Democratic Transition

A book launch was held on 6 October in Budapest, for two books published by ICDT (International Center for Democratic Transition). The two books are;

Heltai András, ed. Elbeszélt történelem: huszonöten a közép-kelet-európai demokratikus átmenetről, [Narrated history: 25 interviews on democratic transition] (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011)

Iván Bába ,The Hungarian Transition: Parties and Movements in the Political Regime Change in Hungary between 1987 and 1994, (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011).

To these two should be added two more, likewise dealing with the end of communism in Hungary:

Iván Bába Békes átmenet? Adalékok a kialkudott rendszerváltoztatáshoz 2007 [Peaceful transition? Addenda to the bargained system shift], (Argumentum, 2007)

Iván Bába, ed. Felgyorsult történelem: 18 beszélgetés a szocializmus bukásáról [Accelerated History: Eighteen interviews about the fall of socialism] (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011)

This was my introductory address:

Iván Bába was involved in all four books, while András Heltai edited the volume of interviews; and I have a very small interest to declare. I discussed the English translation of Iván’s text with particular reference to the word “népi”, how to render it into acceptable English. Borbándi could use the word “populism” in the 1980s – Der ungarische Populismus – but subsequently the word acquired such negative connotations that something else was needed. I was the one, the guilty party, who suggested “demotic”.


Some thoughts about methodology and content of these books

[1] Memory, oral history is inevitably only partly reliable; memories fade, distort, beautify the past, maybe turn self-exculpatory. When a particular event or set of events has been rehearsed, retold several times, we inevitably give them coherence that they did not have at the time – this is well known to social psychology. But this does not mean that the entire exercise is useless. Where it becomes valuable is in two areas. They can point towards particular events and give them a saliency that they would not otherwise have, and thereby allow us to see processes that would possibly remain latent. This doesn’t mean that people are lying. That particular trope that whatever we disagree with or see in a different light should be dismissed as mendacious, that attitude is a particular dysfunction of post-communist thinking, that every cause must have an effect, that if something has happened, someone made it happen. That is the ideological thinking that Hannah Arendt identified. No, there is accident, coincidence, happenstance, error, chance in the world. This does not mean, however, that there are no covert processes, there are, but we should be careful in making distinctions.

I think that the political significance of the 1990 taxi blockade illustrates this proposition, how it was seen at the time and what we know now are very different. It was seen as spontaneous – and fortuitously I was in Budapest at the time, I recall that I had great trouble getting to the airport – but after the events, we can now see the hand the of the security services operating against the Antall government and we can also see the way in which the Free Democrats sought to take advantage of the upheaval. It didn’t become a putsch, but it could just have been.

[2] Then, when several memories are placed side by side, some of the distortions become visible, a kind of intellectual triangulation takes place and this can be very helpful in the construction of a cogent account. The various interviews in these collections do exactly that, they allow us to put together a persuasive narrative of the past and, not least, they can let us see some of the aetiology of events, without ideological thinking.

[3] To this I would add a bit of genealogy. I don’t know how many people here remember the late György Urbán, formerly head of the Hungarian section of RFE. I knew him well in London. Among other activities, he put together a series of interview collections with a great variety of people and these are still of value. Indeed, they have been unjustly forgotten. So, maybe oral history and the exploration of the past through recalled memory has a particular Hungarian dimension – we should register it as a Hungaricum, perhaps.

[4] The key shared feature of late communism, the 1980s, that comes out of these volumes is the decay of the system. Leszek Kołakowski described it as the “decomposition” of both system and ideology. What this generated was a mounting impatience on the part of the middle generation with the system stability that had become stasis – a commitment to no change, whereas the middle generation of technocrats wanted change and wanted power. This was a shared feature of late communism more or less everywhere. They wanted the old, ideological, very conservative rulers out of the way, in order to launch something more dynamic. Crucial here was that they were not democrats, they firmly believed that they knew better than society – this is a universal feature of technocracy – and they sought power to put their ideas into practice.

