Postwar

by Tony Judt

  318 Yeltsin received 57 percent of the vote in a turnout of 74 percent.

  319 The exception was French President François Mitterrand, still uncomfortable with the destabilization of eastern Europe and a little too quick to acknowledge the plotters’ success in restoring the status quo ante.

  320 Even in Ukraine, where many Russian-speakers had been wary of talk about national independence, the coup of August had a dramatic impact on the public mood: on August 24th the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet voted for independence, subject to a referendum, by 346 votes to 1. When the national referendum was held on December 1st, 90.3 percent (in a turnout of 84 percent of the electorate) voted to leave the Soviet Union.

  321 The will, but not the means. Had Gorbachev—or the August plotters—chosen to use the army to crush all opposition, it is by no means sure that they would have failed.

  322 This occasioned some ill-feeling among Czechs. On a visit to Prague in 1985 the present author was regaled by liberal Czechs with accounts of the privileges accorded by the regime to the Slovak minority. Schoolteachers from Slovakia—recruited to teach in Prague’s elementary schools and deemed by parents to be hopelessly provincial and inadequate to the task—were a particular target of resentment. 21The appearance of a separate Hungarian party reflects the presence on Slovak territory of some 500,000 Hungarians, 10 percent of the population of Slovakia.

  323 Quoted in Mladá Fronta dnes 12th March 1991. See Abby Innes, Czechoslovakia: The Short Goodbye (Yale U.P., Newhaven, 2001), page 97.

  324 The political split proved easier to manage than the economic one—it was not until 1999 that agreement over the division of Czechoslovakia’s federal assets was finally reached.

  325 Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje (the capital of Macedonia) were all among the fastest growing cities of Central Europe between 1910 and 1990.

  326 ‘We shall kill some Serbs, deport others, and oblige the rest to embrace Catholicism’—thus the Ustashe Minister of Religion in Zagreb, July 22nd 1941.

  327 On a ‘fact-finding’ visit to Skopje just after the 1999 Kosovo war the present author was ‘confidentially’ informed by the Macedonian Prime Minister that Albanians (including his own ministerial colleague who had just left the room) were not to be trusted: ‘You can’t believe anything they say—they just are not like us. They are not Christian’.

  328 This was not, of course, the way things appeared to Croats and others, who could point to Serb domination of the national army (60 percent of the officer corps was Serb by 1984, a fair reflection of Serb presence in the population at large but no more reassuring for that) and Belgrade’s disproportionate share of investment and federal expenditure.

  329 Since ethnic identity in Yugoslavia could not be ascertained from appearance or speech, roaming militias relied on villagers ‘fingering’ their neighbours—families with whom they had often lived at peace, sometimes as friends, for years and even decades.

  330 Between 1992 and 1994 the UN agencies in the Balkans were all but complicit with the Bosnian Serbs—allowing them, for example, an effective veto over what and who could enter and leave the besieged city of Sarajevo.

  331 It was at French insistence that the signing ceremony was held in Paris—an exercise in ceremonial overcompensation that only drew attention to France’s previous reluctance to act against the Serbs.

  332 The NATO-led Stabilization Force was replaced by the European Union’s EUFOR on December 2nd 2004.

  333 The ageing Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, manipulating nationalist sentiment for electoral advantage, claimed that the term ‘Macedonia’ was part of his country’s ancient heritage and could apply to only the northernmost region of Greece itself. If the Slav state carved out of southern Yugoslavia called itself by that name it must harbour irredentist ambitions. What Papandreou could not acknowldge was that many of the ‘Greeks’ of Greek Macedonia were themselves of Slav descent—albeit officially Hellenized for patriotic ends.

  334 In the winter of 1996, following palpably fraudulent results in local elections, Serb students demonstrated for three months in the streets of Belgrade, protesting Milošević’s dictatorship and demanding change. They received no support or encouragement from the Western powers, however, who looked upon Milošević as a stabilizing factor in the post-Dayton years and did nothing to weaken his position.

  335 And as with the Sarajevo atrocity, Belgrade and its apologists insisted either that it never happened or, when that became untenable, that it was a staged ‘provocation’ by the victims themselves.

  336 Janvier’s performance aroused demands in France and elsewhere that he be co-indicted for responsibility in the subsequent massacre.

  337 Among a younger generation, business-oriented and impatient to escape their country’s encumbering past, it even brought forth a new conformism to substitute for the wooden public language of Communism: uncritical adulation for the mantras of neo-classical economics blissfully unclouded by any familiarity with their social cost.

  338 Giving rise to nationalist jitters at the prospect of Prague’s re-absorption into a Greater German Co-Prosperity Sphere—and a popular joke: “I have some good news and some bad news about Czechoslovakia’s post-Communist prospects.” “What’s the good news?” “The Germans are coming!” “And the bad news?” “The Germans are coming.”

