May 1995 - Vol. 5/No.4
Issue Number 19
Elzbieta Matynia: Director and Editor
Sharon Cooley: Program Coordinator
Philip Pezeshki: Executive Editor
Heshan de Silva Weeramuni and
Greg Snyder: Staff Associates
Published quarterly by the
East and Central Europe Program.
The ECEP is funded by the Eurasia Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
Table of Contents
Between Past and Future:
working Together till 2000
"In America...education plays a different and, politically,
incomparably more important role than in other countries. Technically,
of course, the explanation lies in the fact that America has always
been a land of immigrants... For America the determining factor
has always been the motto printed on every dollar bill: Novus
Ordo Seculorum, A New Order of the World."
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education," [in]
Between Past and Future
Her work in political philosophy having been an inspiration for the clandestine collaboration between the New School and independent scholars in the region in the 1980s, Hannah Arendt remains an invaluable guide as we constantly re-think our work in the new democracies. The current process of transformation, which encompass the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, are also intended to lead to a certain Novus Ordo Seculorum. The citizens of those countries are having to "emigrate", mentally as it were, not just into a neweconomic reality, but also into a new legal and political reality, with all the social consequences of such a move. Thus the role of education in those newly democratized societies can be compared to the role education played in our own nation of immigrants, as descrbed by Arendt. We believe that our work in the region in the field of higher education, carefully tailored to the changing needs of each country, is also contributing to efforts to understand and manage the stresses of societal transformation.
These are issues which will come up at our Annual International Meeting of the Democracy Seminar Network, which takes place laer this month in Mala Wies near Warsaw.
The stresses of change are also addressed in this issue's contributions by Galina Starovoitova, Shlomo Avineri and Eric Hobsbawm.
-- E.M.
Democracy in Russia
After Chechnya Politically speaking, 1994 started for Russia not according to the calendar, but rather on December 12, 1993, the day the first non-Communist constitution was ratified by referendum and the first post-Soviet multiparty parliament was elected. Similarly, the 1994 political year did not end on New Year's Eve, but rather on the day of the Russian Army's attack on Chechnya, on December 12, 1994. Both events--the elections and the beginning of a war by the federation against one of its own subjects--have turned out to be unhealthy for Russian society. Not one of the parties that took part in the elections received a decisive majority and, as a result, neither the Communists nor the democrats can legislatively assert their will. The unexpected success of a third power--the nationalists under the leadership of Zhirinovski--has shocked many common people, who have for decades been brought up on the slogans of internationalism. It has also forced pro-western democrats to feel for the first time the bitter disillusionment of their people, who had withstood, up to that point, the hardships of reform with unusual patience and wisdom and who had quickly internalized, it seemed, the idea of democracy.
Later explanations change little the essence of the ominous fact: fifty years after the crushing defeat of fascism, in one of the European capitals an influential faction has legally formed in parliament that is similar in its platform and ideology to nazism. Zhirinovski's faction occupies third place in number of representatives, after "Russia's Choice" and "New Regional Politics." Having gained access to a wide constituency and to the mass media, this party has launched a campaign actively about the superiority of the Russian people over the other peoples of a multi-ethnic country, about the reestablishment of the empire, and about war.
It soon became clear that the seeds of fascism in semi-official publications were falling on well fertilized soil.
Instead of the rapid fruits of democracy, people have seen rapidly emerging social stratification, unemployment, corruption of officials, the covert preservation of power by and the brazen enrichment of the nomenklatura, the growth of street crime, and the appearance of contracted political assassinations. The dramatic, multiple decreases in western aid promised for the period of economic transformation have intensified disillusionment in capitalization. Western sources themselves admit that, even of that aid which has been distributed (so-called "technical assistance"), a significant portion remains in the hands of consultants.
The frustrated expectations of the supporters of perestroika are accompanied by a national sense of humiliation for a people who have been divided up by new state borders and who must observe the abridgement of the rights of their compatriots who stayed beyond those borders. In many countries of the C.I.S. (and East Europe), popular opinion places on Russian ethnic minorities the burden of collective responsibility for all the sins of the Communist empire. As a result, Russians by the hundreds of thousands are forced to leave the southern Muslim republics, and a majority of those in European Latvia and Estonia are deprived of their civil and voting rights.
