Politics in Central and Eastern Europe
Cohen, Mitchell
Hopes on the left, that social democracy might become the alternative to collapsing communism and rising market fundamentalism in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, have proven to be...
...If Social Democrats are a real presence on the Czech scene, in Slovakia theirs is "a difficult life," as Spejl puts it...
...Still, this doesn't lessen the irony: the alternative to "experiments" was deemed to be radical marketization imposed from top down—command spontaneity, as one 18 • DISSENT commentator calls it...
...The anxiety of freedom...
...Depriving them of subsidies would have incurred heavy social costs...
...By 1994 popular attitudes hadn't changed much, but perceptions of parties had...
...Whereas Czech Social Democrats established a parliamentary base through the Civic Forum, the Slovaks ran independently of Public Against Violence, Civic Forum's counterpart in their part of the country...
...The Poland that has emerged doesn't find nationalism too useful," observes Konstanty Gebert of the foreign desk of Gazeta Wyborcza...
...The Czech Exception What happened to traditional social democrats...
...There has been some economic reform but it has been slow and, especially outside the capital, life is difficult...
...In 1991-92, as Yugoslavia fractured, so too did the relative calm of Hungarians there, especially in the Serbian province of Vojvodina (where Hungarians are about 18 percent of the population) and in Croatia...
...The consequence of this "social contract," comments Gyula Kodolanyi, was that "before 1989, Hungary was a fragmented, atomized society, in which any small or larger community coherence or sense of belonging was undermined...
...This was the principal explanation of Gyula Kodolanyi , an urbane, soft-spoken poet who was one of Antall's advisers...
...Such worries were reinforced by MDF rhetoric in Budapest and qualifications in Hungarian statements about borders...
...Yet radical change—dismantling communism is nothing less—always needs expansive horizons, and as a Hungarian philosopher ruefully remarked to me in 1990, these were "revolutions without imagination...
...He became a champion of shock therapy as labor minister— and still insists on its necessity—but now questions "the elitist method" of transformation...
...In unsettled times, especially during economic upheavals, nationalism, often its virulent strains, flourishes...
...In these circumstances, Social Democrats haven't been very successful in formulating an alternative vision: mostly, they argue for less monetarism, for more investment in infrastructure, environment, and education, and for fashioning agricultural cooperatives out of the old regime's collective farms...
...Polish nationalism doesn't seem to move from passive to active today...
...The right says: we must first have a sound economy and then move forward...
...A mass movement re-emerged in 1989, but this Solidarity, which finally displaced the old regime, was not the same social movement that existed before martial law, and was much more politically heterogeneous...
...In an important gesture, Bucharest supported the embargo against Serbia, a traditional friend and trading partner...
...Discord covers terrain familiar to ethnic conflicts: historical counter-claims, struggles over language rights, disputes over control of education, and local administration...
...Solidarity splintered...
...The original Solidarity rested on a remarkable alliance between intellectuals and a democratic workers' movement...
...A Republic for Everyone...
...The DAHR doesn't just want schooling in the Hungarian language for Hungarians, it wants a separate educational system, from kindergarten through university...
...However, if restoring national identity and reoccupying one's own history is a type of nationalism, that's not bad...
...In short, socioeconomic matters were foremost in the citizenry's mind...
...His chosen means was "archeology...
...The left, in government, can't help them much...
...Post Office, in good social democratic fashion, is the cheapest distributor of magazines, we make money on subscriptions...
...Codita, for instance, though acknowledging that "there is no such thing as a nation-state in today's world" and accepting, in principle, some form of cultural autonomy for Hungarians, was adamant: Romania must be a "unitary state...
...Meciar is a post-communist Peron," a Slovak citizen with social democratic sympathies told me in Bratislava not long before the vote...
...Some people call me a nationalist but I don't...
...Yet fostering democratic political culture and material progress will, at best, entail slow, knotty processes because the region's economic woes are grave...
...In the end there is no alternative to the liberal program because there is no money...
...Today, except in the Czech Republic, social democracy barely exists as an independent force in the ex-communist lands...
...Hungary proper has 10.2 million citizens yet Antall declared himself "spiritual prime minister of fifteen million Hungarians," encompassing Hungarians across the borders...
...Across the border, in Poland, the postcommunists returned to power with a startling election victory in fall 1993...
...Unable to repair itself, it left void any political space social democrats might have filled...
...In any event, Havel seems preoccupied with being philosopher-president...
...But the Czech premier is clever...
...Today, the political space open to Prague's "postcommunists" has limits, although they won 13 percent of the vote in 1992...
...We don't equate the concepts of state and nation," says Bela Marko, the articulate parliamentary leader of the DAHR...
