the rise of English (book review_

The rise and rise of English

Top dog
May 27th 2010
From The Economist print edition









Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language. By Robert McCrum. W.W. Norton; 310 pages; $26.95. Viking; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ENGLISH is what matters. It has displaced rivals to become the language of diplomacy, of business, of science, of the internet and of world culture. Many more people speak Chinese—but even they, in vast numbers, are trying to learn English. So how did it happen, and why? Robert McCrum’s entertaining book tells the story of the triumph of English—and the way in which the language is now liberated from its original owners.

The author’s knack for finding nuggets enriches what might otherwise seem a rather panoramic take on world history from Tacitus to Twitter. Take the beginnings of bilingualism in India, for example, which has stoked the growth of the biggest English-speaking middle class in the new Anglosphere. That stems from a proposal by an English historian, Thomas Macaulay, in 1835, to train a new class of English speakers: “A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.” At a stroke, notes Mr McCrum, English became the “language of government, education and advancement, at once a symbol of imperial rule as well as of self-improvement”. India’s English-speaking middle class is now one of the engines of that country’s development and a big asset in the race to catch up with China.

Bit by bit, English displaced French from diplomacy and German from science. The reason for this was America’s rise and the lasting bonds created by the British empire. But the elastic, forgiving nature of the language itself was another. English allows plenty of sub-variants, from Singlish in Singapore to Estglish in Estonia: the main words are familiar, but plenty of new ones dot the lexicon, along with idiosyncratic grammar and syntax.

Mr McCrum hovers over this point, but does not nail it. English as spoken by non-natives is different. The nuanced, idiomatic English of Britons, North Americans, Antipodeans (and Indians) can be hard to understand. Listen to a Korean businessman negotiating with a Pole in English and you will hear the difference: the language is curt, emphatic, stripped-down. Yet within “Globish”, as Mr McCrum neatly names it, hierarchies are developing. Those who can make jokes (or flirt) in Globish score over those who can’t. Expressiveness counts, in personal and professional life.

The big shift is towards a universally useful written Globish. Spellchecking and translation software mean that anyone can communicate in comprehensible written English. That skill once required mastery of orthographical codes and subtle syntax acquired over years. The English of e-mail, Twitter and text messaging is becoming far more mutually comprehensible than spoken English, which is fractured by differences in pronunciation, politeness and emphasis. Mr McCrum aptly names the new lingo “a thoroughfare for all thoughts”. Perhaps he should have written that chapter in Globish, to show its strengths—and limitations.

Iceland

Life in Iceland

Nasty, brutish and short
May 27th 2010
From The Economist print edition









Wasteland With Words: A Social History of Iceland. By Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson. Reaktion Books; 288 pages; $39.95 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

FILTHY, damp, cold and exhausting, living in Iceland for most of the past millennium had one redeeming feature: that the long dark winter evenings gave people the chance to read a lot and tell stories. That combination of cultural depth and material backwardness is the central message of Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s social history of one of Europe’s smallest and remotest countries.

Given its 300,000 population (about the size of New Orleans), Iceland produces a lot of news. Its volcanoes and banks have blown up with dreadful consequences for locals and outsiders alike. Alone in Europe, it husbands its fish stocks properly. It used to be horribly expensive to visit. Now its hauntingly barren landscape is a bargain holiday destination. This book, drawing on Icelanders’ astonishingly detailed diaries and letters in past centuries, gives the outsider a rare glimpse into the past lives of an extraordinary people.

The story is not wholly pleasant. Even readers with strong stomachs will find them tested. The book opens with an account of a man who rips his own testicles off with a cord after a tantrum involving allegations of infidelity. The pressure-cooker of emotions induced by isolation (the road round the island was completed only in 1974) dispel any stereotypes of Nordic stolidity. The dank squalor of the turf-built hovels in which most Icelanders lived is described with disconcerting relish, along with the suppurating sores, stoically borne, that resulted. Clothes were boiled in urine occasionally, but were otherwise worn without washing.

Life lightened up in the 19th century when mechanisation allowed Icelanders to make some money from fish. In 1940 British and then American forces occupied the island to safeguard it from Nazi Germany. That broke the country’s isolation for ever. The author regards with distaste the pell-mell enthusiasm for globalisation, and casino capitalism that marked the last decade. He is particularly scathing about the bogus boom-year talk of the virtues of the Icelandic national character (innovative, resourceful, etc). Thrift and hard work, not showing off and speculation would have been more accurate, he says.

Books on Icelandic social history are rare. So it is a pity that this one has so many odd omissions. The author barely mentions the greatest tragedy in Icelandic history, the colossal volcanic eruption of 1783 which cut the island’s population by a fifth, to just 40,000 people. He writes a lot about childhood (and child labour) but rather little about sex (which helps while away those dark winter evenings). In particular, he says almost nothing about the country’s fascinating national cuisine. Iceland is a country where raw puffin hearts, pickled rams’ testicles and putrefying shark flesh are all regularly eaten. It may be that, as an Icelander himself, Mr Magnusson does not find such dishes particularly exotic. His readers, especially the unsqueamish ones, would be hungry to know more.

More jokes, please

Explosive humour

May 27th 2010, 13:03 by E.L. | LONDON

JOKES helped make communism collapse. “Anekdoty” as they were termed, helped dispel the climate of fear and highlighted the backwardness and stagnation that were the hallmark of central planning and the police state. The best ones were about people like Brezhnev; few found Stalin a good subject for humour.

But since then life has become trickier for jokesters. Mocking other countries can easily seem patronising and crude. The fictional Borat was hilarious for people who couldn’t find Kazakhstan on a map, rather less so for Kazakhs (and for the Romanian villagers gulled into taking part as extras). Poland’s then deputy foreign minister Radek Sikorski won kudos in 1999 by forcing CNN to apologise after Ted Turner told a silly joke implying that Polish sappers used their feet to detect mines.

Some old joke themes survive. The “hot Estonian guy”, famous for his dim wits and low libido is highly amusing for that country’s envious southern and eastern neighbours. Jews are still canny; pensioners, such as the stereotypical elderly Hungarians Kohn and Grün, are fearful of the future (and sometimes of the fast-changing past). Jokes about “new Russians” and their crudeness and extravagance are legion. But for the most part political correctness has taken its toll. Ethnic stereotypes, once a handy summary of the plusses and minusses of national character, are now seen as thinly disguised racism. Even the most side-splitting joke about, say, a scheming Romanian, a cowardly Czech and a gloomy Hungarian risks attracting a rebuke rather than a roar of approval.

This is not just an ex-communist phenomenon. A recent column which lightheartedly chopped Italy in half and suggested that the southern bits might be nicknamed “bordello” produced some anguished responses (as well as a much larger number of appreciative ones). So did an animated version published a couple of weeks later. the arrival of a TV crew from Rome, solemnly eager to interview the author of the “provocation”.

But a joke-less future would be a bleak one indeed. And good though the old jokes were, it is high time for some new ones. Promising themes might be the sleaze and cronyism of post-communist politics, the stitch-up of Europe between big countries at the expense of small ones, and the lamentably inadequate response of the continent’s political class to the economic crisis.

To avoid offence, every country should concentrate on developing self-deprecating jokes (just as rabbis tell the best Jewish jokes). Estonia has (as in so many things) paved the way here, with two sharply amusing videos, one lampooning that country’s tendency to ignorant self-centredness, a second one its timidity and negativism. Self-deprecating humour is the ultimate sign of emotional and political maturity, just as a rabid prickliness is typically a sign of unresolved complexes about superiority, inferiority, and lack of attention from the outside world.

The sanction for those countries that don’t produce enough self-critical jokes is a simple one: they will be ignored. That is an even worse punishment than being mocked. An Estonian businessman of your columnist’s acquaintance was recently posted to Vilnius to sort out his company's troubled subsidiary there. He forced through radical management changes involving minute-taking, attendance at meetings and punctuality. In return, he sat through a week of back-slapping anecdotes about Estonians's social, sexual and other short-comings. Eventually his hosts tired of the fun and asked him for some Estonian jokes about Lithuanians. “We don’t have any. Our jokes are about the Finns”, he responded coolly.

Readers are welcome to post jokes in the comments section below and to recommend the ones they like best. A future column will pick some winners. Political correctness will not be applied, so ethnic stereotypes, historical grudges and other forms of grotesque unfairness will (within reason) be tolerated.

