It is a great honour to be asked to address this assembly, representing the parliaments of the former Communist countries. And I welcome the opportunity to say something about the legacy of communism and what it means to us today.
I admit.., that I am an anti-communist. In the 1970s and 1980s at our universities in Britain anti-communists were shunned. After all, we were attacking a revolution that offered to liberate humanity from a worldwide capitalist conspiracy. Our professors admitted that the Soviet Union had failed; but only in practice it was bad, not in theory. We apologists for capitalism were wrong in theory, which was far worse than some "accident" of causing twenty million deaths and the expiration of individual liberty over half the globe. The fact that we were right in practice was barely noticed by our critics.
We've been through it all, but I think there's still a lot to learn. Life has been difficult for us thanks to our "nice" friends who repeatedly expressed their outrage at our nastiness so they could better show how nice they were. It was then that I learned how awful feigned kindness can be. From the moment in 1980 I emerged as a defender of conservative values against socialist orthodoxy, my life has been one long series of attacks designed to undermine my position as a public intellectual. Teaching at the University of London was particularly difficult. In fact, my first real experience of intellectual freedom was here in Poland, where I came to speak at conferences and private seminars organized by a small group of people in Britain who, like me, wanted to make contact with other dissidents behind the Iron Curtain.
In Poland, the widespread contempt for the Communist system meant that both students and professors were willing to for a wide-ranging discussion. For them, conservatism was not a sin or heresy, but a possible worldview, all the more interesting because it was condemned by the Communists and despised by the Western left. Traveling in Central and Eastern European countries in those days, carrying the message of message of alternative philosophy was one of the most liberating experiences of my life, regardless of the dangers and deprivations. I began to believe, that I could be right in theory and not just in practice.
Not surprisingly, then, since 1989 I have followed developments with I followed the development of events with interest and concern and found that the moment of liberation from the Soviet yoke was not simply the end of old problems, but also the beginning of new ones. And it is about these problems that I want to talk today, as as well as about the situation on our continent today, as we try to cooperate in solving them.
Before 1989, our continent was divided between totalitarian socialism and free democracy, and while leftist intellectuals defended the former, everyone lived, if they could, in the the second. Today the division is not between different areas of our continent. It is a division between two conflicting views. On the one hand there is attachment to the nation-state, with its language, institutions and religious heritage. On the other hand, there is the cosmopolitan vision of a of a supranational order, a borderless economy and universal human rights law. human rights. Both views grew out of the religious conflicts of the 17th century and both bore fruit in the Enlightenment. And the tension between them is persistent and unresolved.
It is impossible to understand our continent today, if we do not recognize that it is an association of nation states, each has its own territory, customs, language and native religions - assets that define the loyalty of its inhabitants and their shared sense of home. But we must also recognize that the legal and political institutions of our continent have turned in a cosmopolitan direction. Perhaps this is less true in my country. Z certainly true in continental Europe, and it is especially true especially in former communist states. The laws and case law of the courts of European courts have enabled the former communist countries to fill the legal vacuum created by the Communist Party. This in turn has enabled them to receive and protection of emerging investments, and thus enter the global capitalist economy with relatively little friction and, unfortunately, with too little awareness of the social and cultural costs of this.
At the heart of the European project is an agenda, which was established without reference to the specific needs and values of the European peoples. Regardless of their social and religious heritage, the citizens of Europe are forced to recognize rights derived from abstract ideas of freedom and autonomy that oppose the norms of indigenous religions: rights to abortion, surrogate birth, euthanasia, and so on. These rights are defended not because people have chosen to go in that direction, but because they are part of the worldview of the ruling elite, who can make laws over the heads of sovereign governments. Moreover, the governments of European nations have been asked to relinquish the fundamental right of sovereign states which is the right to decide who lives within their borders.
The Treaty of Rome's provisions on Free movement were developed at a time when the signatories enjoyed comparable standards of living, with more or less full employment and similar welfare systems. There was no temptation to change residence, except for specific purposes in a given job. Now, however, freedom of movement means a massive one-way movement of people from former communist countries to the West, particularly to Britain, whose government sets a very low barrier to entry. This one of the causes of the Brexit crisis. But it has also had a serious demographically on the Visegrad countries, which have lost many of the best and brightest of their young people at a time when both starting economy and defending against the Russian threat required a full army of of youth and a total commitment to rebuilding the national economy.
