I find it useful to distinguish between West Central Europe— meaning mainly Germany, but also Austria and that corner of Italy— and East Central Europe. But when people say “Central Europe” in English, they usually mean just the latter. As Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic become Western-style capitalist democracies, join NATO and (eventually) enter the EU, so the line between Central and Western Europe becomes increasingly blurred. Far from being dismayed, those who revived the terms in the 1980s should be delighted by this merging.
The frontier that need trouble us least is the northern one. In his anxiety to gather all the same nations under the flag, Masaryk included in his Central Europe everyone from Laplanders in the north to Greeks in the south. The region stretched, he implausibly suggested, from “the North Cape to Cape Matapan.” But Scandinavia has a quite distinct identity. To be sure, the Baltic states are an important borderline case. Lithuanians, in particular, will tell you their country belongs both to the Nordic or Baltic area and to Central Europe. Lithuania, they argue, is a bridge between the two. Since, however, Scandinavia is part of the Western capitalist democratic world, and the Baltic states are small, their in-between position is not in itself a political problem, although Russia’s objections to their membership in NATO and the status of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad will be.
The major political argument now is about the eastern and southern edges. As revived by Kundera and others, the idea of Central Europe was directed against the East (with a large E), and specifically against Russia. Central Europe, Kundera suggested, was the “kidnapped West.”4 Until 1945, it had participated fully in all the great cultural movements of the West, from western Christianity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment to Expressionism and Cubism. But politically it was now imprisoned in the East. Out of a cultural canon he made a cannon—firing against the East. As Joseph Brodsky pointed out, this was quite unfair to Russian culture. But politically it was justified and effective as an antidote to the even more misleading notion of a single “Eastern Europe.”
In the 1990s, the cultural ca(n)non has been directed against the south more than the east. The new democracies of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia set out early in the decade to pursue Central European cooperation, symbolized by the “Visegrád group” established in February 1991. They did this partly because they believed in the idea, which Havel and the new Hungarian president Árpád Göncz had preached in the 1980s, and wished to preclude any return to the petty nationalisms of the interwar years. But it was also because this right, tight little regional cooperation would win their countries favor in the West. Which it did.
They had little trouble distinguishing themselves from the new eastern (with a small e) Europe: Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia. More difficult was the south. Romania tried to join the group at an early stage. The door was closed firmly in its face. A good reason for this was that Romania was at that time an undemocratic mess. A less good reason was that Polish, Hungarian, and (then still) Czechoslovak leaders thought they had a better chance of entering or (as the Central European ideology prescribes) “rejoining” the West in a smaller, more homogeneous group. Which they did.
Then came the bloody collapse of the former Yugoslavia. This revived another previously dormant geopolitical nation, “the Balkans,” with connotations as negative as those of “Central Europe” were now positive. For politicians everywhere, and especially for Polish, Hungarian, and Czech politicians, the Manichaean contrast between “Central Europe,” bathed in light, and “the Balkans,” drenched in blood, was irresistible.5
To cap it all, the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington made his influential argument that the new cleavages of world politics would be based on “the clash of civilizations”—civilizations being defined mainly by their religious origins.6 The Kunderaesque view of Central Europe, arguing as it does from culture to politics, fits perfectly into the Huntingtonian scheme, and it’s no surprise to find Huntington enthusiastically adopting the term. But he goes further, suggesting that the eastern and southern boundary of Central Europe is simultaneously the frontier of Europe and “Western civilization.”
What is this boundary, more fundamental even than the post-1945 Iron Curtain? According to Huntington, it is the dividing line between western (Catholic or Protestant) Christianity, on the one side, and eastern (Orthodox) Christianity or Islam on the other. This line has been in roughly its present position for about five hundred years, and its origins go back as far as the division of the Roman empire in the fourth century. Huntington even suggests that, because they are on the wrong side of the line, Turkey and Greece may not remain full members of NATO and, in the case of Greece, the EU. Note, however, that the Baltic states, most of western Ukraine, half of Romania, all of Croatia, and even small parts of Bosnia and Serbia (i.e., the formerly Hungarian province of Vojvodina) fall on the “western” side.
