History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  One problem with his position is that it does not really allow for the possibility of a modern, liberal, European Christian Democracy in East Central Europe. Early in July, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki attended a meeting of, precisely, European Christian Democrats hosted in Budapest by József Antall and starring the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Some politicians close to Mazowiecki founded a Forum of the Democratic Right, which clearly aimed to be just that. But in Michnik’s judgment the dynamics of Polish politics would almost certainly sweep a would-be liberal, tolerant, European Christian Democracy into the flood waters of an intolerant, nationalistic, chauvinist National Democracy.

  Kaczynski offers a quite different dichotomy. Michnik and Geremek, he says, represent “the left.” He, by contrast, claims to represent the “center-right.” What, I asked him, distinguished this “left”? Without hesitation, he spelled out four points. First, he said, there was the attitude toward property. He and his colleagues were unambiguously in favor of private property, “the left” much more ambiguously so. Second, there was Michnik and Geremek’s attitude toward communists. For a year since last June’s election they had been far too ready to make compromises with the communists. As late as the autumn, Michnik had argued that the most important thing was to forge an alliance with reformist (ex-)communists. According to Kaczynski, this also reflected ideological preferences: a red—pink continuum. Third, there was the attitude toward the church. To be sure, Michnik often referred to Christian values and professed admiration for the historic antitotalitarian role of the church, but there was still an underlying suspicion, an anticlericalism, which they, the “center-right,” did not share. Fourth, Michnik and Geremek had a basic, underlying mistrust of ordinary Polish people; they, the “center-right,” by contrast, believed in the common sense of the common people.

  Kaczynski is a clever man, and there is something in at least the last three of these points. Yet the truth of the whole is less than that of any one of its parts. For the whole picture he paints is that of a conspiracy: a conspiracy to dupe the common people, organized in what Tygodnik Solidarność writers refer to as the “Warsaw—Kraków salon” and led by the satanic pair, “Michnik and Geremek,” whose names are repeated over and over again.

  To suggest this is covert anti-Semitism (both Michnik and Geremek are of Jewish origin) would be as crude as it would be to suggest that Polish-Jewish history has nothing to do with the argument. The best way to describe it is, I think, in terms of residual images. In what Jaroslaw Kaczynski says, and even more in what some of the more explicitly right-wing groups say, there is the residual image of a Jewish conspiracy. In what Adam Michnik says, there is the residual image of a pogrom. (Of course, these residual images are not historically symmetrical, for there never was a Jewish conspiracy, whereas there were pogroms. Indeed, it must not be forgotten that Poland saw a communist-led anti-Semitic campaign as recently as 1968.) Yet the emphasis in both cases should be on the word residual. To suggest that this is somehow the “real” difference, the bottom line, would be as wrong as it would be to reduce the present arguments to any other single dichotomy: left-right, European-nationalist, monopoly-pluralism, workers-intelligentsia, Ins-Outs.

  Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that what the communists have left behind is an extraordinary mishmash, a profound fragmentation and cacophony of interests, attitudes, views, ideals, traditions: what in Polish is called a miazga. The system of late communism may not have qualified for the label “totalitarianism,” but it was certainly posttotalitarian. Many elements of civil society—elementary property rights, legal structures, intermediate institutions that still existed under the dictatorships in Spain, Greece, or Latin America—were destroyed in Eastern Europe and even more thoroughly in the Soviet Union. In this sense, the totalitarian-authoritarian distinction may yet be found to have some validity.

  A Russian joke about the transition from communism makes the point better than any learned disquisition: “We know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup; the question is, Can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?” In East Central Europe, things are not quite so hopeless. Here one has something more like a goulash than a fish soup. (After goulash communism comes the postcommunist goulash.) There are large lumps of civil society swimming around like meat in the goulash: private farmers, churches, universities, small-scale entrepreneurs. But it is still a very long way from the regular meat and two vegetables of developed Western societies, with relatively coherent blocs of interests, aspirations, and traditions finding their political expression through a small number of relatively durable political parties.

  In East Central Europe today there are a few elements of political differentiation based on socioeconomic positions. For example, ever since the formulation of the Mazowiecki government, private farmers have been the most clearly defined and determined interest group in Polish politics. But it is still very difficult to imagine a class-based politics. Wałȩsa and his political allies may still sometimes speak in the name of “the workers,” but in reality the working class is almost as divided as the intelligentsia is between those who stand to gain from this or that measure or marketization and those who stand to lose by it. In Poland, there is still no significant property-owning middle class. In Hungary, the sociologist Elemér Hankiss argues that one can already identify a small grande bourgeoisie (the “red barons” of the cities and the “green barons” of the agricultural cooperatives) and a larger petite bourgeoisie, numbering perhaps as many as two million. But he cannot yet offer any significant correlation between these new-old classes and particular parties.