Some of the cultural intellectuals did want democracy, though they too were chary of handing too much power to the people. That, of course, is the standard dilemma of reformers, how to redistribute power without the process sliding out of control and the previous holders of power ending up swinging from the lampposts or on the guillotine. The memory of the Terror of 1793-1794 in France haunts Europe still. We can see analogies in the Arab spring today.

[5] There is something unusual, even striking about these works. The thought that the participants in a major historical turning point should be ready and able to sit down and recall their activities in tranquillity, well after the events, is new. A small thought experiment. It is quite inconceivable, it seems to me, that, say, in 1825 Robespierre, Danton, Louis XVI and Napoleon would have been able to do likewise; not least, they were all dead. And the possibility of Lenin, Trotsky, Martov and Kerensky doing so in 1937 is even more bizarre. So this tells us something about the temper of our times and, it seems to me, about the legacy of non-violent political change, as well as the imperative felt by historical actors to leave their version of the story on the record. These books have taken full advantage of this shift; I see it as a quintessential quality of our post-modern age.

[6] Where the books launched today add further insights is into how the technocrats and cultural intellectuals, which includes the democratic opposition of the 1980s, evolved once the basic architecture of democratic institutions was laid down. I think we can characterise this evolution as a double disappointment. The people involved were disappointed because – I would suggest this, though this can certainly be read from today’s volumes – of Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity”, people just didn’t and wouldn’t behave as they should have done, as the intellectual constructs would have had them behave. They were contrary, difficult and unpredictable. The other disappointment was political power itself, which turned out to be more complex and more contradictory than anyone predicted. The technocrats were irritated at what they regarded as the irrational behaviour of both society and the politicians who had constituencies to satisfy. And they still are.

[7] What further emerges from these volumes is that the collapse of communism was heavily elite-led. While there was indeed popular participation in some countries, like Czechoslovakia and Estonia, in Hungary the role of society was at best secondary. This feature of the Hungarian transformation necessarily meant that the new system would reflect the cleavages within the Hungarian elite. And the key cleavage turned out to be the one that has been a part of the Hungarian scene since the early 1900s, the one between those who argued that Hungarian modernity should be constructed largely or entirely on the basis of Western experience, the urbanists, as against those who insisted that Hungarian modernity should be defined by Hungary’s own resources, the demoticists. This cleavage remains with us to this day and it has been mapped onto party politics. Iván Bába’s account is essential reading here, as it provides a thorough and judicious assessment of both. András Heltai’s collection implies that while not absent elsewhere, this cleavage was much less important in other former communist states.

[8] Finally, a word on nomenclature. What to call the events of 1989 is itself in dispute. Was it a revolution? Not in Hungary it wasn’t, though the Czechs had a velvet revolution and the Estonians a singing one, so here we speak of regime change, system shift, possibly of political metamorphosis. Precisely because the popular input was limited, many features of the previous system survived and were salvaged, above all where power and resources were concerned. This also says something about the Western analyses of the regime transition, namely that if new institutions are set up, that would in itself ensure that democratic behaviour and values would rapidly take root. This turned out to be illusory, at any rate in part, to be a confusion between form and content. Content does not invariably follow form, there are façades, appearances and the externalisation of behaviour, where the new forms are maintained, but hide a different reality.

It may be that it really does need a revolution to secure the meeting of form and content. The word revolution should not be understood in its literal sense of barricades in the streets, crowds, violence and blood – the models left us by the French and Russian revolutions; rather it should be seen as a thoroughgoing breach in the flow of history, a disjunction, a caesura. Twenty years later, the compensatory radical shift – historians can decide whether this constituted a “voting booth revolution” - can be said to have arrived in Hungary with the two-thirds majority gained by Fidesz and the Christian Democrats in the 2010 elections. Let’s hope that the participants of these events will give their version of what happened and what is happening well before another 20 years have passed.

Sch. Gy.