We must learn to talk about the pitfalls of a consumer society if we are to help eastern Europe
In the autumn of 1946, the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman visited Germany. He entered a world of misery and resentment. In a distillation of his experiences he wrote: "Our autumn picture of the family in the waterlogged cellar also contains a journalist [himself] who, carefully balancing on planks set across the water, interviews the family on their views of the newly constituted democracy in their country, asks them about their hopes and their illusions and, above all, asks if the family was better off under Hitler. The answer that the visitor receives has this result: stooping with rage, nausea and contempt, the journalist scrambles hastily backwards out of the stinking room, jumps into his hired English car or American Jeep and half an hour later over a drink or a good glass of real German beer, in the bar of the press hotel, composes a report on the subject 'Nazism is alive in Germany'."
I reread this report - quoted in Hans Magnus Enzensberger's essay "Europe in Ruins" (1990) - while revisiting, over the past month, some of the post-communist states of central and eastern Europe from which I reported, as the walls came down, in 1988-91. The correspondence was striking. Ten years on from the east European "revolution", the inhabitants of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, even Romania do not in the main live in stinking cellars - though quite a few live in squalid hopelessness, and in Romania hundreds of orphans will die this winter in the freezing filth of dark, crumbling "hospitals" - but they dash any expectations that they are uniformly glad of a deliverance from socialist authoritarianism. Indeed, in both Hungary and Poland, former communists, now social-democratised, were elected to power in the recent past. Romania elected a centre-right coalition two years ago, but only after seven years of rule by a National Salvation Front which was largely composed of anti-Ceausescu communists and which still acts as the main opposition party.
One could not, in all conscience, "compose a report" saying "communism is alive in eastern Europe"; democracy and capitalism are doing well, in parts. I agree, even more now than before, with Ralf Dahrendorf's comment in 1990, that the decline in high culture and the inrush of the more garish aspects of consumerism "is the price you pay for decades of grey and glum collectivism". He wrote to a Polish friend: "I wish you well in your attempt to stem the tide of trash and glitter, but I suspect that it will sweep you away . . . I do not feel very sorry for you . . . as long as the swing of the pendulum is contained by the limits of the open society."
But I think that a silence has grown up around the "revolutions", similar to (though not as deep as) the silence that surrounded the misery of postwar Germany. We have reports about the miseries of post-communist states, especially of the former Soviet Union. But we do not dwell on, or analyse, the quite shocking changes that a move into capitalism has wreaked on these societies. Nor do we consider the scale, not just of the poverty, especially among the skilled working classes, but also of the cultural bewilderment that afflicts all, and perhaps especially the intelligentsia.
The brusque response is to say that these troubles are inevitable but transitory; indeed, "economies in transition" is exactly what the international financial institutions call these states, suggesting that they are simply en route to a happier time. But that is too brusque for our or their good. A failure to engage with what is really happening will deepen misunderstandings and make the extension of the European Union to the east much more difficult.
Extension is not pre-ordained. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, has given notice that he cannot be counted on to bankroll its high cost. On the other side, Polish farmers are going bankrupt as the government tries to prepare them for Europe. The Czech state sector is still bloated with big corporations; they cannot be privatised without many redundancies. Nevertheless, the people of eastern Europe wait anxiously and impatiently for EU membership. The examples of once relatively poor states such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece, pulled up with the aid of subsidies, is hugely alluring to the central and eastern European states which would like the same warm bath for their economies.
But their understanding of what Europe means, either for the economy or for the nation, remains shallow. In a remarkable essay (as yet unpublished), the Hungarian art historian and communications theorist Peter Gyorgy, who lived his pre-1989 life in quiet hostility to the ruling party, has tried to face up to the continuing "cultural and political infantilism" of a population, especially an intelligentsia, which regarded it as a victory to write socialist realist nonsense in the day and make private fun of the cultural commissars at night. He writes: "Capitalism had appeared as the island of happiness only when we went there to do our shopping, not when we had to do work in it. One of the most depressing experiences of the post-Kadar [ie, post-communist] era was a feeling of being lost, which was especially frightening for those who had, for decades, been convinced that they comprehended and understood the world around them, and that they were able to manipulate and actively shape this world . . . the fundamental role of the hierarchies of advanced capitalism is to undermine the idea and institutions of solidarity; nobody can comprehend the whole thing . . . the Hungarian intelligentsia belonged to this or that crowd, this or that circle, with the various shells of solidarity enveloping each of them. It is all over now."
