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EDITORS NOTES
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University
Time, once again to pay your annual subscription/dues. Please send me your feedback with the check. I like to know whether you find the articles we produce here valuable.
Please note: The anual meeting of the East European Anthropology Group will be on 6:15 PM Friday evening, November 21 in the Edison Room on the terrace level of the Washington Hilton. All subscribers to Anthropology of East Europe Review are simultaneously members of the East European Anthropology Group. At this meeting we will have a chjance to discuss the Review and to hear of each other’s professional activities. The agenda for the meeting is a review of the operations of the REVIEW over the last year, suggestions foir improvements for the journal and the web page, and a review of the finances of the group.
This issue of the review offers articles on the broadest number of East European experiences yet. In addition to the important papers by Hammel, Minnich and Marrant from last year’s AAA meeting, the issue features a paper by Ana devic on role of women in the nationalist movement in the former Yugoslavia. Tim Pilbrow contributes a paper of Bulgarian nationalism, and Marysia Galbraith offers a discussion of the tensions between democracy and heroic idealism in Poland. Clementine Creuziger looks at changes in Russian identity formations and Pat Heck looks at local politics in Eastern Germany. Antonia Young offers some short articles on Albanian themes, and there is a review of three albanian short stories by Lucy Young. Finally, we introduce in this issue a new category of article: The personnal reflection on the East Euroopean experience. Leszek Dzeigiel from Poznan University offers us his reflections on academic culturein Poland over the last forty years. I invite any of our readers who are inclined to do so, to offer their personal reflections as well. I think Prof. Dziegel sets the right tone in his remarks.
I want to encourage people to remember our other special departments: notes from the field, and classics of East European ethnography. Submissions in any of these categories are gratefully accepted.
This is the end of my fourth year as managing editor. Every year, I offer to step aside to anyone else who would like to take over the work. It isn’t as hard as it looks and this moment in the academic fiscal cycle is probably better than most in convincing a dean to shoulder the $3000-$3500 per year it takes to produce the journal, and the $300-$400 in postage. We are doing very subscription wise. Last year, I was able to reimburse my college for the full amount of production costs. I have no intention of doing this forever and I would be grateful if someone else would take it on sooner than later.
BOOKS AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW
If you would like to review any of the following volumes, please contact me.
Hadas and Vörös, eds., Colonization or Partnership?: Eastern Europe and Western Social Sciences. Special Issue: Replika: Hungarian Social Science Quarterly 1996.
Plasser and Pribersky, eds., Political Culture in East Central Europe. Avebury: Aldershot. 1996
Reinprecht, Christoph, Nostalgie und Amnesir: Bewertunge von Vergangenheit in der Tschechischen Republic uund in Ungarn. Verlag fue Gesellschaftskritik.: Wien. 1996
Kirin and Povrzanovic, eds., War, Exile and Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives. Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research: Zagreb. 1996
Ries, Nancy, 1997, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Cornell Univ. Press: Ithica.
Sugarman, Jane C., Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity atr Prespa Albanian Weddings. Univ. Chicago Press: Chicago. 1997

FROM CRISIS REACTION TO CONFLICT PREVENTION IN EUROPE: INTRODUCTION
Joel Marrant
Linfield College
At the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, held in San Francisco, a session was devoted to the topic of conflict resolution in Europe. We reproduce here, in slightly revised form, the introduction to the session and complete versions of the three originally prepared papers, along with a brief retrospective by the session organizer. The goal of the session was to promote discussion and reflection on our capacity, as regional specialists, to work our way beyond the post facto analysis of conflict and violence in Europe, by employing what we know to help prevent its occurrence. We hope these reports will provoke from readers spirited commentary and critique (in the AEER and H-SAE list serve), including updates from specialists sharing information about knowledge of recent developments in specific East European regions, including those examined here.

Human conflict is, in a way, like the weather; people talk about it all the time, and social scientists more than most. And social scientists, as most everyone else, do not seem to do a whole lot about it. We think we understand it; many of us assume, as a deductive premise for our research, that conflict lies at the core of socio-cultural systems; and so we devise explanatory theories to account for it; and we have become experts in the dissection of inter-group conflict after or during the fact. But we as a community of scholars, in spite of many good intentions and some localized efforts in mediation and conflict prevention, have generally gritted our teeth and borne the burden of academic fiddling while homes have burned.

Many of us here have intimate connections with "hot zones" in Europe and elsewhere where tensions run high for a variety of reasons: interethnic hostility, constitutional and political crises, religious strife, irredentist territorial disputes-- frequently linked to, and promoted by, socioeconomic inequalities and differential access to power and resources. Some of these conflicts "only" run a low-grade fever, barely discernible to the public awareness; others occasionally boil over into the media but, unless the conflict explodes dramatically, as in the Bosnian conflagration, they tend to be examined with a mixture of short-term curiosity and dismay, and then neglected. This short-term "reactive" perspective of the public at large seems to parallel the foreign policy philosophies of successive government administrations, as well as the largely passive and detached stance taken by the academy. Although many scholars in the US and Europe have done extensive service as consultants to governments and agencies, their work has tended to be more in the character of specialized "think-tank" situation analysis, rather than practical and integrated ground-level efforts at conflict prevention, resolution, mediation, or "harm reduction". The work of the International Research and Exchanges Board, and a handful of other foundations, has been a significant exception to the rule. Yet for most rank and file anthropologists with professional and personal ties to specific regions either going up in flames or with threatening to do so, the pain is triply acute: along with the feelings of deep sadness we experience as members of the human family in seeing such a waste of human life, feelings intensified by our intimacy with the people involved, there is regret, even remorse, that not more could have been done by themselves as individuals, and the scholarly community at large, to mitigate the human suffering. In recent years a number of non-governmental organizations have been founded which have as their aim the identification of global hot spots, the assessment of factors fostering tensions, and the development of programs to prevent and resolve conflicts. One of the most prominent of these is the International Crisis Group, with its chair the former Senator George Mitchell. Although the ICG and Mitchell have been deeply involved in conflict resolution and mediation work in areas that have already exploded, the fundamental goal of the organization is "to head off crises before they develop, rather than reacting to crises after they happen"-- an unfortunately unachievable goal now for Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Palestine and other regions, where the window of opportunity, however small, has long since been shut (Christian Science Monitor, January 3, 1996: 13). But there are many other locations where it is not too late to prevent or inhibit conflict. And this is where anthropologists and other scientists can and should come into the picture. For crucial to the ICG and similar programs is the service of assessment teams operating at the community level, whose members would draw upon their expertise and familiarity with local conditions to help devise long-term strategies for "harm reduction".

This session will be devoted to considering the role that anthropologists and their ideas might play in these programs. We will examine several cases of conflict or potential conflict in contemporary Europe, including the former Yugoslavia, and compare strategies that might be (or might have been) employed to inhibit or prevent violence. Questions to be addressed include: what kinds of information on history and local sociocultural systems are crucial to an understanding of the conflicts in question? What specific opportunities exist within indigenous community systems for the reduction of tensions? How can civil infrastructure be built to resist movement towards polarization and conflict when crises arise? How might governmental roadblocks and extant structures promoting violence be circumvented? How might indigenous features be integrated with introduced ideas about economic and civic development in an effective aid program?

