Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (139 page)

The consequence was that while the whole society thus fell under suspicion—who might not have worked for the police or the regime at some moment, even if only inadvertently?—by the same token it became hard to distinguish venal and even mercenary collaboration from simple cowardice or even the desire to protect one’s family. The price of a refusal to report to the Stasi might be your children’s future. The grey veil of moral ambiguity thus fell across many of the private choices of helpless individuals.
³⁴³
Looking back, who—save a handful of heroic and unwavering dissidents—could pass judgment? And it is striking that many of those same former dissidents—Adam Michnik prominent among them—were the most vigorously opposed to any retribution for their fellow citizens.

For all that these difficulties were common to every post-Communist state, each country dealt with them in its own way. In places where there never really was a transition—where Communists or their friends remained in power under a new nomenclature and with freshly laundered ‘Western’ agendas—the past remained untouched. In Russia, as in Ukraine or Moldova or what remained of Yugoslavia, the issue of retribution never really arose and high-ranking officials from the old regime were quietly recycled back into power: under Vladimir Putin, Communist-era
siloviki
(prosecutors, police, and military or security personnel) constituted over half the President’s informal cabinet.

In Germany, on the other hand, revelations concerning the size and reach of the state security bureaucracy had astonished the nation. It turned out that in addition to its 85,000 full-time employees the Stasi had approximately 60,000 ‘unofficial collaborators’, 110,000 regular informers and upwards of half a million ‘part-time’ informers, many of whom had no means of knowing that they even fell into such a category.
³⁴⁴
Husbands spied on wives, professors reported on students, priests informed on their parishioners. There were files on 6 million residents of former East Germany, one in three of the population. The whole society had in effect been infiltrated, atomized and polluted by its self-appointed guardians.

To lance the boil of mutual fear and suspicion, the Federal Government in December 1991 appointed a Commission under the former Lutheran minister Joachim Gauck to oversee the Stasi files and prevent their abuse. Individuals would be able to ascertain whether they had a ‘file’ and then, if they wished, come and read it. People would thus learn—sometimes with devastating domestic consequences—who had been informing on them; but the material would not be open to the public at large. This was an awkward compromise but, as it turned out, quite successful: by 1996, 1,145,000 people had applied to see their files. There was no way to undo the human damage, but because the Gauck Commission was trusted not to abuse its powers the information it controlled was hardly ever exploited for political advantage.

It was fear of just such exploitation that inhibited similar procedures elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In Poland, accusations of past collaboration became a familiar way of discrediting political opponents—in 2000, even Lech Wałesa was accused of collaborating with the former special services, though the charge never stuck. One post-Communist Interior Minister even threatened to publish the names of all his political opponents who were tarnished by the brush of collaboration; it was in anxious anticipation of just such behaviour that Michnik and others had favoured simply drawing a final line under the Communist past and moving on. Consistent with this view, Michnik even opposed efforts in 2001 to try the former Communist President Jaruselski (then aged 78) for giving orders back in 1970 to shoot striking workers. In 1989 the recent memory of martial law and its aftermath had made it seem unwise to open up the past and assess guilt; by the time it was safe to do so the opportunity had passed, popular attention was elsewhere and the quest for belated retroactive justice looked more like political opportunism.

In Latvia it was decreed that anyone with a record of KGB involvement would be barred from public office for ten years. From 1994 Latvian citizens were at liberty, following the German model, to see their own Communist-era police files; but the contents were made public only if a person ran for office or sought employment in law enforcement. In Bulgaria the new government, drawing on the practice of post-Vichy France, established tribunals with the authority to impose ‘civic degradation’ upon those guilty of certain offenses associated with the previous regime.

In Hungary, the benign role of the Communist Party in its transition out of power made it hard to justify purging or punishing it for earlier sins—particularly since in post-Kádár Hungary the main point of contention was of course 1956, a date which would soon be ancient history for a majority of the population. In neighbouring Romania, where there were indeed ample recent grounds for retribution, efforts to mount a local version of the Gauck Commission foundered for some years on the firm opposition of the post-Communist political elite, many of whose luminaries (beginning with President Iliescu himself) would certainly be implicated in any serious interrogation of the Ceauşescu regime’s activities. Eventually a ‘National College for the Study of the “Securitate” Archives’ was inaugurated, but it could never aspire to the authority of the German original.

In none of these countries was the problem of coming to terms with the Communist past resolved to everyone’s satisfaction or with complete fairness. But in Czechoslovakia the solution that was adopted aroused controversy reaching well beyond the country’s borders. Stalinism here had come later and lasted longer than elsewhere, and the ugly memory of ‘normalization’ was still very much alive. At the same time Communism had a firmer political basis in the Czech region than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Finally, there was a certain national discomfort at the memory of Czechoslovakia’s apparent serial failure to resist tyranny—in 1938, in 1948 and after 1968. For one reason or another, the whole country—as it seemed to its more uncompromising domestic critics—suffered from a bad conscience. Václav Klaus knew whereof he spoke.

The first post-Communist Czechoslovak legislation—a 1990 law rehabilitating everyone illegally sentenced between 1948 and 1989 and eventually paying out 100 million euros in compensation—provoked little debate. But it was followed by a ‘lustration’
³⁴⁵
law (renewed for five years in 1996 and renewed again when it expired early in the twenty-first century) whose purpose was to vet all public officials or would-be public officials for links to the old security services. This legitimate-sounding objective led, however, to widespread opportunities for abuse. Many of the names found on the old secret police informer lists were, it transpired, merely ‘candidates’: men and women whom the regime was hoping to force into compliance. They included a number of the best-known Czech writers, some of them not even resident in the country.

