Panel 1: Citizen amnesia

Filip Radunović:
Central European Forum revives the spirit of the authentic intellectual discourse of the 1970s and 1980s.
Where are the Schumanns, Adenauers and Havels of today and of tomorrow? How can citizens translate their ideas into political discourse? Central European Forum is one of the few places where this can happen.”

Karel Schwarzenberg:
A fundamental difference between Western and Central Europe is that we are used to sit and wait, expecting help to come from the state and never take initiative to improve situation. We expect the government to tackle our problems. This is our weakness and we sometimes have to pay for it.
When the government fails we start listening to populists and demagogues, which is another common feature of this region.
We must learn that smaller countries should be more aware of our Central European identity, our fate and history and should not claim we’re something we’re not. It is time to realize where we are and who we are, what is our legacy and we must face this in the future.”

Marci Shore:
The problem we are facing today is not just whether there are historical precedents empowering citizens but how people choose to relate to this legacy. Post-soviet historiography, its post-revisionist school, has brought us a central insight: subjectivity cannot mean just liberal subjectivity. We tend to assume that when we talk about subjectivity we mean people who will be empowered to act on behalf of liberal principles. But empirically this is not necessarily the case – for example, the rise of Jobbik is not just passivity. Similarly, last week nationalist demonstrators in Warsaw, who set the rainbow statue in the centre of time ablaze, were active. When citizens act, they don’t always act in liberal democratic manner and we can’t expect that they will do so.
There is not quite enough democratic tradition in Central Europe to remember and not always asking the right questions about the past. We lack the ability to confront the past and to face real sources of evil. What we see instead is the cheap but understandable attempt to suppress guilt, export it and a refusal to take responsibility.
One of the myths of 1989 was the notion of freedom and democracy as something that was going to necessarily be happy and pleasant. Taking the responsibility to forge a civic space means asking questions that are difficult – And taking responsibility means living in anguish. We have to overcome this myth of democracy being nice and happy, and grapple with the fact that what haunts us from the past is part of us and inside of us and the choices we make will be difficult. This kind of engagement is exhausting, very few people have that stamina to go out there everyday to keep pushing.
Conversation is an art, it’s about different people coming together and discussing difficult questions, grappling with different ideas. And this art of conversation is at the heart of what civil society is to be, and the fact that all of you in Bratislava sat here with us for three hours on a Friday night is tremendously helpful.

Jacek Żakowski
Democracy is like a religion. You either believe in it or you don’t. Most of us do, but we have to differentiate between believers and churchgoers. In Poland there are more believers than churchgoers and it is the same with democracy – most people believe in it but if you ask them: what you did for democracy in your country, the answer not so encouraging. We are not accustomed to practicing democracy – how to encourage people to do so?
In Poland people get active when they are directly affected: for example, when there is no sausage. Then they protest and when they get their sausage they go back home. The legacy of communism is that for decades each protest resulted in politicians giving people their sausage so people just went back home.
The problem is not keeping people in streets forever, they should be able to go home. But to keep them engaged at a low level, to keep reading newspapers, to keep informed. In Eastern Europe there is a vacuum at this low level and this lack of civic activity makes democracy fragile vis a vis populism. If you don’t know nothing you believe.
Maybe the fundamental question of the debate is wrong: It’s not just the absence of legacy of citizen inspired change that kills civic space but capitalism. My sense is that these two factors work together, meaning we’re worth off than other parts of the world where only one of the factors applies.
We forgot to tell people that democracy is not something that’s achieved, it has to be achieved every day. It’s constant fight. And we never had this kind of experience in this part of the world – we know that to provide for your family you have to work every day but democratic politics is similar, you must work at it.

