Abstract
Drawing on his experiences as a journalist in Eastern Europe, the author describes Eastern perceptions of the West before and after the collapse of Communism in 1989. Although the West has often taken its political and economic system for granted, those living behind the Iron Curtain clearly recognised the advantages in quality of life and personal freedom made possible under democracy. However, since 1989 the Western model of capitalism and the rule of law has grown threadbare, losing much of the credibility it once held. It is important that we re-establish the moral confidence we once had in our democratic system and recover the necessary enthusiasm to make capitalism work properly.
The significance of 1989 is not just that Communism collapsed. It is also that Western ideas triumphed. My favourite poster from the Velvet Revolution in the then Czechoslovakia showed a ladder leaning against a towering cliff that followed the line of the Iron Curtain. ‘Zpĕt do Evropy,’ it said—‘Back to Europe.’ In those days there was no doubt what lay on the sunny heights at the top of the cliff. Not just prosperity, but freedom; the chance to live a dignified and independent life, to get ahead thanks to talent rather than servility, to live—as Václav Havel so memorably put it—‘in truth’.
For a few brief months, we in the West forgot our shortcomings and basked in the glow of praise from faraway heroes. Moral giants like Mr. Havel, or Andrei Sakharov, Russia's best-known dissident, were speaking not only to their own people but to us. ‘We want to be like you,’ was their message, and that of the flag-waving, candle-bearing demonstrators who filled our television screens. ‘We admire your system just as much as we despise our own.’
It was not hero worship. Though the Communist propaganda about the misery of Western wage slavery and exploitation carried little credibility, those in Eastern Europe who could watch Western television could see on the news every night the problems that the West did have to deal with. Poverty, terrorism and corruption (to name but a few) were evident. But the difference in the way that Western society treated them was huge. Eastern block media covered up bad news. Western media uncovered it. Western politicians could lose elections. Eastern politicians had only to keep their party colleagues happy.
The West still has its problems. But it is easy (particularly for Westerners who never experienced it) to forget what life was really like behind the Iron Curtain. Bureaucrats, not your personal budget, decided how you could travel, what you could buy, and how you would live. The demeaning shortages (for women, the lack of decent sanitary products was a particular humiliation) meant that a system supposedly based on altruism encouraged the most acquisitive and materialistic side of human nature. Worse, these regimes had been built on murder and lies. That tainted everything. If you talked to locals about the past—say, about the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 or the Prague Spring in 1968—you were risking their livelihoods, maybe even their children's education, or their freedom.
The stench from the rotting Communist systems in the East made some outsiders uneasy. A certain kind of bien pensant thinker flinched at talk of right and wrong. When Ronald Reagan rightly called the Soviet block the ‘evil empire’ they regarded it as a crude overstatement. That was sometimes because of anti-Americanism, sometimes because of wilful ignorance. But many in the West, even at the moment of triumph in 1989, felt that it was a hollow victory: our own shortcomings were so appalling that we were in no position to judge anyone else.
As a journalist behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s, I soon realised that I was parting company with my liberal-minded friends at home. I did not particularly like some bits of the Reagan era in America. I certainly did not agree with Margaret Thatcher on everything. But I could not help feeling that these were quibbles. My new friends—in Poland, Hungary and what were then Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia—regarded my diffident attitude to the leaders of the West with scorn. It was not just that compared with the wickedness and incompetence of the Communist regime, the West offered a qualitatively better life. But in particular it was the conservative leaders in the West who were the most likely to bring down the Communist regimes and allow the captives in the East to live the same way that I took for granted.
My discontent with the Left came to a head in Lithuania in the grim days of late 1990. I was in the parliament building in Vilnius, home to the beleaguered pro-independence leadership of Vytautas Landsbergis. The outside world was not rushing to Lithuania's aid. Only tiny Iceland had recognised Lithuania's unilateral declaration of restored independence. Other countries thought the pro-independence leadership was dangerously headstrong and impatient. A Soviet military crackdown was looming. We worried that we might be dead by the end of the week.
The epiphany came when I was in the parliament's communications office, queuing to use one of the few fax machines that could dial directly to the outside world. Unreliable lines made operating those precious machines a demanding job, which was given to a ‘faksistas’ (a newly coined Lithuanian word for a full-time fax machine operator). The phone line hissed, sputtered and fell. Was that a mere technological breakdown, or a sign that the Soviet authorities had cut us off from the outside world? The operator turned to me and said bleakly, ‘If Reagan were still president, this would not be happening.’
I couldn't argue with that. George Bush Sr was a decent man, but he was standing back while Soviet storm troopers were preparing to crush the Lithuanians' struggle for freedom (in the end, 13 people died during an abortive putsch in January 1991). Ronald Reagan would not have stood for it. The Easterners understood better than many Westerners that the American involvement in Europe is the backbone of the continent's security, and a strong and self-confident America would fulfil its role better than a timid or weak one.
