Will Year of Miracles Be Squandered?: Cynicism Threatens to Destroy Gains of 1989

• Print
• E-Mail
• Feedback

It was the working class who toppled communism in Poland, but it they were also the first victims of the transformation. Let us imagine a large industrial enterprise that was able to convince those in power to make concessions through strikes. This company produced desk-size busts of Lenin. The workers were good workers. They did not stop being good workers in 1989. But today no one needs busts of Lenin. The market destroyed this company. The workers, who helped bring freedom through strikes, were the first to fall victim to this freedom. That is the first paradox of democracy in Poland.

The second paradox comes from the fact that the largest firms, like the Danzig shipyards, were Solidarity's strongholds. The new government did not want to treat these people unfairly, because after all, they had brought them to power. But because these firms did not reform, they went bankrupt.

The third paradox is that the people were educated on the political culture by a system run by the party. Thus it was an obvious plan to give Solidarity a leading role and place it in a position where it could decide who became a voivode or a director, or who would find employment in a bank, in the secret service, or in the army. In this way, the democratic system quite obviously lost legitimacy. New types of conflicts appeared. All historical utopias paint a world free of structural conflicts. For the opposition in communist countries, this utopia was, almost everywhere, the utopia of the rule of the people. It was based on the construction of a new communism, but without communists. Pipe dreams of a third way between communism and capitalism prevailed in each of the communist countries. Generally, the search for this third way ended with the realization that this would lead to the Third World. Such pipe dreams were found among both the left and the right, among those referring to conservative, religious, nationalist values, as well as those who based their ideas on plebeian, leftist traditions and ideas of popular rule.

No opposition member would have said before 1989 that we should strive for capitalism. No one demanded privatization, no one thought about it. And yet it turned out that it would be absolutely necessary. That is what was meant when Francis Fukuyama wrote that we had reached the end of history. Fukuyama understood that we were in a situation in which no one could realistically imagine a better political project than the market economy, parliamentary democracy, and unrestricted respect for human rights. Fukuyama could not imagine this, and I think he is right. But for millions of people, this system was not the best at all. In addition, Fukuyama held an illusion that was just as naïve as others' belief in a system based on a government of workers' councils.

To this day, books are published that contest the meaning of the transformation. Their authors believe that people are furious that nothing succeeded; that the last 20 years have been nothing but an accumulation of disaster and mistakes. It is true that not everything was perfect, but I have exactly the opposite view. Many bad things happened, but I have the feeling that, with the exception of the Balkans and Russia, the post-communist countries have not had such a good 20 years in their modern history; or in Poland's case, not in the last 300 years.

The Authoritarian Temptation

Let us begin with Russia. There, people believed in modernizing socialism, but this belief collapsed quite quickly. Why did Russia take this path? There is more than one answer.

It is highly likely that historical change follows a zigzag course. Relatively quickly the Russian elite saw democracy as dermokracija (dermo meaning "shit" or "crap" in Russian), that is, "swampocracy" -- babble, corruption, and criminalization of daily life. The head of St. Petersburg television told me that television under Brezhnev was terrible. You could not say anything, and you simply read official announcements from the page. But in the evening you could go for a walk with your daughter without hesitation. In the 1990s you could call Yeltsin and any other minister or governor a drunk, an alcoholic, a thief; but in the evening you could not go for a walk for fear of being kidnapped and freed only after ransom was paid. That is a very good definition of how the Russians saw perestroika and democratization. That is why Putin's authoritarian solution has so much support in Russia today. He got the lawlessness under control and strove for wages and pensions to be paid on time.

In Poland, this fear of chaos has manifested itself in two ways: Firstly, as a return to the familiar which was also the case in in Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary, and which explains the success of the post-communists. The other path -- the transformation into nationalism -- was taken by Russia's Gennadi Zyuganovs and Slobodan Milosevic.

The critics of the democratic transformation in Poland say that there have been more negative outcomes in the last 20 years than positive ones. They say that the perpetrators of the greatest communist crimes have yet to be prosecuted, that lustration and de-communization was never completed, that corruption is spreading, and that there are great differences in wealth. They voice the bitter complaints of the many "children of the Solidarity revolution" who feel that they did not fight for a Poland like this. They also say that the criteria by which heroes had been assessed in the past, was no longer valid. And also, they claim that in 1989 the timing was not right for the communists, and so the Round Table compromise was a mistake.

Sometimes I think that in Poland -- but also in other post-communist countries -- people are effortlessly winning wars of the past. In 1989, the Soviet Union was still quite firmly in the saddle, and no one could foresee its self-destruction. The Polish compromise was portrayed as a model by the American government and the governments of Western Europe. June 4, 1989 has become a symbolic date. On that day, free elections were held in Poland. They were not entirely democratic, but were real elections that snatched away the legitimacy of the communist dictatorship. On the same day in Tiananmen Square, tanks mowed down students demanding democratic freedoms. Anyone who says today that everything was obvious back then is concealing the fact that he said nothing of the kind at the time. Nor does he say today that he knows the date or the circumstances under which the communist regimes in Cuba or North Korea will collapse -- even if he makes claims that the defeat of communism had always been apparent.

In our countries, we can still predict the past more easily than the future. On the other hand, the past has become more and more difficult to decipher, because its picture is being painted by anti-communists of the 11th hour -- the people who accuse those who did the most of having contacts with the communist political police. It seems that rewriting history to this extent could set the stage for a new type of authoritarian system.

