2013 Virginia Festival of the Book: Christianity

Historian Robert Louis Wilken gave a presentation about his most recent book, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, at the 2013 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville on March 22.

The book festival's web site offers this biographical note on Wilken:

Robert Wilken, author of The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity Emeritus. He taught at UVa from 1985 to 2009 and is the author of many books, including The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought, and The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. He is also the editor of The Church's Bible, a series of commentaries based on writings of the church fathers.

Speaking to a packed auditorium in the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections on the grounds of the University of Virginia, Wilken gave an engaging and entertaining lecture that spanned topics from apostolic succession to Christianity's intellectual confrontation with Islam to the necessity of bishops for the survival of the church (taking a dig at Garry Wills for asking "Why priests?" in a book of that name).

Wilken explained that he wanted the book to include a full range of the Christian communities from the first 1,000 years of the church, including the Syriac churches of the Middle East, the Greek churches that expanded into Slavic lands, and the Latin church based in Rome, with stops along the way among the Coptic churches of Egypt and Christian churches farther south in Nubia (Sudan) and Ethiopia. He said that he wanted to keep the chapters short for readability's sake and, for the same reason, decided not to include footnotes. The book, he noted, is meant for general audiences, not academic readers.

A video of Wilken's complete remarks, including a question-and-answer session with the audience, is here:

The program on "Christianity: The First Thousand Years" was hosted by the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought, St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, and the Center for Christian Study.

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'Mad Dreams, Saving Graces'

Although I believe this book review was published in the International Freedom Review in 1989 or 1990, I have been unable to find that particular volume in my library. What did turn up in a file box was a typescript that shows its age simply by the fact that it was produced on a dot-matrix printer.

Mad Dreams, Saving Graces – Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy, by Michael T. Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1989. Pages: 270. Price: $19.95 (hardcover). 

Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

For the Polish people, the month of September 1989 resonates with history — past, present, and future. It was fifty years ago this month that Hitler’s forces, in cooperation with Stalin’s Red Army, dismembered Poland less than twenty years after it had achieved independence upon the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. September 1989 will be the first full month in more than forty years that Poland’s government is headed by a non-Communist, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The new prime minister is an unassuming intellectual, a newspaper editor who only a few years ago was jailed by the order of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who last month requested that Mazowiecki form a government under the umbrella of Solidarity, the free trade union movement banned from 1981 until last year. What the future holds is anybody’s guess, but given the rapidity of events that were unpredictable even eighteen months ago, for many people, optimism hard to avoid.

Michael T. Kaufman, an American reporter born of Polish parents in exile just before the Second World War, returned to his ancestral land as a New York Times correspondent in 1984.

What he discovered was a country living in conspiracy -- consciously, surreptitiously, historically living in a conspiracy designed to show that no totalitarian government whether Nazi orCommunist can keep the Polish people down.

Kaufman’s account of the underground Solidarity movement in the years following the declaration of martial law in December 1981 is full of tales of personal heroism. The heroes, however, are modest. What they do, they say, is only what is necessary to maintain their own dignity and that of their nation. Whether running from gun-toting secret police or editing underground newspapers, the conspirators felt that their conspiracy was nothing out of the ordinary, only the honest efforts of honest people to keep their heads above water. In Polish, writes Kaufman, “the word conspiracy has absolutely no negative connotation. A Pole will say, ‘I was a conspirator,’ in the same way a Frenchman might say, ‘I was with the wartime resistance.” It is a matter of pride.

It has become a commonplace among both travel writers arid political analysts to describe a nation as being filled with paradox. For Poland, however, this cliché is undoubtedly true. Kaufman writes that Poland’s “social landscape” is dominated by “tragic though sometimes ludicrous paradoxes. Almost everyone in Poland knew that what was economically necessary was politically impossible, that what was required was forbidden. The government knew this, the party knew this, the nation knew it.” He cites a Polish writer whom he had called absurdist in the tradition of Eugene Ionesco. The writer’s reaction to this characterization? “I am a realist like Zola. It is just Poland that is absurd.”

In Poland, merely not to lose is to win. This seems a paradox to us, because, as Kaufman explains, “For those brought up in pragmatic Western cultures, a system that accepts stalemate as the best possible substitute for success seems like a Wonderland absurdity.” Kaufman reminds us of the modest aspirations apparent in the Polish national anthem, which unlike national hymns that lay claim to God’s bounty or military victories, merely states, “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela" [“Poland has not yet perished”].