...In 1989, notes Szomolanyi, "the Slovak population was fairly satisfied with its living standards, but there was dissatisfaction over the split between public and private...
...Specific decisions were also ruinous...
...Such measures, Romanians fret, could be a prelude to demands for border changes...
...After presenting a curious potpourri of "antianthropomorphic" sentiments with New Age echoes, he concluded that the "task of the final years of this century . . . is the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various peoples, races and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization...
...The privatization process is to be completed this winter...
...In that same magazine, in September, Klaus preached to West Europeans: your economies are ailing because the "Thatcherite Revolution" against the welfare state "stopped at best half-way...
...Hedging on borders ended in Budapest when Horn became premier...
...Whether because they were unprepared for their return to power or because in the past they always had an outside authority for economic doctrine, they have little new to say, much less an independent program, and govern, more or less, in a makeshift mode, mostly carrying on what the other post-1989 governments began...
...On the other hand, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz, according to its Hungarian initials), the liberal oppositionists who were soon to be the MDF's electoral rivals, was unyielding in its refusal to sit in a cabinet with Communists, reform or otherwise...
...Also, the MDF engulfed itself in symbolic but destructive struggles, none addressing the matter of sausage...
...Although the SzDSz has a social democratic component, it tends to be dominated by its liberals and has opted for membership in the Liberal International, whereas the SP has turned to the Socialist International...
...And tell your friends about this major financial/technological innovation at DISSENT...
...The SzDSz, though moderating the shrillness that attended its earlier campaign, was still perceived by many as too ideological, and FIDESZ, which ran with considerable success in 1990 as a radical liberal youth movement, had devolved into a party of intellectually smug, neoconservative Yuppies...
...3 My presentation of Kuron's ideas mixes quotes from his pamphlet with elaborations he made to me in an interview on August 9, 1994 in Warsaw...
...Substantial numbers of Hungarians became citizens of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania...
...Five years ago we heard from many ex-dissidents that, whatever alternatives had been championed in the struggle against communism, everyone now believed that the options were, so to speak, Stalin or Hayek...
...However, Common Choice's modest showing at the polls in September led some SDL figures, who are less social-democratized, to press for participation in a new Meciar government...
...After the Velvet Divorce, Slovak Social Democrats were without MPs because the federal Parliament was dissolved and they had no seats in the lower chamber that became the basis of Slovakia's Parliament...
...Civil society would be mobilized by fostering new social actors and movements, especially reinvigorated labor unions...
...In the aftermath of 1989, Social Democrats worked within Civic Forum, the broad protest movement that ousted the communists...
...Still, Slovaks might have eventually assimilated had not Czechoslovakia been formed after World War I. Now, newly sovereign Slovakia needs to establish its own authority, and this raises questions for the country's large Hungarian minority, 600,000 in a population of 5,270,000...
...One reason for the popularity of the "Social Democrats" is the social distress caused by "shock therapy...
...Its principal component, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), was led, until his death in 1993, by historian Jozsef Antall, a highly respected figure, though not an especially effective premier...
...This will to imitate is also understandable, for it rested on a will to Western economic prosperity...
...Still, nationalism is so strong that Colin Anastasiu, a thoughtful Liberal parliamentarian, remarks, "No politician in Romania today can afford to be non-nationalist...
...Indeed, they became revolutions of imitation...
...MDF ire was directed also at the foreign press for its coverage of the protracted struggle within the MDF over Istvan Csurka, a party vice president renowned for inflammatory, radical nationalism and anti-Semitism...
...The least one can say is that the two communities don't speak the same language...
...The state is not a matter of individuals alone but also of communities—ethnic, religious, regional...
...Hungarian desires for political in addition to cultural autonomy stimulate Romanian anxieties...
...For Meciar, it seems, principle is a means to opportunity...
...the party collapsed at the polls in the spring of 1990...
...The right, in government, couldn't cut off the poor and pensioners...
...In its pre-1989 incarnation, the MDF was a nationalist and populist opposition group with ties to reformers in the Communist party, and was willing to join them in a coalition government...
...The restoration of the ex-communists today," Adam Michnik told me in his office at Gazeta Wyborcza, the daily he edits, "is like all restorations—empty and cynical...
...The ruling MDF was perceived to have skewed—that is, ideological—priorities and to be economically ineffective...
...Last summer his preoccupation was the removal from the town center of a statue of King Matthias Corvinus, a medieval Hungarian monarch...
...Kuron was a leader of the Solidarity left before 1989, but famously concluded that social democracy was meaningless until Poland had full-blown capitalism...
