PA Nonetheless, what I have seen on the ground in East Central Europe would support the general argument. Given the fragmentation and confusion of interests, aspirations, and traditions that I have sketched above, it is very difficult to see how any president, however popular or charismatic, could sustain a voluntary consensus over a sufficient period for those painful policies of economic transition to have a chance to work, unless it was by mobilizing nationalistic fervor against a real or alleged common enemy: a new devil—Russian? German? Jewish? Romanian?—to take the place of the communist one. But such an undemocratic, nationalist mobilization would itself undermine the proposed economic transition, which depends crucially on the continued goodwill and active engagement of Western democracies.
No, the political key to creating such a consensus must be the creation of strong, freely elected coalition governments. At the time of writing (July 1990) each of the East Central European countries has fulfilled two of these conditions, but none has fulfilled all three. Hungary has a freely elected coalition government. But thus far it seems to be a weak coalition government, one in which junior coalition partners (e.g., the Smallholders) behave as if they hardly belong to the coalition, while the main partner, the Democratic Forum, is itself a coalition with a coalition. Nor has the Antall government found an architect of economic transformation to compare with Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland or Václav Klaus in Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia has a freely elected government—in fact, it has three freely elected governments: federal, Czech, and Slovak. If President Havel were to put his authority firmly behind the policies proposed by the finance minister, Václav Klaus, who knows that there is no such thing as a soft takeoff, then the federal government might also be a strong government. But it is not a coalition, in the sense of a government constructed as a negotiated deal between distinct parliamentary parties. For here there is at present really only one party, or rather movement. Since the 5 percent rule (taken over from West Germany) led to the elimination at the polls of virtually all the minor parties contesting the election, the Civic Forum in the Czech lands and, to a lesser extent, the Public Against Violence in Slovakia are left as overwhelming blocs, with a parliamentary opposition composed only of communists and nationalists (plus some Christian Democrats in Slovakia).
The competing parties will therefore have to form out of the body of the Civic Forum. There are already nascent political groupings within the Forum, and one proclaimed protoparty, the neoliberal (or is it neoconservative?) Civic Democratic Alliance. These parties will have to separate out in time to compete in the next election, scheduled for 1992. The tendency must therefore be for the Civic Forum to pull apart, rather than to pull together. How this necessary pluralization can be combined with the unity required to sustain the hard policies of economic transition over the two-year period nobody in Prague could tell me.
As for Poland, from the formation of the Mazowiecki government in September 1989 until the spring of 1990, it had something that it has not often had in its history: a strong coalition government. This was a broad coalition, dominated by ministers from the Solidarity side but containing communists in key positions (defense, interior ministry) as well as representatives from the formerly puppet Democratic and Peasant parties. It was a strong coalition, which managed to sustain, in its first six months, a remarkable degree of national consensus through the most radical and painful economic shock therapy that had yet been seen anywhere in the ex-communist world: the so-called Balcerowicz Plan.
The trouble is that it was not a freely elected coalition government. And when free parliamentary elections had been held everywhere else in Eastern Europe, when Czechoslovakia and Hungary had their playwright presidents (Václav Havel and Árpád Göncz), then it began to seem anachronistic and shameful that Poland—the pioneer throughout the 1980s—should still have a rigged parliament and, heaven help us, General Jaruzelski as president. A seemingly transformed General Jaruzelski to be sure, as mild and discreet and civil and cooperative as any West European constitutional monarch, but nonetheless—Jaruzelski.
In the event, Polish politics were transformed by Lech Wałȩsa’s challenge from Gdansk. But even if Wałȩsa had behaved like—well, like Jaruzelski—the problem would still have become acute. It seems to me quite unlikely that, in these external circumstances, the Mazowiecki government and, so to speak, the Geremek parliament could have stuck to the timetable of first holding completely free parliamentary elections in 1991 and only then electing a new president. Even if they had, there would still almost certainly have been a crystallization of competing parties from within the broad Solidarity movement and its Citizens’ Committees.
These Citizens’ Committees are strange creatures. The central one started life as a group of intellectual advisers to Lech Wałȩsa. In the first half of 1990, it was expanded to include representatives of very different political groupings, at Wałȩsa’s behest but against the wishes of many of its founding members. The regional Citizens’ Committees were set up on the initiative of the Solidarity leadership (Wałȩsa, Geremek, and Mazowiecki, then working in close harmony) to win the historic June 1989 election. They had no clear structure or membership. Anyone “who felt good there” could come, as one member explained. This sort of spontaneous, quasi-revolutionary grassroots democracy has, of course, led to countless tensions and conflicts ever since that glorious fourth of June.
In fact the dilemma of the Citizens’ Committees in Poland is comparable to that of the Civic Forum in the Czech lands. Once the electorate had shown that its confidence still lay with the heirs of the revolution (and the Citizens’ Committee lists secured over 41 percent of the vote in the May 1990 local elections), then it was clear that the process of democratic pluralization must occur inside the movement as well as outside it.