Poland is a police state like other Communist countries. It is just that the police are not quite so effective at stifling dissent and the underground conspiracy. The police are held in widespread disdain. One common joke in Warsaw asks: “Why do policemen here walk in threes?” Answer: “Well, the first is there because he can read, the second, because he can add, and the third, to keep tabs on the two intellectuals.” And are Poles proud that one of their countrymen, Feliks Dzierzynski, founded the Soviet secret police (forerunner of today’s KGB) arid participated in Stalin’s bloody purges? Well, in a manner of speaking. In one story about the monument to Dzierzynski in Warsaw, “an old peasant visits the statue, crosses himself, and tells a passerby that Dzierzynski was one of the greatest Poles who ever lived. When the stunned stranger asks why, the peasant tells him, ‘Because he killed more Communists and more Russians than vodka and winter.”

Poles are more aware of their history than perhaps any other European society. A university lecturer told Kaufman that “everywhere else, people think history is something that happens to strangers, while here it is what happens to our mothers and fathers and what is happening to us and our friends.”

What is happening now is the gradual transformation of a Communist police state into a democratic republic. The underground movement that arose spontaneously after martial law was declared in 1981 was not violent but intellectual. Said Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak, “Once resistance had meant taking up a gun. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters.” The underground consisted of “firms” of people engaged in political propaganda activities: newspapers, books, plays, musical performances, debates. The result was stimulation of political ideas and, finally, forcing the government to hold genuinely free elections in which Solidarity candidates won every seat that they contested.

Although Kaufman’s book necessarily ends its chronology of events some months before the most recent occurrences, it is interesting to note his guarded optimism about Poland’s future. Polish hopes for economic rescue by the West, he says, are “politically unrealistic. Some limited growth in capital from abroad [is] probable, particularly if state and society established a truce, but full-scale rescue by a consortium of benefactors seem[s] a chimera.” Moreover, the Polish example poses a threat to Soviet domination over its own republics, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where clamor for independence is loud today, and in the Ukraine and elsewhere farther down the road. How far will Gorbachev allow the Poles to go before saying “Enough!”?

It is far too early to make an accurate assessment of Poland’s economic and political future. What is clear to me, at least, is that the hard-won status now enjoyed by Solidarity is Solidarity’s to lose. Economic or political failure is the unfortunate likely outcome for a government made up of people who have never before held responsible public offices. The hard choices necessary to reform the Polish economy will come down most severely on Solidarity’s own constituents, the workers: higher food prices, layoffs, closing plants and industries. In fact, it may be necessary, on the basis of economic realities, to close down the inefficient and archaic Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which besides being totally non-competitive with foreign shipbuilders, is the birthplace of Solidarity. What an ironic, paradoxical grace note to accompany Solidarity’s triumph!


Richard Sincere, a Washington-based issues analyst, is an American of Polish descent.

'Europe's Neutral States: Partners or Profiteers in Western Security?'

This book review appeared in the Fall 1987 edition of Strategic Review, a publication of the United States Strategic Institute. A shorter version was published in the Spring 1988 edition of Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Vol. 17, No. 1).

Balance-Sheets of Nonalignment

EUROPE’S NEUTRAL STATES: Partners or Profiteers in Western Security?

By Stephan Kux
London: Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies
1986. 42 pages. $8.00

Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

What is the role played by neutral states in the international political system? Is the concept of neutrality still a truly meaningful one in contemporary international politics? Or has neutrality become merely a narrowly legal (and convenient) concept bereft of any real political cutting-edge?

If, as Professor Roderick Ogley asserts, neutrality is “an enormous subject, almost coterminous with world politics as a whole,” these questions deserve further exploration. What surprises the student of international relations today is the absence of relevant material. While descriptive analyses of the politics of individual neutral states are plentiful, no substantial, book-length study of neutrality has been published during the past twenty years — at least in the English language. There certainly have been no new challengers to Philip Jessup’s comprehensive, four-volume study of neutrality published in the mid-1930s.

This short monograph by Stephan Kux, a Swiss political analyst, makes a concise contribution to the literature on neutrality by focusing on Austria, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. He asks if these four countries are getting a “free ride” for their security on the back of the Western Alliance. He concludes that, except for Switzerland, none of them can adequately provide for their own defense, and that they lean instead on mutual nuclear deterrence between the superpowers and their alliances as their principal pillar of security.