...But political classifications are a tricky matter in the postcommunist world...
...The largest increase has been in bookstore and newsstand sales...
...The SP, in part, filled the space...
...Might not Romanians object that extensive autonomy will lead to separatism...
...It called for calibrated economic change guided by a social contract between the regime and a mobilized and organized citizenry...
...One writer, in the Prague Post, called this an "attempt to create as ethnically pure a state as possible...
...True, there are some three hundred thouPut DISSENT on Your Credit Card...
...In a time of economic hardship Polish citizens are too preoccupied with paying for daily groceries to respond to exhortations for sacrifice so that this—or another—Polish diaspora could be repatriated...
...Party leaders fixated on the notion that their political woes were due to the media...
...The distrust is unmistakable, and becomes intense when one raises the question of the Hungarian minority...
...Still, it would be difficult to dispute Anne-Marie Biro's protest that "Most Romanians have trouble with the notion of difference within the country...
...The elitists lack an adequate sense of social needs and imagine that the state can reject all its past functions...
...Webs of Suspicions In Romania, the party of President Ion Iliescu is dependent for its parliamentary majority on the National Unity Party of Gheorge Funar...
...There simply isn't a common understanding of the same problems," complains Anne-Marie Biro, the international affairs secretary of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), which has twenty-nine deputies and twelve senators in Romania's legislature...
...Running independently, Csurka's party was repudiated entirely by Hungarians...
...Although Slovak nationalism is underdeveloped," remarks Milan Simecka, a Bratislava intellectual, "it is as brutal and arrogant as nationalism elsewhere...
...increasing "the influence of religion and the Churches" was the eighteenth, and last, preference...
...What's just includes the right to a job, shelter, health care, education, culture, and social insurance...
...The problem, in this century, begins with the Treaty of Trianon in 1920...
...4) decreasing unemployment...
...No alternative" also seems to be the mindset of the ruling ex-communists...
...Yet if Poles lean left on social matters, they are also allergic to anything that sounds ideological...
...621-40...
...Unfortunately, this redefinition occurs in propitious conditions for figures like Meciar: economic hardship in a political culture unpracticed in democratic norms...
...Last summer, the press devoted much attention to the sixty WINTER • 1995 • 23 Politics Abroad thousand Poles in Khazakhstan, but this aroused little public response...
...He could not explain why, if this were the case, the DAHR received 80 percent of the vote of the Hungarian minority in the last elections...
...Klaus is, moreover, able to pursue his goals unhindered by ethnic tensions...
...A survey in 1993 virtually predicted the election results...
...his speeches are flush with market fundamentalism while his policies are more flexible...
...In Eastern Europe, in this century alone, the same regions have belonged to several countries at different times...
...And this passion was perceived as bellicosity by Hungary's neighbors...
...Details are in Magyarorszag Politikai Evkonyve (Political Year Book of Hungary), (Budapest, 1993), pp...
...When I asked Marko to address this, he affirmed that "we accept Romania as a sovereign state," but he would only declare the border issue "nonfunctional" since most Hungarians live in central Transylvania, away from frontiers...
...As premier, Meciar specialized in exploiting disaffection with Prague and in encouraging prejudice against the country's Hungarian minority...
...Slovakia was once northern Hungary, and Slovak identity began to crystallize especially in the later nineteenth century, largely in reaction to efforts to "Magyarize" the region...
...Simply put, there is a danger that the majority can WINTER • 1995 • 27 Politics Abroad exclude a minority and become a majority dictatorship...
...that is surely one reason why they now find WINTER • 1995 • 25 Politics Abroad themselves in a coalition...
...If masses of immigrants from this heavily Russified community streamed into Poland, major social problems would ensue...
...And that it will undermine efforts to fashion democratic civic solidarity in a country where democratic political culture, to the extent that it exists, is fragile...
...Those unions that still call themselves "Solidarity" bear little resemblance to the original and tend to be right-wing with nationalist and/or clerical orientations...
...All this abetted Meciar's agitations against the fragile coalition that displaced him...
...3) easing the burdens of economic transition...
...How does the MDF understand its defeat...
...As a consequence, while post-1968 Czech Communists were ideological fundamentalists, in Bratislava perestroika-oriented party members helped form the SDL when the old regime fell...
...removing ex-CP members from leading functions was sixteenth...
...The DAHR proposes cultural and administrative autonomy for Hungarians, and education is a principal concern...
...The failure to recognize this damaged right-wing and nationalist parties in the last elections...
...Naturally there is more coverage of major events in Budapest...
...it lost all its seats...
...What confines communists opens possibilities for Social Democrats, who obtained about 7 percent of the vote in those elections...
