So on behalf of the European study, sentencing at this college, it's my great pleasure to celebrate the launch or relaunch of Timothy Garton Ash.
His book, The Revolution of 1989, witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague when he was pulled that summer.
Remember that he, a history faculty and also member here at the European Studies Centre.
Now, of course, it's become kind of a cliché to say that someone doesn't need introduction,
but I think in this case, Timothy Garton Ash really does not need one. He is a he's professor of European studies here at the college.
He is also a long standing member of the European Studies Centre and also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford.
He's the author of some 10 books, most recently his book on free speech, which I'm sure many of you know and have read.
But tonight we're going to go back to some of his early work looking at the publications and reflections on his book on the Magic Lantern.
And I just want to draw attention to one thing because I think in that book, those who have read it is in a sense,
it's a kind of special book and that he's thinking about his role as a journalist, but also as a kind of witness and is an historian.
And I just wonder before you probably forgot in this passage, you might want to read out one thing or you sense,
I think, a kind of reflective moment about that actual process itself.
We said the witness can, if he is any, if he is lucky, see things that the historian will not find in any documents.
Sometimes a glance, a shrug at a chance for more will be more revealing than 100 speeches in these events,
even more than in most contemporary history. Much of great importance was not written down at all either,
because it occurred in hasty conversations with no no takers present or because the business was conducted on the phone,
or because the words or pictures came by television.
And perhaps the most difficult thing of all for historians to recapture is the sense of what at a given historical moment.
People did not know about the future. Now the things we know a great deal about this future.
We're now in six, three decades on. And I think now as we're coming up to 30th anniversary celebration of of 1989, it's a very,
very different Europe than it was at the 10th and 20th anniversary celebrations in 1999 and 2009.
Now, a Europe that's beset with a range of new threats and developments, the idea of A. A. just yesterday have made it quite clear if on a continent,
several range of issues of nationalism, xenophobia and what is now called illiberal democracies, or 1989, was about the dismantling of walls.
You can argue that contemporary Europe is about the construction of fences and barbed wire borders,
and remember that Eastern Europe is the only region in the world in the 21st century that's actually suffering population loss.
So it's also a story of radical and it's serious about immigration sentiment that a sense working with this idea of that kind of his story as witness,
I think in this particular talk tonight is he's looking both backward and looking
to the president's kind of reflections on the publication of Magic Lander,
his experiences and recollections for that and his mirabilis three decades ago.
So please join me in welcoming Tim for tonight's topic. All right, thank you very much, Paul,
it's great to be doing this on home turf and I can see we're going to reproduce the atmosphere of 1989, which was full of overcrowded rooms.
I warn you it's going to get very hot in here. The only thing missing is cigarette smoke and the smell of damp snow.
It's also a great pleasure to be doing it with Paul Betts, if any of you haven't really read his article in past and present.
Looking back on 1989, 30 years on, which is a true historian's reflections on the changing meanings of 1989,
as Paul mentioned, I started travelling behind the Iron Curtain in 1978.
I was travelling throughout the next decade, particularly getting to know the leaders of the Democratic oppositions, the dissidents,
people like lots of Havel, Adam McNair, Qian Qichen stylish and writing about it very much as a spectator, our own guys.
So my model for political writing was Orwell, which is you don't pretend to be impartial, let alone objective.
Nobody is objective, but you don't even pretend to be impartial that you're honest about your own sympathies, your own impartiality.
Read homage to Catalonia. This book, originally published in 1990, that whole book of witness.
From that moment, I then came to this college for the last 30 years, I've kept up with the literature,
including the scholarly literature on this whole area, but also with developments in the countries themselves.
And what I've done in the last year is to go back very intensively to the four or five countries covered in this book to to try and understand,
in a sense what has gone wrong, because of course, that's part of our subject today.
There also what's gone, right? And so there's a big new chapter.
This is what you can buy outside is a new edition with a big new chapter really wrestling with the question of the last 30 years.
What are you going to do today in the next 45 50 minutes, if three things?
First of all, I'm going to try and remind us all of a little of what happened with a slideshow.
Second, and by the way, when I talk about Central Europe in this context, I am talking specifically about the countries that used to be East Germany,
Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and are now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland and a part of Germany.
And I'm talking specifically about those. Secondly, and the main part of my talk.
I'm going to be wrestling with that question of why, what went wrong and why and what is the specific character of Central European populism.
And then thirdly, and rather briefly, I'm going to ask where we are today.
Go to my title. Is it time for a new liberation and ask what Europe can do about it?
So we're going to start with the slide show and we start with a video which I made for the BBC, a documentary in 1989.