Two of Kux’s examples best illuminate the phenomenon. One is Ireland. There is broad domestic-political support for Ireland’s neutrality, and public opinion in its favor hovers around 85 per cent. Neutrality is not rigorously defined in Irish law or politics, however, and it has “come to be regarded by the general public as an essentially nationalistic symbol, fraught with nostalgia toward a hard-won independence and with a persistently anti-British flavor arising from its irredentist claim to a united Ireland.”

Ireland is much too weak to defend its territorial integrity in the event of a major war. This is clear from the “strength” of the Navy of this island nation, which consists of approximately 1,500 men in 7 offshore patrol vessels and 3 helicopters, operating from a single base in Cork with a mandate to cover all of Ireland’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The Air Force features less than 900 personnel manning but 15 combat aircraft. According to Kux, “by far the greatest part of the country’s defense expenditure” — amounting to only 1.8 per cent of the gross national product and 3.1 per cent of the government budget — “is devoted to assistance of the civil power in policing the Irish conflict,” with much of the rest going to sections of the 12,000-strong Irish Army seconded to U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Ireland’s hope for resisting invasion is vested not in the military defense of its integrity and neutrality but in the presumption that its territory will not be considered a prize by either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in the event of war. There are two geostrategic perspectives on Ireland’s importance. One argues that the country is unimportant and that any needs that NATO may have in the region are covered by permanent access to British bases in Northern Ireland. The second perspective sees Ireland as a “missing link” in the defense of the North Atlantic, because the country could “provide the opportunity for extending the reach of electronic surveillance systems, anti-submarine warfare and air defense systems.” The island would also provide a useful logistics base for resupplying NATO forces in the event of a protracted conflict on the continent.

The ambiguity of this geostrategic role has to some extent made Ireland’s neutrality a bargaining chip for Dublin. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill suggested that unification could be the reward for Irish participation in the war against Nazi Germany. The offer was repeated, sotto voce, upon the formation of NATO. On the latter occasion, the Irish refusal was accepted easily because it appeared that the Alliance’s strategic needs could be fulfilled without Irish membership in the Alliance.

Yet, the topic continues to be raised. Enoch Powell, the former Conservative Member of Parliament for South Down in Ulster, told a reporter for the Financial Times in May 1987:  “Without the island of Ireland there is a yawning gap in NATO.... NATO strategists have never been satisfied that Ireland is absent from their ring.” Powell believes that the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (the so-called Hillsborough Agreement) was the consequence of pressures from Washington designed to get the British to disengage from Northern Ireland, speed up the process of Irish unification, and in the end deliver a united Ireland for membership in the Atlantic Alliance. That none of this was discussed publicly by either Dublin or Westminster escapes Powell’s argument, which thus rings hollow. Nevertheless, the fact that the point is raised at all indicates both the sensitivity and continued liveliness of the issue.

Kux’s other telling case study is Sweden. Since 1815 Sweden has managed to stay neutral in all wars and to follow a policy of what is now called nonalignment. In the Twentieth Century invitations to join military alliances have never found a strong resonance among Swedish political leaders. Membership in NATO was firmly refused by Sweden. Immediately after the war, serious consideration was given to Swedish participation in a Nordic neutrality pact, but the idea was stillborn when Norway and Denmark joined the Atlantic Alliance


Swedish national security policy is geared to military defense of the nation’s neutrality and territorial integrity. It seeks to employ a defense force adequate to deter any potential attacker. Whether or not Sweden has that capability is moot.

The series of violations of Swedish territorial waters by Soviet submarines over the past six years has brought some of the inadequacies of Swedish territorial defense into focus. It has also brought an impetus to defense spending. There will be a rise in spending over the next ten years to begin to compensate for the steady decline between 1966 and 1986, when defense spending as a proportion of gross national product fell from 4.2 to 2.9 per cent. Nonetheless, Swedish Commander-in-Chief General Bengt Gustafsson has quipped: “We are still going to become gradually weaker, but more slowly than before.” He expects defense spending to rise to 3 or 3.5 per cent of GNP in the 1990s.

In response partly to the intruding Soviet submarines but also other developments, the recognition has grown in Sweden that its northern region holds more strategic value than it did twenty or thirty years ago. Indeed, George Richey of the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies has posited that “Sweden is the key to the northern flank, and the northern flank is the key to Central Europe.” This view reflects the Soviet buildup in the Baltic and on the Kola Peninsula, and the construction of the world’s largest naval base at Murmansk.