Slovakia Hungary

(a quick blog posting from today)

Pandora's passports

May 27th 2010, 13:50 by E.L. | LONDON

IN SOME parts of the world, having two or even three passports is nothing unusual. Plenty of people in Ireland (north and south) have both British and Irish passports; a sprinkling have American ones too. Even countries that frown on dual citizenship rarely make much of a fuss about it (not least because it is so hard to police). That lesson seems to be lost on Slovak and Hungarian politicians, who are cooking up an almighty row about the Hungarian new dual citizenship law which will give all ethnic Hungarians outside the country the near-automatic right to a Hungarian passport. The new law, passed by parliament on May 26th, removes the requirement for permanent residency in Hungary; in future, applications will simply need to show they speak Hungarian and have some Hungarian ethnic roots (such as a Hungarian grandparent).

For Hungarians, that salves a wound that has been open since 1920, when the Treaty of Trianon dismembered old Hungary, leaving more than three out of ten Hungarians stranded in other countries such as newly independent Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and a much bigger Romania. Giving passports to these Hungarians, who now number around 2m, appeases the radical right in Hungary and also signals to other countries that the Magyar minorities have a protector. That does not matter much in places such as Serbia, Slovenia or Austria, where Magyars live happily alongside their fellow-citizens. But it is potentially explosive in Slovakia, where some in the Slav majority are twitchy about what they see as the uppitiness of the ethnic Hungarian minority, who number about 10% of the population. Slovakia has annoyed Hungary, and alarmed some outsiders, with a poorly-drafted language law that in some cases penalises the use of the Hungarian language.

So Slovakia has protested, appealed to outsiders, and now says it will strip dual passport-holders of their Slovak citizenship. In theory, the fact that both countries belong to the European Union should mean that passports are largely irrelevant. Hungarian passport-holders have the right to work and live in Slovakia just like any other EU citizen. But these sort of ethnic-historical squabbles are just the sort of thing that EU enlargement was meant to settle. It is troubling to see them bubbling up. When Slovakia's new government takes office at the end of June, outsiders will be hoping to see some serious diplomacy between Bratislava and Budapest.

It is also odd to see ethnicity taking such precedence over more modern forms of political identity. The term "ethnic Hungarian" is convenient journalistic shorthand but a poor basis for legislation. There are people who speak excellent Hungarian but have no Hungarian ancestry, and others with pure Magyar blood (nasty term) who happen not to speak the language. It would take a new Nuremberg Law to determine exactly what level of Hungarian ancestry counts as sufficient.

Hungary would be on stronger ground if chose political-historical rather than an ethnic base for the law. For example, it could say that anyone whose ancestors were citizens of the old Hungarian Kingdom had the right to apply for a passport from the modern republic. (Estonia and Latvia took that approach when they regained independence in 1991, giving passports automatically to all citizens of the pre-war republics, regardless of ethnicity, while asking Soviet-era migrants to apply). If Hungary did the same, it is a fair bet that few non-Magyars would bother to take up the offer.

Europe view no 184

Europe.view
An unfinished revolution
Public life in the ex-communist world is again run by a well-connected elite. But things may be starting to change

May 19th 2010 | From The Economist online

The Europe.view column will henceforth appear as a weekly posting at Eastern Approaches, The Economist's central and eastern Europe blog.

IN THE communist era, the countries of eastern and central Europe were run by tightly knit clans. Connections, particularly those of your parents, mattered more than ability. The same kind of people held the top jobs in the ruling party, in government, in media and in commerce and industry. One of the most potent fuels for the revolutions of 1989 was public discontent with this closed system and the unfairness and incompetence that went along with it.


It worked for a time. In the 1990s, social mobility, in both directions, was huge. Some of the former elite ended up washing dishes or selling insurance. People from the fringes of society (unemployed playwrights and electricians) rose to giddy heights. Capitalism opened huge possibilities for the flexible and ambitious. And if you didn’t like it, you could always leave: millions of people tasted the difference with work and study abroad.

They won that fight


But the new era proved brief. Instead of the old monopoly, a new cartel now holds sway. It is not so blatant. The communist parties' statutory grip on power is gone, as are the grim, grey men of the secret police. But from the Baltic to the Black sea, public life has again started looking like a game for insiders. The same people, with backgrounds in the same elite universities, with wealthy and well-connected parents, dominate politics, the media and top jobs in officialdom. Social mobility is slowing in many parts of the developed world, particularly Britain and America. But it is tantalising to see it fade in “new Europe”, which once seemed so open and dynamic.


The problem is most acute in politics. Generous subsidies for established parties rig the system against outsiders and newcomers. Electoral rules have the same effect—candidates for election face onerous registration requirements, for example. When voices are muffled, so are choices. Emigration, and in extreme cases even depopulation, is the unwelcome result.


But change does seem to be afoot. Running as an independent, Indrek Tarand, a popular former official, won a surprise victory in Estonia’s elections to the European parliament last year. In Hungary, the green-tinged anti-corruption movement Lehet Más a Politika (Politics can be different) won an unexpected 7.5% of the vote in the recent parliamentary elections. Less pleasingly, in the same election the far-right anti-establishment Jobbik party won nearly 17%, helped by protest votes as well as its traditional racist base.


The trend is visible elsewhere in central Europe. As the print edition reports this week, new parties and protest movements are making inroads into the clubby politics of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Some, such as the Slovak Sloboda a Solidarita (Freedom and Solidarity), make heavy use of the internet. In the Czech Republic, a movement called Change the Politicians uses smartly made video clips of cultural hotshots such as Aňa Geislerová, Aneta Langerová, Marta Kubišová and Jiří Stránský denouncing corruption and calling for change.


But complaining is easy, as is casting a protest vote. The newcomers will certainly put the old guard under greater scrutiny, dent cultures of impunity and give heart to others who want to change the system. But that is not enough. What the ex-communist countries need is a big new impetus, to complete the changes in officialdom and public services promised but not fully achieved after the collapse of communism. Accession to the European Union and NATO gave that process a boost, but it has proved only temporary. In some respects, the countries of the region are regressing. To restore momentum the new outsiders must show that they can win power and use it—and at the same time not fall into the mire that has engulfed their predecessors.

Important announcement

I have also been made International Editor, starting in September. However I will continue to write on the east European region for the print edition of the Economist, as well as running a new blog called Eastern Approaches.


I am delighted to receive material from outsiders. It need be no more than a short email and a link to something interesting, such as a news item, a pamphlet, or another blog. My aim is to post something new every day. I am also interested in books which I can feature in the "Book of the Week" slot.  My email is edwardlucas(at)economist.com

My column Europe View will now move to this blog as a regular weekly posting. It has had 183 outings in its current form, and (and another 100-odd in its humbler preincarnation as Wi(l)der Europe in European Voice).

I will continue to post my main articles from The Economist and other outlets on this blog, which is about to have a snazzy redesign.

 

Estonia after the Euro

Just in case anyone is interested, here is a video of me and Toomas Hendrik Ilves discussing Estonia after the euro. Part two is here and part three here  

Battle of Britain book review

Britain and the second world war

Boys in blue
May 13th 2010
From The Economist print edition



The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940. By James Holland. Bantam Press; 677 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

EVERY country’s version of the second world war is selective. For Russians, it starts with Hitler’s unprovoked attack in 1941 and highlights the colossal battles in the east. For Americans, it starts with Pearl Harbour and features the Normandy beaches and Guadalcanal. Germans may privately start the story rather earlier, with the humiliation at Versailles which brought economic collapse and fuelled Hitler’s rise to power.

Each version is true up to a point. And each seems a bit odd to outsiders. James Holland’s comprehensive and readable history of the battle of Britain exemplifies the particular British blend of amnesia and nostalgia that the war arouses.

Yet in any terms, this is a tremendous story. In September 1939, Britain was fighting a phoney war alongside a seemingly powerful ally, France. Less than a year later, the country’s survival depended on whether a fragile array of a few hundred fighter planes, flown by exhausted young men, could prevent Hitler’s Luftwaffe from gaining the air superiority necessary for “Operation Sealion”: the first invasion of England since 1066.

The happy combination of youthful gallantry triumphing against overwhelming odds with brainy boffins giving the vital technological edge (through radar, and the brilliantly designed Spitfires and Hurricanes), as well as inspirational leaders using flawless tactics and matchless rhetoric, is irresistible. The author has an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, weaving together reminiscences from both sides, statistics and technical details into the broader picture.