...Uncertainties Ethnic strife, often ferocious, long preceded communism in Eastern and Central Europe...
...The results were portentous...
...Their ability to temper, if it is impossible to resolve, nationalist conflicts will be an essential gauge of the region's future...
...Vladimir Zhirinovsky's neo-Fascists have named themselves Russia's "Liberal Democrats...
...Gypsies would have found this interesting...
...In the 1993 campaign, the Christian National Union, with backing from many clergymen, tried to make an issue of the status of Poles in neighboring lands (Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, Belarus...
...Nationalism provides markers, chimerical or real, for apprehensive populations...
...One hopes that specters of Bosnia stalk politicians in Eastern and Central Europe when they address ethnic issues...
...One is baffled to hear him praise the International Monetary Fund for following his method of change...
...he failed to win a single seat...
...In practice, this means that administration is highly centralized (the model is the old French system), with local power, including elected municipal governments, overseen by appointees of the interior ministry...
...This was a little too reminiscent of the old regime, and raised the unpopular prospect that the mass media might become as it was in the bad old days—ideological and dull...
...Words, and nothing more," he responded...
...This is probably why Kuron insisted to me that his proposals were "practical, not axiological...
...There appears to be an aversion to aggressive political language...
...Where there are national minorities, the concept of majoritarian democracy has limits and must be complemented by a principle of subsidiarity...
...A Post-Communist Peron...
...Yet caricature it would be, for behind an abrasive exterior is someone articulating ideas that could fuel a vigorous debate over the first principles of postcommunist change...
...In the past, Slovakia was ruled either from Prague or, earlier, from Budapest...
...At the same time, he notes Romanian "dismay and disbelief at the international community's inability to deal with [Yugoslavia]—a sense that the international community can't deal with crises and you must be able to help yourself...
...His own party, he did not note, benefited from the same rules in 1990...
...It's useful to begin in the one place where they have had some success, the Czech Republic...
...4 "The MDF wanted to speak about 'Hungarianness, "Hungarian values,' and imperiled Hungarians across the borders," philosopher Mihaly Vajda remarks, "but Hungarian citizens wanted to talk about sausage on their plates...
...The Hungarians advance proposals for extensive cultural autonomy (so extensive that they unsettle sympathetic Slovak liberals...
...Themes favored by MDF were on the bottom of the inventory: strengthening "national feeling" was fourteenth...
...Poles harbor an intense sense of national identity, something tied closely to religion for them, but they aren't much excited by typical nationalist concerns like borders...
...I do not believe that the [Hungarian] minorities stand to gain more rights from an increase in tension with these countries," Gyula Horn declared, adding that he was premier of the population of Hungary alone...
...The left says: we must have a sound economy but must care for the disadvantaged—a consideration absent from right-wing language...
...The week of the new citizenship law in Prague, he was orating at Independence Hall, where he received the Philadelphia Liberty Medal...
...The SP and the SzDSz, whatever their differences, accepted modernity...
...More time is not needed to identify the worst postcommunist scenario, Yugoslavia, and to recognize that this catastrophe was due, in part, to the mistaken confidence of Tito's elite that ethnic animosities could be dissolved without nurturing democratic political culture...
...they 28 • DISSENT Politics Abroad have not yet faced the limits on how much sausage they can put on the national plate...
...2 The comments by Szomolanyi are from her Eastern Central Europe 2000: Transformations of Slovak Society, a report commissioned by the European Union, and from a conversation I had with her in Bratislava in July 1994...
...Reprinted by permission from the Prague Post...
...Though they ousted their pre-1989 leaders, they are unreformed and carry a heavy historical burden: the liquidation of "socialism with a human face...
...Meciar, an ex-boxer, excommunist turned nationalist-populist demagogue, had been ousted from the premiership just the previous spring by a coalition of parties that, led by Jozef Muravcik, his former foreign minister, were fearful of this bully's authoritarian ways...
...A type of "economic correctness" had arisen, partly as an understandable reaction to the bastardized utopianism born of communist experiments...
...2 Those reforms that have been implemented WINTER • 1995 • 21 Politics Abroad brought 15 percent unemployment and little foreign investment by the fall of 1994...
...Nationalism, in this context, is a "normal development," observes Iveta Radicova of Bratislava's Social Policy Analysis Center...
...Gradual reform means propping up industries making unsalable goods...
...On the other hand, the SzDSz and FIDESZ (the League of Young Democrats) championed radical liberalism and rapid marketization...
...The government implemented radical market reforms and, in the words of political economist Tadeusz Kowalik, "subjected the country to shock therapy without any public debate...
...Major issues would be addressed by social contracts produced by interaction between government initiative and an activated citizenry...
