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.Yet it is not merelythe political background that ultimately sets apart Halecki from the ideologues ofthe 1980s.Halecki was an ecumenical Christian thinker and was openly professing hisinterpretation of history on behalf of a united Christianity.He also had a subtle un-derstanding of the character of Orthodoxy and was unquestionably opposed to po-lemic reductionism and to the exclusion of the Orthodox nations from Europe.Withhim, one can still appreciate Anatole France s famous aphorism: Catholicism is stillthe most acceptable form of religious indifference. The 1980s, on the other hand, brought a different attitude toward Islam, or rathertoward what was permissible to be said about Islam.The irony is that the completely(or for the most part) secular zealots of the Central European idea, who have no grandvisions but function essentially within a framework of national, or at the very most,regional interests, are waving the banner of religious intolerance within Christianityand are essentializing religious differences of which they know but little.At the sametime, they have excellently internalized the cultural code of politically correct liber-alism.What has changed radically from Halecki s days is that one cannot profess with-out impunity the complete otherness of Islam.Gone are the days when even Russian Between Classification and Politics 153liberals convincingly bolstered Russia s claim to Europeanness by contrasting it tothe barbarous Turk. 54 This is already unacceptable for the new generation, whichhas to show it has overcome Christian prejudice and which, in a move to overcomethe legacy of anti-Semitism, has added and internalized the new attribute to the rootsof Western culture: Judeo-Christian.One wonders how long it will take before webegin speaking about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition and roots of Europeanculture.Therefore, the Central Europe of the 1980s was not simply the latest incarnationof a debate going back to the 1950s.The debate of the 1980s was a new phenomenonwith different motivations and goals.This explains why it was news for Soviet writersat the time: when in May 1988, at the meeting of Central European and Soviet writersin Lisbon, György Konrád challenged his Soviet colleagues with the question: Youhave to confront yourself with the role of your country in a part of the world thatdoesn t want your presence in tanks but as tourists and triggered a heated debate.Tatyana Tolstaya answered in amazement, When am I going to take my tanks out ofEastern Europe? and added that this was the first she had ever heard of CentralEuropeans speaking of their culture as something separate from that of the SovietUnion. 55 Larry Wolff has remarked that the Enlightenment idea of Eastern Europe,which was perpetuated in the West in the next two centuries, presupposed neither itsdefinitive exclusion nor its unqualified inclusion.56 In this perception, the Balkanswere an integral part, and it is only in the last decades that a real attempt at theirexclusion is taking place.By the end of the 1980s, the argument for an intrinsic differ-ence between Eastern and Central Europe had already taken shape and was internal-ized by a considerable number of intellectuals.The last article in the Schöpflin/Woodcollection squarely dealt with the question Does Central Europe Exist? Writing in1986, Timothy Garton Ash chose to analyze three authors as representative of theircountries: Havel, Michnik, and Konrád.With his usual brilliancy as essayist, Ash ex-plored the meaning of the concept as it emerged from voices from Prague and Budapest,rather than from Warsaw.He pointed to an important semantic division between theuse of Eastern Europe and Central Europe in Havel and Konrád.The first wasused invariably in a negative or neutral context; the second was always positive, affir-mative or downright sentimental. For all his sympathy with the Central EuropeanZivilisationsliteraten, Ash s acute analytical pen could not but comment on themythopoetic tendency of the idea:[T]he inclination to attribute to the Central European past what you hope willcharacterize the Central European future, the confusion of what should be withwhat was is rather typical of the new Central Europeanism.We are to understandthat what was truly Central European was always Western, rational, humanistic,democratic, skeptical and tolerant.The rest was East European , Russian, or pos-sibly German.Central Europe takes all the Dichter und Denker , Eastern Eu-rope is left with the Richter und Henker.57Still, for Ash: The myth of the pure Central European past is perhaps a goodmyth. His most interesting observation was the apartness of Poland: Michnik himselfhad never talked of Central Europe and Milosz s Central Europeanness was moreattributed than professed, emotionally, culturally, and even geo-politically the view 154 Imagining the Balkanseastward is still at least equally important to most Poles, Poland is to Central Eu-rope as Russia is to Europe. Exploring some of the similarities between the nationalcontributions to Central Europeanness (the shared belief in antipolitics, the impor-tance assigned to consciousness and moral changes, the power of civil society, thepartiality for nonviolence), Ash found many more differences that made him exclaimin an exasperated manner whether it was no more than a side product of shared pow-erlessness. His final verdict on the Central European idea was that it is just that: anidea.It does not yet exist, and that its program was a programme for intellectuals. In his evocative ending, Ash refers to the Russian poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, whohad told him that George Orwell was an East European.Having accepted the idea ofEastern Europe in acta, Central Europe in potentia, Ash added: Perhaps we wouldnow say that Orwell was a Central European.If this is what we mean by CentralEurope , I would apply for citizenship. 