He describes the collapse in France and the near-miraculous rescue in mid-1940 of nearly 340,000 British and French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. He also tells the story of the carnage of poorly protected merchant shipping in the early months of the war which threatened to strangle Britain’s supply lines. He ends with Hitler’s fateful decision to postpone Sealion in September of the same year. The Luftwaffe had lost too many planes and pilots to the RAF’s fighters, while Bomber Command had punctured Germany’s myth of invincibility. It was, as Winston Churchill said, not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning.

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the battle of Britain, this book should sell well. But it will leave many readers unsatisfied. One problem is its glibness. Hitler can rightly be criticised for his many disastrous mistakes. But to write of the Nazi leader’s “almost complete lack of military understanding” is wrong: his problem was too much (self-taught) military knowledge, not too little. Similarly, to call the German general Gerd von Rundstedt a “pigheaded fool” is lazy language that would be out of place in a schoolboy essay, let alone in something that purports to be the work of a professional historian. Throughout the book, the language is unsettlingly colloquial and anachronistic. Confusingly, Mr Holland calls the pilots by their first names, though they refer to each other in diaries and memoirs by their surnames.

A bigger problem is that the author’s enthusiasm for his subject is not matched by his grip of history. He peddles the Anglocentric myth that Britain was “alone” in the summer of 1940 (insultingly forgetting Greece, Poland and the entire British empire). Too many characters appear, with annoyingly similar potted biographies. Their tinnily-told stories swamp the rather skimpy treatment of the underlying war-winning narrative, such as the innovative tactics of a brilliant New Zealander, Keith Park, and the way that Max Aitken revolutionised aircraft production. Heroism is indeed captivating. But it was more than heroism that kept Britain out of Nazi captivity.

new rachman novel

New fiction

Inky fingers
May 13th 2010
From The Economist print edition









The Imperfectionists. By Tom Rachman. Dial Press; 272 pages; $25. Quercus; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk


FOR younger readers, stories about newspapers in their heyday may have a whiff of industrial archaeology, akin to tales about whaling or steam trains. Tom Rachman’s first novel is set in Rome, on a once-mighty American-owned international newspaper, surely quite unlike the (Paris-based) International Herald Tribune, where he used to work. The book links together 11 characters, each sharply drawn in a separate chapter. Read singly, each would be a good short story. Together they make an excellent novel.

The opening picture is of the paper’s elderly Paris correspondent, whose skills as a hack have deserted him after a lifetime of dissolution. The last is of the drippy scion of the once-formidable founding family, who fails even to announce the paper’s closure properly. In between comes an agonisingly incompetent new freelance correspondent in Cairo, a memorably ferocious pedant who guards the paper’s prose and accuracy, and the paper’s most loyal reader, an Italian nobildonna who, Miss Havisham-like, prefers ancient editions of the paper to the up-to-date issues.

Most of the characters have interestingly unhappy love lives, with neat twists to their betrayals and disappointments. Though bleakly portrayed, they still attract the reader’s sympathy, not least for their precarious, ill-paid jobs and filthy working conditions (the office carpets not cleaned since 1977, according to the paper’s lore). One longs for them to leave and get proper jobs.

Novels about journalism by journalists tend to be strong on score-settling and colour, but rarely survive the feuds they describe. Mr Rachman’s escapes that category. Though it lacks the transcendent absurdity of Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” (1938), it could sit well on a bookshelf next to Michael Frayn’s “Towards the End of the Morning” (1967), which so vividly captured the feel of the old newspaper industry in the 1960s, on the brink of its television-led transformation into the power and prestige of the “media”.

This novel describes the final echoes of the newspaper story: dedication and ambition fighting a losing battle against backbiting and cheeseparing, and ending in a largely unlamented closure. Readers will look forward to Mr Rachman’s next novel. They may hope he picks a more cheerful theme.

Estonia and the Euro

(from the Economist print edition)

The Baltic states 

Euro not bust
May 13th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Estonia gets a green light to join the euro. Other Baltic states will benefit too

SURPRISES are Estonia’s stock in trade. Its return to the world map in 1991 after a 51-year absence startled outsiders. So did what came next: a fast-growing economy, based on flat taxes, free trade and a currency board. In 2004 it confounded pessimists’ expectations by joining the European Union and NATO. Now it is set to pull off another coup, gaining green lights from the European Commission and the European Central Bank in its bid to adopt the euro on January 1st 2011.

Many thought that highly unlikely. Only two years ago a property bubble in the country popped, rocking the banking system and sending GDP plunging by 14.1% in 2009. Doom-mongers said devaluation was inevitable. But they were wrong. Flexible wages and prices have helped the economy stabilise: unit labour costs fell by 7.5% in the final quarter of 2009. Exports were up by a sixth in the first quarter of 2010 and the central bank forecasts growth this year of 1% (although that depends on the pace of recovery in Sweden and other export markets).

Thanks to a fiscal tightening of a stonking 7.5% of GDP, Estonia easily meets the euro zone’s public-finance rules. Its gross debt in 2009 was only 7.2% of GDP (compared with 115% in Italy), and the government deficit is 1.7% (Greece’s is 13.6%). The concern is sustainability: will future governments be so thrifty? Inflation is low: in the past 12 months the average figure was negative, at -0.7% well below the euro zone’s 1% target. But the ECB report calls for “continued vigilance”, as well as efforts to raise productivity and competitiveness.

The real problem for Estonia is political, not economic. Some euro-zone members (France is often mentioned) think that allowing an obscure and volatile ex-communist economy to join a currency union that already has too many dodgy members should not be a priority. If Estonia is really so solid, why not wait a year to be sure?

Yet that would send a perverse message. Estonia is almost the only country in the whole EU that actually meets the common currency’s rules. All those that use the euro have gaily breached the deficit and debt limits. The grit shown by Estonian politicians and the public in shrinking spending, raising taxes and cutting wages has been exemplary. Punishing Estonia, which obeyed the rules, while bailing out Greece, which has breached them flagrantly, would do little for the euro’s credibility with governments and investors alike.

Estonia has two more hurdles to jump before it can scotch the scoffers: an EU committee meeting at the end of May, followed by a finance ministers’ summit in early June. Few think that France and other doubters will actually block Estonia’s bid; persuasion and horse-trading will probably bring agreement. Then the decision will be irrevocable. That will give heart to Latvia and Lithuania, which hope to join the euro later in the decade. Like Estonia, their currencies are pegged to the euro, so they bear the pain of a rigid monetary regime, but also miss out on the lower borrowing costs and higher investment that membership of the currency can bring.

The next task is to stoke growth and cut unemployment (now over 15%). After that, the aim should be to reach Nordic-quality public services and an economy based on brainpower by 2018, when Estonia celebrates its 100th birthday and also holds the presidency of the EU.

Europe view: Greece viewed from the region

Europe.view

Default, and other dogmas
May 13th 2010
From Economist.com


The experience of ex-communist countries in the 1990s undermines many of the claims now made about Greece

FOR anyone from the ex-communist world with a medium-term memory, the frantic efforts under way to save Greece (and the other wobbly southern members of the euro zone) are rather puzzling.


For a start, what is so bad about default and restructuring? In the 1990s Russia restructured $32 billion worth of Soviet debt into PRINs and IANs (both are now stored in the Museum of Financial Archaeology and may be viewed on application to the curator). In 1998 it defaulted on those debt instruments. People said Russia’s financial credibility would never recover. One banker said he would rather eat nuclear waste than invest in Russia again. But within a couple of years, Russia was flavour of the month.


It was the same story with Poland, which restructured its debt after 1989. Thanks to heavy politicking from America, the freely elected authorities were allowed to swap sovereign debt incurred by the communist regime into less onerous “Brady bonds” (stored in the same museum, also viewable on application). Hungary, which did not have the same backing from America, has had to pay its debt in full. That depressed its growth rate in the 1990s and meant lower government spending and higher taxes. Hungary should have benefited from this sacrifice by gaining a better credit rating. It didn’t. Funny things, markets.


The moral is that investors’ memories are short. If Greece were to restructure its debt, it would not take long for greed to trump fear and for capital to start flowing again.


A second piece of dogma undermined by the experiences of the ex-communist countries is that leaving a common currency area is all but impossible. The Czech and Slovak korunas separated without even a ripple of disturbance. The Yugoslav dinar disappeared in a puff of hyperinflation, but the currencies that succeeded it did pretty well almost from the word go. The death-agonies of the Soviet rouble were painful, but now the Russian currency is one of the most solid in the region. Dig out the drachma from the museum and it may float better than anyone expects.


