it is an ideal
candidate for the role of a “pioneer” that could
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diminish African suspicions of genetic modification. Genetically modified cotton is engineered
to contain the bacterium known as Bacillus
thuringiensis, which eliminates harmful worms
although it does not offer protection against
other, less common parasites. Approved in the
US as early as 1996, it is now grown on three-fifths of American cotton fields. Thirteen further
countries followed the US’s lead, including Argentina, Australia, China, India and South Africa.
The governments of Thailand and Indonesia,
on the other hand, had to revoke their original
approval following fierce protests.
The global image of modified cotton has been
blemished by the fact that it was developed in
the labs of Monsanto, the biotechnology firm
that is regarded as a major villain by non-profit
organizations fighting hunger and working for
improved methods of food production. Its bad
reputation dates back to the days of the Vietnam
war, when Monsanto was the key producer of
Agent Orange, the destructive defoliant that
the US army used widely to spray the jungles of
Southeast Asia, where handicapped children are
still being born today as a result.
While it is difficult to dismiss concerns about
the excessive power of large corporations who,
their critics maintain, are interested only in
lining the pockets of affluent shareholders at
the expense of the poor, what really matters
is whether the genetically modified plant has
improved its growers’ lot in the developing world
as much as its promoters have promised.
growing genetically modified cotton increased
their production by 24 percent and their profits
grew by 50 percent. The British daily The Guardian,
on the other hand, cites a study carried out by the
scientists Abdul Quaum and Kiran Sakhari in the
Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The article says
that the income of farmers growing genetically
modified cotton was 60 percent lower than that
of farmers who had stuck with the traditional
variety. This was because the cost of pesticides
had actually gone up rather than dropped. The
negative scenario has been further confirmed
by press reports on hundreds of villagers who
have fallen disastrously into debt as a result of
buying expensive genetically modified seeds
and ended up committing suicide. As a result
of these recurrent tragedies the government of
the central Indian state of Maharashtra banned
genetically modified cotton in 2012.
A similar report from Burkina Faso by Radio
France Internationale has proved to be a canard.
The genetically modified material enjoys support
in the highest places. SOFITEX spokesman Gilbert
Kaboré told us that there wasn’t a single cooperative (all cotton farmers in Burkina Faso belong
to cooperatives) in his country that didn’t grow
genetically modified plants.
While I cannot vouch for other parts of the
country, this claim certainly doesn’t go down
well in Houndé, where I talked to some dozen
farmers under a palm leaf shelter by a main road.
They are afraid they will never be able to throw
off the genetically modified shackles. “At first
those who agreed to grow genetically modified
cotton got fertilizers for free. This attracted a lot
of people,” says Doh Yezouma, the most fluent
French speaker among the group. “Anyone who
wants to go back to conventional cotton now
faces the threat of being cut off from fertilizer
supplies,” the cooperative’s secretary adds. In this
region SOFITEX provides farmers with fertilizers
on loan before the growing season starts and
they are expected to pay the state company back
Suicide as a Form of Protest Against
Genetically Modified Cotton
The majority of international media reports
on the subject come from India where over
90 percent of plantations at its peak were sowed
with genetically modified cotton. Unfortunately,
the reports contradict one another. For example,
the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy
of Science (PNAS) has calculated that between
2002 and 2008 the farmers who pioneered
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with their crop. They don’t have the money to
buy fertilizers from another supplier.
Why don’t they rise up in protest against
this kind of pressure? “Troublemakers could be
punished by having their crop labeled as inferior in quality and being paid less. SOFITEX has
the purchasing monopoly in this region,” says
Yezouma dramatically. However, he admits that
none of his colleagues have experienced this in
person. Kaboré dismisses this kind of accusations:
“Nobody in Burkina is obliged to grow genetically modified cotton. Anyone can switch back
to ordinary cotton if they wish, and vice versa.”
“And meanwhile, we’re being pushed into
poverty. In 2012 we got 245 West African francs
per kilogram of top quality cotton. Last year
the price went down to 235 francs. How are we
supposed to feed our families?” Yezouma moans
about what Kaboré describes as an adjustment to
the declining price of the commodity on global
markets. Even if he is right, he’ll have a hard
time convincing the farmers who, unlike him,
definitely do not believe in a genetically modified
future.
TOMÁŠ NÍDR
is a freelance journalist focusing on
Africa and Latin America.
Photo: Archive Tomáš Nídr
The President’s Support for Genetics
This picture would be incomplete without
mentioning that the country has been under the
rule of the dictator Blaise Compaoré since 1987.
And although he is not known for committing
any atrocities, it is common knowledge that he
hasn’t been particularly kind to his opponents.
Suffice it to say that, in order to take over this
country of 16 million inhabitants, he had his great
friend Thomas Sankara killed. Nowadays he enjoys
a reputation as promoter-in-chief of kickstarting
backward African agriculture by playing with
genes. It is not advisable to cross him.
The President says that what has motivated
him to take the controversial measure was a desire
to secure food self-sufficiency in the parched
territory that borders an even drier Sahel zone
in the north. Nevertheless, the Houndé farmers
explain away their country leader’s predilection
for genetically modified plants in general and
cotton in particular by various conspiracy theories that don’t always make sense. They believe
that Compaoré has conspired with the world
powers to destroy local agriculture in order to
force Africans to buy food from abroad. Another
theory claims that he has a share in Monsanto’s
seed sales profits. Yet another theory maintains
that he is trying to drive the government-run
SOFITEX into bankruptcy so that his cronies could
buy it for peanuts in a planned privatization.
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AVIEZER TUCKER
A Question of Trust:
Why Europe Misses
a Shale Energy Revolution
T
he current crisis in Ukraine focused attention on Europe’s 25–30% dependence
on Russian natural gas. Europeans pay
three to seven times more for their natural gas
than Americans. Prices vary according to level
of dependency on Russia and the discounts it
grants for political loyalty or denies for disobedience. The recent agreement between China and
Russia will not release Russia from dependence
on exporting to the European market. The Putin
regime will continue to depend on exporting
energy to Europe for paying for the Russian
state and the patronage “vertical of power” that
sustains it, since the Chinese would not have
agreed to pay Russia anything approaching the
European price, and Russia will have to make
massive investment in infrastructure (to which
it is necessary to add the costs of the inevitable
embezzlements and corruption) in the short term
before reaping any profits.
Europe wants a free trade agreement with
the United States to allow exports of unconventionally produced American liquefied natural gas
and crude oil from shale to substitute for Russian
imports. But Europe has another route to energy
security: follow the United States in developing
domestic shale gas and tight oil resources.
The shale unconventional energy revolution
in the United States made it natural gas independent and is quickly moving the economy in
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AV I E Z E R T U C K E R
is Assistant Director of the Energy Institute
at The University of Texas at Austin.
Photo: Veronika Tuckerová
the direction of oil independence by the end of
the decade. It reduced the price of natural gas
by about 80% and allowed a revival of chemical
industries that use gas as feedstock. The United
States is now selling the coal it does not need
anymore for power production to Europe because
it is much cheaper for power production than
Russian gas. Yet, coal is three times as polluting
as natural gas. Europe subsidizes renewable
technologies while burning more of the most
polluting fuel.
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Policies, laws, and public attitudes towards
unconventional technologies and resources in
Europe vary from total ban on hydraulic fracturing
in France and the Netherlands, through moratoria in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, German
government neutrality and different licensing
policies in each Lands, to tax incentives in the
UK and enthusiastic support in Poland.
The European debate appears to be about
the safety of hydraulic fracturing, the technology
that releases shale gas and tight oil by fracturing
the rock formations that trap them using high
volumes of high pressured water, sand and
chemicals. Regulations should mitigate risks. Yet,
concerned Europeans do not trust regulations,
the regulators, the experts who explain how the
technologies can be used safely, and the politicians who tout the benefits of the shale revolution
for job creation, economic growth, the balance
of trade, the public budget, and for lowering the
cost of energy for consumers.
In the United States, trust arrives regularly
in the bank accounts of landowners and coffers
of local authorities as mineral royalties and local
taxes. In Europe, the state owns subsoil mineral
rights. In most European countries, this is legacy
of the nationalizations of the thirties and the
Second World War. The Nazis appropriated
natural resources, especially strategic energy.
After the war, new governments, whether democratic or Communist, did not return mineral
rights to private owners. The state gets all the
royalties. Land owners and local government
must assume all the risks. With no reward, any
risk seems excessive, unless there is trust in
government.
Communist governments were indifferent
to industrial environmental destruction. Citizens of post-Communist countries may suspect
that corrupt politicians would do the same to
enrich themselves. Yet, fear of a greater external
enemy, Russia, may trump distrust of politicians.
Almost all the post-Communist countries allow
the development of unconventional energy;
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in Western Ukraine and urban Poland, it is
popular. The two post-Communist countries
that banned hydraulic-fracturing do not fear
Russia: Bulgaria has been friendly with Russia
since the 19th century. Though Russia invaded
the Czech lands in 1968, Slovakia and Ukraine
separate now Russia from the Czech lands. Many
Czechs, Bulgarians, and other Europeans are not
aware of the price elasticity of Russian natural
gas, the extent to which they pay more than
other countries and how the price can decline
with reduced dependence.
In France and the United Kingdom, policy
decisions about science and technology were
traditionally taken by apolitical technocrats.
During the nineties, they lost their citizens’
trust following a series of bad decisions about
the Mad Cow Disease, HIV contaminated blood,
nuclear waste and so on. Technocratic elites did
not assume responsibility for their mistakes,
resisted democratic scrutiny, and closed ranks.
This created a rift between technocratic elites that
believe in progress, science, state, and technology
and populations that distrust them and consider
their Faustian zeal dangerous. The legal expression of this populist distrust is the Precautionary
Principle that considers all new technologies to
be dangerous unless proven otherwise. It is now
French law.
