History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  How many more turns of the kaleidoscope will we see? As it looks now, Hungary has a very good chance of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution as a full member of what we unreflectingly call “Europe” and “the West.” Of the EU, that is. And of NATO. It will thus become, to recall John Foster Dulles’s words in 1956, a military ally of the United States. But what will those two things mean in 2006? What will the internal condition of Hungary be then, and how will it affect Hungarians’ views of 1956? How much more, and how much less, will we then know about the revolution? It is precisely the mark of great events that their meaning constantly changes, is forever disputed, with some questions never finally answered. Questions such as, What happened in France in 1789?

  CHRONOLOGY

  1996

  1 NOVEMBER. Slobodan Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia wins Serbian parliamentary elections. In Bulgaria, opposition leader Petar Stoyanov is elected president.

  5 NOVEMBER. Bill Clinton is elected for a second term as president of the United States.

  17 NOVEMBER. In Serbia, the Zajedno (“Together”) coalition win municipal elections in several major cities, including Belgrade, but the Milošević regime fraudulently denies them their victory.

  22 NOVEMBER. Beginning of student demonstrations in Belgrade, protesting the fraudulent denial of opposition victories in municipal elections. In Romania, anticommunist Emil Constantinescu is elected president.

  24 NOVEMBER. A referendum in Belarus gives President Lukashenka far-reaching powers, but these are contested by parliament.

  13-14 DECEMBER. An EU summit in Dublin agrees on a “stability fact” that would penalize future EMU members who exceed budget-deficit targets.

  19 DECEMBER. Denmark, Finland, and Sweden become full members of the Schengen group.

  19 DECEMBER. A NATO “Stabilization Force” (SFOR) replaces IFOR in Bosnia.

  25 DECEMBER. Italy rejoins the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System.

  1997

  16-18 JANUARY. Versailles. An Anglo-French meeting in the wonderful Petit Trianon hotel. A tablet in the dining room announces that in this very room M. Clemenceau dictated the terms of peace to the defeated Germans after the First World War. The French delegation to our meeting—a glittering collection of stars from the country’s business, political, and intellectual elite, almost all of them graduates of the grandes écoles—argue with brilliance, lucidity, and near unanimity the French case for the Cartesian imperative of binding Germany into a European monetary union. I cannot help wondering if one day some Germans won’t come to regard monetary union as the new “Versailles.”

  20 JANUARY. Bill Clinton starts his second term as president of the United States.

  JANUARY-FEBRUARY. In faxes apparently sent from a supermarket in Switzerland, a Kosovo Liberation Army claims responsibility for terrorist attacks on Serb police in Kosovo.

  5 FEBRUARY. The Swiss government agrees on a fund to compensate relatives of victims of the Holocaust whose assets were held in Swiss banks.

  11 FEBRUARY. The Serbian parliament recognizes opposition victories in municipal elections.

  19 FEBRUARY. The European Commission allows Italy to impose a onetime tax to help it try to meet the Maastricht criteria in preparation for monetary union.

  21 FEBRUARY. After student and opposition demonstrations force the Serbian regime to recognize the true results of municipal elections, opposition politician Zoran Djindjić starts work as mayor of Belgrade.

  MARCH. Albania collapses into anarchy. Arsenals are plundered.

  THE SERBIAN TRAGEDY

  “PEOPLE COMPARE THIS TO THE ’VELVET REVOLUTION’ IN PRAGUE,” I say to Momčilo. “Yes,” he retorts, “but the Czechs only lasted thirty-seven days!”

  On the 104th day of the Belgrade student protest, Momčilo Radulović—thickset, with a two-day stubble, short dark hair, and black leather jacket—has just burst into the room exclaiming, “We’ve occupied the rector’s office!” He is twenty-three and studies political science. As he leads me to the new center of action, he stops in the middle of the street to explain, “I just want to live in a normal country. I want to get up in the morning, go to a normal shop, read my books, have the rule of law and democracy. And to travel.” “I’m not a child of the Internet,” he adds, referring to a frequent characterization of the students, “but I’d like to be.”