And the moment I've chosen to start with is actually near the end of the 17th November of 1989.
And it's about the students kicking off the Velvet Revolution in Prague.
And I thought if there were any students in the room, you might like this and maybe get a couple of ideas from it.
So here we get. The police broke up several of them earlier in 1989.
But on the 17th of November, crowd students confronted the regime.
I remember Sunday, the 17th of November, I was with my friends, some of our agents who were on our underground paper.
You're very human VIDEO. There was some information about the students, about a student demonstration and the people in the underground developed.
The students had nothing. The police chief didn't believe the students would change part time.
So the students started it.
And what then happened was that the crowds, the rest of the people started coming out in the crowds, by the way, in Bratislava as well as Prague,
started growing and growing havo lots of Havel hurried back to this country house and as it were, took charge of the revolution.
His headquarters were in a theatre called the Magic Lantern.
Hence, the title of the book and I, to my great delight, managed to get a visa from East Germany and took the train into to to Prague.
I'm just so you understand what's going on. This next clip is from the 1999 documentary It Has Havel on Me.
And Then We Look at Samizdat Visit VIDEO from November 1989, when I found Havel in his favourite beer cellar.
Here we go. To know hundreds of thousands of people out on Licences Square every day chanting.
The time has come. The problem directed the revolution from the back rooms of the Magic Lantern Theatre.
I was there with him at the time, know. Now we revisit the scene of the most astonishing performance.
You know, and I think that. He hasn't been back for years, and it was just that, you know,
it was need to be this way that I found some footage from an undercover video filmed at the beginning of the revolution.
And we were all wondering then, how long we would love to see you so suddenly this is a police station, even if it is.
You. Going to say you need.
Apart from the fact that I'm absolutely delighted to be here, the addition and the history,
because that's the beauty of the region, the Foreign Ministry, which we hope is accelerating ahead of this,
and it took 10 years to develop the satellite in the words of wisdom to the people and the families of the victims,
to the potential criticism that suggests the rocket will take 10 days.
So that was the quote. And what was characteristic of 1989 was this extraordinary acceleration effect.
So historians, as you know, can trace things back as far as you like, we pretty quickly get back to the Big Bang.
And certainly, if you're tracing back the causes of 1989, you have to go back at least to 1945.
But if you're looking for the direct chain of causation in Central Europe,
as I've defined it and specifically in Poland for 10 years, it is summer 1979, the visit of John Paul,
the second to his native land in which millions of poles turned out and to greet him and for days,
it was as if the communist states had almost ceased to exist.
It was an early experience of solidarity with us more or less,
followed a year later by the birth of solidarity in the great occupation striking the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk,
something unprecedented in the history of the Soviet bloc.
A movement at its peak of 10 million people.
One in three adults in Poland, which lasted 16 months without a Soviet invasion.
It was finally crushed by the declaration of Martial Law in December 1981.
The tanks on the snow covered streets,
but Poland was never quote unquote normalised in the way that Czechoslovakia was after 1968 or Hungary after 1956.
Solidarity was very much reduced, but not eliminated.
And what then happens is that after Gorbachev comes to power in the Kremlin in 1985,
there is an amnesty in Poland and solidarity very rapidly recovers its strength.
The communist authorities recognise that they're going to have to deal with solidarity.
At the same time, we have a framing development, which is these guys.
That is to say, the Reagan administration makes a remarkable shift from the hard Cold War arms race stance
of his first term to embracing the opportunity presented by Gorbachev in his second term.
This is at the end of December 19 December 1988. Reagan Gorbachev, handing on to Bush senior,
said that the international framework conditions also as made by the West German
government and the US politic are very favourable so that at the end of 1988,
it was possible for me to say the emperor indicated that one could see what one could
not see foresee was how it was going to happen or how fast it was going to happen.
So the image I used at the time was of Ottoman ization.
This was going to be a gradual, piecemeal decline of the Soviet Empire.
I thought wrongly like that of the Ottoman Empire.
Piece by piece disappearing at the edges.
And then, as I say, what is characteristic of 1989 is that fantastic acceleration years, months, weeks, days.
So February 89, we had the opening of the unprecedented round table talks between the communist authorities and solidarity
that leads to an agreement to the first semi free election in the Soviet bloc on the fourth of June 1989.
Remember that date? While the protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing were being crushed by the Chinese security forces that very same day?
You had the worst first semi free election in the Soviet bloc, and its symbol was Gary Cooper.
You see him on the right here. So the poster says high noon, 4th of June 1999, and that Gary Cooper wearing the Soviet and not Spanish.