French elites have given up attempting to
reason with their citizens. Instead they have been
trying to take crucial decisions behind their backs.
The granting of licenses for shale gas exploration a few years ago resembled in that respect
the admission of genetically modified foods
a decade earlier; elites make decisions about
technological policies without public discussion,
expecting nobody to notice. Somebody does
notice. A populist protest movement emerges.
The politicians are scared and order the technocratic elites to back off. They make a tactical
retreat. Instead of attempting to communicate
and explain policies to citizens who distrust them,
they wait for an opportune moment when they
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are distracted, like the world cup football championship, to reintroduce the same policies under
a different name perhaps.
Recently, the British government offered
“communities” that allow exploration of unconventional gas and oil £100,000 per well-site and
1% of revenues if exploration leads to exploitation.
I doubt this offer is sufficiently well targeted and
generous to build trust with local stakeholders,
especially individuals.
Obviously, attempting to introduce hydraulic
fracturing by stealth backfired. Better for the
energy companies and allied politicians and
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civil servants to initiate the discussion before
their opponents do. Returning at least some
mineral rights to landowners and communities
can be a quick and cheap way to build trust in
the long term. Government transparency in the
process of granting concessions and distribution
of mineral income is essential. The citizens must
understand how much money is coming to the
state and where it is spent. Democracy is the
solution and not the problem for building trust
in new technologies and achieving European
energy security.
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Another Code of Nabokov
Andrea Pitzer, The Secret History
of Vladimir Nabokov, Pegasus
Books 2013
When many years ago my first translation
of a novel by Vladimir Nabokov was published
in Poland and I mentioned the subject of totalitarianism in the introduction, a Polish critic
objected, arguing that when I wrote about
Nabokov’s criticism of oppressive regimes, I was
succumbing to fashion (it happened shortly
after the political transformation in Poland),
that the book was definitely about something
else. The book under discussion was Invitation
to a Beheading (1938), widely known as one of
the most overtly anti-totalitarian novels of the
Russian-American writer; you can even call it
a dystopia—albeit a unique dystopia, unlike any
other, extremely artistically sophisticated and
concealing many different meanings, intricate
patterns, as well as false clues and traps set for
the reader to fall into.
In the “Foreword” to the English version of
the work, which I translated from the Russian
and therefore the “Foreword” was not there, the
author wrote: “I composed the Russian original
in Berlin… some fifteen years after escaping
from the Bolshevist régime, and just before the
Nazi régime reached its full volume of welcome.
The question whether or not we are seeing both
in terms of one dull beastly farce had any effect
on this book should concern the good reader
as little as it does me.” The good reader therefore should not be interested in that matter, but
then the author obviously mentions these two
totalitarianisms for some reason. He wrote about
them even more directly in the “Introduction”
to a slightly later novel, written in English and
already in the United States, named Bend Sinister
(1947). Here the author also declares that the
effect of the totalitarian era on the book is “negligible” yet he adds: “There can be distinguished,
no doubt, certain reflections in the glass directly
caused by the idiotic and despicable regimes that
we all know and that have brushed against me in
the course of my life: the worlds of tyranny and
torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine
thinkers and jackbooted baboons. No doubt,
too, without those infamous models before me
I could not have interlarded this fantasy with bits
of Lenin’s speeches, and a chunk of the Soviet
constitution, and gobs of Nazi pseudo-efficiency.”
Let us note that the emblem of the new rulers of
the country governed by the tyrant Paduk, where
the main protagonist had to live, resembles the
swastika (it shows “a remarkable resemblance to
a crushed, dislocated but still writhing spider”),
and its “red and black flag” resembles the flag
of Nazi Germany. Nazism, with its fascination
with shallow occultism, is also alluded to in the
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passage on the father of the dictator, which
begat “a minor inventor, a vegetarian, a theosophist, a great expert in cheap Hindu lore.” And
the words about the machine invented by the
bullying father, called padograph, as proving
that “Quality is merely the distribution aspect
of Quantity,” seem to refer to the law formulated by dialectical materialism and saying that
quantitative changes turn into qualitative ones.
The name Padukgrad refers to Leningrad, and
the mention of “poems printed en escalier (incidentally tripling the per line honorarium) dedicated to Paduk” refers to the “steps” of Vladimir
Mayakovsky and his followers. The fact that in
an imaginary country a language combining
elements of Slavic and Germanic is spoken and
that “colloquial Russian and German is also used
by representatives of all groups” (“Introduction”),
may also direct the reader’s associations towards
the two most murderous totalitarianisms of the
twentieth century.
Knowing Nabokov’s works, as well as his
meta-literary statements, it is impossible to deny
the importance of the theme of totalitarianism
in his work. The matter of historical and political
references in Nabokov’s writings is dealt with
in a recent first book by an American author
Andrea Pitzer entitled The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (Pegasus Books 2013). Although
it seems exaggerated that, as the author says,
each of his books was “meant to fight tyranny,”
it is an absolutely central theme of Nabokov’s
work. The discovery of a multitude of political and
historical allusions is an unmistakable achievement of Pitzer, whose investigations significantly
enrich the interpretation of many texts by one
of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Some of these references are obvious, for
example exposing political tyranny in the two
novels mentioned above, as well as the short
stories “Leonardo” (1933), “Cloud, Castle, Lake”
(1937) and “Tyrants Destroyed” (1938). Elsewhere,
however, as we learn from Pitzer’s book, allusions
to specific facts are hidden, we may even say
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that information is encrypted. You may ask why
Nabokov, an immigrant who left his native Russia
in 1919 and Europe in 1940, an American citizen
since 1945, an artist not subjected to censorship,
enjoying full freedom of speech, is using a code
when talking about historical and political issues.
The answer is simple. Nabokov thought that the
title of authentic art, art of the highest measure, is
deserved only by difficult art, not offering obvious
solutions, shirking stereotypes, seeking novelty
and thus strongly acting on the imagination and
aesthetic sense, capable of giving the recipient
a true aesthetic delight. It should be remembered
that Nabokov’s aestheticism—a fact overlooked,
for example, by his closest friend from the first
American years, Edmund Wilson (Pitzer quotes
numerous excerpts from their correspondence,
which has been published) and by contemporary
criticism—was by no means a repetition of the
slogan l’art pour l’art. In his (most important, in
my view) meta-literary speech Nabokov said:
“For me a work of fiction exits only insofar as it
affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss,
that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere,
connected with other states of being where art
(curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the
norm” (On a Book Entitled Lolita). So the reality
behind the aesthetic experience is a different,
higher and better reality, legitimizing the
importance of this experience. In this reality
tenderness and kindness are the norm, which
obviously combines Nabokov’s aesthetics with
ethics.
In his texts Nabokov, of course, did not hide
and encrypt only political or historical allusions. It is enough to mention that references
to another world, to the possibility of existence
after death, remained virtually unnoticed by the
critics until the end of the writer’s life, despite
certain hints from him. Only when his widow,
in the preface to the volume of Russian poems
(published posthumously in 1979) which the
poet considered worth preserving for posterity,
said that his most important theme, the theme
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permeating the whole work of the author of
Lolita, was potustoronnost’, which can be translated as the hereafter or the afterlife, only then
what had been encoded became obvious and
after a while people even began to wonder
how they could have overlooked what the
“draughtsman” had hidden among the tangled
lines of the drawing.
The Secret History… is a biography of Vladimir Nabokov set against the background of
twentieth -century history, the background
particularly including political violence, dictatorship, ethnic and racial persecution, human
rights violations, concentration camps, genocide, the two most important and bloodiest
totalitarian regimes, the Soviet and Nazi ones.
Pitzer interweaves biographical information
about Nabokov with mentions about the life of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author claims that
Solzhenitsyn was a man “with whom Vladimir
Nabokov has more in common than has ever been
imagined.” But she does not prove the truth of
this claim. On the contrary, the picture emerging
from what she writes shows clearly that these
two writers and people in fact had very little in
common, just that they were both Russians and
they lived more or less in the same period (Solzhenitsyn was 18 years younger). Yes, they both
responded to their era as people and artists, and
their judgments were similar, but as artists they
expressed these assessments quite differently.
Nabokov admired Solzhenitsyn’s courage and
appreciated his role in raising Western awareness
of the enormity of the Soviet crimes. When the
chronicler of the Gulag was exiled from the Soviet
Union, Nabokov even wrote a note welcoming
him in the free world, but he did not have the best
opinion about his writings, as indeed Pitzer loyally
recalls: “Nabokov… disparaged Solzhenitsyn’s
literary abilities, calling him an inferior writer in
an interview for The New York Times and labeling
his work ‘juicy journalese’ in personal notes.” We
do not know if he sensed in him a note of Russian
chauvinism. “Westerners who saw Solzhenitsyn as
committed to freedom—writes the author—were
dismayed to watch him embrace Vladimir Putin,
a former KGB official who has held onto nostalgia
for aspects of the Soviet past.” It is hard to say how
much surprised would Nabokov be.
The hierarchy of values professed by Nabokov
was unwavering and quite conservative; it was
of course reflected in his work. Although the
statement from one of the interviews: “I believe
that one day a reappraiser will come and declare
that, far from having been a frivolous firebird,
I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity,
ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning
sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and
pride,”—is a little bit of a provocation, but only
a little bit, because Nabokov indeed acknowledged the supreme authority of tenderness,
talent and pride. Ethical hierarchies, of course,
also found their reflection in the writer’s attitude to politics. He stated that he wanted to be
called an “old- fashioned liberal” (Strong Opinions),
because a prime example of an old-fashioned
liberal was his beloved father, a lawyer and an
essayist, a leading activist of the pre-revolutionary
and later émigré Russian Cadet party (Constitutional Democrats), Member of the State Duma,
and after the February Revolution a minister in the
interim government. In an interview with Playboy
Vladimir Vladimirovich said: “Since my youth…
my political creed has remained as bleak and
changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the
point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of
thought, freedom of art. The social or economic
structure of the ideal state is of little concern to
me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head
of the government should not exceed a postage
stamp in size. No torture, no executions.” So no
dictatorship, no tyranny. Clearly the writer was
a strong supporter of Western democracy, which
his father wanted to introduce in Russia.