About a week ago, I sent out over the H-SAE listserv on the internet a request for colleagues to designate current hotspots in Europe-- zones where intergroup tensions run high and the prospect of violence and conflict is high. The intention was to use the information submitted, and other sources, to construct a map for distribution at this session. [ these maps were distributed at the session and those in attendance were invited to make additions and corrections. None were offered. The map is reprinted on page 3]

In the responses I received over the internet to my initial statement, a crucial problem emerged. I had requested that people specify regions of "interethnic and religious tension". Several colleagues gently chastised me for this phrasing: Peter Allen pointed out that many of the troubles involving Greeks and their neighbors have" little to do with 'interethnic' and 'religious' factors'", that "there are very complex historical, political, 'Great Powers', and other issues that have contributed to this tension." Begonia Aretxaga agreed, citing Northern Ireland and the Basque Country cases, that "the rubric of interethnic religious conflicts is too narrow for the array of conflicts in Europe that touch on but could not be reduced to those categories". Eva Huseby-Darvas and Eugene Hammel agreed with Peter's cautionary note, but observed "that although the historical sources of such tension are very complex, their symbolism in political discourse is invariably ethno-religious." Bracketing these exchanges was Allen Feldmann's argument that most of the notions integral to the panel ("intervention, prevention, risk classification") "are all highly culture-bound concepts that have to be used with care and always problematicized" (p.c. January 30, 1996).
These pre-conference exchanges highlighted at least three intertwined issues that need to be confronted at this session: 1) the enormous (perhaps insuperable) challenge, in empirical terms, of untangling the historical forces and factors leading to any given intergroup conflict in Europe; 2) the inability of ordinary language categories, and current social scientific typologies, to satisfactorily represent those complex historical realities and provide an effective medium of discourse for interregional comparison; 3) the continuity between "insiders" and "outsiders" (or, in Feldmann's words, the "intervened" and the "intervenors") in terms of the perceptions, symbolic representations, and "cultural structures" guiding our understanding of conflict. Given these points, we are challenged to recognize the limitations and implications of our own entrenchment, and pitch ourselves out into new, unsettled, and humbling territory.

What is perhaps most ambitious about the character of this session is its effort to consider past, present, and future. Other AAA sessions have courageously taken on the task of grappling with contemporary conflicts, including one organized by David Kertzer a few years ago on the wars bedeviling the former Yugoslavia. We are indebted to them, and have learned from them. As a result this session will not be devoted only to discussion of the causes of conflict, debating typologies, nor to polemics about incriminating specific groups for inciting conflict or benefiting from it. Of course we cannot talk about the prevention of conflict without addressing its causes. But a focus upon causes alone threatens us with being swallowed up by the analysis of historical minutiae, structural violence, the inherent antipathies and injustices of state systems, the legacy of colonialism, and on and on. Extending our focus to necessarily include practical strategies of prevention leads us to the full realization of our personal and professional responsibilities. We need to construct both general frameworks for understanding conflict as it exists in so many places and times, middle range understandings of specific cases, and application of knowledge to a potential future, the realm of possible perceptions and newly imagined moral communities. In its long reach, this trajectory follows the fundamental principle of mediation efforts: move away from contention over absolute historical truth, which is irresolvable, to deal practically with present and future human needs. The challenge is to devise and implement on-the-ground programs that address the political and economic sources of tension, while at the same time reduce the likelihood that conflict of this sort will be perceived by any specific people as in their own best interests.

Such an approach conjoins Whitehead's intellectual challenge to all scientists, (that is, "to see the general in the particular, and the eternal in the transitory") with our sense of social responsibility as privileged students of humanity. There is a desperate need to communicate effectively to those engaged in hostilities to understand that the contours of the conflict in which they are involved are neither unique to them and their cause, nor define an eternal and inescapable condition.

Academics may be able to do little to alter the governmental and political structures that foster conditions for conflict. Indeed, the ultimate solutions to human intergroup conflict may well depend primarily on forces far beyond the control of scholars. But the massive scale of the structures in place should not inhibit the proactive involvement of regional experts in efforts to mitigate the effects of governmental policies that directly or indirectly foster the persistence of hostilities, tensions, and the structural inequalities that often underlie them. I am willing, perhaps along with my colleagues here, to be critiqued for some degree of idealism, but the chic cynicism of urbane and privileged Western professionals is not going to change things. There is ultimately neither glory nor honor nor satisfaction in serving as smug analysts of landscapes after battle, regardless of the social capital produced by such labor.

There will be just three papers presented, focusing on three different regions, the reality and or potential for intergroup tensions there, the historical context for hostilities, and practical proposals based on anthropologists' knowledge of local conditions, for mitigating the chance of future conflicts. Following a short break, we will rearrange ourselves, with the three presenters joined in a roundtable by several other colleagues, with expertise in the same and other regions, who generously offered to serve as commentators and discussants. Questions and comments from the rest of you will be strongly encouraged. Our task will be to create a synergetic context for devising realistic and practical strategies for conflict prevention in Europe.

Legend for Map: ZONES OF TENSION AND CONTENTION IN EUROPE
1 .Norway, Finland, Sweden (Saami (Lapps))
2. Estonia (Estonians, Russians)
3. Latvia (Latvians, Russians)

4. Lithuania (Lithuanians, Russians, Poles)

5. Kalingrad (Poles, Russians)

6. Eastern Poland (Belarus, Poles)
7. Western Belarus (Belarus, Poles)
8. Western Poland (Poles, Germans)
9. Southeastern Poland (Poles, Ukrainians, Lemko Ruthenians)
10. Ukraine (Poles, Ruthenians, Ukrainians)
11. Eastern Moldova /Dniester (Moldovans, Ukrainians, Russians)
12. Czech Republic (Moravians/Silesians)
13. Slovakia (Magyars, Slovaks)
14. Vojvodina (Magyars, Serbs)
15. Transylvania (Magyars, Romanians)
16. Southern Dobrogea (Romanians, Bulgarians)
17. Bulgaria (Turks, Pomaks, Bulgarians)
18. Cyprus (Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots)
19. Macedonia (Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Macedonians)
20. Albania (ethnic Greeks in S. Albania)
21. Kosovo (Albanians and Serbs)
22. Bosnia-Hercegovina (Serbs, Croats, Bosniak)
23. Croatia (Croats, Croatian Serbs)
24. Carinthia /Three Country Region
25. South Tyrol -(Italians and Germans)
26. Corsica (Corsicans, French)
27. Northwest Spain (Basques)
28. Spain (Catalonians, Spain)
29. Belgium (Walloons and Flemings)
30. Brittany (Bretons, French)
31. Northern Ireland (Loyalists/Protestants, Nationalists/Catholics)
32. Scotland in United Kingdom
Transnational Conflicts (general)
Anti-Roma
Anti-Semitism (Jews)
Sources: Bruce Seymore II (ed) The ACCESS Guide to Ethnic Conflicts in EuL= and the Former Soviet Union ACCESS: A Security Information Service, Washington, DC 1994;
Janusz Bugajski Nations in Turmoil: Conflict and Cooperation in Eastern Europe Westview Press, 1995

ETHNICITY AND POLITICS: YUGOSLAV LESSONS FOR HOME
E. A. Hammel
University of California Berkeley
(The article first appeared in Anthropology Today, July, 1997. It is reprinted here by permission.)

