Ralf Dahrendorf's Revolution in Europe
Thompson, E.P. & Reflections, Ralf Dahrendorf's
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE, by Ralf Dahrendorf. Times Books, 1990. $17.95 "A very perfet gentil knight" —Sir Ralf Dahrendorf was born in the Weimar Republic, the son of a Social...
...He does not reflect much upon the sources from which the innumerable invasive social forces of this century have arisen, SUMMER • 1991 • 427 Books and are likely in the future to arise...
...It has been an exciting and trendy scene, and a lot of people have been over there, not as comrades in a common cause but as voyeurs...
...What is all this about...
...Yet he exclaims triumphantly of the German compromise: "The open society wins...
...This is very much the flavor of the European month...
...But Dahrendorf surely misunderstands what utopianism is...
...and utopianism imagines what might be as a means of criticizing what is...
...On the way from there to here he has written several somewhat heavy and prestigious books, on class and social conflict and on economics in their special bearing on constitutional questions...
...This is not beyond some correction and control in Western legislatures, and a major actor—Germany—is responsive to democratic pressure...
...What does not appear to have crossed Dahrendorf's mind is the possibility that the fearsome standoff between East and West—the most elaborate and sustained investment of advanced resources in the means of destruction known to history, a small part of whose capacity we have just witnessed in the Gulf War—was the co-responsibility of both parties...
...He has written these Reflections in the form of a letter to a friend in Poland, a letter which turns this way and that until it touches upon most aspects of polity and government in Europe subsequent to the revolutions of 1989—most things, that is, in the formerly communist states of East and Central Europe, now working their passage back to the rest of Europe...
...One can understand it in such a writer as Hans Magnus Enzensburger, who took principled issue with the small fractions of terrorism in the West German and Italian "left" in the sixties, and who is watchful of such irrationalisms reemerging...
...Dahrendorf will scowl at the last...
...West Europe can be trusted to muddle on, adopting a tactful missionary role toward the East...
...We remember that Allende offered a Third Way, or at least a different way, and he also had to be "quashed...
...It may exist "nowhere," but it is held up as a counter-project to the realities of the world in which we are living...
...His view of the political process is of a club of technocratic realists who, when not distracted by "utopians" or by the intrusion of external social forces (perhaps nationalisms) can argue out their preferences in calm committees...
...On these skimpy philosophic grounds we are discouraged from searching for radical social alternatives and turned back into the Eurotechnocrats' world of piecemeal social engineering, Eurocurrency reform, the business of Strasbourg and Brussels...
...For them compromises between systems are not only undesirable, they are categorically impossible...
...But this is the somewhat trivial objection of the outsider...
...The Marxist expects a watershed to be passed—"the Revolution" —after which laws, forms of ownership, social organization, all run in a socialist direction...
...Does it matter if one envisages one, two, three, or more ways...
...Dahrendorf sees this without qualification as a threatening faculty: We must beware of Utopia . . . Utopia is in the nature of a total society...
...It is more akin to poetry than to calculation...
...he himself studied and taught at several Western campuses, entered West German political life, and graduated to being a European commissioner in the early 1970s, thence moving to Britain, where he was appointed director of the London School of Economics, ending up as warden of St...
...Moreover, Dahrendorf carries his anti-utopian argument further, into the matter at the center of his book: the new form which might be taken by East-West relations and reconciliations...
...In 1989 some observers got vicarious excitement from going over, sitting in the Magic Theatre in Prague or claiming to be on first-name terms with Vaclay...
...His Polish friend is advised in awed terms never to move beyond these bounds...
...So that this is old cold war ideology (Only Two Camps) dressed up once again as liberalism...
...Dahrendorf's picture of the course of the revolutions in Central Europe follows closely upon the excited narrative with which Timothy Garton Ash regaled the readers of the New York Review of Books: there is the same dependence upon metropolitan journalists and intellectual circles for all information, the same lack of curiosity about the role of the students during the Prague days and about the means by which the critical adherence of the nation's workers was brought to the revolutionary cause...
...I consider that in 1989 the people of Eastern and Central Europe had by their own efforts almost opened up their own societies for their own trial and experiment and that it was Western advice and more blatant interventions that promptly closed those opportunities down...
...It is the political expression of the imaginative faculty...
...In this Dahrendorf is a characteristic Western intellectual, who supposes himself to be liberal and who in important respects is...
...Indeed, we should beware of even an "intercultural dialogue" between the systems: "the very idea needs to be quashed...
...Is a "Third Way" possible between capitalism and communism...
...Te dominant Western strategy now is the attempt to remodel the economies and polities of Eastern and Central Europe in subordinate ways convenient to Western money...
...Dahrendorf abhors system, which does not make for systematic exposition...
...The militant capitalist—the partisans of Hayek (whom Dahrendorf himself rejects)— sees almost every form of state regulation of private wealth as a systemic threat...
...For the most part Western Europe is presented as a beneficiary of the East's revolutions, not as a participant...
...No Byronic or Lincoln Brigade heroics were required...
...Later in the book, in an informative discussion of "the German social market economy," Dahrendorf appears to forget himself when he writes of it as a "hybrid" —and some of the ideas and the institutions contributing to this hybrid undoubtedly came from the European socialist tradition...
...This is scarcely an original argument...
...One might suppose that this was a case for encouraging, not for quashing, more intercultural dialogue...