But perhaps trumping these feelings of confusion is a kind of envy. Greece is benefiting from the kind of support of which the ex-communist half of Europe could have only dreamed in the 1990s. Imagine for a moment that Greece was an EU candidate country, rather than a full member of both the union and of the euro zone. To judge by the way Turkey has been treated in recent years, Brussels would be demanding not only a leaner public sector but a different political system: for example, secularisation of church-state relations, greater minority rights or a climbdown on issues such as the names the country calls its neighbours.


The big difference, of course, is that in 1981, when it joined the then EEC, Greece was just one small country emerging from authoritarian rule (and from a military regime that had been partly supported by the West). In 1989, the sentiment was different. The west Europeans felt intimidated by the ill-dressed needy hordes in the east and preferred to slow things down rather than speed them up. That led to a long process of negotiations with phoney benchmarks for reform and adoption of EU standards. That was a great business for bureaucrats and consultants. But at the end the decisions on which countries to admit were almost entirely political. Funny thing, politics.


The lesson of Greece is that faced with a big, urgent issue, Europe can get its act together. What will it take for Ukraine or Turkey, both of which arguably deserve EU membership just as much as Greece does, to gain the same kind of attention?

Euro latest

Estonia and the euro 

Long euros
May 12th 2010
From Economist.com


Estonia gets a step closer to adopting the single currency

SURPRISES are Estonia’s stock in trade. Its return to the world map in 1991 after a 51-year absence startled outsiders. So did what came next: a fast-growing economy, based on flat taxes, free trade and a currency board. It confounded pessimists’ expectations by joining the European Union (in 2004) and NATO (in 2004). Now the country of 1.4m people is set to pull off another coup, gaining green lights from the European Commission and the European Central Bank for its bid to adopt the euro on January 1st 2011.

Many thought that highly unlikely. Only two years ago a property bubble collapsed, rocking the banking system and sending GDP plunging by 14.1% in 2009 (see story). Doom-mongers said devaluation was inevitable. But they were wrong. Flexible wages and prices have helped the economy stabilise: unit labour costs fell by 7.5% in the final quarter of 2009. Exports were up by a sixth in the first quarter of 2010 and the central bank forecasts growth this year of 1%. Estonia easily meets the euro zone’s rules on public finances. Its gross debt in 2009 was only 7.2% of GDP, and the government deficit is 1.7%. The only real concern is whether inflation will stay low: in the past 12 months the average was negative, at -0.7% comfortably below the 1% target. But the ECB report called for “continued vigilance” on that.

The real problem for Estonia is political, not economic. Some euro zone members (France is often mentioned) think that allowing an obscure and volatile ex-communist economy to join a currency union that has too many dodgy members already should not be a priority. If Estonia is really so solid, why not wait a year to be sure?

Yet that would send a perverse message. Estonia is one of two countries in the whole EU that actually meets the common currency’s rules (Sweden being the other). All the rest (even those that use the euro) have gaily breached the deficit and debt limits. The grit shown by Estonian politicians and the public in shrinking spending, raising taxes, and cutting wages has left outsiders awestruck (see leader). Punishing Estonia which obeyed the rules, while bailing out Greece which has breached them flagrantly, would do little for the euro’s credibility with governments and investors alike.

Estonia has two more hurdles to jump before it can humiliate the scoffers. An EU committee meets at the end of May, followed by a finance ministers’ summit in early June. Few think that France and other doubters will actually block its euro bid: a combination of persuasion and horse-trading will probably bring agreement. Then the decision will be irrevocable. That will give heart to Latvia and Lithuania too, who hope to join the euro later in the decade. Like Estonia, their currencies are pegged to the euro, so they have all the pain of a rigid monetary regime, but miss out on the lower borrowing costs and higher investment that the euro zone brings.

The longer-term question is what Estonia focusses on next. On May 10th it passed another benchmark, joining the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based rich-country thinktank—the first country from the former Soviet Union to do so. The hunt is on for a new national project. Estonia’s presidency of the EU in 2018 will coincide with the country’s 100th birthday. Finding something to surprise outsiders then is a pleasant challenge for the future.

My election take

A welcome uncertainty, a shameful chaos. That is what Britain woke up to after the strangest election night in living memory.  The chaos is as simple to describe as it is hard to justify. Thousands of people waited in vain to vote but couldn’t because pollings stations were under-staffed or ran out of ballot papers.

 

That would disgrace a country learning about free elections after decades of totalitarian rule. If it happened in Afghanistan or Ukraine, British election observers would tut-tut in disapproval. It is shameful in the country that likes to think of itself as the epitome of parliamentary democracy. Nothing better could epitomise the overpaid, underworked, out-of-touch public sector created by Labour than the useless electoral officer in Sheffield who said “I’m not blaming anybody”. What he failed to realise was this: we were blaming him.

 

Failure to run and to reform public services properly, despite showering them with money, is one reason that Labour has lost so many seats. But it has not lost office automatically. The Conservatives have won, but not by enough to gain power straightaway. And the Liberal Democrats have failed to make their hoped-for breakthrough, but won enough seats for their voters’ wishes to matter more than ever.

 

Sure that means uncertainty, of a kind that is unfamiliar in Britain and harder to explain to outsiders. We are used to simple results. We have two parties, Labour and the Conservatives. One wins, the other loses. Minor parties such as the Liberal Democrats may poll quite well, but their votes don’t count.

 

That system was perhaps defensible in the days when the two main parties won 90% of the vote between them. But it doesn’t fit a system in which the electorate is split three ways. In this election, the Liberal Democrats won nearly a quarter of the votes and gained less than a tenth of the seats.

 

The first big question is whether Labour will be able to hang on by offering the Lib Dems a shift to a fair voting system. That could even include Gordon Brown resigning as Labour leader, making way for another prime minister. If that fails, then it will be time for the Conservatives to try—perhaps with a formal arrangement with the Liberal Democrats, perhaps in a minority government. The Conservatives had a good night—they pushed up their overall share of the vote to more than  36%. But their claims to have a convincing mandate sounded hollow. They made tremendous gains in the easy seats—but failed to win the difficult ones that would have given them a majority in the 326-member lower house of parliament.

 

Anywhere else in Europe, this kind of uncertainty is normal. Election results alone do not determine the government: that comes only after negotiations between the parties. Mostly, whichever government forms has the backing of a majority of the voters. That is something that Britain has not enjoyed since 1955 (even Margaret Thatcher’s greatest Conservative victory in 1983 came with just 44% of the vote)

 

In Britain, we are not used to this. The result comes in the midst of a huge economic crisis. The markets are unhappy. They want a government that can repair Britain’s shattered public finances. Our deficit at 12% of GDP, is likely to be bigger than Greece’s this year. We have to borrow billions of pounds every week. Who will lend it to us? Given the scale of spending cuts and tax rises ahead, some politicians may wonder if now is a good time to be in opposition, not government. Whichever government takes office is unlikely to last its full five-year term.

 

Yet for all that the uncertainty is welcome, because it brings the chance of a change in Britain’s outdated electoral system. This no longer delivers the one thing it is supposed to deliver: a clear result. It was always a scandal that votes for the smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats piled up uselessly in third place in our first-past-the-post constituencies. Now the scandal is intolerable. For the first time in my lifetime, there is a real chance of that system changing.

Apple and Yalta

Cupertino's cold warriors
May 6th 2010
From Economist.com


What has Apple got against eastern Europe?

WHAT have the following places got in common?

America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Vietnam.

Clearly the size of the market is not the determinant. China and Russia don’t appear, but Luxembourg does. It is not about prosperity: Iceland—which, believe it or not, is still one of the richer countries in the world—is out, whereas Vietnam is in. Political freedom or the rule of law are not the binding factors. The Philippines and Thailand are on the list, whereas impeccable democracies such as Slovenia are not.

Perhaps the list comprises the target markets of some tiresome company from “old Europe” that has not noticed that the Berlin Wall has come down and that the division of Europe at Yalta into consumer-citizens in a rich, free west and captive east is long out of date.

But no, the list comes from a company that prides itself on being an icon of über-cool internationalism, with a post-modern disdain for clunky convention and tiresome rules. It is from the Apple Store, where eager customers from all over the world end up in the hope of buying an iPad, or a humble $25 gift card.

First-time visitors are assumed to be from America. If you come from one of the countries listed above, you can switch. But if not, you are out of luck. No matter if your country is in the European Union, NATO and the OECD. For Apple, the eastern half of Europe is still both terra incognita and non desiderata.

