words from budapest

7/29/2019 Words from Budapest

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new left review 80mar apr 20135

g. m. tams

Your trajectory has been an unusual one: a dissident libertarian philosopherunder Communism in both Romania and Hungary, who has emerged as one

o the oremost let critics o the capitalist order in eastern Europe, and author

o a striking set o essays on the historical and cultural legacies and contem-

porary dynamics o the region. Could we start by asking about your original

personal and intellectual ormation, in Gheorghiu-Dejs and Ceausescus

Romania?

Answering this question borders on the impossible,since the whole context which might explain it has gone. Iwas born in 1948, in what Hungarians call Kolozsvr andRomanians, Cluj. The principal city o Transylvania, it had

been transerred rom Hungary to Romania in 1920 by the Treaty oTrianon, awarded back to Horthys Hungary by Hitler in 1940, and wasunder direct Nazi occupation rom early 1944 until the arrival o Sovietorces, when it was incorporated into Romania again. Both my parents

were Communists. They had come back rom the War broken and bitter.My ather, a Hungarian writer, was dispatched rom prison to the ront,where he was seriously woundedhe walked on crutches, later witha sturdy walking-stick, which I still haveby those whom he consid-ered his comrades: the Red Army. My mother, ironically, escaped beingdeported to Auschwitz because she was in jail as a seditious Bolshevik.But her mother and her avourite elder brother were killed. My athersamily belonged to the petty nobility, or rather yeomanry, in the moun-

tainous Szekler region o East Transylvania; his ather was a tailor ina small town. My mother, seven years older than him, came rom anOrthodox Jewish amily, a long line o Talmudic scholars. They could

WORDS FROM BUDAPEST

Interview


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6nlr 80not have met anywhere else, only in the movement. The movementthey never spoke o the Partymeant mostly suering and persecution:arrest, prison, beatings. The suering was sel-explanatory: punishmentby an evil society proved the goodness o the Cause. It was a quasi-

Gnostic world-view: on the one side there was exploitation, oppression,Hitler and death; on the other, the movement.

Later, when my ather was thoroughly disenchanted with the system, Iasked him why he still called himsel a Communist. He showed me alittle plasticwell, I suppose, bakelitecube, with six little photos gluedon its sides: the portraits o some o the best riends o his youth, tor-tured to death by the royal Hungarian and Romanian secret services,

or by the Gestapo in that awul year, 1944. Because I cannot explainit to them, he said. It was the perect Christian idea: bearing witness,martyrdom as the theological guarantee o truth. They were justifedby heroic death, and so was the cause. He could not escape it. Keepingaith in the teeth o adverse political experience, the rotting away o themovement, was the only course. Anything else would have been treason.Duplex veritas also: he never denied that state socialism was a ailure.His identity and his principles were at loggerheads. Some o his com-

rades, back rom the concentration camps, had been rearrested by theCommunist authorities, disappeared without a sound. This destroyedhim as an intellectual.

In the absence o revolution, he suddenly ound himsel with time onhis hands, so he had the leisure to be a wonderul parent. He showedme historical Transylvania, limping on mountain paths, propped on hisstick beore some redoubt or castle, or another ruined medieval church.

There arent many intellectuals today who have working-class riends,but we did. Some o our amily were peasants, in the poorest regionso Europe. I was taught, without great success, to do things in the feldsand the garden. But I was taught something else as well: that everythingrelated to us. My memory was trained by listening to the Hungarianprogramme o the bbc World Service and summarizing the news ormy parents; I was seven years old. I still remember the British Cabinetso that era: Selwyn Lloyd, Rab Butler, Maxwell Fye and so on (but one

admired Herbert Morrison and Barbara Castle). Well Meet Again andThe White Clis o Dover with Vera Lynn were elt to be somehow akinto socialist marching songs. The bbcin contradistinction to Radio FreeEuropehad counted as anti-ascist since the War. I had no idea that I


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tams:Interview7was dierent rom other boys; I assumed it was not just a tiny minoritywho cared about Nehru, Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh and Lumumbaandon the street, strong and swarthy lads were invariably called Tshombe,known rom the newsreels.

Internationalism remained an important creed or my parents andtheir circle o riendsmost o them illegals beore 1945as the Partybecame increasingly nationalist in the sixtiesand started getting rid oHungarian, Jewish andespeciallyHungarian-Jewish leaders andactivists, who all remembered the Iron Guard tactics o Romanianizationrom beore the War. With them went the important post-War conces-sions to the Hungarian minority, including an autonomous territory and

an independent Hungarian university in Cluj/Kolozsvr.

What kind o a city was Cluj/Kolozsvr, where you grew up?

It was a medieval cathedral town, where the thick city walls are vis-ible to this day, with two major Gothic churchesmy avourite is theFarkas utca (Wol Street) reormed church; I am a lapsed Calvinistand the baroque city houses o the Transylvanian aristocracy and the

local patricians: the Bny palace, the Rhdey house, the Kendeyhouse, the Wolphard-Kakas house, the cathedral close to where theuniversity was built in the 1870s. It is, to me, painully beautiul. Itwas called the city o treasures, but not because o its riches: it wasthe regional capital o alchemy; it had a history o religious strie andsudden conversions during the Reormation.It was a Hungarian townin the midst o the mostly Romanian countryside and also a bastion othe Let. In 1946, Iron Guard students rom the Romanian university

murdered two Hungarian Communist workers. The RedsmostlyHungariansstormed the university dormitories. The two victims werelaid in state on a huge cataalque on Main Square, a mourning crowdo tens o thousands assembled, and that night the Communist leadersmade inammatory, bloodthirsty speeches by candlelight, a sinister andthreatening spectacle recounted repeatedly by my elders (I wasnt bornyet). The Hungarian university was Communist, the Romanian one wasright-wing. Similarly, the two soccer clubs in town were also politically

divided: the kmsc (today cfr) was Hungarian and social democratic (itwas originally a trade-union sports association), the Universitate wasRomanian and Iron Guard. They still hate one another, their past orgot-ten, though players and supporters are all Romanian now.