Pending the proposed increase in defense spending — and provided that it is allocated to an optimal mix of manpower and weaponry — it is unlikely that Sweden will be capable of a viable defense of its neutrality in any general European conflict. As former Commander-in-Chief General Lennart Ljung has admitted: “There is a growing gap between the demands which have been placed on us and our actual capabilities.” An annual increase of 3 per cent over five years, he told a parliamentary committee, would be sufficient to redress the erosion of the past two decades. Certainly the infrastructure is there to inspire confidence — an arms industry of growing sophistication, a civil defense program that is nearly the equal of Switzerland’s, and 30 new Gripen multirole aircraft now on line. The details remain to be debated and implemented.

Notwithstanding these defense deficiencies and their strategic implications for NATO — which apply also in one measure or another to the other neutrals — any effort to steer these countries into an explicit embrace by the Atlantic Alliance may not be wise, let alone promising. Kux notes that “to exert direct pressure upon them to develop a closer relationship with NATO and the European Community could well prove counterproductive.” It is better, he believes, to accept the neutrals as “very much a part of the wider Western community.” As long as they share Western political values and practices, “the Western democracies should assist them in every appropriate way to maintain robust and credible defenses, and to pursue assertive but realistic foreign policies based upon a mature and informed public opinion.”

One drawback to this study is the author’s choice not to include Finland as one of Europe’s neutral states. The relations of Finland with the Soviet Union on the one hand, and with the West on the other, have strongly influenced some views of Europe’s future evolution. Indeed, Helmut Sonnenfeldt has spoken of possible “Finlandization of Eastern Europe,” just as other Western analysts have speculated fearfully about a subtle process of “Finlandization” in Western Europe. At any rate, Finland certainly meets the criteria of neutrality, and thus should have been included in Kux’s lineup.

This omission notwithstanding, Stephan Kux has given us a good, if brief, introduction to the problems and prospects of neutrality in Europe in the late Twentieth Century. Hopefully it will inspire more comprehensive and searching inquiry into these important but neglected factors of Europe’s geostrategic and political equation.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant.

'A German Identity, 1770-1990'

This book review appeared in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 1, 1989, just a few days before the Berlin Wall came down (on November 9 of that year).




RICHARD SINCERE
The Story of Germany: From Principalities to A Divided Nation

A German Identity, 1770-1990, by Harold James, Routtedge, Chapman and HalL 240 pp.

Talk about the reunification of Germany has been suspended for a while; the recent flood of East German refugees across the border threatens to depopulate the entire country, rendering the whole question moot. Barely 40 years after East Germany was founded by its Soviet overlords, its experiment in German state socialism is proving to be a failure.

The almost panicky desire of East Germans to emigrate and to take up citizenship in West Germany is symptomatic of the German nation’s search for identity, a search that has taken up most of the past 200 years of German history. This is the subject of Harold James’ fascinating book A German Identity, 1770-1990.

James, assistant professor of history at Princeton University and until recently a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, argues that in the 19th century a doctrine emerged among German intellectuals and political leaders that drew its justification for the German nation “primarily by reference to the inexorable logic of economic development.”

As a result, Germany’s national fortunes rose and fell so to speak — with the stock market. In periods of economic decline, people lost faith in the nation entirely, leading to political chaos and eventually giving birth to the Nazi era. This is not to say that cultural, linguistic, religious, and other influences failed to contribute to German nationalism and national identity. James’ assertion is simply that until the advent of massive economic growth in the mid-1800s, German national identity did not coalesce. Similarly, the unification of myriad German states and statelets could not take place until a certain level of economic integration had been reached.

This belief was current among German nationalists in the mid-l9th century; the economic drive toward national unity was a conscious one, not merely coincidental with political developments.

After the German empire was proclaimed in 1871, German national identity had ample opportunity to develop, further. One interesting development was the emergence, in the 1880s and ‘90s, of explicitly anti-semitic political parties.

To those who think Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews was a horrible exaggeration of a deviant strain of German thinking learning about these activities of the last century comes as a surprise. James’ report is chilling in light of what came later:

“[The anti-semitic intellectuals] sought in the first place to mobilize hatred,” he writes. “Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, who founded the anitsemitic Deutsche Volksverein, did not care about any broader program or indeed any rationale other than simply a violent dislike. ‘first we waht to become a political power,’ be said, ‘then we shall seek the scientific evidence for anti-Semitism.’”

