The Next Area of Unrest: East-Central Europe

Thomas Molnar, the esteemed political philosopher and historian, passed away on July 20 at the age of eighty-nine. This week First Principles remembers Dr. Molnar by publishing some of the many fine essays that he wrote for the Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age.

The following piece, the last he wrote for ISI, originally appeared in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue of Modern Age.

The end of Yugoslavia as a power in the Balkans might be signaling a temporary lull, but by no means a quiet future in the area. Communism and Marxist thinking are no longer ruling over lands and minds, yet they have left behind them signs of deep unrest, a state of undeclared conflicts. The reason why we hear relatively little about the latter is that the Western media, even less truthful than in the past, prefer not to add new controversial reports to the ones with which we deal daily. And while Marxism and Communism are no longer topics, the old national and social antagonisms are not solved, they only look for other channels of manifesting repressed aspirations.

These aspirations have no genuine regional spokesmen, and they mislead us by the loud voice of foreign spokesmen who claim to bring peace, progress, and consolidation. The fact is that, from the Baltic states to Albania, from Kiev to Prague, the entire area has hardly ever known a similar state of agitation, which is more or less hidden to the outside world. This form of hide-and-seek serves the interests of foreign investors who argue for a quick profit and impose damaging conditions on the host-nations; and it also serves the interests of ideologues, local and foreign, who swear by the redeeming solution of continental integration. Nobody, except for the “extremists,” dares bring the issue to public scrutiny, so widespread is the fear of disapproval by Washington and other Western globalists. And the masses indeed accept being fed by a magic potion of integration (European Union, NATO, global market), for two reasons: after communism anything sounds better; and the abundance of consumer goods blinds both the new middle-class and the new proletariat. In sum, nobody dares to oppose the new slogans about the coming paradise. Those who do are branded as extremists, and are exiled from the magic circle of illusions.

This does not mean, however, that in the last fifteen years no improvements have been registered. The last twenty years constitute in the minds of many a relative well-being, already evident during the waning communist regimes in Poland, in Hungary, and even in Yugoslavia after Tito. We in the West are accustomed to see communist rule in East-Central Europe as one block in which all citizens suffered as slaves of the “evil empire.” Yet when asked about that era, many people will admit that, compared with the present, there used to be low–rent apartments, free medical services, free education, inexpensive transportation, low-priced editions of classical and modern literature, and high-class performances of music and drama. All this adds up to some sort of contentment by the earlier proletariat, even if it meant despair for the earlier bourgeoisie. This explains that even today, as these countries enter a consumer-status, elections may bring a socialist majority to parliament. In the collective memory “those years” were, all in all, better than the current unemployment, high prices, and savage competition labelled as “liberalism.”

Here we must mention several paradoxes. America is generally condemned for non-interventions in Budapest (1956), in Prague (1968), in Gdansk (1981), and yet all look to the United States for guaranteeing a better future. Many young Poles, Croats, and Hungarians leave for America, but when they experience the moral and educational wasteland in that same America, and especially when they rear children, they have second thoughts and often return to their native land, eventually to face insecurity and low income. These contradictions also explain why governments are rather unstable, why in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech republic, all solidly anti-communists, socialist governments have been recently voted into power, so that acknowledged party-leaders of the past also figure among the new governments. Even in Berlin, the new associate mayor, Georg Gisy, is an old party hack who once opposed integration of West- and East-Germany.

In spite of the various moves and countermoves, the area here under review gradually approaches a middle-class status, an American-type homogenization that seems to be the new ideal. It is the kind of “boring situation” to which Marx alluded and which Alexandre Kojève foresaw in the early thirties when he returned from both the Soviet Union and the United States. (Among his eager listeners in Paris were Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, who then parted and followed different paths.) The “new society,” very new at least for East-Central Europe, has no capital to invest and expects the foreigners to do so, while it also accuses the foreign investor and accommodating local governments of stealing the land–property and departing with dishonestly gained profit. Yet, the prosperity is modestly evident, the new ownership class has splendid villas, several cars, and second residences, even as the state of mind of the new poor is again fuelled—it is a tradition—by envy and class-consciousness.