This is one of the things that Lech Wałȩsa said most forcefully. But it is not the only thing that he said. In fact, in a series of pyrotechnic interviews and speeches, he said many different and contradictory things—some very acute, some very stupid, some funny, and some less so. There are two ways of viewing the “war at the top” that Wałȩsa launched in spring 1990. One is that Wałȩsa, being in touch with ordinary people, saw that all was not going well with the government he had done so much to create. His former intellectual advisers and comrades were growing too comfortable in their undemocratic, rigged Warsaw coalition: their “new monopoly.” Meanwhile, both political and economic changes were going too slowly. Privatization, insofar as it was happening at all, was benefiting the old nomenklatura rather than ordinary people. As prices and unemployment rose, so did popular discontent: Witness the railwaymen’s and other strikes, which only Wałȩsa, with his authority and charisma, managed to pacify.
What was needed, therefore, was an “acceleration”—acceleration of privatization and marketization, to be sure, but above all political acceleration, meaning free parliamentary elections, Wałȩsa for president, and the faster removal of communists at all levels. Wałȩsa sometimes adopted the argument, made by Jaroslaw Kaczński and others, that, since people could not be offered economic goods, in the short term they should be offered symbolic political goods instead—that is, communist heads on a silver platter. Not salami tactics but Salome tactics.
The other way of describing Wałȩsa’s campaign is more simple. Having contributed more than any other single human being, with the exceptions of the pope and Mikhail Gorbachev, to the end of communism in Eastern Europe; having won the elections; having formed the Mazowiecki government; he suddenly found himself marginalized, up there in Gdansk, while all the action was in Warsaw. Then he found that his popularity was slipping in the opinion polls prominently published by Gazeta Wyborcza—the paper whose editor, Adam Michnik, he, Wałȩsa, had chosen personally. According to one of these polls, he even scored lower than Jaruzelski as a suitable candidate for the presidency. His former advisers made it plain that they, too, did not see him as president. Then news leaked out from the Bel
weder, the presidential palace, that Jaruzelski, resenting the attacks upon him and realizing that his time was past, was ready to resign. So, if Wałȩsa wanted to be president, it was now or never.
There is truth in both versions. The discontents and problems to which Wałȩsa pointed were real, but so was his personal sense of destiny. Like a commander in chief, he replaced the chairman of the Citizens’ Committee with his own appointee, Zdzislaw Najder. Then he sacked—by public letter—the secretary of the Citizens’ Committee, Henryk Wujec, for many years one of his closest comrades. When Wujec politely objected that, since he had been elected by the Citizens’ Committee, only the committee could dismiss him, Wałȩsa wrote back, no longer to “Henryk” but to “Representative Henryk Wujec,” the now famous line, “feel yourself dismissed.” Then he attempted to sack Adam Michnik from Gazeta Wyborcza. Then he peremptorily summoned the prime minister to a meeting in front of the workers in the former Lenin Shipyard, now once again called simply the Gdańsk Shipyard. “Let us meet at the source,” he wrote, as if “the source” of the prime minister’s power was somehow still the workers’ muscle that gave birth to Solidarity in August 1980, rather than the election of June 1989 that gave birth to the Mazowiecki government. (But then, and here’s the catch, it wasn’t a wholly free election, and people were voting for the “candidates of Lech Wałȩsa.”)
In a newspaper interview in mid-June, he said:
For today, when we are changing the system, we need a president with an ax: decisive, tough, straightforward, doesn’t mess around, doesn’t get in the way of democracy, but immediately fills the holes. If he sees that the people are profiting from the change of system, stealing, he issues a decree, valid until the parliament passes a law. I would save half of Poland if I had such powers.
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Is this merely a specific, Polish problem, with one very special history and one very special person, or is it a more general one? Bronisław Geremek has spoken dramatically of the “totalitarian temptation” in postcommunist countries. As an analytical (as opposed to a rhetorical) proposition, this goes too far. One cannot see in any East Central European country today the combination of specific features that the French philosopher Jean-François Revel characterized as the totalitarian temptation. But one can see the seeds of an authoritarian temptation.
This is least apparent in Czechoslovakia, the country with the strongest twentieth-century democratic tradition. To be sure, one can hear criticism of Havel’s high-handed, arbitrary style, and, as you would expect, much more outspoken criticism of his “court.” But, in his speech to the newly elected Federal Assembly, Havel himself came out in favor of somewhat reducing the powers of the presidency from those he currently enjoys. If the government(s) can remain coherent and strong, even while the Civic Forum breaks into different protoparties—a very big if—then there is a chance that Havel could withdraw slightly farther from the everyday political arena, in the best case becoming to the Czechoslovak transition what King Juan Carlos was to the Spanish one.
In Hungary, the temptation is perhaps slightly greater. As one Hungarian writer put it to me a short time ago, “The Czechs are so lucky. When they look under the carpet they find Masaryk, whereas we find Horthy.” Fortunately, Hungary’s new president is no Horthy but instead is that same Hungarian writer: the liberal, genial, and charming Árpád Göncz. In the present design of Hungary’s new political system, if there were to be a new “strongman,” it would probably be in the position of prime minister rather than president. His rule would be reinforced, it is suggested, by an alliance with an extra-parliamentary “movement,” a Bewegung, and buttressed by weak, government-dominated media. But the Democratic Forum really does not yet qualify as a Bewegung. Although the press may not be as fiercely independent as it should be—ironically enough, the former party paper Népszabadság is now said to be one of the best dailies—it is still very far from being a transmission belt for government policy.
