Creating a New-Old Europe

...There was also an ingredient beyond the control of these states—the energy crisis...

...It is a historical fact that Hungary's Stalinists —Rakosi, GerO, Farkas, Gabor Peter— were Jews...

...while intellectuals continued to speak a left-wing language, the nationalist imperative, frequently indistinguishable from an economic one, seems to have led everyone else to clamor not for a democratized socialism, but for a unified Germany...

...q Notes I See Ivan Szeldnyi, "Eastern Europe in an Epoch of Transition," which I partly paraphrase, in V. Nee and D. Sark, eds., Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism (Stanford: 1989), pp...

...The TDDSZ's 16 unions still have but moderate strength...

...The obsessions of the totalitarian mentality add an interesting wrinkle...

...The long parallel struggles against one-party rule in neighboring countries has produced a sense of fellowship among former dissidents, some of whom are now in power...

...The majority of our population is still in a predemocratic situation," says Democracy Now's Uhllmann, a teacher of church history...

...As philosopher Sandor RadnOti observes, "The question is whether they consider the last forty years a great historical hole and want to look backward, or recognize that what happened was a modernization—a wrong modernization but modernization nonetheless—and that one cannot go back, but must find a modern path...

...It leans consequently to a weaker state role in economic life...

...When Reich and his colleagues edited their movement's program they tried "to avoid using the worn-out phrases, but rather described what we wanted, which is still in many ways represented in the socialist idea...

...The GDR sought to rationalize its command structure in the 1970s by streamlining enterprises into cartels...

...However, the word "market" has taken on an almost magical character among some politicians, much as "plan" once did for communists...

...Democracy means that you vote for or against," he told me, "but not for different parties . . . . When we had the one-party system, it is a historical fact that we had a democracy...

...And the workers...

...Where does "Central" Europe end and "Eastern" Europe begin...

...I asked what conclusions he would draw if his party lost the upcoming elections with, say, less than 10 percent of the vote...

...Still, our conservatives —neo, old, paleozoic — insist: "It's because we were so tough that what we knew couldn't possibly change from within, did change from within...

...Nationalism...

...for Czechoslovaks and Hungarians it has partly been a vehicle to distance themselves from the Soviets...

...Though of course it didn't just arrive...

...The West German government has an enormous responsibility to avoid encouraging dangerous nationalist emotions," warns Wolfgang Uhllmann of Democracy Now, an East German network devoted to grass-roots democracy originating in the Protestant churches...

...Where more so than in the center of Europe...

...Whether that strength will be turned into social creativity is an open question...

...Meanwhile, Hungary's debt is $20 billion...

...When I met Csurka one evening at the ornate Hungaria cafe, he declared himself "proud to be a populist and a nationalist...

...History may record party reformers as the Kerenskys of East European communism...

...To criticisms from the Democratic Forum that SDS's policies would virtually sell out the country, the SDS responds that, given the country's debt, it is for all practical purposes sold out, and in any event if Hungary is to join the general process of European integration, the old categories of "national" economies must be reconsidered...

...The slogan, he told me, derived from 1956, when Hungary's freedom fighters, facing Soviet tanks, declared all Hungarians to be with them...

...but meanings that insist on egalitarian humanism in a new-old world...

...After a protracted struggle reformers won control of the Hungarian Socialist Workers party (Communist) last fall, changed its name to the Socialist party, and nominated a popular radical, Imre Pozsgay, as its presidential candidate...

...We SPRING • 1990 • 163 Germany and Hungary thought we'd all be arrested the next day," says Elmer...

...West Germany's party of the extreme right—the "Republicans" — is actively seeking adherents in the East...

...anti-Polish sentiments have intensified...

...Germany's neighbors know this, but they also fear the political and economic strength that will come of its unification...

...What "Central Europeanness" might mean in a post-cold war age with a unified Germany is unclear...

...others it froze or stunted...

...Ribanszky has special credentials when it comes to 1956...

...The most forceful comments on the subject—and on the DF's attitudes toward the Gypsy minority and women's issues (the DF opposes abortion rights)—came from Social Democratic leader Anna Petrasovits, who dismisses DF denials of prejudice as simply "not convincing...

...Although the DF was initiated by populist writers, centrist-conservative nationalists— Christian Democrats of sorts—have stepped to the fore...