All this explains that Right and Left exist again, after both denied their existence in the last years of the old regime. The Right hesitates between two ideological options: nostalgia for the pre-communist past, and a rallying to the modern West. The Left is happily surprised that it had got away with (Stalinist) murder, and is now in a position to reclaim its radical heritage—and to receive the appropriate percentage of votes. When I suggest to my friends that the West’s ultimate objective is the Anglo-Saxon model of a two-party system, the one liberal-conservative, the other socialist-liberal that adds up to a European style social democracy, which as it turns out, they hate but find no objection to its installation. It is mostly the inherited rhetoric which rubs them the wrong way with its national and cultural commitments.

All this discourse must be interpreted in the light of the background of an immense trauma: the communist years. Classes never trusted one another, but they had a common reference: nation and class were historically embedded in imperial structures: Hapsburg, czarist Russian, and Roman Catholic. It was certainly not an ideal situation, but the lines were clear, as were the aspirations. The latter came to be monopolized at the end of the eighteenth century by nationalism, which led, in 1918, to fragmentation. The brief success of communism in Munich, Berlin, Milan, and Budapest added fear to fragmentation, the perfect revolutionary brew. The perhaps unconscious project of the present, transitional regimes is to find a newly integrational “home,” a new empire, call it European Community, or Atlantic culture, or NATO, or globalism. The adjustment is painful, nobody knows where it will lead, and whether it is worth the effort. The imperial and the communist past are certainly rejected—the new Russia is now a market possibility for the ex-satellites—but the future is at best uncertain, and integration in a new ensemble has enormous drawbacks.

Only in political campaigns aimed at the uncommitted masses, do we catch local politicians in an artificially optimistic frame of mind. Privately, and with a knowledge of history, they confess their narrow choice, which is no choice at all; integration with the West, on this or on that side of the Atlantic Ocean, means economic and military imperialism, repainted in illusory colors. No less than the shark that devours little fish, the rich and powerful West will swallow a fragile East Europe. Agricultural products are not wanted on Western markets, and Washington insists that new NATO members purchase American–made planes. When this does not come to pass, there are other pressures and threats. No wonder that “global cooperation” is one-directional as it always is between the strong and the weak.

The above description left out the Balkan countries, which are in far worse shape than the triangle of Warsaw-Prague-Budapest. They too specify one ambition, one future: integration with Europe. Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest are practically unwanted by their supposed Western partners, except for France, with her linguistic and cultural links to Romania. The West-European countries fear being invaded by lower-level merchandise, and by refugees who find no work at home. The first, still small, groups have been the Gypsies from Hungary and Romania, but they were stopped in Strasbourg and repatriated. More will arrive, en route to England and America, the legendary home of the Dollar, and they will be joined by Ukrainians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Hindus. Even faraway Spain, prospering on huge loans from Germany, has apprehensions vis-à-vis this invasion, while North Africans also arrive at its shores, claiming privileges for their agricultural-seasonal work-force over and against the East-Europeans. A “new and integrated” Europe begins to have a huge underclass of Africans and Asians, added to the native post-communist/liberal confusion.

One example of this confusion is playing out in Transylvania, a Romanian province since the Trianon treaty (1920), but with a three-million Magyar minority as the more active element. The latter are loyal to Budapest, and two prime ministers of the Hungarian post-communist governments have declared having 15 million Hungarians under scrutiny, not just the 10 million actually living in post-Trianon Hungary. This, in turn, makes Bucharest fearful of a Magyar aggrandizement that will take economic and cultural/linguistic forms. Yes, but Budapest’s support for Romanian entry into NATO and Europe is also essential. Such “complications” engender the kind of future state of affairs that Western diplomats dread—unless it gives them a free hand for fishing in troubled waters, not unlike the recent conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Many more such potential clashes and mini-wars could be mentioned, while Russia remains relatively immobile. . . .

From Kaunas to Lubliana the territory used to be Catholic, with innumerable signs of the faith. Today, too, in Warsaw near the center, there stands the church in which the martyred Pater Popieluszko used to preach against communism, for which he was abducted by the secret police, beaten to death, and thrown into the Vistula river. Thousands visit his grave every day, and even the military pays its daily respects. The same is happening at the monument in Prague, where the young Jan Palac set himself on fire when the Soviet troops entered the city. The same is true in Budapest, though in other forms, and the same is also true in smaller towns, which have their local heroes and martyrs.