...The MDF, he is certain, "doesn't have a problem of general philosophy," and he insists that it was not the sentiments of Hungarians but the electoral system, whose technicalities allow parties a larger proportion of seats in Parliament than their percentage of the vote, that permitted a decisive SP victory...
...He once told some foreign social 20 • DISSENT Politics Abroad democrats that he too was a social democrat but couldn't say it "aloud" because Slovaks were anticommunist and local Social Democrats work with ex-communists...
...Even if MDF policy was unwise, the situation of these minorities raises real human rights issues...
...This xenophobe, the mayor of the Transylvanian city of Cluj, ran third in the presidential elections of 1992...
...But here the national question is a cross-border matter, and it especially preoccupied Hungary's first postcommunist government, a nationalist coalition that was decisively defeated at the polls in spring 1994...
...Meciar's ouster in March and the SP victory in Budapest dramatically improved the atmosphere...
...we are still too close to the upheavals...
...In contrast, the Union of Labor, formed in 1992 by three left-wing offshoots of Solidarity, tries to be a genuine social democratic voice...
...5) raising pensions and social benefits...
...Klaus's program, notes Miroslav Spejl, vice chairman of the Slovak Social Democrats, "was simply no good for Slovakia where the economy is different from the Czech lands...
...In the meantime, Social Democrats were trying to build an organization ex nihilo, while the SDL had assets from its communist predecessor...
...We are Romanian citizens but we belong to the Hungarian nation whose historical and cultural traditions we share...
...sand Gypsies, but a manipulative new citizenship law aims to push as many of them as possible into Slovakia...
...Now we've made subscribing easier...
...More time is needed to make a full assessment of communism's impact on national identities...
...One factor benefiting the Social Democrats, who claim twelve thousand party members, is the Czech Communists...
...After the Soviet invasion, repression was milder in Bratislava than in Prague...
...Moreover, nuance often vanishes when the Hungarians address Romanian politics...
...Similar ideas, and something of Solidarity's initial spirit, may drive a bid for Poland's 22 • DISSENT Politics Abroad presidency in 1995 by Jacek Kuron, whose Democratic Union won 10 percent of the vote in 1993 running as a centrist party...
...Jerzy Jedlicki, a Warsaw political scientist, observes, "People do not respond to symbolic politics today even though this was such a part of Poland's political past and of the struggle against communism...
...Does one, for instance, perceive the communist decades simply as a black hole or a period that, however bad the means, changed and modernized the country...
...4 I wish to thank Gyorgy G. Markus for bringing this survey to my attention...
...In September 1994, Slovakia had its first democratic elections as an independent state...
...Liberal priorities such as promoting "private enterprise and free markets" and speeding up privatization of state companies ranked, respectively, thirteenth and fifteenth...
...Sociologist Sona Szomolanyi points out that in Bratislava in 1968, "the demand for federalization dominated over the demand for democratization...
...The ex-communists came to power as pragmatists promising an easier future...
...The fate of these uncertain democracies may depend on finding a way to foster social solidarity in a time of economic anxiety without animating destructive forms of nationalism...
...Conservative Nationalists Defeated Hungarian society, like those of Poland and the Czech lands, is, except for the Gypsies, largely homogeneous...
...Because the U.S...
...First they followed Moscow...
...We don't want to be experimented on any longer," was a popular refrain...
...On its own grounds, this position, it seems to me, is understandable and legitimate...
...Opposition to communism was weaker in Bratislava than in Prague, partly because four decades of communism brought substantial economic development to Slovakia...
...This made HZDS the leading party, and it also made it very difficult to assemble a governing coalition...
...The latter began to reinvent themselves as the Hungarian Socialist party (SP), declaring "social democratic" aspirations, and losing many Leninist fundamentalists to a splinter party...
...Imagine Peron had been educated by Moscow's Komsomol school instead of the Argentine military—there you have Meciar...
...But not always...
...Klaus knew this...
...The Slovak economy was much more dependent on sectors—big industrial and military plants—that are difficult to privatize...
...The last chance for the CP was 1968," observes Svetlana Navarova, international affairs secretary of the Social Democrats...
...This was nothing if not an experiment, for nowhere before had it been attempted...
...And he insisted that the real problem was not discrimination against Hungarians but manipulative Hungarian politicians who didn't represent their community...
...24 • DISSENT Politics Abroad He ominously suggested that the SP had "informal networks" throughout the land that undermined his government's reforms...
...Hopes on the left, that social democracy might become the alternative to collapsing communism and rising market fundamentalism in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, have proven to be chimerical...