...Csurka declared to Shipler that before World War II, "Hungary's capital was in the hands of the Jews...

...ou Americans come from a country in which socioeconomic problems are significantly a result of the market," notes Hungarian economic historian Istvan Rev...

...what was good in the old rural society is gone...

...We support privatization with the involvement of both foreign and Hungarian capital," says DF economic adviser Bertalan Dichazi, "but the . . . whole process [should be] carried out under strict public control...

...2 All the while, Western credit and petrodollars were readily obtainable...

...Stefan Heym fears "carpetbaggers" descending on the GDR...

...He emphasizes the difficulties of transition between stages of "extensive" and "intensive" economic growth...

...Isn't that so Solomon...

...In the post-World War II division of the continent, a principle of post-Reformation Europe echoed: cuius regio, eius religio— whoever rules imposes his religion...

...Berend, Csurka told me, was "in the stable of Aczel...

...There is also a territorial rift...

...When asked why so many Stalinists were Jews, Csurka shrugged: "It just happened after World War II and it just happened after World War I [in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919...

...do you hear, Solomon...

...In a party-state one joins the party either for ideological or careerist reasons...

...Instead of facing the problems of the country, the official union leadership is repeatedly guilty of "social demagogy," complains Bruszt...

...East Germans call the dramatic events of last fall "die Wende" —the turning—and they pun on the relation between die Wende and die Wdnde—walls...

...Sentiments like Jeszenszky's are expressed by Enikti Bollobas, professor at Attila Jozsef University in Szeged, in southern Hungary, when describing her own education during the Kädar years: "In history classes I was not allowed to speak in the first person plural...

...Darwin's theory still seems incomplete...

...Among objections to command economies leveled by advocates of both capitalism and market socialism is the impossibility of devising a rational scheme encompassing every nut and bolt in increasingly complex societies...

...As a result," notes Istvan Rev, "once there was a crisis, the optical illusion that there was a consensus was undermined...

...The Romanian drama this past winter produced a moment of euphoria in Hungary, a country whose paced exit from Communist rule lacked the mass catharsis experienced elsewhere in the region...

...Historian Joszef Antall, the DF's leader, and Jeszenszky fit this mold...

...It simply cannot do that...

...By then Soviet subsidies declined and Western credits became increasingly expensive...

...It was, he added, tied to finding a "third way" for the country and to maintaining Hungarian identity, including among Hungarians outside the country, especially in Transylvania, "the cradle of Hungarian culture...

...Moscow's price rises were more gradual than the ones of skyrocketing OPEC in the 1970s, but between 1973 and 1979 the GDR had to treble exports to the Soviet Union in return for the same quantity of oil...

...Does this imply revising the 1919 Treaty of Trianon, in which Hungary lost two thirds of its territory to its neighbors...

...What of the Social Democrats...

...They are counting Jews in leading positions, they are counting Jews in the mass media, and are saying they are destroying Hungarian culture...

...Bonn's ruling Christian Democrats, facing national elections next fall, will be looking nervously over their right shoulder...

...For the moment, there is an auspicious constellation...

...I will never acknowledge that the mistakes made by my comrades meant that we should have given up one-party rule," says Robert Ribanszky, an animated, cigar-puffing man who insists, even after the collapse of the one-party regimes, that his type of communism is a "historical necessity...

...In recent years, the somewhat amorphous idea of "Central Europe" was revived in West Germany and among dissidents in several Warsaw Pact countries—nations that will increasingly turn to West Germany for aid and investment...

...It is a commonplace that traditional German political culture is not democratic...

...Because the Kadar regime was relatively liberal compared to the rest of the communist world, Hungary was privileged in its relations to the West...

...instead of Bismarck's Prussia annexing the rest of Germany, the latter will ingest the wreckage of Prusso-Stalinism...

...Jeszenszky insists that Csurka "does not represent the Forum," but adds that he is an electoral asset because he can speak "to workers and the average man, which many Forum intellectuals cannot do...

...The future culture [of Hungary] should be as European as Hungarian...

...We were told $9 billion...

...Still, economic and political power creates its own realities...

...And what problems are posed by nationalism in the smaller Central European countries...

...and its southern neighbor—could all yield political volatility...

...It's done something like this: a foreign investor wishing to buy a state-owned enterprise makes a convenient arrangement with its nomenklatura managers...

