Welcome everybody to this year's Tarkovsky lecture, which is this year part of a larger conference by the knowledge,
which is Poland, Britain, Europe Project of the European Studies Centre on European Nationalism.
Post 1989, Poland in comparative perspective, and we would like to thank the program of modern Poland,
of the Nobel Foundation and the Polish Cultural Institute and the European Studies Centre for their generous support.
And we've already started with one session for those of you who were there.
The title of the subtitle of the lecture is National Exception or Regional Norm,
which of course, deliberately begs the question, which region are we talking about?
Is it Central Europe? Is it East Central Europe? Is it Eastern Europe? Is it Europe?
Is it the West? Is it the world? And no one is better equipped to address that question than our speaker today, Professor Jack Hooke.
The exact work, Nic, is quite simply the doyen of specialists on Central and Eastern Europe.
In France, he's been working on the region, I think before, say, for 50 years,
Jacques, since he participated in even more of 1968 in Prague and Paris,
the anniversary of which we're celebrating this year, he wrote a very fine book on the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,
now perhaps a slightly minority interest, but then of some importance.
He did a memorable television series called The Other Europe, which produced a book of that title.
He spent a lot of the 1990s working on two major international commissions on former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and then Kosovo.
He has written extensively about issues around populism, post communism, nationalism.
His last book is 1989 as a political world event Democracy, Europe and the New International System,
with an introduction by Vaclav Havel, who indeed Jack knew very well and advised.
So no one of those days would be better equipped to address this subject.
Please join me in welcoming Secretary. Thanks.
Thanks very much, Tim. Great. A very kind introduction being called the doyen,
which simply means age and and being reminded of a book which was a thesis concerning the history of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
Well, my book of laughter and forgetting that is.
So, yeah, it's good to be reminded the 68 hours are still around and it is actually interesting to see.
But I will not inflict that on you at this stage. The debates about 68 that are going on in the unless you are interested in the debate in the after
the after the talk 68 is also one reason why Kolakowski came to this country and to this university.
This is what I had the privilege of meeting him in the mid-seventies of a fighter.
He is he was a real Dwyer of the East European Studies in France.
So but he's all around. And he took me as a young student to see Kolakowski.
And we spent a whole afternoon in the garden here in Oxford discussing the two men were discussing, of course, Eastern Europe, French Communist Party,
everything else, and eventually addressed the fundamental question whether the devil could be considered a proof of the existence of God.
And so I remember that brilliant conversation on that subject,
and I'm sure it was related to our previous conversations about communism in Eastern Europe,
but and of course, many other occasions to remember that I share kolakowski one of them.
Another one here was, I think about 15 years ago, a conference about Central Europe, where L'échec was unanimously elected the king of Central Europe.
So I salute I salute the king.
And of course, not sure the king would recognise this kingdom today because it has undergone evolutions that you started discussing.
This afternoon, Richard Kolakowski wrote an essay that you may remember incidentally, his essays.
I mean, he's known for his magnum opus on Marxism, a number of his essays, which I recently reread, a number of them.
And there's one called How to Be a Conservative Liberal Socialist, which was a way of saying, Forget all Labour's, think on your feet, a new afresh.
This is the kind of good advice we would need for for today.
The opening sentence of that of that essay is to move forward to the back.
And you see, he says, he continues, this is an injunction that I heard once on a tram in Warsaw.
I propose to make it the rallying call for a powerful international that will never see the light of day.
So yeah, move forward to the back.
That could have been the title of this lecture actually,
because obviously we are trying to understand the regression of democracy in Poland, but in East Central Europe more generally.
And this less than 30 years after the fall of the old regime, 15 years after accession to the EU,
Austria in the 1920s, reflecting about what happened to Hungary,
use the term Reichstag regression borrowing from psychoanalysis this term the idea that in times of crisis all structures come to the fore.
And so the books like is really what I be trying to address.
Now. I will focus on the Hungary and Poland, but of course make comparisons with others as well.
It's difficult to avoid the Polish on. Get in tandem because they've actually made it so they've presented themselves together.
Together. They were in Utah in the fall of 2016 and not only celebrating Brexit, but calling for a counter-revolution in Europe.
And that was, for me, a sort of very symbolic moment.
You know, it used to be that dissidents would meet in the mountains on the Czech Polish border to discuss strategies,
how to democratise their societies now to form dissidents.
Because Orban and Kaczynski are former dissidents.
Two former dissidents meet in the to trust, to discuss, to propose,
to call for a counter-revolution in Europe so that that is one reason to put them together.
The second is Poland has been today put singled out in the procedure, as you know,
the EU procedure of invoking Article seven that could suspend the voting rights of a country.
This is unprecedented and of course it will not happen, as we know, because you need unanimity.
But of course it has brought back, so to speak, the Polish question again in two to the four.
So the Polish question returning in the context of an East-West divide in Europe that
has crystallised over the migration crisis and over the what is now called for short,
illiberal, illiberal democracy. So yes, Kolakowski is kingdom is changing.
The other Europe, which was my own take on this, is becoming other again,
but in a very rather different ways from what writers that were engaged in that debate at the time be the Milan Kundera stuff Milosh,
Konrad and many others had in mind.
So that is the polish I mentioned, that is the Central European dimension, and that is and I insist on that.
The trans European dimension there is a danger, especially in in West European journalism,
of simply describing the situation in Central Europe to which a across group illiberal democracy and you already know where they heading.