Similarly, the Eastern European enthusiasm for the rule of law, free markets and political freedom was based not on a naive belief that everything we had was wonderful, but on a realistic appreciation of how things worked. When things went wrong in Communist countries, you were powerless. In Western countries, you had a chance, either through politics, the law or the media, to get something done about it. The West was plagued by corruption, abuse of power and other political and economic ills. But you did not have to take them lying down. In the one-party system of the East, your ability to protest was highly constrained: you might write letters of complaint on some ‘safe’ subjects, but if you trod on the toes of the powerful, you would suffer for it.
Yet now the legacy of 1989 is looking threadbare. The Western model—free markets, political freedom, the rule of law—looked good for much of the 20 years that followed. But capitalism has been let down by its practitioners. In the eyes of many, free markets and casino capitalism are synonymous. The great gains of the 1980s—sound money, free trade and individual responsibility—are no longer as solidly based as they were. The siren calls of protectionism, subsidy and special treatment are becoming louder. Our political systems look weak too. Money counts more than ever. Voter turnout is falling. The era of mass membership in political parties is over; nothing has yet taken its place. The big enemy of political freedom is no longer totalitarianism but apathy. The rule of law is also looking weaker: the rich seem to live above the law, using off-shore companies to avoid taxes and conceal the ownership of their companies, while the criminal justice systems in our countries fail to deter criminals, fail to catch them and fail to convict them. Law and justice were never synonymous, but they are moving farther apart.
Worse, the Western world seems to be mesmerised by the worst features of what is happening in the East, particularly crony capitalism in Russia. The biggest shortcomings in the Russian system are indeed a concentrated form of our own most painful flaws. But rather than shuddering at that, we seem to have closed our eyes to it. German business jumps into bed with Russian energy companies that are little better than organised crime syndicates. British bankers sell stolen property on the London Stock Exchange, picking up fat fees as they highlight the ‘flexible listing requirements’. Accountants turn a blind eye to fraud, lawyers work out ways to bend the law and bankers find ingenious and expensive means of dodging money-laundering rules. Our top politicians take hospitality from thuggish Russians whose business habits and associates are so dreadful that they cannot get visas to the United States. The people who should be guarding the integrity of our system are betraying it, for 30 silver roubles.
As a result, the West has largely lost the moral authority that it enjoyed in 1989. Once it was the Russian elite who feared us, and ordinary Russians who admired us. Now the elite despises us for our corruption and weakness, and ordinary Russians see little difference between one lot of rulers and another.
It is not too late to recover some of the spirit of 1989. Just because our system is flawed does not mean that it is always wrong or that it can't be fixed. Indeed, without some kind of moral self-confidence in our own system, we cannot defend it at all: we are in the same position as the kind of left-wingers who believe that mugging is a political action by the poor against the rich.
It is that question which is now the central ‘ideological front’ of what I called, in a book published in 2008, the New Cold War. Does the West really believe in its own values? Do its rulers feel any sense of shame? And do voters mind? The broad path downwards is tempting. We could easily become more like Russia (some might argue that Italy already has gone a long way in this direction). Our rulers dip their snouts in the trough, paying lip service to conflict-of-interest rules, soaking up expenses and bribes while in office and looking forward to lucrative directorships afterwards. Voters regard politics as a mildly entertaining soap opera but lose any sense that it makes a difference to their daily lives. Public-spiritedness becomes a mugs' game. Voting is something you do with your wallet and your feet. If politicians muck us about too badly, we stop paying taxes or move abroad. As public services fray, we go private. The rule of law remains, at least in theory—a ghostly reminder of a nobler age.
Recovering our position requires first of all a clear understanding of the historical and geographical context in which we are arguing. Stalinism, for example, should not be regarded as some distant abstraction, as irrelevant to modern-day politics as the Bismarckian militarism of nineteenth-century Prussia. It remains a powerful and toxic force that modern Russia has yet to confront. A degree of historical amnesia is a necessary lubricant in politics. The post-war rapprochements between France and Germany, or more recently between Britain and Ireland, would not have been possible if either side had stuck rigidly to a script featuring past historical wrongs. But that presupposes goodwill. Germany and Poland get on pretty well—but it took Willy Brandt's genuflection in Warsaw in 1970 to dent the Polish conviction that nothing could be forgotten or forgiven. Nobody should rub modern-day Russians' noses in the Katyn massacre or the mass deportations of 1941 and 1949 from the Baltic states to Siberia. But the quid pro quo is that Russians do not speak of those years with pride, nostalgia or (as Mr Putin did on his recent visit to Gdansk) with evasiveness.
To recover the moral self-confidence of 1989, we need not only to remember what was wrong about the past but also to recover our enthusiasm for making our own system work properly. This does not require dramatic ideological shifts. Instead, it is about the boring business of making public services work better so that citizens believe that they are getting a fair deal in their daily lives, that their tax payments are well spent. The confidence in the rule of law and in a fair and benevolent state has been sorely tested by the events of the past year.
Without the ideological competition from Communism, we in the West have become a bit lazy. We need to realise that the enemy we are facing now—of crony capitalism—is in some respects even more dangerous than in the Cold War era. We no longer face the danger of nuclear obliteration. But we do face the danger that our system is losing its credibility and becoming simply a playground for the rich and powerful. Government for the people, of the people and by the people is not an American invention, or a fairytale. It is what makes capitalism morally defensible.