...The Democratic Forum recently issued an "Appeal to the New Democratic Organizations in Central and Eastern Europe" that asserts that a "cardinal prerequisite of democracy is toleration for those whose political views, religion or language differs . . . ." Well and good...

...Since then Pozsgay's star, and his 162 • DISSENT Germany and Hungary party's, have plummeted...

...The new East German Social Democratic party refuses to cede Rosa Luxemburg to the SED...

...An important aspect of SDS thinking," comments Rev, "is also the recognition of a long-term problem...

...The government cannot sustain unprofitable enterprises anymore...

...They may yet be in for a surprise...

...The GDR and Hungary obtain, respectively, 93 percent and 90 percent of their oil from the Russians...

...the country intelligentsia which makes up its backbone composes a strata anxious to supplant the nomenklatura...

...in reality it was composed by the now-fallen Leninists and Stalinists...

...Typical of them was their agreement in December 1988 to a 5 percent decrease in the workers' real wages, only to call for a 'warning strike' when some prices went up the next summer...

...The more inoffensive they try to seem," Ginter Grass once wrote of his compatriots, "the greater the dread they inspire in their neighbors...

...Under the Communists it was the reverse...

...As a Jew he collected around him Jewish people in the leadership in the Kadar era, and they were people playing significant roles in the society...

...the first issue of the Social Democrats' paper carried a celebrated quote by her on its front page: "Freedom is always freedom for those who think differently...

...the Czechoslovaks acclaim a playwright along with a former communist chief...

...Once the current neoliberal "free market" myths play themselves out—they are in part a natural overreaction to the last four decades— new political spaces will open...

...Their president, Petrasovits, is frank about the dilemmas they face in a period which, in her view, requires liberal economic policies — privatization, liberalization of foreign trade policy, and diversification of property ownership...

...Will unification be a German event per se, or linked tightly to European integration...

...But as the 1990s dawn, an ascending Western Europe moves toward integration and the communist bloc has imploded, with the Eastern European nations moving toward self-Finlandization...

...but one wonders why Berend's comments produce a lawsuit while Csurka's —let's understate— engender defensiveness...

...These groups emphasized grass-roots activism...

...Brown, Eastern Europe and Communist Rule (Durham and London: 1988), p. 246 and Charles Gati, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (Durham: 1986), pp...

...In Budapest I asked virtually every political figure I met the same question: "Imagine I'm a simple worker...

...The mistreatment of Romania's Hungarian minority in Transylvania was not only a rallying cry for more radical nationalist elements in Hungary, but a justified concern for virtually all Hungarians...

...it's also unfair because, after forty years of Moscow's dictates, these nations have a right to their own lives...

...One should not mistake a legitimate desire for reconstituting a sense of national self with rabid nationalism...

...Last year Ribanszky fought the Communist reformers...

...The name I most often heard linked to allegations of anti-Semitism was that of a famous figure in the DF, the writer Istvan Csurka...

...I wish to express my gratitude to Nicole Fermon, Andrei S. Markovits and Vladimir Tismaneanu for comments on early versions of this article...

...The answer will depend on taking the old idea of socialism and giving it new meanings...

...It'll be the result of all the propaganda against us...

...The DF also has the interests of its own constituents at heart...

...After World War II, East German Social Democrats were forced to merge with the Communists in the Socialist Unity party...

...The heyday of Magyar populism was in the 1930s when the Hungarian countryside was dominated by great estates and the government by the authoritarian Miklós Horthy...

...In "The Emperor's Bust," a Polish noble of Italian origins living in the Eastern Galician province of AustriaSPRING • 1990 • 161 Germany and Hungary Hungary watches wars, nationalism, and democracy undo his beloved empire, a realm of diversity under one crown, "a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men . . . a home, not cabins...

...Now with the transformation of Eastern Europe as a whole, we're losing our preferential place...

...That is why conservatives today believe they are dancing on its grave...

...At the same time, Hungarian economist Janos Kornai argues that the "vertical" bureaucratic coordination of the economy—that is, the planning that remained intact—prevailed over the "horizontal" market coordination of buyers and sellers...

...upon losing, he and like-minded comrades—among whom he apparently is considered slightly outré — formed their own party...

