Reappraisals
Page 31
For similar reasons, the old “pillars” are in decline. Younger Belgians see the world rather differently. They are not much moved by appeals to sectoral interest—the same prosperity that has underwritten the “Flemish miracle” has defanged the politics of linguistic resentment. What is more, Belgians no longer align themselves with a single party or community in every facet of their lives. Declining religious practice, the accessibility of higher education, and the move from countryside to town have weakened Catholic and Socialist parties alike. In their place has come the rise of single-issue, “à la carte” voting. This is a desirable development—without the “pillars” Belgian politics and public life may well become more transparent, less cozy and corruption-prone. In short, they will cease to be distinctively Belgian. But what, then, will keep the country together?
One answer is prosperity. The obvious difference between Belgium and other, less fortunate parts of Europe, where politicians exploit communal sensibilities and corruption flourishes, is that Belgium is rich. Brussels may be an unappealing, seamy city, and unemployment may be high in Wallonia, but life for most people in Belgium is tranquil and materially sufficient. The country is at peace—if not with itself then at least with everyone else. If Belgium disappeared, many Belgians might not even notice. Some observers even hold the country up as a postnational model for the twenty-first century: a virtually stateless society, with a self-governing, bilingual capital city whose multinational workforce services a host of transnational agencies and companies.
Even the transportation system has a curiously decentered, self-deprecating quality. A major junction in the trans-European network, Brussels has three railway stations; but none of them is a terminus— trains to Brussels go to and through all three stations. The “Central Station” is, symptomatically, the least of them—obscure, featureless, and buried underground beneath a heap of concrete. As with its stations, so with the city itself: Brussels has successfully effaced itself. Whatever “there” was once there has been steadily dismantled. The outcome is an unaspiring anonymity, a sort of underachieving cultural incognito of which Sarajevo and Jerusalem can only dream.
But the scandals and their shadow won’t go away, with their dead politicians, dead prosecutors, dead children, escaped criminals, incompetent and corrupt police forces, and widespread sense of neglect and abandonment. Last summer it seemed to many that the Belgian state could no longer perform its primary mission: the protection of the individual citizen. Swayed by political and economic forces beyond its control, caught between federalist decentralization and uncoordinated, incompetent government agencies without resources or respect, Belgium is the first advanced country truly at the mercy of globalization in all its forms. It is beginning to dawn on more than a few Belgians that in progressively dismantling and disabling the unitary state in order to buy off its internal critics, they may have made a Faustian bargain.
As we enter the twenty-first century, and an uncertain era in which employment, security, and the civic and cultural core of nations will all be exposed to unprecedented and unregulated pressures beyond local control, the advantage will surely lie with countries whose governments can offer some guarantees of protection and a sense of cohesion and common purpose compatible with the preservation of civil and political liberties. So Belgium does matter, and not just to Belgians. Far from being a model, it may be a warning: We all know, at the end of the twentieth century, that you can have too much state. But Belgium may be a useful reminder that you can also have too little.
This essay on the state of Belgium first appeared in the New York Review of Books in December 1999. It prompted a number of exchanges on the subject of Belgian history, the Flemish language, and other matters: See in particular the New York Review of Books vol. 48, no. viii, May 2001.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV
1 See Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961), 1317-1469.
2 It is not clear where Belgium would go. In our day neither the Dutch nor the French have shown any interest in acquiring it; anyway, few Flemings or Walloons feel much affinity with their fellow Dutch or French speakers across the border. For Walloons in particular the problem of just who they are is a recurrent theme in their literature; on this and much else about the dilemmas of being Belgian, see Luc Sante’s fine book The Factory of Facts (New York: Pantheon, 1998).
3 See Astrid von Busekist, La Belgique: Politique des langues et construction de l’État (Brussels: Duculot, 1998).
4 On postwar retribution and its aftermath, see Luc Huyse and Steven Dhondt, La Répression des collaborations 1942-1952: Un passé toujours présent (Brussels: Crisp, 1991). Just this year, Herman Suykerbuyk, a prominent member of the (Flemish) Christian Democratic party, has been pressing for a law to indemnify the victims of “repression”—i.e., Flemish nationalists condemned after the war for collaboration with the Nazis.