That's American soft power. That is at its height.
Imagine that today solidarity won almost everything it possibly could in that election,
including completely dominating the upper house, the Senate in in a free election.
This led to the selection of the first non-Communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc today,
which mousavi its key that he is absolutely exhausting but exhausted, but making the V for victory sign in Hungary.
The great symbolic moment, and again,
I describe this at length in the book was a ceremonial reburial of imminent of the communist leader of the 1956 revolution.
And the most electrifying moment of that was the speech by a then unknown, fiery young student leader.
Anyone recognised him.
Viktor Orban, who, by the way, breaking the agreement between the opposition speakers, called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
I've never forgotten that moment. He was fantastic back then.
At the same time, something else really important was happening in Hungary, namely the opening of the Iron Curtain.
Quite literally, with giant wire cutters, the Austrian and Hungarian foreign ministers is the famous picture,
openly cutting the wire of the Iron Curtain knowing full well.
And by the way, we now know from the documents that the Hungarian Communist Party knew very well that the
East Germans would seise the opportunity many East Germans went on holiday in Hungary.
This is the famous pan-European picnic of summer 89, located strategically just by the now open Iron Curtain,
and there's a bunch of happy East Germans fleeing across.
Now this, of course.
Triggered a reaction inside East Germany itself, where people said, remember, exit, voice or loyalty rather than exiting, I'm going to raise my voice.
Initially, these protests were, as usual, violently repressed.
7TH of October 1989 Leipzig the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic.
People fleeing from the security forces. It's a great photo, I think, filled with a mixture of fear and excitement on their faces.
Only two days later, the 9th of October 1989.
That's what we have a vast turnout on the streets of Leipzig at the Monday demonstration.
An estimated 70000 people filling the Ring Road around Leipzig, and this was a crucial moment at which the barrier of fear was broken.
And from that point, there was really no turning back for the demonstrations,
which by the 23rd of October, and this is also Leipzig had turned from the Chant Villas in dusko.
We are the people with already turning towards.
We been involved. We are one nation. We want one new Germany followed, of course.
As you all know, on the 9th of November by the totemic images of the opening of the Berlin Wall back in Prague.
However, they were still repressing the protest.
I think this is a wonderful photo of the student protests that they grabbed by an
equally young policeman who doesn't quite know what he's doing like it very much.
After the 17th of Ember, the student protests, of course, the crowds gather in Windsor Square, 300000 people.
Now what this crowd is about to do is this.
That doesn't sound much, but I do it alone. But I can tell you if three hundred thousand people all take their keys out of their pockets and do that,
it makes the most amazing sound like mass Chinese bells.
Nobody, no historian will ever know who was the person,
the unknown citizen who first decided to take the keys out of that party and in whatever notes.
But it's one of those examples of the creativity of the crowd and very rapidly, not quite in ten days, but very soon thereafter.
My old friend Vladislav havo here. Still, the dissident becomes at the end of December,
the president in a hastily made suit with the famously too short trousers and quite a leg length right back.
So if we could have the lights back up, please? That was the reduced Shakespeare Company Company version of 1989.
Ten years in ten minutes. Read more about it in the book, which is available at a knockdown price in the hole.
Of course, Bulgaria had followed and Romania, which are not going to talk about by the end of the year.
This was followed by German unification in 1998, with some very impressive statecraft from the Bush administration in West Germany
by the equally stirring story of the self liberation of the Baltic states.
And by the end of the Soviet Union,
which our colleagues in the Russian and Europe from the Study Centre have written about so eloquently so that by 1992,
we could say we are now in the post war world.
From the post-war world to the post war world now, these days,
a lot of people complain about Western triumphalism or liberal triumphalism after 1989, and there was a lot of that.
But that's because it was one [INAUDIBLE] of a western crime, right?
It was one of the greatest victories for freedom, democracy, Europe, the West that any of us are likely to experience.
Probably the greatest. A nuclear armed post, totalitarian enormous continental land and apart softly and suddenly vanished away in just three years,
with hardly any shot fired in anger. These were almost entirely peaceful revolutions, unlike the 1789 model, and I would argue that 1989.
Was the best year in European history. That is a challenge for you.
Namely, a better life. A mistake on mistake was not that we celebrated this as a great Trump.
Quite right. Our mistake was to believe that this was the new normal, the way things were going,
the direction history was travelling so that when it comes to Iraq,
many of the neo conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz genuinely believe that if you only knocked down the dictator,
a new democracy will somehow miraculously emerge as it had in Central Europe or when it comes to the Arab Spring.
The almost entire journalistic coverage treated this as a kind of new 1989.