Still, you can always buy your Apple hardware from an authorised reseller. The real irritation comes when you want to buy electrons, not atoms. Sign up for an iTunes account, and the opening windows offer a glimmer of hope.  It offers not just two kinds of Portuguese, but Polish and Russian too, as well as the mysterious “Spanish (International Sort)”. It looks fine. So—at first sight—does the iTunes store, which offers a tempting array of countries.

But some are more equal than others. Visitors from Finland, for example, are presented with a full array of music. But register with an address in Estonia, just half an hour away by plane, and you get only a list, admittedly rich, of games, gimmicks and lectures. Films and music are out of bounds.

This approach annoys a lot of people. One organisation in Poland has been berating Apple for its approach to the biggest and most advanced market in eastern Europe. It is now celebrating a partial victory (Apple has agreed to open up its distribution market). But even in Poland, the company’s offering is nothing like what you get across the border in Germany. Other countries in the region have yet to see any improvement at all.

One of those most irked by the company's approach is the iPhone-toting president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a loyal customer since 1982, when he bought an Apple IIe. Estonia, he notes, is one of the most wired countries on earth. Tallinn is the centre of NATO’s cyber-warfare research, and Estonians invented another icon of internet cool: Skype. Skype’s director of new products, Sten Tamkivi, has an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac at home. He describes the Apple rule as “a weird relic of commercial east-west segregation inside what is otherwise known as the European Union".

Why doesn’t Apple, a company so irritatingly up to date in its products and marketing, update its worldview when it comes to sales? Apple’s global headquarters did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman in Britain promised to investigate. When we get an answer, we’ll post it here.

Greece and its neighbours

Greece's woes and the neighbours 

Greased up
May 6th 2010
From The Economist print edition


The region may share in some of Greece’s pain

AVERTING a meltdown in Greece, at least temporarily, is good news for that country’s fragile ex-communist neighbours. Their big worry is Greek-owned banks, which account for as much as a quarter of banking assets in Bulgaria, some 15% in Romania and a tenth in Serbia. These institutions have been facing potential runs by depositors, as worries have grown over Greece’s solvency and thus over the Greek banks.

The financial authorities in some nearby countries had already imposed emergency-notification rules to delay (and if necessary to prevent) local banks from being drained dry by cash-hungry headquarters in Athens. The bail-out from the IMF and the European Union includes €10 billion ($13 billion) in recapitalisation for Greece’s banks, and adds a condition about keeping their foreign subsidiaries alive and lending.

This echoes the efforts made last year to bolster foreign-owned banks’ confidence in central and eastern Europe and stop them from pulling out in panic. In that process, as it happens, Greece was particularly unhelpful. Outside advisers have been pressing the IMF and other lenders to make sure that the authorities in Athens behave differently this time.

Any further tightening of credit in Greece’s region is unlikely to be too severe. Other foreign banks may expand their market share as Greek-owned rivals contract. But Greece is not just a provider of capital, it is also a big export market (taking a tenth of Bulgaria’s exports last year). And Greece employs plenty of migrants, especially from Albania, where remittances make up about a sixth of GDP. A deep recession in Greece will surely dent both growth and confidence in its northern neighbours.

Yet some think that the troubles in Greece may also provide a welcome refutation of the notion that Europe’s big divide is between a feckless ex-communist east and a virtuous old capitalist west; it is, rather, between a prudent north and a profligate south. In July Estonia expects the go-ahead to adopt the euro in 2011. With no net public debt, a deficit of 1.7% of GDP and 1.7% inflation, Estonia meets the Maastricht criteria better than any existing member. But nerves may yet trump logic.

Enthusiasm for enlargement is cooling. Any country with Greek levels of debt and hubris (eg, Hungary under its cocksure new government) will meet a particularly chilly welcome. And the sight of Greece’s agonies may make others, especially larger countries such as Poland, think again about the single currency’s advantages. In a crisis being able to devalue and to control your own monetary policy can prove an advantage.

Long piece on power and history

Report No. 30: Putin, Power and History: Does the Past Still Matter?
Posted Date: 3 May 2010

Following last month’s joint Polish-Russian memorials to commemorate the Katyń massacre, and the outpouring of Russian sympathy since the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others, CEPA Senior Fellow Edward Lucas offers a penetrating look at the politics of historical reconciliation in Central Europe.

Executive Summary
In the aftermath of communist rule, a fierce moral debate ensued in the east that raised profound questions about the intellectual framework which shaped history and politics under the old regime. Did Russia’s new leaders really accept the enormity of what the Soviet Union had done or did they still regard it as a success story brought down by bad luck and bad leadership? Under Vladimir Putin, it would be incorrect to say that historical revisionism wholly dominates Russia’s dealings with its neighbors. However it would be equally wrong to view recent signs of reconciliation as a sincere change of heart on the part of Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues. Nevertheless, Russia’s efforts to blunt long-standing historical disputes with Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland could lead to further attempts at reconciliation with Ukraine and the Baltic States. If successful, then the smoothing over of historical rows is potential game-changer for the region.

Accounting for History

Moral superiority and a sense of historical injustice have been the twin fuels of European politics since 1939. But what happens when truth intrudes, memories fade and differences blur? Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s presence at the joint Russian-Polish memorial service in Katyń on April 7, and the outpouring of sympathy in Russia for Poland since the plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, raises profound questions about an intellectual framework that has shaped local and outside understanding of the European continent’s history and politics.

The story used to be simple. Totalitarianism was the continent’s curse in the past century. But whereas Germany atoned for its evil deeds, Russia (the legal successor to the Soviet Union) did not. From that blindness and moral laziness, all manner of ills flow and until they change, Russia will neither reconcile with the former Soviet empire; nor, so the argument goes, will it be able to shed its own burden of authoritarian rule.

It is important to state at the outset that this approach was always open to serious criticism. To illustrate that, try unpicking the version of European history that many people in the English-speaking world would count as the bare-bones version, which would go something like this.

The story starts with Nazi aggression in the 1930s. That was wicked, and Western collusion was admittedly shameful—chiefly in the Munich agreement in which France and Britain arm-twisted Czechoslovakia into submission. But then things got better. Britain bravely fought alone until the mad and evil Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the mad and evil Japanese attacked America. Then the “allies” liberated Europe, with the landing on the Normandy beaches epitomizing the Anglo-American sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Yalta was a blot on the record (blame FDR’s illness, or Churchill’s weakness) but the Western allies soon regained the high ground, fighting the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Airlift (good) and the Soviet-built Berlin Wall (bad). The (good) Germans soon accepted how wicked they had been under Nazism and made amends. That contrasted sharply with the Soviet Union which was always tied up in knots about Stalinism. When the evil empire collapsed, we continued our stellar record, embracing the newly free countries in the east and bringing most of them (in some cases a bit too quickly) into the European Union and NATO.

Such versions of the past are not wholly false. But they are at best incomplete and at worst highly partial. They leave out huge chunks of what really happened, inflate the importance of sideshows and ignore causation and context.

When the entire picture emerges, the sunshine on the moral high ground dims. Take what many would regard as the central fact of the 1930s and 1940s: the transcendent wickedness of Nazi Germany. Nothing can take away from the bestial crimes committed by the Hitler regime. But the Nazis did not arrive on asteroids. Imagine that World War One had finished with a Marshall Plan, rather than the humiliation and punitive reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles agreement, and the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had hyperinflation not destroyed the middle classes, and without the multiple (and quite unnecessary) humiliations imposed on Weimar Germany by the victorious allies, Hitler would have remained a bar-room bigot and the Nazis a loathsome irrelevance.

Second, it is simply not the case that Britain and America went to war to stop the Holocaust. For most of the war they ignored the fate of the Jews or dismissed it as an irritant. Nor does the idea that the war was a crusade for democracy and freedom square easily with the decision to declare war on (democratic, free) Finland in 1940, and the enthusiastic alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union from 1941, let alone the determined refusal to see the horrors that regime inflicted on Russians and tens of millions of the empire’s other subjects. The reluctance of the British and American authorities to accept the truth about the Katyń massacre when the corpses were first exhumed in 1943 (and indeed for decades afterwards) is evidence of that.

That disgraceful episode in history undermines another myth: that the war was fought to save Poland and rescue Czechoslovakia. That was a fine point of principle at the start—but not one that Britain and the other allies adhered to as the war went on. Besides Katyń, other examples abound: foot-dragging in support of the Warsaw Uprising (imagine if the same thing had happened in Paris); Poland’s treatment at Yalta; derecognition of the London-based Government-in-Exile; and the decision to ban Polish forces from the victory parade in London in 1945.