Balkan society is a frightening mirror for our own. Here I draw attention away from the usual preoccupation of who did what to whom, toward underlying structural problems in the achievement of a peace that could have been overcome with luck and diplomatic skill. These structural features are characteristic of many regions, and they can be overcome.1

Tribes and History

The history of Europe and the Near East, like that of other places with deep roots that run to the treetops (thus the Old World but mostly not the New) is a history of local kinship units with rights to land and no way to make a living without it. The idea that participation in social and economic life was possible without access to land was, with few exceptions, unthinkable. As population became more dense (and I imply a very ancient regime like the Neolithic), kinship groups became large enough to be thought of as ethnic groups. While some kinship groups might achieve dominance over others but still remain part of a single ethnic system, claims on loyalty beyond that could no longer depend on the ascribed statuses of kinship but had to be negotiated in terms of the achieved contracts between ethnic groups even if they were sometimes symbolized in kinship usage. This shift is the transition from tribalism to feudalism, and the echo of Henry Maine is unmistakable. As population became still more dense, ethnic dominance became more complex, with one group often achieving dominance over several other ethnic groups. This is the transition from feudalism to imperialism. It is in the dominance of one ethnic group over multiple other ethnic groups that coresided in the same territory or were contiguous within the scope of empire, that the roots of the Yugoslav and similar problems lie. This sketch is intended in no way to be evolutionistic but only historical, and not even uniformly so, frequent but not inevitable.

Imperial Hegemony

There are several kinds of imperial domination. In the first, a dominant ethnic group holds sway over several others whose positions, either structurally or geographically, are disjoint. Under such circumstances the level of competition between the subordinate groups can be, although it is not always, low. They are, in ecological terms, allopatric. The solidarity of the subordinate groups is in some sense organic. The distinction between vlasi (shepherds) and meropi (agricultural serfs) in the mediaeval Serbian empire is a case in point; each group had its own economic sphere, and indeed they were forbidden by the Code of Stefan Dusan to intermarry. Caste systems can have this characteristic, as do most hierarchical systems supported by elaborate religious symbolic structures. They drip legitimacy.

In a second type, a dominant ethnic group holds sway over several subordinate groups that are in competition for the same resources. They are, in ecological terms, sympatric. The solidarity of the subordinate groups is in some sense mechanical. Competition between them can not only plauge them and cause trouble for the controlling elite, but can also provide an opportunity to exploit their competition for imperial benefit. Divide et impera is the rule in such a system. The Roman Empire is an example, and others spring readily to mind. If organic solidarity emerges at the level of the subordinate groups, let us say through trade relations, trade flows through the controlling hands of the imperial elite and becomes part of the mechanisms of domination.

In a third type, there is more than one dominant ethnic group, and these dominant groups are themselves in competition. If they do not share subordinate groups, their conflicts are relatively simple to understand. Many imperial clashes have been of this kind, as for example the initial conflicts between the Ottomans and the mediaeval Serbian Empire. But if their competition progresses through expansion and they encroach on one another's territories, they often pass to a fourth type.

In the fourth type there are multiple dominant ethnic groups, and they share one or more subordinate ethnic groups across imperial boundaries. They may do so because one empire has succeeded in wresting territory from another, or because two or more empires have come to dominate parts of one or more subordinate groups, or because members of a subordinate group in one empire have fled to another empire, or for any combination of these reasons.

As before, this exercise in ideal-typical speculation is not intended to set forth an inevitable succession. History has many variant examples. The situation in the Balkans, along with that in most of the Middle East and in a few other parts of Europe is one of the most difficult. It is especially the tribal and imperial borderlands that give trouble, and in particular the edges of the Germanic expansion, whether north and west against the Celts, south and west against the Latins or, most relevant to this discussion, eastward against the Slavs. The core of the problem lies in the territoriality of subordinate ethnic groups.

Balkan Politics

For as long as we have records, the Balkans have been an area of conflict between empires. I do not here recapitulate accounts already published,2 save to say that the ethnic identity of groups was in many ways of extrinsic or hierarchical origin, achieved by absolutist definition or the machinations of local elites. Ethnic emergence is not all from the bottom up in some kind of inchoate welling of the spirit, as the romanticist tradition would have it. Little by little, in the flow of empires and the consolidation of local power, political mobilization led to ethnic nation states that purported to have an unbroken existence out of the mists of history. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 played no small role in solidifying these trends, and ethnography and folkore no small part in symbolizing and legitimizing the new entities, culpa nostra.

The key to the thinking continued to be Neolithic -- that ethnic groups had rights to territory and that territories should be ethnically homogeneous. The mixing of ethnic groups on imperial territories, by flight, by forced relocation, or by opportunistic migration -- all a consequence of imperial conflicts -- created an ethnic chaos incompatible with these territorially neat organizational ideas. Pursuit of the idea of ethnic homogeneity under such circumstances can only result in war, as ethnic chaos is transformed into ordered power.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

There are of course other solutions. The Communist regime in Yugoslavia after 1945 probably came closer to a long term solution than any other recent empire in the region. It made allegiance to the Party the key to success. It attempted to create and impose a universal church that would not only subsume but eliminate competing symbolic systems. It discouraged ethnic chauvinism and was in fact draconian in supressing it, on the Soviet model. The Achilles' heel of the Communist attempt to replace ethnic identity by political citizenship and secular religion was the continuing penetration of the positions of power and control by Serbs, although that penetration was probably less than it had been under the Serbian monarchy. Resistance to it, not only by the non-Serbian populace but also by non-Serbs within the Party apparatus itself, led to increasingly open interethnic hostility, as Tito's influence waned. Only raw power could hold Yugoslavia together. That power was typically represented by a Serbian official at local levels and became increasingly important within the government itself, especially during the tenure of the Serb, Rankovic, as head of the secret police in the mid-sixties. Tito disenfranchised the minority Serbs outside of Serbia by denying them the special voting privileges accorded non-Serb minorities in Serbia, the Voyvodina, and Kosovo, and such constitutional moves led to deep resentment among the Serbs of the Diaspora. The outcome under these circumstances was division in the Party, collapse of the state, secession by constituent units, and an attempt by the most powerful of the them to retain control, especially because its coethnics resided in the secessionist parts. Without stretching the analogy too much, the Titoist independence from Moscow, like Henry VIII's from Rome, was finally overcome by Protestants whose separate identities grew out of the social and economic positions to which they had been allocated by the organs of power. Without stressing another analogy too much, I point out that Tito's moves were a form of affirmative action designed to restore political voice to ethnic groups that had been denied it by previous structures of power. In the end, the call to the ethnic standard was the only viable device left for political mobilization as a multiparty system came into being.

Is there a solution besides the traditional application of force, in this or in similar instances? In my musings on this I clearly betray my allegiance to the rationalist notions advanced by Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and other luminaries of the American Rebellion, my admiration for Gellner's vision of a modern society, and my continuing confusion between Weber's simultaneous celebration of rational decision-making and religious ideology, as against the Marxian insistence on the importance of the relations of production, that is the location of original sin in economic processes.

The first element of an alternative and, to me, just solution is the development of a culture of civil rights and citizenship. It requires abandonment of the notion that polities are necessarily territorial and that ethnic groups in particular have rights to territories and thus to constitute homogeneous polities. It means, and it is no news to Marxists, that persons in a civil society should have rights of participation founded on their position in the socioeconomic system rather than on where they live. That goal is not easy to achieve, because all people live somewhere, all somewheres have issues, so that politics cannot help but be local in some important degree. But it is a far cry from worrying about local schools and fire protection to insisting that all issues be determined by locality.