Fortunately, the feared consolidation of the "Zhirinovskyites," the communists, the agrarians, and the new party, "Women of Russia," did not take place. Some initiatives of the reform factions ("Russia's Choice," "Yabloko," "Party of Russian Unity and Accord," "December 12," and others) do influence decisions of the State Duma. The Duma itself has turned out to be a fairly well-structured legislative body,
but it remains heavily dependent on the interests of various economic groups. The constitution--adopted in a referendum by a narrow majority of the population) has granted little power to lawmakers. An enormous amount of power is concentrated in the hands of the President; moreover, the impeachment of the President is virtually impossible, since it requires a resolution of the Supreme Court and the approval of separate, two-thirds majorities from both houses of Parliament. However, the new constitution has strengthened private property rights and has allowed the process of privatization to move forward more securely.
The worsening of the economic situation in October 1994 and the price increases have been accompanied by a sharp drop in the popularity of the leadership of the country--specifically, in the unprecedented fall in the approval rating of President Yeltsin (down to 16%). After his improper conduct at the ceremony of the removal of troops from Germany and his avoidance of the Prime Minister of Ireland, the problem of his competence stood squarely before public opinion. The shift of Yeltsin to the right was prompted by external political factors as well: the Republican victory in the U.S. elections and the expectation of harsher U.S. policy towards Russia, as well as the exclusion of Russia in plans to extend NATO into Eastern Europe.
Speaking at the Budapest summit in November to those who plan to move the borders of NATO to the western borders of Russia, President Yeltsin angrily declared, "It is too early to bury democracy in Russia!" At the same time, he decided to openly "clean things up" in his own country, not worrying about western opinions. As has been noted by some Russian analysts, there is a certain connection between the events in Brussels and in Grozny.
The conflict between Chechnya and the Russian Federation should not be considered an ethnic conflict. The authorities did not even give as a pretext for the invasion the defense of Russian-speaking people. Such a pretext would have been unbelievable, in light of the fact that Russian- speaking people suffered from the bombing of Grozny at least as much as the native population. This war is connected more with the struggle for power in Moscow than with either economic or ethnic factors.
The Chechen invasion represents the pursuit (conscious or unconscious) of three goals: 1) to distract the attention of the disillusioned people of Russia with a "small victorious war" from the absence of plans for long-term economic reform; 2) to satisfy the appetites of the military, who have long dreamed of demonstrating their importance for the preservation of Russia's integrity and to console themselves over the defeat in Afghanistan; and 3) to influence the decision regarding the route of the future international pipeline from the Caspian Sea. The northern Caucasus variant would allow Russian oil exporters to insist on an increase in their share, but along this route lies recalcitrant Chechnya, which announced its sovereignty three years ago. Two alternative routes for the pipeline--through Iran or Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia--and then further through Turkey are also unpalatable for international corporations.
It seems, however, that this last, pragmatic motive was not the primary catalyst for the ill-advised decision to forcefully suppress Chechnya (the negotiation process was rejected by Moscow, but not by Grozny). Yielding to the forces of militarism and nationalism, which do not take into account common sense, must have satisfied the offended vanity of many--including the President himself.
Moreover, more than two-thirds of the population of the country have strongly condemned the military venture. Even those who have accepted the necessity of Chechnya's submission for the sake of the preservation of the territorial integrity of Russia have condemned the harsh methods and lack of professionalism which characterized the operation.
The political makeup of Yeltsin's support dramatically changed in December. Only one faction in Parliament, that of Zhirinovski, and the ultra-nationalists (such as Barkashov and Nevzorov) support the war in Chechnya. Those who used to support Yeltsin (including Gaidar's party, "Russia's Choice," and the author's party, "Democratic Russia") have announced their opposition. Yavlinski, the leader of the parliamentary faction "Yabloko," has even demanded the immediate resignation of the President and new elections. Yet, as stated above, impeachment is an almost practially impossible procedure, and adding amendments is likewise extremely complicated.
The confused democrats do not want to admit (even to themselves) that, for the improvement of the new constitution, it may be necessary to violate it. Since this would mean an additional loss of faith by common people in democratic procedures, however, it will again be necessary to postpone initiating the smooth development of democratic institutions in Russia and developing a legitimate framework.
At the same time, everyone feels the weakness of the current government.
The authority of the Russian leadership as the vanguard of democracy has fallen in the opinion of the leaders of the newly independent states as well as for the leaders of autonomous republics within the Russian Federation itself. Civil rights workers, domestic and foreign press, parliaments of the countries of the C.I.S. (Ukraine, Georgia, and others), and leaders of national republics within the Russian federation have all come out against the Russian policy in the Caucasus.
