SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAIL O O9
mentarian often sounded like
someone writing all-caps com-
ments on a conspiracy-theory
YouTube post. But they shared
views on Vladimir Putin’s Russia
(favourable), on the European
Union and its currency (op-
posed), on immigration (unfa-
vourable) and, notably, on the leg-
acy of reunification – both parties
characterize voters in the east as
victims.
Why does this former country,
almost 30 years after it ceased to
exist, still maintain its own, in-
creasingly extreme, political pro-
file?
The “economic victims” argu-
ment no longer makes much
sense – the people voting AfD
here don’t tend to be poor or un-
employed, just older and less edu-
cated and male. But that itself is
significant: older, less educated
men are an inordinately large
population group in the former
East Germany. “During the 1990s
and 2000s, far more women than
men left this state,” says Roland
Rau, a demographer with the Max
Planck Institute. “For example, at
least 40 per cent of the women
from the 1977 birth cohort ended
up leaving Mecklenberg-Western
Pomerania,” and those who left
tended to be more educated.
One eastern German politician,
the Saxony integration minister
Petra Kopping, argues in a much-
discussed new book that the re-
gion is suffering a “crisis of mascu-
linity” that is turning groups of
men toward antisocial voting pat-
terns.
But others suggest that those 41
years of life in a walled-up, mono-
ethnic society isolated from the
outside world and unwilling to
face up to its past reshaped the po-
litical perspectives of multiple
generations in more fundamental
ways. Geographer Wolfgang Rich-
ter, who as Rostock’s commis-
sioner for foreigners in the early
1990s worked heroically to pre-
vent the city’s infamous anti-im-
migrant riots from turning dead-
ly, says there was “a foundation of
intolerant and racist views in the
GDR years,” that were allowed to
flourish once the Wall came
down.
“There was barely any coexis-
tence with other nationalities in
those years,” he tells me. “People
of my generation, our grandpar-
ents were Nazis, and they sent cer-
tain messages to their grandchil-
dren – it was a scapegoat mental-
ity, one that definitely existed in
the GDR before 1989. And then the
whole thing was made worse by
the sudden radical change of re-
unification – suddenly there was a
great degree of frustration and
displacement that made all these
feelings bubble to the surface.”
When the Berlin Wall opened,
it was like a pressure valve – but
what escaped was a whole gener-
ation’s positive energy, its ambi-
tious young people, its educated
women and people eager to find
variety and difference. Now, 30
years later, that movement is fi-
nally reversing, jobs and creative
people are returning eastward.
But the psychology of the border
remains a dominant force in
many minds here, and it will be at
least another generation before
that wall fully comes down.Whydoesthisformer
country,almost30years
afteritceasedtoexist,
stillmaintainitsown,
increasinglyextreme,
politicalprofile?OPINION |I
magine someone who had witnessed the liberation of
Western Europe in 1945 returning in 1975, only to find the
dictators coming back. That’s rather how it feels revisit-
ing central Europe 30 years after the velvet revolutions of
1989.
In Budapest, earlier this year, I sat in a hotel bar with an old
anti-communist dissident friend, Janos Kis, who calmly de-
scribed the regime of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
to me as an autocracy. Yet it was Janos who first introduced
me to Mr. Orban, back in 1988, presenting the then-25-year-
old student as a bright light of a new generation of young lib-
eral democrats.
At a rally in Gdansk this June, I heard European Council
President Donald Tusk call on his fellow Poles to learn from
the example of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s in op-
posing the country’s current nationalist-populist Law and
Justice partygovernment. Yet, Law and Justice triumphed
again last month in a general election.
In the Czech Republic, power is divided between Prime
Minister Andrej Babis, an oligarch who was once listed as an
informer by the secret police in Communist-ruled Slovakia,
and the bibulous president, Milos Zeman, who makes no se-
cret of his sympathetic view of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi
Jinping’s China.
In the territory that used to be the Stasiland of East Germa-
ny, a far-right, virulently xenophobic party called the Alter-
native for Germany (AfD) has received the support of a
shocking one in four voters in no less than three recent state
elections, in Saxony, Brandenburg and – only last Sunday – in
Thuringia. This despite the fact that these states have for
nearly three decades been part of one of the richest, most sta-
ble democracies in the world, which has made vast financial
transfers to precisely these poorer post-communist regions.
No wonder commentators are rushing to paint a chiaros-
curo picture: from yesterday’s glorious light to today’s encir-
cling darkness. Overstatement is often felt to be essential to
get your voice heard in an overcrowded internet marketplace
of ideas, and so we read of the coming death of democracy, a
new age of the dictators and so on. This is simplistic and
shortsighted.