5 The main newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, have almost no readers outside the French- and Dutch-speaking communities respectively. As a result, neither takes much trouble to report news from the other half of the country (and when the Flemish press recently reported rumors of a royal “love child” born to King Albert of a foreign mistress, Francophone commentary treated these as politically motivated slurs upon the sole surviving symbol of Belgian unity). When someone speaks Dutch on Walloon television (and vice versa) subtitles are provided. It is only partly a jest to say that English is now the common language of Belgium.
6 Jean-Pierre Stroobants, in Le Soir, July 13, 1999.
7 It was the Gendarmerie who were responsible for the disaster at Brussels’s Heysel stadium on May 29, 1985, when forty soccer spectators died in a riot that the police did not anticipate and proved unable to control.
8 On the Dutroux affair, see Yves Cartuyvels et al., L’Affaire Dutroux: La Belgique malade de son système (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1997), and Dirk Schümer, Die Kinderfänger: Ein belgisches Drama von europäischer Dimension (Berlin: Siedler, 1997). Dutroux is not the first notorious criminal to escape with ease from Belgian captivity: In 1979 Zelko Raznatovic, serving time for armed robbery, escaped from Verviers prison and was never recaptured. He is now better known as Arkan, leader of the paramilitary Serb terrorists in Bosnia and colleague of Slobodan Milošević.
CHAPTER XV
Romania between History and Europe
The February 2000 issue of the Bucharest men’s magazine Plai cu Boi features one Princess Brianna Caradja. Variously clad in leather or nothing much at all, she is spread across the center pages in a cluster of soft-focus poses, abusing subservient half-naked (male) serfs. The smock-clad underlings chop wood, haul sleighs, and strain against a rusting steam tractor, chained to their tasks, while Princess Brianna (the real thing, apparently) leans lasciviously into her furs, whip in hand, glaring contemptuously at men and camera alike, in a rural setting reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Love and Death.
An acquired taste, perhaps. But then Mircea Dinescu, editor of Plai cu Boi and a well-known writer and critic, is no Hugh Hefner. His centerfold spread has a knowing, sardonic undertone: It plays mockingly off Romanian nationalism’s obsession with peasants, land, and foreign exploitation. Princess Brianna is a fantastical, camp evocation of aristocratic hauteur and indulgence, Venus in Furs for a nation that has suffered serial historical humiliation. The ironic juxtaposition of pleasure, cruelty, and a rusting tractor adds a distinctive local flourish. You wouldn’t find this on a newsstand elsewhere in Europe. Not in Prague, much less Vienna. You wouldn’t even find it in Warsaw. Romania is different.1
In December 2000, Romanians went to the polls. In a nightmare of post-Communist political meltdown, they faced a choice for president between Ion Iliescu, a former Communist apparatchik, and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a fanatical nationalist. All the other candidates had been eliminated in a preliminary round of voting. The parties of the center, who had governed in uneasy coalition since 1996, had collapsed in a welter of inc
ompetence, corruption, and recrimination (their leader, the former university rector Emil Constantinescu, did not even bother to stand for a second presidential term). Romanians elected Iliescu by a margin of two to one; that is, one in three of those who voted preferred Tudor. Tudor’s platform combines irredentist nostalgia with attacks on the Hungarian minority—some two million people out of a population of twenty-two million—and openly espouses anti-Semitism. The magazines that support him carry cartoons with slanderous and scatological depictions of Hungarians, Jews, and Gypsies. They would be banned in some Western democracies.2
Both Tudor and Iliescu have deep roots in pre-1989 Romanian politics. Tudor was Nicolae Ceauşescu’s best-known literary sycophant, writing odes to his leader’s glory before making the easy switch from national Communism to ultranationalism and founding his Greater Romania Party in 1991 with émigré cash. Ion Iliescu is one of a number of senior Communists who turned against Ceauşescu and manipulated a suspiciously stage-managed revolution to their own advantage. President of Romania between 1990 and 1996 before winning again in 2000, he is popular throughout the countryside—especially in the region of Moldavia, where his picture is everywhere. Even urban liberals voted for him, holding their noses (and with Tudor as the alternative). There are men like these in every Eastern European country, but only in Romania have they done so well. Why?