Opposition towards the policy vis-a-vis Chechnya's democratic press, has the character of pronouncements against the regime as a whole. Yeltsin's personal responsibility for the bloodshed in Chechnya is emphasized, as well as for the death of young draftees and peaceful civilians. People point to the fact that, at one time, Yeltsin ostensibly believed in the principles of representative democracy, but that later, his faith in his personal mission as a savior and leader of Russia allowed him to forget the means of achieving his goals.
By failing to align himself with any democratic party or political trend and by striving to remain "President of all Russians," Yeltsin has found himself in political isolation. Losing power, losing contact with society, the leader feverishly looks for a way of to assert himself--and returns to the old party methods of the order, the command, the lie, and fear. The final appointments in the cabinet of ministers illustrate this readiness to partially restore neo-Bolshevism.
The longer the war in Chechnya continues, the more influence the military will gain--any war, once begun, eventually becomes a "sacred war." For some people, it is necessary to justify so many senseless deaths, while for others, it is necessary to avenge the loss of their loved ones.
The current tragedy of the Russian reformers lies in the fact that, in contributing to the displacement of the former power, they were forced, as with Yeltsin, to again turn the government over to a third party under the conditions of a risky compromise. The issue is not only that they cannot reach an agreement among themselves on whom to place their stake: on Gaidar, Yavlinski, Kovalev, or on one of the women politicians, since it is difficult to guess today with much certainty for whom all of Russia will vote tomorrow. The issue is also that those who, today, have real raw power in their hands will not ask the democrats about their choice.
The question is, will the west coldly observe the agony of the "lost chance" and follow the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs? What would the West do if those who have power introduce prefabricated criminal proceedings against the westernizers and throw them in prison? If assassins begin to await them, one after another, at their entranceways? If a Russian Pinochet organizes his gulag at the stadium, but promises stable development in the direction of a market economy...in the direction of Lebed'..."Du côté de chez Swann..."
Galina Starovoitova, former Adviser on interethnic issues to President Yeltsin, is the Co-Chair of "Democratic Russia," and currently the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University. This article was excerpted from a larger piece.
In The Dustbin of
History The brutality with which Moscow is trying to suppress the Chechen secession is obviously not the way in which a democratic country deals with a recalcitrant province. In its ruthlessness it far surpasses anything seen during the Soviet intervention in Budapest in 1955 or Prague in 1968.
A whole people--admittedly a small one, headed by a questionable leader--is trampled in Roman, imperial fashion. That this also heralds the end of democratization in Russia has been pointed out by most Russian democrats.
But the Chechen uprising raises a wider issue. Russia subjugated the Chechens, and other mainly Moslem peoples in the Caucasus, at about the same time in the 19th century that the French conquered Algeria and the British consolidated their power in India: and the methods were no less bloody. Chechnya is as much an "internal" Russian affair as Algeria was an "internal" French affair because, technically, it was a French departement.
The Russian presence in Chechnya, and in other areas in the Caucasus, is a result of empire and conquest, and the
Chechens have the same right not to live under foreign rule as the Estonians, the Angolans and the Palestinians.
That the Russian empire is territorially contiguous to Russia proper, and not separated by sea or ocean, is a mere accident of geography. As Britain and France have learned after many vicissitudes and much soul-searching, empires cannot be held together under conditions of democracy.
What France, with a republican tradition going back to the Revolution of 1789 could not do--preserve both empire and democracy--Russia, with its tenuous hold on democracy and its weak civil society, certainly cannot do.
Any attempt to hold on to the remnants of the Russian empire by force will necessarily reestablish authori- tarian, nationalistic and militaristic structures in Russia. Much of this is already happening.
The apologists for empire have always maintained that the end of empire may spell chaos. Yeltsin and his current apologists in the West maintain the same. Up to a point, this is true: the spectacle of post-imperial Africa is not exactly edifying. But consider the alternative: Can we imagine how Western democracies would fare today, and what colonial wars they would be conducting in Africa, had the wisdom of such conservative statesmen as Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle not extricated their countries from the conundrum of empire?
The argument can also be reversed: A continuous Russian attempt to hold on by force to its imperial possessions will further destabilize the area, create further tensions with other Moslem nations, and embroil an increasingly authoritarian Russia in a lengthy series of nasty wars which will ultimately alienate it from the West.