I plead guilty to this myself. I have those hopes, too. But it was a big mistake.
These illusions were reinforced were encouraged by the fact that things in Central Europe,
not in the former Yugoslavia, not in former Soviet Union, but in Central Europe, were actually going very well.
That was successful transition to democracy Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary to join NATO by the end of 1999.
So on the tenth anniversary, we had an awful lot to celebrate on the 20th anniversary.
2009, we had even more to celebrate because not just those countries, but Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and most remarkably, the Baltic states,
which haven't existed on the map of Europe in 1989, were members of the EU and NATO, something no one would have dreamed of.
Almost no one would have dreamed of on the first of January 1989, right?
And political scientists were arguing that Poland, the countries of Central Europe, were,
quote unquote consolidated democracies might be an idea just to open the door to give a tiny bit
of ventilation because I'm sure you're feeling increasingly like people in the Magic Mountains.
But no. However, on the 30th anniversary, what a different feeling we're not.
We look at what is happening in these countries and actually we rather tend to understand what has still gone well.
The fact that there's been enormous economic growth, that life expectancy has increased up to 10 years in many of these countries,
that young people have extraordinary life choices and life chances thanks to the EU.
But politically, we look at it and we remember that guy.
And then we look at that guy.
Look, I think the change of the physiognomy of Viktor Orban over the last 30 years, he now has what I would call a Mussolini jol.
I think it is very significant. The worst case is clearly Hungary.
Hungary has been downgraded by Freedom House to the status of three.
I have argued and this is a bold claim, but I will defend it in Q&A that Hungary is no longer a democracy,
not just illiberal democracy, but no longer democracy is what political scientists call a competitive, authoritarian system.
Now you're going to say, but look, they just the opposition just won Budapest.
Indeed, they did. And do you know what? The opposition just won Istanbul.
The fact that you win the mayoralty of the capital city doesn't mean you are in a proper democracy.
No one would say Erdogan's Turkey is a proper democracy. Poland is an intermediate condition.
The Law and Justice Party, which won another election on the 13th of October,
is clearly attempting to follow Orban's example to do what I call order urbanisation alla colonnades.
But isn't there yet? And we'll talk about that. I think the term illiberal democracy is a helpful term to describe a liberal democracy in decay.
It's a transitional, not a stable state. OK. And I think Poland, in that sense, is close to a liberal democracy.
Czech Republic has an oligarch who's a former secret police informer as its prime minister and Milos Zeman as its president,
who is extremely close to Xi Jinping's China and Putin's Russia.
And as Paul mentioned in East Germany, despite the massive financial transfers from the rest of Germany, more than two trillion euros,
despite the fact you're part of one of the largest, richest, most stable democracies in the world in recent Lund.
State elections, one in four voters in round figures in Saxony.
Brandenburg only last Saturday, fewer India voted for the RFA.
The alternative a few Deutschland, a genuinely far right xenophobic party using a Turkish rhetoric.
We haven't heard in German politics, except on the very far right.
A shocking fact. So here I turn to the second part of my lecture and assume that we both understand the problem,
namely the strength of nationalist populism in Central Europe.
And I want to ask the question. Wow.
So if you look at the media, there are so two stereotypical answers with very crudely summarised are because they're part of the West.
And alternatively, because they're part of the East. Right?
So on the one hand,
Orban and Kaczynski are looked at in through the same prism as Trump and Le Pen and Nigel Farage and other populists and mature democracies.
On the other hand, there's a very strong stereotype which says, Well, these were really all along the eastern countries,
and all that's happening is that they returning to their historic form.
OK, now logically, these two explanations on the face of it cannot be true.
You cannot be both with the West and east any more than you will be both black and white, right?
That in principle is a logical contradiction.
But I think there is a more nuanced form of the argument, which I am going to try and make in which it is a bit of both.
So on the one hand, I remember in the mid 1980s the attack on the great Polish dissident and I were talking
and I was complaining to him about the damage Mrs Thatcher was doing to British society.
And he said, if only we had your problems, right?
Well, in a sense, one could argue, now they do. It's a kind of backhanded success.
Look at the contours of Central European populism.
Allegedly pure people account opposed to a corrupt liberal elite.
The will of the people is said to Trump. The verb is well chosen.
All other sources of democratic legitimacy anti-immigrant, Italian pluralistic institutions like independent courts are undermined and criticised.
There is a simplistic, emotionally appealing nationalist narrative.
If you look at the profile of social support, it's defined by class, education and geography.
Those parts of our societies, which feel traumatised by globalisation, liberalisation, Europeanisation digitalisation tend to vote for the populists.