Our mistake after 1989 was not that we celebrated what
happened in central Europe, and subsequently in the Baltic
republics and the former Soviet
Union, as a great triumph for free-
dom, democracy, Europe and the
West. It was all of that. Our mistake
was to believe that this was the
new normal, the direction history
is travelling. Now we are in danger
of making the same mistake, only
in the other direction. The future
triumph of anti-liberal authoritar-
ianism is no more inevitable than
was the future triumph of liberal
democracy. This cautiously opti-
mistic statement clearly holds
true in mature democracies such as Britain and the United
States, where the forces of liberal democracy are pushing
back hard against the ravages of nationalist populism. But it’s
also true in central Europe. Strictly speaking, “illiberal de-
mocracy” is a contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs.
However, the term is useful to describe the condition of a de-
mocracy that is being eroded but has not been completely
destroyed. The decline is still reversible by democratic, legal
means, including peaceful mass protest.
Leading the democratic fightback in central Europe today
is Slovakia, a country which was an authoritarian laggard in
the 1990s, and has had more than its fair share of post-Com-
munist corruption in recent years. Sparked by the horrifying
murder of a journalist who had been trying to expose that
corruption, Jan Kuciak, together with his fiancée, mass
peaceful protest helped oust a post-Communist populist
prime minister, Robert Fico. The momentum from those pro-
tests contributed to the election earlier this year of a female,
liberal, pro-European President Zuzana Caputova. Ms. Capu-
tova, who was only 16 at the time of the Velvet Revolution in
the former Czechoslovakia in November, 1989, is a fine repre-
sentative of a new generation shaped by the experience of
what I call post-Wall Europe. So when I go to Bratislava this
month, there will be much to celebrate.
I will then take the train from Bratislava to Prague, cross-
ing what is now an international frontier between Slovakia
and the Czech Republic, in time to witness what promises to
be a large demonstration against the dreadful duo of Mr. Ba-
bis and Mr. Zeman. It will be organized by a student-led
movement called A Million Moments For Democracy, to
mark the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the 1989 Velvet
Revolution. They already put together a huge demo this sum-
mer at Letna park, the site of the largest peaceful protest in- One of the organizers, Benjamin Roll, a cheerful, beard-
ed theology student, told me his father had been a sound en-
gineer at the 1989 demo, literally amplifying the voice of Va-
clav Havel. So in the Czech Republic, too, there are grounds
for hope.
I shall of course be in Berlin for the 30th anniversary of the
fall of the Wall, staying in the hotel that was then the show-
case Grand Hotel of the Communist regime and is now a
Westin. Shocking though the AfD results are, they don’t fun-
damentally threaten German democracy. That cannot be
said of Law and Justice rule in Poland, for the party of Jaros-
law Kaczynski clearly wants to follow the Hungarian exam-
ple. It is pursuingOrbanisation a la polonaise. But it faces pow-
erful independent media, major opposition parties, big cities
under opposition control and a highly mobilized civil socie-
ty.
By far, the worst case is Hungary. Freedom House last year
downgraded its status to “partly free,” the only European
Union member state to be so classified. Indeed, after a careful
analysis I have argued that Hungary is no longer a democracy,
not even an illiberal one, but rather a regime of the kind that
political scientists call “competitive authoritarian.” Yet even
there, the opposition managed earlier this month to win the
mayoralty of Budapest. They did this by effectively uniting,
but winning Budapest doesn’t suddenly make Hungary a de-
mocracy again, for after all, the Turkish opposition – by unit-
ing – won the mayoralty of Istanbul, and no one in their right
minds would pretend that the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdo-
gan is a democracy. But it is a distinct point of light.
Inevitably, the focus of most writing about this 30th anni-
versary, including my own, has been on the question “What
has gone wrong?” But if the post-Wall generation in Central
Europe fights for the liberties it has grown up with, and the
EU starts standing up for democracy in its own member
states, there is every reason to believe that the 40th anniver-
sary, in 2029, will again give us cause for celebration.
Thenewstruggle
fordemocracy
inCentralEurope
TIMOTHY GARTON ASHOPINIONProfessorofEuropeanstudiesatOxfordUniversityandasenior
fellowattheHooverInstitution.HeistheauthorofTheMagic
Lantern:TheRevolutionof’89WitnessedinWarsaw,Budapest,
BerlinandPrague.Ourmistakeafter
1989wasnotthat
wecelebratedwhat
happenedincentral
Europe...Our
mistakewasto
believethatthiswas
thenewnormal.