Russia should accept that democracy entails decolonization. It should allow those of its constituent republics, where an identifiable ethnic group wishes to secede, to do so peacefully. That these new states, being small and weak, will in the nature of things ultimately become de facto Russian dependencies, as so many Francophone African nations are dependent on France, is not in itself unreasonable.
But the Russian empire has to go the way of all other empires. Like the British and French empires, it belongs to the dustbin of history. No democracy can be built in Russia until its leaders realize this.
Shlomo Avineri is the Herbert Samuel Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a former director-general of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This article appeared in the February 2, 1995, issue of The Jerusalem Post.
Nationalism, History,
Restoration Valeri Pandjarov: Your were born in Egypt, grew up in Vienna and Berlin, and lived in England. What is your personal attitude towards nationalism?
Eric Hobsbawm: My personal attitude is that, while I can understand the force of nationalism--and I can understand why, as Benedict Anderson says, it is something that people are prepared to die for--I don't approve of it, and I think I should be opposed as much as possible. My personal attitude is to some extent determined by my attitude towards my own particular nationalism--which would be Zionism, because I am Jewish. Zionism has been a bad development for Jews, and, consequently, I've always been opposed to it.
VP: Do you distinguish patriotism from nationalism?
Hobsbawm: I am entirely in favor of what you might call citizen patriotism, but that's a different matter. What I am opposed to is the kind of ethnic- linguistic nationalism which establishes specific identity, and especially which establishes an identity which is superior to all others. The danger of nationalism, particularly for historians, is that it eliminates the possibility of a universal discourse in which people from one background to talk to another, and argue with one another on a rational basis.
VP: Our age is sometimes called "The Age of Nationalism." How, in general, do you account for this?
Hobsbawm: I think there are two developments. First, I think it is the age of the decline and crisis of the traditional nation-state, of the kind of nationalism which was essentially a state-making project. This had considerable historic justification in the nineteenth century, or at least a case for it could be made. This is no longer, I think, a serious issue today.
On the other hand, you find the development of a new kind of sentiment which uses the language of nationalism, but is not in my view comparable to historic nationalism. I call it identity politics of an ethnic or other type, since it is an attempt to establish a group identity against other similar groups. It is unlike the old nationalism, in that, I believe, it does not have a serious political project. It does, however, sometimes succeed in gaining state status because of the collapse of states, as we can see in the cases of the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia. The classic nation-state is also being undermined the outside, of course, from by the rise of a trans- national, global culture and global economy.
VP: Since the concept of a nation is historically very young, is it possible for a new, "fresh" nation to emerge today? What are some examples of nations born in the twentieth-century through favorable political circumstances?
Hobsbawm: It is theoretically conceivable, but I don't think it is likely in actual fact, except in parts of the Third World where particular groups (ethnic communities and so on) used to exist , as it were, below the level of the politics. It is possible that some of these may emerge as ethnic units or nationalisms in the modern sense. I think some of this has been happening in the course of the twentieth century in Africa.
VP: When can national self-identification be changed by the use of force?
Hobsbawm: I'm not certain that it can be changed violently and suddenly, but over a period of time it can change or can be transformed. If you look at a situation like South Africa, for instance, it is not very clear. There are a number of "traditional," separate peoples among the Africans, Zulus and others, as well as a number of groups which are probably not peoples or tribes in the same way; these groups may conceivably develop an identity in the course of the political fight against apartheid, or for independence. One cannot generalize about this.
VP: In the context of the debate on the difference between a nation and an ethnicity, do you think there is a considerable difference between the language politicians speak and the language historians speak?
Hobsbawm: Absolutely..., absolutely; there is, there must be.
VP: In scientific language "nation" and "ethnicity" are universal, clear terms, yet they still often provoke conflicts.
Hobsbawm: As we know, outside of academia they are not clear terms at all--they are highly ambiguous. The one thing I would say is that almost any territorial state of almost any size has got to be multi-ethnic. There are very few places in the world in which you could say it is practically possible for the total population to be culturally, or ethnically, or linguistically homogeneous, having a single identity, either ethnic otherwise. Moreover, I think the attempt, characteristic of traditional nationalist thinking, to create such unified, homogeneous, ethnic or linguistic units is bound to lead to disaster, or at least to great injustice. I think this is true in your country, as well as in a lot of other countries.