...MDF leaders apparently feared that ousting Csurka would damage them at the polls...
...The history of the Social Democratic party, an ex-member told me, "is one of mistakes, losses, and disasters...
...The government began attacking respected television and radio figures even while seeking to deploy the media on behalf of nationalism...
...There is, moreover, a broader picture to be kept in mind...
...At the same time, Social Democrats have a formidable foe in Premier Vaclav Klaus, an adept politician whose verbal vehemence on behalf of radical market economics led the Economist to label him "Vaclav Thatcher...
...What does it mean to be "left of center" in Poland today...
...Its single previous experience of "sovereignty" was the Nazi-collaborationist regime of Father Josef Tiso during World War II...
...Lacking structure and means, they fared poorly...
...This aimed to demonstrate that "we are a reliable partner in hard times," says Cornel Codita, one of Iliescu's advisers...
...Because it was a loser in World War I, two-thirds of Hungary was parceled out to its neighbors...
...Peter Weiss, a shrewd politician who paid much attention to how ex-CPs reformed in Poland and Hungary, sought to pilot the SDL toward social democratic politics...
...Meanwhile, the SP, many of whose leaders had been reformers during the more prosperous years of "goulash communism," presented itself as a pragmatic party of competent economic managers...
...but neither does it necessarily imply chauvinist virulence when raised from a nationalist perspective...
...It resurrected itself so successfully by 1994 that it won an absolute majority in Parliament (with a third of the vote, but a plurality in every social sector...
...Liberal precepts had their appeal but also limits, partly because the population was ill-inclined to ideology...
...Romania wants to be part of Europe, and ties with the United States have improved since Clinton became president...
...Hungary's exit from communism was a gradual process...
...He recently told an interviewer that "views that no one in the West would call left are considered left here...
...You can use your credit card...
...Soon after its elite took over the cabinet, Solidarity's early vision of change from below and democracy in the workplace was something of the past...
...These gains were, however, coupled with resentment toward Prague...
...An important factor undercutting nationalism is this: apart from Gypsies, Poland today is an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society because of war, expulsions, and genocide...
...The MDF presented itself in 1989-90 as a moderate nationalist party committed to temperate change, and this was a winning combination in a moment of great uncertainty...
...Vladimir Meciar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) won 35 percent of the vote, some 25 points ahead of any competitor...
...It won 7.3 percent of the vote last year criticizing blind acceptance of Western economic models and warning that vast inequalities of wealth would imperil democracy...
...WINTER • 1995 • 19 Politics Abroad Politics Abroad Premier Vaclav Klaus reads the paper...
...Means may vary, he reckoned, but the goal is the same, an identity of demos and ethnos that implies no future for a Hungarian minority...
...Rather than rule alone, its leader, Gyula Horn, who became premier, formed a government that included the same SzDSz that four years earlier rejected such a coalition...
...Notes 1 Maurice Glasman, "The Great Deformation: Polanyi, Poland, and the Terrors of Planned Spontaneity" (New Left Review, May/June 1994...
...Why is it that Csurka gets lots of media attention but not the problems of Hungarian minorities [in Slovakia and Romania...
...Today, newly independent, Slovaks face the difficult task of defining their identity...
...To raise this question from the left hardly makes one a Stalinist...
...It is a common MDF complaint, but one that evades the issue—the politics and prejudices of a high official in a ruling party—and ignores the obvious: the foreign press corps in Budapest is large, while in Bucharest and Bratislava it is minuscule...
...I asked this of a journalist at Polityka, a leading Warsaw weekly usually described as left...
...One cannot, of course, reduce Romanian nationalism to Funar...
...in the meantime, they declare themselves "social democrats...
...No referendum was allowed, though polls showed overwhelming opposition to the breakup...
...As to the opinions of ordinary Czechs and Slovaks— this concerned the two leaders little...
...After the 1990 balloting, in which the MDF ran first, garnering a quarter of the vote, Antall formed a coalition without the Free Democrats or the Communists...
...The MDF followed—or was perceived by many to follow—behavior patterns of precommunist aristocratic elites...
...Solidarity collapsed," says Kuron, "because having formed the [first noncommunist] government from its own ranks, it then acted above society rather than placing itself at the head of a newly fashioned mass movement...
...After 1989 they sought to develop apart from the Czechs (though with ongoing contacts) and, with about a thousand members, have ended up political and financial dependents of the SDL, which, with forty-five thousand members, is seeking membership in the Socialist International...
...He expressed his willingness to sign bilateral treaties with Slovakia and Romania confirming the present borders and became the first 26 • DISSENT Politics Abroad Hungarian premier to pay a state visit to Bratislava...