I think that as in every stereotype, there is, of course, an element of truth.
And I will, of course, develop that. But but I think that that is missing the point, that this is a problem that is trans-European.
We can observe it everywhere. Where does actually Western Europe start is not clear.
Austria clearly is part of the picture. Austria-Hungary is back in business, illiberal, closed, so to speak.
So yes, but it is a trans-European and I don't have to go country by country to single out, to point out.
Indeed, when you see the way or abandon, Kaczynski welcomed Brexit and in fact,
indeed the whole Visegrad group saying this is the main lesson from Brexit, bring repatriate powers to the national governments.
This is the main lesson that we derive from that.
So Brexit first and the election of Donald Trump then providing the context which seen from Central Europe,
you have what was considered the two main bastions of liberal western liberal democracy going a different way.
And you just see the response, as Orban put it in his Daily Telegraph interview immediately after the election of Donald Trump with Brexit.
Brexit opened the door with the election of Donald Trump.
We have crossed the threshold. The liberal non democracy is over.
What it. A What a day. What a day. He was simply over the top, over the moon.
He could not restrain himself. This was for him.
He said in that interview that he suddenly, thanks to Brexit and Trump, he felt liberated from this European concern.
Liberated is not quite do it. Vindicated is the better word.
He felt vindicated in the previous session.
Somebody raised the question of legitimation. Well, there you have it.
Legitimation. This is what they saw in those events.
So, yes, you were pointing fingers at us, seeing as we are a backward, unruly of unworthy of Europe, periphery of the continent, etc., etc.
No, we were the vanguard of the nationalist populist tide that is reshaping the politics in Europe in.
Internationally actually, because it's Trump. But you could add in other other continents, you could add Modi, etc.
I mean, the list is long. That could you know, there's a kind of nationalist international that that has come into being in recent years.
So this reminds me a bit of of a short story by Maxwell in May about a cyclist in the Tour de France who is lagging behind the peloton.
You know, and he's lagging so much that the following year he finds himself head of the race.
So that is that is a little bit how the a central European nationalist, populist, etc., I think could can be seen.
And this is how they seem to say they're very pleased with themselves.
I've just been to Hungary, seem to think a week before the election I spent a week talking to some of the people in the surroundings of Orban.
They are not apologetic. They're very assertive, very determined, very self-confident.
They have the feeling that the tide is going their way, etc., etc.
So this is something to bear in mind when we discussing the situation,
which doesn't mean you have to sort of not see what is actually happening, but simply be aware that the retarded cyclist is now in the peloton.
The peloton actually is moving or they feel the peloton is moving in that direction.
Time is limited and I'm already behind, so to speak.
What I suggest to do is briefly look at some of the main features of populist nationalism in Central Europe.
You could call it varieties of populism, etc. Look at some of the explanatory hypotheses we can formulate and then look at the European dimension.
What does it what are the implications?
What are the consequences for Europe?
It is good to remember when we look at Central Europe today that the Visegrad Group, when it was created and I think the founding moment was,
I think Vaclav Havel speech into Polish same in January 1990 where he basically outlines the situation.
We are coming out of dictatorship.
We have the common we have cooperated among dissidents, Solidarnosc after 77, etc. in making the democratic transformation possible.
And we have a common goal, which is European integration.
He also added a number of other reasons we have to cooperate to fill the geopolitical
void not just left by the communist system that was disintegrating the Soviet bloc,
but left by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was an interesting point that he was thinking also in geopolitical terms.
And I will now come back to that quote We have now complete regression on all three counts.
They are in Democratic regression. It's not overcoming nationalist tendencies of the pre-war period, which was others concern as well.
They are back on that on that track.
And they have now adopted a very critical or often hostile posture towards towards European integration.
So we have the Visegrad Group in complete reversal mode.
So briefly, the varieties of opinion, I don't think I have to dwell too much on the Polish Hungarian variety.
Budapest in also, as Kaczynski called it, because you are from this audience it's familiar is familiar with it a challenge to the rule of law.
The Constitutional Court. In both cases, of course, this is a common strategy.
In fact, Kaczynski copying in accelerated form some of the things that Orban had done.
Yes. Some of the defendant's media in Poland.
This is true for the public media. But you still have independent private media in Hungary.
This is no longer so this is no longer. So I do not think I would think I would see an old dissident friend in Budapest.
So a couple of weeks ago a morning, the disappearance of Nick Saban as the ultimate upholder of independent journalism in Hungary,
that sort of sums it up, how far we have gone.
And they have a common features in that in the discourse the revolution betrayed.
That is a familiar one, of course.
1989 was not to be a revolution, etc., etc.
You know that that version, the related element is the network that has been established because the revolution didn't happen.
You have a network that has been established that is related to the old regime, to the old secret police, etc.
And this is they've got the chance to state the economy, etc., etc.
Cloud, of course, in the Polish in the Polish version.
But the Hungarian one is a very, very well, I, I spoke to the rector of the Communist University who went on and on about that.
He says, what we need is a change of guard. I said, What do you mean, got the communists?
You know they are. But I said, But you know, this is 30 years after the death of communism.
You're beating a dead horse. Oh, no, no.
This is this is a priority, you know. So it it doesn't mean the reality is not important.
It is the rhetorical element of element.
And I think in both cases, Orban, he moved to the right to capture the nationalist conservative electorate very deliberately.
And in a way you can say you remember the piece was in Coalition with some Oberon and the League of Polish Families.