The automatic response is to plead realpolitik or human error. What else could we have done? Voters in 1918 wanted revenge (“Hang the Kaiser”) on Germany and would not have accepted war any earlier than 1939 (in Britain’s case) or 1941 (for America). Munich bought valuable time for rearmament. By the time of Yalta, Poland was already doomed (“wrong place, wrong time, old boy, sorry”). Similar arguments are made on every other question where the moral foundations look soggy. So bombing of German cities was perhaps unnecessary or excessive or even mistaken in retrospect? War is full of mistakes; hindsight is 20/20. Handing the anti-communist Cossacks and Yugoslav royalist Chetniks back to be murdered in 1945 was terrible? Yes—but it was the price of getting back “allied” prisoners of war from communist clutches. Perhaps we should have done some things differently. But what matters is that we won and the Nazis lost.

Such arguments are wholly defensible. Nobody would argue that Britain should have simply surrendered because it could not stay on the moral high ground, or that America should have stayed out of the war in Europe because both sides were equally bad. Fighting to stop and defeat a potential invader requires no further justification. That you start late and finish badly is beside the point. But dodging so quickly and so often between principled and pragmatic arguments easily looks opportunistic and even propagandistic. It is a slippery basis for firing accusations against other countries in other ages, such as Russia now.

It is also odd when commentators criticize modern Russia for sentimental over-indulgence in wartime memories without mentioning their own countries’ predilection for exactly the same thing. Britain’s annual Poppy Day celebrations (when the guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month) have largely lost the original haunting, somber tinge of personal tragedy and bereavement. Instead, they are a media-led bath of insipid (or worse, fetid) nostalgia and self-congratulations. It is easy to see similarities: two declining countries looking back on their glory days and reliving their defining moments of heroism (the Battle of Britain on one side, the Siege of Leningrad on the other). Modern politicians yearn to stretch their shadows to match those of the giants of yesteryear. It would be quite unfair to equate Churchill with Stalin in terms of character or deeds. But the unreflective way in which they are remembered by Britons and Russians respectively can be strikingly similar.

The self-centeredness is a shared sin. American films (“Saving Private Ryan” and “U-571”) grossly distort the historical record. Britain likes to say that it “stood alone” in 1940, conveniently forgetting the Polish Home Army, as well as Greek, French, Dutch, Norwegian and Yugoslav resistance. That is not quite as bad as the Soviet historiography that forgets the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and starts the war with Barbarossa in 1941. But Western critics of the Soviet approach all too easily overlook the failings in their own accounts of the past.

Nor does the simplistic version of the next chapter of history, the Cold War, emerge intact from scrutiny. To take just one example: denazification in West Germany was partial and incomplete. It was more important to preserve a functioning legal system than to sack all the Nazi judges. Nor could the Third Reich’s intelligence assets or rocket scientists be discarded: they were needed to build weapons and spy on communism. Both decisions are defensible on pragmatic grounds. The result was that the Federal Republic became a staunchly and admirably free society. Its success, both economic and political, showcased the Western system and helped win the Cold War. But the idea of unquestionable moral superiority does not fit easily with hiring Germans who had enthusiastically served the Nazi war machine, while sending to the firing squad the Chetnik Yugoslavs, whose only crime was to have fought the communists.

These flaws and blunders do not create the moral inferiority pushed by Soviet propagandists in the past, nor the moral equivalence promoted by Kremlin spin-doctors now. Everybody is not as bad as each other. The West emerged at the end of the Cold War as the victor and justly so. Welfare capitalism, the rule of law, political freedom and human rights (loosely labeled “democracy”) was a model yearned for by more than 200 million people in the east, freed from a system marked by atrocious economic, political and social failure.

The combination of Soviet failure and Western success brought a victory that was rather more resounding than deserved; it was unexpected almost everywhere, and it was even unwished for in parts of the West that liked having illusions about socialism, or thought Western Europe was well rid of the barbarians in the east.

But come it did, and in its wake a fierce moral debate in the east about history. The legitimacy of communist rule in Eastern Europe rested on lies, chiefly about the origins and aftermath of the war. It was necessary to paint the pre-war (“bourgeois nationalist”) era blackly and to overlook the dirty tricks and violence that allowed the Communists to take power between the Baltic and the Black Sea.

Once communist rule ended, the demand for historical truth was burning not only inside the former captive nations, but between them. A century’s worth of grievances had been concealed behind the phony façade of socialist brotherhood. Lithuanians and Poles wanted to talk about Vilnius. Hungary wanted to talk about Trianon. Germans wanted to talk about the Beneš decrees. And, with ghastly results, Yugoslavs didn’t just talk about how they ended up in six artificial provinces of an artificial country: they fought.

But the biggest issue was with Russia. Did the country’s new leaders really accept the enormity of what the Soviet Union had done or did they still regard it as a success story brought down by bad luck and bad leadership? Would they pay compensation (or at least give back stolen property)? Would they withdraw their troops from the old empire or leave them to protect their interests (whatever they might be)? Would they open the archives? The agenda was impossibly crowded. Czechoslovaks wondered if the NKVD archives might reveal the truth about the murder (or suicide) of the much-loved Jan Masaryk in March 1948. Estonians wanted their presidential seal and regalia, confiscated in 1940. Romania wanted its gold. Poles wanted more details about Katyń. And so on.

Many Russians regarded these concerns as tiresome, irrelevant or ungrateful. They wanted due credit (i.e., a lot) for their own suffering under communism and their role in its downfall. They felt they had given up, almost entirely peacefully, an empire that included places where Russians had lived for centuries. In Ukraine’s case, they had given up (from a Russian viewpoint at least) an integral part of their spiritual and cultural patrimony. It is rather as if the Third Reich had collapsed 1991, leaving a democratic Germany to be confronted not only with furious Poles, Czechoslovaks and Danes wanting justice and reparations, but also an independent Bavaria.

The new historical debate was comfortable and familiar ground for old cold warriors. Instead of bemoaning the Soviet Union’s misdeeds in dusty meeting rooms in west London and New Jersey, it was possible to visit the scene of the crime and discuss it with the victims and their relatives. History became a white-hot subject and a vital ingredient in nation building. Where Soviet propagandists demonized “bourgeois nationalism” as a hellish mixture of injustice and exploitation, the temptation after 1989 was to see the pre-war era as an idyll and problems such as authoritarian rule, pig-headed diplomacy and economic failure were set aside. At least, people argued, these mistakes were our own mistakes, made by our own leaders, in our own country. What came next had been qualitatively worse.

The chance to speak honestly about the past, after 50 years of totalitarian propaganda and lies, was necessary, important and right. In another article I dubbed it “therapeutic historiography.”[1] But as time has gone on, the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities have faded. In 1991, the task of sorting out history was an urgent one. Now the present and the future look more compelling. Bilateral rows, unconnected with the communist era, have faded from being pressing political issues to the subject of academic debate (at one end of the spectrum) and name-calling in the blogosphere (at the other). Ten years ago, what really happened at the battlefield of Kosovo Polje in 1389 was a big issue between Serbs and their neighbors. Now it is becoming a (properly) remote one. The same goes for issues such as the Treaty of Trianon (which dismembered post-Hapsburg Hungary), or Żeligowski’s seizure of Vilnius (then Wilno) in 1920.

Some issues remain on the agenda: Lithuania’s squabbling with Poland about spelling remains a real nuisance. The Slovak language law really annoyed Hungary. The dispute between Greece and its northern neighbor about where the Macedonia label belongs and who can use it has paralyzed the expansion of the European Union and NATO, with dire results. But these arguments are increasingly seldom the central questions of real politics. And they are regarded with exasperation, not sympathy, by outsiders.

In the West too, public opinion began to rethink its view of Eastern Europe after 1989. Questions such as the fate of the Cossacks, the failed Anglo-American intelligence operations in the post-war Baltics, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Western silence over Katyń came onto the agenda. Western governments which had given Baltic gold reserves or embassy buildings to the Soviet Union paid compensation. Sweden, which had deported Latvians and Lithuanians to the Soviet Gulag in 1945, invited survivors back for an official apology and a meeting with the King. Countries that once regarded their policy of not recognizing the de jure Soviet annexation of the Baltic as an embarrassing historical relic started talking about it with pride. The idea that Stalin and Hitler were criminals of an equal hue sounded mainstream, not deranged. To some extent, even the heroic-sentimental self-image of the West changed. The British historian Norman Davies, and writers such as Timothy Garton Ash, deserve credit for their huge role in these changing perceptions. Another factor was daily life. Once, Eastern Europe was off the tourist trail. Now millions of outsiders have travelled to the ex-captive nations on business or on vacation, just as millions of east Europeans have gone to the west to relax, work or study. Their version of history has rubbed off on the Westerners, replacing or at least complementing the distorted and self-satisfied notions that used to be so widely accepted.