During this period, several parties arose that actually took “anti-semitic” as part of their name; there was no hiding their agenda. Examples included the Antisemitische Deutschsoziale Partei [Anti-Semitic German Social Party] and the Antisemitische Volkspartei [Anti-Semitic People’s Party].

One reason anti-semitism became so important in the German’s search for national identity stems from a longstanding German habit of defining the German nation in terms of other nations. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Germans adopted the customs, styles, and even languages of others. German intellectuals openly admired English and American systems of government, French philosophy, and Greek civilization. The aristocracy and rising middle classes unashamedly aped styles of dress from Paris.

Of course, some Germans warned against this copycat culturalism. Germaine Necker, better known as Madame de Staël, wrote that “self-abnegation and esteem for others are qualities in individuals, but the patriotism of nations must be egotistical.” Other critics were harsher.

Still, even in modern times the Germans have seemed obsessed with comparisons to other nations and cultures. At the time of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, one Nazi newspaper exhorted its readers to show the world Germany’s best side; “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more light-living than the Viennese, more vital than the Russians, more cosmopolitan than Londoners, more practical than New Yorkers.”

The most pressing question of German identity we face today is, of course, the division of Germany into two parts at the end of World War II. German reunification has been a cloud hanging over Europe for more than 40 years. The French and the Russians fear a strong, united Germany, having suffered so much at its hands during the two world wars. There has never been a peace treaty signed to bring World War II to an end, primarily because the German question remains unsettled.

To counteract this precarious situation, West Germany and France pioneered the European Economic Community, which now comprises 12 nations. West German prosperity, tied closely to the fortunes of other Western nations, serves as a palliative against the twin shames of the Nazi heritage and the division of the German nation against the will of the German people.

And, as we see each day on the evening news, East Germans — citizens of the most prosperous Eastern bloc country — are dissatisfied with their lot and are willing to sacrifice everything to move to West Germany.

It is clearly not just material prosperity that draws these refugees to the West. They desire freedom, something that even glasnost and perestroika cannot offer and desire a chance to participate in the German nation unencumbered by Moscow.

Harold James’ book, A German Identity, 1770-1990, helps us to understand what these Germans are looking for. Not just a history book, but an interpretive essay that requires of the reader substantial knowledge of German events (and particularly chronology), it belongs on the shelf alongside Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism and Gordon Craig’s The Germans. Its analysis of nationalism is an important contribution to the theoretical literature, and its specific examination of the German people puts it among the best socio-political studies of modem Germany.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

'The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain'

This review originally appeared in The Washington Times on Thursday, September 17, 1987.




BOOK REVIEW / Richard Sincere
Spain after Franco
The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain
By John Hooper
Penguin, $6.95 paper, 287 pages


Earlier this year, sporadic demonstrations and riots by students occurred in the Spanish university towns of Salamanca, Madrid and Seville. It was unclear to observers exactly what the students wanted. They seemed to riot for riots’ sake.

Some light is shed on the situation in “The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain,” journalist John Hooper’s comprehensive examination of the Spain that has emerged in the 12 years since the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

One problem Spanish students face is the inability of the country’s job market to absorb university graduates. Paradoxically, the students are demanding the removal of all barriers to university admission and more state grants to those in higher education. If the government yields to these demands, the students may soon regret it. As Mr. Hooper reports, there are some 500,000 undergraduates in the universities and another 190,000 in the junior colleges or polytechnics, “which is more, frankly, than a country of her level of economic development requires, especially in a recession. Ever since the mid-’70s graduate unemployment has been a serious problem.”

Mr. Hooper does not limit his book to contemporary policy problems such as education. Although he says in the introduction that “this is not a book about politics or economics:’ it is in fact both. “The Spaniards” successfully takes the measure of the country since Franco’s death in 1975. Its chapters on the church, the family, the sexual revolution, the welfare state, housing and the media each vividly portray not only events since 1975, but the social forces that preceded them.

There is a misconception about Spain often encountered in North America and Europe (as Mr. Hooper notes, the Spanish, like the British, often refer to Europe as though it is somewhere else). This misconception is that for the four decades of dictatorship, Spain was a boiling pot with a lid clamped down, and that Franco’s death took the lid off, precipitating near-revolutionary change. This is only half true.