The development of a system of representation under which advocacy can be nonlocal would allow ethnic groups to achieve representation wherever they resided. It is hard to see how to develop such a system in a formal way, because self-conscious interest groups are infinitely divisible (witness, for example, religious cults). We accomplish such representation in the United States in an informal way. We have female candidates, Asian, Black, Hispanic candidates, and so on, and it is up to these politicians to decide how to balance their duties of general representation (on let us say issues of economic policy) against their duties of group representation. The system often does not work well, but it always works better than nothing. Of course, such people must be elected in the first place, and the current mood on the Supreme Court is antipathetic to nonliteral interpretations of the constitutional structure of representation, which is based on locality in a way that was sensible when people had to walk to vote. The Court has struck down attempts to achieve ethnic representation by gerrymandering voting district boundaries. There is some foundation to the cautious attitude of the Court, although their constitutional rationale may not be just the same as the motivations of all the Justices. From all the evidence at hand and especially the Yugoslav, the institutionalization of ethnicity (as opposed to its celebration), by whatever means, prejudicial or restorative, is the road to hell. That road, as we know, is paved with good intentions. It is of course possible for that road to be the best, or the only workable, alternative in a set of dreadful alternatives.
Broader currents of change may also assist. Part of our limited success in containing ethnic conflict in the United States depends on the absence of strong historic ethnic claims to territory; thus far Hispanics have not formally asked to have California and the Southwest back, although they may soon have them de facto, and Native Americans have claimed and received monetary compensation for lost lands. The reason for the paucity of ethnic claims to territory is of course the historical fluidity of the American economy and the force of migrational mixing. A clever government that wanted to avoid ethnically based territorial conflict would encourage internal migration. Tax policy has been used for many purposes, why not for this one? The key in the U. S. tax code is the deductibility of moving expenses. The portability of health and retirement benefits that allowed workers to stay in an insurance pool even if they changed jobs and locations would also assist. While problems of ethnic territoriality are not acute across large regions like counties and states in the U.S., they are acute in the cities. It would help to find clever ways to diminish residential ethnic segregation, and the cleverest way is through economic mobility and fair housing legislation. Indeed, it has been shown that the residential segregation of Blacks is now less in Southern cities in which new housing has been built than it is in Northern cities in which the housing stock has been stagnant, simply because the new housing has been built in a period in which ethnic discrimination in the real estate market is illegal. This path to solution only works if Blacks participate enough in the economy to get into the real estate market at all.

Ethnic conflict can still arise, even in the absence of claims to territory, if ethnic groups are allocated to and kept in social positions that have markedly different access to social and economic benefits. A permanent underclass in any society is always a potential source of trouble. If it is ethnically or religiously identifiable, it is a powder keg. Little, if any, of the rhetoric about affirmative action addresses this point; symbolic discourse is seldom about the fundamental issue. "Cultural diversity" can be seen as a code phrase for "Fix it before it blows up." The important issue in the preservation of a polity, as distinct from the preservation of the hegemony of some portion of it, is the prevention of internal conflict. Long term organizational planning must include policies that maximize the migration of ethnic groups not only across territory but also through positions in the social structure, in order to break the easy identification of ethnicity with social position. There has been a great deal of this structural migration of ethnic groups in the United States, unless they were culturally marked in ways that were difficult for the majority to overlook, as for example by skin color.

Yet another kind of mobility is that of cultural and symbolic systems across social groups, which we usually think of as diffusion. Especially under the homogenizing influence of the much-maligned mass media, ethnic groups in many countries share large parts of major symbolic systems. The sports and entertainment industries are cases in point. Football and baseball in the U.S., soccer in other countries, basketball in many, the cinema, and musical forms like jazz and rock are great unifiers and diminishers of cultural distance. (It is no wonder that they are viewed with suspicion by totalitarian regimes.) People who compete for jobs and would not intermarry can still talk peaceably about baseball, although to be sure they can also fight about soccer. The importance of commonality in that most essential of all symbolic systems, language, cannot be overlooked. The recent debate about the place of "Ebonics" (lower class Black urban English) in the educational system is a case in point. That speech style, like all local dialects, is seen as an impediment to full participation in social and economic life, but for some, it is a matter of local pride and a particular social role. It should not pass without notice that the speech style of sportscasters on television or the texts of sportswriters in the print media are different from those of the anchors or the editorial writers, both in Britain and the United States. No one misses the symbolic implications of the differences or the effects of speech style on mobility in the job market.

There is another kind of mobility, as well, and that is the mobility of persons across ethnic boundaries. The ultimate blurring of ethnic boundaries comes through intermarriage. A clever government would give tax breaks to married couples who broke ethnic ranks; such a demonstration in support of family values might even tempt a Pat Buchanan. Marriage as an alliance system of course has a long history -- between royal houses, between clans, between localities -- it could not harm interethnic relationships if interethnic marriage were thought acceptable by all parties, and the resultant blurring of original boundaries over the generations would ultimately diminish the problem. It might not eliminate it; for example, even in Brazil where ethnic intermarriage is fairly frequent, darker persons are often allocated lower social positions than lighter ones, despite the proverb that "Money makes white." Similarly, in Yugoslavia where ethnic intermarriage did occur among urban professionals, one of the effects of the recent war has been the breakup of many such unions. I make no naive claim that marriage is a peaceable institution or that it diminishes conflict in some simple way. It just confuses conflict and blurs the fault lines in the larger society.

Finally, we may anticipate some decline in the importance of the ethnic nation state itself. Ethnic nation states may have been a natural form of organization when economies were national, one ethnic group was ascendant, and transportation, especially of bulky goods, was crude, inefficient, and expensive. The national character of economies is disappearing before our eyes. They are no longer local, and even when they are expansionist they are not part of an explicit national imperialism, as for example the Dutch or British East India Companies were. They are just after the money, not the glory. Under the pressure of such changes, there is less reason for local elites to be concerned with territories and the control of economic systems located on them. It is more important for such elites to control the international networks and the flow of finance. Further, economic activity cannot be conducted efficiently under hostile conditions, and the emergence of ethnic warfare is detrimental to everyone's economic interests. The economic burden of the so-called civil wars of the late 20th century is enormous, on those directly involved, on the countries who have to pay for the peacekeeping and relief efforts and on the economic players who see their markets go up in smoke. Only the munitions dealers and NGOs delivering services to refugees prosper under these conditions.

Conclusions

Centuries ago, politicians were persuaded that their greatness depended on the size of their populations, which could be increased most easily by conquest. Beginning perhaps with Adam Smith and Malthus European rulers were convinced that their greatness depended on the extent of their territories, which could also be increased most easily by conquest. Under both philosophies, the growth and collision of empires produced ethnic strife and intensified ethnic identification, which emerged disastrously when imperial control collapsed, and sometimes led to that collapse. Nowadays the instrument of greatness is not conquest but infiltration and control of world markets. While in former times successful conquest may have improved the life chances of even the lowliest of the conquerors, in modern times successful infiltration of other economies may impoverish those at home in elite orgies of downsizing and outsourcing.

Some politicians are thus persuaded that their greatness depends on the productivity of their populations, or to coin a phrase, "It's the economy, stupid." These politicians must do three things. First, they must, despite the increasing disjunction between the polity and the economy, strive to focus and contain economic forces within the polity that they represent; else they will represent nothing. Second, they must strive to increase the wealth of that polity by increasing the productivity of its labor force, else they will not be the representatives of their polities for long (even in nondemocratic systems). Third, they must strive to break the links between easily identifiable and traditionally marked social categories (like genders and ethnicities) and particular loci in the socioeconomic system (like homeless, unemployed, on the dole, blue collar, rich, and so on), else their polities will fracture before their eyes (and surely before the next election). To succeed, they must maintain at least the same level of general welfare, but they must also strengthen the mechanisms of mobility of persons, symbols, opportunities, and rewards in order to prevent differentiation that can too easily emerge as separatism.