Even in Poland, where the authoritarian temptation actually has a name and a mustache, the immediate danger is certainly not that of a Balkan-style transition from communist to noncommunist dictatorship. In fact, one might say that the immediate danger here is of too much democracy, not of too little. The immediate effect of Wałȩsa’s extraordinary campaign was to accelerate—to use his own buzzword—the process of pluralization and political fragmentation.
If Hungary needs the element of strength, and Czechoslovakia the genuine coalition, Poland needs the free election. But will the freely elected government then be a strong coalition, as the half freely elected Mazowiecki government was for its first six months? Or will it rather be a weak coalition, with members from numerous smaller parties or factions, subject to endless conflicts and frequent reshuffles? This is, after all, what happened last time Poland regained its independence and attempted to build a parliamentary democracy, in the years from 1918 to 1926. Then, as the historian Norman Davies observes jocularly, “the proliferating profusion of possible political permutations…palpably prevented the propagation of permanent pacts between potential partners.”
At a meeting of Lech Wałȩsa’s central Citizens’ Committee in late March, at the very beginning of the “war at the top,” Tadeusz Mazowiecki expressed his fear that the fledgling Polish democracy could turn into “a Polish hell. A Polish hell of squabbles, intrigues, and conflicts.” At the dramatic thirteenth meeting of that committee, in June, Wałȩsa said, “Maybe we have to go through the Polish hell.” And that is rather how it looks at this writing. One could, perhaps, afford such fissiparous politics—the Italians seem to manage—if one already had a flourishing free-market economy, with only a small state sector, and a developed civil society. But here, in the immediate postcommunist period, too much still depends on the state. It is the state that has to organize the withdrawal of the state from the economy, the state that has to create the conditions for “building” civil society. One might, therefore, offer an alternative definition of the Polish hell: Italian politics without the Italian economy.
Altogether, if there is a threat to democracy in East Central Europe, it will probably come through a period of, so to speak, excessive democracy. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as well as in Poland, one can see three major elements that give cause for concern. First, there is popular disgruntlement, not only about the costs of economic transition, such as price rises, reduction of subsidies, and unemployment, not only about new injustices and the slowness of visible change but also about the processes of parliamentary democracy, which are themselves held to be responsible for the slowness of change. It is difficult to adapt psychologically from the dramatic fast-forward of last year’s revolutions to the slow motion of this year’s parliamentary democracy. Seeming indifference to the new politics (reflected in the very high abstention rates in Poland and Hungary) and revolutionary impatience are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.
Second, the processes of the fledgling democracy are, indeed, often slow, ramshackle, and flawed. If there is abnormally low popular tolerance or understanding of political conflict (“Why can’t we still be united?”), there is also an abnormally high level of political conflict inside the new political elites: because there are no clear dividing lines, no proper parties, and few “rules of the game”; because the new leaders, too, are unused to living with routinized, multilateral conflict and have difficulty moving from antipolitical to ordinary political language; and, yes, because power is a dangerous drug. Finally, the inevitable dislocation and distress associated with the conversion to a market economy could increase both the fissiparousness of the elite and the disillusionment of the populace. One could then all too easily imagine these three elements—elite dissension, popular disillusionment, economic distress—combining in a vicious circle, each exacerbating the other.
After 1918 came 1926 and Pilsudski’s coup. Yet although in so many ways the past seems to be returning with a vengeance, there are at least two powerful reasons for believing that history will
not simply repeat itself. The first is the popular experience of dictatorships (of right and left) over the last half century. When the expatriate Nobel Prize—winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was asked, on a recent trip to Poland, what he thought people might have learned from the years under communism he replied, “Resistance to stupidities.” An optimistic interpretation, you may say, but there are some grounds for believing that fifty years of bitter experience have given the people of East Central Europe a resistance to certain kinds of stupidity. The kinds of stupidity associated with dictatorships, for example.
As we have seen, people are unfamiliar with, and therefore sometimes distrustful of, the forms and habits of democracy. But the habits of dictatorship? With these they are all too familiar. “Though I may not be able to define freedom,” wrote another Polish poet, “I know exactly what unfreedom is.” Suppose a would-be strongman comes along and, using populist demagogy, attempts to overturn the parliamentary government. How, then, would he rule? By an extraparliamentary mass movement? By police terror? By censorship? By martial law? The repertory of dictatorship is relatively small and, in this region, quite comprehensively discredited.
Against this argument you may cite Romania, where an authoritarian regime has succeeded the Ceausescu dictatorship. Without insisting too much on differences of tradition and political culture between East Central Europe and the Balkans, I would point to a second, powerful, reason for believing that these countries can after all resist the authoritarian temptation. This is the international context. If more or less authoritarian regimes flourished in East Central Europe between the wars, this was partly because there were examples of authoritarianism elsewhere in Europe that could somehow be associated with the dream of modernity. Today there are no such examples, and modernity is unambiguously associated with democracy.
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