A key part of the aetiology is inequality, both economic and cultural.
In all those broad generic sense is one can absolutely say yes.
It's a backhanded tribute to their success. They've become part of the West.
They have our problems now.
More interesting is to look at the specificity of Central European populism, how it's distinct, which is not what I propose to do.
So the argument that, in my view, clearly does not hold up is what I call vulgar.
Huntington is crude cultural determinism.
There is a great book by the historian Larry Woolf, which I can recommend to you called Inventing Eastern Europe,
in which he shows how certain prejudices about the east of Europe in Western Europe go all the way back to the Enlightenment of All and Rousseau.
And if you hear President Macron talking about Poland and Hungary now, it's like Voltaire, but not quite in the sense you laugh.
It's a it's an old West European press prejudice,
which simply does not hold up as a broad generalisation because these countries have very different paths.
This is a picture from the Velvet Revolution.
A demonstrator is holding up a picture of Thomas Masaryk, the founding president of interwar Czechoslovakia, in front of the demonstrators.
So when the Czechs and the demonstrators demonstrations that are now happening in Prague against vibrations,
they're also constantly referred back to Mousavi.
So when the Czechs look back to that pre-war history, what do they find an absolute model democratic statesman?
If the Germans were to look back pre-war, they find out of Hitler and the Italians Benito Mussolini,
civilised west, barbaric east, and then they get quite worse.
What I would concede is that when you look at the rhetoric of is full of law and justice,
there are clearly elements of pre-war political culture that are re-emerging.
Pollock catalytic the old equation of the poll is a Catholic. The Pope must be a Catholic.
The language of pre-war post-national democracy. In Hungary, the nationalism, the absolute obsession with Triano,
Orban is now building a huge monument to the lost territory, some criminal when, as you know,
Hungary lost nearly three fifths of its pre 1914 territory, which will be opened next year on Wait for it,
the 4th of June 2020, which is the anniversary of the trade on treaty.
So we have three Fourth of July, right? The Polish fourth of June, the Chinese fourth of June in the Hungarian Fourth of July.
But I think, and I want to argue much more important than those elements from pre-war political culture on number one,
the legacy of 40 years of communism and the nature of the transition.
And number two, the external circumstances. And this is the heart of my argument that this is in effect,
not somehow some throwback to a pre-war history, but populism with post-communist characteristics.
That's the essence of it. So the joke at the time in 1989, at the beginning of the transition was after 40 years of communism.
We know you can turn an aquarium into fish soup. Can we can fish soup back into an aquarium, right?
Or the destruction wrought by communism? The destruction of independent institutions of all kinds?
And part of the explanation for the relative strength of the populist advance in Poland and Hungary is quite simply,
the fragility of democratic institutions,
independent courts, independent media, civil society because they've only had 30 years to be built up, unlike in Britain or America.
Even more important is the matter of the economy and poverty.
So please remember that the opposite of communism for Marx enabled was not democracy.
The opposite of communism for Marx and angles was capitalism.
And in the Communist Manifesto, they said the essence of communism is the abolition of private property.
So they tried to abolish private property. Now they didn't wholly succeed in Poland and Hungary.
But most property in Central Europe at the end of 1989 was in either state or so-called collective or cooperative ownership, not in private hands.
So the huge challenge was how do you make a market economy with virtually no private property?
How do you make capitalism with virtually no capital? OK.
Answer number one. Give it back to its former owners. Restitution slow.
Difficult. Complicated. Only a small part of the story.
Answer no to sell it to the friendly foreigners who want to emulate the Western Europe you want to trade.
Quite successful, largely practised. Let me give you a clear statistic 50 percent of Hungary's exports saw a big one 80 percent.
80 percent of Hungary's exports today come from foreign owned companies foreign and 80 percent.
OK. Many of them German companies, German car manufacturers and so on, as in Slovakia as well, say, in Poland.
But that's actually very good for the initial period of economic growth.
But number one, it risks trapping you in the middle income trap,
where you're simply a supplier of cheap, skilled labour to foreign aliens who make the profit.
But number two, it does give you a sense of dependency and dependency, particularly on Germany.
OK. But most of the property was privatised into domestic house.
In a process that was swift and extremely corrupt because there were none of the independent institutions and the rule of law,
independent courts or regulators to control it. OK, so what of course happened is that the people who were well placed in the communist apparatus and
nomenklatura or had good connexions in the democratic era disproportionately benefited from privatisation,
sometimes called the privatisation of the no category. OK.
And they got a disproportionate share of the spoils.