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8nlr 80Minorities everywhere in Eastern Europe tended to be on the let,attracted by communist internationalism and by the Comintern opposi-tion to the Versailles and Trianon treaties. In the whole o Romania, theHungarian university o Cluj/Kolozsvr was the most reliable bastion

o Marxism-Leninismwhich has not, o course, endeared the ofcialdoctrine to Romanians, intellectuals or not. Stalinism is still remem-bered, rather unairly, as an epoch o renewed Hungarian domination inTransylvania, the suppression o which made Nicolae Ceausescu ratherpopular or a while.

And your upbringing?

It was a strangely Victorian childhood. What passed or communismat the time was a rigidly rationalistic, puritanical, diligent, asexual, dis-ciplined regime, with a penchant or high-mindedness, high culture,sel-improvement, rigorous study; everything repressed, quiet and well-mannered, all in the name o Revolution. Reading Raphael SamuelsLost World o British Communism, with all the dierences between domi-nant culture and isolated sub-culture, I recognized the steely grey o thesel-sacrifcing, altruistic, egalitarian, unsentimental and unromantic,

positivist Bolshevism o our youth, with the subdued, undeclared hero-ism that was its secret ideal. We Bolshevik children, too, were seen butnot heard in our prickly woollen knee-socks and shorts, listening to thegrown-ups discoursing about weighty matters. During my long illnesses,I was read interminable nineteenth-century epics by my ather and wastaught to read everything, i possible, in the original. Every Saturdayevening and Sunday morning, we went to symphonic concerts. I playedthe violin; we all were supposed to read music, understand Latin, read

Dante and Milton and Byron and Goethe and Pushkin in our teens. Istarted on the Critique o Pure Reason at ourteen. I didnt understandit, o course, but I fnished it, in the rightul, incomprehensible oldHungarian translation.

There were modest holidays: I remember summer days on the grass inthe courtyard, with a basket o applesI hate applesreading, reading,reading. In the evenings, my mother would stand in the dark, watch-

ing through the slats, waiting or the black car to arrive. When, somefteen years later, in February o 1974, at hal past our in the morn-ing, the secret police fnally rang at my door, I was not surprised. We


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tams:Interview9were waiting or that all our lives. It was our regime, it was my parentsparty, but it was also our obvious enemy. In the early 1960s when myather was fred as the head o the Hungarian State Theatre in town, butonly sent into internal exile, we were relieved. My parents told me in

excruciating detail how to behave i I was beaten (I never was), how tobreatheregular respiration is the most important, think o somethingormal, recite verses in your head, think o mathematical ormulae,anything rhythmicthey thought it was practical advice, but they onlysucceeded in rightening me out o my wits.

What was your perception at the time o HungarianRomanian relations in

Transylvania?

We knew how Romanian peasants had been treated by the TransylvanianHungarian nobility and the Hungarian state beore 1918; how theRomanian national movementsthe movements o the ethnic major-ity in Transylvaniahad been dealt with, how their rights had beendenied; but we were innocent, as internationalists opposed to discrimi-nation. But was our antipathy to Romanian nationalism totally bereto suppressed eelings o ethnic pridethe sense that we were better,

as internationalist Hungarians, than the chauvinist Romanian upstartsand newcomers? I very much doubt it. Nationalismin this case, theirnationalismwas deemed primitive, probably an echo o the old con-tempt o the town or the country. My parents did not speak Romanian(I am uent). As good internationalists, they read the literature o theircountrys majority in translation. I once asked my mother, How comeyou speak perect French but no Romanian? By then, she had spentsome orty years in Romania. She just laughed.

My frst oppositional thoughts were rather selfsh: how dare the regimedisappoint my adored, heroic parents? My frst thought about the Partywas that they were traitorscome to think o it, that is still what I believe.The ancient contrast between ideal and reality was what shaped our so-called political thoughts. Very un-Marxist. Exaggerated, rigid moralisminstead o historical thinking. It has given me a deep, abiding hatred othe regime, so intense and savage that it is hard to describe.

So, with the Hungarian University closed down by the regime, presumably

your university education was in Romanian?


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10nlr 80No, it was in Hungarian; the two universities were actually merged intoone, which is still bi-lingual today. But I spent two years in Bucharest aswell, studying Greek which wasnt taught at the time in Kolozsvr.

What drew you to Descartes, the subject o your rst book?

My interest was historical and critical: I was concerned with the birth oReason. It is a text quite similar to Antonio Negris Political Descarteswhich, alas, I did not know at the time, although his book is better. I wasvery much taken with the frst linguistic turn, the Romantic version,like the one to be ound in Johann Georg Hamanns critique o Kant. Ialso wrote on Novalis.

Youve mentioned the arrival o the Securitate in February 1974: what sort o

activities were you involved in?

It wasnt anything that I didthe regime was too rigid and terrible orreal resistancebut what I didnt do: I reused to write some loyal articleon Ceausescus new moral code. I was promptly denounced and takento the Securitate headquarters two days later. It was harassment: I was

detained a ew times in the street, put into the black carand whiskedaway or a ew hours, then released during the night. Sometimes theyjust let me cool my heels in the bleak corridors.

What made you decide to go to Hungary in 1978, rather than seek asylum in

the West?

