Central European democracy
Michnik, Adam
Thoughts on Democracy in Central Europe This article began as a talk at the New School for Social Research, at a forum on Ira Katznelson's recent book Liberalism's Crooked Circle, which was...
...Today the East European of the post-Yalta generation can do without a cult of the West...
...Well, we rejected communism for several different reasons: it was a lie, and we were searching for truth...
...After a while, the frog again spoke to him, this time from his pocket: "Sir, did you forget about me...
...it required conformity and we desired authenticity...
...meant an unjust world...
...the second behaved as if they had forgotten that the dictatorship ever existed...
...Freedom returned to Central Europe, and Central Europe returned to history...
...Then it would be easy to undermine the procedures of the democratic state...
...The weak side"—wrote Bogdan Cywitiski"was always under siege...
...Democracy is freedom written into the rule of law...
...In the meantime, democracy is neither black nor red...
...One can argue whether bolshevism was preying on the socialist idea, or whether the socialist idea provided bolshevism with its intellectual and political arguments...
...I have reached the age at which I would rather have a talking frog than a new wife...
...It is a realm of the spirit, but firmly rooted in reality...
...Cogito...
...but I learned to distrust both...
...The conservative held that the free market liberates in people an animal rapaciousness, while the socialist was of the opinion that it virtually requires an animal aggression...
...This frog is Central Europe, knocking at the gates of NATO and the European Union...
...the partisans of the civil principle have defended the fundamental tenets of democracy against intolerant chauvinism...
...Egalitarianism found itself in conflict with the principles of liberal economy...
...The socialist, on the other hand, saw in humans good beings, forced by inhuman social conditions into animal behavior...
...Fundamentalists of different varieties condemn the moral relativism of democracy, as though it were the state that should be the guardian of moral virtue...
...If you kiss me, I will become a princess once again...
...The great cultural diversity of this region was to be—and frequently was—the best weapon of self-defense against the claims of ethnic or ideological power...
...What remains of this vision seven years after the fall of communism...
...There was something wonderfully uplifting in this rebellion...
...Kundera, as well as Vaclav Havel, Konrad, and others, were fully justified in rereading the cultural heritage of this region of borderlands— where nations, religions, and cultures rub up against one another...
...I lived in one of them for forty years...
...We, however, the defenders of gray democracy, do not grant the state this right...
...Does the criminalization of abortion constitute an attack on the fundamental right of a woman to decide about her own maternity...
...These arguments made for extreme emotional tension: there have been constant appeals to moral arguments...
...Moral absolutism is a great strength for individuals and groups struggling against dictatorship...
...All of this also belongs to the heritage of 1968...
...One can debate the relations of both these utopias with the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century...
...People from Central Europe like to tell jokes...
...The liberal will say: the economy first—economic growth, clear rules of the market, stable systems of taxation, privatization, exchangeable currency...
...And this is why, in the framework of democratic institutions, citizens can meet and collaborate independently of their faith, nationality, or ideology...
...First came the grandeur of the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia...
...Does the legality of abortion imply approval of the murder of unborn children...
...The frog spoke to him with a human voice: "I'm a beautiful princess, turned into a frog by a mischievous wizard...
...More than ten years ago, through the works of its artists, philosophers, and writers, Central Europe came to be thought of as a realm of spiritual freedom, diversity, and tolerance...
...I once asked Jiirgen Habermas: "What do we have left of the idealistic faith in the freedom-oriented socialism of the sixties...
...Moreover, the students of Berkeley and Paris were fascinated by the communist project, and by the revolutionary rhetoric of Mao Tse-Tungof which the students of Warsaw and Prague had had enough...
...If you kiss me, I will become a princess again...
...This world not only broke the coalition of antitotalitarian ideas, but also revealed their contradictory character...
...The system of parliamentary democracy and market economy has had fierce adversaries since its inception...
...Katznelson responded briefly at the New School forum and has written up the response for Dissent.—EDs...
...SPRING • 1997 • 15 Politics Abroad Nevertheless, I think there were also some common threads: the anti-authoritarian spirit, a sense of emancipation, and the conviction that "to be a realist means to demand the impossible...
...In the world of jokes, they not only felt free and sovereign, despite captivity and Soviet domination, they also laughed...
...But there was also something frightening in it: the vandalized universities, destroyed libraries, barbarian slogans that substituted for intellectual reflection...
...communism meant the suppression of religion, and we held freedom of conscience to be a fundamental human right...
...Here, national and civic consciousness developed as a result of human bonds—and not by the order of state institutions...
...Both those attitudes at times took on a grotesque form: the first went so far as to call for discrimination against the members of the communist apparatus...
...This coalition collapsed along with communism...
...The debate over abortion has in fact been an argument about the axiological foundation of the state...
...I am a beautiful princess, turned into a frog...