As current acrimonious debate in California regarding the constitutionality of affirmative action currently demonstrates, one of the most difficult things they must do is break the link between gender or ethnicity and economic disadvantage without setting the stage for retaliatory restitution of the status quo ante. While there are some who adhere to the belief that nations, races, and genders have been assigned to their social positions by nature or by God, there are others who cherish a belief in the unconstrained opportunity for individual achievement. They may hold this view for entirely practical and nonideological reasons. For example, because variance exists within groups, natural selection can be expected to work more efficiently at the individual level than at the group level, and society, as a whole is better off if selection is directly for achievement rather than for some presumed and inevitably imperfect correlate thereof. There is no bleeding heart liberal core to that notion, just as there is not to the idea of the necessity of maintaining social order. Nevertheless, what proponents of individualism must decide is whether it is necessary to combat historical and current ethnic and gender discrimination with similarly ethnic- and gender-specific countermeasures, or simply to proscribe it. Especially difficult for them is the problem of sharing a bed with those who would be perfectly content to keep their ethnic- and gender-based historical advantage. But sleeping with the enemy is no new tactic in political reform.

Although my last remarks seem far from the original topic, these apparently disparate subjects, warfare in the Balkans, the election of minority representatives through deliberate adjustment of voting districts, and affirmative action in California, are closely related in a structural sense. Consciousness of group identity, while a powerful force in creating solidarity, is also a powerful force in creating deadly conflict. Such consciousness can arise at any level of social organization. The survival of any such level above another of divisive consciousness depends on intelligent dilution of differences through mechanisms like the mobility of persons or the permeability of symbolic boundaries. A rational polity in the grip of the powerful symbolic forces of ethnicity or religion cannot last, or in the words of Lincoln, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." In the long history from Diocletian to the tragedies of modern Bosnia that can be seen from his very doorstep, in Ngorno-Karabakh, Kashmir, Rwanda and Zaire, we see a mirror and lessons for the preservation and improvement of our own imperfect solutions and lucky happenstance. Sadly, nothing we see around us leads us to believe that our politicians have the wit or the will to seize the day.

Endnotes

1 I am indebted to Burton Benedict and Elizabeth Colson for their comments. I have also profited much from the writings of Robert Hayden. None of these is responsible for my views.
2. For a more detailed view of the Yugoslav collapse and ethical dilemmas arising therefrom, see inter alia "The Yugoslav Labyrinth", Anthropology of East Europe Review 11:39-47, Special Issue: War among the Yugoslavs, rev. ed. 1994. (D. Kideckel and J. Halpern, eds.); "Demography and the origins of the Yugoslav civil war", Anthropology Today 9 (1) :4-9) 1993; "Meeting the Minotaur" (Anthropology Newsletter 35 (4): 48, 1994; "Minotaur redux. Anthropology Newsletter 36 (2): 2, 1994; "Science and humanism in anthropology: a view from the Balkan pit", Anthropology Newsletter 36 (7): 52, 1995; Lessons from the Yugoslav labyrinth. In War in ex-Yugoslavia: culture and conflict (D. Kideckel and J. Halpern, eds.). Pennsylvania State University Press, in press.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE LEGACY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING IN THE SOUTHEASTERN ALPS:
SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION
Robert Gary Minnich
University of Bergen

The disintegration of what Katherine Verdery (1996) aptly calls “Communist Party states” was preceded in various Central European countries by initiatives to re-introduce the institutions of "civil society." Protagonists of this activity understood their mission as the consolidation of a unified opposition to totalitarian regimes which it was claimed had virtually co-opted the “public sphere” (Habermas 1989) of society. These initiatives gained momentum in the wake of perestroika, accompanied the demise of effective Communist Party control and elicited legitimacy at home and abroad with reference to western models of plural democracy and free-market economy where civil society is perceived as an essential component of “a desirable social order” (Hann 1996).

This normative understanding of the potential role of civil society (Seligman 1992) behind the “iron curtain,” conveyed over that barrier primarily by dissident elite spokesmen such as Vaclav Havel (Hann 1996), caught the attention and imagination of western governments and academics. And following the dramatic fall of the Berlin wall significant material and human resources have been dedicated to bolstering the "public sphere" of these societies by establishing grass-roots non-governmental interest organizations_ (Sampson 1996) and promoting market economies based upon free enterprise. It is apparent, however, that western proponents of such programs frequently have assumed that locally implanted NGOs automatically promote civic awareness and thereby somehow seed the ground for pluralist democracy (Wedel 1994). The infrastructural prerequisites for such a development, such as an independent judiciary and a political culture emphasizing voluntary association as an institutional model for articulating and implementing collective interests, have been less in focus.

It appears to me that the instrumentation of conflict prevention envisioned by the organizer of this session is less presumptuous (Marrant 1996a). Here voluntary organizations and freely initiated businesses situated in settings of potential ethnic conflict are perceived as potential vehicles for mobilizing loyalties and commitments which can transcend primordial collective self-associations in their quest for public support and participation.
But in order for locally based voluntary organizations to actively inhibit or mediate parochial conflict, I would assert that they require the presence and participation, if not initiative, of credible and informed impartial interlocutors who in situations of acute conflict are capable of mobilizing sanctions or proposing alternatives which are legitimate in the eyes of the contesting parties. In the classic jargon of political anthropology, effective instruments for the resolution of conflict ultimately rely upon the ability to achieve compromise or enforce settlements on the basis of some kind of mutually acknowledged authority, be it founded upon the threat to use force or the persuasiveness of cogent argumentation. And the timely presence of a well-informed anthropologist willing to commit himself/herself, perhaps at personal risk, to an activist role may be beneficial to such an undertaking.

Allow me to return to the level of involvement which I identify with the intentions of this session (Marrant 1996b). I turn to the ethnically contested borderland of the Southeastern Alps where I have investigated the institutionalization of civil society in terms of the extension of citizenship rights. I allude to what is known today as the Three Country Region (hereafter: TCR) where several valleys converge at the conjunction of the current Austrian, Italian and Slovene state borders. And I begin by describing two coeval historical processes which in the case of Habsburg society gained momentum after the turmoil of 1848. The first is the consolidation of authority and control in this region by institutions of the modern territorial state — a process which political historians identify with Neo-absolutism. And the second is the effective propagation of ethnic nationalism as a secular religion which eventually legitimated and informed the policy of the states which succeeded the Dual Monarchy. In the following section I then outline the manner in which the above processes have influenced the creation and viability of voluntary organizations in a Slovene village before, during and after its encounter with Italian fascism. And finally, in the third section, I discuss the role of voluntary associations for the preservation of political stability in a multi-ethnic setting where the potential for confrontation is a part of the daily agenda in the lives of ethnically self-aware local residents. This comparison between the institutionalization of civil society in Carinthian and Slovene borderlands enables me to critically evaluate the potential of grass-roots voluntary organizations for preventing ethnic confrontation or resolving its locally divisive consequences.

For more than a millennium speakers of Germanic, Romance and Slavic dialects have populated the Southeastern Alps in a mosaic of linguistically diverse settlements. Upon the demise of the Dual Monarchy the multi-cultural ambient and social, economic and political integrity of this region were profoundly disrupted by a fundamentally new principle of social order, namely, the territorial jurisdiction of nation-states (Peter Sahlins 1989). Violation of these newly established borders consequently represented a threat to the integrity of the successor states where loyalty was no longer reserved for the reigning monarch but rather solicited by political, cultural and clerical elites on the behalf of the region's popularly acknowledged yet imagined "peoples." The social stratification of the region's population was no longer merely a matter of ranking in terms of one's relatively fixed position in a static agrarian social order; it was supplemented by ranking according to one's mother tongue, that is, ethnic identity. The structural tensions permeating late Habsburgian society which invited confrontation and political mobilization were thus transformed. One's official ascription to the ethnic majority or minorities of a given state, through for example ethnic censuses (Brix 1982, von Czoernig 1857), ultimately had extreme consequences for the terms of citizenship accorded to each individual.

