By Feiwel Kupferberg
This e-book offers a unique realizing of the break-up of communist hegemony in East Germany and jap Europe. according to comparative case experiences, it argues that id politics is a specific invention of communist rule, generating a political citizen. Focusing upon identification politics is helping us greater to appreciate the longterm balance of communist hegemony, its unexpected cave in, the problems of reworking communist societies to liberal democracies and the unforeseen revival of ethnic, nationalist and cultural conflicts in post-communist jap Europe.
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Example text
One of the reasons there was no trust between the authorities and the citizens was that the authorities were utterly and unashamedly dishonest. They lied freely and without inhibitions. They lied about the state of agriculture and industry and health care, claiming that statistics proved that living was getting better and better, even at times when living standards declined and the overall state of the economy was heading for disaster. They lied about the marvellous state of the environment that was supposedly getting better every day, thus postponing the discovery of the shocking state of the country till later generations.
Breaking the secret code of totalitarianism required the joint effort of two men, working partly in different political contexts, partly together for a common cause, and it was the combination of similarity and differences, mediated by the exchange of ideas, that made the discovery possible. 34 The Break-up of Communism in Eastern Europe The discovery in question was made jointly by the intellectual leaders of two movements, V aclav Havel and Adam Michnik, sometimes meeting at Havel's summer house, sometimes in the border region between Poland and Czeckoslovakia (Kriseova, 1991 ).
No one knows what such a totalitarian Utopia might look like. Here intellectuals definitely have an important role to play, even in the future, even in our societies. We talk about 'stable democracies' in Europe, but the fact is that most of these democracies vanished some fifty years ago almost without resistance. And who would dare to say that this could not happen again? We need the intellectuals, now as before, not as political leaders but as moral leaders, as the moral conscience of society, as a 'discerning minority' (Hession, 1984), which is dedicated to universal values and to the pursuit of truth for its own sake.