And what are they? They've captured that?
Well, they covered the ground. I think that there are some number of similarities.
You can just I don't need to dwell on that. You have you know that very well.
Perhaps what you may be less familiar with is the Czech and Slovak version, because Czechs and Slovaks, they keep a low profile or lower profile.
But if you look at close range, the picture is not very pretty.
And basically you get a milder version as often with the Czechs, you get a milder version of the same trend in in Central Europe.
There is, of course, a discourse about Czech exceptionalism.
I, in this audience would expect me to launch on a big tirade about Polish exceptionalism.
I will not do that because I saw that Norman DAVIES was in the audience there, perhaps not here,
but, you know, you can't you can't be that, you know, this is the hot the heart of Europe.
You cannot you cannot be that. I mean, he is the expert on the subject, and I will not dare in front of him go over that old chestnut.
Although maybe I will say a couple of things about in ways in which Poland is different, exceptional, perhaps vis a vis the other Central Europeans,
no varieties of populism, the Hungarian Polish hardline version, the softer Czechoslovak version, the Slovak version.
You have essentially an attack on the rule of law, which has not been as obvious as elsewhere,
but it have come to the fore in the context of the current corruption scandal.
As you know, the assassination of this of the journalist and his and his fiancee.
And suddenly the idea of the inefficiency of the police, the judiciary, etc., etc., came came to the fore.
That's one aspect of it. The second and you see how closely the political power is connected both to the police and to the judiciary.
And the second, I think, more more interesting in a way aspect or less surprising is in the discussion about populism,
because after all fits are what is what is fits of Sparty fits US party is called smear when he created it more than ten years ago.
Smear means direction, but he didn't say which direction. So that for me is a definition of a parliament.
Its its me. The direction. This is me. Follow me.
So that is that is the second thing is, is that he went very deliberately for the nationalist electorate.
That was since mid-year. So he provided a sort of soft landing for the boss, which are both nineties, you remember,
which are some of you must remember, you know that the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Nachar.
So he basically provided a soft landing for the major electorate and not so soft when the election campaign comes.
And as it did in 2016 and the whole for the six months prior to the election was about the migrant campaign taking European Commission to the court.
I think he was the first East European to take the Commission to the court over the quotas, over the migrant quotas he eventually lost.
But that doesn't matter. It's just the symbolic, the political charge there.
And his statement is, you know, you could I mean, Orban is often quoted Kaczynski,
of course, on on on his fear of epidemics that migrants can bring, etc., etc.
Well, you you should read major out. I will never allow a single Muslim to come into this country anyway.
They would not be happy here because we have no mosques.
If we want mosques, you know this way in Germany, France, Britain, if you can make it from today.
Good luck. That is that is that is feasible.
And he created a coalition with nationalists in Slovakia.
You have a continuum of nationalism. FETO is a milder version home.
I just gave you an example.
Then you have the Slovak National Party, which used to be the equivalent of the whole Nazionale, although it has become it has mellowed somehow.
That happens to two extreme right wing parties.
It's not happening to your beat, incidentally, far right, nationalist, extreme xenophobes, anti-Semitic, everything.
And now, because they see that Orban has occupied the whole nationalist field, including the far right, they they are squeezed.
And they say they're trying to reinvent themselves as a sort of centre, centre, right party.
So this is also very new experiment. I don't know how successful it will be, probably not.
But you have in Slovakia, therefore the continuum fits all Slovak National Party and now you have got Libre,
this openly fascist party that entered Parliament in in the last election.
So yes, nationalism, xenophobic and the corruption issue, the rule of law is a key element, incidentally, that provoked popular demonstrations.
As we have seen, government was brought down. Robert Fitzgerald resigned.
And to fix the problem and you know the problem what is was the role of Italian mafia in Slovakia,
in regional governments in Slovakia, in capturing European funds?
That's what it's about. Prepared to kill people over that.
So to fix the problem of the Italian mafia in Slovakia, Robert Fritz appointed his successor, called Pellegrini.
So we have sort of the picture in good hands.
The situation is in good hands, obviously, with Pellegrini, the Czech.
The Czech always have. I mean, the Czech version of populism comes in three.
The three phases of Czech populism. One could see the three faces of Czech populism.
It could be a title for for an article if the title is already taken for fascism.
So populism has not been the three faces of populism has not been done.
First phase is, is that of Andrej Babis, a Slovak who became prime minister in the Czech Republic, is an entrepreneur.
So this is a different this is different kind of populism. This is what I would call entrepreneurialism, populism, entrepreneur, populist.
That is, you have a successful businessman who starts buying media, he bought newspapers, etc., and then eventually decides to step into politics.
He steps into politics and creates a party called Uno.
Uno means yes, but he doesn't say yes to what because again, it is yes to him.
Just like FETO. Snip. So this is.
If you're looking for what is characteristic a strong leader with authoritarian rhetoric the rhetoric of of or of Babish is is I mean,
he's very tough on migration as well. But his main thing is the parliament is a talk shop.
They are useless. They do nothing. I am a doer.
We are doers, we do things. Okay, this is one version.
The state should be run like a company. That's a quote.
The state should be run like a company. So there's no distinction between private and public a common good or anything like that.
So you have that the on Brexit.
I heard him at a conference when I was in private.
Well, he said if I were British I would vote for Brexit, for Brexit, but I'm not.
And you know, and he's doing very well with European funds, his firm.
