Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

When at some point in writing this book I went to Housman’s, the renowned socialist bookstore in King’s Cross, London, to make sure I had everything I needed for writing on the legacy of the Soviet socialist times, I had a shock. The shop’s cellar, clearly neglected, presented a real dustbin of history: piles upon piles of books, torn, dusty, and clearly untouched for decades, all on the now obviously unwanted subject of Soviet socialism. Years of magazines, brochures, journals, political analyses of events that used to light up the nations, now presented the possibly most undesired moment of history. Is it really all over? Now, as I once heard from a Polish friend in London, we’re “all free and happy”. Moreover, those of us, who were lucky and entered the club of so-called normal countries (i.e., entered the EU) could “help” those others less lucky, like Belarus, Ukraine or Russia, to achieve this ideal of democracy.

But could anyone seriously come to such a conclusion? The Big Change, promised after ’89 didn’t happen. Instead, we developed political and cultural polarizations that are dividing the public sphere in most ex-communist countries. Every day, dozens of cheap flights carrying a migrant workforce from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe are launched back and forth from the British Isles; and every day, racist articles in the gutter press seem to tell a different story. Three decades ago Eastern Europe was on everybody’s lips because of communism, revolutions, invasions, workers struggle. Now Western newspapers, if they write about us at all, it’s because we comprise an “eastern danger” to the British job market, or they praise us for “growth”, i.e. successful austerity measures. The respective countries are described mostly with disappointment, as they didn’t exactly become what they were supposed to, rather becoming a liability to the initially so open European Union. As all the force of the liberal governments in
those countries was at best aimed at erasing that there was ever communism in there, the reality confirmed that over 23 years after the collapse of the Wall we’re still defined by the past, in economic, cultural and every other respect lagging behind the ideal that is Western Europe. As the EU now suffers the biggest crisis since its inception, there emerges a space for a discussion over whether Club Europe or Club West are really the best possible worlds.

The relationship the West, by which we mostly mean Western Europe and the United States, has with the former Bloc still often brings to mind the Cold War era hostility. Indeed, to use the concept of the popular liberal pundit Edward Lucas’ book,
The New Cold War
(with the subtitle “And how to win it”), prefaced by Norman Davies and recommended by Anne Applebaum no less, spreads the popular opinions on the former East (specifically, Russia) as still dangerous to “our” democracy. Association with the “East” is still nothing positive or to be proud of: for that reason we even designed the term “Central Europe”, a geographical manipulation, to drag us more to the West, or more like, away from the East, as much as we can.

Although Russia, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, have all become capitalist, and often to an extreme degree, it seems that they have not become so enough, or not enough for Western standards. In the criticism of Russia especially, while public opinion rightly points out the censorship, homophobia, mistreatment of political prisoners and other abuses of democracy, there is rarely a criticism of the economic turn Russia has taken after 1991. In the criticism of the previous regime, rarely is it mentioned that since the beginning of the 1990s there were over 2.5 million ‘excess deaths’, mostly as a result of poverty and its malaises, like alcoholism, causing a drastic lowering of life expectancy, from 63.5 for men in 1991 to 58.6 ten years later.

All of the post-socialist economies underwent a massive collapse, but what we mostly get as a response is a shrug of the shoulders: ‘it had to hurt’. As we can see though, especially since the capitalist crash in 2008, there has been a growing tendency to discuss the socialist and communist project again, to shyly come back to reading Marx and classics of Marxism, which slipped from public debate a long time ago. Such discussions happen not only in narrow academic or leftist/activist circles, but are discussed at large by prominent economists, like Paul Krugman, who are openly critical of the way the Former East is currently beating recession and crisis with drastic austerity measures. Still, in the former East itself, this debate barely exists. We still pursue the already obsolete model of “creative capital”, bankrupted elsewhere, privatisation and credit bubbles, still discuss the “information society”, while the dismantled health care and lack of jobs are leaving more and more people below the poverty line. We tackle the crisis with austerity, with no discussion about the alternatives.

0.1 Center of Warsaw, capital of ‘a regular European country’. Gigantic adverts cover the modernist pavilion, with the Leszek Balcerowicz installed ‘register of public debt’ over the Sin Strip Club

So yes, the East is still more beastly than the West, but perhaps
it has become more so during the ‘transition’, finally fulfilling all the negative stereotypes the West had about it while it was ruled by its decaying communist parties. The Western New Left, when it arose in the 60s, had abandoned looking to us as a source of inspiration a long time ago already, when we were mired in the post-50s and 60s stagnation – they preferred to look at Asia and Latin America’s revolutionary communism instead, and today there’s no doubt they remain places to look towards. But maybe there was a different reason why all those copies of
Labour Focus on Eastern Europe
were rotting away forgotten in the basement. Today we’re not in a great need of a new theory, but rather find ourselves incredibly passive. The half-rotten papers at Housman’s presented the rise and decay of one of the biggest grass-roots oppositional movements in history, Solidarność, today a shadow of what it once was, plagued by its right wing factions and disdained by the rest of Polish society and the governing parties it created, who are now more likely to send police with truncheons than support their strikes. Yet we feel that something has changed since the Russian protests in late 2011, that Eastern Europeans, from silently accepting their inferiority have finally risen, tired of living in countries of which the Western commentators say “they have the love of despotism in their blood.”