The most valuable element of Pitzer’s work
is pointing to the many still unnoticed allusions
to specific events and political and historical
phenomena in specific works by Nabokov. Her
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hypotheses are not always convincing, but
some findings seem to be indisputably correct.
Pitzer reconstructs the fate of Hermann, the
narrator and also the hero of Despair, and then she
says: “Knowing that civilians were interned in starvation conditions for years by the Tsar and then
liberated by the Bolsheviks amid mass murder
lends a different frame to Hermann’s faith in
Communism and his willingness to kill. Nabokov’s
first truly loathsome narrator, a murderer without
even the recklessness of passion, on examination turns out to have spent nearly five years in
a concentration camp. He is undeniably a villain,
but to condemn him without acknowledging
the epic real-world events that he lived through
is to miss half the story.” I think not. Although
the war experience of Hermann enriches him as
a character, it certainly does not change the moral
assessment of him; in Nabokov’s writings the
responsibility of an individual cannot be erased
by any circumstances. For his transgressions the
writer condemns Hermann to nothing less than
eternal damnation. Comparing him in the “Foreword” to the English version of Despair (1966) with
Humbert Humbert from Lolita, he says: “Both are
neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in
Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander
at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole
Hermann.”
More important is an interpretation of the
past of two figures from the excellent short story
“Signs and Symbols.” Indeed, the plot contains
some hints at another, hidden plot, which can be
reconstructed at least in general terms (a literary
ploy also used by Nabokov elsewhere). The topic
of the Jewish fate is clearly signaled in the short
story. Nowhere is it mentioned explicitly that
the protagonists are Jews, but it is unmistakably
suggested, most apparently when the heroine
sees a photo of her relation: “Aunt Rosa, a fussy,
angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in
a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies,
train accidents, cancerous growths—until the
Germans put her to death, together with all the
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people she had worried about.” As Pitzer does not
mention it, we should add that the family name
of the protagonists—although we can figure
that out only on the basis of some allusions—
is Soloveichik, which according to dictionaries
of surnames points to Ashkenazi Jews.
The protagonists are double immigrants, as
they first emigrated from Belarus to Germany,
and then from Germany to the United States,
which allows us to guess that they had bad experiences with both the bloodiest totalitarianisms
of the twentieth century. The fate of the protagonists is a streak of sorrows and pains. And now
they fear that their mentally ill son will commit
suicide. His condition had been defined by a man
named Herman Brink, a psychiatrist, as “referential mania.” As we read, “the patient imagines that
everything happening around him is a veiled
reference to his personality and existence…
Everything is a cipher and of everything he is
the theme. All around him, there are spies… He
must be always on his guard and devote every
minute and module of life to the decoding of
the undulation of things.” In support of Pitzer’s
claims it can also be added that Brink can be
a Jewish (Ashkenazi) surname, but essentially
it is a German name. The first name Herman
(Hermann)—already the narrator and protagonist of Despair was called that—is composed of
Old-High-German elements heri (“troops”, “the
military”) and man (“a male”, “a man”, “a human”).
So this name means “warrior”, “soldier”, and
this meaning, as well as the sound association
with Germania (the Russian form of Herman
is Gierman, and the characters use Russian in
private), may be not insignificant from the point
of view of twentieth-century Jewish fate.
The son of the protagonists—as Pitzer
writes, reconstructing the hidden plot—“was
a child when his family escaped Germany,
where he had learned to fear even the wallpaper
(perhaps not without reason). Soon after, his
terrors grew and closed him off from humanity
entirely.” This seems very likely, but it is not
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the most important element of the story still.
In the finale of the story there are three late-night
phone calls. The first two alarm the characters, but
it turns out that the callers dialed a wrong number,
and the reader never learns what the third was
about, because the story ends. The reader is willing
to consider the third call (the magic number three
appears here) as the announcement of the news
that the mentally ill young man died, because
the whole story is filled with bad omens, signs of
sadness, grief, misery and death. Of course, if we
decide that the third call must be the news of the
suicide of the protagonists’ son—as noted by Brian
Boyd—we accept “what from within the story’s
world has to be defined as madness” (Vladimir
Nabokov: The American Years), seeing a message
about his destiny in everything that surrounds the
boy. Our attitude is dictated by our reception of,
among other things, literature, it is in literature
that events are arranged in patterns. But, in the
opinion of Nabokov, not only in literature. As one
of the tasks of an author of an autobiography
he regarded finding patterns in your life and in
his autobiographies he did find such patterns.
The presence of intricate, artistic designs in the
real world is the hidden evidence of its maker’s
intention. So if the eponymous signs and symbols
actually are signs and symbols, the reality depicted
in the story has a transcendent dimension. We
can say with certainty that it indeed has such
a dimension, because it is after all created by the
author, who is its god. And the signs and symbols
in our (the author’s and the readers’) reality would
actually serve as a premise allowing us to guess
that it also possesses a transcendent dimension.
So a tragic ending of the short story would in fact
be an optimistic ending, as you would be allowed
to see in it a guarantee—albeit uncertain and
ambiguous—of the existence of other worlds
and immortality.
Pitzer’s comments on the novel Pale Fire are
extremely interesting. What she writes about the
first king of Zembla is devoid of political references. Trapped by Arctic winter in the New Land
(the Russian geographical name of the territory
is Novaya Zemla, traditionally it is listed on the
Anglo-Saxon maps as Nova Zembla), members of
the expedition of the Dutch sailor William Barents
consoled themselves with going back to their
native customs from the New Year period. Pitzer
writes: “So it happened that on January 5, 1597, for
the hours up until the stroke of midnight—a span
remembered for four hundred years even as his
name was lost to history—the gunner on William
Barents’ third expedition drew the winning lot
and reigned as the first king of Nova Zembla, an
imaginary monarch in a land of ice and death,
and ruler over hope and despair, and the king of
nothing.” Since the name of this king is unknown,
the numeral “two” next to the name of the protagonist might refer to the first ruler of the land,
although Charles II was to be the title of the ruler
of Zembla, not Nova Zembla (other researchers
have already written on his associations with
authentic European Charleses IIs.).
Amazingly, the critics have forgotten about
the fact that when Pale Fire was being written,
Nova Zembla was present in the headlines, as
the Soviet Union was conducting its nuclear tests
there. Pitzer recalls these tests and concludes that
“it is hardly surprising to find Nabokov seeding
nuclear signs and symbols through the pages
of his novel.”
She also interestingly reminds us that in
the perceptions of prisoners of the Gulag Nova
Zembla was the seat of the harshest concentration camp, from which virtually no one could
escape. But the hypothesis that the imaginary
Zembla denizen Charles II Beloved aka Charles
Kinbote, and in fact, a Russian Vseslav Botkin, is
an escapee from this camp, seems difficult to
prove. More convincing is the reconstruction
of the history of this character made by Brian
Boyd in his book Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic
of Artistic Discovery.
Pitzer also writes about the most famous
work by Nabokov, asking at the beginning of
her work: “What if Lolita is the story of global
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anti-Semitism as much as it is Humbert Humbert’s
molestation of a twelve-year-old girl?” Well, it is
not, although it is true that anti-Semitism is an
important theme in this novel, which, as Pitzer
loyally acknowledges, was already established
by Alfred Appel, Jr. in his commentary on the
novel. Also other comments about Lolita are
not always convincing. Pitzer believes that
Humbert Humbert is lying about his participation in a secret Arctic expedition, and that in
fact he was deported to northern Canada and
placed in a camp for foreign suspects, using the
infrastructure of a camp from World War I, where
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they already had sent uncertain people. Such
camps did exist, and Humbert is an unreliable
narrator, but it is completely unclear what reason
he would have to lie about that period of his life.
Many of the claims in Pitzer’s book go way
too far, but her work is an obligatory reading for
all experts, researchers and enthusiasts of the
Russian-American writer.
LESZEK ENGELKING
translator of Russian, American and Czech literature,
a prominent expert on the works of Vladimir Nabokov
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Václav Burian
Two Recapitulations
and One Stocktaking
A. J. Liehm: Názory tak řečeného Dalimila / The Opinions of Dalimil,
Dokořán, Praha 2014, 680 pp.; Milan Uhde: Co na sebe vím / What
I Have on Myself, Torst/Host, Praha/Brno 2013, 648 pp.; Petr Uhl
(a Zdenko Pavelka): Dělal jsem, co jsem považoval za správné /
I did What I Thought was Right Torst, Praha 2013, 600 pp.
One early evening this April, a writer, former
dissident and politician Milan Uhde (1936) gave
a talk in the auditorium of Olomouc University’s
Arts Department. It was a charming performance
laced with characteristic self-irony. What had he
achieved during his two years as the Minister
of Culture in the Czech government (before
Czechoslovakia split up)? There was apparently
only one achievement he could boast about:
helping to secure the survival of a fine military
orchestra, which had been under the threat of
closure after the fall of the previous regime. His
intervention had given the orchestra a chance to
adapt to the new conditions of free arts and a free
market. The talk offered a fresh perspective even
on issues he had discussed many times before.
A fantastic performance, not only for someone
who is 88 years old… Yet you could have fitted all
of the audience in the great auditorium around
four café tables.