...Iliescu and his postcommunist party (which has, with scant warrant, decreed itself "social democratic") have used nationalist motifs, including sanctioning the rehabilitation of World War II dictator Ion Antonescu, to strengthen their legitimacy...
...Consequently, privatization should be social privatization: remuneration gained from it should, among other things, pay for welfare institutions and social needs...
...Klaus also pursues his policies unrestrained by President Vaclav Havel who, though often at odds with the premier, has little power...
...WINTER • 1995 • 29...
...Attempts to resurrect the Hungarian Social Democratic party were beset by squabbles, splits, and incompetent leadership...
...What we want is for the Hungarian community to make the decisions in matters directly affecting it...
...So, please, subscribe now, and while you are at it, subscribe for two years: that is an even bigger help...
...Prague subsidizes housing and heating, maintains a minimum wage, and transfers funds obtained by privatizations to aid industries in trouble, thereby minimizing unemployment...
...Excavation under the statue would reveal Roman ruins, demonstrating that Romanians were in Transylvania first, for Romanian nationalists deem themselves descendants of ancient Romans...
...The SDL leads Common Choice, a left coalition including the Social Democrats, Greens, and the Farmer's Movement...
...In the world of Janos Kadar's "goulash communism," in the 1960s and after, the regime aimed to provide Hungarians with rising living standards...
...Very practical matters are at stake too: a large flight of Hungarians from Romania across the frontier would thoroughly destabilize Hungary...
...The party took particular umbrage at a recent draft education law, which it maintains is discriminatory...
...now they accept economic correctness...
...The last five years increasingly showed people that you can get ahead by business but not by being a nationalist activist or poet...
...Traditional sources of nationalist disquiet are gone, with no major national minorities within (the Jews are largely gone, though one still hears stories of anti-Semitism) and no threats from without, especially from the traditional enemies, Germany and Russia (though Poles watch Moscow with apprehension...
...Romania's population is 23 million, and some 1.8 million are Hungarians (about 7 percent...
...All this, however, was before the Slovak elections...
...Before and just after World War II, Czechoslovakian social democracy was vibrant...
...This was arguable in 1990, but false in 1994...
...Combine this with Klaus's agenda and the Velvet Divorce was unavoidable...
...He seems to have no sense of the mood in G-7 countries when he calls on them to deploy resources equivalent to those used to fight the cold war— "The Marshall Plan is much too small"—in a global program to "equalize opportunities...
...They call themselves "Social Democrats" now and, like other ex-Commufist parties, include legitimate social democrats along with people who have learned only that the word "Leninist" won't get them far anymore...
...Kuron sees himself addressing Polish dimensions of global problems, but when he looks beyond his borders, his thinking falters badly and even sounds opportunistic...
...Yet the predominance of sausage over nation, even if it defeats an unpalatable governing party, may also imply something unhealthy—a more generalized aversion to social solidarity, to all "we's," not just the nationalist or communist variety...
...The results are the same...
...However, as a Western embassy source in Bucharest pointed out to me, Iliescu wants Funar removed, tried to be "somewhat accommodating" on the education bill (he was opposed by MPs in his own party) and covets improved relations with the West — "the last thing he needs is ethnic rioting...
...They harnessed social discontent that came of marketization, and largely occupy what might have been social democratic political space...
...The rhetoric is still around but the commitment is gone...
...Funar is partial to racist vulgarity—in his view Hungarians "have barbarian genes" —and is devoted to ridding Cluj, 20 percent of whose 300,000 inhabitants are Hungarian, of Magyar influence...
...One disaster was beyond its control: Alexander Dubcek, hero of the Prague Spring, joined the party in 1992 and was to be its leader, but an auto accident took his life soon after...
...A brilliant figure in the struggle against the old regime, this gruff, burly fellow reminded me, when I visited him in his Warsaw flat in August, of a caricature of a Chicago ward boss...
...anyone born into plenty ought to pause before looking askance at it...
...A state, Codita upheld, "organizes the life of an entire community," and consequently "a state should have one education system...
...And ex-Communist parties, many claiming to be "social democratized," now sit in governments across the region...
...In the meantime, almost all the other parties in the country were willing to share power with the Communist party's successor, the Party of the Democratic Left (SDL), to contain Meciar...
...The party eventually rid itself of Csurka, but it was a messy business, and for many in the MDF the nuisance was apparently the press, not Csurka...
...Solidarity with a small 's' won't get you very far in Poland today," observes Gebert, adding that "there is a lot of egoism and little sense of social responsibility...
...he was spared by the Velvet Divorce, just as railing against Prague fueled Meciar's popularity...
...No wonder critics speak of "market Leninism...
