by Geert Mak
‘But at the same time, Maastricht was also the start of a new era. Thatcher was gone. Mitterrand wasn't getting any younger. And within that same general atmosphere, Kohl began distancing himself from me as well. Maastricht was behind us and relations within Europe were being reshuffled. More and more, the Bonn-Paris axis began ruling the agenda.
‘Yet I believe that the essence of our parting of the ways was largely personal. Following the enormous success of reunification, Kohl became a different man. He had steamrollered his way over a few opponents before then, of course, but he had always been quite a good colleague, quite amiable. After 1990, however, he began towering above himself, he became the first chancellor of a reunited Germany, he excelled at that, he revelled in it, but he was no longer able to see the other leaders as his colleagues, unless they happened to be the president of the United States. He began treating Mitterrand the way Yeltsin later treated Gorbachev, condescendingly, humiliatingly. And when I wanted to do things differently, that irritated him no end.
‘At Maastricht, most of the member states had been in favour of having the new European Central Bank in Amsterdam. He was the only one who favoured Frankfurt; he had to go out of his way to force that one through. Not long afterwards, the Croatians announced their secession from the Yugoslav federation. We considered that extremely dangerous, we believed it could mean the start of Yugoslavia's disintegration, and we were right: it finally resulted in a long, violent civil war. But Kohl supported the Croatians openly, he saw their right to self-determination as an extension of that of the German people themselves. Our fearless foreign minister, Hans van den Broek, protested vehemently against that standpoint, again and again. And Kohl's attitude changed to one of: those damned Dutch again! At the drop of a hat, Ruud Lubbers was no longer a partner but a troublemaker.
‘In 1994, Jacques Delors asked me to succeed him as chairman of the European Commission. The Spanish prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez, publicly announced my candidacy. I went to Mitterrand. “No,” Mitterrand said, “Kohl and I have agreed to support your Belgian colleague, Jean-Luc Dehaene. You're trop marin, too Atlantic, you focus too much on England and America.”
‘At that point you could already see the contours of the new Europe taking shape: Kohl and Mitterrand simply put their heads together at Mulhouse and decided things like that, just the two of them, then announced it and expected everyone to go along with them. Kohl, the colossus of Europe, choosing his own man, his aide in Brussels, Dehaene. And he was so angry when the Netherlands didn't accept that decision.
‘The shortest talk I ever had with him was also the last one we ever had. It was about that chairmanship. Kohl had terrorised the little countries, one after another they had bowed to his pressure, but four countries were still standing: England, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. Kohl said: “But this is undemocratic. Eight of the twelve are for Dehaene. Why won't you accept that?” I said: “I see things differently. Together, the four countries who oppose Dehaene's candidacy account for half the population of the EU. Fifty per cent of the European population is saying no to this, no matter what you and Mitterand say. Dehaene and I should both withdraw our candidacy.” Kohl was furious. But that's the way it was, and that's the way it went.
‘In late August 1994, I stepped down as prime minister of the Netherlands. Do you know how that goes here in Holland? My wife was in the hospital, I had my chauffeur drop me off there, then he drove on to our house. My daughter let him in. He had three of those huge satchels full of my personal documents. He upended them here, on this table, he said “Bye, Heleen,” and he left.
‘That was the end of twenty-one-years in Dutch politics.’
Chapter SIXTY
Gdansk
IN THE TRAIN ON THE WAY TO GDANSK, WINTER ARRIVED. THAT MORNING the air had still been cold and clear, but around noon the sky suddenly disappeared behind a curtain of grey, and autumn was over. The wind came up, it started hailing, then the fields turned calm and white. The farms were asleep, the village chimneys were smoking, snow drifted beside the tracks.
Gdansk is smaller and more intimate than you would expect. It is the perfect city for strikes, uprisings and revolutions. The cranes at the shipyards, the church steeples, the hotel apartment for the foreign press, the inner city with its Dutch Renaissance houses, all are within fifteen minutes’ walk of each other. How many revolutions have failed because the movement was too diffused, too fragmented? Here it is the very opposite, here you can literally shout freedom from the housetops and everyone will hear.