...the workers of Gdansk in 1981 were not demanding private medicine or deregulated housing...
...17.95 "A very perfet gentil knight" —Sir Ralf Dahrendorf was born in the Weimar Republic, the son of a Social Democratic deputy in the Reichstag who suffered imprisonment under Hitler...
...In Europe itself we must act in more imaginative ways to give a common voice and a common heart to our continent: that means much attention to education, to investment in languages, travel, exchanges of all kinds, music...
...The project, still supported by some members of Charter 77 in the Czech government, to activate a "Helsinki" citizens' process from below, does not meet with his support...
...But Dahrendorf repeatedly gets himself into self-contradictions...
...One has heard it for some forty-five years, although rarely in 426 • DISSENT Books as civilized and well-informed a tone...
...The small underresourced contingents of "utopians," East and West—peace movements, Greens, feminists— who tried to communicate across the "system's" borders (whether physical or ideological) and to work out programs for common adoption, which sometimes looked to a different way, were swept aside by planeload after planeload of Western advisers, diplomats, bankers, academics, and voyeurs, who brought the dogmas of "the market society" and who are bringing Eastern and Central Europe, amid mists of liberal rhetoric, under a new kind of subjection...
...His Polish correspondent is concerned lest the "Revolution" and the ending of state subsidies should bring to his country declining artistic and musical standards, a growth in pornography, and so on, and he is scolded with the dogma that all must be left to the market...
...When the full meaning of the market society hits East and Central European working people, as it is beginning to do now, we will see whether their consciousness and expectations have changed in any significant ways in the past fifty years...
...Instead he sketches a few points of supreme political reference—Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, Madison's Federalist, Popper's Open Society...
...Utopia is a complete alternative, and therefore of necessity a closed society...
...Nor does he give the impression of close acquaintance with the active ("grass-roots") ingredients of democratic process: the democratic practices known to him are at a higher and more formal level: the Bundestag, the European Commission, the University Senate committee...
...If one is trying to put a broken continent together there might be other ways of encouraging, but not forcing, a culture...
...However miserable as well as mendacious the performance of communism was, it floated upon a rhetoric of security, full employment, and certain norms of free health, women's rights, education, and cheap housing...
...Anthony's College, Oxford, where he now is...
...In any case, what on earth makes Dahrendorf suppose that the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart was produced by a "market...
...One reason that the European Revolution of 1989 failed to realize its possibilities was because of the weight of admonition on all sides—but especially from the West— warning that these possibilities did not exist...
...I must make it quite plain in conclusion that he does discuss some of the more difficult questions of our time, his discussion is honest, and his book deserves to be read...
...People pride themselves today on their street wisdom and compete with each other in their disenchantment...
...I do not see them reproducing the platforms of the American Republican party or the British Conservative party...
...It was difficult to extract myself from that sentence, but Dahrendorf's life has been like that, one thing leading into another just as the pages of this meandering book do...
...In my years of intensive activity alongside East and West Europeans in the cause of peace, the warden of St...
...Hence he is only reflecting on one-half of a revolution and not on what the West could contribute to its completion...
...He is an exemplary modern European, and he has never not been a successful one...
...there were failures and loopholes everywhere, but people complained of these in terms of the regime's own rhetoric...
...Liberalism has long been sapping own energies by setting up on all sides an elaborate defensive system against enthusiasm, idealism, and—very heavily in this book —"utopianism...
...That, he says, is because it is the wrong question...
...No," is his unusually sharp answer...
...They are—we all are—well-intending spectators of the dramatic changes on the other side of the continent...
...If the "open society" (which Dahrendorf more or less equates with "market society") cannot coexist with any part of the socialist "system," then it must be itself in that respect a closed system also...
...To promote any form of social change, one must first imagine the alternatives...
...If the European "Revolution" is to be fulfilled there must he fluent citizen participation, in which Americans must take part as common participants in shared projects, not as voyeurs or as dispensers of liberal charity...
...In all of this I may have done Dahrendorf injustice...
...I am glad that he did not catch an upper-class British tone when he took British nationality, but there is something "teutonic" in his complacency and refusal of imagination that annoys me...
...It confuses the true choice, between an open and a closed society...
...But Dahrendorf has almost nothing to say about these distorting forces...
...The result gives rise to complacency, a selfcongratulatory tone...
...Hence he has scarcely a line of speculation as to what the consequences might be of one party's withdrawing from an adversary posture (which is in effect a large part of what the revolution was about) and what might be the opportunities for response on the part of the other party...
...I remain unconvinced by Dahrendorf 's forecast (which is essentially of a Westernizing of the East, as it becomes a market society, with no reciprocal process) because the people of the East have not been brought fully into the discourse yet...
...I have been dimly aware of a more august circuit of conferences, in schlosses, gorgeous villas, and institutes, sponsored by NATO or national governments, where no doubt he has been an esteemed performer...
...On occasion West Europeans have had to cope with emergencies of external origin, such as hordes of refugees flooding into their territories or walls suddenly being pulled down, but these have not been of the West's making...
...Must a victory for one way be a defeat for the other...
...Anthony's College has never fallen in my way...
...It is wrong because it is another version of system thinking, and thinking in terms of systems lies at the bottom of illiberalism in all its varieties...
...Utopianism is not a form of politics, a political program...
...As we can see, to cold warriors of both sides it matters a great deal...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
