Hopes and troubles in Prague
Kohák, Erazim
Prague is lovely in springtime when a cloudburst clears the air and sun lights up the bright green slopes above the river and the pastel facades of the Old Town. The narrow streets fill with...
...not at home, where he faces problems and discontent...
...The "liberals" for their part embrace ecology about as enthusiastically as Ed Meese once did...
...There is a rumor that the drugstore next to 131la labut has brooms, but that is an hour away by bus and streetcar, at four crowns a ride, and by then the stores will be either closed or out of milk or bread...
...Unfortunately, there are also people far more interested in exploiting grievances than in redressing them...
...We have thoroughly eliminated all visible marks of the enforced enthusiasm: the red stars, the slogans, the statues of Lenin, the street names...
...The Leninist perception of politics as warfare powerfully reinforced that perception...
...Their talk now is of the "historic triumph of liberalism," a local code name for the Gospel According to Reagan and Thatcher...
...Our forests are dying, our rivers contaminated...
...In a third-world economy, foreign capital, if left to its own devices, does not invigorate the economy but superimposes a self-contained affluent economy upon it...
...It is the right that is buoyed by a sense of riding the crest of History — aanndd the left suspects that it may be so...
...As the tradition of rule here tends to be authoritarian, so the opposition tends to be "revolutionary," standing aside or obstructing the work of governing and waiting for the government to fail so that it can take its turn at ruling...
...Adam Smith's invisible hand is not likely to provide the needed vision...
...It requires a separate analysis...
...We have yet to rediscover what Masaryk taught: the possibility of an agreement to differ in mutual respect...
...Whatever the strains of the present situation, except among the former party activists, there is a deep-rooted, bitter determination: never again...
...Barely eighteen months after the all-powerful State withered away, the longdepressed, threadbare city has come vibrantly alive...
...Soviet communism devastated the region economically, ecologically and socially...
...Theirs is an affluence of a wholly different magnitude...
...Socialism—a term that includes rather indiscriminately F.D.R.'s progressive taxation, Stalin's collectivization, and Mitterrand's economic planning—has been surpassed, once and for all...
...Yet were he to present his vision of a humane, democratic Czechoslovakia actively to the people, as he did in the election campaign a year ago, he could go far toward changing the situation...
...In the winter, Prague lives in toxic smog...
...Since we now have democracy, it is not currently punishable by law, but it still feels somehow disloyal to disagree...
...The West has come to Central Europe...
...For Central Europe, restitution, privatization, and an opening to Western capital are essential...
...As a whole, Central Europeans tend to leave valuation and choice to History, unconsciously assuming that the latest is thereby also the best, "vindicated by History...
...Yet memories remain of the arrogant ideological incompetence, of the petty tyranny of Communist party ward heelers, of the endless frustration...
...Even F.D.R.-style New Dealism appears as the road to serfdom: Hayek is an unchallenged best-seller...
...The crumbling of the Soviet empire appears as nothing less than the Verdict of History, vindicating the Great Liberator, Ronald Reagan, and all his policies as History's choice...
...yet fewer than 10 percent of Czechs and Slovaks live there...
...Central Europe had to open itself to the first world...
...There is much initiative...
...For the most part, it produced a celebration of ethnicityatlarge, everyone becoming Irish on St...
...It is the Gilded Age...
...A clanging streetcar ride away, a worn, aging woman, a heavy shopping bag in each hand, trudges from store to store in a vain search for a household broom...
...It is damnably difficult to break free of such perceptions...
...While Czechoslovakia contributed mightily to the Slovak resurgence in our century, the Czechs have been overbearing and insensitive partners...
...Though our current laws guarantee a right to dissent, our instincts remain binary...
...It is simply the third-world effect...
...Restitution and privatization are working wonders...
...The opposition in Czechoslovakia, such as it is, has also to contend with a third aspect of the Marxist-Leninist heritage, the overtly rejected yet ingrained suspicion that dissent is really treason...
...Yet without systematic support, such individual efforts, however laudable, can be no more than Band-Aids on a cancer patient...
...It seems safer to let History have her way—and that does not make for an effective opposition...
...The effect is rather different when the discovery of diversity fuses with a perception of diversity as a threat...
...All the traditional arguments for restraint upon the robber barons, appealing to the ideas of social justice, fall upon deaf ears...
...The resurgence of Slovak nationalism, to be sure, is a far more complex phenomenon than a simple fusion of ethnic awareness with the Leninist conception of diversity as warfare...
...After the fiasco of the planned economy, most Czechs are prepared to give free rein to the Market...