Moreover, the dissolution of the borders made it impossible to maintaining a national immigration policy. The EU tried to take control of the the situation by distributing migrants according to a quota system. But Mrs. Merkel's open Mrs. Merkel's invitation to Syrians, the influx at the Hungarian border and the big issue of human smuggling in the Mediterranean made such a policy unviable. The situation is particularly troubling for former communist countries for the same reason that communism made it impossible - or in any made it unattractive - to migrate to them from anywhere outside the Soviet sphere. Hence, this unforeseen price of freedom came as a tremendous shock , both political and psychological. Paradoxically, communism, established as an international movement and claiming to abolish all sovereign borders helped preserve the nation state. Indeed, the nation was an enduring reality around which resistance could form and, combined with the powerful revival of the Catholic faith in Poland, proved decisive in overthrowing the tyranny of communist tyranny.
Resistance against mass immigration has drawn accusations of "racism and xenophobia" from the EU, along with moves to expel Hungary's Fidesz party from the European People's Party (EPP), and even the expulsion of Hungary itself from the European Union. This in turn has strengthened Viktor Orbán's government in its stance and led to growing resistance to immigration throughout the region. The issue has also been absorbed into a broader conflict, between domestic and international perspective, which goes back to our continent's past and to dark and difficult emotions that tore the continent apart in the 20th century.
W The result was a sudden and radical change in the language and direction of political conflict political conflict across Europe, with the European elite condemning the "populism" of the national movements national movements, which in turn condemn the elitism of the European political class. This conflict has played out in increasing anger and confusion in my country, between supporters and opponents of Brexit. It seems to me that it is now important to both to understand what is at stake and to reach some resolution.
The charge of "populism" is directed against the movements for national independence and national renewal, mainly to dismiss the fact that they enjoy popular support. This is what we saw in the Liberal response in Britain to the Brexit. The majority voted for Brexit; but you can dismiss their vote by describing it as "populist". For there are two ways of appealing to people - indirectly, through institutions that guard the liberal vote, and directly, by asking them what they think. A direct appeal to the people is dismissed as dangerous. After all, they don't know what they think, and if they do, it's because, because they are thinking inadequately. Only when people are guided and tempered by a liberal constitution, and that means filtering their raw emotions through a fine net of liberal fluctuations, so that only a harmless stream of sentiment gets through.
The same charge of populism is used against the Law and Justice party in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary. Both are accused of too direct an appeal to people's feelings, especially their feelings of belonging. Ordinary people cling to forms of membership that are local, limited and difficult to translate into bureaucratic norms. Their values are shaped by religion, family, language and national history and do not necessarily recognize the power of of supranational obligations or universal human rights codes, especially when those codes are in direct conflict with the special obligations of marriage, family, and religion. "Populism" is increasingly defined as a a pejorative term, to dismiss the appeal of this kind of sentiment, although it is a sentiment without which ordinary people may find it difficult to recognize their political commitments.
It seems to me that the conflict between leftist intelligence and ordinary human nature has shifted from the realm of socialism vs. capitalism to such a new realm of enlightened liberalism vs. residual nationalism. What liberals denounce as populism is actually an attempt to to preserve old and inherited feelings of identity and belonging. A people condemn elitism as really the Enlightenment concept of a of a universal and boundless political order in which conflicts supposedly disappear because their cause - which is the competing web of of national loyalties - has been swept away. The EU was founded by people moved by the ideas of the Enlightenment and who saw nationalism as the force that unleashed a century of European wars.
Looking hindsight, it is equally reasonable to see the idea of a universal and boundless form of politics as the basis for entrapment of Eastern and Central Europe by the Communists. Nationalism German was certainly destructive; but so too was the internationalism of the Soviet internationalism. Why not acknowledge that they are not in themselves more destructive than others, but that each of them can become destructive when it is introduced into a totalitarian project, in which dissent is not allowed, and people can no longer express their views?