The secret police lists soon found their way into the press, published and publicized by politicians and parliamentary candidates hoping to discredit their opponents. In the course of the mud-slinging even Havel was mentioned as a one-time candidate for recruitment into the police network of spies. And, as some critics had warned, while the secret police files furnished copious data about those they sought to recruit they were all but silent on the identities of the policemen doing the recruiting. A cartoon in the daily
Lidové Novinyý
showed two men talking in front of the parliament in Prague: I am not worried about lustrations’, says one of them.‘ I was not an informer. ‘I was just giving orders’.
³⁴⁶

Lustration was not a penal procedure, but it did cause acute embarrassment to many of its victims, unjustly ‘named and shamed’. More seriously, perhaps, it was from the outset an overtly political device. It was one of the issues on which the old Civic Forum alliance broke up—longstanding dissidents (Havel included) opposed the new law while Klaus enthusiastically supported it as a way ‘to clarify who stands where’ (and embarrass his ex-dissident critics, some of them erstwhile reform Communists). It is noteworthy that Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia also opposed the lustration law, not least because of his own widely rumored links to the former secret police—though once he had taken his country into independence he made copious use of the information in police files for his own political ends.

In the first twelve years of its application, the lustration law did relatively little direct damage. It was applied to some 300,000 people who applied for clearance: an estimated 9,000 of them did not pass, a strikingly small number compared to the half a million Czechs and Slovaks who lost their jobs or were purged from the Party after 1968. But the more lasting impact of the legislation was the bad taste it left behind, contributing to a widespread cynicism in Czech society about the way in which the ‘velvet revolution’ had played itself out. ‘Lustration’ in the Czech Republic seemed to be more about legitimizing an incoming elite than dealing honestly with the outgoing past.

In July 1993 the Czech parliament adopted a ‘Law on the Illegality of and Resistance to the Communist Regime’, in effect declaring the Communist Party a criminal organization. In theory this should have criminalized millions of former Party members, but its impact was purely rhetorical and no action followed. Far from discrediting Communism and legitimizing its overthrow, the law merely reinforced the skeptical detachment of the public at whom it was directed. Ten years after the law was passed, opinion polls revealed that one Czech voter in five favored the unreconstructed (and perfectly legal) Communist Party, which remained the largest political organization in the country, with 160,000 members.

XXII

The Old Europe—and the New

‘You have to wonder why Europe does not seem capable of taking decisive
action in its own theatre’.
Richard Holbrooke

‘Si c’était à refaire, je commençerais par la culture’
(‘If I were starting over, I
would begin with culture’.)
Jean Monnet

‘It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in
love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the
manifestations of their aggressiveness’.
Sigmund Freud

‘What is the explanation of this curious combination of the permanent
unemployment of eleven percent of the population with a general sense of
comparative prosperity on the part of the bulk of the population?’
Beatrice Webb (1925)

The fissile political temper of the Nineties was not confined to the countries of the former Communist East. The same urge to escape the bonds of centralized rule—or else to relinquish responsibility for impoverished fellow citizens in distant provinces—was felt in the West. From Spain to the United Kingdom the established territorial units of Western Europe were subjected to extensive administrative decentralization, though they all managed more or less to retain at least the form of the conventional national state.

In some places this centrifugal propensity had already surfaced decades earlier, as we saw in Chapter 16. In Spain, where the longstanding demand for autonomy in Catalonia or the Basque region had been recognized by the new constitution, Catalonia especially had emerged within a generation as virtually a state-within-a-state, with its own language, institutions and governing councils. Thanks to a 1983 Law of Linguistic Normalization (
sic
), Catalan was to become the ‘dominant language of instruction’; ten years later the Generalitat (Catalan parliament) decreed the exclusive use of Catalan in kindergarten and infant schools. Not surprisingly, even though Castilian Spanish remained in use everywhere, many younger people were more comfortable speaking Catalan.

None of the other Spanish regions was to acquire quite this level of national distinctiveness; but then none of them carried the same weight within the country as a whole. In 1993 Catalonia, one of seventeen Spanish regions, accounted for a fifth of the country’s GNP. Over a quarter of all foreign investment in Spain came to Catalonia, much of it to the flourishing provincial capital, Barcelona; per capita income in the province as a whole was more than 20 percent above the national average. If Catalonia were an independent country it would count among the more prosperous states on the European continent.

One reason for the rise of a distinctive Catalan identity was an easily stoked resentment at the substantial contribution Catalans were expected to make to the national exchequer, thanks in part to the setting up in 1985 of an Inter-Territorial Compensation Fund to assist Spain’s poorest regions. But Catalonia—like the Basque country, Galicia, Navarre and other newly assertive autonomous provinces—also benefited from the hollowing out of ‘Spanishness’. Franco had exploited to exhaustion the traditional gamut of national claims—the glory of Empire, the honour of the military, the authority of the Spanish Church—and after his fall many Spaniards had scant interest in the rhetoric of heritage or tradition.

Indeed, rather like an earlier generation of post-authoritarian Germans, the Spanish were decidedly inhibited about ‘talking national’. Regional or provincial identification, on the other hand, was unpolluted by authoritarian association: on the contrary, it had been a favorite target of the old regime and could thus credibly be presented as an integral aspect of the transition to democracy itself. This association between autonomy, separatism and democracy was less clear in the Basque case, where ETA pursued its murderous path (even mounting assassination attempts in 1995 on both the king and the prime minister). Moreover, whereas the six million Catalans were prospering, the old industrial districts of the Basque country were in decline. Unemployment was endemic and income levels in the region were lower than in Catalonia, hovering close to the national average.