And some of them became oligarchs like the present prime minister of the Czech Republic,
Andrej Babis, who is a classic product of post-communist privatisation.
Extremely murky and corrupted a former secret police informer. OK,
so now imagine you're a worker in the Lenin shipyard in GDAX and you went on strike
in August 1980 and you've been fighting the communists and fighting for freedom.
And no, because of shock therapy and marketisation. You're unemployed.
You're on your uppers. You haven't been retrained. You're out of the job in very traumatic experience.
Not only do you see other people getting very rich. What other people are?
It's general. Yara's ask his former spokesman, Yasur, over who's now very extravagant parties in his luxurious dinner.
It's former secret police chiefs who are now wealthy oligarchs.
And so the peculiar feature of this story is not just the inequality that we have in the West.
It's a sense of historical injustice about the apportioning of the spoils.
It's not just some people rich and some are poor. It's bloody [INAUDIBLE] who screwed us for 40 years and rich and we're still poor.
And this comes on top of what was already a sense of a lack of historical catharsis.
OK. Because if you do a velvet revolution, a peaceful, negotiated transition of power, inevitably you have to make compromises with the former.
Oh, that's right. You can't just the next day put them in prison, let alone hang them through numbers.
This is something we were extremely well aware of at the time.
I remember long conversations with various Hungarians who was a wonderful historian of France about this problem.
Most of these countries didn't do anything about it. East Germany is a peculiar exception.
They actually follow the Spanish model after Franco amnesty and amnesia.
That hasn't worked out so well at the moment. And nor is it in these countries because a sense of historical injustice and the lack
of revolutionary catharsis has come back to haunt the politics of these countries.
My own view is lesson for the future.
If you do a Velvet Revolution, have a truth commission, at least have some public symbolic confrontation with the past.
You may not be able to lock the [INAUDIBLE] up because it was a negotiated transition,
but at least now, with some sense drawing a line between bad past and better future.
I could talk some more about the titular character of inequality, but looking at the clock,
I'm going to skim that, and if somebody would like to ask me in the Q&A, we can come back to it.
The populists have exploited all these pathologies and complexes of the communist legacy in the country, they say.
What happened in 1989 wasn't a true revolution.
It was a handshake of hands that handshake transition,
a corrupt compromise between communists and former communist, and the true revolution, they say, begins now.
And that has a certain appeal. They say these cosmopolitan, liberal metropolitan elites didn't take any notice of you.
They were contemptuous of, you know what we're doing.
We're giving you 500 zlotys a month for every initiative, a second and subsequent child to every family to show that we can.
There's not just a significant amount of money 117 euros a month for a full family.
I mean, has a real economic meaning. It's also a gesture of respect.
And if you believe, as I do with the problem of inequality,
is as much about the inequality of attention with respect to the other halves of our society as about economic inequality.
And that's very important. Dawn, does this talk about the redistribution of dignity?
Very interesting phrase. Not uninteresting. Of course, the populists all talk about immigration.
All populists talk about immigration. Yeah, America, France, Germany, you name it.
The peculiarity of Central Europe is that Central Europe does have a big problem with migration.
Its problem is immigration, not immigration. The figures are absolutely staggering.
27 percent of the population of Latvia left between 1990 and 2017, 27 percent to 250 million poles, also East Germany.
You remember why the Berlin Wall was built. They don't always vote to stop the haemorrhage of people from East Germany.
The Wall comes from the haemorrhage. Subsequently, since the wall came down the 9th of November 1989,
nearly two million East Germans out of a population of less than 17 million people have left.
Think about that. The population of those territories is back to the level of 1945.
It's absolutely staggering. So why are they all about immigration? Well, even across the room, Stephen Holmes have made this point.
Talk about demographic panic, demographic panic, right?
We think that our country is being as it were evacuated by our own people.
And so we worry about new people coming in. And I think there's some truth in that.
But on top of that, there is a way in which populists can play on,
as it were traditional conservative values and forms of identity that were curiously conserved under
communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe is what it used to call the conservative effect of communism.
And so that Orban and Kaczynski campaigned very effectively on the fear of Muslim immigration in countries that have virtually no Muslim immigrants.
And this completely reverses the symbolism of 1989.
Let me just show you one thing you will remember.
Remember the wildcatters, the great symbol of 1989? Now take a look at this.
You have to see this is a Hungarian tabloid, which is very close over during the 2018 election, which was fought on Stop Immigration,
Stop Europe, George Soros in the centre, his arms around the shoulders of the opposition leaders.
And then if I've got a project anywhere, do you see the work of this?
You see a couple left that what one thing holding.
