Homelands by Timothy Garton Ash;

Author:Timothy Garton Ash;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fish soup

While Yugoslavia descended into war and genocide, the rest of post-communist Europe embarked on an unprecedented experiment. It was called ‘transition’, using the term popularised in the transitions from authoritarian dictatorship to democracy in southern Europe and Latin America, or ‘transformation’. Neither word quite captured the scale of the challenge. Under communism, all the key ingredients of capitalism and liberal democracy had been destroyed: private property, the rule of law, multi-party politics, free and fair elections, uncensored and diverse media, academic independence, pluralism, constitutional checks and balances, a strong civil society built on private economic resources independent of the state. All had been liquidised. There were libraries full of books about the journey from capitalism to communism and from what Marx called ‘bourgeois’ democracy to a one-party state. There was no guidebook for travelling in the other direction. No one had ever done this before. No one knew if it could be done.

As so often, a joke best captured the truth: ‘We know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup; but can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?’ Over the next two decades, an answer emerged. ‘Yes, but it’s going to be a fairly odd sort of aquarium.’ In fact, there was an entire gallery of peculiar aquariums. Whereas in January 1990 there had been just nine states in the eastern half of Europe, including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, by 2010 there were twenty-four, including Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as Montenegro and Kosovo, which both declared their independence from Serbia. A monolithic eastern Europe had never existed, except in the minds of people in the West, but now the ‘other half’ of Europe was more than ever a kaleidotapestry. Every one of these new countries went through its own unique variety of transformation.

Unlike the French and Russian revolutions, which had staked out new, utopian political ideas, the velvet revolutions of 1989 were what the German social thinker Jürgen Habermas called ‘revolutions of catching up’. The ideas whose time had come were old, well-tried ones. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik revised the 1789 French Revolution motto to read ‘Liberty, Fraternity, Normality’. With the exception of the Russians, who still had their own distinct dreams of imperial greatness, most of the peoples who had lived behind the Iron Curtain simply wanted the freedom, prosperity, civilised life and normality of countries like West Germany, France and Britain – or, indeed, Canada and the United States. This they had seen on rare, memorable trips to the fabled West (remember the Jiří I met in Prague in 1979, who had saved up for seven years to make one short wedding anniversary trip to Paris); in films (my steelworker host in Kraków, settling down with a beer to enjoy a Western on Polish TV); or, in the case of most East Germans, every day on West German television. And the West looked particularly appealing at this moment. Like the middle-aged woman in an American diner watching Meg

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.