The intelligentsia has suffered a decline both in material welfare and in cultural and political importance. But so, too, have large parts of the working class. "To make a living as a teacher at Budapest University is bad," writes Gyorgy, "but not nearly as bad, I presume, as being a beggar in the mining town of Ozd, scavenging in the debris left around closed pits."
The outcome of the huge set of economic, social, moral and cultural changes unleashed on closed worlds - even relatively open closed worlds, such as Hungary - has been, writes Gyorgy, that "the old, all-purpose maps can be thrown out, with no new ones anywhere in sight".
He continues: "There has hardly been an age when the elite intelligentsia and the political parties were so unfamiliar with the culture of contemporary Europe and America, as they are now; it is also true, however, that they hardly had the time to get used to the thought that we, too, are in the west . . .
"Obviously they have realised that the new map can only be Nato and the EU - and therefore they are not even willing to discuss the price of joining these organisations. They will discuss neither the economic nor the political consequences of it, leaving the subject to those who have a natural aversion to it. In this way, the public discussion of these questions is left in the hands of crooks and pocket Nazis, frenzied right-wingers and ghost communists; in short, the great issue of the age is debated literally by the underground."
This is true elsewhere than in Hungary. In the Czech Republic, the former foreign minister, Jiri Dienstbier, told me last month that "there is no preparation for EU membership; very few have been trained in the subject and only now are people realising what a change it will be".
Franciszka Cegielska, the mayor of the Polish Baltic port town of Gdynia and a national MP, said she had detected little interest in debating the EU among her fellow legislators. "They see the European Union only as a goal," she says, "not as any kind of problem. We have done no proper analysis of this. For the past ten years, there has only been the slogans 'we are Europeans', 'we must join Europe'. Only now do you hear small voices saying: 'but what will it cost us?'."
In Romania, the centre-right presidency of Emil Constantinescu pinned a great deal of its legitimacy on getting into Nato and ultimately into the EU. But the rebuff from Nato, in 1997, weakened it to the extent that it cannot now implement the reforms that would make it a realistic candidate for either Nato or the EU. "It is quite clear," said Silviu Brucan, the 83-year-old eminence grise of the Romanian revolution in 1989 and still a formidable power, "that Romania will fail again next year when the Nato review comes, and that we are at the end of the queue for Europe. Reform happens here when the west demands it and offers money. No one went on the streets against Ceausescu for the sake of capitalism. Yet it is the only hope."
The silence over the real state of the central Europeans who are about to, or wish to, enter Nato and the EU is in part because we have lost interest, in part because they are struck dumb - and in part because we both believe that the traffic in ideas is still one way. It is true, as the writer Timothy Garton Ash observed a decade ago, that no new ideas came out of the eastern "revolutions"; all were based on enlightenment values. But there is no reason why that should go on being true.
The central and east European experience of cultural swamping might be turned to value for us all, even though (or even because) the culture that was swamped owed much to the imposition of communism. A proper debate about the roles of national, European and "global" (American?) cultures, and how they can live with one another, has scarcely begun, especially in Britain.
How does the growth of a consumer society affect old cultures and solidarities? What do we mean by nationhood when states lose important attributes of sovereignty to Nato and the EU? The east European countries can help us to answer these questions but, to do so, their elites must indeed "grow up" while "Europe" must cease to be either an ideal or a fortress, but a conversation to which all contribute.
The great task of the dissident intellectuals under communism was to keep alive the notion and the practice of a civil society, still vibrant under the sludge. They did so, by creating Solidarity and the Civic Forum and other groups and by sustaining the various solidarities of which Gyorgy writes.
Advanced capitalism has its own sludge - which is certainly much more tolerant of little solidarities and which is consonant with an open society in a way that communism was not. But it needs to be kept out of many important areas of our private and our public life, in order that we remain socially healthy. That is more familiar ground to those who have shaken themselves free of communism than it is to us. The traffic need not all be one way; and it must not be, if we are to create a larger Europe, rather than merely extend it.
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