Slavenka Drakulić:
After 1989 in Eastern Europe it was obvious that democracy started as an ‘empty form’ – institutions without democracy. Democracy had to be built from the scratch filling out the empty forms (elections, parliament, multi-party system). However, the modus operandi has remained traditional. A tribal attitude and mentality still very strong and this is a source, the root of corruption.
None of the structures of control in former Yugoslavia, especially the secret service, were ever abolished and confronted, there were no lustrations of any kind.
There has always existed a division between official history and private memory, a strong and painful division. You are taught a different history at school and hear different stories at home at the table. The gap between memory and history takes a lot to overcome and that makes everything very difficult – we have no facts to build civic space on.
The war itself, in Croatia, in Bosnia, Kosovo , didn’t happen overnight. A war always requires preparation and that includes a need for homogeneity. If you don’t homogenize, you are a traitor. Homogeneity prevents any anti-government activity.
The majority of society wants certainty, not freedom. We see have signs of fear and insecurity – the question is who is going to read the signs and address the fear. If the big parties don’t address this fear someone else will: populists who will read this fear and manipulate it and turn it to their own use. 20 years ago it was just Jörg Haider in Austria, now at least 20 countries these parties are strong, the Right is on the rise. As a citizen I’m afraid, I’m afraid of fear.
Nobody mentioned unemployment and the fact that the majority of unemployed in many countries are young. A society that has unemployed children is cutting a branch on which it’s sitting because these kids will have to do something to get out of this situation. And that provides material for social change, which I guess is our hope for the future.

Péter Esterházy:
We should look at three basic notions: citizens – responsibility – parochialism. What is a citizen? In asking this question I refer to Masaryk’s definition of a citizen. Speaking about Hungary a citizen exists but in each period we only had 1 citizen. In 1930s Sándor Márai was the only citizen. Now we have Péter Nádas. There is an absence of citizens, of people who have the ability to be true to themselves, authentic. Why is that so? I think dictatorship or its ideology was not as important, what was decisive was that dictatorship eliminated many traditions, such as the tradition of classical social democracy.
There was no freedom but there were private islands of freedom under Kádár. After 1956, politicians came up with an invention. The slogan: whoever is not with us is against us’ was modified into: ‘whoever is not explicitly against us is with us’.
People living under dictatorship felt that they couldn’t change anything and they had no responsibility. And when everything is decided by dictatorship, people behave like small children, believing the state will take care of their problems. People became selfish and this mentality continued in the 1990s.
We haven’t learned that what needs to be done, we have to do ourselves – we have to sweep our yard ourselves, nobody will do it for us. However, the young people don’t see the problem. As soon as they see a problem they will start searching for an answer but at the moment they see it as a problem of the older generation, something that is for us to solve. But I’m a 60-year old pensioner who writes novels about women’s breasts. We haven’t been able to solve it, now it’s up to you. Unless you do it, you’ll live in a very murky future.
Absolutism has always been very attractive. In history has always turned on the point of sovereignty, and this can be taken advantage of by populists. Thirty-year old people today are like children, they exercise self-censorship. Under communism we played the game of reading between the lines, we used metaphors. Under dictatorship this is a dignified form of defence. But it seems that we’re playing a similar game even today and we have again accepted to play this humiliating self-censorship game.
Habermas talked of a constitutional nation but this is not a case in Eastern Europe, we think in the framework of a national state, don’t see the cohesion, the force that brings us together. What brings us together is not in harmony with our reality today. Populism arouses emotions, feelings, while liberalism is based not on feelings but on ratio. Populism is not limited to us, it is also on the rise in France, the Netherlands: populism marches through Europe.

Rudolf Chmel:
It seems to me that Slovakia has two souls. One soul is an open Slovakia, which in 1989 wanted freedom and democracy. The other one is closed, inward-looking, not that interested in individual freedom because it’s not desirable to have responsibility.
The majority of society wants to have certainties, not freedoms, and that is the situation of Slovakia today. Even in 1989 (which we’ll remember by forgetting, as we usually do), people wanted to live better. What they missed most was consumer goods, travelling, many missed freedom of religion. The regime could have continued if people had been given this.
Democracy is something only a small part of society missed, those who were carriers of free society. These two Slovakias still exist, and the same split exists in the other countries.

Photo: Peter Župník