VP: How can we explain the priority of politics over historical arguments, as in the case of the "Macedonian Question," which is obstructing contemporary Bulgarian-Macedonian relations?
Hobsbawm: This is, of course, an essentially political debate, not a linguistic or historical one. Linguists would not be at all surprised to find that there is a whole range of dialects, which merge with each other and which overlap. Most linguists would probably take the view that, linguistically speaking, the languages spoken by the Slav inhabitants of Macedonia are closer to Bulgarian than they are to Serb, but this doesn't prove that they are Bulgarians in the political sense.
For one thing, why should it prove that this implies a political unity with one or other of the neighboring states? Especially insofar as Macedonia is--and has always been for many, many centuries--by definition a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic and multi-religious entity.
VP: In the second edition of your book Nations and Nationalism Since 1789, there is a map displaying peoples, languages and political divisions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Eastern Europe. I think that hardly any Bulgarian or Macedonian historian or politician would agree with the southern half of the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border, which, at that time, artificially divided people who spoke the same language.
Hobsbawm: That is inevitable, although I add that the choice of this map was not mine. All maps of this kind are approximations. But this seems to me to be the weakness of the situation. People use arguments about language or about anything to make political claims. It does not follow from the fact that, on both sides of the present frontier people speak the same sort of language and can understand each other that political claims are implied.
Over many centuries most states have developed the idea that you can have different religions in the same state. While it would have been shocking in Western Europe in the sixteenth or the seventeenth centuries, it is now commonplace to find Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims in the same state. We have to learn the same thing about different ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups. This has to be separated from the political unity of the state and the political obligations of citizens to these states.
VP: But how would you settle such a problem? Why should the historical truth necessarily imply political claims, and is it justifiable to make compromises with the historical facts for political reasons?
Hobsbawm: I can speak only as a historian; politicians will use our material for their own purposes. But I believe the main thing for historians is precisely not to lend themselves, if they possibly can, for this sort of making political cases. It seems to me that we cannot prevent anyone from using our material, but we should not let ourselves become propagandists for one political use of our material rather than another. Historians have done this quite often in the past.
VP: If we look at the last fifty or seventy years of world history, what event has been the most significant for you?
Hobsbawm: Obviously, the political event which dominates the twentieth century, for seventy-five years or so after 1917, is the Russian Revolution.
In the first place, it transformed a large part of the world, by conquering and creating states, more rapidly than any other ideology has done since Islam in the seventh century. Within forty years of the October Revolution one-third of humanity was under Communist governments. This did not last, but nevertheless, the effects must be dramatic.
Secondly, it dominated for a very long time the international conflict between, if you like, capitalism and communism; the one exception, which was historically decisive, was the uniting of liberal capitalism and Communism against fascism. Nevertheless, even in this respect the Russian Revolution was decisive, because without the Red Army it is very unlikely that Europe could have been reconquered by the West.
On the other hand, even more important is the social and social-economic breakdown of nineteenth century liberal-bourgeois civilization. This explains why the October Revolution broke out in 1917, as well as the era of catastrophe between 1914 and the years immediately after the Second
World War.
Second, I would cite the extraordinary technological, economic, and social transformations of the thirty years after World War II. These changes cannot be attributed simply to politics, but the actual changes brought about in most countries of the world, including large parts of the Third World, are almost certainly of much more significance than the political events, including the October Revolution.
VP: From this perspective, the result of the Cold War--the fall of Communism--assumes less significance, doesn't it?
Hobsbawm: Let's say that it has medium-term significance, whereas the other developments have long-term significance. The fall of Communism becomes part of an historical episode, whereas the extraordinary explosion of resources, population, technology, and so on in the thirty years after World War II is something which will go on determining the shape of history for a long time to come.
VP: In your opinion, can we speak of historical progress in general?
Hobsbawm: I think we not only can but must speak of historical progress in terms of material plenty: the human race is many times more numerous, lives longer, is bigger, lives far better, and has at its disposal a material technology which is also to some extent a cultural technology. There is no way in which this cannot be described as progress, as evolution in a specific direction.
I also believe, however, that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the general assumption was that technological, economic, material progress would at the same time involve the moral progress of the civilization and of civilized values. I don't think we can make this assumption today. But progress is not a single homogeneous trend; some things can progress, and others may even regress.
VP: What is the next most probable stage of social evolution that lies just beyond the nation and nation-state?
