<\/p>\n
Moving Forward, Looking Back<\/b><\/p>\n
A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe,\u00a0<\/span>Milan Kundera<\/span><\/p>\n Faber & Faber,\u00a0<\/span>2023,\u00a0<\/span>74 pp<\/span><\/p>\n Two priests meet up at U \u010cern\u00e9ho vola. By the time they start drinking their second beer, they find themselves in a deep theological debate. Back and forth the argument goes. But they just cannot come to an agreement. As the priests leave the pub, they decide to write to the Pope and ask for help in settling their dispute.<\/span><\/p>\n Back at the monastery, the first priest sits down at his desk. \u201cDear Holy Father,\u201d he writes. \u201cIs it okay to smoke cigarettes while I pray?\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/span>A few weeks go by and eventually the first priest receives a reply. \u201cNo, it\u2019s not okay,\u201d<\/em> the Pope writes. \u201cPrayer is a serious endeavor. When one is communicating with God, it\u2019s important to fully concentrate entirely on prayer.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the meantime, the second priest had also written his own letter. \u201cIs it okay to pray while I am smoking?\u201d<\/em> He asks the Pope.\u00a0<\/span>The Pope responds to this second letter too. \u201cYes,\u201d<\/em> he replies, \u201cthere is never a bad time to pray. God is always listening.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n In short, the manner in which a question is formulated very much impacts the answer. Albert Einstein once posited that if he had 60 minutes to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes framing the issue and just five working out the solution. In practice, that is rarely how it works. These days hot takes on current events are blasted across the Internet in seconds. When it comes to thinking about geopolitics, the tendency is to dust off an old solution to an old problem and use it again \u2014 even in cases where it didn\u2019t work that well the first time. Creativity, thinking rooted in inductive reasoning, is entirely displaced by deductive reasoning.<\/span><\/p>\n Donald Trump and Viktor Orb\u00e1n are dangerous, not because their popularity reflects real flaws in the way society is organized, but because they associate with people who have<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Today\u2019s Tweets, op-eds and podcasts insist that we have entered a \u2018new\u2019 Cold War. Depending on the day, the US-led West is pitted against China or Russia, or both. When it feels too complicated to specify an enemy, it\u2019s enough to settle for abstractions like authoritarianism, illiberalism or populism. We can also mix these things together in convenient ways. Anything to avoid self-examination. <\/span>Donald Trump and Viktor Orb\u00e1n are dangerous, not because their popularity reflects real flaws in the way society is organized, but because they associate with people who have \u2014 in a vague but damning phrase \u2014 <\/span>\u201cKremlin ties\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n This reflexive referencing of the Cold War \u2014 a very unusual historical period based on an infinitesimally rare bipolar international system \u2014 frames problems in a way guaranteed to produce flawed solutions. Why is contemporary US-China competition not compared to the late 19th and early 20th century rivalry between the British and German empires that helped spur World War I? Is it because your average newspaper columnist has considered this and then concluded that today\u2019s conditions better resemble the late 20th century? Of course not. We don\u2019t draw this parallel because the people most inclined to do so have all died. <\/span><\/p>\n Contemporary governments, media and academia are led by people who came of age in the late Cold War, so they cram current events back into a vintage Cold War box.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If history is any guide, such recency bias will cause many people to die. It\u2019s the exact same thinking that led World War I generals to send horse-mounted infantry charging into machine gun fire. In the 1930s, it led the French to assume that constructing defenses along the Maginot Line bordering Germany would help them prevail in future trench warfare. That future never came, as the Nazis marched around the fortifications and into Paris. During the Vietnam War, the United States replicated World War II tactics, deploying hundreds of thousands of troops while carpet bombing the enemy. By 2003, advocates of the US invasion of Iraq invoked the 1930s appeasement of Hitler to justify deposing Saddam Hussein. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also hoped to demonstrate he had learned lessons from the Vietnam debacle. So the US Army tried to occupy a vast country of 438,446 square kilometers<\/span> with insufficient troops. Rumsfeld had forgotten that he was fighting the Iraq War instead of Vietnam War II.<\/span><\/p>\n Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has fueled more talk of a Cold War sequel. It has also provoked comparisons with specific events from the Cold War \u2014 the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example. This general atmosphere no doubt contributed to Faber & Faber\u2019s decision to republish two late 20th century essays from the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera<\/strong> under the title \u201cA Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe\u201d. The book\u2019s first section centers on Kundera\u2019s 1967 speech to the Czechoslovak Union of Writers. The second includes Kundera\u2019s 1983 essay \u201cThe Tragedy of Central Europe,\u201d which first appeared in the French journal <\/span>La Deb\u00e1t<\/span><\/i> before it was translated and published pretty much everywhere. Each section is preceded by a short introduction \u2014 written by Jacques Rupnik<\/strong> and Pierre Nora<\/strong>, respectively.<\/span><\/p>\n Kundera does not speak or write with a historical outlook of minutes, days or weeks. He is thinking in centuries. Kundera is interested in ideas like \u2018nation\u2019 and \u2018language\u2019 and \u2018culture\u2019 \u2014 not scoring points against political straw men or women.