There were a number o reasons. First, I did not want to go to prison,

and in Romania it would have been only a question o time. Second, Iwas ed up with being a member o a hated and ofcially persecutedminority in my own native town and longed to be just a Hungarianauthor in a Hungarian environment, and not to be rowned at i I spokeHungarian on the busthough there is no escaping this. As we speak,mutual hatred between Hungarians and Romanians is aring up again,the conict omented, as per usual, by irresponsible right-wing politi-cians. God, its boring. But thirdly, there was an opposition taking shape

here in Hungary; I thought this would be my intellectual home. And Imay have been a little bored by the provinces.


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tams:Interview11I didnt go to the Westalthough it would have been much simpler asI had an uncle in Paris, a sometime worker at Renault, a member oseveral groupuscules, then o the psubecause, as an old-ashionedintellectual, I elt I had some duties here: building an opposition to the

regime, doing serious philosophy in my native tongue (my Descartesbook came out in 1977). Then there was the hope o leading a morenormal lie, as it seemed to me then. I taught or a spell at the Universityo Budapest, known as elte, but I was fred ater publishing an under-ground pamphlet under my own name, supporting the Polish oppositionater General Jaruzelskis coup in December 1981. So much or normallie. I was blacklisted, orbidden to publish, my name disappeared romthe press and rom proessional publications, my passport was confs-

cated and my telephone cut othe usual stu. I was unemployed untilI was elected to Parliament in 1989.

Hungary was indeed a country very dierent rom Romania. Hungaryand East Germany were the only actually existing socialist countrieswhere there was no lurch towards nationalism, where the anti-ascisttradition was taken seriouslyalthough the great intellectuals o theinter-war extreme right were all rehabilitated and were writing uriously

in the so-called Communist journals. Their anti-Western attitudes andromantic anti-capitalism helped: they sincerely preerred the SovietUnion to America, on the usual anti-liberal grounds. But, unlike inRomania, propaganda against our neighbours was not permitted and,unlike in the rest o the Soviet bloc, anti-Semitism was silenced (a policyshared with East Germany and Yugoslavia). It was estering silently, butit could rarely be elt in public lie. Nationalism, what there was o it, hada slight oppositional tinge.

How would you characterize the culture o the time?

Everywhere in the Soviet bloc there existed a strange combination ohigh modernism andlooked at rom today, or rom the Westanincredible and tradition-laden cult o Letters, o the Arts, o Scienceand Philosophy. Socialist modernization, apart rom putting an endto illiteracy, epidemics and abject poverty, by introducing hygiene and

indoor plumbing, heating, old-age pensions, paid holidays, ree healthcare and ree education, cheap public transport, numeracy and so on,


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12nlr 80also opened lending libraries in every district and all the larger frms. Itintroducedor the frst timescholarly and critical editions, and anenormous volume o high-quality mass publishing, social sciences, seri-ous literary and art criticism; dozens o new theatres and museums were

opened, hundreds o new cinemasart flm ourished; all extremelyhigh-minded. Millions o people learned to read music and sang inchoirs. Philosophy had never been regarded as part o the national cul-ture beore 1945. National classics were properly edited and publishedor the frst time. Hundreds o scholars worked on translations. Thesewere extremely bookish nations.

At the same time, as this was a system o state capitalism, tempered and

limited by planning both production and redistributionand steeredby very complex mathematicspolitics was disproportionately rationalor, rather, rationalistic. As a system still based on commodity produc-tion, wage labour, money and the separation o the producers rom themeans o production, class dierences and inequality persisted. In this,the Party represented a kind o collective tribunus plebis, always adjust-ing consumption levels, lie quality and cultural participation towardsequality and maintainingin a largely, but not exclusively, symbolic

ashionthe primacy o the working class. Social mobility was switand advantages were oered to working-class kids in access to highereducation and cadre promotion. Statistics show that even in the 1980s,a crushing majority o leading ofcials and managers came romproletarian amilies.

It is a supreme irony that the demands o todays hard rightor an inde-pendent Hungarian-language state university in Kolozsvr, a Hungarian

Autonomous Region in Transylvaniahad been achievements (latersuppressed) o the Stalinist era. There were not only privileges or peopleo proletarian origin, but also or minority cadres. The Leninist prog-ramme had encompassed the development o all ethnic cultures: thenow warring regional or ethnic elites o the Soviet bloc had been createdby the Party. National cultures that like harking back to a fctitious MiddleAge had been endowed with a scriptthen a press, publishing, highereducation, theatreby literate commissars with romantic leanings, who

believed in pristine olk cultures in the Urals, ar away rom decadentSt Petersburg. Faust was translated into dozens o languages by poetswho were themselves just one generation rom general illiteracy. Thesenations are now watching pop videos on YouTube.


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tams:Interview13What meaning would you attribute to the symbolic primacy o the

working class?

We should not orget that all caste and class systems, whatever their

dierences, are grounded in a value system extolling the virtues o thespirit over manual work, o the leisured class over those who must earntheir keep, o meditation over activity, o things done or their own sakeinstead o or sheer physical survival. Clergy and aristocracy were notonly supposed to rule but also to be superior morally, intellectually andeven physicallyremember Lord Curzons surprise at seeing soldiersbathing during the First World War: I never knew the working classeshad such white skins! Well, the Party inverted this. Actually existing

socialism, although it was not socialist, was unique in operating a ter-rifc moral switch by asserting the superiority o manual labour andputting the worker at the pinnacle o the moral hierarchy. It is seldomunderstood what a tremendous cultural coupure this was. It earned theregime more hatred than anything else; the post-1989 eastern Europeanpress is still joking about it, in their sincere contempt (good old classhatred) or grease-smeared yahoos in cloth capscalled here, character-istically, Lenin hats. The very existence o workers reading Brecht and

listening to Bartk is denied.