I got offered billions with that and actually it is with all the European funds that he got into trouble.
Not okay. Misuse of a tiny fraction.
One of his subsidiary companies, you know, €2 million.
This is peanuts for him. It's absolutely peanuts. But anyway, he's in trouble because of that.
So this is one face entrepreneurialism, populism, the second face of populism.
Milos Zeman Again, I don't have time to go over everything.
I would simply say in the second round of the election, you had two candidates.
This was in January of this year, Milos Zeman and former chairman of the Academy, professor of chemistry.
And, you know, very nice and vaguely pro-European, vaguely liberal, everything, vaguely didn't have much to say, but was a decent man.
The the other one had lots to say, mainly in a brutal and insulting way.
And guess who won? And in the runoff between the first and the second round, the posters in Prague were stopped, migrants stopped.
Roush The rush downhill.
Migrants in the Czech Republic spoke. Never mind. But what does your answer to that?
I agree only with the first proposition. Right.
That's that's how courageous the Liberals are in Prague.
And the third face of Czech nationalist populism is Tommy Okamura.
Now, you may, you may be surprised, but the most radical xenophobic language dig the migrants, stop them, send them,
etc. It comes from a guy with no Japanese who is a leader of the extreme right wing Czech Nationalist Party.
So if Pellegrini is going to fix the mafia, why couldn't Okamura fix the migrants in the Czech Republic?
That is. And of course this is the picture and unduly of the Czechs and Slovak simply because they
are less attention paid to it hopes to correct the extreme focus on the Polish Hungarian.
On the Polish Hungarian case. If I had time, I would make the comparison with Slovenes closer to the Czech version.
Slovenes can succeed even to make populism boring.
You know, they have a political party of the party of the moderate centre which won the election, which was created six months before the election.
And it's what so reminded me of, you know, in those who know the good soldier shape of, you know, it's all to,
you know, somehow try to create a party, a party of moderate progress within the limits of the law.
Okay. It talks that's that's that's the story.
And take on the more interesting for this audience Poland centric audience is Croatia because the nearest comparison for Poland is Croatia,
nationalist, conservative, super Catholic.
And they created together now the Three Seas a project you know about that this is a great thing.
And so now we have from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill said, not the Iron Curtain, but the populist nationalist alliance has been.
Has been form briefly what they have in common.
As I said, rule of law and independent media.
Secondly, the decay of the party system.
I do not have one, but this is a crucial thing.
You know, in the 1990s, the emergence of the party system in all the countries in the Czech Republic, I used to say,
well, you know, you may not like these parties, but you have these two pillars or this created by Vaclav Klaus.
You have the Social Democrats that you will create coalitions with.
The Christians always watch the Greens or whatever. Small, small parties will be available.
That is gone. That is gone. And in the space, in the middle, came, came.
Babish And ten years ago, I wrote you published a book in Prague called The Prematurely Tired Democracy.
And in those days, I was rather talking about the disillusionment with democracy at the time,
and disillusionment I thought was inherent to democracy, first of all.
And secondly, it could mean that people are becoming more critical and more demanding with there is a critique of the democratic system.
It was not simply legitimated by the negation of the communist system.
So there was a new phase and I was sort of trying to see a positive element in the disillusionment.
Now, now we've moved to something. This is no longer disillusionment with democracy, which is a huge if you look at the surveys,
I mean, the trust in government 11% is the average in the Visegrad.
So this is not high. But there you have the authoritarian drift and the call for strong hand government.
You know which countries it is strongest in the whole of Eastern Europe, Czech Republic and Romania and then Slovakia, etc.?
Not Poland. I mean, Poland is that. But and since I am on the Czechs and, and the Slovaks and I want to return to Poland as soon as I can,
but I wanted at least if I had the time, I was simply using the figures that I had with me.
When you look at the surveys, you see a similar trend.
It's a trans-European trend, and then you have a much stronger Central European dimension.
So, you know, dissatisfaction with governments was it it didn't bring the power point I could have inflicted on you.
You know, plenty of data is a huge survey published by Interpol, which I recommend,
which is that which is really trans-European, all European countries on that.
And it goes subject by subject, you know, trust in government, trust in judiciary, media, etc., etc.
For me, the interesting thing is when you come to issues such such as the one I've just mentioned,
the migration of tolerance towards others, you have a rather strange picture because not only is Central Europe,
the the negative posture is stronger, but you have a surprising element when you say to people, immigration has negative consequences for our country.
Two thirds of all say yes, 83% of Hungarians, but 88% of Slovaks, 91% of Czechs bear no migrants there.
I mean, so this is interesting. Islam is perceived as a menace by half of the this is half in the EU.
The EU average is half do think Islam is a menace.
Half of the EU says yes, which is already quite high. It's it's over two thirds in Poland and Hungary and then 78% for Slovaks, 85% for Czechs, etc.
I could go on like that, but what I'm trying to say is that, yes, they produced a milder version politically,
but the underpinning in society is there and sometimes even on some aspects, even stronger than you would suit.
And so the question for political science,
after all that is this is the room or at least half of Italy's political science oriented, how to define these regimes?
I think this is this would be an important question for a discussion.
Is it? Authoritarian is must levitsky in a way call it.
In other words, you still have competition, you still have elections. But the level playing field is no longer there.
You no longer have fair competition.
You basically could hardly talk. I mean, increasingly difficult to talk about free and fair elections.