The social forces shaping Spain under the constitutional monarchy of King Juan Carlos have their roots in the rapid economic development that started in 1961 and began slowing down in 1973, a period known as the anos de desarrollo. As in so many countries where political development is hampered and channels of political expression are blocked, the energies of the Spanish people were directed toward industry.

The result of the anos de desarrollo was not only a nearly unbelievable rise in the standard of living — per capita income quadrupled — but a sea-change in Spain’s demographics. Whole regions of Andalusia, Murcia and the central meseta emptied as shanty towns multiplied in suburbs around Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and San Sebastian. This in turn caused subtle but discernible shifts in family living and in language patterns.

In prosperous Catalonia, for instance, non-Catalan workers began speaking Catalan instead of Castilian (Spanish) in the work place. The demographic shift also put pressure on the housing market and pushed up the demand for consumer goods.

The development of Spain’s new constitutional government is also a reflection of the time that came before it. Adolfo Suarez, the first prime minister chosen by the newly installed Juan Carlos, had been a junior member of the government under the late dictatorship; the current, Socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzales, was once a member of the Young Falangists. The decision to grant autonomy to provinces and regions came about because of nationalist sentiments (and even terrorist movements) in the Basque region, Galicia and Catalonia that had been felt for decades.

It is in his descriptions of the various regions of Spain that Mr. Hooper is at his best. He provides capsule histories rich in detail that show how disparate countries came together to form a unified Spain, how successive governments in Madrid held the Iberian Peninsula together, and how in the last years of Franco, nationalism (‘regionalism” is too weak a word) had grown so much that it became an unignorable force.

The case of Catalonia is telling. I can attest to the depth of feeling there, having visited Barcelona province several months ago.

Although the new constitution gives the Catalan language full recognition along with Castilian after years of suppression under Franco, it is not uncommon to see bilingual commercial signs with the Spanish half smeared with red paint and a Catalan nationalist slogan, such as “Visca Catala” (“Long live Catalan!”), sprayed alongside it.

There is a movement afoot to have Catalan declared one of the official languages of the European Community — perhaps a not-unreasonable request, as more people speak Catalan than Danish or Irish. As if to make their point, Catalan-language enthusiasts sponsored a consumer fair on the Ramblas, Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, in which all products were labeled solely in Catalan.

As Spain enters the mainstream of the Western political community -- it is now a member of both NATO and the EC -- it must come to grips with its new identity. The society that is emerging, Mr. Hooper says, is “distinctly idiosyncratic.”

Spain is “a federal monarchy with a tax-paying king whose father was alive when [Juan Carlos] ascended the throne; a welfare state in which three-quarters of the jobless do not qualify for unemployment pay; a former police state where the majority of detectives belong to a trade union founded by erstwhile members of the secret police; a democracy in which the circulation of a neo-fascist newspaper has risen sixfold; and a country dedicated to the cult of the Virgin Mary where there are a half a dozen whores for every nun.”

The past decade has been tumultuous, producing a Spanish state that is democratic; autonomous regions that are linguistically and culturally diverse; and multiple political parties competing for real power. Thus has Spain become a laboratory for the hypothesis that authoritarian states, which allow some freedom and competition, more easily become democracies than do totalitarian societies, which lack institutions that compete against the state.

There is still some fear that Francoist elements within the armed forces may attempt a coup. Such an attempt did take place in 1981. But younger officers are coming from more diverse sectors of society than their predecessors, and thus have more democratic views.

Those of us who spent the mid-1970s glued to the iconoclastic comedy “Saturday Night Live” saw Chevy Chase report, week after week, that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still seriously dead.” To American high-school students in 1975 the line was morbidly funny; in 1987, Spanish high school students can freely take to the streets as one of the fruits of Franco’s demise.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant.

'Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays'

This article appeared originally in the International Freedom Review, Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 1991. This is the first time it has been made available on line or in digital format.

Book Review
LIFE IN FREEDOM
Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays 
by Stanislaw Baranczak
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 258 pages; cloth, no price given.)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

What follows is a sort of trompe d’oeil of a book review, as Stanislaw Baranczak’s Breathing Under Wateris essentially a collection of book reviews. Perhaps if this present essay is someday published in a collection, and another reviewer tries his hand at a critique... but enough! The mind boggles, which is precisely the effect Baranczak achieves in his description of life in Eastern Europe under totalitarian communism.