Later that evening I stopped in a student
pub for a beer. The students were singing a song
from the musical Balada pro banditu /A Ballad for
a Bandit with Uhde’s lyrics, repeating the chorus
over and over again. This is the third generation
for whom this faux folk song is a staple of their
pub and campfire repertoire: Zabili, zabili / chlapa
z Koločavy. / Řekněte, hrobaři, / kde je pochovaný…
(They killed, they killed / a man from Kolchava /
Gravedigger, tell me / Where he’s buried…). Nearly
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written for Listy, the exile newspaper, from
Czechoslovakia’s early “normalisation“ in 1971
to the heady days of “perestroika“ in 1988 and
1989, when people went out into the streets
for the first time after many years, and Alexander Dubček made a public comeback. This
was also the time when the issue resurfaced of
the legacy of Prague Spring and the future role
for its representatives, i.e. not only Dubček’s but
also Liehm’s.
Antonín Jaroslav Liehm—whom his readers
recognized for decades just by the initials AJL—
was a journalistic star of the highest order.
Destined for a stellar future after the war, he
was prevented from climbing up the ladder by his
extraordinary intellect and stubborn character;
he was perhaps the most influential critical guide
to the “new wave“ of Czechoslovakian cinema in
the 1960s, the best period in his country’s film
history so far. But he also “enjoyed“ a popularity
of a different kind. The pamphlet entitled On
the events in Czechoslovakia, known at the time
as the “White Book“—distributed by the occupying army after the August 1968 invasion and
authored by an unspecified “Soviet journalist
press group“—cites Liehm several times as one
of the men who had planned to take power
over Czechoslovakia after a counter-revolution.
The canonic interpretation of the Prague Spring,
Lessons Drawn from the Crisis Development in the
Party and Society following the XIII Congress of
the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1970)
mentions him, alongside František Kriegel,
Jiří Pelikán, Eduard Goldstücker and others as
a representative of the “forces championing
Zionism in politics, a key tool of international
imperialism and anti-communism“—apparently
being endowed with a defiant intellect and
a German-sounding name was evidence enough,
even without the requisite “origins.“
Present-day Czech culture and politics would
be missing a great deal without AJL. Even though
his return from Paris exile to his native Prague
shortly before his 90th birthday was noted
all Czechs and almost every Slovak knows it
by heart. An Internet search engine brings up
multiple hits for the song lyrics but only the
seventh gives the author’s name. The song has
become folklore: almost everyone knows it but
hardly anyone knows who wrote it.
The Hollywood-style musical was shot at
a Hollywood pace and achieved, in Czechoslovakia’s 1970s terms, Hollywood-level success.
Milan Uhde claims—and there’s no reason to
doubt the veracity of his memoir—that it took
him two weeks to write the play [based on Ivan
Olbracht’s 1933 novel Nikola Šuhaj loupežník] for
a Brno theatre The Goose on a String. The film
version of A Ballad for a Bandit followed in 1978.
By 1975 Uhde, a prohibited author, could no
longer be acknowledged as the author and could
most definitely not be credited in the 1978 film:
after all, he had signed Charter 77 a year earlier.
It would never have occurred to the students
singing Zabili, zabili… that just around the corner
from the pub they could come by an autograph
of the author of their beloved song. Surely the
tall, burly man, a politician, chairman of Czech
Television’s Board of Directors, with his charming,
lively, slightly histrionic as well as schoolmasterly
delivery, couldn’t possibly, in another day and
age, have written the ballad of the slain bandit?
But maybe this is what all three Czech authors
(more accurately: two authors and one interviewee) of seminal memoirs published in Prague
over the past six months have in common. The
famous yet unknown playwright. The ninety-year-old journalist revered by the nation and
hated by Brezhnev’s Kremlin. The leading Charter
77 figure who has shocked every reviewer: how
could someone who had spent nine years in
jail “under the Communists“ be so vehemently
opposed to anti-communism, of all things?
It took some guts for A. J. Liehm (1924) to
publish in book form his almost entire output
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warmly by the media, in the still prevalent “postVelvet“ atmosphere, epitomized primarily by
Václav Klaus, it is considered right and proper to
say that someone is a “man of 1968, but otherwise an interesting (decent, bright, experienced)
person“… In the post-1989 public discourse
being called a “man of 1968” is definitely not
a compliment.
AJL defends the Prague Spring but he is far
from being nostalgic about it. In one of his articles written in exile he said: “In 1968 there were
plenty people in the world, in Europe in particular,
who believed in democratizing and humanizing
what Moscow referred to as socialism, and the
Prague Spring appeared to offer an interesting
option. (…) Nowadays, twenty years later, the
situation is fundamentally different, in that
nobody believes in such an option anymore.
And that includes the Czechs and Slovaks, who
have, of course, always favored, and always will,
any improvement of the stupid system they live
in, but would send packing those who try to
preach socialism with a human face or any other
face, for that matter.“ (1988, p. 411). This wasn’t
his only hunch. In 1984, writing about the prominent representatives of Husák’s real-existing
consumer socialism, he pointed out something
the Czech world is still characterized by: “First
and foremost, these people are anti-socialist
and fiercely anti-communist, as befits members
of the bourgeois class. They have understood
the essence of our system and quickly adapted
to it.“ They join the Communist party and other
official institutions “because membership is
a condition of social advancement“, “they join
[…] without any inhibitions, in fact they would
often do anything to become members, without
giving up any of their anti-socialism or anti-communism“ (pp. 335–336). Indeed, it was this kind
of “anti-socialism or anti-communism“ that had
a significant effect on the generalized condemnation of the “men of 1968,“ whereas you rarely
hear any objections to the “pragmatic“ former
members of the Communist party.
What has stood the test of time in the 18 years’
worth of essays, opinion pieces, reviews and
interviews? In a few samples, necessarily chosen
at random, what strikes one after all these years
more than it did at the time (when the readers
were probably most interested in a critical view
of the situation in Czechoslovakia ) is the fact that
in those days Listy in general—it bore the subtitle
“A Journal of Czechoslovakia’s Socialist Opposition”—and its commentator AJL in particular
were much freer (or simply, more relaxed) when
writing about the US than many other important
exile magazines and, quite understandably, than
Radio Free Europe. No committed Czech intellectual, from 1956 onwards at the latest, could
have failed to be fascinated by Poland; and AJL
obliged with several opinion pieces focusing on
John Paul II, Martial Law, an interview with the
writer Tadeusz Konwicki, as well as an especially
noteworthy interview with the noted critic Jan
Kott.
Although a political animal par excellence,
AJL does not expect works of art to reinforce
his own views. He is quite brilliant at capturing
the high aesthetic and intellectual standard
of Josef Škvorecký, who was born in the same
year, yet whose depiction of Prague Spring must
have clashed with that of Liehm the citizen. His
obituary of Ferdinand Peroutka (1978, p. 650)—
the legendary Czech journalist of the interwar
period who had to flee his the country at the
time AJL embarked on his journalistic career—
is a wonderful tribute across generations and
human stories.
Few people are as vulnerable in the eyes
of future generations as those who comment
on public affairs in print, while other people’s
expressions of loyalty to dictatorship, or simple
mistakes or errors of judgment, are soon
forgotten. Readers’ complacency, however, is
cheap and easy: they have the advantage of
knowing “how things turned out.“ AJL frequently
knew “how things would turn out.“ It was quite
a daring thing to do—to publish in book form
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nearly all of his writings for one of the two or
three significant exile papers of the second of
the four decades of Communist rule. But he
could afford to do it.
Here is his assessment of Václav Havel: “Havel
voiced the feelings of his generation (…) with
great accuracy, across political and other affiliations. Right up to the generations that will
follow. Whoever fails to comprehend this will
lose in this country once and for all.“
AJL made this observation in 1968. The promising playwright was only 32 years old.
often applied to uncompromising writers among
Havel’s intellectual peers. Not that some of them,
at least, had not been socialists, or that they
always rejected the socialist regime’s potential human face. However, they had kept their
distance from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, to say the least. Breaking with “real existing
socialism” was for them a financial (albeit severe)
drama rather than an existential, fundamental
one as it was for the likes of Šabata or Liehm.
Uhde’s existential drama took place after 1968.
While he felt no desire to conform and recant
publicly after the August invasion of Czechoslovakia, nevertheless, as he describes with great
candor, he had initially hoped to remain at least
a tolerated author. The turning point came when
he resolved to publish his work in the West and
especially after he signed Charter 77. He subsequently became one of its most distinctive and
influential personalities outside Prague.
It is this that is so valuable about Uhde’s
memoirs, maybe more so for Czech than foreign
readers in this instance. Fate has given the Czech
Lands only one metropolis with everything
that this entails: before the War the theatres
outside of Prague used to be referred to—not
pejoratively—as “country“ theatres (these days
the correct term is “regional“). Brno is the only
city that defies these categories, and not only
in terms of official institutions. It is the only
city that also boasted something that might
be called a “Charter 77 scene,“ compared with
all the other towns and cities that basically
had only one or two courageous individuals.
A depiction of postwar Brno, a city left with just
one “regional“ publishing house and a single
literary journal, Host do domu (whose quality
improved continuously in the 1960s) is quite rare
in memoir literature. However, Uhde’s depiction
of a “normalised“ Brno is far from being just
black-and-white or grey, the color often used to
describe the two decades under Gustav Husák.
In those years it was solidarity shown by a few
individuals that helped Uhde become one of the
Milan Uhde’s memoirs begin with a drama
he would have been unable to grasp at the
time: the German occupation interfered with
the childhood of a boy from a “mixed marriage,“
leading to incomprehensible events: “My parents
were inventive in their resistance. For example,
they managed to prevent me from noticing the
disappearance of my maternal grandfather and
grandmother from my life.“ (p. 16). These are
chilling sentences showing that religious or
“racial” issues played no role in the boy’s life up
to that point. That was what things had been
like in his middle-class family of lawyers in Brno,
a city that was by then predominantly Czech
but which was still significantly influenced by
German language and culture.