Hybrid regimes. Illiberal democracy is a term that Orban himself has used.
Young von Miller is very critical of the use of that word because he thinks that only
the only true democracy is liberal democracy and therefore one shouldn't use it.
I think this is and I see what he means and I sort of basically agree with him on the on what his intentions are.
But I think it's dodging the issue. I think he's dodging the issue because this is a debate within democracy, and it's a very old debate.
It's not something invented a few years ago by Obama or Kaczynski or something like that.
This is something much older. You can go back to the American style and this distinction of of freedom of the moderns and the ancient,
you know, the freedom of enjoyment, liberal freedoms of enjoyment of liberties.
State is simply to guarantee that freedom or freedom to participate.
The positive freedom as I thought they would have it. So this is an old debate.
It's a debate within democracy. And it makes the debate all the more difficult because both Orban and Kaczynski and others.
Because, of course so and but we should have a similar inclinations, is to say, but we have the popular vote.
We have the popular sovereignty behind us, and we should not accept the constraints of constitutions,
institutions, neutral, non-elected bodies, non-elected bodies such as, I don't know, the central bank of the EU,
etc., etc. There's a whole group of non-elected bodies in European Union fits in that category Brussels,
Brussels, bureaucrats, etc. These non-elected commissioners, they are telling the sovereign people what to do.
So this is no.
Yeah, I think when when Kaczynski talks about legal impossibility, this is what is at stake.
We the will of the people, the democratic will of the people.
We have the majority, but it is constrained by legal constraints and we should resist.
Of course you answer. But the European Union is based on that, on the rule of law, the acceptance of those constraints.
But this is this is what it is about.
And this is why we have the discussion. This is why we have the what more than discussion is now a political confrontation.
But still I still believe it's a debate within democracy.
And and and it will have to be fought on the ground.
One element, the illiberal populist onslaught, targets society and particularly civil society.
The Hungarian case is, I think, very interesting because there they went further than elsewhere in trying to constrain,
restrict control the activities of independent civil society organisations.
They have more or less followed put in legislation about foreign agents who have to disclose the foreign funds you get and you are labelled something.
It's not foreign agent like in Russia, but something similar.
And you have, I think I would call it the salami tactics in the reverse.
You remember salami tactics, how to deal with your opposition.
Well, I see you have something similar going on that first you tackle political opposition.
They are weak. That is fragmented. They're gone. Then you target NGOs, civil society.
You have various organisations that finance from abroad, sort of, etc., etc.
This is your second line of thought. And now they're moving even into the third phase, which is the sphere of culture, and that includes university.
And the Central European University is of course a perfect target,
but within the broader context of schooling in general theatres, cultural life in general.
Why? Because they consider that the cultural sphere, just like under communism all.
Like much like under communism, it becomes the ultimate sphere where the opposition retreats.
They've been defeated politically. Their NGOs are now being shrunk.
Well. Culture is where they tend to retreat.
This is where you move on. And this is why I will come to it.
Cultural war matters so much how to account for all for this illiberal drift.
As I said, I will spare you the Polish exceptionalism thesis.
It has merits. I remember the discussions we had about Solidarnosc, you know, was it an exception and an exception?
The only social movement of that size where the working class was part of it?
Or was it the tip of the iceberg? You know, revival of civil society elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Okay. Discuss. I mean, this would be a perfect essay question for Oxford students.
I will, for the time being, perhaps in the discussion we return to it.
The only aspect of that exception is, as I mentioned, that I think is interesting is reading an essay by a mutual no he Franco Romanian author.
He has an essay where he compares Spain and and Poland.
And, you know, the rural priests are very conservative, very Catholic.
They even both worship worship the black virgin.
So, yeah, you have this parallel and he puts his finger on what makes Poland unique.
In those days, he saw Poland and Spain. I think Spain in the post Franco era has has, so to speak, no longer fits quite the parallel that Chiron made.
But I think that this idea of the special place of religion and the Catholic Church, within the context of what I've been talking about,
the Central European predicament, that is a unique polish, which you don't have that in Hungary, you don't have that in the Czech Republic.
The Czechs on this is the most secularised society in Europe, not just central in Europe, period.
As I said, the only country that would come anywhere near it is Croatia.
That's where the problem may be, but that is unique and that indeed is related then to the to the nationalist
discourse that has been developing in the bar by the ruling party in Poland today.
In the in the hypotheses about the the explanatory hypotheses and I can only sketch them out because time is running on one is is the most
widespread perhaps in the literature for me the least convincing for Central Europe is about the winners and losers of the transition.
And this is and you have the same thing in the literature on populism, the winners and losers of globalisation.
So then you lose your translated into the win. Yes, of course I can I can see that the the the attraction of that of that model.
I can also see that you have somebody like Martin Krol,
who in his how to call it a pamphlet that he wrote very smoothly and basically says, you know, what was a problem?
Well, how basically political liberals jump on the Biden bandwagon of economic liberals simply
became a smokescreen for the introduction of Chicago style market market reforms.
And so you have capitalism introduced under the banner of Solidarnosc and all these dissident intellectuals.
Liberals were infatuated by the guru Mr. Bauer settlement, who was a very doctrinaire and still is actually very doctrinaire, a free marketeer.
So that's that's one take. That is an element of that.
Basically, you could sum it up as the omission of the social question.
You didn't want to think in those terms because you thought it would distract from the higher duty of etc., etc.
Oh, this comes back with a vengeance.
