continued ..
The “velvet revolutions” that took place across central and eastern Europe in 1989 were largely unmarred by the human suffering that is usually part of root-and-branch political upheaval. Never before had so many deeply entrenched regimes been simultaneously overthrown and replaced using basically peaceable means. The left praised these velvet revolutions as expressions of popular power. The right extolled them as both a triumph of the free market over the command economy and the well-deserved victory of free government over totalitarian dictatorship. American and pro-American liberals, for their part, were proud to associate liberalism, routinely ridiculed by leftist critics as an ideology geared towards maintaining the status quo, with the romance of emancipating change. And, of course, these largely nonviolent changes of regime in the east were vested with world-historical significance since they marked the end of the cold war.
The non-violent nature of the revolutions of 1989 was not their only unique feature. Given the prominent public role played at the time by creative thinkers and savvy political activists such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Adam Michnik in Poland, the events of 1989 are sometimes rem embered as revolutions of the intellectuals. But what ensured that these revolutions would remain “velvet” was a background hostility to utopias and political experiments. Far from craving anything ingeniously new, the leading figures in these revolutions aimed at overturning one system only in order to copy another.
Germany’s foremost philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, warmly welcomed “the lack of ideas that are either innovative or oriented towards the future” after 1989, since for him the central and eastern European revolutions were “rectifying revolutions” or “catch-up revolutions”. Their goal was to enable central and eastern European societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed.
Where once dissidents in countries such as Poland had associated emigration to the west with treasonous capitulation and desertion, after 1989 that view no longer made any sense. A revolution that defined its principal goal as westernisation could offer no persuasive objections to westward emigration. Why should a young Pole or Hungarian wait for his country to become one day like Germany, when he can start working and raising a family in Germany tomorrow? Democratic transitions in the region were basically a form of en masse removal to the west, and so the choice was only to emigrate early and individually or later and collectively.
Revolutions often force people to cross borders. After the French Revolution in 1789, and again in 1917 after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the defeated enemies of the revolutions were the ones who left their countries. After 1989, the winners of the velvet revolutions, not the losers, were the ones who chose to decamp. Those most impatient to see their own countries changed were also the ones most eager to plunge into the life of a free citizenry, and were therefore the first to go to study, work and live in the west.
It is impossible to imagine that, after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky would have decided to enrol at Oxford to study. But this is what the future Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and many others did. The revolutionaries of 1989 were strongly motivated to travel to the west in order to observe up close how the kind of normal society they hoped to build at home actually worked in practice.
The massive flow of population out of the region in the post-cold war period, especially because so many young people were the ones voting with their feet, had profound economic, political and psychological consequences. When a doctor leaves the country, she takes with her all the resources that the state has invested in her education and deprives her country of her talent and ambition. The money that she would eventually send back to her family could not possibly compensate for the loss of her personal participation in the life of her native land.
The exodus of young and well-educated people has also seriously, perhaps fatally, damaged the chances of liberal parties to do well in elections. Youth exit may also explain why, in many countries across the region, we find beautiful EU-funded playgrounds with no kids to play in them. It is telling that liberal parties perform best among voters who cast their ballots abroad. In 2014, for example, Klaus Iohannis, a liberal-minded ethnic German, was elected president of Romania because the 300,000 Romanians living overseas voted massively in his favour. In a country where the majority of young people yearn to leave, the very fact that you have remained, regardless of how well you are doing, makes you feel like a loser.
The issues of emigration and population loss bring us to the refugee crisis that struck Europe in 2015–16. On 24 August 2015, Merkel, the German chancellor, decided to admit hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees into Germany. Only 10 days later, on 4 September, the Visegrád group – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – declared that the EU’s quota system for distributing refugees across Europe was “unacceptable”. Central and east European governments were not buying Merkel’s humanitarian rhetoric. “I think it is just bullshit,” commented Mária Schmidt, Viktor Orbán’s intellectual-in-chief.
This was the moment when central Europe’s populists issued their declaration of independence not only from Brussels but also, more dramatically, from western liberalism and its ethos of openness to the world. Central Europe’s fearmongering populists interpreted the refugee crisis as conclusive evidence that liberalism weakened the capacity of nations to defend themselves in a hostile world.
The demographic panic that raged in central Europe from 2015 to 2018 is now fading to a degree. We still need to ask in any case why it would find such politically combustible material in central and eastern Europe, given that virtually no immigrants actually arrived in these countries.
The first reason, as mentioned, is emigration. Anxiety about immigration is fomented by a fear that supposedly unassimilable foreigners will enter the country, dilute national identity and weaken national cohesion. This fear, in turn, is fuelled by a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse. In the period 1989–2017, Latvia haemorrhaged 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5%, and Bulgaria almost 21%. In Romania, 3.4 million people, a vast majority of them younger than 40, left the country after it joined the EU in 2007. The combination of an ageing population, low birth rates and an unending stream of emigration is arguably the source of demographic panic in central and eastern Europe. More central and eastern Europeans left their countries for western Europe as a result of the 2008-9 financial crises than all the refugees that came there as the result of the war in Syria.
The extent of post-1989 emigration from eastern and central Europe, awakening fears of national disappearance, helps explain the deeply hostile reaction across the region to the refugee crisis of 2015-16, even though very few refugees have relocated to the countries of the region. We might even hypothesise that anti-immigration politics in a region essentially without immigrants is an example of what some psychologists call displacement – a defence mechanism by which, in this case, minds unconsciously blot out a wholly unacceptable threat and replace it with one still serious but conceivably easier to manage. Hysteria about non-existent immigrants about to overrun the country represents the substitution of an illusory danger (immigration) for the real danger (depopulation and demographic collapse) that cannot speak its name.