The countervailing cult o the intellectual, disguising the new mid-dle class, was supposed to hide class dierences through the idea othe seless service o the mind in realizing a world, to the advantage omanual workers, in which spirit and matter, work and leisure, wouldmerge. Since this was, o course, mostly ideology and nothing more, agreatnow orgottenliterature o communist disillusionment came

into being. In general, the most eared opposition to the regime was onthe let. The Hungarian Secret Services anti-Trotskyite sub-division wasdissolved only in 1991. There were practically no Trotskyists in Hungary;the Section dealt with any kind o Marxist heresy, but it shows the direc-tion o the leaderships ears.

Would it be correct to think that Yugoslavia remained a relatively separate

universe rom the central and eastern European scene o the 70s and 80s, with

not that much contact between the two?

It was, o course, separatein terms o exit visas, or example, itcounted as a Western country, although it was much less hostile to the


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14nlr 80Soviet Union than Ceausescus Romania, which was consumed withanti-Communist and anti-Russian hatred, in love with everything thatseemed anti-Soviet, rom de Gaulle, Begin and Nixon to the Shah o Iranand Brother Number One, Comrade Pol Pot . . .

Ceausescu was duly honoured at Buckingham Palacethe Order o the Bath.

Indeed. I attended de Gaulles speech at the University o Bucharest in1968, in which he was buttering up Ceausescu and waxing eloquent overce petit pays latin, entour par Slaves et Magyarshe didnt say Hongroisto thunderous applause; none rom me, Im araid. But there werecontacts with Yugoslavia, certainly. When I was blacklisted in Romania

and Hungary, I published my essays in Hungarian-language journalsin Yugoslaviathey were excellent. It was much less censored thanpublishing and the press in either Hungary or Romania, and especiallypermissive regarding New Let heresies, hysterically eared and hatedin the Soviet bloc. By the 1970s, the regime in East Central Europe hadstopped pretending that it was in any way Marxist; that was the damnosahaereditas, silently repudiated. In my student days, Weber, Wittgenstein,Heidegger and Lvi-Strauss were the major thinkers, and the success

o analytical philosophy and neo-classical economics was tremendous.The strict division in the countries under German inuence betweenscienceincluding o course the humanities, history, economics, soci-ology, aesthetics and philosophyand politics, a plague o public liein Eastern Europe, comes rom Weber, the undisputed saint and heroo the 1970s, the last decade when East European intellectuals were stillreading books. Marxists, like the Lukcs school in Hungarya groupI was riendly with, but to which I never belongedwere dissidents o

the New Let or the Eurocommunist variety; so, both anti-Soviet andintrinsically questioning the legitimacy and authenticity o the social-ist system, while the Party was simultaneously afrming the regimessocialist character and not wishing to be reminded o it, under the newmarket dispensation with its growing inequality and individualism. Theamous decision o the Hungarian Central Committee against the dis-ciples o LukcsHeller, Mrkus, Vajda, Kis and otherspracticallyoutlawed Marxism or the remainder o the systems lie-span. By

the time it could have been rehabilitated in 1989, it was dead, and allprotagonists were liberals.


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tams:Interview15In Yugoslavia, it was dierent. It was a bureaucratic state capitalism likeany other, but its leaders were still dreaming about some kind o non-alienated and non-reifed order, in spite o the obvious bankruptcy othe sel-management adventure, andin a multi-ethnic and ederal

statethey ancied themselves internationalists, only to wage a bloodywar against one another a ew years later. They had become either liber-als or bloodthirsty religious Middle Age-anciers and chauvinists. Butbeore that, they had welcomed Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse toKorcula and Dubrovnik. I frst saw the New Let Review in Belgrade in1979. In general it was simpler to smuggle books than periodicals, asthe Hungarian authorities did not know the names; the words New Letwere known to customs and border-guard ofcers, even in English, but

there was no problem in importing Franz Mareks let-EurocommunistTagebuch rom Vienna, except i it had the hammer and sickle on thecover. By contrast, Yugoslavia was a communist paradise, with remit-tance money rom the guest workers sent back rom Germany, and itseemed to be closer to a real world with its quarrels, debates and politicalstruggles out in the open, in spite o the repression and the militarismand the caudillismo o Titos ruling clique. But by the 1980s, Hungarianand Romanian intellectuals were rather looking to the Westand,

increasingly, to the inter-war, reactionary-corporatist regimesor theirinspiration. It is also very instructive that it is in the Balkans, especiallythe ormer Yugoslav republics plus Greece, that there is today a youngand vigorous Marxist let, and not Central Europe, the so-called Visegrdcountries, where there is nothing comparable, although they are threat-ened by a vicious and violent, quasi-ascist right. (In the Vojvodinaprovince, hate crime against ethnic Hungarians is a daily occurrenceand neo-Nazi parties are extremely strong in Bulgaria and Greece, using

and concomitantly opposing the social protests there.)

How important were Gorbachevs policies as enabling conditions or the

advance o democratic orces?

They were important negatively, in the sense that it had become clearthat the Red Army wouldnt intervene. At the frst major unauthorizeddemonstration in Budapest in June 1988 where I was to be the main

speaker, I was beaten up by riot police and dragged away, but we werereed in two hours. The solemn reburial o Imre Nagy a year later wasa state aair, secured by the ci-devantHungarian Secret Services, Armyand Police, masquerading as revolution. I was so disgusted I didnt


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16nlr 80attend. Gorbachev himsel was seen as a comic fgure: weakness is neverorgiven. Anyway, the role o the Soviet Union may have been exagger-ated, it wasnt an active presence. Id never met a live Russian until adissident conerence in Paris in 1989. I have never set oot on Soviet or

ex-Soviet territory as we speak: I couldnt get a visa beorenow I donthave the money.

