Gentlemen, I want to say something about the dissident movement as a homogenization of the European public space. (This text consists of the author's lectures on Eastern European literature at the National University of Mexico: Mexico City, semester 2013/14 and 2014/15).
Dissidence in these lectures was observed from one direction, usually called Westernization of IE (Eastern Europe), designed with the aim of bringing IE nations closer to democracy.
A million ways - a million questions: how do you become a dissident, who were the dissidents? When was Dissent born, and when did it disappear from the horizon of European thought? Was the dissidence, in fact, a mini-West?
Dissidence as a consciousness is linked to the last years of Stalinism, and as a movement somewhat later, in any case to my countryman, Milovan Đilas: 1953. His best work, The New Class, was published abroad, clandestinely, in your own language, dear friends, in Spanish, in Buenos Aires, in 1957. and is considered the alphabet of dissident thought. The work is based on a personal example, Đilas's dungeon (he refused to emigrate and accept a chair in the USA). Although Leszek Kołakowski, a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, had published a year earlier his more conciliatory work: What is alive and what is dead in the socialist idea (1956), this man of ours, a native of the Spartan Čevo (his oldest graves and enclosures are there, in a village that I, by the way, also consider my homeland) is the true father of the dissident movement.
Some authors link this period to the birth and infancy of the pan-European public space, and some move the beginning later, such as Jacques Rupnik, from the Center d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, who sees the formation of the European public space as a whole only in the Prague document Charta 77, and in to the Polish popular movement Solidarnoszć (1980). (See Jacues Rupnik: The Legacy of Chapter 77 and the Emergence of a European Public Space, 2007, 22.) Those who believe that Slavic nations and cultures are based precisely on the text, on reading, on the science of texture, believe that in the dissident epoch established touch between author and reader like nowhere else. It was the brotherhood of the author and an anonymous citizen of free beliefs, who, like the author, lives under the repression of communism.
The crisis of European opinion was a further impetus to the strengthening of the dissident wave. The post-communist liberal ethos, based not in one of the great nations of the IE, which everyone considers very strange today, but in the smallest, in my (Montenegrin) nation, gentlemen, has become not just a sweet-sounding phrase but a reality. Yugoslavia, however, at that time the most competent, the most invited to pave the way of anti-communism for heretical thought, squandered its chance. The baton of freedom passed into the hands of the Central European dissident movement.
German reading
But that is a long story, possibly related to German unification, which could not expect a positive response from a unified Yugoslavia. From the Central European Dissent, however, it did and received it within the so-called Prague Call in 1985:
"Probably the most significant statement on the European stalemate coming from Charter circles was the 1985 'Prague Appeal' which called for a simultaneous dissolution of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The dissidents broke a taboo which nobody in Western Europe was then prepared to touch: they saw no objection to the reunification of Germany as a necessary condition for the peaceful and democratic reunification of Europe". (Ibid., 25).
The development of the dissident movement was unimaginable without the support of Western governments, from the media to the financial, and ultimately moral. Critical space is not created by itself (CG today is a real example: unbearably oversaturated with ideology, impoverished by criticism, which is the only one standing in the way of looting public goods and undermining social development), just as it does not suffocate by itself - the pretext of critical space is action , eloquence, or its bloodthirsty companion in IE: censorship.
What were the dissidents great at? In that their action was eloquence. Eloquence is stronger than censorship.
Dissent was a phenomenon, surrounded on all sides by the institutional atmosphere of Europe in the seventies, which it richly enjoyed in its mature phase, starting from Helsinki (Helsinki documents and conclusions of the OSCE) to the Amsterdam Peace Congress in July 1985:
"The Prague Appeal, a document drafted for the Amsterdam Peace Congress and signed March 11, 1985, by almost fifty prominent Chartists, fulfilled that hope... (See M. Hauner: Antimilitarism and the Independent Peace Movement in Czechoslovakia, Routledge, London , 1990, pp. 92ff.)
The Helsinki Charter inspired the institutional organization of dissent from this side of the steel curtain, so in Moscow, for example, the Helsinki Committee was organized in May 1976. The Committee remains, according to some, the most influential legal committee in Russia to this day.
"Dissident history", says Max van der Stoel, the foreign minister of the Netherlands, perhaps the most liberal European nation, with an enormous experience of exile, from Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes to the present day (English liberal thinkers of the 17th century were not safe at home, but received political asylum in the Netherlands!) "she was connected at a conference in 2007. with the history of Europe!" Every country should read the minutes of the conference. The dissident movement is a real chance to get to know the new European history.
With German media support, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution (Oct. 1986), a document on deprivation of liberty was sent to the OSCE conference, and the so-called counter-conference, together with exiled writers from IE and with German authors. Hungarian writers sent an appeal to the OSCE in Vienna in November of the same year.
Here, it would be interesting to consider the relationship of the reform spirit to degenerative processes, and vice versa.
A homogeneous and autonomous attitude towards a degenerative process - let's see now how important it is for every oppositional society to form its own spiritual climate - is enormously important. The Yugoslav calvary is more than an obvious example, because that country, unfortunately, degenerated by ethnic atavism, colloquial affects, ethnographic urges, national-chauvinist arbitration, could not find the strength to single out one of its own, its own and no one else's, from its fund, among thousands of ethno-costumes. , upholstery. Yugoslavia was naked when the war knocked on the door. Bare ground among the hills of bones.
