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Eastern Europe Renascent: An Interview With Radek Sikorski
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10332 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
4,359 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Radek Sikorski is the former Polish deputy defense minister. He became notorious among procommunists in Poland for his attempt to weed out communist sympathizers and former apparatchiks from the Polish armed forces; he was attacked in the Polish press as an "agent of foreign capital" whose Oxford studies had supposedly been paid for by British intelligence (in fact, he studied on a normal grant from the Inner London Education Authority). He has now left the Polish Defense Ministry. This interview is concerned with the new situation in eastern Europe and the problems of creating a civil society out of post-Cold War political chaos.
Herb Greer: Václav Havel, writing in Summer Meditations, is much concerned with the post-Cold War problem of trying to build a civil society out of the ruins of what went before. He makes an interesting point: It is a curious paradox that as freedom arrived, there was "an enormous and dazzling explosion of every imaginable human vice." One of the disadvantages of freedom is that people do not know how to contain this explosion. The totalitarian system channeled vice into the system and used it. Without that confinement, the explosion stands in the way of a decent and civilly functioning society. Of course Havel was writing about Czechoslovakia. Do you see the same problems in Poland?
Radek Sikorski: Yes, but I would analyze it differently. What President Havel perceives as an explosion of vice is largely an explosion of information about vice. That vice existed under communism just as much, if not more, but the information was suppressed. Take anything from child abuse to the murder rate, through all the vices that are listed in that book. We didn't know about it, and therefore there seemed to be less of it. Now our societies have entered the information age, with press freedom and television freedom, and so I think the "explosion" of vice is more apparent than real.
Second, it is true that some new vices have appeared. For example, it was not possible under communism to attack the government, or attack your opponent and overstate your case. Everybody was told what to think, the press was controlled, and no uncontrolled expression of opinion was allowed. Today we seem to have a confusion of ideas, a profusion of parties, a great aggressiveness in public debate, unreliable journalism--because, after all, where were the journalists supposed to have learned their trade properly--and a bitterness of public discourse in east European countries. I think President Havel may have that partly in mind as well. That is a real problem, but I think it is just a symptom of joining the real world, where
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