Slate's Bizbox
foreigners: Opinions about events beyond our borders.

Europe's Bill Clintons

By Anne Applebaum
Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

"Za Chlebem do Polski" read the joke title of a front-page article in Zycie, a Warsaw newspaper, over the weekend. The literal translation of the phrase is "To Earn His Bread in Poland," but the connotation is somewhat different. To go and "earn bread" abroad implies emigration to America, third-class steamer berths, Ellis Island. Nobody from America, of course, comes to "earn bread" in Poland. But the subhead then continued the joke: "Now even Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States, finds that it pays to do a bit of work in Poland." For it is he: While it isn't exactly a reverse immigration, the former president is scheduled to make a speech here the week after next, at a business conference. Nor is Zycie the only paper to have trumpeted details of his rumoured fee ($100,000) and the cost of tickets to the conference ($1,500), enormous amounts of money in a country where the average wage is a few hundred dollars a month, and most people, if you asked them, would probably prefer to pay retired politicians not to speak.

Curiously, news of Bill Clinton's first unofficial trip to Warsaw has filtered out in the same week that another Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, is sponsoring another conference, this one dedicated to the "Generation of 1968." Among those attending are Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the 1968 student revolt in Paris; Peter Uhl, Czech dissident and founder of the illegal Revolutionary Youth Movement in Prague; Sergei Kovalyov, Russian dissident of the same generation; Adam Michnik, Polish dissident and editor of Gazetza Wyborcza. Alas, the most famous American member of the club will not actually overlap with his European counterparts, but their proximity makes me think that the phenomenon of the generation of 1968, so much remarked upon over the past eight years in the United States, deserves another Pan-European look.

For what is immediately striking, looking over the list of participants—and counting a few who will not be in Warsaw over the next few weeks—is how similar their career patterns have been, which is strange, given what different societies they came from. The students of Berkeley were protesting against Vietnam and capitalism. The students of Paris were protesting against Algeria and capitalism. The young Joschka Fischer, now German foreign minister, threw rocks at police in protest against the wartime silence of his parents' generation and against capitalism. Young Czechs and Poles, on the other hand, were organizing university riots against communism in Warsaw. Meanwhile, the Russian dissidents were barely able to unfurl a few banners in protest against the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 before they were rounded up and shipped off to prison camps.

Nevertheless, they did all have a few things in common. They all wore the uniform of their era: T-shirts, sneakers, blue jeans (the Russians had to buy them on the black market). Many of the East European dissidents were the children of Communists and were thus, like the Westerners, engaged in a recognizable form of generational rebellion. Many in both East and West were influenced by the ideas of the New Left and also spoke dreamily of a Third Way between communism and capitalism—although in the case of the Easterners, this was largely because actually calling for capitalism was considered too outrageous.

Just as the baby boomers have left their distinctive stamp on American politics, the same generation of European intellectuals also left their mark on their own countries. In Eastern Europe, the dissidents who came of age in 1968 became both the tacticians and the coordinators of the revolutions of 1989. They wrote and distributed the samizdat pamphlets, they helped organize the strikes and protests, they kept Western journalists informed. In the wake of the revolution, many moved from the world of shadow politics into public roles, and they had extremely high hopes. They were idealists poised to put their ideals into practice.

Unfortunately, a decade after 1989, the dissidents of the 1968 generation look less heroic—and more like their Western counterparts. A few, like Fischer and Vaclav Havel, have succeeded in mainstream democratic politics. Others, like Cohn-Bendit, exist on the political fringe. Some, like Kovalyov, are effectively still dissidents. Some dropped out altogether. Many others, like Michnik, became journalists, the profession to which the irresponsibly critical have always been attracted—and no wonder: As a rule, the generation that popularized the rhetoric of destruction hasn't proved particularly good at working within political institutions, even democratic political institutions. It is striking, in fact, that the outstanding political successes of that generation are those who created their own. Fischer became a leader of the German Green Party; Havel invented the democratic Czech presidency. Both were condemned by their former comrades—the Germans who thought Fischer had sold out to the system, the Czechs who didn't understand why their old friend Vaclav didn't want to get drunk with them anymore.

* * *

Apropos of the article I wrote last week about Afghanistan, I note that the French edition of Elle magazine has decided to forgo its usual supermodel and has put on its cover a photograph of an Afghan woman in a chador. Interviewed on television, the editor said she had decided to break with precedent after noting all the TV coverage of the destruction of the Buddhist statues. Why, she asked, was so much attention being paid to inanimate objects, and so little to the sufferings of real women? Slate, it seems, is in good company.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:


Around 1968, Fischer and Cohn-Bendit, Michnik and Havel were all opposing their own governmental structures, trying to overthrow by one means or another. Fischer and Cohn-Bendit both advocated and indulged in some degree in violent acts; history should judge them harshly. All of the student leaders in the West were from privileged, upper class backgrounds, permitting them the luxury of playing at revolutionary. Michnik and Havel, on the wrong side of the iron curtain, had a more justifiable need to overthrow their government, but less ability to act.

Bill Clinton was a poor boy with a scholarship to Georgetown, and his interest was working his way up within the Democratic system, not overthrowing it. He was applying for a Rhodes Scholarship, trying to keep out of Vietnam, preparing for a career inside the mainstream Democratic Party, and studiously avoiding any significant involvement in the anti-war, anti-capitalism, or other protest movements. He is not a child of '68, any more than W. is. He doesn't belong in the same article.

--Arthur Stock

(To reply, click here.)


 Revolutionaries and dissidents play a vital role in repressed societies. But, what happens when the revolution succeeds? Well, make way for the politicians and bureaucrats. Old revolutionaries, like retiring generals, or deposed despots, must either get with the new program, or fade away. "Sell-outs"? I think not. Havel, et al succeeded in their struggles. How could they be sell-outs to their own success?

--Tony Adragna

(To reply, click here.)


Afghan women under Taliban rule do not in fact wear the chador, a garment which has a variety of forms and is most often seen in Iran and occasionally in Saudi Arabia. The Taliban has decreed that Afghan women must wear an even more radical form of covering, called a "burqa." While the chador often leaves the eyes exposed, or otherwise permits the wearer at least a small field of vision, the burqa is so constructed as not to have any openings at all in the upper part. It is the equivalent of a cloth sack over one's head. The wearer must content herself with the hazy vision afforded by looking through a portion of the garment made of more loosely-woven cloth…

The point here is not to engage in some suspicious form of oppression Olympics, i.e., for western observers to award bronze, silver, and gold medals to the most oppressed women in the Muslim world. Rather, it is to be careful to make distinctions between the various forms of veiling which some Muslims use. Different styles of veiling have had different social functions at given moments in their history. We need to be aware of these distinctions if we are to understand (for example) the decisions of some women in other parts of the Muslim world to wear a hijab--covering the hair but not the face--or, in this case, if we are to appreciate the full deleterious impact of the Taliban's decision to adopt a form of dress with scant cultural pedigree within Afghanistan, and even scanter in the Muslim world as a whole. Only by making such careful distinctions can we begin to conceive of what a movement like the Taliban might really mean, to both adherents and local opponents.

--Seth Graebner

(To reply, click here.)

 (5/14)

Washington Post