Otherwise, therefore, we will be forced to repeat our own degenerative processes from the past, and I do not know a worse punishment for the Balkans.
Obsolescence of political ideas
What can the literature of one region, specifically IE, be divided among themselves by different languages, forced against the wall of the global world on the one hand, and forced to play a major role on the other? Can she continue, or will she not have the same strength as she did in the seventies?
The space of the IE in the seventies was divided, they were bordered by stakes of national languages and literatures, connected more "military" and "politically" (the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet communist empire) than in some, more natural and spontaneous, immanent way of enlightening the people.
In the XNUMXs, on the other hand, a new world in the form of technological associations and giants (corporations) stepped onto the scene, which he himself named global, and the era globalization.
Relevant messages were sent and exchanged on both sides of the Iron Curtain, which, as is well known here in Europe, stretched along a line from northwestern Yugoslavia to western Poland, and along the German and Austrian eastern borders, on the other side.
Let's look at a contemporary competent picture of the dissident interactions on the western edge of the iron curtain - it is provided by Keith Bullivant, speaking about the decisive lever in the relationship of the West (mainly Germany) to IE, in his work of the same name, quite convincingly:
"The ties to other Warsaw pact countries had constituted a sort of enforced brotherhood (italics GČ) that papered over the cracks inherent in German relationship with those countries". (See: Germany and Eastern Europe, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1999, 6.)
According to Yugoslavia, it will soon be shown, as the body bursts in pain and shame, that Germany not only did not demonstrate the will to continue with its earlier preference for the dissident option, but, dramatically, the will to destroy the bridge with the tenuous Yugoslav opposition. Berlin sincerely supported the Central European opposition, and neither sought nor found such a thing in the Yugoslav backyard. As long as what remained could be called a bridge, as long as there were any assumptions for a united Yugoslav opposition, German political goals were directed elsewhere, and the government looked at a potential Yugoslav dissident as a bourgeois would a poor relative from the countryside.
The German tone in the address to the Yugoslavs seemed a bit vengeful - not literally, but in the sense of intolerance towards parasitism, moneylending, campaigning and that Balkan laziness in relation to serious social processes, in which the state is either realized, or not realized in its time. To the hard-working Western world, Yugoslavia looked like a society of lazy people - I deliberately avoid lazy people, I put the laziness of the state apparatus in the first place, and ethnicity only last, because the Western citizen is not irritated by this or that nationality, but by the laziness and barrenness of the bureaucracy. Obsolescence of political and cultural ideas.
The troubles on Yugoslav soil have laid bare neo-communism, which is transmitted through the partiocratic system, the bureaucratic apparatus and then further, deeper, to the last gotovan and dembel, today in Montenegro, for example, who shamelessly take the public word and public power as they can. shovel and pickaxe.
Honest Europeanism
I was well aware of the situation in Central Europe, no less than that in Yugoslavia, since I studied and lived there, traveled, mostly by hitchhiking and trains, which cut the European continent into sandwiches with Hungarian kulen and Prague ham like nowhere else in the world. . I ate bread there, black and white, earned with my hands and fingers. I emphasize this because the acquaintance of the intelligentsia in IE with Western trends often looked like an impossible mission, or, at best, to apostrophize the popular title of Bohumil Hrabal (Strictly Controlled Trains, Oscar for the film version in 1968), a strictly controlled reception.
Among the creative intelligence of the IE lay vast knowledge, although information was scarce.
The two main sources of information were: 1) Radio Free Europe, after all, jammed permanently, because the Czech government installed a jamming tower on Vinohrady (the highest point of the capital), visible from all land and air approaches; 2) samizdat, an internal literary miracle, publishing in the metropolitan underground, which reminds you of the old scholastic heresy, of apostates, censorship and the pyre; despite all the evils of the government and the interference of the police, self-publishing managed to ensure the continuity of free thought; 3) tamizdat, book production abroad (Western governments that support the fight for freedom) which in IE you could only reach by hand.
Despite everything, the dissident experience from those years represents for me, even today, after Buenos Aires, New York, Tokyo, one of the most exciting in my life. There was no lack of excitement from politics even later, in the civil service, various and unexpected, but this always had, in addition to charge, depth, because it was a European problem par excellence.
Here at IE, the messages from the French philosophical address (M. Foucault, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, JF Lyotard) and from the German (HG Gadamer, J. Habermas, P. Sloterdijk), disseminated in samizdat, on the so-called gestetner, that bee of forbidden literature in the wasteland of IE.
Dissidents had a dangerous political ear. The apostates from Communism, at least for me, I hedge, carried in their hearts the strongest and most sincere Europeanism. In this they were more honest than the Westerners I met. I saw a romantic picture of Europe as a whole with them, and never again.
The European Union owes a lot to dissidents. If she were to ask herself how much today, she would be surprised, because their actions are a tip on the scales of a united continent. Dissidents are the childhood and early youth of the EU. They are rare birds, who are impossible to know outside their own passion: outside the literary frenzy (Aleksandar Solzhenitsyn, Czesław Miłosz, Béla Hamvas), that is, outside the fire of political freedom of that era (Nâzim Hikmet, Yukio Mishima, Nelson Mandela).
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