One shouldnt ever orget that the demise o socialism was a tragedy.Even when I was violently opposed to the let, I perceived it as such. Justthink. A gospel directed against work, power, procreation, against caringabout tomorrow or about deaththink o the lilies o the feldsignifedby the hated Roman symbol o torture and assassination, the cross, ends

up being represented by a monarch in Caesars robes in, o all places,Rome; a prophetic community distinguished by its ban on gravenimages, represented by the most graven o all images, MichelangelosMoses. Then again: a creed adamantly or total liberation, or a defnitivebreak with any kind o authority and hierarchy, combined with a hyper-critical high modernism, housed in the symbolic abode o the Czars, theKremlin (no Marx there, but Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov), whilethe whited sepulchres o the Politburo took the salute o goose-stepping

Red Army soldiers, keeping in place a system o prisons, concentrationcamps and psychiatric hospitals where critical reason was healed withchemicals and electric shocks. Quite enough to make you desperateabout humankind. It is difcult to imagine, perhaps, a complete civiliza-tion being plagued to this extent by disenchantment and despair, but itis a act nevertheless. We dissidents may have celebrated a victory, but ithad somehow, even then, an atertaste o deeat, a whi o the hangover.

How would you contrast the experiences o 1989, across the region?

First o all, it was no accident, as Stalin was so ond o saying, thatthe regime was ultimately beaten by the Polish workers movement.Solidarnosc was called a trade union, but how was it set up? It was anetwork o actory cells, organized not by trade but by region, led by acentral body advised by committed intellectualsentirely reminiscento the early Communist Parties. It was split, like its enemy and predeces-

sor, into workers councils and the revolutionary party, which were in theend indistinguishable, just as in Russia, Hungary and Germany between1917 and 1923. O course, by the time o Solidarnosc the Party repre-sented market reorm, and the workers demands were or a restoration


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tams:Interview17o the planned and egalitarian welare state. During the 1980s, the Polishworkers opposition ollowed its adversary towards the re-establishmento a liberal market capitalismin the hope o greater libertyand bothwere beaten into insignifcance in the political context o the new liberal

democracy. In Hungary, pro-market ex-Communists, pro-market liberalsand pro-market national conservatives competed or power. The brand-new ideologies all advocated embourgeoisement, the creation o a middleclass, allegedly the guarantor o reedomand now the great and goodare wondering why the new middle class is so authoritarian and racist.

There was only one genuine revolution in the region, the Romanianoneit took the Romanian intelligentsia a decade to prove that it was

a kgbcoup dtat, although in the early days o January 1990, I saw theblood on the snow when I could fnally return to Kolozsvr/Cluj, theblood o soldiers and workers whom nobody likes to remember. But Ido, and I am grateul to them that I could return ater a decade and havea moment o delirious happiness that Ceausescu was gone. It still movesme to tears when I speak o that now. As to the rest, it was a process odecomposition complemented by skulduggery, in which we dissidentswere the dupes legitimizing the Schweinerei that was going on. Still.

Like all revolutions, it was a moment o inspiration, when the peoplebecomes a many-headed genius. You cannot imagine the subtlety andintelligence o the myriad circles, clubs and associations in 1988/89.The average case, though, was one o compromise. The onset o theeconomic crisisspeeded up but not caused by privatization, deregula-tion and liberalizationdid not at frst righten public opinion. Peoplelike Waesa, Havel, Kuron and the rest (mysel included) presented theirideals as something Westerna synonym o successto the extent o

cheering on the Gul War. When the measure o the collapse o a civili-zation was fnally takenwhile we old dissidents were still celebratingreedom, but already being accused by the new powers-that-be o beingrootless-cosmopolitan 68ers, ornicators, gays, Roma-lovers and, worsto all, e-mi-niststhen it was too late.

I dont or a moment regret having ought against the socialist regimemendacious, stupid, brutal, repressive and treacherousand I do still

emotionally identiy with the dissidence o those years. But I dislike verymuch the results o those struggles and, although my part in the eventswas modestI was more o an orator in mass meetings than a genu-ine leader, and then a Member o Parliament or the Free Democratic


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18nlr 80Alliance (szdsz) rom 198994I eel responsible. It is especiallyhumbling that the simplest Trotskyist, council communist or anarcho-syndicalist militant saw much more clearly than amous and brillianttheorists that, however deserved the terminal deeat o the Soviet bloc

and o Soviet-style state capitalism had been, however understandableand salutary the sudden East European inatuation with reedom andrights, however promising the all o the market Stalinist parties, it wasat the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise o working-class power, o adversary culture, the end o two centuries o benefcentear or the ruling classes. What was a philosophical construction andidealization in Marxs Capitalcapitalism as a total system, with capitalas the only Subjectbecame a palpable, quotidian reality.

To what extent was your political trajectory a response to the social and politi-

cal outcomes o the transition, and to what extent did it involve a critique o

liberalism as such?

This trajectory is really peculiar, as it takes the shape o the ight othe boomerang, rom let to right and back again, although I became aMarxist or the frst time only in the 2000s. The frst hal is common-

place enough, a rebellion against dictatorship with the added dimensiono ethnic discrimination experienced in Romania. But strangely enough,I was helped in this by my orays in conservative thought. MichaelOakeshottI met him once and was suitably impressedand, inparticular, Leo Strauss awakened my simmering doubts concerning lib-eralism beore my turn to the let. (Actually, I might write some day anessay to be called Leo Strauss or Revolutionaries.) As in my early youthNietzsche had aroused my interest in Christianity, so Strauss drew me to

Spinoza and Rousseau. Liberalism, as a system o separations and tem-pered conict, is incapable o grounding a political order that is eternallyin need o motivations or the ree acceptance o obligations, also calledaltruism. Lacking this, it will have to go to amazing lengths in legitimiz-ing coercion and the proering o the noble lie by learned elites. NaturalRight and History, the only book to deal with the tragic cynicism oWeber and the deception o the alleged acts/values dichotomy, openedmy eyes to the weakness o a political world-view in need o procedural

certaintiessustained in the English-speaking world by an abstract andvacuous normativism wholly ignorant o modern philosophy, with theexception o a misinterpreted and simplifed Kant: this is what they callpolitical philosophy.