By every measure, Romania is almost at the bottom of the European heap (above only Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine). The Romanian economy, defined by per capita gross domestic product, ranked eighty-seventh in the world in 1998, below Namibia and just above Paraguay (Hungary ranked fifty-eighth). Life expectancy is lower in Romania than anywhere else in Central or Southeastern Europe: For men it is just sixty-six years, less than it was in 1989 and ten years short of the EU average. It is estimated that two out of five Romanians live on less than $30 per month (contrast, e.g., Peru, where the minimum monthly wage today is $40). By all conventional measures, Romania is now best compared to regions of the former Soviet Union (except the Baltics, which are well ahead) and has even been overtaken by Bulgaria. According to The Economist’s survey for the year 2000, the “quality of life” in Romania ranks somewhere between Libya and Lebanon. The European Union has tacitly acknowledged as much: The Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament lists Romania as last among the EU-candidate countries, and slipping fast.3
It wasn’t always thus. It is not just that Romania once had a flourishing oil industry and a rich and diverse agriculture. It was a country with cosmopolitan aspirations. Even today the visitor to Bucharest can catch glimpses of a better past. Between the 1870s and World War I the city more than doubled in size, and some of the great boulevards laid down then and between the wars, notably the Calea Victoria at its very center, once stood comparison with the French originals on which they were modeled. Bucharest’s much-advertised claim to be “the Paris of the East” was not wholly spurious. Romania’s capital had oil-fired streetlamps before Vienna and got its first electric street lighting in 1882, well before many Western European cities. In the capital and in certain provincial towns—Iasi, Timisoara—the dilapidated charm of older residences and the public parks has survived the depredations of Communism, albeit barely.4
One could speak in a comparable vein of Prague or Budapest. But the Czech Republic and Hungary, like Poland, Slovenia, and the Baltic lands, are recovering unexpectedly well from a century of war, occupation, and dictatorship. Why is Romania different? One’s first thought is that it isn’t different; it is the same—only much worse. Every post-Communist society saw deep divisions and resentments; only in Romania did this lead to serious violence. First in the uprising against Ceauşescu, in which hundreds died; then in interethnic street fighting in Târgu-Mures in March 1990, where eight people were killed and some three hundred wounded in orchestrated attacks on the local Hungarian minority. Later, in Bucharest in June 1990, miners from the Jiu Valley pits were bused in by President Ion Iliescu (the same) to beat up student protesters: There were twenty-one deaths and 650 people were injured.
In every post-Communist society some of the old nomenklatura maneuvered themselves back into positions of influence. In Romania they made the transition much more fluently than elsewhere. As a former Central Committee secretary, Iliescu oversaw the removal of the Ceauşescus (whose trial and execution on Christmas Day 1989 were not shown on television until three months later); he formed a “National Salvation Front” that took power under his own direction; he recycled himself as a “good” Communist (to contrast with the “bad” Ceauşescu); and he encouraged collective inattention to recent history. By comparison with Poland, Hungary, or Russia, there has been little public investigation of the Communist past: For many years, efforts to set up a Romanian “Gauck Commission” (modeled on the German examination of the Stasi archives) to look into the activities of the Securitate ran up against interference and opposition from the highest levels of government.