...The first demanded the methodical punishment of the guilty parties...
...communism was enslavement, fear, and censorship, and we desired freedom...
...Today the classic ideological positions— liberalism, conservatism, socialism—do not dominate public debate about taxes, health reform, or insurance...
...Both antiliberal utopias were turned into totalitarian systems...
...here it was easier to devise the idea of civil society, precisely because the sovereign national state remained largely in the realm of dreams...
...In opposition to so-called "corrupt demo-liberalism," the fanaticism of ideological inquisitors offers again and again new projects for a "promised land...
...Was there any common denominator in the rebellions of students in Berkeley, Paris, and West Berlin—and those on the streets of Warsaw and Prague...
...Dilemmas appeared that the socialist, the conservative, and the liberal resolved in different ways...
...Today, seven years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the nations of Central Europe are facing new opportunities and new challenges...
...First was the memorable "Autumn of the Nations" in 1989...
...Put differently, this multinational mosaic, conquered by the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, was, and still is, a source of conflict and destabilization...
...Standing up to the world of totalitarian dictatorship was to risk, or even to sacrifice, not only one's own safety but also that of one's friends and family...
...Let's give them the symbolic names of "conservative" and "socialist...
...Within it a diverse world of tensions and values, emotions and conflicts, was covered with a thick layer of ice...
...And all this has been told to you by a frog from Central Europe...
...For the socialist, it was a system that generated, disguised, and perpetuated inequality and injustice...
...There is no room there for the utopias of a just, harmonious, and perfect world—or for moral absolutism...
...a bit of egalitarianism and a bit of clericalism...
...Franz Grillparzer, a great Austrian writer of the nineteenth century, warned prophetically against the road that leads "from humanism, through nationality, to bestiality...
...Each of those values is needed in democratic politics...
...We want human virtues to be guarded by the human conscience...
...Why do I myself not want to subscribe to any of the great ideologies...
...We will get married and live happily ever after...
...None of these disputes is fatal for democracy, which after all is a permanent debate...
...It was in that year that tens of thousands of students filled the streets to demonstrate against the establishment...
...Each day one had to make choices that could have costly consequences...
...For the conservative, the democratic order was a negation of tradition—the defeat of the Christian spirit by a rapacious nihilism...
...I know because this moral absolutism was also my experience to a certain degree...
...But possibly, this is more often an argument about language than about ideas...
...At the root of the rebellion of 1968 was a need for justice: a need to have access to freedom and to bread, to truth and to power...
...Let us skip the controversies about defining the borders of Central Europe...
...Later, a wave of xenophobic rage in Germany in 1992-1993, and the breakup of Czechoslovakia...
...But before it collapsed, the coalition had marked public debate with a specific tone of moral absolutism...
...Radical movements—whether under black or red banners— gladly use democracy in order to obliterate it...
...Here we have a land of small nations, conquered, subjected, and enslaved for generations, transforming itself into the fertile soil that gave birth to Robert Musil and Franz Kaflca, Thoma Masaryk and Karel Capek, Adam Mickiewicz and Joseph Conrad, I.B...
...This world of many nations and cultures had experienced the deep ambiguity of the national right of nations to sovereign existence: the right of one nation usually endangered the right of another nation...
...Parliamentarianism arose as an alternative to civil wars—conservatives can argue with liberals and social demo18 • DISSENT Politics Abroad crats whether that was the result of common sense or the wisdom that comes with misfortune...
...They were fully justified in presenting it as the realization of a multicultural ideal of society—a miniature Europe of Nations— founded on the principle of maximum diversity in minimum space...
...The church has called for a constitution and criminal code that would be in accordance with religious norms...
...A nostalgia the security of the "good old communist days," when, as they said, "the state pretended to pay the people, and the people pretended to work...
...loyalty to the nation, to the church, and to tradition...
...How will things turn out for them...
...Translated from the Polish by ELZBIETA MATYNIA q This article is taken from the East and Central Europe Program Bulletin (December 1996) of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research...
...Why today does this formula cause in me an internal protest...
...The heroism of the people who had resisted repression has shown its second face: intolerant, fanatical, and opposed to new, modernizing ideas...
...the secular character of the state...
...We were put to a double test: the test of captivity and the test of freedom...
...And then she heard his answer: "Dear lady frog, I will be completely honest with you...
...Why did we rebel against communism...
...The world as it is...
...For active dissidents, this situation created a climate favorable to harsh and demanding valuations...
...The moral absolutism of the anticommunist opposition required us to believe that communism is inherently evil, the devil of our times, and that resistance to communism is something naturally good, noble, and beautiful...
...it is these that equip us with the capacity to choose...
...The democratic opposition demonized communists and angelicized itself...
...Communism was like a freezer...
...a radical critique of the Enlightenment and the harsh language of moral absolutism...