Somebody else has caught wind of the social question and they do it in their own way.
You know, it is not the five hundreds sorry for children allowances, etc.
They they know how they call it the better Poland.
They. Okay, this is you got it.
They they are culturally very conservative, but socially it's a compassionate, compassionate conservatism.
That could be something they haven't they haven't yet used, but it could.
So so that's one thing. I don't find it terribly convincing because you look at the economic performance of the country,
all of them, including Poland, the only country that didn't have the economic crisis.
Again, if you don't want to talk about Poland, Czech Republic, I mean, global growth, lowest unemployment in Europe, they are below 3%.
They have to import, you know, construction workers from Ukraine, etc., etc.
So this they've never had it so good. The coffers are full.
The debate, pre-election debate in Czech Republic, in the parliamentary debate in the fall round, something like this.
And I think we should increase the teachers by 10%.
What? Only 10%? Oh, this is an outrage. 15% and immediately, etc., the next one, 20%.
So yeah, you can say anything because money is there.
Nobody can object. Yeah, but you know, we are we are a sort of stringent situation, you know, the kind of argument one hears in France, etc.
But this is a government that has performed remarkably well on an average of three
and a half percent growth comes to the electorate and loses two thirds of its vote.
So you cannot explain that in economic terms.
So so you have to go for something else. And I think that some of the other things I have mentioned are more are more pertinent.
Yes. The. I suppose the you could always point to the discrepancies between regions and a lot has been made about the south east and north west.
But I, I know the discussion.
The only thing that I find interesting is that the electoral map of peace and platform overlaps.
I mean, especially the previous not overlap with the maps of the partition of Poland.
And then you look and you say, well, does it actually.
Does it help? Is that another strong element of socio economic?
Could you connect that with the socio economic argument? This would be the bucket Poland or something like that.
Poland able and be you know. You know, you know.
There are a recent article by Irina Crossfield and another colleague of hers shows the thesis is not convincing.
Look, if you compare incomes on both sides of that historical border, they've been narrowed down during the communist period.
And since there are some differences. But this is not significant.
No. What matters is religious practice, religious religiosity, which is stronger in that part of Poland for historical reasons.
And that is that is more that is more interesting, I think, than the than the other argument.
And I guess I would say that if you look at possible explanations,
the second hypothesis about nationalism as a prime challenge to liberalism in
terms of identity politics and search for a legitimate legitimation of power,
that is a much more much stronger argument. Incidentally, this is an argument we had very early on and we dismissed it.
I remember in the beginning of 1991, we were in Krakow at a conference, a team was the prison, etc.,
and we were not celebrating, but we were discussing the democratic transition since were looking very promising.
And suddenly, amidst of this very jolly and optimistic crowd came one prophet of doom.
And his name was Adam Michnik.
And he said that Poland is facing the threat, could be facing the threat of three fundamentalism, three fundamentalist threat.
The first was nationalist fundamentalism. And that was, you know, a homogeneous ethnic, hardline nationalist group that could return to the surface.
He said, and I quote, the national interest so defined, yeah,
this is everything should be subordinated defence of national interests and national interests or defined sees
discussion of anti-Semitism in Poland or discussions of pogroms against Roma as harmful to the Polish nation.
Well, perhaps he was on to something. Second, second fundamentalism.
He was warning against religious fundamentalism.
And he says that is the tendency to obliterate the divide between the sacred and the profane,
between moral norms and legal norms, etc., etc., basically warning against kind of Iranian scenario for Poland.
Again, we said, What are you talking about? Thirdly, he warned against the political culture of the Polish opposition.
He said it's used to think in religion, in moral absolutes, then in us,
etc. And this is not a culture that is conducive to the political pluralism that you need for parliamentary democracy.
And he was concluding by said, well, all this means that we are to be facing a threat of populism.
That is a term he used because he said, again, the language of rebellion against communism was the language of the people.
Against them. It was already the populist thing was, so to speak, embedded in that.
So at that time we had dismissed it and we had no discussion.
I remember Tim also gave us kind of a rejoinder.
I had discussion. We didn't think this was it.
But I must give Adam credit that, you know, prophets of doom, eventually,
if you wait long enough, end up being sometimes at least partially in a fashion.
Right. The yeah.
I sectionalism that is the second is the the third element,
perhaps the most important in my opinion, is the what could come under the heading of culture wars.
I said for the social question, the first hypothesis much and cross essay is a reference for this one.
A good cause book. The term the totalitarian temptation by which he means liberal is God.
Where where does this connect to the previous issue?
Bebo. Esteban Bebo, the Hungarian writer in his book about the misery of the small states of Eastern Europe, made the following point.
He was writing during the war and he said, There is a danger. And he was talking about all the countries of the region.
And he said there is a danger for democracy and even a threat of fascism when the cause of freedom comes into conflict with the cause of the nation.
Because in that case, then he develops the cause of individual freedom,
will always lose the tension in Eastern Europe between individual freedoms and the collective freedom.
And because of the nature of nation state building in those countries, these are nations without state.
These are culture of nations that whose existence is by no means ensured, guaranteed.
And therefore that is the crucial question around which the East European predicament of.
And I think that the way the nationalists in Central Europe in the migrant crisis have succeeded in framing the problem in precisely those terms.
Our nation, our national independence, our national being, because we are cultural nations defined by language, culture, religious affiliation,
etc., etc., is being threatened by the invasion which has to be stopped like we did stop previous invasions, you know, the Turks, etc., etc.