  Indeed, in both Poland and Hungary the more important divide may be between those who believe that parliamentary politics can change something in their everyday lives and those who do not. In these countries’ first free elections in more than forty years, the rate of abstention was staggeringly high: nearly 40 percent in Poland’s parliamentary elections in 1989, nearly 60 percent in the local elections in May 1990; 35 percent in the first round of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, 55 percent in the second.

  It would be wrong to say that there are no ideological divides. Of course there are. They emerge, for example, in one of the most important debates in all contemporary East Central European politics: how to proceed with privatization. Should the present management of state enterprises be allowed to turn them into joint-stock companies? Or should ownership be given to the workers? Or should shares be distributed to the whole population, perhaps through a system of holding companies or investment funds? And what, if any, should be the limitations on foreign ownership? But, again, these differences are not sufficiently clear and simple to form the basis of different political parties. The arguments are precisely about how to proceed with privatization, not about whether to.

  If the basis of postcommunist politics is neither class nor ideology, then what is it? At the moment, the answers would seem to be history and the West. Western models play a major role, both in the design of the new political institutions of East Central Europe and in the formation of parties. Everywhere, teams of Western experts have been called in to give their advice. In domestic debates about the new constitution, the “French model,” the “Italian model,” and the “German model” are basic terms of reference. The last mentioned is particularly noteworthy.

  Germany has offered many things to East Central Europe over the centuries, but democracy has rarely been among them. Now, however, the German model of democracy is arguably the most relevant of all, because it is a model built on the rubble of a totalitarian dictatorship and very deliberately designed to prevent the return of such a dictatorship. It is, one might say, a Western system built on Central European experience. Constitutional elements such as the rule that parties must win more than 5 percent of the popular vote to gain any seats in parliament or the parliamentary institution of the “constructive vote of no confidence”—that is, a vote of no confidence that simultaneously appoints a new prime
minister—have been copied directly in Czechoslovakia and Hungary respectively. The West German parties, together with their wealthy and active party foundations, also play important roles. At the moment, the CDU seems to be most successful, while the SPD has the problem that all over East Central Europe ex-communists are now calling themselves Social Democrats.

  On the other hand, there is history. I have referred already to some residual images that shape and color Polish and Hungarian politics. In Czechoslovakia, the only relatively clear divides at this moment are historical-national ones, with separate Czech and Slovak versions of the revolutionary civic movement dominating the Czech and Slovak governments, while both are challenged by Slovak nationalists, by Hungarian nationalists in Slovakia, and by Moravian and Silesian autonomists. But these echoes of the interwar period are only one part of the story. Both the more recent and the more distant past also play roles.

  To understand present conflicts, you really need a collective biography of the last forty years. Members of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, for example, often charge the Free Democrats with being former Marxists, while claiming they themselves had no illusions about communism. Similar charges are heard in Poland. Yet many of those who never had any illusions about communism were also never particularly active against it. Gáspár Miklós Tamás, the Transylvanian philosopher and Free Democrat MP, memorably calls them “the sleepers.” In present-day politics, you have the class of ’48, the class of ’56, the class of ’68, the class of ’80, and—largest of all—the class of ’89. Both between the classes and within each class there is a complex personal history of friendships and rivalries. You cannot begin to understand the personal alignments of today unless you know who did what to whom over the last forty years.

  Sometimes, however, one can dig too deep. For example, there were, to be sure, obvious differences of tone and style between Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Lech Wałȩsa over the last ten years: Mazowiecki always diplomatic, cautious to a fault, a cabinet politician; Wałȩsa direct, instinctive, a tribune of the people. Yet the origins of the conflict between them essentially lie in developments over just the last year (1989—1990), when Mazowiecki was sitting in the prime minister’s office in Warsaw while Wałȩsa was sitting in Gdansk.

  “How you see things depends on where you sit,” as Wałȩsa himself put it. Last autumn, the civic movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia believed that they were embarking on a sort of “march through the institutions,” to recall the German student slogan of ’68. But what we have seen was almost the opposite: a march of the institutions through people. It is remarkable how quickly and fully people identify with that particular part of the political system in which, initially almost by chance, they have come to serve: with government as opposed to parliament, with parliament as opposed to the extraparliamentary movement, with the presidency (in Prague Castle) as opposed to the government, and so on.

  At the same time, one cannot ignore the elements of history, tradition, and political culture stretching back not months but centuries. Obviously, these are more difficult to analyze and assess. But they are certainly there. Watching a meeting of Lech Wałȩsa’s Citizens’ Committee in the main lecture hall of Warsaw University, with people making theatrical entrances and exits, passionate speeches, and furious interjections from the floor, and then plotting in the corridors, I wrote at the top of my notes one word: sejmik (literally “little parliament”—that is, the gentry parliaments of prepartition Poland). Then the film director Andrzej Wajda slipped into the chair beside me and said, “You see, all they need is sabers and they’d be fighting each other outside.”