The young boy took words seriously, sometimes including those of Nazi propaganda.
Initially he also made much of the postwar
promises about building a new order. In this
respect he fits a simplified, yet generally accepted
cliché that Czech intellectuals born in the 1920s
were more prone to become fanatical believers
in communism. This included Uhde’s professor
of Marxism at university, Jaroslav Šabata, who
spent many years in prison after 1968 and whose
portrait in Uhde’s memoirs is as respectful as
several previous depictions of the man. Milan
Uhde, by comparison, is a “1936 man“, a label
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most successful Czech playwrights—albeit not
under his own name.
While Milan Uhde is in many ways a typical
“1936 man“, he is rather isolated in terms of his
post-1989 civic stance, even though he served
as a Cabinet Minister and a Speaker of the Parliament. Being that rare case—a member of the
older generation of the erstwhile democratic
opposition (“the dissenters“) to embrace the Right
and promote a market that was as free could
be—he found himself at loggerheads with friends
of many years’ standing when he supported the
privatization of Prague’s Barrandov Film Studios.
He championed a democratic system with
a (conservative) emphasis on the role of political
parties, whereas Václav Havel was rather sceptical
of party affiliations. While this has estranged Uhde
from many of his Charter 77 friends, as a suspect
humanist intellectual he has never gained the
full confidence of the newly-constituted Right
led by Václav Klaus either.
It its only seemingly paradoxical that Petr
Uhl—journalist, self-taught legal expert defender
of political prisoners (he is an engineer by training)
and himself a long-term political prisoner (having
served nine years in total)—the most Left-leaning
of our heroes, should be most distant in spirit from
the previous regime. Born in 1941, he grew up at
a time when Moscow was actually less influential
than the independent, non-Moscow based French,
German or Polish Left of the 1960s: “One of the
things I brought back to Prague from Paris was
Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski’s open letter
to the Polish United People’s Party“ (p. 74).
His book provides a further reminder that
at least from the 1970s onwards, the non-conformist circles in Poland followed Czech affairs
much more avidly than the other way around,
yet the Polish influence is far from negligible, as
can be seen in, for example, Květen, the first post1948 Czech literary journal that was not wholly
conformist, or the impact the Polish Orange
Alternative had on the (much less witty) young
dissident grouping, The Society for a Funnier
Present.
In 1968 Petr Uhl was one of those young
people who drew their inspiration from the
Western European Left, as well as the Polish
student and the nascent dissident movements.
While that entailed standing up for at least parts
of the Prague Spring legacy, Uhl was not a “dissident“ in the narrow sense of the word; since his
heart had never been in what he and his friends
criticized not as a Communist regime but rather as
a Bureaucratic Dictatorship, he could not possibly
have become an “apostate.“ That was one of the
reasons why he was skeptical about Alexander
Dubček’s political comeback at the turn of the
1980s and 1990s. And it was also a reason why
his opposition to the Lustration law brought him
closer to Dubček: “He had a good heart and came
from a political culture that was different from
mine, yet not a hostile one. I had many reservations about him but I came to recognize that while
some moments in his life might be described
as failures, they were not the result of his being
afraid. It wasn’t out of cowardice that he signed
the Moscow Protocol after the August 1968 invasion or the package of extraordinary measures
adopted by the Presidium of the Federal Assembly
in August 1969 but rather out of a realization that
it was, unfortunately, inevitable.“ (p. 106). This is
characteristic of Uhl’s approach to politics and
people: he doesn’t approve of a “bureaucratic“
notion of politics yet at the same time he is not
dismissive of human decency and is prepared
to enter into a political alliance where there is
common ground. This happened in Charter 77 as
well as in the Committee for the Defence of the
Unjustly Persecuted in relation to Václav Benda,
a conservative Catholic and a Pinochet admirer:
a reliable ally in a good cause, a sensible and
brave man.
When he speaks of people whose guilt he
regards as proven and not atoned for, Uhl can
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be blunt and harsh, however, not just in blanket
terms, applying collective guilt: he rejects the
notion of the Sudeten Germans’ collective guilt
while being severely critical of the postwar role
played by President Edvard Beneš and repudiating the notion of the collective guilt of all the
members of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party.
Uhl can sound schoolmasterly; you have
to read him very carefully to find humor and
detachment, but it is worth the effort. This is how
he describes his first encounter with his newlyminted father-in-law and his son’s grandfather
Jaroslav Šabata in 1976, after the latter’s release
from a five-year prison term: “We both felt we
had to analyze the course and implications of
the Seventh Congress of the Communist International as well as other issues, for example,
whether the decision to establish People’s Fronts
had been the right one. (…) My father-in-law
spent about an hour at our place before travelling
to Brno. I walked him to the Museum subway
station but somehow we couldn’t bear to break
off this fundamental debate on the Communist
International.“
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Less than a month later came the publication
of Charter 77, in which the two men came to
play a major role.
The temptation to tell the author of a memoir
what he should have done better or what he
should have thought is as great as it is pointless.
More to the point is the question of what kind of
witness an author bears to his own life. Uhde’s and
Uhl’s life summaries are among the best and most
comprehensive Czech memoirs of recent years.
AJL’s memoir, The Past in the Present (Host, Brno),
appeared twelve years ago, well before his current
stock-taking. It is good that after publishing his
memoir he has been granted time for more work.
Let us hope that these stocktakings of Milan Uhde
and Petr Uhl too are far from definitive.
VÁC L AV B U R I A N
is a journalist, an editor of the bimonthly Listy, and a translator
of Polish literature.
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Wojciech Stanislawski
A Broken Trail
Angelika Kuźniak, Papusza,
Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2013
Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof
Krauze, Papusza, Next Movie, 2013
The memory of the poet Papusza, revived
by the book and the film about her, allows us to
understand that the Gypsy culture was a really
important part of the colorful, multinational
Central Europe.
The incompatibility of two worlds—the
settled, European group centered around
farming, and the migratory caravans which
appeared on the trails leading from the Balkans to
Lithuania, Poland and the Netherlands—probably
resulted from their very nature. The newcomers,
separated by a cocoon of different language,
customs and faith, were not able to fit into either
the feudal or the bourgeois order of modern
Europe. Royal and aristocratic courts, officials
and bishops tried to force them to settle down:
in vain. Roma communities were at best threatened with marginalization, finding a niche for
themselves in the world of “loose people,” defying
the rigors of state governance, and in the worst
case—with criminalization, since every now and
then appetites appeared to force the “vagrants”
into the role of farmers or apprentices. Across
the centuries attempts of this kind were doomed
to failure, while the efforts of untimely modernizers, trying to squeeze the Roma into the mold
of the existing social order, put the very idea of
modernization into ridicule.
The people of the highway, shunning
high culture and literacy, the charms of the
city, schools and medicine, survived for the
longest in the weakly urbanized expanses of
Central and Eastern Europe. They maintained
their status of marginalized “people of the
highway,” almost invisible to the modern state
and functioning—with their coppersmithing,
horse trading, music making, divination and
petty theft—on the outskirts of the modern
economy, until the arrival of the two totalitarianisms. During the Second World War they
barely avoided annihilation; that part of their
community survived is owed to the fact that
they were scattered across the countryside,
and that the Nazis did not regard them as their
prime target. The postwar Communist regimes,
in which modern bureaucracy could count on
the support of the apparatus of repression, in
a period of two decades managed to “assign
the eternal wanderers to the soil”: the wooden
wagons were burnt as firewood, their inhabitants
were deposited in dilapidated buildings, work
orders were issued and armies of hygienists and
social workers were recruited.
A success? Not necessarily: rather a further
stage of bringing the idea of “forced modernization” into ridicule and providing a proof that
cultures are even harder to transplant than
old trees. The half-century which passed from
settling the Roma in Poland, Czech Republic,
Slovakia and Hungary brought huge changes
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with it: a batch of such gloriously named
processes as Urbanization, Schooling and
Uprooting Illiteracy worked wonders. The statistics, however, are ruthless: the unemployment
rate (extremely high) or university degrees (very
low) among the citizens of Roma origin show
the durability of invisible barriers.
Perhaps, as it is often the case, an ideal
solution did not exist. After the defeat of the
two utopian projects, the Enlightenment and
the Socialist one, it is difficult to imagine
how communities guided by a coherent, but
un-codified system of rules, precepts and taboos,
extremely patriarchal, living beyond time and
calendar, could painlessly plunge into the world
of “modernity” without forsaking their lifestyle.
Such things happen: various customs or indeed
worlds, do not cross the border defined by the
twilight of childhood, as Carlo Gozzi would have
it. Remaining forever in their forests, not entering
into “modernity” or “adulthood, are both Winnie
the Pooh, and the elves from Tolkien’s trilogy,
while cuddly toys of childhood are relegated to
the attic at the threshold of the primary school,
and in a few years they are joined by the skipping
rope and skateboard. Perhaps it would be easiest
to say that in the mid-twentieth century, even in
Central Europe, where time passed more slowly,
Roma communities experienced a particularly
tragic dilemma: the old way of life was impossible to maintain and the new one offered few
really attractive things—and if it did, it was the
attraction of the “hot water at the tap” kind,
which the various beneficiaries of modernity
strangely fail to appreciate.
