Glancing around the gorgeous late-Baroque dining room of the Palais Schwartzenberg, with dinner served by white-gloved footmen and the Prince himself presiding, you could imagine for a moment that you were back in 1814, at the Congress of Vienna. But look again and you discover in place of Tsar Alexander the Russian historian Yuri Afanasiev, instead of Talleyrand, then historian of the French Revolution, François Furet. The part of Prussia’s Prince Hardenberg is taken by Joachim Fest, the biographer of Hitler, and then, of course, there is Lord Weidenfeld — now Metternich, now Castlereagh.
Only Prince Schwartzenberg is indeed Prince Schwartzenberg. In 1814 his ancestor was commander-in-chief of the imperial Austrian armies. The present Prince is chief-of-staff to President Vaclav Havel in Prague Castel, but has taken time out to join this conference in Vienna. The Institute for Human Sciences, a remarkable institution started by a young Polish philosopher, Krzysztof Michalski, eight years ago, had brought together in the old Habsburg capital distinguished representatives f the intellectual and political élites of West Central Europe (Germany, Austria) and East Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia), as well as others from American, Britain, France, Italy Russia, Lithuania, Estonia and Romania.
The conference is entitled optimistically “Central Europe on the Way to Democracy”. At the end of a long journey through Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, it leaves me with a picture of Central Europe today which is at once plain and terribly confused, deeply inspiring and profoundly daunting.
Plain and inspiring is the fact that leaders, people in power, not just from East Central Europe but from Lithuania, Estonia, and , yes, from Russia, are proclaiming a passionate desire for their countries to “return to Europe”, to become democratic, liberal, constitutional polities with free-market economies and the rule of low.
Confusing and confused, however, are the way in which they express this general aspiration, reflecting understandings of “democracy” or the “market” or “the rule of law” that at times differ sharply, not only from our own but also from each other’s understandings. Profoundly daunting, above all, is the sheer number of people who wish to “return to Europe”, and the scale of the obstacles and costs that we are beginning to discover along the road.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall has revealed not just a few immediate neighbours wanting to join us West Europeans in our leafy suburb, but people as far as the eye can see, first in run-down terraced houses, then in ramshackle tenements, then, in the far distance, homeless, in rags, but all crying: “We, too, are Europeans” We, too, want democracy and freedom and prosperity!” The vulgar form of this pressure is the mass of East European shoppers crowding Vienna and Berlin, the thousands of Romanians seeking asylum in Germany The intellectual form is a tired, emotional member of the Estonian Popular Front cornering you in the hotel bar and saying: “You know, for you, the commitment to democracy is a lip service, for us it is a matter of life and death.”
You may construct all sorts of content arguments about where Europe ends, and why Russia is not part of Europe, but when you have this particular, individual man or woman standing before you, pleading with you, this Estonian, this Lithuanian, and also, yes, this Russian, you imply cannot say they are “not European.” Old-fashioned Europeans, perhaps, often nationalist Europeans, but so are many Hungarians or Poles, and, for that matter French or English.
At the same time, even the closest and easiest case, that of the former German Democratic Republic, democratises just how difficult and costly the transition to democracy will be. For whereas in Spain, Portugal or Greece, there was still a market economy (albeit a very distorted and imperfect one) and major elements of civil society, here almost everything has to be recreated from something worse than scratch. For examples, since property rights were never clearly defined, nobody knows who owns what. As the Russian joke has it: we know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup; the question is, can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium?
What began in East German last Sunday — DM-day — is not just the transplant of one organ: it is the transplant of a whole nervous system. As Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out at the Vienna conference, the projected cost to West German of this transplant is of the order of £40bn to £50bn over the next two years. The final cost is likely to be even higher. And this is just to secure the transition for 16 million people in the wealthiest state for the former Eastern Europe. What, then, would be the price for the poorer 60 million of Polish, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, let alone for further tends of millions inside the USSR or in the Balkans? Daunting.
The true measure of our commitment to any good (such as, for example, democracy)is not what we want for ourselves but what we want for our neighbours. The solidarity of neighbours is not, however one of the salient strengths of European history. In the recent past, the French have not cared all that much that Germany was divided. Many West Germans have lived relatively happily with the denial of democracy to East Germans, and even now are reluctant to pay the price for securing it. Most East Germans are not notable for their tender concern for the well being of Poles. But then gain, what has Poland so far done for Lithuania?
A partial exception is the efforts at Central European co-ordination: between Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, following the Bratislava summit in the spring (a permanent secretariat may shortly be established); between the Alps-Adriatic five (Czechoslovakia, Hungary Austria, Italy and — mainly northern — Yugoslavia); and possibly between the Baltic countries. Yet even between Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia the present reality is as much one of competition as it is of co-operation. The fact that they have common problems foes not necessarily mean they have common solutions.
One of the most important shared problems is how to combine democratic politics with the strong government needed to carry through a painful transition to a market economy. The ideal must be freely elected strong coalition. This, none of them has so far achieved.