So the wire cutters from being the symbol of liberation have become the symbol of this Soros led American
Jewish West European conspiracy to flood conservative Christian Hungary with Muslim immigrants.
But the symbolism of the wire cutters has turned through 180 degrees, and this appeal to traditional values is extremely effective.
Paul says quite rightly, in his past and present article, he reminds us that nationalism or if you like it, you call it patriotism.
And the churches with some two of the great motivating forces of the 1989 revolution perfectly true.
Now the populist. Are reverting to and exploiting those forces.
And they saying you don't want your country to be just a cheap copy of a decadent West European consumer society.
We go back to traditional values of nation, family and church.
So in both countries, the battle against LGBT plus rights and gay marriage is an important part of the programme.
The Polish Catholic Church, I said I quote non heterosexual partnerships are completely alien to European civilisation,
and Orban says We want more Hungarian children.
So you decadent West Europeans, whether you are LGBTQ i.e. a class addressing your demographic problem by immigration.
But we there are all conservative, traditional European Christian Europeans just going to have lots more children,
a rhetoric, by the way, which is very close to that of Vladimir Putin.
I mean, this is a a spectrum which ideologically there's a there's a big overlap to the East, so it's the reverse of Donald Rumsfeld.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld? New York was Eastern Europe, old Europe was Western Europe.
It's the other way around now. Like they say, No, no, no. Western Europe is New Europe and where the good old Europe, Viktor Orban said.
I quote back in 1989, we thought Europe was our future.
Today, we think we are Europe's future. It's a complete reversal.
The last area in my analysis and then I'll come very quickly to today is the external context, the external context in 1989.
And if anyone is thinking about Hong Kong here, just make the comparison for a moment with uniquely capable.
It was morning in America. The United States had enormous soft power.
It had this great relationship with the Soviet Union. Western Europe was flourishing.
We have the project of 1992 with Germany was doing very well.
And if you ask people in 1989 in Central Europe what you really want to be, they would say we want to be a normal country, right?
And if you then push them and say, what do you mean by normal? Basically, the answer was like West Germany, right?
So there was this clear and present model of how you wanted to be.
And Russia was weak and retreat. Today, it's a very different picture.
I don't need to tell you the United States, the condition of the West, the condition of the European Union and of course,
China, which, by the way, is as much a product of 1989 as all the fragile democracies of Central Europe, right?
Because the Chinese Communist Party systematically learnt the lessons from the
collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in order not to repeat them,
and developed a unique system which ironically called in shorthand Leninist capitalism,
which has made it has its own problems but has made it extremely powerful so that China is now a force,
particularly in central and south eastern Europe, with large investments in countries like Serbia and Hungary.
And when the EU stops threatening Viktor Orban, he says,
and he said this once expressly said this you don't want to give us some money, we'll just go and find it from China.
But the one thing that I do want specifically to draw your attention to is the deeply problematic role of specifically in the EU,
in the erosion of democracy in Central Europe. So as you all know, the slogan of these revolutions in 89 was the return to Europe.
And then we had 15 years in which the EU exercised enormous,
normative and transformative power on these countries because they wanted to join it, right?
And they changed.
Their constitutions are law books, their competition policy, their food labelling everything in order to get into Europe, quote unquote.
Once they got in 2004 for the countries, I'm talking about 2007 for Romania, Bulgaria,
once they got in, they discovered they could get away with anything you can do,
whatever you like once you're a member of the EU, whatever its fine principles in the in the treaties, and they are very fine.
And it's worse than that. It's not just that the EU, despite all its fine words in Article two of the Treaty of European Union,
is allowing Orban and Kaczynski to get through, which is what is clearly a violation of European standards and values.
The EU is actually facilitating facilitating the erosion of democracy in east central Europe and no one.
We can't do much about this, but the fact is the people who emigrate are by and large,
the pro-European pro liberal pro-democratic people, young and energetic, right?
So the very fact of immigration is is weakening the Democratic Forces.
Number two, EU guarantees of foreign direct investment means that German car manufacturers are quite happy to go on investing.
Russia announced a huge new investment in Hungary. Whatever the politics, because you'll secure.
Number three, because the EU, as you all know, being in the European Studies Centre helps its poorer regions.
Vast funds have been flowing to these countries through the national governments to be disposed of by the national governments.
Hungary 2017 More than 3.2 billion euros net 600 euros ahead.
A patronage fund for Viktor Orban 95 percent of public investment in Hungary is co-funded by the EU.
Any small town in the Polish or Hungarian countryside and you will see something funded by the EU.