...Die Wende was a turning away from the SED, even though the party sought to salvage itself with a new name—the "Party of Democratic Socialism" —and new leaders...

...Discussing his celebrated feud in the 1970s with Hungary's cultural dictator, Csurka told Shipler, "It cannot be denied that there was a special group of party leaders, represented by GyOrgy Aczel...

...At the same time, a cleavage opened...

...The Count Morstins and most Marxists, for differing but not entirely variant reasons, could find nothing intrinsically positive in such self-definition...

...There is a deep gap between a small group like ours—theologians, teachers, artists—and our people, without a democratic experience...

...If Europe successfully moves from the traditional nation-state system and becomes, by means of the European Community, more like Count Morstin's vision of Austria-Hungary—minus the monarchy, and with a common market keeping locks off the mansion's doors—German unification takes on a different context...

...At the present time it's unrealistic...

...ast summer a young liberal Budapest historian declared to me, only half facetiously, that she favored resurrecting the AustroHungarian empire...

...SDS's Janos Kis, who calls himself a "social liberal," has a somewhat stoic response: "Inflation and unemployment are going to happen anyway...

...But even the Socialist Unity party (SED)—the GDR's Communists—is resigned to some type of unification with the West...

...I'm not nostalgic and don't want to see a return to the old society...

...These "conspirators" began meeting secretly in spring 1989, months before Honecker's fall...

...In 1974, 800 Hungarian Ikarus buses brought home one million tons of oil but in 1986 it took 4,500...

...Combine a command economy with an undemocratic political system and you create conditions for reckless borrowing should the regime come upon hard times...

...meanings inseparable from democracy, meanings that never forget the disasters done in its name by command economies and "vanguard" parties...

...One DF chapter is suing the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for comments quoted by David Shipler in the New Yorker...

...The Soviet bloc was no home, but rather a house with locked doors and windows...

...One-party rule remade or destroyed aspects of national life in these diverse countries...

...The mid-twentieth century application came subsequent to the nationalist age, one in which cultural-territorial communities defined themselves politically...

...These 132 Kombinaten were to make planning and direction more efficient...

...Perhaps with less than 5 percent of the vote...

...Ironically, this is just what communist regimes told workers...

...Gains and losses from the process of economic transformation are already an issue in Eastern Europe...

...You know your Bible, Solomon, and you know that it is written there that on the sixth day God created man, not nationalist man...

...When I visited Budapest in January, I found DF intellectuals angrily denying Western press reports that their party harbored anti-Semitism...

...The party platform declares: "Economic efficiency must be coordinated with social justice—market competition controlled by solidarity...

...212-16...

...And the Jewish question...

...This attempt to have both planning and a market was partly thwarted by politics, that is, by party and state vested interests...

...True, unification, a new-old problem, will invert the process of a century ago...

...Among some there was an aversion to party politics— understandable given the record of what was, for so long, the only party in town...

...And here, too, is where the question of workers' organizations becomes important...

...Perhaps the apes are descended from the nationalists since they are certainly a step forward...

...Not only did the East German regime give SPRING • 1990 • 167 Germany and Hungary false public statistics, but many of its own economists didn't receive accurate information...

...They should recall a comment of Hungary's Stalinist MAtyas Rakosi at a politburo meeting: "Comrades, have we sunk so low as to be taken in by our own propaganda...

...It's a question of culture...

...in Hungary they will find nomenklatura allies...

...Virtually every SDS leader I spoke with, including its most prominent figure, author GyOrgy Konrad, urged that the issue of anti-Semitism not be exaggerated...

...Think of the past . . . ." Her words brought to mind a short story by Joseph Roth, the dual monarchy's elegiac novelist...

...In Hungary, they are among the most unpopular institutions and their leadership is still largely of the communist— and not necessarily reform—mold...

...2 See J.F...

...Even the apes never hit on an idea like that...

...A central factor shaping the new-old Central Europeans will be the interplay among these three categories...

...Tell my why I should accept your marketizing policies when they are likely to cause me much grief — inflation, possible unemployment, social dislocation...

...Anti-Semitism is a real, though not central, issue in Hungary today...

...The DF embodies the dilemmas of conservatives and nationalists in post-communist societies...

...Gorbachev would be in Berlin...

...the latter speaks of the need to direct nationalism into "proper channels...

...in Hungary, faced with economic malaise, the party-state withered away...