At worst, the result has been an extreme cultural determinism. I call it Vulgar Huntingtonism, by analogy with Vulgar Marxism. It says: If your heritage is western Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the German or Austro-Hungarian empires, Baroque architecture, and coffee with Schlagobers, then you are destined for democracy. But eastern (Orthodox) Christianity or Islam, the Russian or Ottoman empires, minarets, burek, and Turkish coffee? Doomed to dictatorship! Of course, this is crude to the point of parody. But the way political ideas get used in real politics is very crude. And it has not been in the interest of the “Central Europeans” to restore any confusing nuances.
Yet this extreme cultural determinism curiously coexists with an equally extreme political voluntarism. For, in the political usage of the West, countries seem to jump in and out of “Central Europe” according to their current political behavior. The best example of this is Slovakia, and it’s worth dwelling on for a moment.
2
In 1990, few people doubted that Slovakia belonged to Central Europe. It joined the Visegrád group as part of Czechoslovakia, and being in the same state as the Czech lands was certainly a help. Yet Slovakia had many of the historical qualifications in its own right, being geographically central, overwhelmingly Catholic, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and with a capital that was once—though as Pressburg or Pozsony rather than as Bratislava—a cosmopolitan Central European city.
At the same time, its politicians were looking for more autonomy from Prague and a better deal in the Czecho-Slovak federation. These nationalist demands escalated under the demagogic populist Vladimír Mečiar, until the new Czech prime minister Václav Klaus suddenly gave more than most Slovaks (and probably Mečiar himself) wanted: full independence as a sovereign state, as of 1 January 1993. A headline in a Czech newspaper encapsulated the Klaus view. It said, “Alone to Europe or with Slovakia to the Balkans?”
For nearly six years thereafter, with one six-month intermission, Mečiar ran a corrupt, nationalist, semi-authoritarian regime of the kind that has been called, adapting a Latin American term, demokratura. It had more in common with the Tudjman regime in Croatia or even the Milošević regime in Serbia than it did with politics in the Czech Republic. The two parts of the former country— Masaryk’s country—grew apart at extraordinary speed. (“Yes, we occasionally look at Czech television,” a Slovak friend told me. “We watch it as we used to watch Austrian television in the communist times.”)
The three pillars of Mečiar’s demokratura, as of Tudjman’s and Milošević’s, were state television, the secret police, and the misappropriation of the formerly state-owned economy by regime members and supporters.7 Television was grotesquely biased and manipulated. The secret police, called the Slovak Information Service (hence SIS, but not to be confused with the British Secret Intelligence Service), bugged, burgled, and intimidated Mečiar’s opponents. SIS officers were almost certainly implicated in kidnapping the son of the country’s president, Michal Kovác, Mečiar’s most prominent critic, as well as in the subsequent murder of someone trying to spill the
beans on their involvement in the crime. “Privatization” was a polite word for misappropriation. And then there was nationalist scapegoating of ethnic Hungarians, some 11 percent of the new state’s population. They were denied basic minority rights, such as having street signs in their own language, and ranted against by Mečiar in what one Slovak democrat described to me as “hate hours.” Relations with Hungary were abysmal.
In this fashion, Slovakia ejected itself from Central Europe. It fell off the “first wave” list of candidates for NATO and the EU. The Czechs, despairing of their former partner, took up instead with Slovenia, as that most northern, prosperous, and peaceful of the former Yugoslav republics successfully sold itself as a Central European state. (There were even quips about Czecho-Slovenia.) Early in 1998, Madeleine Albright—herself of Czech origin—warned that Slovakia could become “a hole on the map of Europe.” As late as August, Milan Šimečka, one of the country’s leading independent journalists, wrote to me, “The situation here is worse and worse. Yesterday happened something bad [sic] in the private TV Markiza, Mečiar is going to take it. He learns from Milošević and Tudjman.”