  Around the heavy conference tables in the rectorate are packed some eighty students belonging to what they call the Main Board. “Silence!” people shout at the top of their voices. “Silence!” A tall, bespectacled history student named Čeda Antic tries to keep order: “Kolega Gavrilović to speak next.” A girl with long brown hair and a little pink-and-white plastic handbag takes longhand notes in a ring-file binder, as if at a lecture. She is the official minute-taker. From the window I can see the student masses gathering below, with their flags, posters, and badges, while pop music blares out: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” How touching to hear the Beatles still.

  The Main Board is discussing the route for today’s Walk. Walking, with a capital W, is the students’ characteristic form of protest. Today, they’ll parade around the rectorate courtyard, then walk to the education ministry to support their deans. Instructions are given by mobile phone—a major technological advance on Prague in 1989. The mobile phones are a present from Bogoljub Karić, one of the country’s best-known multimillionaires and until recently—or perhaps still—a close associate of the hated president Slobodan “Slobo” Milošević. “After ninety days, Karić decided that he supports us,” Momčilo says, with nice irony. The student next to me has a multicolored badge saying “Propaganda.” Their other departments included Information, Security, Culture, and Protocol. Information is for foreign visitors like me, Propaganda for their own rank and file. Protocol is now on the mobile phone to his colleague at the loudspeaker jeep outside.

  The sound of singing comes from the square below. Everyone in the room rises to their feet, some standing to attention. This is the “Hymn of St. Sava,” a patriotic hymn of nineteenth-century Serbia, celebrating the patron saint of education and only recently revived as the university anthem. Some sing along quietly, with expressions of mildly ironic affection on their faces; most are respectfully silent; one or two look embarrassed or resentful. At the end, a few—mostly the singers—cross themselves after the Orthodox fashion. Between St. Sava and the mobile phone this is no ordinary student protest.

  Two days later—day 106—there is a vital decision. Early on, the students had formulated three demands. The victories by the Zajedno (“Together”) opposition coalition in local-government elections on 17 November (by coincidence, also the starting date of the Prague events in 1989) should be properly recognized, the rector of the university should resign, and the student dean should also go. Milošević conceded the first, main demand several weeks ago, and Zajedno mayors have already moved into their offices. Today, the rector and student dean have offered their resignations. But are these resignations binding, or is it a trick? Professors from the law faculty are summoned to explain the legal niceties. Suddenly, we’re in a law lecture.

  Even if the resignations are binding, should the students stop here? Some faculties want to go back to lectures, others to raise new demands. Biljana Dakić, a fourth-year history student who is one of my guides, nods vigorously at a comment by the student chairman. What’s he saying? “He says, ‘Democracy is when the minority respects the will of the majority’” But then a pale-faced man stands up and shouts, “This is a provocation! If you accept this, you’ll all be fooled!” Čeda Antic intervenes. If the resignations are definite, he says, they should have a Victory Walk and then go back to lectures; if not, they should call for nationwide elections to a constituent assembly. Back to school or forward to the revolution! “You see, we have our Robespierres and our Dantons,” Čeda wryly explains afterward, but he, the Girondin, was trying to outflank them.

  TWO CLICH�
�S have been attached to this revolutionary theater of the Belgrade students and to the Serbian drama altogether: “velvet revolution” and “nationalism.” Neither gets us very far. Certainly some students say things that sound nationalistic to a Western ear. Most seem rather confused in their political views. But is that true only of Serbian students? And who would not be confused if through the most impressionable years of childhood you had seen your country fall apart, in a war which had many Serb victims, too, and if, through those years, you were told constantly by state television, radio, your parents, teachers, and leading intellectuals that this terrible war was the fault of others: Slovenes, Croats, Muslims, Germans, Americans? “When I was seventeen,” Momčilo tells me, “I wanted to go and fight for my fellow Serbs, like my older brother.” Biljana was born in Knin, a city in the Krajina from which the Serbs, including many of her family, were driven out by the Croats’ “Operation Storm” in 1995. Three of her uncles are now refugees in a Serbia that greets its fellow Serbs with far from open arms.