...True, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) has now had four decades of democratic government...

...And in the future...

...Both the GDR and Hungary have serious debt crises because their governments sought to sustain themselves through credits and loans—often provided by reckless (but, of course, never blamed) Western lenders...

...Hungary faces a difficult path ahead, especially as plans for austerity, marketization, and privatization move ahead...

...At least for now...

...168 • DISSENT Oarmanv and linnuary "This is a revolutionary period without imagination," worries sociologist Mihaly Vajda...

...hopefully the Stasi (political police) would be preoccupied...

...neo-Nazi skinheads have rioted in Leipzig...

...It was manipulating politicians who did...

...The DF prefers a more cautious process of economic liberalization, and accepts a larger state role in the future economy...

...A measured process of unification is one thing...

...Now, the reborn SPD is the child of new faces, in particular party secretary Ibrahim BOhme, a one-time SED member jailed in the 1970s for his "incorrect" behavior, and three Lutheran pastors who came together in a study group devoted to Hegel...

...Jeszenszky rejects the "populist" appellation...

...The church, in particular the Evangelical church, with eight million members out of a GDR population of sixteen million, was the only institution not under state dominance, serving as a shelter for democratic oppositionists, though often uneasy in this role...

...Sixty years ago populists were against the aristocracy, which owned most of the land...

...The premise—that there was the One (Totalitarianism) overthrown by the One (Freedom, which equals "The Free Market")— demonstrates an inability to see these countries on their own grounds...

...Even in 1956, "the Hungarian masses didn't support a multiparty system...

...Consider, though, two other comments she made in the same conversation: "Hungarianness is Central Europeanness...

...Will Chancellor Kohl, known for obtuseness about World War II, refrain from exploiting nationalist sentiments...

...You might say that relations of production became fetters on productive development...

...They were in power in the press, television, radio, but not so much in politics...

...Many East Berlin intellectuals who fought the Communist regime retain substantial leftwing idealism...

...A comedian declared on East German television: "Gregor Gysi used to be a lawyer, now he's unskilled labor...

...This populism was frequently informed by chauvinism and anti-Semitism, aimed especially at urban (meaning Budapest), Western-oriented Jewish intellectuals and the Jewish middle classes...

...As for the "goulash communism" of Kadar's Hungary, it was an attempt to buy public quiet by a politically illegitimate regime...

...Replacing it by a multiparty system was a mistake...

...170 • DISSENT...

...Of all the parties in the country, mine has the best leader, the best program, and the worst membership...

...With European integration the word of the hour, with the USSR withdrawing its troops, with Ceausescu gone, with neighboring Czechoslovakia headed by Havel and with a friendly (and rich) Austria to the west, old feelings of Hungarian isolation, which can lend themselves to a dangerous nationalism, are defused...

...in Romania, the orchestra strikes back violently at the Great Conducator, Ceausescu...

...with pluralism, the SED began to unravel...

...Noting that Hungarians now compose a quarter of Transylvania's population, he added that "The question is not where Transylvania came from...

...I suggested to Csurka that the Democratic Forum's use of a rallying cry like "Whoever is Hungarian is with us" is unwise in a country struggling to consolidate democratic pluralism: it implies that only one party legitimately represents "the nation...

...nationalism's unhappy history yields evidence supporting their apprehensions...

...Writers preoccupied with the peasantry advocated an alliance between it and themselves on the basis of a mélange of ideas—some left-wing, some extreme right-wing, some promoting a "third way" distinct from the capitalist West and communist East...

...The justification for an independent German Democratic Republic (GDR) rested on its "socialist" nature...

...What does this mean, I asked, given that Hungarian populism was born of a peasant universe now all but gone...

...The SDS advocates the most radical measures in this regard— measures likely to bring social distress that could generate a mood of nationalist and populist demagogy...

...The fate of Hungarian Communists is similar...

...in East Germany, upheaval is triggered by mass exit...

...this is a moment for inventiveness...

...Last fall the two parties took opposing sides on a national referendum concerning presidential elections, and one slogan within SPRING • 1990 • 165 Germany and Hungary DF ranks was that "whoever was Hungarian" supported them...

...Of course, the East Europeans do share commonalities—geographical and historical proximity, the legacies of Soviet dominance...