Behind that change is an even bigger conceptual difference. Western countries, on the whole, are not proud of their worst achievements. They are ashamed of them. And the discussion of history is not criminalized, or even politicized. The allied bombing of Germany has prompted agonized introspection from the middle of the war onwards. Britain contributed to the rebuilding of the beautiful Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Queen attended its reopening. That is in sharp contrast to Russian historiography, which is missing this mixture of atonement and sympathy towards the former adversary.

In the prevailing Russian version of history, as in the Soviet one that preceded it, the “fascist” enemy is demonized to the point of being inhuman. Even the most revolting war crimes, such as the mass rape of German and other women, are all but ignored. In Western Europe, taboos about the war have vanished. It is possible to discuss allied war crimes, the blunders of the generals, Churchill’s drinking habits. Roosevelt’s near-senility at Yalta, and even whether Britain should have gone to war at all without risking official displeasure or criminal prosecution.

Relevance and Relativism

But along with a wider perspective has come diminishing relevance. The generation with first-hand memories of the Second World War and its aftermath is dying out. The end of the Cold War has made history (especially European history) less relevant. The threat of nuclear annihilation made people want to know why we were in a military standoff with a totalitarian superpower. Now, the practical use of history is in understanding Islam and our relations with the Arab world. History is no longer a compulsory subject for British teenagers. Before they drop the subject, they learn little apart from a few anecdotes about the love lives of British monarchs, and a version of the Second World War that is even skimpier than the caricature with which this article begins. As fog descends on the public’s understanding of history, it is becoming similarly irrelevant for most policymakers.

In Russia too, interest in history has waxed and waned. In the 1990s, history was a national preoccupation. The crimes of Stalinism were one hot topic, the real history of the Russian revolution, and the missing history of the White (anti-Communist) Russians in exile was another. Much nostalgia for the Tsarist era remains—the popularity of Boris Akunin’s stories about the detective Erast Fandorin is a prime example.

But under Mr. Putin, the clock started to tick backwards in a more sinister way. His infamous remark that the Soviet Union’s collapse was the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the past century is well known. It came against a background of a new approach to the past that glorifies the Soviet Union, denigrates the West, and portrays the Yeltsin years as a period of disgraceful weakness and chaos from which Russia has now been rescued.

“Many school books are written by people who work to get foreign grants. They dance to a butterfly-polka that others have paid for. These books, regrettably, get into schools and universities,” Mr. Putin said in the summer of 2007.[2] He demanded new history textbooks that “make our citizens, especially the young, proud of their country” and insisted “no one must be allowed to impose guilty feelings on us.” Those textbooks portray Stalin as a tough leader who made some bad mistakes, not as a monster. These ideas were quickly appropriated by the mainstream Kremlin-controlled media. In September 2007 Rossiiskaya Gazeta, an official government newspaper, cast doubt on the idea that the NKVD was responsible for Katyń. That was as shocking for Poles as if a German government newspaper said that the evidence for gas chambers at Auschwitz was flimsy. Russia also denounced Estonia and Latvia for “fascism,” particularly after Estonia moved a Soviet-era war memorial from the center of town to a military cemetery in April 2007. The central ideological plank of the regime’s ideology is the idea that wartime heroism and sacrifice bestowed an unchallengeable moral legitimacy on both the Soviet Union and on Russia. This idea is both conceptually flawed and open to devastating empirical challenge. But its assiduous promotion has had an effect. According to a recent poll, only 20 percent of Russians believe that the Katyń massacre was the work of the NKVD.

A second plank is anti-westernism. Mr. Putin and his colleagues believe (or affect to believe) that Western moral superiority is nonsense based on hypocrisy. Western countries do not really believe in international law and human rights. They just pretend to — and use these notional moral frameworks as a way of constraining Russia. What really matters is power politics and the pursuit of market share. The same applies to history. Granted, Stalin was bad; but no worse, Mr. Putin has argued, than dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Western imperialism, the near-extermination of Native Americans, slavery and so on balance Russia’s presumed and alleged historical sins. Moreover, Russia has no direct responsibility for the Soviet Union.

That argument has some force. But it is not conclusive. The huge difference is that Britain, America and other Western countries do not celebrate the darkest parts of their history. They are ashamed of them. They certainly do not conceal them. Schoolchildren learn rather a lot about the bad side of European expansion into Asia, Africa and the Americas (some might think they learn too little about the good side). What is missing in Russia is an understanding that past imperialism had a dark side that was bleak indeed. To this day, many Russians believe that their mission in the Baltic States was a civilizing one: “We found this place in ruins, and we have built it up. Now how they thank us,” said my (Russian) fixer bitterly in Narva in 1990. The fact that Narva had been obliterated by allied bombing and the Red Army in 1944, in a war in which Estonia was guiltless, escaped her (she also thought that Britain had been neutral during the whole of World War Two).

The ignorance extends not only to the crimes of Stalinist expansionism, but also to the conquest of the Caucasus in the Tsarist era. Had a Britain or America massacred the Circassians in the way that the Tsarist General Suvorov managed in the 1860s, it would be a matter of national shame and sorrow.

It would be tempting but wrong to say that this revisionist approach to history wholly dominates Russia’s dealings with its neighbors. Seen from the Baltic States or (under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko) from Ukraine, the historical gap looks unbridgeable. Russia makes no secret of its detestation of figures such as the wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. When Ukraine made him a national hero, Russia expressed disgust and outrage: in Russian historiography, Bandera and his followers were nothing more than brutal Nazi henchmen. Russia explicitly refuses to recognize the Baltic States’ version of their own history, in which they were occupied from 1940-91 and subject to “illegal immigration” by Russian and other Soviet migrants. Russia, by contrast, sees them as newly independent ex-Soviet republics, just like Moldova or Georgia.

But elsewhere the picture is rather different. That can come as a shock to those who see Mr. Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues as repellently unrepentant apologists for the Soviet era, and even for Stalinism. It would be overly optimistic to describe the shift as a sincere change of heart: nothing on the scale of Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung has taken place. But for all that, Mr. Putin has effectively damped down many of the most burning historical issues.

In 2006, as president, he visited Budapest to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, where he told his Hungarian counterpart, “Certainly modern Russia is not the Soviet Union but I must tell you frankly that in our hearts we feel a certain moral responsibility for these events.”

On the same trip he went to the Czech Republic, endorsed (without repeating it) Boris Yeltsin’s apology in 1993 and said,

The only concern we have when talking about the tragic events of the past is that certain political forces use these events today to provoke anti-Russian feelings and try to give the impression that Russia is a somewhat incapacitated country. This makes us uneasy. But I must tell you absolutely frankly that while of course there is no legal responsibility here and indeed, there cannot be any, of course a moral responsibility exists. It could not be any other way.

In 2009, Mr. Putin went to Gdansk and uttered words on the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland that blunted the sharpest edges in Polish-Russian relations, “...one must admit that all the attempts to appease the Nazis undertaken between 1934 and 1939 by striking various agreements and pacts with them are inadmissible from the moral point of view and from the practical, political point of view are senseless, detrimental and dangerous.” He went on to say,

“Certainly, one must admit these mistakes. Our country has done it. We sincerely want Russian-Polish relations to be also cleared of this residue of the past, developing in the spirit of good-neighborliness and cooperation to be worthy of the two great European nations.”

At Katyń on April 7, Putin took a similar stance, saying:

We have been brought here today by common memory and grief, as well as common historical duty and faith in the future. Here lie Soviet citizens burnt in the fires of Stalin’s repressions in the 1930s, Polish officers shot by secret order and soldiers of the Red Army executed by the Nazis during World War Two.

Russia and Poland, and the Russian and Polish peoples, have suffered through practically all the tragedies of the 20th century like no other countries, like no other Europeans. They have paid a heavy price for the two world wars, the fratricidal, armed conflicts and the cruelty and inhumanity of totalitarianism.

Our people, who have lived through the horrors of civil war, forced collectivization and the massive purges of the 1930s, probably understand better than any other what Katyń, Mednoye, and Pyatikhatka mean to many Polish families, because the sites of massive executions of Soviet citizens are in the same mournful category.