Then, suddenly, everything changed. In September 1998, Mečiar lost the election. He was peacefully and decisively defeated by a grand coalition of opposition parties, supported by nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, independent media, and parts of the Catholic Church. When I visited Bratislava in November, there was a real sense of liberation. Slovakia did not have much of a popular “velvet revolution” in 1989, and the sociologist Martin Bútora suggested to me that this peaceful overthrow of Mečiar was “our delayed velvet revolution.” In previous years, people who joined in the 28 October manifestation to mark the founding of Czechoslovakia had looked around nervously, fearing Mečiarite surveillance or provocation. This year it was all smiles and celebration. The head of the private Radio Twist told me he used to spend three quarters of his time defending it against regime harassment: licenses revoked, punitive taxes, power lines cut. Now he jokes that he has so much free time he doesn’t know what to do with it.
In parliament, I watched the dismantling of two pillars of the demokratura, as deputies installed a new supervisory board for state television and a new head of the security service. One deputy prime minister told me how the new government was going to build a true market economy. Another, himself a Hungarian, explained how the rights of the Hungarian minority would be respected.
The governing coalition is a fragile one, but thus far it has made all the right noises. And the West has responded in kind. Madeleine Albright told the new foreign minister in January that “if Slovakia continues these reforms and keeps improving its relations with its neighbors” then it would be “a strong candidate” for the next round of NATO enlargement. The French foreign minister encouraged him to believe that the EU might start negotiations with Slovakia before the end of 1999. As if by magic, Slovakia is back in Central Europe again!
If you ask “Why did it fall out?” you can find several answers. One is the presence of a substantial ethnic minority, who could be made scapegoats—especially because the Hungarians are widely seen as a former oppressor. (Slovakia was part of Hungary until 1918 and subjected to “Magyarization.”) It has been something close to a rule in the 1990s that the greater the ethnic mix in a postcommunist country, the more likely the country has been to take a nationalist authoritarian rather than a liberal democratic path. Those that have done best are also those that are ethnically most homogeneous: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and, yes, Slovenia. (Like all rules, this one has exceptions to prove it, such as Estonia, with its large ethnic Russian population.)
There’s a great irony here so far as the Central European debate is concerned. The 1980s revival of the Central European idea involved a celebration of the region’s prewar ethnic and cultural mélange: mixed cities, such as Prague or Czernowitz or Bratislava before it was called Bratislava, where people habitually spoke three or four languages; large minorities, especially Jewish and German ones; multiculturalism avant la lettre. Yet it seems that one of the preconditions for being seen as part of the political Central Europe in the 1990s was precisely not to be Central European in this earlier sense. Or, to put it another way, Slovakia’s problem was that it was still a bit too Central European, in the older sense.
Other reasons offered for Slovakia’s falling away include the weakness of its pre-1989 opposition. “There were really only two dissidents in Bratislava before 1989,” the former dissident Miroslav Kusý reminded me. (The other was Milan Šimečka, father of the independent journalist.) This meant there was no liberal counterelite to take power after the communists fell, leaving the door open for a skillful populist thug like Mečiar. Then there was the fact that Slovakia’s only previous experience of nation-statehood was the clerical-fascist state of Monsignor Jozef Tiso, established under license from Hitler during the Second World War. And this was an agrarian society, with a relatively small bourgeoisie. In other words, Slovakia was missing some vital elements on the 1980s Central European checklist.
But then you have to ask why it succeeded in bouncing back again. Well, there was the proximity to better examples: Slovakia is sandwiched between Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, while Bratislava is an hour’s bus ride from Vienna. And there was significant pressure from the West—both active criticism and what has been called the “passive leverage” of NATO and the EU (i.e., if you don’t do X and Y, we simply won’t let you in).8 But perhaps most important was another key item on the 1980s checklist: civil society.