The tension resulting from the split into two
worlds—the caravans and IDs, the violin and
scrawls in a notebook, spells cast on chicken
and penicillin-prescribing clinics—would be
difficult to bear for everyone, let alone a person
endowed with special sensitivity. Bronisława
Wajs, Papusza or Lalka (Doll) experienced all
this to the full, standing on the border between
the forest and the basement, Holocaust and
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Stalinism, the Borderlands and the “Recovered
Territories” in western Poland, and finally, as
a cultural anthropologist would put it, between
the world of “orality” and “literacy”. And we are
only now becoming ready to confront this split
which she was forced to experience—and try
to give justice to her.
A strange thing: Papusza is not an unknown
figure. The first translations of her poems by
Jerzy Ficowski were published in the early
1950s, and later—against the will of the poet
(or ignoring it)—reprinted many times. She
appeared on postage stamps and in anthologies, her name was mentioned in textbooks.
Also the dramatic story of her life was recounted
many times in radio and press documentaries
still in the Communist Poland. Both meetings
with her which we could enjoy this year thanks
to the book by Angelica Kuźniak and the film
by the Krauzes, do not disclose any unknown or
embarrassing facts: they simply take her from
under the magnifying glass of the humiliating
paternalism (“Oh yes, the Gypsies, you know,
singing and violin…”) and usher her into the
group of “great spirits”: poets struggling with
themselves and the world.
This was all the more difficult that, admittedly,
Roma culture has recently been conventionalized and commercialized in a dramatic way.
Great educators, particularly those associated
with the “anti-pedagogics” tendency, often
despair over the child’s imagination, curtailed
or even crushed in the first years of school: but
what should we say about various concerts of
“Gypsy bands” playing at weddings and festivals of folklore? Sequins, galligaskins, artificial
eyelashes and mascara appear there in an abundance which would probably delight only camp
enthusiasts, admirers of Dolly Parton and Johnny
Liberace. With texts it is not any better: it seems
that to create “Gypsy songs,” nowadays apparently written mainly by non-Gypsies, it is enough
to rattle a matrix containing just a dozen words
{colorful wagons, fate, violin, love, black eyes,
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cuckoo, soothsayer, silver, tears, tambourine,
moon, horses, tents}, and then take them out
at random, like a bored Dadaist.
And then we read:
How much of Papusza is there in these
poems and how much of Jerzy Ficowski, who
first persuaded the Doll to write down her recitations to music, then took the effort of translation,
and finally of releasing them in print? I guess it
will remain indefinite, as will the relationship
between them, remarkable through the fact that
it was so ambiguous and non-erotic. Ficowski—
twenty something, during the war a member
of the Home Army, fighting in the ranks of the
“Tower” regiment in the Warsaw Uprising, in the
first years of the brutal consolidation of power
by the Communist regime pursued by the secret
police, and also a budding poet—found himself
in a wandering caravan in 1948 and spent nearly
two years hiding there. What a stroke of luck to
stumble upon Papusza—a young woman, wife
of a much older husband, from her earliest years
so eager to discover the world that she taught
herself to read and write, while remaining almost
entirely outside the “literary culture” not only as
a “creator,” but also as a recipient (among a dozen
books which she was able to name there was
Leśmian, the Ballads of Mickiewicz, but also
a stack of cheap romances and the second part
of The Count of Monte Cristo).
The years in the camp, the literal and metaphorical inserting of a pen in Papusza’s hand
by the poet—such was the introduction to the
drama of her life. The climax would occur in the
next few years. Ficowski, having obtained the
support of Julian Tuwim, a poet championed
by the regime, and making an excellent use of
the boon for Socialist Realism, which encouraged people to find and support “folk” artists,
hitherto absent in official circulation, begins
to publish her poems in his own translation (in
a compact form they were to appear as Songs
of Papusza in 1956). At the same time the first
version of his book Polish Gypsies appeared in the
bookstores (1953): a historical and ethnographic
compendium, containing, among other things,
a description of customs and daily practices as
well as a set of basic phrases in a number of
Romani dialects, that could—stretching things
a little bit—be considered a “dictionary.”
The original edition of the poems brought
Papusza momentary fame, the echoes of which
reached the Roma community too. But this made
it easier for the Gypsy elders—a few months
later, after the publication of Polish Gypsies—
to accuse Papusza of being an accomplice in
“revealing secrets”—for in the eyes of the leaders
of a community which derives its cohesion and
identity from a kind of withdrawal from the
world at large, a printed description of phrases
and behaviors that henceforth became transparent to any stranger constituted such a crime.
The outrage of the Polish Roma was all the
greater because at the same time they became
a target of a hostile campaign of the Communist
authorities, whose firmness was matched only
by their misunderstanding of the foundations of
the Roma culture. Instant “orders to settle down”
were issued, the Gypsies were forced to accept
identity cards and encouraged to “productivization” through the creation of “Gypsy cooperatives” and “Roma work brigades,” taking part
in the crude and forced industrialization of the
country. These unwise initiatives were shortlived: all that remains of the “work brigades” are
some photos of Nowa Huta, after the first wave of
the settlement campaign, and devastated tenement houses in the formerly German Western
Poland. The majority of the Polish Roma offered
a passive resistance to the endeavors of the
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Oh, forest, my father,
black father,
you brought me up,
you abandoned me
—and we fall silent.
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regime until the end of the 1960s. In the period
of the publication of the Gypsies on Polish roads
the fear of imposed changes was particularly
strong. The threat of a curse and exclusion hung
over Papusza: she paid for it with mental illness,
recurring nervous breakdowns and ultimately
with the decision to stop writing.
In all accounts and evaluations Bronisława
Wajs appears as a tragic character: marked out
from the beginning, but separated from her
peers by her curiosity about the world, not
fitting into the patriarchal society (although
attempting to adapt to it), standing between
the world of writing and the world of songs, in
subsequent years she became a witness of the
war, the Holocaust, the destructive modernity,
and finally a victim of ostracism. Unfulfilled to
the end either in love and motherhood or in
her work, she was gradually fading (she died in
May 1987) in an apartment amongst the dreary
communist countryside, bereft after the death
of her husband and left by her foster son: how
much closer to the figure of Job, or a Mater Dolorosa than a vociferous “accursed poet” mired in
games of self-creation.
And Ficowski, an insurgent and poet, in
the film a young man and faun, at his ripe age
remembered rather as a self-styled Faust, with
a Spanish beard, fancy beret and a melancholy
look? The first unjust thought charges him
with forgetting that when you domesticate
someone you are responsible for that person.
We think about a frivolous poet who knew, after
all, about the power of the Roma taboos, but
ignored their consequences; having listened to
Papusza, having gifted her not only with a pen,
but a hope for a different fate, he returned to his
non-Gypsy life, like thousands of reporters who
are willing to listen to the stories of others as
long as they can serve as material for a moneyearning text.
Fortunately, both works dealing with
Papusza, the film and the book, are far from
unequivocal, showing a young man who indeed
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was not loyal to his “sister” when he saw the
world standing wide open before him, but
seeing her hurt, he awkwardly tried to come
back, help her, support her. In vain: Papusza got
stuck in a Gorzów tenement house as a witness,
as a treasury guard robbed of the jewels—he, the
eternal youth, travelled around the world, translating Garcia Lorca and poems of the Ashkenazi
Jews, tirelessly searching for the remains of the
legacy of Bruno Schulz and commenting on
it in his other opus magnum—a collection of
essays entitled Regions of the Great Heresy. It
must be said for him that until the end of his life
he remained faithful to the abused—by translating songs of caravans and shtetl, and as
a citizen, by signing memoranda of protest to
the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic,
by engaging in the activities Workers’ Defence
Committee (KOR), accepting with dignity the
recurring publication bans. But Papusza, what
use was Schulz and KOR to her? In the words of
another poet, “outstretched hands glow in the
dark like an old town.”
We are left with a few volumes—in which, if
you sift out diminutives, cuckoos and the sound
of tambourines, the most powerful voice turns
out to be the stoic acceptance of transience, of
oblivion. “My white, red and green forests / my
black evenings / midnight hours / already do not
remember anything / and do not know at all.” And
lest we forget too soon—the film also remains:
with moving roles of Papusza (Jowita Budnik)
and her husband Dionizy (Zbigniew Waleryś) and
even more moving images: poignant, majestic,
black-and-white shots. If the producers want to
capitalize on the successes already accomplished
at festivals in Thessaloniki and Karlovy Vary, it
will be enough to publish an album consisting
of still-frames: particular scenes, well-composed
and well-photographed, generate as powerful
emotions as daguerreotypes or collections of
the masters of photography from a century ago.
Background music—songs composed by Jan
Kanty Pawluśkiewicz.
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Maybe it just had to be that way, and the
Central European Gypsies were some distant
analogy to the heroes of our childhood, which
are the free Native Americans? In fact, did they
not share the same fate? In real life—a degradation
or, at best an acculturation. In mass culture—
sugary falsehood, whether in the Disney version
or a dancing club one. To the vast majority of
people this is enough: the rest, perceiving these
old tribes as a figure of irresponsibility, freedom,
vagrancy, is left with a vague mixture of guilt
and regret, and watching for the now defunct
caravan, which—in the last scenes of the film—
arrives on black meadows under the high, white
sky.
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historian of Russia and the Balkans, commentator
of the Rzeczpospolita daily
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Hašek in Galicia
Aleksander Kaczorowski
In 1901, when Jaroslav Hašek wandered into
Galicia, this remote province of the Habsburg
monarchy was synonymous with poverty and
backwardness for his countrymen, and also the
embodiment of all Polish vices. Czech officials,
who settled there from the first decades of the
nineteenth century, regarded any work assignment in this region almost as a banishment. Not
allowed to enter the houses of the nobility, they
knew the country only from the perspective
of a primitive rural serfdom and poor Jewish
towns sinking in the mud. “Miserable highways,
terrible inns, trouble with finding a decent horse
team and the coachmen as if freshly imported
from a barbarous country—such were mostly
their first impressions—,” says an expert on the
“Galician triangle1.” “For visitors from Bohemia,
the technical condition of roads and inns, land
drainage systems (or rather the lack of them),
cultivation techniques, standard of living—
and not just of the privileged class—served as
measures of advancement. Galicia assessed from
this angle had to seem like an open-air museum
of backwardness.”2
Not only of material backwardness, let us add.