...President Havel, a man of noble spirit and still the country's greatest asset, spends much of his time abroad, where he can expect applause and admiration...
...Yet we are ready to heed the cry of the land, the beloved land...
...With a weekly food budget of perhaps four hundred crowns she cannot afford the lovely Dutch tomatoes at fifty-two crowns a kilo or a pound of Italian spaghetti for twenty-eight crowns...
...The new Czechoslovakian government, run largely by former dissidents turned young upwardly mobile professionals, shows little inclination to do so...
...The minority's choice, just by virtue of being chosen by a minority, appears suspect, as "set aside by History...
...But the pressure is no less absent from further below...
...It is the one call that can save Central Europe from slipping into the Third World in its mindless imitation of the First World...
...In social policy, it is disastrous...
...Of late, after having been roughed up by Slovak skinheads on a visit to Bratislava, he has been more of a presence abroad than at home...
...Yet our discourse suggests that few of us conceive of the 456 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad future as a field of options calling for a range of complex valuations and choices...
...We may be fascinated with the affluence of the West and awed by invocations of the Verdict of History, but are we willing to sacrifice our land...
...The left and the right alike have long concurred that humankind's goal is ever-increasing individual consumption, differing only as to the best means for achieving it...
...But a night at the Hotel Intercontinental, inhabited by German industrialists and American evangelists, comes to 7,500 crowns...
...Another straw of hope—more than a straw —is the flowering of life away from the world of the mass media...
...This grotesque yet deep-rooted conviction, impervious to all evidence, is another aspect of our communist heritage...
...For the most part, their dissident connections have enabled them to latch on, at least minimally, to the new world of Western-financed affluence...
...The elegant new stores offer a wide selection of crystal, jewelry, furs, and the latest computer technology to no less elegant young, upwardly mobile professionals who think nothing of spending 82,000 crowns for the latest status symbol, a laptop computer...
...To question it is certainly folly, perhaps knavery...
...In several northern cities, children can go out only wearing respirators...
...In Czechoslovakia, this is one of those times...
...As for anything that is no longer fashionable, be it Kantian ethics or rail transport, our discourse tends to describe it as "surpassed by History...
...The trouble is that things don't just happen...
...However, it will take a conscious effort if that opening is not to produce the third-world effect...
...America's burgeoning indebtedness and the savings and loan crisis become evidence that the Great Liberator spared no expense to restore our freedom...
...The effect is visible in the aesthetics of our daily life...
...After years of suspended animation, the vast majority of Czechs simply want to get on with the business of living...
...There are no brooms...
...The massive influx of Western capital encouraged by the slanted exchange rate—tourist dollars, investments, loans—is not revitalizing the domestic economy any more than it did in Guatemala or the Dominican Republic...
...As the domestic economy comes under greater strain with the collapse of the traditional Soviet market for Czechoslovak exports, there is a growing sense of disillusion, discontent, and distress...
...However little we may like it, we are not willing to question the policy lest we revert to what we have just survived...
...The counterpart of those peculiar locutions is a tendency not to choose but to inquire what History has chosen—what is "advanced," "progressive," or just plain "modern" —and to strive mightily to keep up with History, forswearing what it has surpassed, eschewing what it set aside, embracing what it has vindicated...
...A distinctive feature of that culture is a deeply ingrained historical determinism...
...When a society turns over the management of its affairs to Adam Smith's invisible hand, it is entrusting itself not to an abstractly rational pursuit of private weal but to the blind working of the attitudes, habits, and thought patterns ingrained in its political culture...
...It presents us with a higher need: the need to restrain our greed so we may go on living with a clean conscience in a peaceful land, a living, healthy land at peace...
...It may not resolve them, but it vents the unease, offers a scapegoat, and so is perceived as legitimate...
...Today that talk is all but forgotten...
...Since the communists remain the major force on the Czechoslovak left, most democratic leftists are content to have it be so...
...The person in the street may grumble, and with reason, but he or she is not willing to risk a reversion to the old regime...
...We may speak of crises, but there is joy in just living day by day...
...The one issue capable of challenging the Verdict of History may well prove to be ecology...
...Soviet propaganda failed to capture the heart of Central Europe, but it succeeded in shaping its perceptions...
...We seldom speak of them, even to each other...
...The crucial question for Czechoslovakia today is whether its people can overcome the conviction that History, not humans, is the arbiter of right and wrong...
...Among the intellectuals, that is not surprising...
...Yet the issue will not go away...
...It takes an activist government, vigorously pursuing a course between Reaganism and Bolshevism, to prevent the third-world effect...
...The discontent, though, has not taken the form of pressure for an active government role...