So there is this discourse that does the framing of the migrant crisis came together with something broader,
which we can call the culture wars in which the good legutko then puts in a broad framework.
Basically, he says, what this liberal Europe stands for is basically all the societal questions ranging from abortion,
gay marriage, LGBT, etc. You have a whole range of those ending up with multiculturalism.
The foreign minister, the previous woman, the foreign minister, actually,
Kosky had had this talk about these God bless the cyclists and vegetarians who are threatening the family values and Christian Poland, basically.
So this is it.
You have the framing of a liberal, weak, decadent Europe, which is threatening the dissolution of the very core values that matter for us.
And that is the fundamental difference we have with Europe today.
I heard that in Budapest not once, quite all over the place, all the Ottoman establishment, all on that line.
This is a most important issue for them. All the other issues that I mentioned are subordinated to that one.
It is a collective. Is a collective volume that I've seen of essays by Polish authors.
There is actually pretty conservative political thinking, which is worth reading and and reflecting upon.
And you have a whole range of authors.
I saw it in one collection published in Prague, which includes Krasnodar, Ski T, Hot Ski Village, Stein and the whole range, a whole group of them.
The good guy I just mentioned, because he is has published his book now in English and has this is a new totalitarian temptation.
But what what what if you have to look for common denominators about what could be called the blind spots of European liberalism?
First, I would say memory for memory.
Well, the big mistake, mass of jet ski, the thick line,
basically refusal to deal with the communist past in the name of modernising the country and looking to the future.
Secondly, identity. They favour individual rights proliferation.
Liberal Europe favours proliferation of individual rights.
They forget about the collective identity of the nation.
And thirdly, sovereignty instead of the post-modern post-national Kantian delusions about perpetual peace, the end of history.
And I don't know what which is the kind of fig leaf for the European project.
Nation state must remain the key subjects of domestic and foreign policy.
This is a basic, if you want, mantra of the new conservative thinking.
And it comes at a time when the liberal post 89 cycle had been exhausted.
So it's not just that these ideas are brand new and we never heard them before, of course,
but they come in a package formulated at the very moment when the liberal cycle had been exhausted.
You want a democracy, you have it. It's in crisis. You wanted a market economy.
We have it since 2008. We know it is in difficulty, even though Eastern Europe has less so difficult to say less difficult situation than elsewhere.
And you want it returned to Europe. Well, welcome.
You are part of Europe, but Europe itself is in crisis.
Which brings me to the last point, which is precisely Europe and I.
My God. Okay.
I will I will just say it in telegraphic style and then we can develop that in the discussion.
What I intended to say about Europe is, first of all, to remind I don't have to remind this audience, but since no Monday, this is not a yes.
I can I can do my historical take on this.
If you read I remember years ago, Galitsky, when he came to Paris in the early nineties, I invited him to food as also seem often suave.
You had invited him and he opened his talk by saying, How many times have we already returned to Europe?
And then he developed the argument, you know, Yeah, we've been there before, and this is a very old debate.
And the whole 19th century in Poland, of course, is an intellectual debate about the merits and the drawbacks or threats posed by Western modernity.
And this book was actually, put simply, a Polska or a palazzo.
What it is, is about that you reject a certain form of modernisation because it comes together with was Germany's ation was a call to come.
So there is there is a it's good to be reminded that this is a very old debate, very old in the previous sessions.
I think some have already alluded alluded to that.
So that's what on the European side, the whole literature about EU transformative power now reads very,
very strange, how to say it politely well, obsolete or slightly out of touch.
Anyway, interesting. Informative. But you know.
Yeah. The assumption that the EU leverage can transform.
Will it help to transform Central Europe? It works until you get in.
It does. It's no guarantee of irreversibility.
And so that is very important. The whole literature about the idea that you have transition, consolidation, integration, that was the trajectory.
Right. And that. And then what?
Well, then you have regression. It looks like. So, yeah.
Second thing, the European response to Central European regression.
Contrast between Hungary and Poland. Benign neglect to Hungary when Orban came to power in 2010.
But it'll make letters from Mrs. Emily Cross from the commission, you know,
could you please perhaps amend something, you know, in your law, in the media, etc., etc.?
I mean, one of the crossings, I mean, was on the board of 12 companies registered in the Panama Papers.
It's not good. Anyway, this this was the benign neglect enjoyed by Hungary, and you can contrast that with a rapid response to Poland.
The laws were adopted in December, December 15, January 16.
Timmermans, the commissioner, was already asking explanations after explanation, phase two evaluation.
And then eventually you come to measures taken, including the procedure that I already referred to about Article seven.
How do you explain the contrast? Well, you could simply say Hungary was thought to be an isolated case.
Poland changes the picture. Size matters.
So if Poland goes that way, that is means concerned for the whole region, obviously.
That's one explanation.
The main explanation, however, is that Poland had us alive and would be protected in the EU, the British conservatives who are in Brexit mode,
whereas Orban very early on opted for the party, the People's Party, CDU, CSU in particular.
Just one reminder in 2000.
In Austria, you have the shoes. The government. For the first time, an extreme right government comes into extreme right party comes into government.
Outrage, etc. Ostracism of Austria.
So yeah, for one year they are suspended.
They are. They are under scrutiny. There is a commission. The commission eventually says that democracy has not been undermined, etc.