During the final decades of the Dual Monarchy the local communities of this multi-lingual region fell under the effective control of a highly standardized and efficient state administration — the work of an "empire of bureaucrats" (Johnston 1983). The consolidation of state authority was accompanied by the universalization and extension of civic, political and social rights (Walby 1992) — rights which we commonly attribute to citizenship (Marshall 1964)._ Among these, the freedom of association opened for the establishment in rural communities of a myriad of grass-roots organizations. The public secular institutions forming the “public sphere” of enlightened modern society, formerly reserved for the burghers of towns, cities and market centers, were extended to the agrarian countryside.

Following adoption of the December Constitution of 1867, the emerging public arena of political discourse in this nascent borderland was distinguished by an ideological polarization between secular and clerical authority which systematically solicited the support of an increasingly enfranchised local population. Voluntary organizations became the quintessential vehicles for articulating this polarization in local life. A fundamental political cleavage was established within the region which yet today is fundamental to and distinguishes the left and right poles in the political landscape of Carinthia and Slovenia. In the Dual Monarchy's multi-cultural regions voluntary associations also became essential vehicles for the politicization of ethnic difference and for recruiting support to increasingly influential nationalist factions within the political framework outlined above. Ethnic identity gradually assumed the quality of an imperative status in the everyday lives of the residents of this borderland in-the-making.
In sum, the institutionalization of "civil society" in local communities was intimately intertwined with the state's increasing administrative control over everyday life and increasingly standardized and pervasive ideological representations of the Dual Monarchy's constituent peoples. This perspective on the structural transformation of late Habsburg society facilitates, I believe, a more realistic evaluation of the relative role of locally institutionalized civil society as a potential vehicle for inhibiting ethnic confrontation and conflict. It suggests, in fact, that ethnic-nationalism and its implementation is essentially the work of political and dependent cultural elites which more often than not are conveniently located at some distance from the scenes of bloodshed and persecution which this pedigree of "anti-rational" (Stokes 1993: 4ff.) populism inevitably perpetrates. Ethnic-nationalism is by definition one ethnic group's aspiration for political autonomy at the expense of other such groups.

In order to set the above processes of state-making and national consolidation in proper perspective I need to specify my understanding of "the legacy of ethnic cleansing" in the TCR. First, I examine this legacy in terms of the biography of a woman who has been subjected to ethnic persecution. I outline her response to these acutely perceived threats to the Slovene people with whom she unquestionably has identified herself throughout her life. And I examine the implications of ethnic persecution as the motor of traumatic experience which generated and institutionalized passive and armed resistance in her native community. In other words, I consider the legacy of ethnic persecution and opposition in terms of collective memory.

In a chapter for a forthcoming book, War in Former Yugoslavia: Culture and Conflict, I discuss the life history shared with me by Mrs. Darinka Kravanja-Pirc (hereafter: gospa Darinka) as the proto-biography of a citizen. Gospa Darinka was born in 1910 into the family of an inn-keeper and baker in the town of Bovec which is located in the Upper Soca Valley which today borders the Friuli-Giulia-Venezia region of Italy. Slovene has consistently represented the mother tongue of nearly all residents of the Soca Valley since the time of Slavic settlement in the 6th and 7th centuries.

As a resident of one and the same place — Flitch / Plezzo / Bovec — gospa Darinka has been the citizen of five different states: The Dual Monarchy, The Italian Monarchy of Victor Emanuel III succeeded by the Fascist Republic of Italy, The Third Reich, The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and The Republic of Slovenia. Born into the emerging middle class of this essentially agrarian settlement gospa Darinka has been aware of her Slovene heritage since childhood. This self-understanding was conveyed by her parents and grandparents through, among other things, their active support of various voluntary organizations which flowered in her native town around the turn of the century. The local reading circle and library, choral society (all manifestations of secular initiatives) and various associations initiated under the auspices of the local parish church were together vehicles for propagating awareness of an imagined Slovene nation whereby Slovene language was presented as a literary tradition commensurate with the heritage of the German language.

Gospa Darinka's nostalgic and well-informed recollection of late Habsburgian society also dwells upon the creation of civic awareness in her native community. Within the context of her family she experienced a keen sense of obligation to actively support the various secular and clerical voluntary associations which promoted the welfare and "enlightenment" of her fellow Bovec townspeople. She clearly distinguishes between the possibility to exercise local self-determination through these organizations and the often arbitrary exercise of control over her native community by super ordinate authority, whether it be the Kaiser, Il Duce, Tito or the government in Ljubljana.
A few years after the incorporation of the Soca Valley within the newly acquired Julian Province of Imperial Italy in 1918, the centrally conceived ethnic-nationalistic policy of the fascist regime pervaded the conduct of all public institutions in Bovec. The local freedom of association, previously extended by the Vienna parliament and guaranteed by the Kaiser, was co-opted by the highly centralized political, cultural and social institutions of the fascist state, institutions that were dedicated to reclaiming the loyalty of what were perceived to be the unenlightened and uncivilized Slavic inhabitants of this ancient Roman province. Bovec entered the epoch of what a local historian, Andreas Moritsch (1994), calls integral Nationalismus.

Except for masses in the local parish church the use of Slovene in public places was banished and all local voluntary associations which had propagated Slovene language were disbanded. Ethnically self-aware Slovene teachers, functionaries and professionals either went into exile or were deported to central Italy. In fact the severe economic depression of the 1920s which fueled populist support for fascism drove a significant portion of the local population into economic emigration to Western Europe and the Americas. The decimation of Slovene institutions and the town's cultural and political elite was tantamount to dissolution of the nascent civil society which had been formed at the turn of the century in this predominantly Slovene speaking community. Ethnic confrontation was imported by immigrant monolingual fascist functionaries, military personnel and officials into this predominantly Slovene speaking region.

For the vast majority of residents native to the Julian Province the fascist epoch was a period of occupation and ethnic repression. In response Bovec natives who managed to avoid internment and deportation drew upon their organizational experience with the institutions of civil society in Habsburg society. They created effective illegal organizations dedicated to resistance which culminated in regional paramilitary organizations such as the TIGR movement (cf. Sardo? 1983, Zidar 1987) and the National Liberation Front. Much of gospa Darinka's recollection of this period alluded to both subtle forms of passive resistance and paramilitary campaigns where she and members of her family were involved. When discussing this period she repeatedly referred to the sign which her father was forced to post in their family inn: "only Italian is spoken here."

The fascist administration of Bovec was succeeded by Wehrmacht occupation. Recalling this brief interlude between 1943-1945, gospa Darinka noted that the commanding officer in Bovec imposed a much less severe regimen in the community, tolerating, for example, the public use of Slovene. Significantly, he was a native of Maribor in Lower Styria, spoke Slovene and acknowledged that his Mother was a Slovene. In contrast to his monolingual Italian predecessors he exercised his authority strictly with reference to his obligations as a Wehrmacht officer and, according to gospa Darinka, tactfully avoided whenever possible the ethno-nationalistic policy of the Nazi regime. Indeed this case demonstrates how cross-cutting ethnic loyalties integrated in the self-understanding of a critically positioned individual can inhibit the perpetration of ethnic confrontation.
With reference to the arrival in Bovec of the Yugoslav peoples' authority in 1947 Gospa Darinka wryly notes that she had married a member of the proletariat who became the first mayor of Bovec under the new regime. Thereby she avoided sanctions experienced by her brother and other close acquaintances who were subjected to the nationalization of property and other measures taken to eradicate the influence of the former burgher class in Bovec. The local choral society, library and other town associations were nevertheless revived at this time. The right of voluntary association was conditionally reinstated. And, significantly, the articulation of Slovene self-awareness in non-politicized fora was no longer restricted. The threshold for public expression of Slovene self-identity in Socialist Slovenia was considerably higher than in other Yugoslav republics where the proximity of autochthonous populations of other officially acknowledged ethnic groups and a collective memory of inter-ethnic strife throughout this century presented a much more inflammable setting for ethnic confrontation.