  Amid this baffling cacophony of intelligentsia politics—baffling to a large part of the population as well as to the outsider—with its strange admixtures of Pilsudski and Olof Palme, Horthy and Thatcher, Masaryk and Weizsäcker, Bundestag and sejmik, the only serious path to real understanding is a detailed historical and, in the case of the leading actors, biographical narrative. But, short of that, there are still a few generalizations that might be risked.

  2

  A friend of mine has a thick file labeled simply “TD.” It contains invitations to conferences on the subject of the “Transition to Democracy” in Eastern Europe. “TC” might be a more accurate label. What one can certainly observe in the whole of Eastern Europe, and in much of the Soviet Union, is the Transition from Communism. But the only case in which one can be almost 100 percent certain that the transition will indeed be to democracy is that of the former German Democratic Republic, which will cease to be called democratic but actually become so. It is, however, no disrespect to the people of East Germany to say that this will be as much an imported as a homegrown democracy.

  Inside the Soviet Union, the aspirations of such European peoples as the Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians, and of European Russians are clearly in the same basic direction—toward liberal democracy, the market economy, and the rule of law—but the problems they face are both of a different kind (being part of a multinational internal empire) and of a different degree (fish soup rather than merely goulash). In the Balkans, too, there is a rather different pattern, with what seems at the moment to be a transition from a (notionally) communist dictatorship to a non-(or ex-?) communist dictatorship in Romania, and Yugoslavia facing ethnic-national problems more comparable with those of the Soviet Union than with those of East Central Europe.

  The heartlands of East Central Europe—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—are therefore, at the moment, something of a special case. One might also say a test case, for the success or failure of their attempts will influence future developments in the countries of the Balkans and the Soviet Disunion. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia are the three ex-communist countries that are at the moment clearly attempting to build their own democracies on the ruins of dictatorship. Hungary and Czechoslovakia have had wholly free parliamentary elections, which all observers accept to have been fair. Poland has had partly free but wholly fair parliamentary elections and wholly free local elections. These elections were not contested by a “normal” party spectrum, as in Western Europe, but nonetheless they produced real parliaments. New constitutions are being written. There is already legally guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly, and worship. There are a free press and free media, although the practice of independent journalism still leaves much to be desired—especially in the all-important medium of television. People can travel freely, limited only by shortage of hard currency. The increasing convertibility of their own currencies is itself a vital element of freedom and dignity. Everyday life is less abnormal.

  So these countries are traveling hopefully, but will they arrive? It is a commonplace to say that the chances for the political transition from dictatorship to democracy depend to a very large degree on the economic transition from a planned to a market economy. However, it is also true that the chances for the economic transition depend on the politics of transition. It is, I think, slightly misleading to describe the problem as that of a possible “failure” of the economic transition, for even “success” will be agonizing in the early stages. This transition is, as Ralf Dahrendorf has written, unavoidably a valley of tears. The valley may be shallow or deep, short or long, but a valley there will certainly be. Even the Germans, with far better starting conditions in 1948, got poorer before they got richer. (There is also a problem of unrealistic popular expectations in East Central Europe, based on a mental elision of the idea of the 1950s Wirtschaftswunder with the visible reality of West German prosperity in the 1990s. Perhaps the Goethe Institute should organize a traveling exhibition showing everyday life in Germany in the early 1950s.) In Czechoslovakia, there is talk of achieving a soft landing. But the real question is whether they can achieve a soft takeoff. Even East Germany is not going to have that.

  The immediate question, therefore, is, What variant of democratic politics can, on the one hand, provide sufficiently strong, stable, consistent government to sustain the necessary rigors of fiscal
, monetary, and economic policy over a period of several years, while, on the other hand, being sufficiently flexible and responsive to absorb the larger part of the inevitable popular discontents through parliamentary or, at least, legal channels, thus preventing the resort to extraparliamentary, illegal, and ultimately antidemocratic means? This challenge has already been posed in a quite direct way in Poland, with peasant farmers physically occupying the agriculture ministry and blocking highways across the country.

  For some in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the requirements implicit in this question seem to point to the need for a strong presidency. In an opinion poll conducted in Poland in mid-July 1990, 52 percent of those asked said the highest power in the state should be the president, against 43 percent for parliament. In Hungary, by contrast, the argument seems already to have been decided in favor of parliament, with a presidency having little real power although lots of real influence. The American political scientist Alfred Stepan has argued forcefully that the South European and Latin American experiences of attempted transitions from dictatorship to democracy suggest that an unambiguously parliamentary system has a better chance of striking the necessary balance than a presidential one. Executive presidents are less able to create consensus behind painful (e.g., anti-inflationary) policies than parliamentary coalitions are. The executive president therefore becomes either a weak president, because he bows to the majority, or a strong but antidemocratic one, because he does not. It is, of course, questionable how far such experience is applicable to a regime with a very different history and with the unprecedented task of transforming not just an authoritarian but a posttotalitarian polity, not just a controlled but a central-command economy.