...October 7—the GDR's fortieth anniversary— was chosen as the date of the party's refounding...

...Honorable Jews also suffered from the Communists...

...Referring to its populist-nationalists, Ivan T. Berend, a Jew and former member of the Communist party's central committee, declared anti-Semitism "strong in the Democratic Forum, although they are very cautious in expressing it...

...What happens when they cannot avoid being at center stage...

...Nationalist emotions have already appeared at demonstrations in Leipzig and Dresden, with banners for a united Reich, including parts of Poland...

...Such was one factor in Honecker's "economic miracle," though the GDR's special relation with West Germany is also important...

...It just arrives...

...Hence the fears of German unification...

...The SDS's thinking appears to be dominated by a neoliberal radicalism inclined toward shock therapy for the economy in the form of rapid privatization, a quick introduction of market forces, and a fast opening for foreign investors...

...We live in a country in which our difficulties come from the opposite problem...

...The early application of this principle was in a prenationalist world, in soil cultivated for the transition from universal Christendom and feudalism to nation-states and capitalism...

...nationalist sentiments are more forceful in the south, especially Leipzig, cradle of the anti-Honecker protests, than in Berlin...

...Whereas the central planning of the first stage requires "a few thousand agents . . . now it has to predict and influence the behavior of millions or hundreds of millions of consumers...

...Let them believe in their historical necessities...

...Now that die Wande and the Berlin Wall no longer pose the same physical and psychological barriers, the real question, as novelist Stefan Heym told me, "is unification when and under what conditions, and what kind of Germany it will be...

...The DF, founded by populist writers in 1987, has emerged as one of Hungary's major parties...

...The problems of economic change color the differences among the Hungarian parties...

...Shorthly after I spoke to Csurka, he warned Hungarians on radio of the dangers posed to them by a "dwarf minority...

...Here is where a dangerous political space may open—say, for nationalist-populist demagogy...

...Once this was accomplished, and once surplus agricultural populations had been transformed into proletarians, command economies were unable to transform themselves into productive, consumer-oriented systems capable of responding to scientific and technological advances and popular needs...

...You can no longer predict the future by scientific or pseudoscientific means," the biologist Jens Reich, a founder of New Forum, the East German opposition movement, told me in Berlin at the year's end...

...in Yugoslavia economic and nationalist crises tear at the country...

...Until now, "the strength of the official unions lies in the passivity of the workers," says Lasz16 Bruszt, national secretary of the Democratic League of Independent Trade Unions (the TDDSZ), a two-year-old effort...

...their 45,000 members are mostly in the service and tertiary sectors, although the blue-collar constituency is growing, according to Bruszt...

...The New Forum declares that it didn't fight the Communist "plan dictatorship" to have it replaced by "market dictatorship...

...These same dangers can imperil a new democratic political system and undermine amiable relations among the region's nations...

...We overran the fortress and discovered that there was nothing behind it," says Andras Kereszty, a reformist editor of Nepszabadsdg (once the party daily, now a public stock company...

...196-200...

...They want to belong to particular nations...

...Competition for foreign assistance, resentments stirred by dislocations accompanying economic change, and the possibility of what Bogdan Denitch calls the "Mexicanization" of the region—its relation to the West might come to resemble that between the U.S...

...Nobody in either West Germany or East Germany was prepared for the speed at which the ancien regime fell and demands for unification intensified...

...Count Morstin fumes to a Jewish publican: This dreadful Darwin, who says men are descended from apes, seems to be right...

...The latter first presented themselves as an East German party, but now champions "unification— not reunification," in the words of Konrad Elmer, a pastor who sits on the party's executive...

...A large part of the world, alas, thinks of the Robert Ribanszkys when the word "socialism" is uttered...

...This is "a qualitative question, not a blood question...

...If the necessary measures had been taken in 1980, when the debt was much smaller, there would have been less of a problem...

...The latter provide manipulated data— drastically underestimating the firm's assets— to accountants who then "estimate" its worth...

...After 1945, the redivision of the land didn't make life better for the peasants...

...it's a matter of democracy, of allowing people to live according to their nationality...

...History tells us that economic well-being tempers German nationalism...

...For many Germans, the notion of a Central European identity implies a new weight for themselves in a reshaped continent...

...In Western Europe there is substantial social democratic strength, as demonstrated in last year's elections for the European parliament...