Nevertheless, today, hardly fifteen years later, the Catholic Church is in general retreat, even in a religious Poland. When I asked an archbishop in the summer of 2002 about his reaction to the church scandals in America, he responded, “It is the business of the American Church.”

The central “problem,” hence, is to regain some of the old ground and influence, according to local and present circumstances, certainly not all ex-properties, but, understandably, accommodations with the new liberal-social structure with its hedonistic “culture.” In Rome, 12 years ago, Cardinal Ratzinger suggested that I convey the following brief message to Catholics in Hungary, where I was going to teach and publish: “Tell them to obey their bishops!”—that is, to follow the hierarchy and through it, Rome. In short, be extremely prudent. A Catholic revival must thus be cultural and favorably disposed towards the young and their initiatives.

Christianity is profoundly rooted in these lands where the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches recall at every step that the nation itself is a Christian foundation, that there is a local saint in every village, a place of pilgrimage for every region. The Church may now rebuild her schools and monasteries, start up universities, revitalize publishing houses and radio/television debates, and enter into dialogue with other religions and with individuals who themselves recall other times, other mores. These are the modern ways of accommodation without causing either retreat from the public square or ideological conflict. Last year, having lunch with the Archbishop of Lublin and Monseigneur Jozef Zycinski, I had a taste of the quality of the new prelates as active participants in university life in the “Polish renaissance,” and in international meetings of philosophy and science. Later, I had opportunities to meet superbly prepared professors and, at the Law School, future Catholic lawyers. Similar impressions could be reported from Zagreb (Croatia), Cluj-Kolozsvár (Transylvania), Prague and Slovenia—all ex-communist countries.

Impressions of young people, the so-called “guarantee of the future,” vary not so much from nation to nation, but from ideology to ideology. Generally, there is little trace of Marxism; rather, there is a deep social understanding with reference to the recent past and the foreseeable future. All agree that Marxism, with its best foot forward, did bring the idea of equality to countries historically divided into haves and have-nots. Thus, many young people from lower classes have become integrated in their respected nations, and have become more patriotic, more nationalistic. This is an unexpected consequence of communist internationalism!

At the same time, wide reading and the opportunity to travel have turned young people into adults without illusions, a good thing in view of living in mass-democracies, but hardly listening to promises of utopias. The upshot is an increased realism, which excludes hostilities and slogans. Youths get used to the prospect of benefiting by new opportunities (travel, scholarships, late marriage—but also scarcity of living space, apartments, housing), yet envisaging a return to home and starting a family. Here, then, there are beginnings of pluralistic societies, but with roots not forgotten, and even revived. What is striking is the contradiction between sociological studies and statistics, on the one hand, and young people’s true preferences, on the other. I have collected during the past twelve years an amazing number of good impressions with only a modicum of unfavorable experiences, though mainly from the intellectual and professional areas. But they are part of the total picture, and carry us forward.

The attentive reader will have observed here the nature of foreign political issues as they have developed during these last fifteen years or so. The countries of the area are certainly not beginners in matters of international relationships: they have been many times overrun, conquered, devastated, integrated into larger units, exploited, made to suffer deadly losses, even near-annihilation. Thus they regard and experience the present situation not as the threshold of an ideal state of affairs, but as a new test of their capacity to survive. Surrounded by potential enemies and by distant “well-wishers,” they are nothing if not hard realists.

The new pressures, as they and their leaders see them, do not come from the East but from the West. The pressures are not military (although every pressure is ultimately that), but socio-cultural. These pressures emerge from geopolitics and ideology. Now being squeezed by the globalist ideology, their position has hardly improved from the time when they were surrounded by the old-type empires. The question is whether they join the new imperialisms, and are relegated to passivity, or whether they fight for an illusory independence and are branded “nationalists,” a term of opprobrium when one is too weak to assert one’s self. Yet, there appears to be no choice. These small countries (Poland is the largest, with 40 million people, Slovenia the smallest with 2 million) will join “Europe,” partly to protect themselves, partly to survive in an economically over-competitive world in which solidarity and partnership are unstable things on which to lean. At the same time, they must keep out of compromising alliances, and accommodate tremendous foreign “fifth columns” that gnaw at internal stability. “Join, but without enthusiasm!” might be the best advice given to the nations in question. For them to succeed presupposes, among other things, deep cultural insight into the conditions and circumstances of the coming century.