Baranczak is a remarkably fluid writer in English, considering that he only came to the United States in 1982, in the aftermath of Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s martial law crackdown on the Solidarity trade union. In this he shares a heritage with other Central Europeans who chose to express themselves in English, such as the Pole, Joseph Conrad, and the Czech, Tom Stoppard.

Baranczak is a finely-honed and witty stylist who writes with a clear understanding of his audience. He can make an obscure Polish essayist of the early twentieth century come alive for American readers who have never encountered a single one of the books under discussion. This is a rare talent.

Baranczak is at his best in the first few essays in this collection, in which he describes the culture shock that awaits Eastern Europeans (“E.E.”) who arrive in the West. Given current circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe—where not only travel but emigration is easier than ever before—these chapters are especially pertinent today.

His biting wit targets both East and West. He lists some “things American which E.E. will never be able to come to terms with” like Barbara Walters, Wonder Bread, stand-up parties, baseball, and small talk, among others. Ms. Walters, he says, reminds E.E. “of the superficiality and pretentious blah-blah of Eastern Europe’s own TV anchors” and television commercials, which “though basically unknown as a genre in the Communist bloc, have much in common with the general mindlessness and bad taste of what serves as mass culture there.”

Baranczak is not always lighthearted In his approach. The themes and subjects he takes up include some that are quite serious. He reviews biographies of Lech Walesa and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski; he analyzes the prison letters of Václav Havel; and he searches the collected poems and plays of Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) for an underlying philosophy currently guiding the Pontiff. He takes on important but neglected Polish writers who perished during the Holocaust or who spent their entire careers in exile, avoiding Nazi and communist persecution. He reveals the secrets of totalitarian censorship and how the oppressed are able to be creative and truthful despite it all.

In the book’s title essay, originally delivered as an address in Boston in 1982, he points out that in totalitarian countries, “the so-called dissidents. . . may of course constitute a minority, and they usually do; but on the other hand, they are the only normal people around.”

More precisely, he writes, the dissidents are the people who most actively seek to “live like human beings.” Poland, he said, though it may be a country under occupation (this was the period of martial law, when totalitarian repression was brought out in the open), is a country “of free people who know exactly what they want and who most certainly will continue their struggle to achieve it.”

Despite the efforts of apologists and merely ignorant people in the West who try to understand the totalitarian regime or explain away its oppression using Western paradigms, “the only people who still behave abnormally and who constitute the minority — in other words, the only real dissidents in today’s Poland—are its Communist rulers.”

This lesson must be learned and remembered by all of us. It is too early to take for granted the emerging democracies of Central Europe. Ethnic tensions simmer beneath the surface. Yugoslavia is ready to fall apart. Romania and Bulgaria, despite changes in regime, still suffer under communist rule. In Poland itself, Solidarity’s once indivisible solidarity was riven by disputes between Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, representatives of just two of many factions.

In Hungary, the free-market-oriented ruling party has lost seats to the (former) Communists in a number of local election contests. Only in Czechoslovakia and what used to be East Germany do the transitions to democracy seem to be going relatively smoothly. Yet in Czechoslovakia there have been disputes over what the name of the country should be — “the Czech and Slovak Federated Republic” seems to have won the battle for compromises, seeking to satisfy the historically dissatisfied Slovaks in a federation dominated by Czechs — while In eastern Germany, strikes among the industrial proletariat began soon after reunification, a signal of the deep-felt fears of economic upheaval after years of impoverished certainty.

The bottom line is that we have not yet reached Fukuyama’s proclaimed “End of History.” Communism is not yet a museum piece. It still exists in Albania, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and in nascent forms in various so-called Third World countries. It still earns the allegiance of a few recalcitrant American academics who continue to plead, “True Marxism has simply never been tried.” We must, therefore, still worry about totalitarianism and its effects on the human soul.

In this collection of essays, devoted primarily to explorations of the human spirit, Stanislaw Baranczak ultimately spins a cautionary tale of many threads, warning us to be aware that our own human frailties too often lead to the totalitarian temptation. Baranczak uses two terms to praise another author that apply equally to himself: “perspicacity of vision” and “lucidity of prose.” These make Breathing Under Water a compelling read.

Richard Sincere is author of several books, including Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa (Washington: International Freedom Foundation, 1990) and a frequent contributor to the book pages of the International Freedom Review. Currently, Mr. Sincere is editor of CSIS News at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.