However, who was the first when Austria was totally isolated was the first to give a press conference with Mr. Schuster,
the Austrian prime minister, Viktor Orban. He was that he was not a member of the European Union, but he was that immediately why?
He understood immediately what this was about. This may one day apply to him, and he forged this alliance with the Austrian right.
And then it was a key issue around what?
Around the bench decrees, abrogation of the banished decrees of 1945 about the properties of the Czech,
of the young, of the Germans from Czechoslovakia,
that this should be the abrogation of those decrees should be a precondition for Czech Republic and Slovakia joining the EU.
This was official endorse the head of the CSU at the time.
Mr. Stoiber went to the Phidias conference in Budapest and Orban pledged to do just that.
The alliance was then formed and it dropped when Orban came to power and after 2010 started to doing some of the things I've been talking about.
He led the wonderful protection shield which has lasted, which has been very effective,
and he never misses an opportunity when he gives an interview to remind everybody, I am vice president of the PPE.
And if you look at the video from the Madrid conference of the PPE last year, he's the one who gets big applause, not the Chancellor Merkel.
So this is it. You want to understand why the leverage of the EU?
Well, it's a tricky thing. Why situation is desperate, but not serious.
Well, it's because you have a number of things.
Again on in telegraphic stop public opinion in Poland and in Hungary remains pro-European.
You may wonder why vote for anti-European?
I think because people understand that being remaining part of the EU, supporting the EU,
not wanting any Brexit of any sort is a kind of guarantee against not going beyond certain limits.
I think it's a safety valve. If you cannot control them from inside and from below, try to control them from above.
I think that in Hungary, certainly that is an argument that I have heard.
Third argument, geopolitics.
I think a major limit on this illiberal drift is geopolitical.
And you again, to quote Adam Mechanic in his essay, The Choice of a tradition, you know, from 30 years ago, something like that,
the choice of the tradition in Poland is not pilsudski that ethnically homogeneous Poland to large, more cosmopolitan Poland to concept of the nation.
And and then, of course, is related to who is the main enemy of Russia or Germany.
So he's and he explains why he chooses sort of the pilsudski vision the that that in other words,
the choice of definition of a nation is related to a geopolitical choice as well in that pilsudski demovsky very issue.
The problem with Kaczynski is that he has both.
He takes demovsky version of definition of the nation and he takes pilsudski version of political power.
He wants to be the national it instead of the dilemma.
Is Russia or Germany the main enemy? He says both.
So, you know, we that is not that is not terribly helpful.
But the geopolitical factor, Kaczynski or not, is that.
And I think that would be a constraint on any drift of Central Europe further to kind
of eastern variations they may share with Russia in the talk about decadent Europe,
about about how weak it is and how useless the Liberals are, etc.
At the end of the day, I think that geopolitical concerns are finally, Europe itself is being very politicised in times of crisis.
Europe is undergoing a crisis.
Internal Grexit, North-South divide within the eurozone.
East-West divide on the issues we are talking about an external threat implosion of the neighbourhoods,
Ukraine and Putin, the Islamist in the south now Trump overseas.
This is an entirely new predicament for Europe.
There is an interview by of the French president in a literary journal.
And I conclude with that, where he where he says at the end of the interview, I ask him, why do you remain?
He paints a rather bleak picture. How come you remain an optimist?
So I remain an optimist because I feel the tragic dimension is returning to European politics, the awareness of the tragic dimension.
He says, Yes, we can no longer take for granted what we used to being sort of prosperous,
democratic, under the American umbrella, etc., etc. that no longer holds.
The landscape is changing. I do. We understand that and we take that challenge or we are gone.
And so this is the moment we are we are confronted with a choice.
So it is, as Adam Mechanic says, the Polish choice, a choice of a tradition.
It is a Central European choice. Do you want to be part of the European Court or do you want to be drifting closer to Russia?
But at the end of the day, it's also a European choice, as Mark Wise just put it.
Thank you for that. And. Thank you very much, Jack, for a terrific lecture.
Comprehensive and incisive, amusing, looking at the whole wider context around exactly what we want.
If I may pick up quickly on two things Jack said.
Firstly, listen, Karpovsky, his terrible message loves to tell the story of two young girls racing without approval from God,
and one young girl was clearly winning. But the one who was far behind kept shouting, I'm winning, I'm winning, I'm winning.
And eventually the one in front collapsed in tears. And the one about life and Auburn and Kaczynski and a little bit behind,
because in reality, their societies, what they've done in their countries is far behind.
But they're shouting, I'm winning and winning. And convincing others collapsed in tears.
And of course, the only reason they can do that is and this is a really important point you've made again and again,
that the European Union is not really tolerating them.
It is supporting them. Over 50% of public investment in Hungary and Poland comes from EU funds.
You see, this is the lack of and so on.
And so that I think is a really important point for us to take tomorrow.
The other point I'd like to pick up is short on staying in Poland because you
could read have a different way where arguing on explanation all out of control.
But the liberal gamble is a politics can change concept and that authoritarian
conservative Catholic culture that was there in Spain has been changed by politics,
both domestic and regional. And so the question before us is why has that been possible in Spain and not in Poland?
I hope we can take that forward tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I said at the beginning, the Czech Republic is the dynamic of central leadership and standing in front of Keith OLBERMANN.
He was very old, but he's incredibly young and vigorous more than most of us,
but also has a fantastic range of knowledge and indeed wisdom, which we've benefited from this evening.
Thank you so much.