Hobsbawm: It's very difficult to foresee solutions; one can more easily foresee problems. But it's perfectly clear, for instance, that a large part of the world economy today is conducted on a scale which cuts across the political units which still happen to be large industrial states, and which exceeds their influence.
It's also clear that a number of questions, the economic but especially the environmental ones, require global solutions. For instance, if we take the simple case of overfishing in the oceans--there must be an authority which can actually impose limits.
The question is, who will or who can undertake such solutions. At the moment, there do not exist the institutions which can, though there are some regional institutions (like the European Union) which have a certain capacity to coordinate a large area. This would seem to be a unique case, unless something can be reconstructed on the basis of the C.I.S., in what used to be the Soviet Union. Globally speaking, there are some authorities, but they are de facto specialized authorities, chiefly financial, whose power is essentially based on the fact that they represent the rich who can give loans. (They can, therefore impose certain criteria of politics of the poor countries.) At the moment, these are the only bodies which are actually capable of operating on a global scale.
There's a third possibility which I believe to be unrealistic. No single state, not even the United States, is in a position to single-handedly impose a policy on the rest of the world, especially since the world, economically speaking, divided into three groups of approximately equal weight. So we can leave out the "great power" solution to the problems of the world.
VP: What is your account, as a historian, of the so-called "velvet restoration" in several countries of Central and Eastern Europe--former Communist parties returned to power through elections during the last couple of years?
Hobsbawm: When Communism failed in Eastern Europe nobody had another alternative or solution. The dissidents and the new leaders didn't have enough experience; this is one of the weaknesses, if you like. Except for a relatively small fringe of opposition, there were no alternative elites. The system virtually monopolized, in one way or another, everybody who had any kind of abilities, regardless of their convictions. If you wanted to do anything, including play chess or pole vault, it could only be done by being within the system. Over the next ten or fifteen years, however (through the change of generations), a new elite will no doubt emerge.
The West assumed that Communism would all disappear and be replaced by, I don't know, "democracy," "market economy," and so on. Indeed, a particularly extreme form of market supremacy was often imposed on these countries. This didn't work, and it could have been predicted that it wouldn't work. Consequently, people who had expected something else to happen found themselves looking for somebody to represent and defend them against the generally negative impact of the new economy. I don't believe that this is a restoration of Communism in any realistic sense. In fact, I think that even the people who ran Communism know that this is not desirable, let alone feasible. But it does mean that people representing the interests of the victims of the changes will continue to be politically significant in nearly all the countries.
One very significant thing about the current transition is that, when the old social security system breaks down, it has to be replaced by something else, but no alternative social security system is in place. If people expect to get housing or health services through their place of work, if this is not possible anymore it will have to come from somewhere else. I think that neither the Western or Eastern economists even considered this as a serious problem.
VP: Don't you think this problem ought to be explained from the viewpoint of the peoples' concern about their survival.
Hobsbawm: That's right. I know a lot of these people simply didn't actually realize what the actual situation was in those countries; there are certain things that could not be simply abolished. You see this very much in the difference between West Germany and East Germany. I mean, I'm sure that after a few years East Germany will be integrated and East Germans will be as prosperous as the those in the West. But it will take many years of serious adaptation, and, in spite of the fact that West Germans have spent enormous amounts of money on it, it hasn't happened yet. These things do not solve themselves immediately.
Eric Hobsbawm is University Professor of Politics and Society (Emeritus) and Senior Lecturer in Political Science and History at the New School for Social Research.
Valeri Pandjarov is a 1994/95 Pew Democracy Fellow and PhD candidate at the New Bulgarian University.
NOTESCommittee on the Study of Democracy
The Committee for the Study of Democracy, in association with ECEP, will host two visiting professors in the academic year 1995/96.
Janos Kis, Head of the Dept. of Political Science at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary; and former President of the Hungarian Free-Democracts, will offer a course in Fall 1995 entitled, Democracy Proseminar: Philosophical Problems of the Transition to Democracy.
Galina Starovoitova, Head of the Center for Ethno-Cultural Studies, Institute for the Economy in Transition (Moscow); and former MP in the USSR and the Russian Federation, will offer a course in Spring 1996 entitled, Democracy After Communism: the Case of the Former Soviet Union.