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The publisher makes no claim for historical parallels, but they no doubt hope the buying public will. Readers are fortunate that <\/span>Kundera does not speak or write with a historical outlook of minutes, days or weeks. He is thinking in centuries. Kundera is interested in ideas like \u2018nation\u2019 and \u2018language\u2019 and \u2018culture\u2019 \u2014 not scoring points against political straw men or women.<\/span> In addition to feeding new Cold War delirium, there are no doubt plenty who might wish to harness Kundera\u2019s writing to craft simple arguments about the merits of liberalism, globalization or democracy. Though Kundera may sympathize with many of those ideals, these two pieces defy expectations. He is thinking aloud, and even if you disagree with his conclusions, engaging with well-communicated complex thinking is a useful exercise.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Small Nations, Big Thinking<\/b><\/p>\n Kundera\u2019s 1967 speech \u2014 made when he was 38 years old \u2014 is a curious historical document that does not easily fit into the 2023 preferred style of discourse. The speech is most relevant today as an artifact representing the culturally liberalizing Prague Spring era that preceded the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. At the same conference, another writer, Ludv\u00edk Vacul\u00edk, gave a much more inflammatory, politically charged, speech condemning the Communist Party\u2019s preeminent role in Czechoslovak society. \u201cNot one human question has been solved in the course of the last twenty years,\u201d Vacul\u00edk said of Communist rule, going on to blame it for the country\u2019s \u201cpostwar failure\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In collective memory, Vacul\u00edk\u2019s speech has somehow imbued Kundera\u2019s cultural argument with additional political weight. Kundera\u2019s speech, however, is not overtly political. Nor is it liberal. In fact, it is quite nationalist, and Kundera\u2019s nationality is Czech \u2014 not Czechoslovak. Given the topic and tenor of Kundera\u2019s speech, this distinction is important. At its 1918 founding, Czechoslovakia was a diverse, multinational state. Czechs made up less than half the country\u2019s population. That country of 13.5 million housed more Germans than Slovaks, along with Hungarians, Romany, Ruthenians, Poles and more than 100,000 Jews. By the time Kundera spoke in 1967, a good amount of that diversity was gone. The hellish Nazi occupation certainly played a major role, but so too did forced deportations implemented by the Czechoslovak government. In Kundera\u2019s telling, Czech culture is a victim of history, but the full 1967 version of the story was more complicated.<\/span><\/p>\n Kundera condemns \u201cvast integrationist approaches\u201d that are looking to \u201cbring about a common history\u201d before adding that \u201cculture is important as ever to justify and preserve our national identity.\u201d Today, Kundera\u2019s nationalism is seen as understandable, even honorable. We know of the brutal Soviet led occupation of the country that would follow. But Kundera does not so much speak of the Soviet or Russian presence as he does glorify the rebirth of culture that began with the 18th and 19th century Czech National Revival. He implies that the cultural flowering of the Prague Spring carries that spirit forward.<\/span><\/p>\n So far as anyone talks this way in contemporary Central Europe, they are figures coming from the political right. In a 2019 speech, for example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n warned that his country risked \u201cdrifting rootlessly away in the storms of history\u201d in a Europe that was being led by people who \u201cdo not mind if our continent gives up its culture\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n Kundera and Orb\u00e1n do not think about culture in the same ways, but nor do they sound like adversaries. In 2023, it\u2019s hard to believe any progressive Czech speaking the way Kundera does.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n As a writer, Kundera is interested in language and literature. He is preoccupied with the fate of small nations, but size is a relative concept. He is addressing the Czechoslovak Union of Writers (not just the \u2018Czechs\u2019 as the book intimates), and yet he doesn\u2019t once use the word Slovak in his speech. This focus on Czech language and literature looks ironic decades later, as Kundera ceased to write in Czech, trading it for cosmopolitan French. Incidentally, it is also worth noting that the new English language translation presented in this book is actually translated from an already existing French translation of the speech, not directly from the Czech original.<\/span><\/p>\n Kundera, to his credit, seemed to realize that he could be misspeaking even as he spoke. In one of the speech\u2019s more profound lines, Kundera notes that historical actors rarely have sufficient perspective to understand their own period in real time. \u201cThe Renaissance did not define itself by the narrow na\u00efvet\u00e9 of its rationalism \u2014 that quality became visible only after the fact \u2014 but rather by a rationalist liberation from earlier boundaries,\u201d Kundera noted.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Spirit of Culture<\/b><\/p>\n This book is just 74 pages long and can be read at a single sitting. Such brevity, and the handsome, compact hardcover packaging, was no doubt intentional. Even so, it does feel as if Kundera\u2019s pieces could have done with a bit lengthier, contextual, introduction. Though no offense is intended, Rupnik (whose Czech ties are well documented) and Nora are both older French men. Amid the book\u2019s thematic overtones (that smaller nations in Central Europe are often left to the whims of bigger countries and cultures, and that these ideas are still relevant today) it does seem like a missed opportunity to have younger Czech, Central European or Ukrainian thinkers provide introductory thoughts instead.