However, what is most interesting about the new confrontation is that the intellectual left has again taken the highest position, is not ready to recognize the democratic legitimacy of movements it considers "populist" and is determined to thwart any attempt by these movements to establish themselves in government. The same annihilating rage directed against conservatives such as myself in the 1970s and 1980s is now directed against alleged populists, and - not surprisingly - there is a growing population of populists to retaliate as well as they can. The resulting rise in temperature is one of the factors in the loss of confidence in the EU, which, it seems has led to a conflict that it cannot manage. And it is a conflict that reveals itself in all the rapid changes that our continent.
This conflict is particularly important for post-communist countries because they lacked a clear idea in 1989 of what they are and what unites people into a political body. The communists had a a program in which people were called to a cause that was clearly unattainable, or at any rate hopelessly outdated. They offered no concept of identity other than the all-encompassing goal of the communist millennium. All those factors that could convince people to adhere to that goal - culture, art, music, religion, history - were pushed underground, and the carefree surface of daily life contained no promise of a future other than this one. Inevitably, therefore, people sought a new identity politics , that would hold them together as "we."
This was the one thing that the EU was not was able to provide. Instead, it gave them a way into the global economy and a way away from home, but without a new way of belonging. As the disappointments, the hope of belonging grew. Where is it and who defines it? Global capitalism is not the answer because it only invalidates the world of loyalty and puts everything, including human relationships, up for sale. There is certainly what is justified in those old leftist critiques: that the human heart has no real place in the global economy, the heart that so many of us observed in those who fought against communist tyranny in your countries and who hoped that when the mask of dictatorship finally fell, that from under it a smiling nation would emerge from beneath it.
In my opinion, this situation should be seen as an opportunity, not a crisis. After thirty years of turmoil the people of Eastern and Central Europe are beginning to understand that they are After thirty years of turmoil the people of Eastern and Central Europe are beginning to understand that they are the inheritors of two great achievements: on the one hand the nation state The nation-state as a form of social and political identity; on the other hand, the Enlightenment concept of citizenship, in which everyone assumes full responsibility for belonging society within a common rule of law. These two achievements are at war with each other in part because the EU wants to suppress or even destroy the national idea. But properly understood, they are interdependent. And this is the task we all which we all now face, and you in particular. We must recognize that without national identity and the resulting loyalty there is no way to build a society of citizens.
Democracy and the rule of law are realities only when opposing sides can live with each other on terms. The great mistake of the Communists was to eliminate the opposition, to conscript the people into a "unity" which they they did not choose and which they were not allowed to question. The great advantage of democracy is that it makes opposition possible and legal. As a consequence, however, in a democracy more than half of the people at any time can live under a government that they did not elect, perhaps even a government that they hate.
What makes it possible? Why don't democracies fall under the pressure of of popular opposition? The answer is simple: they do not collapse because citizen's loyalty is not to the government but to something higher, something that is common to all citizens, regardless of their political beliefs and inclinations. That higher thing is the nation, the entity to which we all belong, and which defines the first person plural of democratic politics. Without this common "we" democracies cannot survive, and it is by destruction of this "we" the communists were able to maintain power, ruling as "they" dictatorships.
It seems to me, then, that the so-called populists are right to emphasize the nation-state as a source of loyalty and that their enlightened liberal opponents should recognize this and stop using the European institutions as a way of punishing governments that lean in that direction. Conversely, those who wish to revive the national ideal and reaffirm the rights of national sovereignty should listen to the voice of the liberal enlightenment and accept that national sentiment always must be tempered by the recognition of those persons who do not, or cannot share them.
This, in my opinion, defines the task before you today, which is to reconcile two urgent needs: the need to affirm national sovereignty and the need to conform to universal standards of citizenship. These are two great gifts of the European political heritage and they are mutually interdependent. We should oppose those who wish to separate them, denouncing one or the other as an offense against the people. After all, it is the people who have have the most to lose from any conflict between them, and the task of the politician is not to create conflict, but to calm it down. I hope that we've reached the point where this is possible. And that eventually the poison administered by the Communists will be removed from the system.