And this is not only great because you can say we've rebuilt your your,
your streets and your marketplaces and your hospitals mentioned the EU money, you can directly use it to reward your friendly oligarchs.
Right? So Orban doesn't censor the media in Hungary.
He just controls it through friendly oligarchs who are rewarded with generous government and EU contracts.
So we are allowing him literally to bite the hand that feeds to run an election campaign under the slogan Stop Europe,
stop Brussels to use EU money to undermine European values.
And then last point on the moral functioning of the EU.
Why doesn't the EU, which has been trying with the Article seven proceeding and the rule of law mechanisms?
Why isn't it more effective? Because it is is a member of the European People's Party, the biggest centre right European Parliament grouping.
And because those groupings have been given significant power in the European Union chairmanships of committees,
the Spitzenkandidaten procedure and so on.
They're desperate to hang on to every single MP to make them the largest group so that
while Fidesz has been dramatically violating European standards for the last few years,
the EPP is still using its funds to secure its majority.
So the joke here is that the partial politicisation of the EU has a directly counterproductive effect, right?
That is to say, the European political parties, which were intended to increase democracy at the EU level are precisely the thing that
are preventing the EU from more effectively defending democracy and a member state.
So in my view, the EU as such is substantially malfunctioning when it comes to the defence of democracy in these countries.
So is it time for a new liberation?
That was my subtitle.
One of the student leaders of the demonstration against Norwegian Salmon addressed this question directly at a big demonstration.
Here you can see it in Prague on Lech now earlier this year, because obviously there was such a strong opinion of the Velvet Revolution.
And he said this and I quote We're not making a revolution.
We embrace the legacy and values of 1989 and want to further them by actively striving.
And for a better future. But the situation is different now we are warning against.
We are warning against the course of change in our country under vibrations.
We are warning against the taming of Justice in the media and the use of patient power by a few oligarchs.
We are warning against democracy being stealthily stolen away from us.
And that seems to me exactly what these countries have had the revolution.
They've had the fundamental change of system.
And what is needed now is a kind of liberal democratic reform initiative to defend what has been achieved against terrorism
and to address the deformations that I've been talking about earlier that have come through the nature of the transition,
the very difficult attempt to turn the fish soup back into an aquarium.
I'll be very happy to talk about individual countries in the discussion period.
Broadly speaking, Slovakia is a great beacon of hope.
Having just elected a young female liberal pro-European president,
Susanna Terapeutica remarkable achievement in a country with a massive post-communist corruption and socially conservative and Catholic.
The Czech Republic a little way behind Poland again.
I hope we can talk about it in discussion, but in the balance between liberal and liberal democracy,
a government that would very much like to follow the old path and Jaroslaw Kaczynski may turn out to be an old man in a hurry.
But on the other hand, strong independent media, strong local government, including big city governments,
strong civil society grouping constitutional patriotism and very significant opposition parties who can compete in relatively fair and free elections.
Right. So the challenge there is actually to find the programmes, the leaders, the campaign, the unity to win the next election.
Does that sound familiar? I think it somehow does. They have our problems now.
But Hungary is by far the most difficult case because as I argued at the beginning, it's beyond the decade form, which I call the liberal democracy.
So it's very difficult to argue. That in a national election in Hungary, you really going to have a fair and free election.
But the opposition parties really have an equal chance of winning.
And this is my very final point. This is where Europe comes in.
For me, this is a great test for Europe and specifically for the European Union.
Germany said a dictatorship can exist in Europe, he said, but a dictatorship inside the European Union.
This is impossible. What is Viktor Orban going to prove him wrong?
Are we going to let Viktor Orban prove him wrong?
Are we at long last finally going to make that connexion between the Europe of values and the Europe of money, which is a key connexion to make?
Is there the political will to do that? Can we bring Ursula von der Leyen to take this seriously?
Big question if Donald Tusk becomes head of the EPP?
Will he take this seriously? I would argue, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not just a critical,
even an existential issue for Central Europe, for the new member states I've been talking about.
I would argue that this is a critical issue for the whole of Europe and the European Union.
We have a project in the dona€t programme called Europe's Florence.
It's about the European narratives, what stories we want the EU to tell convincingly, of course.
And I would say that the story that means so much to me and to many people in this room,
which is how Europe has helped the cause of freedom in country after country from Greece to Portugal to Spain to
Central Europe to southeastern Europe over the last 50 years is one of the best stories that Europe has to tell.
But what's going to happen in the early 21st century? Are we still going to be able to tell that story?
Or is it rather going to be the story about of how the EU actually let freedom fail even in its member states?
That, I think, is a question before us. Thank you very much. I look forward to this discussion.