...Why did we prefer to become a small repressed minority, rather than to join the majority that made careers in the world of totalitarian dictatorship...
...One professed humanistic values, but lived within heroic values, with their fundamental principle of loyalty to one's own identity and loyalty to one's friends from the democratic opposition...
...both threaten the democratic order...
...it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business...
...There is a bit of fascism in it and a bit of communism...
...In communities where national identity frequently coincided with religious identity, there has been a natural temptation to allow a religious establishment...
...Conservative partisans of the national principle emphasized the need to reconstruct the ethnic fabric destroyed through years of official denationalization...
...Two opposing worlds of values have confronted one another...
...At that time we defined ourselves as socialists and people of the left...
...Conflicts—difficult to understand for Westerners who had perceived this territory simply as the Soviet Bloc—came to life once more...
...And in the end it was we who won...
...The tennis ball ended up in the bushes...
...I will marry you, you will be a prince, and we will live happily ever after...
...Yet only democracy, having the capacity to question itself, also has the capacity to correct its own mistakes...
...Milan Kundera helped to create this myth against the fact of Soviet domination: in the place of the Anglo-Saxon formula "the countries of the Soviet Bloc," an image appeared of Central Europe as a home of equal nations with an abundant, colorful culture, nurtured by a diversity of languages, religions, traditions and personalities...
...I don't regret this experience, nor do I think I need to be ashamed of it...
...The trump card of these small nations was their very non-imperial character, which made them natural allies of freedom and tolerance...
...Fatal, indeed, would be such an intensification of conflict that all sides become incapable of compromise...
...Democracy is gray, is established only with difficulty, and its quality and flavor can be recognized best when it comes under the pressure of advancing red or black ideas...
...This is how the two great utopias were established: one retrospective and the other prospective, a utopia of conservative, hierarchical harmony, and a utopia of egalitarian, socialist harmony...
...SPRING • 1997 • 19...
...For my generation the road to freedom began in 1968...
...The students of Prague and Warsaw were fighting for the freedom that bourgeois democracy guaranteed...
...It emerges in the place where he lives...
...But there is no doubt that these connections existed, even though we can find conservatives among the antifascist opposition, and we can find socialists among the most consistent adversaries of bolshevism...
...Only strong institutions could achieve this...
...The dispute over the shape of the state—should it be national or civil—has turned out to be fundamental, especially in multinational countries that have just regained independence after their long enslavement...
...NATO and the European Union have not yet made up their minds to kiss...
...it was social inequality and injustice, and we believed in equality and justice...
...Centuries of existence in an environment of oppression and repression produced a specific culture, characterized by honor and self-irony, the stubbornness to stand by values, and the courage to believe in romantic ideals...
...Let us mention some of them: dealing with the communist past, the shape of the market, the fundamental principles of the state, the place of the church and religious values in the new reality...
...So, we rejected communism for reasons equally dear to a conservative, a socialist, and a liberal...
...the language of war has been used...
...This is a natural turn of events in the postcommunist democracies...
...The second proposed a process of national reconciliation...
...It is these that give color and diversity to our life...
...amnesia—no"—turned out to be too difficult for the people of the democratic opposition...
...The most outstanding witnesses of resistance in those yearsAleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Zbigniew Herbert—defended absolute values...
...The East European,"—wrote Barbara Toruriczyk in 1987—"already has his own kingdom...
...But they were born out of a common inspiration: a pas...
...Only gray democracy, with its human rights, with institutions of civil society, can replace weapons with arguments...
...For years, jokes offered them asylum...
...Looking for the ball, one of the players saw a frog...
...That is why we say, "gray is beautiful...
...Democracy is not infallible, because in its debates all are equal...
...The defrosting process was a gradual one—so first we saw beautiful flowers, and only later, the rot...
...it was an ongoing attack on the traditions and national identities that we held to be ours...
...In this way, a peculiar coalition of 16 • DISSENT Politics Abroad ideas emerged, which Leszek Kolakowski noted in his well-known essay, "How to be a ConservativeLiberal Socialist...
...conservatism challenged the spirit of liberal tolerance...
...It was not an absurd idea, not a false image...
...This is why the seekers of a moral state and of a perfectly just society do not like democracy...
...Those decisions were not the result of academic debates, but were moral acts frequently paid for with imprisonment or ruined careers...
...He or she would be a careful defender of the idea of a tolerant state—with regard to the Catholic church, to national minorities, to the neighboring countries, and to the past...
...The player put the frog into his pocket, found the ball, and continued the game...
...At first glance, these were completely different phenomena: the students of Berkeley and Paris rejected the order of bourgeois democracy...
...Each of these three will have to formulate ideas in a new context: the context of a populist and still unnamed ideology...
...And finally, the Catholic church...