It was in this forest of churches and cranes that it all started, the tiny fissures that ultimately brought about the earthquake of 1989. An enormous strike in 1970, bloodily beaten down, put an end to Gomulka's old brand of communism. In 1976, an assistance committee for the families of those who had been arrested formed the basis for Solidarity, an opposition movement – openly supported by the Polish-born Pope – which soon had approximately ten million members. A strike in 1980 at more than 300 locations led to freedom for the trade unions, and to Mass being read on the radio each Sunday.
The December 1981 coup by General Wojciech Jaruzelski turned back the clock for a time, a state of emergency was declared, but it was too late: the influence of the church and trade unions on broad sections of the population could no longer be undone. In addition, the country's economic problems had become more than the regime could handle. A round-table conference in January 1989 – by which time the country's annual inflation had risen to 600 per cent – finally brought free elections and freedom of speech. Gdansk was the place where it all began, and that was no coincidence, for it was here that all of communism's weak spots overlapped: religion, nationalism, rebellious industrial workers, the obstinacy of an old German Hanseatic port, a clear organisation and a wind that always came blowing in from overseas.
Former dockworker Kazimierz Rozkwitalski drives me around the town. That is where the synagogue used to be. Burned down on the Kristallnacht in 1938, it is now a car park. This seaside bunker still bears the bullet holes from September 1939, the first shots fired in the Second World War. Look, the Gestapo used to have its headquarters over there, they started murdering intellectuals here right after the occupation began. Here we have the town hall, bombed to rubble in 1945, but can you really tell it wasn't built in the Middle Ages?
Kazimierz is a wonderful storyteller, and his German is excellent. Where did he learn it? He lets the name roll from his tongue. ‘Inge Zimmermann, hundertachtzig Procent Nazi!’ Between 1939–45 she hammered the German language into his youthful skull, and there it remains. He shows me the former Lenin dockyard, now Stocznia Gdańska SA. An enormous monument of stainless steel, anchors and crosses makes sure no one overlooks the fact that this is historic ground. Here was where the electrician Walşesa delivered his first speeches, here began the decline of an empire. One tattered banner is still hanging.
Why, after all the other failures, was it in Poland that the revolt against the communist nomenklatura finally succeeded? ‘After the Soviet Union, Poland was by far the biggest communist country in Europe,’ Kazimierz reminds me. ‘It had two or three times as many inhabitants as the other Eastern European countries.’ In addition, there was the all-powerful church. And the outspoken Polish patriotism. Plus a weak communist tradition. ‘The regime always left loopholes. For us, the common workers, the 1970s under Edward Gierek were perhaps the best years of all, it was never as good again after that. We always had work and food, we were allowed to go on holiday, some of us already owned cars, the schools and hospitals were well organised. That's more than you can say these days.’
January 1990: the Polish Communist Party disbands itself. September 1993: the last Soviet troops leave Poland. August 1996: Gdansk's Lenin dockyard goes bankrupt. And now? We walk through the slush, the dockyard is a city in itself. ‘Tot,’ Kazimierz murmers, ‘tot’, just the way he learned it from Fraulein Zimmermann. ‘Fifteen years ago this place was full of ships and stevedores.
There were still 30,000 people working in the harbour then. Today there are only 3,000. Of the 17,000 people who used to work at the Lenin dockyard, there are maybe 2,000 left.’ The grass grows tall between the paving stones, the brick warehouses are empty, rusty railings run from one bush to the other, in the silence you can hear the melting snow gurgle through the zinc gutters. But the yards are not completely dead. A huge crane comes clanging past, a railway engine appears from around a corner, workers are welding and sand-blasting. This is not bygone glory, more like a slowly dissolving past.