(Stalinist) repression swept people away regardless of their ethnic origin, convictions or religious beliefs. Whole social classes became victims - Cossacks, clergymen, ordinary peasants, professors, officers…teachers and workers. The logic was simple - to sow fear, to awaken people’s basest instincts, to turn them against each other and to make them obey blindly and unthinkingly.

There is no justification for these crimes. In our country, we have passed a clear political, legal and moral verdict on the atrocities of that totalitarian regime. And this verdict cannot be revised.

It would be hypocritical to urge us all to forget, especially before these graves and the people who come here to honor the memory of their family members. It would be hypocritical to say that everything has sunk into oblivion.

No, we must preserve the memory of the past, and will do so, no matter how bitter it may be. We cannot change the past, but we can preserve and restore the truth and, hence, historical justice.

Russian and Polish historians, clergymen and representatives of the public have undertaken this laborious task. While studying the past they are working for the sake of the truth, and, hence, the future of our bilateral relations.

It is these concerted efforts to reflect on the past and heal historical wounds that can help us avoid misunderstanding, permanent stalemate and primitive interpretations dividing peoples as innocent or guilty, as irresponsible politicians sometimes try to do.

For decades, there were attempts to conceal the truth about the Katyń massacre with cynical lies. But to lay the blame for these crimes on the Russian people would be the same sort of lies and manipulation.

History written with malice and hatred is just as false and glossed over as history adopted to suit the interests of specific individuals or specific groups. I’m sure that this is increasingly understood both in Russia and Poland.

No matter how difficult it may be, we should meet each other halfway, realizing that it is impossible to live only in the past.

And so today we are here together. Here, in Katyń, at the commemorative ceremony devoted to the 70th anniversary of the Polish tragedy. And we were together in Gdansk as well, on the anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two. Our nations fought against a common enemy on the fronts.

I’m confident that we will also celebrate the anniversary of the Great Victory (in World War Two) together, which was primarily won by the soldiers of the Red Army, and which claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers of the Polish Army, the Armia Krajowa and the Anders Army, as well as lives of thousands of defenders of Moscow and Warsaw, Westerplatte and Smolensk.

The big breakthrough was that Putin accepted the Polish version of events: this was an NKVD crime, not (as the Russian government argues in a case in the European Court in Strasbourg) unclear; and certainly not the work of the Nazis. But he also relativized the crime, arguing that Soviet prisoners of war lay in the same soil (something that historians have not previously asserted). And he came out with an original argument that Stalin had ordered the killings to avenge the deaths of an even greater number (30,000) of captured Soviet prisoners of war in 1920. That is problematic for several reasons. First, the number of those prisoners’ deaths is disputed and almost certainly far fewer than Mr. Putin claims. Second, they died chiefly from typhus at a time when the Polish state was barely able to feed and care for its own people (not least because it had just been attacked in its infancy by the Soviet Union). To equate that with the deliberate massacre of captured Polish officers suggests an alarming degree of slipperiness and relativism.

What Mr. Putin did not do is condemn Stalin outright. Nor did he take the elementary steps that the Poles are asking for, in terms of opening the archives (noting that Britain has yet to open all the files concerning the death of Władysław Sikorski in 1943). He said that exposing the names of the perpetrators would be unfair to their surviving relatives.

Overtures

Yet for many Poles, particularly those in government, the trajectory is enough. More patient diplomacy with the Russians will steadily produce more results. But hoping for a “big bang” is unrealistic. The Polish parliament, for example (stung by “Katyń denial”) has categorized the massacre as “genocide.” That is disingenuous. The scale is so vastly different from the Nazis’ mass killings that it looks self-absorbed. It offends Jews (and Armenians) who think that the label is theirs by virtue of much greater suffering. Perhaps Russia would have accepted that at the height of the Yeltsin years (when the then Russian leader visited Warsaw in 1993 he knelt at the Katyń memorial, laid flowers, and whispered “prostite nas, jesli mozhete” [forgive us, if you can]. But that era is past. For politicians impatient to make their mark on history, it seems better to take what can be gained now, rather than waiting for a future Russian leadership that might, perhaps, adopt a more radical stance.

A similar quasi-reconciliation is in the cards for Ukraine. The departure of Viktor Yushchenko has ended, at least for the next four years, the period in which a radical Ukrainian-centered view of history clashed head on with the Kremlin’s neo-Soviet version. No more bashing on about the Holodmor. No more glorification of Stepan Bandera and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army). No more arguments about Kievan Rus and who brought Orthodox Christianity to the Eastern Slavs. No more rows — probably — about the future of the Black Sea Fleet at its base in Sevastopol. With Belarus, the argument has never started. Moldova is too small and poor to matter (not to the Moldovans, of course, but to the outside world).

It is increasingly likely that he will make a similar overture to one of the Baltic States — most likely Lithuania. It would be easy to imagine Mr. Putin (or perhaps Mr. Medvedev) on a trip to Vilnius, making a somber but not penitent speech about history. It could go something like this:

In 1939 the specter of fascist aggression cast a shadow across the whole continent of Europe. The Western countries had failed to form a convincing anti-fascist alliance. Worse, they collaborated with the Nazis in the Munich agreement. Some circles in Baltic States were planning their own alliance with Nazi Germany too. To forestall that, and to buy time, the then Soviet leadership came to a temporary tactical arrangement under which the Baltic States came under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. That temporarily sheltered them from fascist aggression. In Lithuania’s case, it enabled the country to regain its historic capital Vilnius and some other territories. The incorporation [слияние] into the Soviet Union that then took place remains controversial to this day. Though it can be argued that it was technically in accordance with international law at the time, it clearly did not represent the freely expressed will of the Lithuanian people. That is a matter for regret as much for us as it is for you.

In return, Lithuania would drop its demands for compensation and for Russia to explicitly use the o-word (“occupation”). To ease the deal, Russia could agree to restore the oil pipeline to the Mažeikiai oil refinery, in return for a stake in it going to a friendly company (it is currently owned, but unloved, by the Polish PKN Orlen; Russia has cut off its supplies, claiming that the pipeline needs maintenance).

Such a deal would, it should be noted, leave the other Baltic States in a difficult position. Soviet rule in the Baltics during the occupation era was not uniform. Lithuania gained territory that it lost to Poland 20 years previously. In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Soviet Lithuania also regained Klaipeda. Under its long-serving (August 1940 to January 22, 1974) Communist Party chief Antanas Sniečkus, Lithuania avoided the Russification inflicted on its northern neighbors. The Soviet-era migration to Estonia and Latvia, and the citizenship and language laws adopted in response since independence, have raised legal issues, often poorly understood by outsiders, that do not concern Lithuania. In short: when Estonia and Latvia condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its consequences, they do so in slightly different terms.

Clearly a unilateral Lithuanian-Russian deal would be troublesome for Estonia and Latvia. It would therefore be nice to think that Lithuania would not even consider such a step without close consultation with the other two Baltic States. On the evidence of the past, that does not seem likely. On May 9, the Baltic States seem set to repeat the fiasco of 2005, when two presidents (Arnold Rüütel of Estonia and Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania) stayed away from the Russian 60th anniversary celebrations of victory in World War Two, and one (Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga of Latvia) showed up. This year, Estonia’s Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Latvia’s Valdis Zatlers are going, and Dalia Grybauskaite is staying away (the result of a botched attempt to entice Dmitry Medvedev into coming to Vilnius for the 20th anniversary of Lithuania’s declaration of restored independence). If the Baltic States cannot coordinate their stance on something as predictable as an anniversary, what chance do they have when facing up to a serious Russian effort to play divide et impera.

Conclusion

This smoothing over of historical rows is potential game-changer. For 20 years, it has been an article of faith for people in the region and their friends that laying the ghosts of Soviet history was both a moral and political imperative. Those efforts have failed. Stalinist and neo-Soviet versions of the past have not died. They have revived, albeit in diluted form. The rest of the world —and many in the former communist world —seem increasingly ready to accept messy compromise, woolly words and half-truths in order to have normal relations with Russia. Resisting that tide is going to be tough.

It is worth it — not least because of solidarity with those Russians who do care about the past. Mr. Putin’s step is a profoundly important and welcome one. But it is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for a real change.


[1] The Economist. The End of History, Revisited: The ex-communist states of eastern Europe are leaving their pasts behind. February 25, 2010, available at http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15577511.
[2] “Butterfly-Polka” (Polka-Babochka) is, incidentally, an unusual choice of phrase straight from the Stalinist propaganda lexicon, when it was used to indicate something utterly alien. See this explanation by Pavel Felgenhauer, a hard-hitting journalistic critic of the Kremlin, available at http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2372256.