The Belgian Curtain: Europe after Communism — A Reader’s Guide

Vassals were little freer than slaves. In comparison, burghers, the inhabitants of the city, were liberated from the bondage of the feudal labour contract. As a result, they were able to acquire private possessions and the city acted as supreme guarantor of their property rights. Urban centers relied on trading and economic might to obtain and secure political autonomy.

John of Paris, arguably one of the first capitalist cities (at least according to Braudel), wrote: "(The individual) had a right to property which was not with impunity to be interfered with by superior authority - because it was acquired by (his) own efforts" (in Georges Duby, "The age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1981). Max Weber, in his opus, "The City" (New York, MacMillan, 1958) wrote optimistically about urbanization: "The medieval citizen was on the way towards becoming an economic man ... the ancient citizen was a political man".

But communism halted this process. It froze the early feudal frame of mind of disdain and derision towards "non-productive", "city-based" vocations. Agricultural and industrial occupations were romantically extolled by communist parties everywhere. The cities were berated as hubs of moral turpitude, decadence and greed. Ironically, avowed anti-communist right wing populists, like Hungary's former prime minister, Orban, sought to propagate these sentiments, to their electoral detriment.

Communism was an urban phenomenon - but it abnegated its "bourgeoisie" pedigree. Private property was replaced by communal ownership. Servitude to the state replaced individualism. Personal mobility was severely curtailed. In communism, feudalism was restored.

Very like the Church in the Middle Ages, communism sought to monopolize and permeate all discourse, all thinking, and all intellectual pursuits. Communism was characterized by tensions between party, state and the economy - exactly as the medieval polity was plagued by conflicts between church, king and merchants-bankers.

In communism, political activism was a precondition for advancement and, too often, for personal survival. John of Salisbury might as well have been writing for a communist agitprop department when he penned this in "Policraticus" (1159 AD): "...if (rich people, people with private property) have been stuffed through excessive greed and if they hold in their contents too obstinately, (they) give rise to countless and incurable illnesses and, through their vices, can bring about the ruin of the body as a whole". The body in the text being the body politic.

Workers, both industrial and agricultural, were lionized and idolized in communist times. With the implosion of communism, these frustrated and angry rejects of a failed ideology spawned many grassroots political movements, lately in Poland, in the form of "Self Defence". Their envied and despised enemies are the well-educated, the intellectuals, the self-proclaimed new elite, the foreigner, the minority, the rich, and the remote bureaucrat in Brussels.

Like in the West, the hinterland tends to support the right. Orban's Fidesz lost in Budapest in the recent elections - but scored big in villages and farms throughout Hungary. Agrarian and peasant parties abound in all three central European countries and often hold the balance of power in coalition governments.

THE YOUNG and THE NEW versus THE TIRED and THE TRIED

The cult of youth in central Europe was an inevitable outcome of the utter failure of older generations. The allure of the new and the untried often prevailed over the certainty of the tried and failed. Many senior politicians, managers, entrepreneurs and journalists across this region are in their 20's or 30's.

Yet, the inexperienced temerity of the young has often led to voter disillusionment and disenchantment. Many among the young are too identified with the pratfalls of "reform". Age and experience reassert themselves through the ballot boxes - and with them the disingenuous habits of the past. Many of the "old, safe hands" are former communists disingenuously turned socialists turned democrats turned capitalists. As even revolutionaries age, they become territorial and hidebound. Turf wars are likely to intensify rather then recede.

THE TECHNOCRATS / EXPERTS versus THE LOBBYIST-MANAGERS

Communist managers - always the quintessential rent-seekers - were trained to wheedle politicians, lobby the state and cadge for subsidies and bailouts, rather than respond to market signals. As communism imploded, the involvement of the state in the economy - and the resources it commanded - contracted. Multilateral funds are tightly supervised. Communist-era "directors" - their skills made redundant by these developments - were shockingly and abruptly confronted with merciless market realities.

Predictably they flopped and were supplanted by expert managers and technocrats, more attuned to markets and to profits, and committed to competition and other capitalistic tenets. The decrepit, "privatized" assets of the dying system expropriated by the nomenclature were soon acquired by foreign investors, or shut down. The old guard has decisively lost its capital - both pecuniary and political.