History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  18 APRIL. French president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl send a joint message to the current president of the European Council of the EC, proposing an intergovernmental conference on “political union” of the existing EC, as well as that already planned on economic and monetary union (EMU).

  3 MAY. Árpád Göncz—writer, translator, and former political prisoner—becomes acting president of Hungary.

  4 MAY. The Latvian parliament proclaims the country’s independence from the Soviet Union.

  6 MAY. The nationalist Croatian Democratic Union wins parliamentary elections. Its leader, Franjo Tudjman, becomes president of Croatia.

  8 MAY. Estonia declares independence.

  11 MAY. Lech Wałȩsa declares a “war at the top,” which will divide Solidarity in Poland.

  16 MAY. Nationalist conservative József Antall forms a right-wing coalition government in Hungary.

  20 MAY. The National Salvation Front, led by the former communist Ion Iliescu, wins elections in Romania. Iliescu becomes president.

  29 MAY. Creation of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to finance reconstruction of postcommunist countries.

  30 MAY. Boris Yeltsin is elected president of the Russian Republic.

  MAY—JUNE. Continental European countries impose ban on imports of British beef, for fear of bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “mad cow disease.”

  7 JUNE. A Moscow summit of the Warsaw Pact seeks to transform it into a “political-military” rather than a “military-political” body

  10 JUNE. In the first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1946, victory for the movements that led the “velvet revolution”: the Civic Forum in the Czech lands, the Public Against Violence in Slovakia.

  10 AND 17 JUNE. In Bulgaria, former communists—now called Socialists—win parliamentary elections, followed closely by the Union of Democratic Forces, an opposition coalition.

  14-15 JUNE. Romanian miners are bused in from the provinces to attack protesting students, “intellectuals,” and opposition parties in Bucharest.

  20 JUNE. In Yugoslavia, the Croatian Republic removes “Socialist” from its name and adopts the checkerboard flag of the wartime fascist Croat state. Serbs in the Croatian province of Krajina start forming their own de facto authority.

  25-26 JUNE. AS urged by President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, European Community leaders, meeting in Dublin, decide that an intergovernmental conference on political union should be held parallel to that already planned on economic and monetary union.

  26 JUNE. The Hungarian parliament votes for the country to negotiate its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.

  28 JUNE. Vienna. I hear Lech Wałȩsa speak at a conference on “Central Europe on the Way to Democracy,” together with several former Solidarity leaders against whom he has declared his “war at the top.” Wałȩsa is given a tour of the Habsburg capital. His guide points out a statue of the empress Maria Theresa. A little later, Wałȩsa muses, “Hm, interesting that Mother Teresa already has a monument.”

  1 JULY. German “Monetary, Economic and Social Union.” The deutsche mark comes to East Germany.

  1-13 JULY. The Twenty-eighth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  2 JULY. The Slovenian parliament issues a declaration of sovereignty giving republican laws priority over federal ones. The Kosovo assembly declares the province to be an “independent republic” in the Yugoslav federation.

  5 JULY. Václav Havel is reelected president of Czechoslovakia.

  5-6 JULY. A NATO summit in London concludes with a declaration marking the end of the cold war.

  14-16 JULY. Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher visit Moscow and the Caucasus. Crucial German-Soviet agreements on the external aspects of German unification, with Gorbachev accepting that united Germany will be in NATO.

  14 JULY. British trade and industry minister Nicholas Ridley resigns after telling The Spectator that the proposed European monetary union is a “German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe.”

  16 JULY. Slobodan Milošević is elected leader of the postcommunist Socialist Party of Serbia.

  APRÈS LE DÉLUGE, NOUS

  I TELEPHONED JACEK KUROŃ, THE VETERAN OPPOSITIONIST, NOW Poland’s minister for labor and social affairs. A woman answered the phone.

  “Could I speak to Minister Kuroń, please?”

  “But this is the censors’ office!” the woman replied politely. (The telephone numbers differ by only one digit.)