I am reminded of the story a lady friend, a photographer, once told me about an encounter in a small Portuguese village, not long after the Carnation Revolution. An old man she met there had pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘A member, for forty years.’ It was his certificate of membership in the Communist Party, the symbol of dozens of years of silent resistance, of hope of a better life – if not for him, then at least for his children. The collapse of the communist experiment was inevitable. For many it came as a liberation, but it was also a trauma, and this fact is systemically ignored in a triumphant Western Europe. It brought democracy and intellectual freedom, but only a small portion of the population was better off materially. In Poland, you can clearly see both sides of the story. The figures are amazing: inflation went down from 600 per cent in 1990 to 5.5 per cent in 2001. Foreign investments rose in that same period from several million to almost $5 billion, the country's per capita national production more than doubled from $1,500 in 1990 to almost $4,000 in 1998.
At the same time, the average Polish citizen experienced something very different. Many of the social facilities that were once free or very inexpensive – medicine, hospitals, day-care centres, schools, care for the elderly – today cost a great deal. Millions of Poles lost their jobs, and the pensions for the elderly and invalids lost much of their buying power. As a fellow passenger told me in the train to Gdansk: ‘We used to have plenty of money, but there was nothing to buy. Now there's plenty to buy, but we have no money. In the final analysis, we're no better off. We've been fooled.’
The collapse of the wall did not bring prosperity to huge numbers of Eastern European families, but rather shortage: at home, in the schools and hospitals, in every area. Figures from the World Bank clearly show the scope of the drama: in 1990, seven per cent of all Central and Eastern Europeans lived below the poverty line. In 1999 that had risen to twenty per cent. In that regard, Eastern Europe was worse off than East Asia (fifteen per cent) or Latin America (eleven per cent). The United Nations signalled the same trend: in 1999 there were ninety-seven million people living below the poverty level in the former Eastern Bloc, as compared to thirty-one million in 1990.
The situation has to do in part with the legacy of years of stagnation and Soviet exploitation, with hopelessly obsolete industries, with maintenance that lagged behind by decades. In Poland, the small farmers are in big trouble. They cannot keep up with the competition from Western Europe and the rest of the world. In Berlin, fountains of water regularly burst through the asphalt: yet another broken water main from the DDR years. The Prague metro still used the leaden Soviet train carriages which the Russians had once foisted on the Czechs; in 1998, one of the capital's subway bridges nearly buckled under their weight.
After the collapse of the wall, communism may be viewed as a failed and twisted experiment in social modernisation. ‘But,’ the writer, politician and acadamic George Schöpflin observes, ‘at a deeper level it was much more than that. It tried to create a new civilisation, and to base that on a fundamentally different way of arranging the world.’ The fall of communism also meant the fall of an entire system of morality, and it is within this vacuum that Eastern Europeans must struggle towards the development of new forms of citizenship. ‘Huge numbers of people have essentially no idea what politics is about, what can be reached through it and what cannot. They expect immediate results, and are filled with bitterness when those results do not come … Slowly, very slowly, the myth of the West is being replaced by the reality of the West.’
Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland's biggest media company. The daily newspaper of the same name has a circulation of more than 500,000, spread over 20 local editions, and the group has 2,000 employees. In Warsaw I met cultural editor Anna Bikont, one of the paper's founders in 1989.‘Gazeta Wyborcza means “Election Paper”, and that is literally what it was,’ she explains. ‘Because of the elections, Solidarity was allowed to publish its own newspaper for two months, the first free newspaper in the Eastern Bloc. Adam Michnik came up with the idea – he always thought ahead – while the rest of us were still living entirely in that little, underground world of Solidarity. So we started the Gazeta, with four women at a kitchen table.’
For the Poles, the paper's appearance was a major event. ‘The most important thing was the language in which the paper was written. We were complete amateurs, we didn't write in the officialese of the Polish press agency PAP, we wrote in normal Polish. We used news from foreign press agencies, and we called our friends to verify things, we took our news straight from the source.’ The Gazeta was characteristic of Solidarity's tactics: its founders and readers did not fight head-on against communism, they simply organised themselves outside the apparatus, and on a massive scale. After the communists were voted out of office, the newspaper continued to be published.