The Czechs were outraged by the inhuman attitude of the nobility to the peasants, and denying
the Ukrainians the right to national identity.
Moreover, they themselves were treated with
contempt, both by virtue of their plebeian origin
and by serving the Austrian invaders. Even when
they stressed (although they rarely did) that they
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regard themselves as Czechs and Slavs, they met
with disregard for their national aspirations, or
worse, with accusations of Russophilia. In general,
however, they did not have a developed sense of
national identity and even at home they spoke
German (“because speaking Czech does not bring
you bread”). Jan Matejko, Jan Styka, Leopold Staff
and Karol Szajnocha descended from these families. Schoolmates and priests called them “Little
Schwabs.”
It does not seem that Hašek knew anything
about it. Despite the presence in Galicia of nine
thousand Czech bureaucrats (and several times
more colonists, mainly in Volhynia), the image of
the province in the eyes of a visitor from Bohemia
practically did not change for almost one hundred
years. The protagonists of his sketches are peasants, the action generally takes place in the
cottages, fields, meadows, inns. When traveling
to Galicia, Hašek, like his countrymen, ignores the
houses of the nobility, because he is not invited
inside. “The noble world, for the Poles the world
of the only true civilization in this region, by most
Czech travelers could only be observed from
a distance. Parks, gardens, stately mansions, and
even the ‘modest but tidy’ manors constituted
an inaccessible space.“3 The space available for
the Czech vagrant was formed by such distinctive public buildings as railway stations, jails
and brothels. So we should not wax indignance
at Hašek that when the Good Soldier Schweik
revisits a brothel in Sanok after many years, its
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owners prove to be—tsk, tsk—“a Polish nobleman
and noblewoman.”
The author of The Adventures of the Good
Soldier Schweik for most of his adult life made
his living from writing fees. He wrote for the best
and most widely read newspapers, not needing
to bother about their political orientation. His
Galician essays came out in the daily Národní listy,
a conservative-nationalist organ of the Czech
bourgeoisie. And Tribuna, where in the spring
of 1921 he published a sham journal of Marshal
Józef Pilsudski, was not, as the title suggests,
an organ of the Czech people, but a liberal and
progressive newspaper, issued by the Prague
Jewish Community. Its head was Ferdinand
Peroutka, the most prominent Czech journalist
and commentator of the twentieth century, close
to the associates of presidents Masaryk and Beneš,
and after the war, director of the Czechoslovakian section of Radio Free Europe. Peroutka was
a political animal, but he also had an excellent
literary sense. Tribuna published, for example,
one of the first translations of Franz Kafka’s short
stories into Czech, translated by Milena Jesenská.
Hašek’s lampooning of Piłsudski and the Poles
was in line with the views of the Czech public. Our
southern neighbors really wanted to “make politics in Central and Eastern Europe,” as we read in
the alleged diary of the Marshal. “It would not hurt
the Poles if they were slapped in the face—wrote
Masaryk to Beneš on 20th December 1918—on the
contrary, it would be beneficial, it would cool
down the heads of the dangerous chauvinists.”4
The founder and four times the President of the
Czechoslovakian Republic was convinced that
the reborn Republic was an anachronistic relic,
that it would be a classic seasonal country, torn
apart by ethnic conflicts and having no chance of
survival squeezed between Germany and Russia.
“The reconstruction of historical Poland is a repeat
of the errors of old Poland and an embryo of its
collapse,”5 he wrote to Beneš in June 1919. “The
Poles: their tactics will not save them,” he added
in a letter to the leader of the National Demo-
crats, Karel Kramář. “They are confronted with
great internal problems: landed estates—the
Jews—fragmentation of the parties and orientations… Only an ethnically homogenous Poland
can be strong.”6 Such an opinion was widespread
among the Czechs, as was the belief in a specific
historical mission that Providence had bestowed
upon their nation: “It is the truest truth—the
Czechoslovakian President wrote to his most
trusted associate and successor—that only we are
prepared and we can bring and maintain order
(…) Our Poles prefer us, they are afraid to be in
Poland, they are afraid that there will be no order
there. The Germans from Bielsko, from Cieszyn,
etc. ask us not give these cities to the Poles. They
are afraid of the Polish mess.”7
Much has been written about the reasons
for the Polish-Czech animosity. There is something symbolic in the fact that in the same week
when Jaroslav Hašek was born, on Monday,
April 30, 1883, the Warsaw daily Word (Słowo)
published the first episode of With Fire and Sword
(Wednesday May 2, 1883). And that at the same
time when in Prague, the dynamically evolving
capital of the most industrialized province of
the Habsburg monarchy, the future author of
The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik was
growing up, in Warsaw Henryk Sienkiewicz was
writing subsequent episodes of his apology of
the seventeenth-century nobility in order to
“uplift hearts.”
Thanks to the “Trilogy,” this patriotic nonsense
fed to the masses for generations, modern Poles
identify more with Michał Wołodyjowski than
with his nameless serfs, never mentioned in any
volume of this work. And yet it is among these
peasants, who in the times Sir Michał and his ilk
were at best slapped in the face by the nobility,
that a vast majority of us would find our ancestors. This is the power of myth; such was the
hypnotic charm of the nineteenth-century Polish
culture, to which not only Jews, Germans,
Galician Czechs clung, but also the children of
the Małopolska or Mazovia peasants who
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150 years ago still regarded only the noblemen
as Poles and they were addressing each other
in the plural form (like the French vous), as Czechs
do to this day. For the Czechs managed to get
through the nineteenth century without nobility,
which somehow did not prevent them from
building the national identity in their plebeian
classes and assimilating the majority of Jews and
tens of thousands of the Galician, “Polish” peasants who in the late nineteenth century migrated
to Zaolzie for work, and their descendants in
general think of themselves as Czechs through
and through.
and culture—though not politics—survived at
least until 1918. Czech nobility was Germanized
at the same time and for similar reasons that
the Lithuanian or Ruthenian nobility was Polonized—all those Radziwiłłs, Sapiehas, Czartoryskis, Giedroycs and Miloszs, who permanently
fixated the thinking of the Poles around the “East,”
the “Borderlands,” in short, around the insane and
impossible mission aimed at colonization of the
Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands, the
last episode of which was the genocide of Poles
in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–44.
Of course there is no reason to blame the
Ruthenian and Lithuanian nobility that centuries
ago it chose the Polish identity, as this allowed
them to draw extensively on the achievements of
the civilization of the Polish Republic and multiply
their wealth, creating oligarchic states in the lands
of the so-called Borderlands. But you cannot
also, without being ridiculous, be surprised that
representatives of the Ukrainian, Lithuanian—or
Czech for that matter—political elites, generally
stemming from plebeian and petty-bourgeois
classes, and representing the vast majority of the
local populations, said to the nobles: “Be gone!”
This gesture of rejection of the exploiting classes,
cutting themselves off from the parasitic nobility,
was a milestone on the road to empowerment of
the “rustics” and “louts”, “nouveau riche” and “shopkeepers”—on the road to their transformation into
a modern nation. And by the way, are we aware of
the origins of the numerous epithets derogatory
to the dignity of working people in the Polish
language? Greengrocer, prole, lout—they are all
relics of our backwater nobility, with its apology
of idleness and a grange-based attitude to reality.
Grange-based, i.e. resulting from an instinctively
adopted perspective of the owner of a grange
(although there is no grange and perhaps never
has been). Perhaps it is not surprising that this
galaxy of class-based invective has its counterpart
in Czech (and probably also in the Ukrainian and
Lithuanian) in numerous offensive descriptions
of the nobility.
Hašek’s lampooning
of Piłsudski and the
Poles was in line
with the views of the
Czech public. Our
southern neighbors
really wanted to “make
politics in Central and
Eastern Europe,” as
we read in the alleged
diary of the Marshal.
Contrary to the wide-spread myths, the Czech
lands still in the eighteenth century resembled
in terms of social structure the lands which
are the undisputed cradle of Polish culture,
that is Wielkopolska, Mazovia and Małopolska.
An overwhelming majority of the population
were peasants, and in Bohemia and Moravia
the native language of one third of them was
German. Until the mid-nineteenth century the
Germans dominated numerically in the majority
of cities (just like the Jews in the Polish lands). This
dominance in terms of wealth, capital, civilization
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Now we are closer to understanding why
a little less than a hundred years ago, no Polish
writer could possibly write such an iconoclastic,
anti-heroic, anti-political, egalitarian and thoroughly democratic book as The Adventures of the
Good Soldier Schweik. We are heirs of an anachronistic culture of the nobility and romanticism,
which prevents us from understanding the
simplest things. Such as the fact that war—every
war—is pure slaughter with someone making
money off it. We are always trying to find some
sense in war, we harness theology and martyrdom
to it, getting what Schweik called “idiocy to the
power of two.” In Poland, after all, it is impossible
to die stupidly. The Pole is killed on the field of
glory, even if he died in a plane crash.