...It can be done, as the example of Costa Rica demonstrates...
...The hallmark of the third world is private affluence amid public squalor...
...Slowly, the message is sinking in: the 458 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad devastation of the environment is the obverse of the affluence we admire...
...The parallel between Quebec and Slovakia is striking...
...An electoral victory tends to appear not as the voters' choice—which may be wrong and might be reversed—but as the Verdict of History, which it would be reactionary, if not downright immoral, to question...
...If they can, they might yet find their way...
...The grounds for hope need to be structural also, and, as a recent visitor, the American philosopher Richard Rorty, aptly observed, they are likely to be ironic...
...They are simply too recent...
...For forty-two years we have lived "planned" lives...
...Yet is was the Soviet and our own communist propaganda that for years presented the cold war as the epochal confrontation of two definitive and incompatible contenders for the future...
...Nothing less than the first way will do...
...We tend not to ask what is good, what is true, what is just, only what is the latest...
...Some of those grievances are imaginary, many are all too real...
...History has condemned any attempt to interfere with the free play of the market...
...In the declining years of the old regime, dissident intellectuals, then working as stokers and window washers, earnestly debated the virtues of a "third way," a vaguely visualized strategy for the postcommunist future that would break out of the stifling shabbiness of ideological totality without succumbing to the one-dimensional consumerism of the West...
...Defeated, she searches the shelves of a self-service grocery...
...Public opinion polls have noted a marked shift of popular opinion from the center to the right...
...The elegant young, upwardly mobile professionals who FALL • 1991 • 455 Reports from Abroad buy laptop computers and drive Western cars are not the apex of the domestic economy...
...European opposition parties have seldom regarded themselves as Anglo-Saxon style loyal opposition, dialectical partners of the ruling party, sharing with it the responsibility for the common good...
...Those cost four to six times as much as their domestic equivalents...
...Vaclav Havel once said that there are times when it is necessary to do what is good without calculating the odds...
...It is ironic...
...and the conviction that dissent from History is treason...
...There is something of a paralysis of frustration in the air, but there is one great compensation: the daily miracle of life without fear...
...The erstwhile dissidents, now occupying high offices, have been thoroughly coopted by affluence...
...Nationalist rhetoric has invoked the wartime Slovak state, which prided itself on having more stringent anti-Semitic laws than Nazi Germany, its sponsor and ally...
...The governments and the parliaments of the two constituent republics—Czech and Slovak—devote the bulk of their energies to petty ethnic squabbles, to mutual accusations of past misdeeds, and to countercultural happenings like the recent desecration of a monument to Soviet military casualties of the Second World War...
...Pressing problems go unsolved while all energy focuses on redressing perceived slights to national pride...
...We understand identity of views as friendship, disagreement as hostility...
...Ironically, in our new freedom we tend to make an anonymous History as much of an arbiter as the Communist party ever dreamed of being...
...Totalitarian regimes do not foster moral maturity, and the new Czech and Slovak leadership—with a few honorable exceptions like President Havel or the federal EPA director Vavrouek—shows little enough of it...
...Yet for all its complexity it illustrates the crucial point: when divergence comes to be perceived as warfare, solutions become impossible...
...That again is a perception that affects the rulers and the dissenters alike...
...Then ethnic awareness easily turns from celebration to a deeply destructive nationalism...
...q FALL • 1991 • 459...
...The conspicuous lack of initiative from above is matched by a lack of pressure from below...
...Now it seems safer just to let things happen and call it "market economy...
...The environmental devastation wrought by mindless expansion is obvious...
...Under anonymous state ownership, Prague had been like an unwanted child...
...Not at all...
...nor is social democracy, smeared with the red brush...
...The investment climate is excellent...
...In the Czech popular consciousness—less so in the Slovak—History's most memorable and authoritative pronouncement has been what is described as "The Historic Triumph of Liberalism over Socialism...
...When a former "second world" country abandons the search for a third way, the impact of the First World has the effect of nudging it into the Third World...
...Superficially, the results are impressive...
...His critics have been set aside...
...Last week it was vinegar...
...That is a powerful argument...
...Vaclav Havel is a man of moral vision, still widely respected—though in Slovakia his popularity has sunk inversely to the rise of nationalism...
...The narrow streets fill with folk...
...The old houses, the streets, and the stores, unowned and unloved, grew ever more shabby, the shelves ever more dusty, the uncaring clerks ever more surly...
...FALL • 1991 • 457 Reports from Abroad Nowhere is this lack of tolerance for diversity more evident than in the militant nationalism now paralyzing major portions of the former Soviet empire...
...Patrick's Day and Italian on Columbus Day...