Anna Bikont: ‘A whole world opened up for us, we got to know more and more people, correspondents began working in all the cities. At first the newspaper and Solidarity were one and the same, we were activists who were making a newspaper, not much more than that. But gradually we became more professional. We found out that there were different kinds of responsibilities: one old comrade became a cabinet minister, the other became a parliamentarian, and we became journalists. It was hard to be critical, because ministers were often personal friends as well. I remember the first time it really became messy. The Solidarity ministers had been given expensive apartments, just as under communism, and we wrote that this was completely inappropriate. They were furious.’
Within their own ranks as well the editors engaged in heated discussions. ‘Solidarity was a myth,’ Bikont continues. ‘It was, after all, a coalition of three totally diverse groups: trade union people, democratic dissidents and nationalists. In Gdansk, the trade unionists set the tone. In Lódź it was the nationalists; the discussion there was all about changing the names of the streets. In Warsaw, people were concerned with democratic reforms, with procedures, with maintaining the rule of law. We had had a common enemy to keep us together, but as soon as the enemy disappeared the movement burst like a bubble. For the rise of a democratic Poland, however, our myth proved invaluable.’
In the end, Lech Walesa himself helped the editors of the Gazeta to break out of the dilemma. ‘The masthead of our paper included the Solidarity motto “Nothing divides us”. One day, Walşesa forbade us to use the union logo any longer. I remember how sad we were about that, it had always been a kind of spiritual anchor. But after a few months we started feeling relieved, it was as though the umbilical cord had been severed, as though we had finally grown up.’
Today, ten years later, Bikont looks back on it all with mixed emotions. ‘It was a huge success, both Solidarity and our paper, but in the end there were no real winners. The nationalists lost, because instead of their ideal Poland we got a democracy and a European Union. The church lost, because the priests didn't gain a foothold in the world of national politics. The democratic opposition lost too, because they didn't anticipate the traumas that a tough new brand of capitalism would bring to a country that had lived so long under a planned economy.
‘But there may be one group that won: the young people. They're in favour of Europe, they speak languages, they've travelled, they're open to the world. Great opportunities lie in wait for them. But for the generations that spent most of their lives under communism, hope was the only thing they had, and that hope has neve
r borne fruit.’
That evening I dine with Jaroslaw Krawczyk, historian and editor-in-chief of Centuries Speak magazine. His hangover from the night before needs dealing with, and he does so with large quantities of beer. Outside the snow is falling by the bucketful, the grey flats are almost hidden by the flurries. Krawczyk strides through the neighbourhood, steps down to a cellar door, and we find ourselves in his favourite bar, an underground cavern where couples are kissing and a hefty blonde girl keeps putting brimming glasses down on our table.
We talk about Solidarity. ‘That was our 1968, the struggle of our generation. Many of our fathers were generals, party bosses. My father, for example, still can't revise his opinions, he's still a communist. And as you know, we all hate our fathers.’ About the church in Poland: ‘A new religious movement is on the rise here: Radio Maryja. For the ill, the lonely, the pensioners. Nationalistic, almost fascistic. The poor people's hatred has a way of growing very quickly.’ About Europe: ‘As a Western journalist, you can travel all over the place, you do as you please. But look at my coat. It looks fine, but I bought it second-hand. That's the way we intellectuals have always lived here. You people in the West can talk all you want about Europe, but we are Europe, just like the Czechs, the Hungarians and the Rumanians.
‘The new Czech ambassador once told me that he had had to deal with complete idiots, but we Poles had very intelligent communists. I tried to refute it, but I finally had to admit he was right. The repression here actually was much milder than in the rest of Eastern Europe. The Communist Party was never really big here, it never had more than half a million members. Gomulka was never anything but a dim-witted tyrant. And Gierek always kept the door ajar to you people in the West.’