  “I thought censorship had been abolished?”

  “Yes it has, but our contracts run until the end of July, so we’re still here.”

  “Well, I wish you pleasant inactivity.”

  “Thank you, and all the very best to you.”

  She sounded charming.

  Former censors, former border guards, former apparatchiks, former secret policemen: What is to be done with them? Or, rather, what is to be done with Them—Oni—as the communist power holders, great and small, were universally known. There is the question of justice. Should the men at the top be brought to trial for the evil they did or that was done under them? If so, on what charges and by what laws? At a lower level, it becomes almost a question of social justice. Is it fair, people ask, that those who had comfortable office jobs under the communists should still have them today, when ordinary people are having to tighten their belts yet more? Is it fair that members of the nomenklatura (those nominated to leading positions by the ruling communist party) are exploiting the unclear legal conditions of privatization to take over as capitalists the enterprises they have previously commanded as communists?

  Yet the requirements of justice can clash with those of efficiency. If the choice is between a compromised, incompetent person and an uncompromised, competent one, then the decision is easy. But what if the choice is between a compromised but relatively professional person and an uncompromised but wholly amateur one? I dine with the new ambassador of an East Central European country, a charming person, Catholic, brave, honest, unbowed. The number-two man at the embassy, by contrast, is plainly from the old guard, at best an unprincipled careerist, complete with regulation dandruff and greasy smile. He starts telling me how this year he hoped they would lay a wreath at the monument to the American rather than the Soviet liberators. A perfect turncoat. Yet at least he has some rudimentary professionalism in foreign affairs, whereas the ambassador tells me that “our foreign minister has introduced a new element into international relations—it’s called trust.” Oh dear.

  There is the problem of Them, but there is also the problem of Us. “We are not like Them,” chanted the crowds in Prague during the revolution of 1989. Six months later, some of those same people can be heard muttering about how the new power holders resemble the old. In Poland, the disgruntled now speak of a “new nomenklatura.” The Citizens’ Committees, they claim, are beginning to work like the Party Committees of yore. As in the old days, they say, a telephone call from the Committee decides the issue.

  Many things contribute to this inchoate discontent. Partly it is that, having known no other power holders than the communists, people do not distinguish between what is common to all power holders and what was peculiar to communist ones. Partly it is that, in the first postrevolutionary phase, these countries’ new would-be democratic leaders are almost bound to resort to the method of placing “one of Us” instead of “one of Them” on the commanding heights, whether of the secret police or of the media, by nomination rather than election or free competition. This has been true of Czechoslovakia—one writer called it Havel’s “anti-February,” referring to the communists’ February 1948 coup—and of Poland under its post-Solidarity prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, although the nominations are often the outcome of complex negotiations and in no case imposed by force or the threat of force.

  One may have some sympceathy with those at the top, for they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t
. If they leave old communist appointees in place, people say it’s not fair and nothing has really changed. It’s like the Polish police cars: same vehicles, same colors, same people inside, but where before it said Milicja it now says Policja. If, however, they replace the communist appointees with their own, then people cry, “Foul!” and “New nomenklatura!” On the one hand they are required to make changes fast and effectively, on the other hand democratically and constitutionally. As one speaker remarked at a stormy session of Lech Wałȩsa’s Citizens’ Committee, the trouble is that there are no generally accepted “rules of the game.” This leads into temptation.

  Visiting old friends catapulted from jail to cabinet, from stoker to parliamentarian, from being a victim of the secret police to being the head of it, I was interested to see how the acquisition of power had changed them. Could they prove exceptions to Lord Acton’s rule that power tends to corrupt?