<\/span><\/p>\n If Kundera\u2019s 1967 speech is a snapshot of that era, the second essay in this collection feels more timeless. It begins with an anecdote about a Hungarian radio worker who sent a telex (the precursor to the fax machine, which preceded email, which has since been displaced by the SMS) to the world during the 1956 Soviet invasion of his country. \u201cWe are going to die for Hungary and for Europe,\u201d the message read. He did die, and Kundera picks up the theme of a man willing to die for Europe. It is no coincidence that similar rhetoric has surfaced amid the recent war in Ukraine. In September 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for example, Tweeted that \u201cUkrainians are fighting bravely for their future. They are also fighting for our common values.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Readers content to stop there will be satisfied to have a simple parallel between Hungary in 1956 and Ukraine in 2022. But again in this essay, Kundera makes a more complicated argument. Here he has broadened his perspective beyond Czechness to include all of Central Europe. He argues that \u201cGeographic Europe\u201d has always been divided into two halves. One half is \u201ctied to ancient Rome and the Catholic Church,\u201d while the second has been tied to \u201cByzantine and the Orthodox Church\u201d. A contradiction occurred after 1945 when \u201cthe border between the two Europes shifted several hundred kilometers to the west, and several nations that had always considered themselves Western woke up to discover that they were now in the East\u201d. Those places \u2014 Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary \u2014 found themselves \u201cculturally in the West and politically in the East\u201d. This is the \u201cKidnapped West\u201d of the book\u2019s title.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Kundera goes on to celebrate the cultural vibrancy of Central Europe, a good deal of which was centered on the multicultural Habsburg capital of Vienna \u2014 but also including poets, painters and philosophers from elsewhere. Here Kundera\u2019s argument is still cultural, not political. \u201cCentral Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate,\u201d he writes. \u201cIts borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation.\u201d And though he did not make this argument when writing this in 1983, he leaves present-day Ukraine in this space (a sliver of which was indeed once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). In one footnote, as an aside, Kundera even references Ukraine as \u201cone of the great European nations\u201d and laments that it \u201cis slowly disappearing\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n Kundera\u2019s two most important points are even broader. The first centers on his disappointment that Western Europe simply ignored,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>that Central European culture was their culture\u00a0<\/span>and that it was being stomped out by Communism.\u00a0Second, Kundera tells an old story of trying to approach Western European cultural figures \u2014 not politicians, journalists or academics \u2014 who might help rally awareness to the plight of Central Europeans.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n As he and a friend tried to figure out the appropriate person to contact, they began to realize, \u201cthat this figure did not exist\u201d. Serious culture, even in Western Europe, had ceased to matter. There \u201cwere great painters, playwrights, and musicians, but they no longer held a privileged place in society as moral authorities that Europe would acknowledge as its spiritual representatives,\u201d he writes.<\/span><\/p>\n I was a toddler when this essay was first published, so it is hard for me to say whether Kundera was right about the world back then, but this certainly seems to be the case today. Our understanding of the world is now shaped by public relations professionals. Discussion of serious politics is left to think tanks, retired politicians and pseudo-intellectual commentaries. This all but guarantees that we see a caricature of a complex world, and it\u2019s exactly how we end up framing things via nonsensical ideas like Cold War II. So far as the republishing of these Kundera essays might accomplish anything, it might go a ways toward reminding readers that complex, critical thought can mediate engagement with public affairs. We could all do with a lot more commentary by the Kunderas of the world and a good deal less from the Applebaums.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But I wouldn\u2019t hold my breath that this will happen. Rather, I would expect that this book and contemporary geopolitics would continue to be framed entirely in dusty metaphors. The early 20th century intellectual Walter Benjamin famously wrote about the angel of history, an angel whose \u201cface is turned toward the past\u201d. His eyes look back even as a \u201cstorm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned\u201d. In the meantime, \u201cthe pile of debris before him grows skyward,\u201d Benjamin wrote. \u201cThis storm is what we call progress.\u201d So far as there is any single lesson to learn from 20th century European history, it\u2019s that preoccupation with the recent past obscures, rather than illuminates, the present \u2014 with disastrous results.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Benjamin Cunningham looks back in his article\u00a0at two late 20th-century essays from the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera under the title \u201cA Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe\u201d. The book\u2019s first section centers on Kundera\u2019s 1967 speech to the Czechoslovak Union of Writers. The second includes Kundera\u2019s 1983 essay \u201cThe Tragedy of Central Europe,\u201d\u00a0 and they both perfectly reflect on the actual situation as\u00a0Kundera does not speak or write with a historical outlook of minutes, days or weeks. He is thinking in centuries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":8747,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nezarazene"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10819,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9862\/revisions\/10819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}