  In the circumstances, it is remarkable that these students have produced a protest that has been so relatively peaceful, responsible, wittily inventive, and basically democratic. Despite all the propaganda and the poisoned mental environment in which they have grown up since the age of twelve or thirteen, and though many of them have never been to the West, they, like the “velvet revolutionaries” of Central Europe in 1989, embrace a model of “normality” that includes the fundamentals of Western democracy. What is more, they are trying to practice it in their own protest. Entirely gentle this was not. At the beginning, stones were thrown and windows broken. Then they reverted to eggs. But some put the eggs in a freezer first, so they came out as hard as stones. Perhaps deep-frozen eggs are the Serb version of velvet.

  Against all the virulent denunciations of “Europe” by Slobo’s hacks, the students still write on their placard, “EURO polis, EURO demokratija, EURO standard, EURO pravo [law], EURO vlast [authority].” We in the rich EURO-Europe hardly deserve such touching faith. Or, again, “AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE: Bill Clinton, Stevie WONDER, Johnny CASH, and Bob HOPE! SERBIAN PEOPLE HAVE: Slobodan Milošević, no WONDER, no CASH, and no HOPE!” But a small wonder this was.

  We must also distinguish between nationalism and patriotism. I walk over with Čeda Antic for a coffee at the Hotel Moskva. He, the talented history student, reminds me that the pre-1914 Serbian conspirators of the Black Hand used to meet in this café. Why, perhaps the future assassin of Franz Ferdinand sat in this very corner. But today’s Young Serbia is not talking of assassination. Čeda is twenty-two. As a young child, with a Serb father and a Croat mother, he thought he was a Yugoslav. Then he found that he was really a Serb. In his search for identity, he discovered the glorious history of medieval Serbia—and the Orthodox church. He read the Bible, believed, and was baptized into the Church two years ago. His godfather is a fellow student, active in the protest. Čeda was one of those quietly singing the hymn of St. Sava.

  Like many people I talk to in Belgrade, he now thinks that Yugoslavia was a mistake from the very beginning. “It was,” he adds, “our mistake”—meaning that of the Serbs who thought their aspirations could best be realized in a larger state of all the southern Slavs. Now the Serbs’ historic task is to start again, to build a modern, liberal, democratic Serbian nation-state.

  It is a travesty to call someone like this thoughtful, idealistic young man a “nationalist” in the pejorative sense in which that term is now almost universally used. He is a patriot—someone who cares deeply for his country. If it were otherwise, he would not be demonstrating but trying to emigrate, as hundreds of thousands of younger, educated Serbs have already done.

  He feels that the students have done what they can for Serbia, their new-old patria. Now it is up to the people and the opposition parties, three of which are supposedly united in the Zajedno coalition. The students have carefully kept their demonstrations separate from those organized by Zajedno, so as not to be “taken over” by any side, but we now walk out to observe the latest opposition demonstration, dedicated to the demand for free media.

  1

  More flags, more nineteenth-century patriotic hymns, more rousing speeches on Republic Square, before the National Museum. It looks like a scene from 1897 rather than 1997, except that one of the flags says “Ferrari.” The crowd use their whistles—another hallmark of the Belgrade demonstrations—to blow like crazy at every mention of Milošević. Then off we stroll again, on what I’m told is “the Media Walk,” past the egg-stained state television station, known as “TV Bastille,” past white-haired “Grandmother Olga,” an old lady who became a symbol of the protest, still cheerfully waving from her first-floor balcony, past Radio Belgrade, past the Politika newspaper, and so back to Republic Square. On the television in my hotel room, I find CNN reporting “a massive demonstration” with calls for Milošević’s resignation. Well, it did not look massive to me, but what CNN says must of course be true.