  Everyone, but everyone, is changed. It’s not just the externals, although these are important. Offices with secretaries—most of them ladies of a certain age, inherited from the ancien régime. Chauffeur-driven cars—avoiding, if at all possible, the old black Tatras in favor of Volvos, Mercedes, or, as in Havel’s new presidential motorcade, supersexed BMWs. Suits and ties instead of the regulation dissident sweaters (with the exception of the former dissident Adam Michnik—still defiantly wearing jeans—and the Hungarian Young Democrats, who, even in the sumptuous, gilded Budapest parliament, have a quite distinctive line in casual summer wear; “yes, they discuss it in their caucuses,” an MP told me). The unaccustomed press of business, exacerbated by deep tiredness, poor institutional backup, and the endless flow of Western visitors. Changes in bearing, manner, and manners. When Havel became president, he adopted a ramrod-straight posture and a rather gruesome imperial stare that I had never noticed before. One sees it often now, on television, far away. Just playing the part?

  Many others exhibit the same features to a lesser degree. “I feel as if I’m two different people,” says one. “My old, private, writer self and a new public self.” There is irony here. Against what did they set out to do battle? Why, against the double life, against the split between public and private selves, the daily toll of public conformity and mendacity which, as Havel demonstrated better than anyone in his essays, played a vital role in sustaining the previous system. Yet now they are themselves condemned to live sorts of double lives. Not that the new public language is comparable to the old. The Havel-speak now used by Czechoslovak television commentators is quite depressing, but it is still a world away from Newspeak. Nonetheless there is—in Poland and Hungary as well as in Czechoslovakia—a certain incipient divergence between the public and private language of the new leaders.

  Corruption by power? The germs of it, in some cases, yes: a little too much enjoyment of the new privileges; perhaps a few too many trips abroad—“for the good of the country,” of course. (Oh, the hard life of luxury!) The arrogance of power, subtly reinforced by the feeling that you have deserved it after so many long years of struggle. “Where were you in November?” Havel recently retorted to a crowd of Slovak hecklers. “Where were you in August?” “Where were you in ’68?” “Where were you in ’56?” Explicitly or implicitly, these are also the challenges made in Polish and Hungarian politics. But this line of argument is as dangerous as it is understandable. When the writer Wiktor Woroszylski attacked the Polish parliamentarian Ryszard Bender for having been a member of parliament under the Jaruzelski “normalization” regime, Bender retorted by recalling Woroszylski’s own communist past. Where do you stop with the reckoning? Where do you draw the line?

  Everyone finds it difficult to come to terms with the loss of the common enemy. Of course, there were endless personal conflicts inside the opposition movements, as well as deeper differences of tradition and ideology. But, sooner or later, people pulled together against the common oppressor. This was true, at a rather basic level, of all the East Central European societies under communism. In your circle of friends you could always find common ground in grumbling about Them. A young Dresdener described to me his shock at discovering, during the election campaign, that his friends could actually think differently. Unheard of! What was true of the majority of the population in a mild way was true of the politically engaged minority in a much stronger way. For all the tensions and conflicts, the emotional experience of Solidarity in Poland was, indeed, that of solidarity. The heyday of the Civic Forum in the Czech lands was a shorter but no less intense experience of triumphant social unity. Yet, to put it in Hegelian terms, the triumph of unity was also the beginning of its negation.

  The one great conflict is succeeded by many small conflicts. However much you may rationally appreciate that there is no pluralism without conflict, the mere fact of these conflicts is somehow felt to be abnormal and disturbing. Often they involve the severing of old friendships, with sadness and bitterness. There is a lack not only of the forms and procedures in which to regulate these conflicts but of the language in which to express them. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, the civic movements came to power with a rhetoric derived from the antipolitical language of the democratic oppositions—a language of philosophic and moral absolutes, of right against wrong, love against hate, truth against falsehood. To communism as a monopoly system of organized lying they counterposed the antipolitical program of “living in truth.”