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The “velvet revolutions” that took place across central and eastern Europe in 1989 were largely unmarred by the human suffering that is usually part of root-and-branch political upheaval. Never before had so many deeply entrenched regimes been simultaneously overthrown and replaced using basically peaceable means. The left praised these velvet revolutions as expressions of popular power. The right extolled them as both a triumph of the free market over the command economy and the well-deserved victory of free government over totalitarian dictatorship. American and pro-American liberals, for their part, were proud to associate liberalism, routinely ridiculed by leftist critics as an ideology geared towards maintaining the status quo, with the romance of emancipating change. And, of course, these largely nonviolent changes of regime in the east were vested with world-historical significance since they marked the end of the cold war.
The non-violent nature of the revolutions of 1989 was not their only unique feature. Given the prominent public role played at the time by creative thinkers and savvy political activists such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Adam Michnik in Poland, the events of 1989 are sometimes rem embered as revolutions of the intellectuals. But what ensured that these revolutions would remain “velvet” was a background hostility to utopias and political experiments. Far from craving anything ingeniously new, the leading figures in these revolutions aimed at overturning one system only in order to copy another.
Germany’s foremost philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, warmly welcomed “the lack of ideas that are either innovative or oriented towards the future” after 1989, since for him the central and eastern European revolutions were “rectifying revolutions” or “catch-up revolutions”. Their goal was to enable central and eastern European societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed.
Where once dissidents in countries such as Poland had associated emigration to the west with treasonous capitulation and desertion, after 1989 that view no longer made any sense. A revolution that defined its principal goal as westernisation could offer no persuasive objections to westward emigration. Why should a young Pole or Hungarian wait for his country to become one day like Germany, when he can start working and raising a family in Germany tomorrow? Democratic transitions in the region were basically a form of en masse removal to the west, and so the choice was only to emigrate early and individually or later and collectively.
Revolutions often force people to cross borders. After the French Revolution in 1789, and again in 1917 after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the defeated enemies of the revolutions were the ones who left their countries. After 1989, the winners of the velvet revolutions, not the losers, were the ones who chose to decamp. Those most impatient to see their own countries changed were also the ones most eager to plunge into the life of a free citizenry, and were therefore the first to go to study, work and live in the west.
It is impossible to imagine that, after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky would have decided to enrol at Oxford to study. But this is what the future Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and many others did. The revolutionaries of 1989 were strongly motivated to travel to the west in order to observe up close how the kind of normal society they hoped to build at home actually worked in practice.
The massive flow of population out of the region in the post-cold war period, especially because so many young people were the ones voting with their feet, had profound economic, political and psychological consequences. When a doctor leaves the country, she takes with her all the resources that the state has invested in her education and deprives her country of her talent and ambition. The money that she would eventually send back to her family could not possibly compensate for the loss of her personal participation in the life of her native land.
The exodus of young and well-educated people has also seriously, perhaps fatally, damaged the chances of liberal parties to do well in elections. Youth exit may also explain why, in many countries across the region, we find beautiful EU-funded playgrounds with no kids to play in them. It is telling that liberal parties perform best among voters who cast their ballots abroad. In 2014, for example, Klaus Iohannis, a liberal-minded ethnic German, was elected president of Romania because the 300,000 Romanians living overseas voted massively in his favour. In a country where the majority of young people yearn to leave, the very fact that you have remained, regardless of how well you are doing, makes you feel like a loser.
The issues of emigration and population loss bring us to the refugee crisis that struck Europe in 2015–16. On 24 August 2015, Merkel, the German chancellor, decided to admit hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees into Germany. Only 10 days later, on 4 September, the Visegrád group – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – declared that the EU’s quota system for distributing refugees across Europe was “unacceptable”. Central and east European governments were not buying Merkel’s humanitarian rhetoric. “I think it is just bullshit,” commented Mária Schmidt, Viktor Orbán’s intellectual-in-chief.
This was the moment when central Europe’s populists issued their declaration of independence not only from Brussels but also, more dramatically, from western liberalism and its ethos of openness to the world. Central Europe’s fearmongering populists interpreted the refugee crisis as conclusive evidence that liberalism weakened the capacity of nations to defend themselves in a hostile world.
The demographic panic that raged in central Europe from 2015 to 2018 is now fading to a degree. We still need to ask in any case why it would find such politically combustible material in central and eastern Europe, given that virtually no immigrants actually arrived in these countries.
The first reason, as mentioned, is emigration. Anxiety about immigration is fomented by a fear that supposedly unassimilable foreigners will enter the country, dilute national identity and weaken national cohesion. This fear, in turn, is fuelled by a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse. In the period 1989–2017, Latvia haemorrhaged 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5%, and Bulgaria almost 21%. In Romania, 3.4 million people, a vast majority of them younger than 40, left the country after it joined the EU in 2007. The combination of an ageing population, low birth rates and an unending stream of emigration is arguably the source of demographic panic in central and eastern Europe. More central and eastern Europeans left their countries for western Europe as a result of the 2008-9 financial crises than all the refugees that came there as the result of the war in Syria.
The extent of post-1989 emigration from eastern and central Europe, awakening fears of national disappearance, helps explain the deeply hostile reaction across the region to the refugee crisis of 2015-16, even though very few refugees have relocated to the countries of the region. We might even hypothesise that anti-immigration politics in a region essentially without immigrants is an example of what some psychologists call displacement – a defence mechanism by which, in this case, minds unconsciously blot out a wholly unacceptable threat and replace it with one still serious but conceivably easier to manage. Hysteria about non-existent immigrants about to overrun the country represents the substitution of an illusory danger (immigration) for the real danger (depopulation and demographic collapse) that cannot speak its name.
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