...communism was a grotesquely deficient economy, and we sought rationality, efficiency, and affluence...
...The dispute over the shape of the market economy has taken on the form of a social conflict, in which the arguments of socialists and of conservatives have come together in a criticism of the policies of liberal transformation...
...Freedom in itself, without the limits imposed on it by law and tradition, is a road to anarchy and chaos—where the right of the strongest rules...
...The conservative would bring back the continuity of national symbols, would fight for a Christian reshaping of the Constitution and institutions, would warn against the dangers of liberalism and relativism, and would demand harsh treatment for people of the old regime...
...it is thanks to their mutual contradictions that we can afford inconsistency, experimentation, changes of opinion, and changes of government...
...Herbert wrote: "let your sister Scorn not leave you / for the informers executioners cowards—they will win" ("The Envoy of Mr...
...The argument between Katznelson and Michnik is focused on the scope and ambition of democratic politics in Eastern Europe...
...Both of these come down to anachronism or hypocrisy...
...Democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of passions, emotions, hatreds and hopes...
...but it is a weakness for individuals and groups active in a world where democratic procedures are being built on the rubble of totalitarian dictatorships...
...At the same time, a nostalgia will appear, surprising to all—for the socialist, the SPRING • 1997 • 17 Politics Abroad liberal and the conservative...
...Unemployment, social inequality, and the frustration of employees have resulted in a slowing down of the pace of reform...
...Singer and Albert Einstein, Miroslav Krleia and Dominik Tatarka, Czeslaw Milosz and Jaroslav Seifert, Elias Canetti and Emanuel Levinas, Eugene Ionesco and Georg Lukacs...
...He gives new names to Europe and does it from right here at home...
...and tolerance toward people of different faiths and nationalities...
...So: two men, with the experience that comes with age, were playing tennis...
...Thoughts on Democracy in Central Europe This article began as a talk at the New School for Social Research, at a forum on Ira Katznelson's recent book Liberalism's Crooked Circle, which was written as a letter to Adam Michnik...
...One had to believe that "Human life is a serious game," as a church historian of the communist period wrote...
...Hence, certainly some of our statements will appear unclear, others perfectly banal...
...loyalty to values that were betrayed and mocked...
...For the socialist, the central issues will be to give a human face to a rapacious market economy...
...and finally, violence, terrorism, and political killings...
...It returned as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance, but also of hatred and intolerance, both ethnic and religious...
...Yet in each of those debates, there is a need for socialist concern for the poorest, a conservative defense of tradition, and a liberal reflection on efficiency and growth...
...But, woe to those moral absolutists who emerge victorious in political struggles—even if only for a while...
...Here, I believe, lies the source of many arguments with my American friends...
...the total victory of relativism over the world of absolute values...
...For the American public, these meanderings of Central European democratic thought may appear a bit exotic...
...Let's remind ourselves, however, of the statement by the Hungarian writer George Konrad: "It is we, who live in Central Europe, who began the two great World Wars...
...So there we are...
...But these conflicts were understood all too well by the residents...
...The formula for which I was a spokesman: "Amnesty— yes...
...Dictatorships, whether red or black, destroy the human capacity for creation, they kill the taste for human life and, eventually, life itself...
...Because a democratic world is a chronically imperfect one, a world of freedom (sinful, corrupt, and fragile), after the collapse of totalitarian necessity (also, luckily, imperfect...
...His answer was: "Radical democracy...
...Since this formula is close to me, I will try to decipher it in my own way...
...They don't yet know whether they prefer to have a talking frog or a new wife...
...This is why, frequently, it chooses banality over excellence, shrewdness over nobility, empty promise over true competence...
...The subject of democracy is people, not ideas...
...These writers also had a wise idea concerning spiritual-political 14 • DISSENT Politics Abroad strategy: their nations, strikingly weak and powerless in confronting the imperial appetites of their neighbors, would transform powerlessness into power...
...And finally the need for rebellion, rooted in the conviction that "as long as the world is as it is, it is not worth it to die quietly in your own bed...
...Both conservative and socialist rejected the order of a freedom based on the free play of political and economic forces, on the specific domination of property and money...
...After years of repression, the church has reasserted its claim to a place in the public debate...
...One can also try to explore whether fascism used the antiliberal arguments of conservatives and the dream of returning to a world of pre-industrial values, or whether the conservatives saw in fascism a way to defend themselves against demo-liberal destruction...
...to defend the poorest sectors in society...
...sionate dream, about freedom and democratic order...
...Democracy is not identical with freedom...
...This is why it lends itself to manipulation, and may be helpless against corruption...
...One must know this context in order to understand the dilemmas of the new postcommunist democracies...
...Dealing with the communist past has divided voices for justice from the voices for reconciliation...
...The conservative saw in humans wild beings who could not be domesticated by calls to reason...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