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tams:Interview19So, when looking at the liberal turn o such ormerly socialist luminariesas Jrgen Habermas, becoming little more than pillars o the establish-ment, I decided to throw out my whole so-called oeuvre, break with myentire lie so ar, and go to school again. This has o course liberated my

passionate repudiation o the state o aairs we wrought, my sympathyand compassion or people impoverished and made illiterate again bythe market turn. I was obliged to recognize that our naive liberalism haddelivered a nascent democracy into the hands o irresponsible and hate-flled right-wing politicos, and contributed to the re-establishment o aprovincial, deerential and resentul social world, harking back to beore1945. The break was naturally quite painul, as it excluded me rom thecircle o people I was associated with or decadesthe dissidentsso

that my riends at the moment are mostly generations younger than Iam; wonderul people, but without the shared memories so necessaryor true riendships. At the same time, young Romanian letists madeit possible or me to have a consoling shadow existence in Transylvania,and to get rid fnally o the eeling that poisoned my youththe sensethat ethnic conict was irremediable. Ater a thirty-year absence, or thefrst time in my lie when I give talks and sometimes write or journalsin Romanian, I am made to eel welcome in my own land: a source o

great delight and maybe undeserved justifcation.

What was the impact on the rest o the region o the ethnic conficts in Croatia

and Bosnia, and then o the nato war on Yugoslavia?

At the ofcial level, these things are strictly and rigidly determined by thepast, as the ruling class sees itor example, the two socialist countrieswhere there were no Russian occupying troops, Poland and Romania, are

the most anti-Russian today, in remembrance o old territorial and ethnicdisputes. In the case o Yugoslavia: Germany, Austria and Hungary sidedwith nato and Catholic Croatia against Greek Orthodox and allegedlyCommunist Serbia; Czechs, Romanians, Greeks and Russians turnedagainst what they saw as the Central Powers, perceived as Catholic andGerman. It warmed up the old prejudice about the CatholicOrthodoxdivide as the boundary between Europe and the Oriental barbarians, aclich beloved o Hungarian nationalists and ethnicists. The Hungarian

Prime Minister o the time (and o today), Viktor Orbn, called theHungarians o Serbian Vojvodina a nato minority; very useul, asyou can imagine, under the nato bombs alling on jvidk/Novi Sad.By presenting Miloevic as a Communist and as a Russian ally, it was


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20nlr 80possible to establish the image o the central European let as somethingOriental, barbaric, backward and condemned to deeat. (On the otherhand, the let as an agent o modernization is concomitantly seen as theproconsulate o Jewish America; it was Jewish England in the 1930s.)

Most o the dissidents o 1989Havel, Kuron, Michnik and othersully supported the nato bombing o Belgrade. By that time I was outprotesting, and was called the useul idiot o Miloevic or my pains. Iremember a debate with Alain Finkielkraut at the Institut Franais inBudapest: hea supporter o the anti-Semitic, ethnicist Croat leader,Tudmanwas laughing at me or my oolish sentimentalism: Well,people get killed in the cause o liberty and America, do they not?

In a striking essay written at the time, The Two-Hundred-Years War, youdescribed a pattern common to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Yugoslavia and

the ussr: politics was conned to the centre, while regional elites represented

ethnicity without politics; when the centre disappeared, ethnicismsharply

distinguished rom nationalismwas the only remaining orce. You also pre-

dicted that the West would either tolerate extreme ethnic purging in Yugoslavia

or construct an empire o its own thereboth, as it turned out . . .

A peculiar concern o mine was the ate o ethnic minoritiesI was,I am and I remain a Transylvanian Hungarianand I could see howminorities and majorities alike ailed to learn anything rom their expe-rience. All they seemed to want was power. To get as ar as they possiblycould rom democratic nationalismwhich is a variant o classicalrepublicanism: political equality and sel-determinationthey engagedin what I called ethnicism: an apolitical, destructive practice, opposed tothe idea o citizenship. Transylvanian Hungarians were in the frst ranks

o the 1989 Romanian revolution, which they were repudiatingas it wasoreignwithin a ew months, ater having been victims o Romanianpogroms. Common citizenship appears as a chimera. Small wonderthough: citizenship and civic-democratic nationalism are dependent onthe state, annihilated by neo-liberal politics. Nationalism has reunitedsmall principalities in large statesItaly, Germany, Romania, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, maybe even Soviet Russia. Ethnicism hasdestroyed them and created miserable little statelets, provincial and

barbarous, dependent on international fnance and local mafa or theirlivelihood. In this respect, Eastern Europe is not variegated. It is an areao ear where a plastic replica o tribalism appears soothing and homey.


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tams:Interview21It has been argued that the Wests crucial geo-political move ater 1989 was

to insist on an individual, hub-and-spokes relationship with each central

European country, breaking the links between them, rather than negoti-

ating with the bloc as a whole. One result was that any dissent rom the

WashingtonBrussels consensus was automatically ramed as isolationism, ornationalism. What do you make o this argument?

There is some truth in it, but the liberal elites needed no encourage-ment rom the West to sever their ties to a Russia seen as embodyingterror, backwardness and poverty, nor to become neo-conservatives.It was not only Western pressure, it was also the desires o importantgroups in Eastern Europe equating reedom with the West, so they vol-

unteered. In vain did I write in the early 1990s that liberty was not ageographical concept. Becoming Western or, later, European was themost popular slogan in this period. So, de-industrialization and the sell-ing o almost everything to multinational conglomerates or a song wasjust the thing, received enthusiastically by people in love with what agreat writer o the 1930s Hungarian vlkisch movement, Lszl Nmeth,called sel-colonization.