Transforming a dysfunctional state-run economy into something resembling normal human exchange has proven complicated everywhere. In Romania it was made harder. Whereas other late-era Communist rulers tried to buy off their subjects with consumer goods obtained through foreign loans, under Ceauşescu the “shock therapy” advocated after 1989 in Poland and elsewhere had already been applied for a decade, for perverse ends. Romanians were so poor they had no belts left to tighten; and they could hardly be tempted by the reward of long-term improvement. Instead, like Albania and Russia, post-Communist Romania fell prey to instant market gratification in the form of pyramid schemes, promising huge short-term gains without risk. At its peak one such operation, the “Caritas” scam which ran from April 1992 to August 1994, had perhaps four million participants—nearly one in five of the population. Like “legitimate” privatization, these pyramid schemes mostly functioned to channel private cash into mafias based in old party networks and the former security services.
Communism was an ecological disaster everywhere, but in Romania its mess has proven harder to clean up. In the industrial towns of Transylvania—in places like Hunedoara or Baia Mare, where a recent leak from the Aural gold mine into the Tisza River poisoned part of the mid-Danubian ecosystem—you can taste the poison in the air you breathe, as I found on a recent visit there. The environmental catastrophe is probably comparable in degree to parts of eastern Germany or northern Bohemia, but in Romania its extent is greater: Whole tracts of the country are infested with bloated, rusting steel mills, abandoned petrochemical refineries, and decaying cement works. Privatization of uneconomic state enterprises is made much harder in Romania in part because the old Communist rulers have succeeded in selling the best businesses to themselves, but also because the cost of cleaning up polluted water and contaminated soil is prohibitive and off-putting to the few foreign companies who express an initial interest.
The end of Communism has brought with it nearly everywhere a beginning of memory. In most places this started with the compensatory glorification of a pre-Communist age but gave way in time to more thoughtful discussion of politically sensitive topics from the national past, subjects on which Communists were typically as silent as nationalists. Of these the most painful has been the experience of World War II and local collaboration with the Germans—notably in their project to exterminate the Jews. Open debate on such matters has come furthest in Poland; in Romania it has hardly begun.
Romania was formally neutral in the early stages of World War II; but under the military dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu the country aligned itself with Hitler in November 1940 and joined enthusiastically in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, contributing and losing more troops than any of Germany’s other European allies. In May 1946, with Romania firmly under Soviet tutelage, Antonescu was tried and executed as a war criminal. He has now been resurrected in some circles in post-Communist Romania as a national hero: Statues have been erected and memorial plaques inaugurated in his honor. Many people feel uneasy about this,
but few pay much attention to what would, almost anywhere else, be Antonescu’s most embarrassing claim to fame: His contribution to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.5
The conventional Romanian position has long been that, whatever his other sins, Antonescu saved Romania’s Jews. And it is true that of the 441,000 Jews listed in the April 1942 census, the overwhelming majority survived, thanks to Antonescu’s belated realization that Hitler would lose the war and his consequent rescinding of plans to deport them to exterminationcamps. But that does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Bessarabia and Bukovina, Romanian territories humiliatingly ceded to Stalin in June 1940 and triumphantly reoccupied by Romanian (and German) troops after June 22, 1941. Here the Romanians collaborated with the Germans and outdid them in deporting, torturing, and murdering all Jews under their control. It was Romanian soldiers who burned alive nineteen thousand Jews in Odessa in October 1941; who shot a further sixteen thousand in ditches at nearby Dalnick; and who so sadistically mistreated Jews being transported east across the Dniester River that even the Germans complained.6
By the end of the war the Romanian state had killed or deported over half the total Jewish population under its jurisdiction. This was deliberate policy. In March 1943 Antonescu declared: “The operation should be continued. However difficult this might be under present circumstances, we have to achieve total Romanianization. We will have to complete this by the time the war ends.” It was Antonescu who permitted the pogrom in Iasi (the capital of Moldavia, in the country’s northeast) on June 29 and 30, 1941, where at least seven thousand Jews were murdered. It was Antonescu who ordered in July 1941 that fifty “Jewish Communists” be exterminated for every Romanian soldier killed by partisans. And it was unoccupied Romania that alone matched the Nazis step for step in the Final Solution, from legal definitions through extortion and deportation to mass extermination.7