  Now we expect many things of politicians in a well-functioning parliamentary democracy, but “living in truth” is not one of them. In fact, the essence of democratic politics might rather be described as “working in half-truth.” Parliamentary democracy is, at its very heart, a system of limited adversarial mendacity in which each party attempts to present a part of the truth as if it were the whole. When Václav Havel was asked at a public discussion in London whether he thought it would prove possible for the new politicians to continue to “live in truth,” he replied, “Either yes or no. If it proves not, I certainly won’t go on being one.” Now it may just be possible for the president, as moral father-figure, to go on “living in truth”—although some might think that campaigning for the Civic Forum in the election while protesting that you are not campaigning at all comes pretty close to the line. But it is certainly not possible for any lesser mortals who actually have to compete for power.

  Partly for tactical or strategic reasons—“unity is strength,” as the crowds chanted in Prague—but also for intellectual and emotional ones, there is a reluctance to move from antipolitical to explicitly political language. Instead, there is a tendency on all sides toward Manichean overstatement. Having lost the communist devil, says Adam Michnik, we find the devil in each other.

  1

  New political divisions are clearly emerging. But how to describe them? Western observers grasp for simple, comprehensible dichotomies: the functional equivalents of the categories of “reformists versus hard-liners” or “regime versus opposition,” which served understanding (and misunderstanding) in the past. Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak participants and analysts are only too happy to offer new, clear dichotomies—partly in an attempt to understand the situation, partly to mold it. Unfortunately, they offer not just one or two but ten or twenty new dichotomies.

  The real issue is pluralism versus the “new monopoly” of his former advisers, says Lech Wałȩsa. No, it is parliamentary constitutionalism versus extraparliamentary populism, says Solidarity’s parliamentary floor leader Bronisław Geremek. It is Europeans against nationalists, says Adam Michnik. No, say others, the real conflict is between underrepresented workers and overrepresented intelligentsia. Or between country and city. Or simply between those who now have power and those who want it: the Ins and the Outs. Then someone else comes along and says, to the relief of many baffled Westerners, that, after all, the fundamental argument is still between left and right. But no, says another; the crucial difference is rather between liberals of right or left and illiberals of right or left.

  In the U-sha
ped Hungarian parliament you have, starting from the speaker’s left, a few independent members, then Socialists (i.e., former communists), Young Democrats, Free Democrats, Smallholders, the Democratic Forum, and the Christian Democrats. That looks clear enough: left to right. But, wait a minute: the economic policy of the Free Democrats is far more radically free market—or “Thatcherite”—than that of the Democratic Forum, while at the far right of the Democratic Forum sit members of what is described as the Protestant, populist left: communitarian and anticapitalist.

  Let’s try again. The basic divide is between two Hungaries: the cosmopolitan, urbanist, Western-oriented Hungary represented archetypally by the multilingual Jewish intellectuals of the Free Democrats; and a nationalist, populist, sometimes anti-Semitic, Transylvania-oriented Hungary, represented by the monolingual intellectuals of the Democratic Forum. But then the Forum’s foreign minister, Géza Jeszenszky, a diplomatic historian, spends twenty minutes explaining to you with eloquence and passion, in fluent English, why this is a caricature. And the populist “left” (or is it “right”?) rather prove the point by their furious attacks on their own prime minister, József Antall, and his cozy cabinet of Christian Democrat or Gladstonian-liberal gentlemen. But, then again, it is Antall, a devout Catholic, rather than the Protestant populists who has pressed one of the policy proposals most offensive to Free Democrats and Young Democrats: that there should be religious instruction—initially it was even implied that this might be compulsory Catholic instruction—in schools. So is that all clear?

  In Poland, things are no less complicated. Take, for example, two prominent exponents of opposing points of view: Adam Michnik, chief editor of the Solidarity daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chief editor of the Solidarity weekly, Tygodnik Solidarność, and a leading light of the so-called Center Agreement, a pro-Wałȩsa party. Michnik essentially argues that the basic divide in Polish politics today is still that which can be found, in one form or another, in the histories of all East and Central European countries—between Slavophiles and Westernizers, populists and urbanists, Kultur and Zivilisation.