...The investor obtains an enterprise at a cut-rate price, and the managers are guaranteed their positions or an attractive severance...

...But, I interjected, doesn't that make Russian invaders out of your democratic opponents...

...The American media take its consumers on tours of Eastern Europe—one day Warsaw, the next Berlin, then Prague—leaving the sense that the same thing, more or less, happens in each place...

...The idea behind NEM was that you could have a market system but not complete market dominance," and this failed, says Budapest reform economist Mart& Tardos...

...To be a populist means to follow this movement and to be attached to the peasants...

...There is a consensus across most of the Hungarian political spectrum that the country's economy must be significantly deregulated and privatized, with subsidies to unprofitable enterprises reduced or cut...

...But this also led to tensions with newly constituted parties, such as Democratic Awakening— initially with an array of political views but now representing the center-right—and the Social Democrats...

...Here in Budapest it gives me the creeps...

...The New Forum's Jens Reich, on the other hand, says that "everything has been called `socialist' from the greatest dreams of mankind to the most brutal dictatorship...

...We tried to use the slogan in a positive sense, not an exclusionary one," he responded...

...But he insisted that his problem with Aczel was "because he is a Communist, not because he is a Jew...

...Today's deep foreign debt and domestic malaise derive from sources internal and external to the structures of the economies...

...A suggestive model with which to explain Eastern Europe's trauma was developed— before last year's events—by sociologist Ivan Szelenyi...

...He concludes that market socialism is dead "if it means something different from Sweden or Austria, which Hungary can't afford right now...

...He was Janos Kidar's secretary from November of that year until June 1958, that is, from the month in which Kadar betrayed the Hungarian revolution and became Hungary's chief, to the month in which its leader, Imre Nagy, was executed...

...For history has its ends, not an end, and those ends we now witness are created by changing men and women in the changing circumstances we call history...

...But then he chose to point out "a few facts" to me...

...The Hungarians were perhaps once too proud of their past," remarks historian Geza Jeszenszky, dean at Budapest's Karl Marx University of Economics and head of the foreign affairs committee of the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum (DF...

...In Hungary, 164 • DISSENT Osmium and Hungary a major source of national ferment was calmed with the overthrow of Ceausescu, the "genius of the Carpathians...

...There forty signatures were affixed to the party's founding document, which identified with "the traditions of the democratic socialism of European Socialists and Social Democrats" and called for an "ecologically-oriented market economy with democratic control of economic power...

...Jews in Erfurt have received anonymous threats ("The oven at Buchenwald is still waiting for you...

...The transition to intensive growth was accomplished by Keynesianism and the displacement of laissez-faire by the welfare state, giving birth to Western consumer society.' The GDR and Hungary pursued two different responses to this crisis of transition...

...The former encompasses the era of dynamic industrialization— the production of what Marx called constant capital, the means of production—in Eastern Europe from the late 1940s through the ensuing quarter century...

...They imagine themselves to be the composers of the dirge to which they dance...

...Who needs these small nations quarreling with one another...

...It is no longer enough for people to be divided into races, far from it...

...Imagine," exclaims Dieter Klein, vice chancellor of Humboldt University, "I as an economist didn't know our actual level of debt—$20 billion...

...She goes on: "Right now Hungarian Social Democrats must speak of social responsibility and build a people's party—of workers, intellectuals and entrepreneurs— not a class party...

...I, for one, hope that the conservatives embrace the notions, beloved of MarxistLeninists and liberal technocrats, that history and ideology end with them...

...But Honecker's days were numbered and the Social Democrats emerged publicly...

...A metamorphosis was required parallel to that which occurred in Western capitalism after its "extensive" period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ended in structural crisis—the Great Depression...

...the country intelligentsia forms its backbone, and a mixture of centrist-conservatives and nationalist-populists its leadership...

...However, in Poland the Communist party was embattled by a mass workers' movement...

...Gregor Gysi, its new chief, is a lawyer unsoiled by the Honecker era...

...She urges strong and independent trade unionism and a "socially responsible state," SPRING • 1990 • 169 Germany and Hungary rejecting "the neoliberal notion that the market can regulate everything...

...One important factor: having conceived modernization on the Stalinist model of heavy industry, Communist regimes proved incapable of adapting to the technological revolutions of the last two decades...