  339 A notable exception to this story is Estonia, which has benefitted hugely from its virtual adoption by its Scandinavian neighbours. In 1992, when it left the ruble zone, 92 percent of Estonia’s trade was with the former Soviet Union. Five years later over three quarters of that trade was with the West, much of it across the Baltic.

  340 And inefficiency—one irony of ritualized privatization in eastern Europe was that once collective farms were broken up into tiny plots they could no longer be worked by tractor but only by hand. 17It is estimated that inflation in post-Communist Ukraine reached an annual rate of 5,371 percent in 1993.

  341 But Romania is perhaps unique. In the Bucharest mayoral elections of 1998 the Romanian Workers’ Party blanketed the city with posters of Nicolae Ceauşescu. ‘They shot me’, the posters read. ‘Do you live any better? Remember all I did for the Romanian people’.

  342 And even on occasion with unreconstructed Fascists, nostalgic for the better days of World War Two—notably in Croatia.

  343 Though not, perhaps, across the self-serving moves of certain prominent writers—who would have risked little by declining their services: e.g. Christa Wolf, whose much-vaunted literary ambivalence appears somehow less admirable in the light of later revelations of her cooperation with the Stasi.

  344 By way of comparison, the Gestapo in 1941 had a staff of fewer than 15,000 to police the whole of greater Germany.

  345 From the Czech lustrace, meaning ‘bringing to light’, though the translation carries purgative connotations as well.

  346 I am indebted to Dr Jacques Rupnik for the reference.

  347 Julius Caesar’s Gallia Belgica lay athwart the line that was to separate Gallo-Roman territories from the Franks and mark the boundary thenceforth demarcating Latinate, French-dominated Europe from the Germanic north.

  348 The main newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, have almost no readers outside the French- and Dutch-speaking communities respectively. As a result, neither takes much trouble to report news from the other half of the country. When someone speaks Dutch on Walloon television (and vice-versa) subtitles are provided. Even the automatic information boards on interregional trains switch back and forth between Dutch and French (or to both, in the case of Brussels) as they cross the regional frontiers. It is only partly a jest to say that English is now the common language of Belgium.

  349 The more historically disposed perhaps called to mind the passage in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène by the Comte de Las Cases, where the exiled Napoléon Bonaparte envisages a future ‘association européenne’ with ‘one code, one court, one currency’.

  350 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Re
public joined in 1999, just in time to be (somewhat reluctantly) committed to NATO’s engagement in Kosovo. Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia were admitted in 2004.

  351 The economic recession of the early Nineties also helped, contributing to a widespread view in Sweden especially that the country’s exporters could not survive without unrestricted access to the European market.

  352 See Chapter 21. The pain was real enough. East European countries lost between 30 and 40 percent of their national income in the years after 1989. The first to recover its 1989 level was Poland, in 1997; others took until 2000 or beyond.

  353 A highly optimistic assumption. In the years following their accession to the EC in 1986, the economies of Spain and Portugal grew on average between 1 percent and 1.5 percent faster than the rest of the Community.

  354 On January 1st 2002 a total of 600,000,000,000 euros in cash was seamlessly distributed and introduced across the euro-zone countries, a remarkable technical achievement.

  355 If they still worked as smoothly as they did it was at least in part because the federal machinery was so very well oiled, not least by money: in the 1990s Switzerland was still by most measures the world’s wealthiest country.

  356 Quoted in Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London, 1984), p. 63.

  357 The decline in the Dutch vote may be especially ominous. Once the kernel of European enthusiasm and a generous contributor to EC and EU funds, the Netherlands in recent years has been retreating into itself—a development both illuminated and accelerated by the rise of Pim Fortuyn and his subsequent assassination.

  358 It is perhaps worth adding that in January 2004 only one French adult in fifty could name the ten new EU member states.

  359 Not everywhere, however: in the UK—as in the US—the income spread between the wealthy and the rest grew steadily wider from the late 1970s.

  360 The ECJ should not be confused with the European Court of Human Rights, set up under the auspices of the Council of Europe to enforce the 1953 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

  361 In Giscard’s ‘Constitution for Europe’, Article 3(I) defines the Union’s aims as being ‘to promote peace, its values, and the well-being of its peoples’.

  362 Quoted by Andrew Moravscik in The Choice for Europe (New York, 1998),. p. 265.

  363 Mordantly predicted at the time by the US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who foresaw that the Europeans ‘will screw up and this will teach them a lesson’.

  364 The EU was not alone in subsidizing its own farmers to the detriment of others. It was not even the worst offender: Norway, Switzerland, Japan and the US all pay out more in per capita terms. But the EU appeared somehow more hypocritical. While Brussels preaches virtue to the world at large, its own practice is often quite selective. East Europeans, instructed to incorporate and adopt a veritable library of European Union regulations, could hardly fail to notice the frequency with which West European governments exempted themselves from those same rules.

  365 In 1995, according to a UNICEF study, one British child in five lived in poverty, compared with one in ten in Germany and one in twenty in Denmark.