Even in the worst moments of Mečiarism, Slovakia had a vibrant civil society—or what Slovaks call “the third sector.” There was the powerful Catholic Church. (Although its leaders were rarely outspoken in criticizing Mečiar, prominent lay Catholics were.) There were independent radio stations, magazines, and the private television channel Markiza. And there were numerous nongovernmental organizations. Some sixty of these got together before the elections in a countrywide campaign to persuade people to turn out and vote, starting in the remotest mountain villages and working down toward Bratislava. There were mass meetings, posters, pamphlets, T-shirts, buttons, baseball caps, and “Rock the Vote” concerts. Arguably, this swung the election. The number of votes cast for Mečiar’s party actually increased marginally from the previous election in 1994, but, at least partly thanks to this campaign, the electoral turnout went up much more—from 75 percent to 84 percent. It was these new voters who vanquished Vladimir the Terrible. When I described this civic campaign to opposition friends in Serbia a week later, they threw up their hands in envious despair. So perhaps this was a triumph for Central Europe, in yet another sense.
In sum, the phenomenon of Mečiar shows that a positive political outcome (in shorthand, “democracy”) is not culturally predetermined by a Central European heritage. But the circumstances of his ousting do suggest that it helps.
3
Geopolitical boundaries are not just lines drawn on maps by officials in gilded conference chambers. If they are real, then things change when you cross them on the ground. The Iron Curtain was like that: Walk ten yards from Checkpoint Charlie and you were in a different world. If you want to experience such a dividing line in today’s Europe, then I suggest you go by foot, as I did on a cold November evening, through the border crossing between Vyšné Nemecké in Slovakia and Užhorod in Ukraine.
The shock is instantaneous. Well-made asphalt roads give way to potholes and cobblestones. The Ukrainian border post seems to have been overrun by shaven-headed, thickset men, dressed in black boots, black jeans, black sweaters, and bulging black leather jackets—the uniform of the postcommunist mafiosi. I watch them taking customs officials by the elbow for a quiet word in a dark corner. I can almost hear the word corruption hiss through the freezing fog. Murmuring into their mobile phones, they jump into dirty black Volvos—of the latest, most powerful model—and screech off down the road.
Pausing only to set our
watches forward one hour from Central to East European time, my companion and I proceed, more sedately, past large, extravagant villas, with giant satellite dishes, security cameras, high walls, and metal gates. “New Ukraine!” exclaims our guide, a professor at Užhorod University, whose own salary is barely fifty dollars a month—and he hasn’t been paid for three months. He accepts the hard currency that I give him for a day’s guiding services (the equivalent of a month’s salary) with a mixture of gratitude and wounded pride, while we both desperately try to keep up the pretense that this is just normal academic collaboration between two of the world’s great universities, Oxford and Užhorod.
The hotel demands payment in advance—cash only—and remember to lock your door from the inside. A friend tells how his father-in-law had a small collision with one of those black Volvos. Four men in black jumped out: “This will cost you $4,500. Cash. We come to your office tomorrow morning.” He rang the police, gave them the Volvo’s license number, and they promised to check it out. An hour later, the police rang back. They said, “When those men call tomorrow, you pay.” This is a different world. Its essential qualities, as in Serbia, are habitual corruption, arbitrariness supported by violence, and a state that either cannot protect you or is itself criminal.
Today, the boundary between Central and Eastern Europe— Ukraine, Belarus, and European Russia—is clear and deep and real. I’ve made the case anecdotally, almost flippantly, but one could do so systematically and at length, with supporting statistics and graphs. This is emphatically not to argue cultural predestination. The Huntington line, our new successor to the Curzon line, runs many miles east of here. The line you cross at Užhorod is the western frontier of the former Soviet Union, not the eastern frontier of western Christendom. Nor am I suggesting that these countries are eternally doomed to corruption, chaos, and poverty. Indeed, there is a real possibility that western Ukraine and western Belarus, which, like the Baltic states, were part of the Soviet Union for only two generations rather than three, might recover more quickly than the rest. But both the quality and the sheer scale of the problems of postcommunism in the states of the eastern Slavs make for a political dividing line that will probably last for at least another decade. Today, the eastern frontier of the West runs no longer along the river Elbe, nor along the Oder and Neisse, but along two rivers most people have never heard of: the Bug and the Už.
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