We see today how, in many countries, the ideology of anti-communist authoritarianism is emerging. In Hungary it is embodied by Viktor Orban, leader of the Fidesz party. Orban's path is interesting. He began as the wunderkind of Budapest's liberal intelligentsia. The party he created had an anti-communist face of peace and harmony. I well remember a campaign poster by Orban's party: There were two opposing photographs. On one, we see a brotherly kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker; on the other, a tender embrace between a pretty girl and a good-looking boy. These were two different worlds. But Orban soon led his party to the right -- to an authoritarian, radical, revanchist anti-communism that united conventional conservatism and Hungarian ethnonationalism. In Poland, the two-year administration of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) was comparable. In Russia, the path to authoritarian government was cleared by Yeltsin, who radically overthrew the traditions and ideology of Bolshevism, but used anti-Bolshevik slogans to employ methods far removed from democratic standards. Today there is no major disagreement over the fact that the 1996 presidential elections in Russia were faked. At the time I was, as a democrat, on the side of my Russian friends -- who declared that it was necessary by all means to stop the communists and who would never give up their newly regained power.

Against a Cynical Europe

After 20 years, it is useful to view Europe as a new whole, a Europe without utopias. This Europe purposely fosters political and cultural pluralism. At the same time, it is a Europe without a strong canon of values. The strengths of democracy are always based on a strong nation-state tradition that purposely permits pluralism and respects human rights and the principle of tolerance. But where these traditions no longer exist, we see a Europe of Berlusconi-ism, in which only clever games, social technology, cynicism, and money count reign: A coalition of business, politics, the media, and the mafia. There is no doubt that the communist threat -- which once was strong even in France and Italy -- has quite simply disappeared. In France, the communists have shrunk to a microscopically small group, and in Italy they became social democracy.

Second, a spirit is growing in Europe of selfishness and nihilism, fear and anxiety. In this regard, the European Union project is very important, and at the same time stands on such wobbly legs that it is constantly being attacked and challenged from many sides.

Third, in the post-communist countries, the gravest threat is that the experiences of Putinism will be adopted. That is, a new version of the Latin American systems where democratic institutions exist on paper, but where in reality a someone else rules. The classic example of this is Vladimir Putin, but this model was also constructed in Poland in the two years under Kaczynski's PiS government. As a result institutions of civil society were weakened by attacks on the independent judiciary and independent media.

Is there one Europe? I think not, but that need not be a catastrophe. Europe has grown together over time through crises and new attempts. It continues to be a dynamic entity that is still being built. What is important is that a European consciousness emerges -- particularly in young, post-communist Europe. This need not lead to European isolationism. For example, Europe should not turn away from Ukraine. Europe will have a chance if it learns to intelligently export its soft power. If Europe were to close itself off, it would fall into neo-isolationism and lose. Europe should be a democratic project and a light for the entire world.

What threatens Europe today? On the one hand, a cynicism that weakens and that hollows out any doctrine or system of values. On the other hand, all authoritarian or even totalitarian projects. We talk of a multicultural Europe, which is of course good. Nevertheless, if we have a large portion of citizens from the Islamic world living in Europe -- who demand rights as minorities on the basis of European principles and yet deny these rights to others as a majority due to their own principles -- then we must work to ensure that the European Union steadfastly defends its democratic values. Of course I am oversimplifying. But this is the paradox of democracy; it always tolerates its enemies.

And it must be this way, but only to a point. When this point is passed, democracy knocks its own teeth out. I have often asked myself why the Weimar democracy fell. My answer is because no one wanted to defend it -- neither the intellectuals nor the unions or even the workers. An egoism prevailed and brought the Nazis to power. Of course, history does not repeat itself, or as Marx and Hegel said, it repeats itself only as farce, and yet democracy can never be guaranteed. We could still reach a point where no one wants to defend democracy anymore.

When I see contemporary plays or read contemporary literature -- especially by young Polish artists -- I see contempt for the institutions of a free state. One could of course say that the elites have done everything they can to become objects of contempt, but if no one will defend the democratic state, it will ultimately succumb.

My obsession is the defense of the republic. The essence of the debate in all our countries is: do you defend liberal values or are you in agreement with a state in the Putinist mold? This is of great importance, as is the relationship between state power and the institutions independent of it. Will the state attempt to assimilate these institutions, or is it willing to consciously limit itself and permit the existence of civil, religious, professional organizations that must be independent of the state by definition and with whom the state must be able to compromise?

A second problem that is perhaps less serious today, but was very important 10 years ago, is lustration and decommunization. Can a democratic system tolerate a conscious consensus in the matter of exclusion of and discrimination against a specific group of people, merely because they were informal collaborators with or members of the ancien regime? No, this path leads directly to dictatorship. In Czechoslovakia after the war, the dictatorship began with the expulsion and murder of the Germans, who were after all citizens of the republic -- not, as in Poland, with the expulsion of Germans from Germany. In Czechoslovakia, a majority supported the expulsion of Germans. The principle of collective responsibility was applied. That smoothed the way for a coup. We should be very sensitive -- even oversensitive -- to such signals, in order that we can prevent similar behavior in the future.

• Back
• 1
• | 2

• Part 1: Cynicism Threatens to Destroy Gains of 1989
• Part 2: The Working Class Who Toppled Communism Were the First Victims of the Transformation