Of course, the Czechs have also been
fed various foolish things. As a child Jaroslav
Hašek listened to stories about the Hussites,
the fifteenth-century “God’s warriors” allegedly
striking fear into the hearts of half of Europe—
and heard them from the lips of no other than
Alois Jirásek, who was his teacher. It is largely
due to this eminent novelist, called “the Czech
Sienkiewicz” by his contemporaries, and to the
national ideology promoted in his novels, that
the Czechs rejected Catholicism, which in the
times of Hašek was still professed by more than
90 (ninety!) percent of them. They believed that
Jan Hus invented Protestantism a whole century
before Martin Luther, though in fact this famous
preacher was a better Catholic, and certainly
a better Christian, than the Pope then (or rather
the three popes exercising the papal ministry
at the same time)—and this is why in 1415 he
was burned at the stake in Constance. Jirásek
also persuaded his countrymen that Germany
was their eternal enemy, although in reality the
Czechs owe their relatively privileged position
of the most advanced civilization among the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe to their
very durable, centuries-old ties with Germany.
The price for the development was the loss of
the inefficient feudal state in the first half of the
seventeenth century, after the Battle of White
Mountain, and the subsequent national apostasy
of the native nobility, who chose the “German
option.” “None of them is to be regretted,” as
Schweik would put it; upon hearing of the death
of the heir to the throne, Prince Ferdinand, in
a terrorist attack in Sarajevo, he asked which
Ferdinand was killed, because he knew two:
One was a helper at the druggist, and another
collected dog turds.
In Hašek’s youth, at the end of the nineteenth
century, the Czechs were an ambitious nation
of townspeople, petty bourgeoisie and wealthy
peasants, generally professing beliefs held at the
time in the Polish lands by supporters of national
democracy. As a child Hašek was a witness and
victim of a drunken downfall of his father,
a teacher of mathematics; hence, among other
things, his aversion to the petty bourgeoisie
and its ideology—integral nationalism, hostile
to Germans and Jews. At the age of twenty he
became the editor of an anarchist newspaper—
anarchism was popular among many of his peers,
not having family ties with the metropolitan
working class, at that time already supporting the
dynamic social democratic party. He supported
himself by writing humorous sketches and short
stories, enjoyed himself with friends in pubs, for
five years wandered around Bohemia, Slovakia,
Hungary and Galicia in search of adventure.
He wrote the first story about the adventures of
Schweik in the Austrian barracks in 1911. A few
years later he saw them (the barracks) personally.
In the summer of 1915 he found himself on the
Eastern Front, and in the autumn of the same
year he was captured by the Russians.
Contrary to the myths disseminated at the
beginning of the war by the German propaganda—and after the war sustained, for other
reasons, by the Czechoslovakian propaganda—
it is not true that Czech soldiers voluntarily, in
whole units, went to the Russian side. In general,
they ended in captivity as a result of errors in
command, made by Austrian officers. This was
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the case of Hašek, who remembered the year in
Russian captivity as the worst experience of his
entire life. Infectious diseases and famine decimated the POWs regardless of their nationality;
the author of Schweik caught tuberculosis in the
camp, which over time, along with alcoholism,
most contributed to his premature death.
The Russians changed their attitude to the
Slavs in the Austrian uniforms only in the autumn
of 1916. Because of war failures they allowed
the creation of Czechoslovakian Legions, which
soon reached 60,000 soldiers. Hašek was editor of
a Legions’ newspaper in Kiev, he wrote patriotic
agitprop and humorous sketches. At the news of
the abolition of religious holidays by the “Government of People’s Commissaries in St. Petersburg”
he replied with a mocking essay entitled “How the
Bolsheviks liquidated Christmas.” He noted there
quite soberly that among the many things that
the Bolsheviks revoked “you could find only one
thing they did not revoke, namely the promise
made by Lenin to Emperor William that Russia
would mess things up in a big way.” So he was not
a naïve virgin, as you can see. Despite that, a few
months later he defected from the Legion and
having reached—not without hiccups—Moscow
he volunteered for the Red Army. Soon, appointed
political commissar of the Bolshevik Fifth Army,
he found himself in Samara on the Volga, one of
the key cities along the Trans-Siberian railway line.
There, in June of 1918, fate brought him back in
touch with his compatriots.
For the Czechoslovakian Legion stuck in
Russia for good. It would seem that after the
Treaty of Brest the Czechs and Slovaks did not
have anything more to do there. Initially, the
Allies intended to transfer them on the Western
front as quickly as possible, in part through
Arkhangelsk, in part through Vladivostok. And so
it would have been if not for the idiotic orders of
Trotsky, who ordered them to disarm. The Czechs
had behind them soldiering in the Austrian army
and rotting in Russian captivity; they were tough
and they wanted to return to their home country
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at any price. At that time they were the strongest
and best-equipped armed force between the
Volga River and the Pacific Ocean. They easily
drove out the innumerous and poorly armed Red
Army, at the end of May took Penza and Omsk,
and in early June, virtually without a fight, they
captured Samara. Hašek then fled from the city
disguised as a woman, narrowly avoiding death,
as the sentence for desertion was still hanging
over him.
Following the “Battle of Samara” the legionaries were embroiled in the civil war in Russia
against their will. Most returned to their home
country only in 1920. And what was Hašek doing
then? As always he wrote about his exploits with
gusto: “At that time I edited (…) near Yamburg
a magazine in the Tatar-Bashkirian dialect for
two savage divisions of Bashkirs and other
thugs who fought with the White Troops of the
Estonian Republic.”8 We will not track his sins here,
or attempt to trace determinable facts. We will
just add for the record that after escaping from
Samara he came to Irkutsk, where he became
a member of the local Party Committee, remarried, and probably wanted to settle on the Baikal.
Fortunately he was reclaimed by History, impatient that her Chosen One, instead of finally
writing the greatest Czech novel of all time, was
wasting his time among the Buryats and Yakuts
(the knowledge of whom he probably drew from
the classic Russian-language works by Wacław
Sieroszewski).
In August 1920, the Bolsheviks stood on the
outskirts of Warsaw. Their cavalry ravaged the
Galician small towns, where less than twenty
years before Hašek wandered in search of
adventure. It seemed that in a few months, if
not weeks, the Cossacks of Budyonny would water
their horses in the Vltava River and remind the
Prague waiters how the word bistro had found
its way to gastronomy. So our hero, with his wife
and a commission from the Party in his pocket,
struck out for his homeland in order to inflame
the revolutionary instincts of the local working
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class, which allegedly groaned under the yoke
of Masaryk and no longer had anything to lose,
except for dumplings. However, when after
several months of travel he reached Prague, he
quickly lost his enthusiasm for underground work.
He was suspected of the worst offenses, even
crimes, allegedly perpetrated during the civil war
in Russia. He reacted to defamatory articles with
a “sincere confession before the Czech society,”9
in which he admitted that he was “not only such
a wretch and villain” as described, but a “much
worse swine.”
Here is a (short) list of his transgressions:
“Even through my coming into the world
I brought a great displeasure to my mother, who
did not sleep for a few days and nights.”
“When I was six months old, I ate my elder
brother and stole the holy images from his coffin.”
“When I was a one-year-old, there was in
Prague not a single cat whom I would not have
picked an eye out or cut the tail off.”
“When I went for a walk with a nursemaid,
all dogs gave me a wide berth. The nursemaid
did not walk for long with me, however, because
when I was eighteen months old, I took her to
the barracks at the Charles Square, where for
two packs of tobacco I left her at the mercy of
the soldiers.”
When a comrade from the legions, the writer
Rudolf Medek, met him in an inn and accused him
that, as a Bolshevik commissar, he was executing
legionnaires, and therefore was a murderer and
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a bandit, Hašek exclaimed proudly: “Sure I am.
And I’m not ashamed of it! I ordered them to be
shot by the dozen. I took particular delight in
ripping their guts out and hanging them on the
city gates to scare off those who allowed themselves to be stupefied by your patriotic doggerel.
I committed worse atrocities than the famous
Asian Genghis Khan.”10
In the end, however, he moved from Prague to
the countryside. In the spring of 1921 he settled
in Lipnice nad Sázavou and there he wrote the
first volume of The Adventures of the Good Soldier
Schweik. He died on 3 January 1923. The inn where
he dictated his masterpiece almost to the end of
his life is still functioning.
ALEKSANDER
KACZOROWSKI
Editor in Chief of Aspen Review
Photo: Jacek Herok
Danuta Sosnowska, “Inna Galicja”. Warszawa 2008, p. 102
Danuta Sosnowska, “Inna Galicja”. Warszawa 2008, p. 104
Danuta Sosnowska, “Inna Galicja”. Warszawa 2008, p. 106
Eva Hahn, “Cień Masaryka”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 26.09.1997
Janusz Gruchała, “Tomasz G. Masaryk”. Wrocław 1996, p. 217
Janusz Gruchała, “Tomasz G. Masaryk”. Wrocław 1996, p. 216
Eva Hahn, “Cień Masaryka”, Gazeta Wyborcza, 26.09.1997
Jaroslav Hašek, “Zniknięcie posła i inne opowiadania”. Kraków 2004, s. 429
Jaroslav Hašek, “Zniknięcie posła i inne opowiadania”. Kraków 2004, p. 432–433
Radko Pytlik, “Nasz przyjaciel Hašek”. Warszawa 1984, p. 223
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No 2 | 2014
2 | 2014
Index: 287210
CENTRAL EUROPE
Aspen Institute Prague is supported by:
CENTRAL EUROPE
REENTERS HISTORY
Marek Cichocki, Robert Cooper, Tomáš Klvaňa, Luuk van Middelaar, Peter Pomeranstsev, Emmanuel Todd
Ukraine Can Be a Neutral State
An interview with Roman Szporluk
Right in Ascendance or Mainstream in Decline?
Frank Furedi
W W W . A S P E N I N S T I T U T E . C Z
POLITICS
Exit Politics I. Krastev | Russian Minority in Estonia after Crimea M. Ehala
Czech Export J. Bureš | Eurasian Commonwealth V. Inozemtsev, A. Barbashin
Another Code of Nabokov L. Engelking | Hašek in Galicia A. Kaczorowski
ECONOMY
CULTURE