Visiting Fellows
Anatoly Tikholaz, Asst. Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Kiev-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine, was invited by ECEP for a curriculum working visit in April. During his stay, he gave a talk entitled, "The Prerequisites for Legal Reform in Post-Soviet Society." He worked with Elzbieta Matynia to prepare a course, "From the History of Ideas: Democracy Versus Totalitarianism", which they will co-teach this June at Kiev-Mohyla Academy. Dr. Tikholaz also selected and purchased course materials and other books for curriculum development in Kiev.
Alexei Voskressenski, 1991/92 ECEP Visiting Fellow and current ECEP Associate, has recently written three books, Russia-China-USA: Redefining the Triangle (ed.); The Difficult Border: Current Russian & Chinese Concepts of Sino-Russian Relations; and The Sino-Russian St. Petersburg Treaty of 1881. (Order from Nova Science Publishers, Inc. at FAX: 516/499-3146). Prof. Voskressenski is currently a deputy director and senior research Fellow at the Russia-China Center.
Announcements
Martin Butora, our long-time collaborator from Bratislava, was elected in March 1995 to be the President of the Slovak P.E.N. (Slovenski P.E.N. Center) a member of International P.E.N., which gathers 70 distinguished writers from Slovakia. The previous president of P.E.N. in Slovakia was Martin Simecka.
Dobrin Kanev, Chair of the Political Science Department of the New Bulgarian University, Editor of the Political Studies, and a long-time ECEP collaborator, was recently appointed Director of the Research Department of the Bulgarian Parliament.
Lecture
On March 14, as part of International Diversity Week, a panel session was held on, "The Ex-Yugoslav in Exile". The panelists, Milka Tadic, Ivo Skoric, Lazar Stojanovic and Aleksandra Wagner spoke on their experiences of exile, war and peace in Yugoslavia.
In Memoriam
We were very sorry to learn of the death of Agnes Hochberg, feminist scholar and activist, who passed away on March 2. Agnes studied at the New School in 1992-93, where she worked closely with ECEP, and was completing her Ph.D. at the European University in Florence. She was a founding member of the Feminist Network in Hungary. Her writings are being compiled by her advisors Luisa Passerini of Florence and Antonia Burrows of Budapest.
Meetings
Meetings were held this Spring with: Alexander Yastremsky, Dean of the Social Science Faculty, and Vilen Gorsky, Dean of Humanities, Kiev-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine; Carol Tegen, Senior Program Administrator, Open Society Institute, NYC; Edward Serotta, Central Europe Center for Research & Documentation, Berlin; Oleksiy Haran, Professor of Political Science, Kiev-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine; John Loiello, and Robert Schiffer, U.S. Information Agency, Washington D.C.; Peter Tichansky, Senior Vice President, Business Council for International Learning, NYC; Beata Chmiel, Editor-in-Chief, Ex-Libris, Warsaw; Ian Bremmer, President, Association for the Study of Nationalism, Inc., Hoover Institute, Stanford University; Anatoly Tikholaz, Department of Philosophy, Kiev- Mohyla Academy, Ukraine.
Working Group on Collective Memory
Memory matters for the people of Eastern and Central Europe. Willful and often conflicting acts of collective remembrance have brought into being the nation-states of the region. Such, for example, were the Czech national revival and the continuing struggles for national independence of Poland of the 19th century, and, in the more recent past, such were the struggles for national independence in the former Soviet Union and in the former Yugoslavia, for better and for worse. In Soviet-dominated Europe, opposition to the Communists sometimes seemed to be fundamentally "the struggle of memory against forgetting," as Milan Kundera once put it.
Yet, after 1989, after the breakdown of the Soviet bloc and the fall of the Commnist regimes, the situation has changed. It has become radically more complicated. It has become much more difficult to remember in a coherent way, and while for some the costs of memory have come to be very dear, memory also has become, for others, boring, of little interest.
In a proposed volume, members of the Working Group on Collective Memory will address the problem of "remembering after Communism," in all its complexity, drawing upon their direct experiences in the "Other Europe."
The Working Group, which met in New York in early April, includes Martin Butora and Sona Szomolanyi (Slovakia); Marcin Krol and Barbara Szacka (Poland); Elena Michailovska (Bulgaria); Jan Urban (Czech Republic); Andras Kovacs (Hungary); Ivan Vejvoda (Yugoslavia); Jeffrey Goldfarb, Elzbieta Matynia and Judith Friedlander (New York).
The participants will present working drafts to the next international meeting of the Democracy Seminars network, to be held in Warsaw, May 27-30. Jeffrey Goldfarb, who leads the working group, will edit the manuscripts for publication.