I turn now, briefly, to the context of Slovene national politics — the institutions and discourses enclosing a moral universe which integrates all those who acknowledge a Slovene self-identity.

Part of the territory redeemed from Italy by the partisan army fell under the interim allied military administration (AMG) between 1945-47. The AMG zone became a refuge for the conservative and largely clerical opposition to the new regime. This was a constellation of Slovene political, academic and clerical elite that originated in late Habsburgian national politics described earlier. But once the new Yugoslav-Italian border was finalized the vast majority of this Slovene opposition went into political exile, first in nearby Italy and then on to the Americas and Western Europe. Here these exile communities established political and cultural organizations through which they have maintained to the present a collective memory of their exodus from Communist Yugoslavia. Since the attainment of Slovene state sovereignty in 1991, members and descendants of this emigration have contributed to the revival of the classic opposition in Slovene national politics.

Toward the conclusion of the 1980s voices of opposition toward the existing socialist regime in Yugoslavia were raised by members of Slovenia's resident cultural and academic elite, initially with regard to issues focusing upon emerging ethnic nationalism in Serbia. With the support of a relatively free and critical press this domestic opposition sought legitimacy with reference to the western concept of civil society which it promoted as the right to establish a pluralist democracy. And an increasingly liberal communist party leadership which was still in effective control of state institutions acceded to these demands and subsequently supported through the revision of the republic's constitution the formation of a multi-party system of government. Thereby self-determination was restored to local communities such as Bovec in the form of the unabridged right to initiate and support political factions in the newly extended "public sphure" of Slovene society. And previous to Slovenia's first multi-party elections in 1990 the country's clerical and communist leadership publicly addressed the collective memory of those who had gone into political exile. A massive public ceremony of reconciliation was staged at ko?evski rog, the site where it is assumed that thousands of Slovenes, who had collaborated with the occupying powers during WW II were massacred by partisan forces upon their deportation to Slovenia by allied military authorities from internment camps in neighboring Carinthia. Symbolically the clerical-conservative opposition anchored in Slovene national discourse was thereby re-instated in the public sphere of the homeland.

This sketch of the changing role of voluntary organizations in Bovec, and in Slovenia at large, illustrates the interdependence of locally institutionalized civil society with the authority of the state and other super ordinate power structures which have the capacity to either guarantee or deny basic civil rights. It also describes how the effective politicization of ethnicity eventually came to generate unquestioned self-understandings of one's collective identity, regardless of one's position in society. The combination of Gospa Darinka's experience as both a self-aware Slovene and citizen with a strong sense of civic obligation emphasizes the changing possibilities for her to participate meaningfully in the “public sphere” of her native community. Furthermore, we have observed that voluntary or forced exile generates resistance whereby collective memories emphasizing deprivation, persecution and homicide persist until they are meaningfully addressed in the public sphere of one's felt associations. And we have seen how the non-ethnic ideological polarization of the Slovene national public sphere, extended across the globe, also produced an articulate opposition movement which has significantly influenced the re-constitution of the public sphere in that state which lays claim to this universe of Slovene national discourse. Reconciliation is a phenomenon enclosed not only by local communities of face-to-face contact, but also by the imagined moral community in which injustice has been perpetrated.

III

The mediatory role of the local institutions of civil society in the prevention of ethnic conflict is more clearly apparent elsewhere in the TCR, namely, in the bilingual regions of neighboring Carinthia. This region borders with Slovenia and Italy and remains yet today the home of an autochthonous Slovene speaking minority population. While this region underwent the same structural transformation described above, the articulation and politicization of ethnic difference and the classic clerical-socialist opposition in local political culture has played itself out in the context of bilingual villages in a manner quite remote to the historical experience of Bovec townspeople. In southern Carinthia ethnic confrontation has remained focused within local communities.

During the Anschluß the Slovene population of this region was subjected to much the same sort of state-sponsored ethnic repression and persecution as that conducted in the Julian Province of fascist Italy. Deportation and exile ravaged the community of self-aware Slovenes during this tragic epoch and led to armed resistance. Since ethnic cleansing was not attained ethnic national contention over this territory persists to the present. But today it is delimited largely to the public sphere of Austrian national politics where the discursive theme of minority-majority relations seems to feed upon the underlying tension maintained between opposed elites which to a certain degree attain their livelihood through their position in organizations dedicated the preservation of the ethnic divide.
Following W.W.II the renewed international recognition of the Austrian Republic was contingent upon guarantees of the rights of its ethnic minorities. The recognition of Slovenes as an ethnic minority and the guarantee of their rights as full and equal citizens of the Austrian Republic became law. Much of the intervening history of relations between Carinthia's Slovenes and the dominant German population can be described as an exercise in containing ethnic confrontation under the auspices of Austria's legal and administrative institutions. In other words, the state's guarantee of basic civil rights has enabled a Slovene elite to form organizations conceived to represent their common interests within the public sphere and political administration of Austrian society. But even Carinthia's Slovene organizations are notably divided between the clerical right and socialist left.

Austria's most vociferous protagonists of German ethnic nationalism reside in the ethnically mixed region of southern Carinthia and consistently utilize the media, public occasions and the political institutions in this Bundesland to articulate their political platforms; the most notable of these ethnic nationalists is Austria's political comet, Georg Haider. Not infrequently Slovene and sympathetic German public figures are subjected to harassment and violence instigated by Austria's German nationalist right-wing fringe which is implicitly encouraged by the rhetoric of ethnic-nationalism maintained in public media.

At the local level ethnic polarization is played out in voluntary organizations and local community councils where issues of language use in administration, primary education and public events inevitably generate confrontation. The possibility to mediate such local level conflict, to generate Slovene-German coalitions around issues of local common interest, is often inhibited by Carinthian media and regional authorities which continue to promote the ideals ethnic nationalism.

In order to counter the preponderance of German nationalism in various Carinthian seats of authority, Slovene organizations have consistently mobilized support and sought legal sanctions in Vienna where this pernicious residue from Austria's Nazi past is less influential. The retention of an ethnically neutral legal system and state administration at the highest levels of the Austrian state authority represents a guarantee for the country's Slovene population to attain fair and equitable treatment as citizens. As long as Austria's German and Slovene nationalists acknowledge their mutual status as citizens of the republic one can anticipate that their participation in the organizations of their own choice and design represents a vehicle for their relatively peaceful coexistence-existence. Such a state of affairs does not, however, say anything about the longevity of a persistent ethnic confrontation. Rather we have to look at processes throughout Europe and across the globe which are eroding the sovereignty of the nation-state.

The kinds of support and legal recourse solicited by Slovene minority organizations both in Austria and Italy is not limited to the state in which they are located nor to the motherland, the Republic of Slovenia, which has proven in its "democratic" Gestalt to be less responsive to Slovene minorities' material requirements than its "communist" predecessor. Rather minority leaders have sought alliances across state borders with other ethnic minorities and they have engaged themselves with pan-European themes such as multi-culturalism and the "green" movement. Various committees and programs of the European Parliament and Union have been most responsive in their support of these initiatives which ultimately represent an erosion of the sovereignty of individual European nation-states in favor of regional political configurations.