...Nonetheless, on that morning, as Elmer drove from his home, he found that he had company to lose—a car with three imposing gentlemen—before making his way to a village near Berlin...

...but responding to a general collapse of the GDR's econpmy —a real prospect with three thousand people emigrating daily—raises the possibility of volatile scenarios...

...A mélange of groups promoting antimilitarism, human rights, and ecology had emerged in the GDR even before New Forum's birth and the mobilizations of last autumn...

...They use the word 'cosmopolitan.' " One cause of friction is the DF's uneasy relation with its chief competitor, the Alliance of Free Democrats (or SDS, according to Hungarian initials...

...Yet when the West began to recover from its OPEC-induced tribulations, the East was suffering the full brunt of its energy crunch...

...I want rights for Hungarians abroad and to promote interaction between Hungarians inside and outside our borders...

...The FRG (West Germany) may have had forty years of political democracy to counteract this, but the GDR (East Germany) had Prusso-Stalinism...

...The SDS is Budapestanchored and many of its prominent figures are Jews...

...It is a fact, but that is no reason for anti-Semitism...

...They are supposed to get . . . the long-term fruits of privatization in a country which as yet has no serious program of unemployment relief and in which most workers have no savings...

...With elections on the horizon, West German Social Democrats moved quickly to aid them...

...It is a function of budgetary restraints...

...In any event, unification is a complex matter, both because of the economic demands it will make on West Germany and because the two Germanys are still members of different military alliances...

...These introduced significant market elements and decentralized decisionmaking, and permitted the growth of a "second" —non-state controlled—economic sector...

...The question is appropriate inasmuch as the history of nationalism in the region has very unhappy chapters...

...The new political environment brings together economic crisis and pressures from a population desirous of fast change in the belief that the national question and higher living standards are linked...

...He advocates an independent watchdog, answerable to parliament, to oversee privatization—and the machinations of the old nomenklatura...

...The International Monetary Fund might have to decide if its notions of economic efficiency have priority over the survival of new democracies...

...It'll be natural," he said...

...Here, then, a "fact:" 166 • DISSENT Germany and Hungary nationalists, particularly those of a victimized people, have a difficult time confronting the underside of their own aspirations...

...The GDR's economy did function measurably better than the other COMECON countries, but by the late 1980s it slowed down, with its official successes in part based on doctored statistics...

...There is, after all, a neat Marxist explanation of the collapse of Communist regimes in the last year: the base undid the superstructure...

...There is a danger that the legitimate struggles of workers could be hijacked by the ancien trade union regime in difficult economic times...

...In the Warsaw Pact countries, the average annual growth rate was 10 percent in the 1950s, but only 1.7 percent and .77 percent for the GDR and Hungary, respectively, in 1989...

...Yet as the Economist pointed out, unification will not "make" Germany the dominant economic power in Europe—West Germany alone is already that...

...The main problem with our entire system," argues Michael Brie, a professor at East Berlin's Humboldt University active in reform circles of the SED, "is that it worked against innovation in the economy...

...Cold warriors, confident in their rigid concepts, told us not long ago that a declining Western Europe, losing its backbone and faced with totalitarianism unchangeable from within, was being enfeebled, "Finlandized...

...he was defense attorney for leading dissidents...

...Gysi's accession was actually a coup by party intellectuals, an SED journalist, Hannes Bahrmann, told me...

...I have no a priori answer to the question of what to tell the workers in this situation...

...After speaking to Ribanszky, I recalled a comment made by the Social Democrats' Petrasovits: "I feel fine using the word `comrade' in West Berlin...

...You intellectuals may have free speech now, but I must feed my family " The answer was invariably that short-term difficulties must be suffered for the sake of long-term economic health...

...The church was the only place in which democratic procedures took place—in synods and church groups...

...It seems that the transition from laissez-faire to moderate state intervention in the West now finds a mirror image in the East, a shift from planning toward markets...

...Here, then, a contradiction of Stalinism: a regime claiming to plan everything "rationally" from top down, but unwilling to give its own economists genuine data, must nurture its own economic crises...

...Under communist regimes, trade unions were generally "transmission belts" for the policies of the ruling party...

...Hungary's strategic response to the problem of transition to intensive growth was embodied in the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) reform of 1968-74, and subsequent reforms of the late 1970s...