Europe's oppressive legacy - by Imre Kertesz
"It will be the very first task of the new Europe to hack out clear paths through the jungle of ideologies and fallacies. It is a typically twentieth-century phenomenon that politics and culture have become not just antagonistic but inimical to one another. In this terrible century of lost values everything that was once of value became ideological. The hour was struck for the political adventurers and leaders of the people who undertake to direct and later exploit the masses with the help of the apparatus of political parties cultivated by devious stratagems.It has become more obvious than ever before that there exist at least two Europes, in which shared history, the shared European experience, is reflected in at least two different ways. There is a general
belief that democracy is a political disposition, but if one thinks about it, democracy is in truth more a culture than a mere system—and here I am using the word culture in, as it were, its horticultural sense. The democracies of Western Europe came into being organically; democracy sprouted as a political system on the soil of a social culture, through a process of economic, political and behavioural necessities, successful revolutions or great social compromises. In Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, the political structures were the first to be brought into being—insofar as they have been brought into being—and society must now undertake the gradual, wearisome and possibly painful task of assimilating to those structures."
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