Central Europe on the Way to Democracy
I would like to follow on from the very different contributions of Joachim Fest and of Adam Michnik to make a comment, if I may, about the language and premises of the dialogue between West and East, about the development of a democratic Europe, to which this conference has I think contributed much and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen even more. […]I think one should at least start not just from the rhetorical philosophical but from the genuine working hypothesis that we may have something at least to learn as well as to teach, but we have to know where to look. I think it's quite wrong to believe that we have anything to learn in the areas of, for example, the organization of an economy or polity. There is no third way. But there is I think really something in the area very hard to define of what one calls in Polish the imponderabilia, the human qualities or the spirit, which sustains democracies in good times and especially in bad. A certain combination of irony and courage. The conviction deriving, and I formulate carefully, from the Judeo-Christian tradition that, as Jan Patocka put it very simply, "There are things worth suffering for." I think it's a mistake to try to draw up any balance sheet, to construct a full symmetry between what the East has to offer the West and what the West has to offer the East, but as a basic attitude of approaching this dialogue, I think that working hypothesis that we have something to learn as well as to teach is a very important one. The last 200 years might not lead us to be very optimistic about the chances of a mutual learning process between West Central Europe and East Central Europe, between as it were Mitteleuropa and Europa śródkowa, but after what happened in 1989, we may hope that even this might be possible.