What have been the longer-term eects?

Apart rom the abject impoverishment o the region, the transormationo Eastern Europe into an economic black hole, galloping unemploy-ment and Third World-type inequalities, it has made ethnicismnotnationalism, as it lacks the civic dimensionappear as the only sys-temic opposition. So ethnicism has attracted, alas, the rebellious spiritswho rightly resent the neo-imperialism o multinationals and inter-

national organizations, rom nato to the imf to the who, and whothink that liberal capitalism is merely a disguise or oreign subjectionand exploitation.

How would you assess the role o the eu in the region?

The whole thing has been a op. The eu is regarded here as no morethan a bunch o unlovely oreigners, with highalutin constitutional

rhetoric masking iron-hard Western egotism. The shrinking liberalminority regards it as a possible saeguard against murderous crowds, aquintessential liberalism o ear that bodes ill. The eu has intervenedin a salutary ashion in the interest o press reedom or gender equality,


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22nlr 80but nobody seems to believe in the selessness o its motives. But thenit was never popular. People are unwilling to believe in a reedom thatalways seems to be accompanied by cuts and more cuts.

How would you periodize Eastern Europes quarter-century since 1989?

First, the moment o independence and reedom: liberal eervescence.Second, privatization and the dismantling o the remains o the socialistwelare state, along with the realignment o the ormer communiststate parties, which enthusiastically accepted the neo-liberal agenda asbefts their positivist, progressivist and modernizing tradition. Third, aright-wing corporativist backlash against this, largely unsuccessul, with

the result: disappointment and rage. Fourth, the rittering away o con-stitutional systems, civil rights, pluralism and toleration that yielded,in the case o Hungary, a sti, nationalist order and, in the rest o theSoviet-bloc countries, chaos.

Chaos could suggest a complete breakdown o social orderis that what

you perceive?

By chaos I mean the breakdown o the customary loyalties, sympathiesand belies that would support the assumption o some sort o commongood, and which have been replaced not so much by a new rebelliouscreed as by prejudices, superstitions and whisperings about occult pow-ers; everybody or him- or hersel; the reign o suspicion; the eelingthat we are fnished, but that at the same time the whole thing is a joke;advanced ill-humour; a erocious rejection o anything that smacks othe supra-individual; hatred o all politics; contempt or law; hatred o

everybody and sel-hatreda closed horizon.

In several instances, the ground or the resurgent right in central Europe

was cleared by the understandable electoral annihilation o centre-let

governmentsthat o Leszek Miller in Poland (200105) or Gyurcsny in

Hungary (200409)led by born-again ormer Communists. Elected on

promises o restoring social stability and solidarity ater the ravages o shock

therapy, in oce they proved thoroughly corrupt and cynical, while continu-

ing the remorseless neo-liberal policies. What responsibility do these centre-letpartiesand the measures dictated by convergence criteria more generally

bear or the rise o the virulent right?


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tams:Interview23Please dont orget that these people have never been communists oany description. They were modernizers who elt shackled by the SovietUnions military might and were always less critical o Western lib-eral capitalism than the dissidents. They were opposed to Solidarnosc

because to them it seemed to mean disorder, because it was proletar-ian and because it was Catholic and naively patriotic. It was not onlythe spds Helmut Schmidt who swore by Karl Popper: these people hadnever been the enemies o the open society, in the sense o the circula-tion o capital and individual liberties, as long as these did not amountto popular power. Reason and progressthe most powerul strand othe workers movement since Saint-Simon, in which Capitalwas viewedas esoteric matter, while leaders and theorists preerred the late Engelss

positivism and empiricismreason and progress now pointed towardsWall Street and the City o London. It is not true that so-called let par-ties in Eastern Europe promised more social justice than their so-calledright-wing rivals; they were alwayssince 1981 at the latestassociatedwith cuts and balanced budgets. So no surprise there. With the inter-esting exception o the Hungarian socialists, they are also blatantlynationalisticsee today the likes o Robert Fico, Ivica Dacic, VictorPonta, Sergei Stanishev, Milo Zeman and the rest.

The centre-let parties have been in avour o shock therapy rom thebeginning. They sometimes attack their right-wing competitors or notbeing orthodox enough in ollowing the prescriptions o the WashingtonConsensus. This is why ormer dissidents such as Adam Michnik couldsupport a let that was, and is, impeccably neo-liberal, a synonym to myormer comrades-in-arms or a commitment to reedom and pluralism.The ofcial centre-let in Eastern Europe is closer in spirit to the Western

political mainstream than is the ofcial East European right. It may some-times protest about authoritarian developments in Poland or Hungary,but it introduces or implements them elsewhere. I this is treason, it hap-pened more than thirty years ago. We know rom Ernest Mandels bookFrom Stalinism to Eurocommunismthat it was not Margaret Thatcher butEnrico Berlinguer, Secretary-General o the Italian Communist Party,who frst extolled the unparalleled virtues o austerityin 1973! Thereis nothing to be hoped or rom these parties and the subservient trade

unions sometimes associated with themwhile Solidarnosc has dwin-dled to a small revivalist sect, ready to support Genghis Khan.


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24nlr 80In a major 2000 essay, On Post-Fascism, you analysed a confuence o orces

that served to limit eective citizenship under liberal capitalism, despite the

expansion o ormally democratic processes. Has the experience o the past

decade altered the picture?