...It was a vote against social insecurity caused by the change...
...Polish society harbors, as a dual legacy of communism, deep frustrations and an ingrained socialist sense of what's just and unjust, says Kuron...
...Marko insisted that the difference between Iliescu and Funar is only rhetorical since "they both maintain the idea of the nation-state...
...Last May he published a pamphlet entitled "A Republic for Everyone," and his argument is reminiscent of Solidarity's 1981 program which called for a decentralized "selfgoverning republic...
...Our circulation has gown with each issue for the last several years...
...Romanians, Codita told me, are troubled lest Hungarians create a system of apartheid to insulate themselves...
...We welcome these new readers, but each copy they buy costs us money, and money is hard to come by for a left magazine...
...But following their 1948 coup, the Stalinists behaved, well, like Stalinists: social democracy was banned, its properties seized, only to be retrieved by a recreated party subsequent to the Velvet Revolution...
...The Fate of Magyar Minorities Polls showed that the status of Magyar minorities beyond Hungary's borders, while an MDF passion, was not so for the public...
...Preoccupied with "Hungarianness," it never developed economic proficiency—such matters were considered "dirty work," as (socialist) political scientist Attila Agh notes...
...In contrast, many Hungarian nationalists foundered on their attempts to fashion a postcommunist national vision that is fully modern and free of precommunist prejudices...
...When I suggested that enhancing the powers of local government might be a good idea in general and could alleviate some Hungarian concerns in particular, I was informed that I was "imposing American ideas not relevant to Romania...
...People were willing to accept lower living standards for a short period in exchange for freedom, but they also expected eventual economic improvement...
...Material progress will be a necessary condition for tempering nationalism...
...In 1990, in disgrace, it gained 10 percent of the vote...
...3 The elite method, deployed by all the Polish governments since communism fell, falsely assumes that there is only one form of economic rationality and fails to recognize that there can be "different rationalities" within a market society...
...And now the imitators have been displaced in elections by their predecessors— who end up being imitators thrice over...
...After martial law was imposed in 1981, an underground continued the struggle, and like all undergrounds, from Lenin's to the Maquis, it had to be narrow to survive...
...As an alternative to the "elite method," Kuron proposes an "interactional" one...
...They lack other non-nationalist means to legitimize—no great economic success," notes Anastasiu...
...With 10.4 percent of the vote, it became the second largest parliamentary bloc (followed by a coalition of parties from the Hungarian minority with 10.2 percent and Christian Democrats with 10.1 percent...
...When asked to rate political priorities, Hungarians gave as the top five (out of eighteen): (1) competent managers for the economy...
...in return they were to leave public life in the hands of the party and eschew civic engagement...
...SzDSz's leader, Gabor Kuncze, became deputy premier and minister of the interior...
...He was succeeded by MDF's Peter Boross...
...Few Romanians seem to have pondered—perhaps they don't want to ponder—what it means to accept a large minority in the country, especially one that feels besieged...
...Yet postcommunist societies cannot simply follow Western models, warns Kuron, who calls for a decentralized Poland, enhanced local government, workers' self-management, and the development of cooperatives within a "social market economy...
...Things may have been simpler...
...The fear that there might later be an effort to reopen Trianon," Codita says, "is the bottom line...
...He was instrumental, by New Year's 1993, in bringing seventyfouryear-old Czechoslovakia to an end...
...When Civic Forum fragmented in 1991, a social democratic parliamentary base was fashioned, thanks in particular to a faction of `68ers (deputies who were ex-reform communists) who joined the party...
...Free enterprise, it seems, is undermining "the nineteenth-century ethos of an ethnic community also bound by faith...
...2) improvement of education and health care...
...Combine the "Velvet Divorce" with recent history — tthhee occupation, genocide, and expulsions of world war—and the result is a largely homogeneous country...
...as we've seen, it hasn't resonated much in economically distressed Poland, and in Hungary, despite their best efforts, it was proven that nationalists in government can't always obscure their failures with patriotic ardor...
...A community can't change its national identity when its citizenship is changed...
...Geza Entz, Antall's secretary of state in charge of Hungarian minorities abroad, asked me...
...Still, a "Republic for Everyone" may well be attuned to what Kuron calls—and polls confirm as—the left-of-center but disheartened mood of Poles...
...True, they may make solidaristic appeals if times become difficult but, for the moment, it seems that economic liberalization has diluted social solidarity along with nationalistic impulses— all while expanding disparities between rich and poor...
...If ex-communists are unable to cope, political spaces can widen for nationalist-populist demagogy...
...The real question is how history is reoccupied...
...You could say nothing in public...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