  Seen from outside, through the lens of such Western media coverage, and with the 1989 matrix still imprinted on our retinas, you might think that the Serb story is now “Zajedno versus Slobo” (like Civic Forum versus Husák, or Solidarity versus Jaruzelski) and the question is simply when Slobo will go. Seen from inside, it does not look like that at all. Even those parts of the opposition joined in the Zajedno—“Together”—coalition are still quite untogether in many vital ways. Despite the country’s dreadful condition, Milošević and his allies still have many important sources of power, and he has nowhere else to go. Above all, the question of democracy is overshadowed by the still unresolved national question. And that is still, as it was a century ago, about the basic issue of the frontiers of states in relation to those of peoples, including the position of Serbs outside the present Serbian state—especially in Bosnia—and that of other nationalities inside the present Serbian state, especially the Albanians in Kosovo.

  I talk to all three leaders of Zajedno—Vesna Pesič of the Serbian Civic Alliance, Vuk Drašković of the Serbian Renewal Movement, and Zoran Djindjić of the Democratic Party—as well as to Vojislav Koštunica, a “moderate nationalist” whose small but significant Democratic Party of Serbia was briefly in the Zajedno coalition but now stands separately again.

  Koštunica–gray-suited, analytical, sober to the point of gloominess—harks back wistfully to the first Yugoslavia, a unitary state under a Serb king, before the dreadful bloodletting between Serbs and Croats during the Second World War confounded British-style nation building. (Serbs as English, Croats as Scots?) But he thinks Drašković’s idea of restoring the monarchy is dotty. Why, the exiled Prince Alexander’s Serbian is so poor they have to talk to him in English!

  Vesna Pesič—a small, neatly dressed, energetic woman–is the only one with a consistent, impeccable record of commitment to civic, liberal causes, opposition to the war, and rejection of nationalism. But she also has the smallest following.

  Vuk Drašković is the strangest character of them all; a tall, nut-brown, prophetic figure—although his long black locks are now more neatly trimmed and the prophet is cased in a very smart Italian suit. Politically, he is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When he talks about the past, about the atrocities committed by the Croat Ustasha during the Second World War, he is the old Mr. Hyde, the writer whose fiery language helped to inflame Serb nationalist feelings in the 1980s. When he talks about the present, he is a perfect Dr. Jekyll, swiftly hitting all the Western piano keys—“human rights,” “regional cooperation,” “peaceful change,” “right for refugees to return to their home”—but also referring with justifiable pride to his own record of opposition to Milošević’s war.

  Behind this Jekyll and Hyde there is the unmistakable silhouette of an old ’68er, one of that last defining generation of student activists, now to be found in high places all over Europe. To complete the picture there is his equally extraordinary wife, Danica, a tall, dark-skinned, orange-haired woman, bursting out of a gol
d-threaded designer jacket and skirt. In our short conversation, she lives up to her reputation for verbal extremism by suggesting that the Serbs should really set about getting rid of the communists “like the Albanians.” (The Albanians are looting army arsenals as we speak.)

  Finally, there is Zoran Djindjić, also an old ’68er but now the very model of a modern politician. Neat in suit, white shirt, and tie, speaking excellent German (once a pupil of the sociologist Jürgen Habermas, he spent most of the 1980s in West Germany), he sits in his vast office as the new mayor of Belgrade and explains how he can do something from there. In the Balkans, he says, the difference between pays légal and pays réel is especially large. On paper, the city government may have few powers and less money, but in practice it has many properties and concessions (taxi stands, restaurants, bathing places) that can be privatized in an exemplary procedure, as well as other forms of informal power and influence. Also, the Serbs like a big man in power, and the mayor of Belgrade is that. I quote to him the Serb peasant who said, “I’ll vote for the opposition when they are in power.” Exactly so.