58In the meantime, Eastern Europe in acta ceased to exist (while nobody from theWest applied for citizenship either before or after), but it inaugurated a third round inthe development of the Central European idea after 1990 when it made its entry fromthe cultural into the political realm [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.Yet it is not merelythe political background that ultimately sets apart Halecki from the ideologues ofthe 1980s.Halecki was an ecumenical Christian thinker and was openly professing hisinterpretation of history on behalf of a united Christianity.He also had a subtle un-derstanding of the character of Orthodoxy and was unquestionably opposed to po-lemic reductionism and to the exclusion of the Orthodox nations from Europe.Withhim, one can still appreciate Anatole France s famous aphorism: Catholicism is stillthe most acceptable form of religious indifference. The 1980s, on the other hand, brought a different attitude toward Islam, or rathertoward what was permissible to be said about Islam.The irony is that the completely(or for the most part) secular zealots of the Central European idea, who have no grandvisions but function essentially within a framework of national, or at the very most,regional interests, are waving the banner of religious intolerance within Christianityand are essentializing religious differences of which they know but little.At the sametime, they have excellently internalized the cultural code of politically correct liber-alism.What has changed radically from Halecki s days is that one cannot profess with-out impunity the complete otherness of Islam.Gone are the days when even Russian Between Classification and Politics 153liberals convincingly bolstered Russia s claim to Europeanness by contrasting it tothe barbarous Turk. 54 This is already unacceptable for the new generation, whichhas to show it has overcome Christian prejudice and which, in a move to overcomethe legacy of anti-Semitism, has added and internalized the new attribute to the rootsof Western culture: Judeo-Christian.One wonders how long it will take before webegin speaking about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition and roots of Europeanculture.Therefore, the Central Europe of the 1980s was not simply the latest incarnationof a debate going back to the 1950s.The debate of the 1980s was a new phenomenonwith different motivations and goals.This explains why it was news for Soviet writersat the time: when in May 1988, at the meeting of Central European and Soviet writersin Lisbon, György Konrád challenged his Soviet colleagues with the question: Youhave to confront yourself with the role of your country in a part of the world thatdoesn t want your presence in tanks but as tourists and triggered a heated debate.Tatyana Tolstaya answered in amazement, When am I going to take my tanks out ofEastern Europe? and added that this was the first she had ever heard of CentralEuropeans speaking of their culture as something separate from that of the SovietUnion. 55 Larry Wolff has remarked that the Enlightenment idea of Eastern Europe,which was perpetuated in the West in the next two centuries, presupposed neither itsdefinitive exclusion nor its unqualified inclusion.56 In this perception, the Balkanswere an integral part, and it is only in the last decades that a real attempt at theirexclusion is taking place.By the end of the 1980s, the argument for an intrinsic differ-ence between Eastern and Central Europe had already taken shape and was internal-ized by a considerable number of intellectuals.The last article in the Schöpflin/Woodcollection squarely dealt with the question Does Central Europe Exist? Writing in1986, Timothy Garton Ash chose to analyze three authors as representative of theircountries: Havel, Michnik, and Konrád.With his usual brilliancy as essayist, Ash ex-plored the meaning of the concept as it emerged from voices from Prague and Budapest,rather than from Warsaw.He pointed to an important semantic division between theuse of Eastern Europe and Central Europe in Havel and Konrád.The first wasused invariably in a negative or neutral context; the second was always positive, affir-mative or downright sentimental. For all his sympathy with the Central EuropeanZivilisationsliteraten, Ash s acute analytical pen could not but comment on themythopoetic tendency of the idea:[T]he inclination to attribute to the Central European past what you hope willcharacterize the Central European future, the confusion of what should be withwhat was is rather typical of the new Central Europeanism.We are to understandthat what was truly Central European was always Western, rational, humanistic,democratic, skeptical and tolerant.The rest was East European , Russian, or pos-sibly German.Central Europe takes all the Dichter und Denker , Eastern Eu-rope is left with the Richter und Henker.57Still, for Ash: The myth of the pure Central European past is perhaps a goodmyth. His most interesting observation was the apartness of Poland: Michnik himselfhad never talked of Central Europe and Milosz s Central Europeanness was moreattributed than professed, emotionally, culturally, and even geo-politically the view 154 Imagining the Balkanseastward is still at least equally important to most Poles, Poland is to Central Eu-rope as Russia is to Europe. Exploring some of the similarities between the nationalcontributions to Central Europeanness (the shared belief in antipolitics, the impor-tance assigned to consciousness and moral changes, the power of civil society, thepartiality for nonviolence), Ash found many more differences that made him exclaimin an exasperated manner whether it was no more than a side product of shared pow-erlessness. His final verdict on the Central European idea was that it is just that: anidea.It does not yet exist, and that its program was a programme for intellectuals. In his evocative ending, Ash refers to the Russian poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, whohad told him that George Orwell was an East European.Having accepted the idea ofEastern Europe in acta, Central Europe in potentia, Ash added: Perhaps we wouldnow say that Orwell was a Central European.If this is what we mean by CentralEurope , I would apply for citizenship. 58In the meantime, Eastern Europe in acta ceased to exist (while nobody from theWest applied for citizenship either before or after), but it inaugurated a third round inthe development of the Central European idea after 1990 when it made its entry fromthe cultural into the political realm [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]