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East-European Intellectuals and the National-Communist State: A View From Bucharest
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14555 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1988 |
4,569 Words |
| Author
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Mihai Botez
Mihai Botez, presently a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, is a mathematician and
human rights activist in Romania. This essay was presented at
a conference "The Future of Communism" sponsored by the
Foreign Policy Research Institute. |
As a mathematician and futurist living in Romania, I have the unique privilege of seeing "from within" how intellectuals and the communist state can coexist in an East-European context. I will try to prove that East-European intellectuals do not represent a threat to the existing communist rule, although they can challenge it.
If intellectuals means in the broad sense "better-educated people who earn their living from mental rather than manual labor" (including in our technocratic era white-collar employees as well as creative and critical intelligentsia), then what could East-European intellectual mean? Are intellectuals living in Eastern Europe a new species of intellectual?
Further, if a state is, by Max Weber's definition, "an organization which can successfully claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory," and therefore a communist state is a state in which physical force is in the hands of the sole ruling Marxist party, then what could National-Communist State mean? Is such as organization a new one?
My conviction is that both these new categories are now realities, and that Romanian intellectuals and the Romanian communist state fully illustrate them. The expression "A View from Bucharest" in my title will remind you that all my theoretical speculations about the complex relationships between the traditional bearers of societal awareness--the intellectuals--and the totalitarian communist power are subjective, and that the image-maker is a critical intellectual who will go back to Romania. And let me add that, being a professional futurist, I see these relationships in future-oriented perspective. For the present is not only the result and final stage of the past; it is also (and maybe most essentially) the starting point for the future. Therefore, I will not describe the past wars--with victories and defeats--between intellectuals and communist power; I will only try to discover, in present situations, the seeds of possible future developments.
My article has four parts. Part 1 introduces East-European intellectuals. Part 2 describes the National-Communist State. Part 3 deals with the "social contract" (or "social compact") between East-European intellectuals and their national-communist leaders, imagining "from within" different cost benefit analyses of alternative behavioral options. Part 4 discusses some opportunities for a renegotiation of this contract, using a new, fresh resource: solidarity of critical
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