Not much. In the conditions o deregulated, neo-liberal global capital-ism there are not only growing migrant populations but many othercategories o people who are estranged, or one reason or another, romtraditional nation-states which can no longer supply legal protection,on the one hand, or patriotism, on the other. I citizenship is not inthe process o becoming a universal conditionexpanding, as it didrom 1789 onwardsthen it will lose its sense. I it is available only

to the ofcially registered, sedentary white populations o the Westernnation-states, it will lead to authoritarian regimes based on racial andmoral panic. I equality only obtains among the relatively privilegedcivic nations in a dwindling number o still stable bourgeois states,then citizenship becomes a distinction instead o the universal condi-tion promised by the French Revolution. I anti-immigrant xenophobia,anti-Islamic hate-mongering, anti-Roma hysteria and the like prevail, itssymbolic and police order can only be sustained by tyranny seemingly

propped up by the people, meaning this time the well-to-do whites andthose who aspire to become such. Europe may become a larger Rhodesiaany time now.

How could we install a system o universal citizenship? The price to bepaid is to dismantle the contemporary version o pseudo-liberal capital-ism; no multiculturalism can do justice to this problem. But the whitemajorities are increasingly desperate. Beore 1989, I was araid only o

the secret police. But today I may ace the wrath o my own people as Iam seen to be on the side o the Roma, o the immigrants, o the gays andso onso, unlike at any other time in history, equality is perceived to beinimical to the interests o the majority. People are not interested in ouropposition to the Wall Street regime, as soon as we deend the darkies.Both are oreign. The let is, again, seen as a Jewish cabal, representingthe Other. Under the pretext o equality, the let is elt to attack, again,the local, the traditional, the intimate, the home-grown. Like global capi-

talism, communism is seen as insensitive to the Home. Yes, it is, as it isconcerned about the homeless.


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tams:Interview25What intellectual resources rom the past would you consider o particular

value today?

It was not Marx, Engels and the Second International, but the ound-

ers o the CominternLenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharinand aew others, like the Austro-Marxists around Otto Bauer and the Dutch-German Let-Communist opposition, who were the frst to be sincerelyinternationalist and anti-racist. It was they who took up the cause o theoppressed peoples o the periphery and the semi-periphery, o the col-oured nations, who seriously opposed imperialismstill seen by Marxto have possessed a mission civilisatrice in India and similar benightedplaces at the back o beyond. Whatever happened to the idea o interna-

tional solidarity, riendship between the peoples, sel-determination, obeing on the side o the poor, or the notion o the weakest link? There isa welcome tendency now among the young let in the region to developorms o anti-national co-operation between various oci o resistancein East European countries, to oppose the pressure o global capitaliststrategies still located mostly in the West. In the gatherings I attend inZagreb and in Belgrade, the daughters and sons o Croatian and Serbiannationalists, who once drunk on each others blood, are resuscitat-

ing the frst condition o any anti-systemic opposition, called in goodGerman Fundamentalopposition: disbelieve the classiying principles othe enemy. And they are doing it together. When rebels in the eighteenthcentury started disbelieving the inherent superiority o Norman bloodor the ineable blessedness o the bishops, they began to overcome thedierentiations imposed rom above that caused them to be obedient,the bowing to spiritual and moral superiority that is always necessary topreserve the ascendancy o the ew over the many in any caste or class

society. The contemporary trick o the rulers is culture.

The dominant system shamelessly identifed with Westernexcellencediligence, thrit, rugality, patience, discipline, hard work,sel-improvement, elegance: all this comes in a slick aesthetic garblooksdown upon the East and the South as unruly, lazy, a slave to Bacchusand to desire, racist, xenophobic and so on. It is a variation on the greatold theme o the inerior being creatures o the heart and o corporeal-

ity, as opposed to reason, the prerogative o the mighty throughout theages. Women were supposed to be creatures o sentiment and irresistiblesexuality, Jews and now Muslims were and are presented as driven byenvy, resentment, passion and by the absence o a well-tempered sense


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26nlr 80o reality, which always means a conservative attachment to the ancienrgime. The ineriorproletarian, emale, coloured or Semiticis alwayssomehow equated with the body; demands or social justice are alwaysmotivated by need. The superior is equated either with the fery soul

warriors, or Sombarts heroic entrepreneursor with the ice-cold spirit:priests, scholars, bankers, administrators. The poor, including poorregions and poor nations, by the sheer act that they wish or more andor better, are presented as growing up in a culture o dependenceonhand-outs rom the richand o thet: that is, attempts to expropriate,and to realize social justice by making their own what rightully belongsto others. The weight o such cultural classifcations is enormous: redis-tribution is regarded as charity and confscation o property that can be

eected only by a tyrannical state; hence all egalitarian movements implyan end to reedom.

What is striking is that all these cultural classifcations are increasinglybiologized and moralized. The East European establishment wants toprove that we are deserving poorsee Viktor Orbns work-based soci-ety, which will fnally vanquish the accursed welare state, a base andcunning communist stratagem i ever there was onewho might be

permitted a little slack, as we are straining every nerve to be like every-one else and proud o it (in Orbns case, very proud, all in the spirito the Holy Crown o St Stephen). So we should stop being lazy bumswho complain too much; low wages are the proper punishment or ourmoral imperection. And i some cultures uniormly ail to perorm,there must be some genetic imperection as well, must there not? Thisclassically colonial view o cultural dierences is nothing new; in theEuropean case it can dispense with military might, unlike in 1914, but

it is otherwise the same. The countervailing orce the Eastern peoplesbuiltBolshevismailed, or was deeated, or both. Youll be told thatthe reconstruction o a new East European let will be born in a cultureo resentment, caused by the lack o a deeply ingrained democratic cul-ture such as one can admire in the unceasing grandeur o the Mother oParliaments. Well, there is a lot to resent. But as capital has no nation-ality, nor can the anti-capitalist movement have such. Truly egalitariantendenciesnot to speak o truly communist currentswill not aim at

dierentiation and diversity, although their starting point is exactly this.Class, race and cultural dierences are those they must want to oblit-erate. Vive la dirence? No. Vive la Commune!

words from budapest

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