...Unsavory though it may be, the nationalist rhetoric is perceived by most Slovaks as articulating legitimate grievances and discontent...
...In Central Europe, the rediscovery of our rich and diverse cultural heritage as Moravians or as Slovaks or as south Bohemians could be enriching after years of drab uniformity...
...It is simply creating a new affluent economy, financed from the West and superimposed on a domestic economy without affecting it significantly...
...For her, the store that sells 82,000-crown computers belongs to a world as distant as the America whose extended part it in fact is...
...The gaps have been filled with luxury imported items—fine Italian pasta and German detergents in bright boxes...
...Liberalism—understood as vintage Reaganomics with a dash of Thatcher— has been vindicated...
...In great part, it has been financed by the Canada-based Slovak World Congress headed by prominent former officers of the Slovak version of Hitler's SS, the Hlinka Guards...
...The political culture of the post-communist Central Europe is quite different— and rather less favorable...
...Nor do local politicians show any more inclination to deal with basic problems...
...there is music in the air...
...Carter's human rights initiative and grain embargo go unnoted...
...Others, new owners who purchased orphaned properties at privatization auctions, are transforming them with capital from abroad...
...For years, the left—communist and democratic alike—had insisted that it is not only public opinion but History itself that was going its way, until even the right began to believe it...
...Are the computer stores the new Potemkin villages, much as the model collective farms had been under the old regime...
...Under the law of restitution, the long-ago owners are reclaiming the stores they once cherished, lovingly restoring the old façades, as if to make up to them for years of abuse and neglect...
...That is a self-contained world where prices are quoted in dollars and D-marks, financed by foreign capital—and largely absorbing the influx...
...There is the whole scale of slights and grievances typical of a smaller group's self-perception...
...Environmental damage may seem an unlikely issue for the left, traditionally responsive to bread-and-butter issues...
...The phenomenon of Slovak nationalism is as distressing to thoughtful Slovaks as German nationalism has been to cultured Germans...
...In Margaret Thatcher's Britain, that culture included a tradition of democracy, a sense of fair play, and a respect for diversity...
...Are we willing to sacrifice it...
...Programs are considered not on merit but on historical correctness...
...It is freedom springing up...
...The West has come to Central Europe...
...What we are facing is a variation upon that theme: selective human affluence amid natural squalor...
...Given that perception of the cold war, it is not surprising that to most Czechs the crumbling of Soviet power did appear as the Verdict of History, vindicating Ronald Reagan's brand of "liberalism" against all critics...
...Here facts are irrelevant...
...Its centerpiece would be a progressive income tax, designed to siphon off excess profits and to reinvest them at the base of the domestic economy in the form of infrastructural and social programs instead of waiting in vain for the new affluence to trickle down...
...Ecology challenges that goal...
...It is a phenomenon all too familiar from the Third World...
...We love our land intensely...
...Many Americans, prone to underestimating the power of their example and to overestimating the effect of their preaching, tend to blame the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe...
...The community of ethnic kin, sharing memories, attitudes, and language, serves as an instant in-group, reassuring amid fragmenting certainties...
...Now the shoe is on the other foot...
...Consciously, we have rejected Marxism and all its works...
...In the past year, prices have doubled and the selection of domestic goods has grown thinner...
...In a time of transformation, an intensification of ethnic awareness is quite expectable and can have a positive effect...
...the conviction that History has vindicated Reagan's and Thatcher's "liberalism...
...It is too early to tell whether any political force will prove capable of using ecology as an effective call to save us from sliding into the Third World...
...A very affluent Czech might earn as much as ten thousand crowns a month, thrice the national average...
...It is more painful in philosophy...
...For the first time in generations, it questions the assumption that insatiable greed is the highest human need...
...It is not affluence trickling down...
...It is the bandwagon effect with a theoretical justification...
...When prominent visitors, above suspicion of communist leanings and so free to speak, such as John Paul II, recall it, they provoke an awkward silence...
...If not, they are more likely to slide into a third-world status with a privileged stratum appropriating and reexporting Western capital while their faltering economy sputters on and they themselves work off their discontent in ethnic conflicts...
...America went through such a period of ethnic resurgence after the Vietnam War...
...Nor need the effort be much more radical than F.D.R.'s New Deal...
...Demagogues have a field day...
...Prague is a city obsessed with fashion and devoid of taste...
...We would not want to risk having the communists return to power...
...The official line is that ecology must wait until we can afford it, after we have built more factories and encouraged more pollution...
...Even its communist rulers acknowledged as much when, two years ago, they literally ran away from power...
...The operative factors are memories...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