  366 Invoking slightly different criteria to make a similar point, the Cambridge political theorist John Dunn divides the workforces of wealthy countries into ‘those who can individually take very good care of themselves on the market . . . , those who can hold their own only because they belong to surviving units of collective action with a threat advantage out of all proportion to the value of individual members’ labour, and those who are already going under, because no one would chose to pay much for their labour’. Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason. Making Sense of Politics (London, 2000), p. 333.

  367 Gorz, as befitted a man of his time and politics, assumed that this new class would in turn fuel a new generation of radical social movements. To date there is little evidence of this.

  368 In 1992 alone, the Federal Republic opened its doors to nearly a quarter of a million Yugoslav refugees. Britain admitted 4,000; France just 1,000.

  369 At the end of the twentieth century there were an estimated 5 million Gypsies in Europe: some 50,000 in Poland, 60,000 in Albania, half a million in Hungary, perhaps 600,000 each in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic and at least 2 million in Romania. The prejudice and abuse to which they were exposed was common to every country in which the Gypsies lived (not to mention places like Britain to which they were forbidden entry).

  370 The Dansk Folkeparti originated in a breakaway from the Danish Progress Party, itself a product of the anti-tax movements of the early 1970s (see Chapter 14) but considered by a new generation of radicals to be too ‘soft’ on the EU and insufficiently anti-immigrant.

  371 In Switzerland, where anti-immigrant prejudice was especially widespread in the German-speaking cantons, the racism was not always buried: one election poster showed an array of dark-skinned faces over the caption ‘The Swiss are becoming Negroes’.

  372 With one exception: Edith Cresson—a former French Socialist Prime Minister turned EU Commissioner—contributed to the discrediting of the whole Commission when it was revealed in 1999 that she had used her power in Brussels to invent a well-paid consultancy for her former dentist.

  373 Even taking into account the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties, the number of war-related deaths in Europe in the second half of the century was less than one million.

  374 Raymond Aron (born in 1905) shared some of Zweig’s wistful memories, if not his despair: ‘Ever since, under a July sun, bourgeois Europe entered the century of wars, men have lost control of their history’.

  375 Many Poles, it should be noted, also insist upon their country’s place at the centre of Europe—a revealing confusion.

  376 Much the same is true of Albanian Kosovars. Liberated by NATO from Serbian oppression, they aspire to independent statehood less from nationalistic ambition than as a surety against the risk of being left in Serbia—and out of Europe.

  377 Anna Reid, Borderland. A Journey through the history of Ukraine (2000), p. 20. Hence the place of ‘Europe’ in the language and hopes of the Ukrainian revolution of December 2004.

  378 See Tony Judt, ‘Romania: Bottom of the Heap’, New York Review, November 1st 2001.

  379 As the common language of many tens of millions of people in the Americas, from Santiago to San Francisco, the international standing of Spanish was nevertheless secure. The same was true of Portuguese, at least in its quite distinctive Brazilian form.

  380 With the exception of Romania, where the situation was reversed and French had by far the broader constituency.

  381 The exception in this case is Bulgaria, where Russia and its language had always found a more sympathetic reception.

  382 Respectively the French, German and Italian flagship expresses.

  383 In June 2004 the present author received the following greeting from a correspondent in the foreign ministry in Zagreb: ‘Things here good. Croatia got EU membership invitation. This will change many mental maps’.

  384 Hungarians in twenty-first-century Romania, Slovakia and Serbia were another, smaller post-imperial minority: once dominant, now vulnerable. In the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia, Hungarians who had lived there for centuries were periodically assaulted and their properties vandalized by Serb youths. The response of the authorities in Belgrade, who appeared to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the catastrophe of the Nineties, was depressingly predictable: the attacks were not ‘serious’ and in any case, ‘they’ started it.

  385 Quite the opposite. In a series of measures in the spring and summer of 2004 the authorities significantly curtailed both the rights of the press and the already restricted opportunities for public protest. Russia’s brief window of freedom—actually disarray and the absence of constraint rather than genuine constitutionally protected liberty—was fast closing. In 2004, Russian observers estimated that KGB-TRAINED officials occu
pied one in four of civilian administrative posts in the country.

  386 Including the domestic political calculations of Greek politicians, who for many years used their vote in Brussels to hinder and block any movement on Turkey’s candidacy.

  387 In addition they were wont to see as ‘European’ an idealized free-market, contrasting it with the graft and cronyism of Turkey’s own economy.

  388 The Christian Democratic Union in Germany was officially opposed to Turkey joining the EU.

  389 Democratic Spain did indeed develop an official ‘heritage’ industry, fostered by its Patrimonio Nacional, but the latter took care to emphasize the country’s distant Golden Age rather than its recent history.

  390 In T .R. Reid, The United States of Europe. The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (NY, 2004), p. 131.

  391 Britain was not unique. In one week in September 2004 the Spanish national lottery, El Gordo, took in 5,920,293 euros.