Concluding remarks:

Through its formal association with the European Union in June 1996, the Republic of Slovenia joined Italy and Austria within what is popularly perceived as some kind of super ordinate social, cultural and political order. While this development should not be understood as a panacea for the resolution of on-going ethnic confrontation within the TCR, it is indicative of changing patterns in the integration of the lives of those who inhabit the region.
The dramatic decimation of the very formidable infra-structure of freight companies, customs officials and border officers formerly required for controlling traffic across the Austro-Italian state border is a vivid reminder to TCR residents. Though negative in its economic impact, the removal of the border is a powerful symbolic statement about the new social and cultural reality in which they mutually reside. The authority of the nation-state to control the daily social and economic intercourse of TCR residents has been irrevocably eroded. Even local monolingual mayors have become inspired to promote the integrity of the TCR as a region with "one culture and many languages"! And they have acted by coordinating marketing campaigns for local tourist boards and initiating a joint application for hosting a future Winter Olympics. The pre-eminence of the nation-state which in this corner of Europe has been popularly perceived as the inevitable form of political consociation for ethnic groups has been placed in question. And therewith the basic right of free-association, generating the civil society of local communities and regions, has found other guarantors, less pre-occupied with the impossible vision of ethnic statehood.

So what is the role of the anthropologist in such a context? My answer is personal and has more to do with shaping opinion than with conflict resolution. I have recently affiliated myself with an international and inter-disciplinary three year research project, financed by the Austrian Ministry of Culture in celebration of that country's millennium. Our research objective is to document and discuss the causes and consequences of the partition of the TCR by territorial states driven into existence by ethnic nationalism. While this academic project does not address parochial conflicts arising from ethnic confrontation, it does contribute to a reformulation of popularly held images of collective identity and political association which, appropriately, will be reminiscent of multi-cultural society in the Habsburgian past. At the same time it is my hope that my Austrian, Italian and Slovene colleagues will capture in their representations of the region fundamentally new patterns of European integration which reflect both its unity and manifest heterogeneity.

Endnotes

1. Acknowledgments: This manuscript is based in part upon field investigations conducted within the framework of the interdisciplinary project (1996-1998), Das 5sterreichisch-italienischslovenische Dreildndereck. Ursachen und Folg, en der nationalstaatlichen Dreiteilung einer Region financed by the Austrian Ministry for Science and Culture.
2. With the growing preponderance of free-market ideology and liberal individualism among the major economic powers of the world the concept of nongovernmental organization has been readily and easily associated with the classic idea of civil society, thus enabling governments of these powers to relegate the implementation of welfare institutions and the advancement of political plurality to initiatives taken within the public sphere but located outside the framework of formal responsibility maintained by these western regimes (cf Wedel 1994).
3. In this way the relative autonomy of local polities (i.e., vidlage councils, provincial parliaments, etc.) to regulate and control the political process was co-opted by the increasingly pervasive institutions of the centralized state. 'ne initial institutional vestiges of "civil society" generated in the "public sphere" of local communities became standardized according to uniform administrative and legal codes extended throughout the Dual Monarchy.
4. A parallel development among political emigrants from Istria following partisan "redemption" of the region is outlined by Pamela Ballinger (1 996). Her perspective on the narrative constructions of collective identities resulting from personal trauma generated through persecution and armed conflict illustrates the capacity to transfer and maintain the institutions of opposition (whatever their ideological content) to alien environments from which they can effectively exert pressure for either a violent or politically contained resolution of collectively experienced injustice.

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STRATEGIES FOR INTERETHNIC CONFLICT PREVENTION IN TRANSYLVANIA
Joel Marrant
Linfield College
Strategies for Interethnic Conflict Prevention in Transylvania Joel Marrant Linfield College
Thus far in the session, inter group conflict has been explored in two regions, the former Yugoslavia and the Three Country Region of the Southeastern Alps. Gene Hammel and Bob Minnich have called our attention to the extremely complex historical background to conflict there, and suggested ways underlying tensions might have been mitigated and interethnic clashes prevented. I would like to build on this by introducing to the mix a third region that is equally dogged by a history of hostilities .

Our previous speakers built for us a clear framework for locating not just the historical roots, but the structural requisites for inter group conflict in this part of the world. Much of what they have proposed about their zones applies directly to this other "land between" that I will be talking about, so hopelessly misunderstood and misrepresented in the consciousness of outsiders: from Bram Stoker to Henry Kissinger. In contrast with the other two presentations, however, I will be spending much less time on how inter group tensions in this region have developed historically and focusing more on specific suggestions regarding the prevention of future conflicts. In doing so, I am building upon the ideas and inspiration of numerous scholars who have sought to both untangle the knots of history in the Danubian Basin and to build a foundation for peace and justice in the region. Among them is Laszlo Kurti, whose briefing to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on human rights in Romania in April, 1990 (Kurti, 1991) provides us with a baseline view set in the early post-Communist era of the roadblocks hindering the development of peaceful relations between Hungarians and Romanians. Given the often dismal prognosis regarding interethnic relations, it is worth noting that events that have taken place in central Europe in the last two years offer hope that the potential upsurge in hostilities forewarned by Kurti seven years ago may be averted. Yet rather than be lulled into complacency by such positive developments, we should redouble our efforts to design and implement localized proposals for action*.

Transylvania is located along that fracture line, partially real, partly perceived, that runs from the Baltic Sea through the north European plain, across the Carpathians and then, at the Drava-Sava-Danube line, explodes across the former Yugoslavia to emerge somewhere in the Adriatic. The region is one of those quintessential hot zones of contention scattered like land mines across the European continent. It can be characterized as such today, primarily because of past efforts on the part of Imperial states (Ottoman, Habsburg, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Soviet), their pre-feudal predecessors and their nation-state successors, to consolidate control over territory and resources, to the advantage of one group over others. One result has been longstanding tension among populations, particularly Magyars and Romanians, and open hostility over the past century between the two modern nation states that have sought to encompass all of their children within their own political borders. As has occurred in so many other regions, vertical cleavages, such as class, have reinforced horizontal ones, such as ethnicity, with religious and cultural differences being constantly exploited as well to serve the interests of states and their ruling elite.
The twin prongs of Romanian-Magyar conflict in Transylvania have been incessant argument over historical rights to the territory and its resources, and state policies towards minority populations. From the Codex Triparticus in 1515 that proclaimed the three privileged nationalities (and excluded Romanians) to the early post-Communist anti-Magyar noisemaking of Iliescu and Funar, no political state governing Transylvania developed fair and consistent policies for dealing fairly with all of its constituent populations and promoting civic institutions that would deflect ethnic politics from playing out their ugly course. Ethnic nationalism has been the default key in the 20th Century for social mobilization and identity formation, struck again and again, because of the absence of compelling alternatives.

Given this history, it is astounding that the states of Hungary and Romania have actually taken substantive steps to create a new context for dealing with these problems. There is now nearly in place the first comprehensive treaty between the two states that addresses issues of minority rights and border guarantees. This was signed in Timisoara on September 16, 1996 and depends only upon the approval by the Magyar Parliament for full implementation*.
The document is far from perfect. There are certainly significant holes and ambiguities in the Treaty that will require concerted effort to repair. There are also large numbers of Romanians and Magyars, in and out of Transylvania, who opposed the treaty and will continue to demonstrate against it. There are also other peoples in the region, most notably the Roma, whose abuse and repression remains unaddressed politically and economically. Without social justice and genuine citizenship available to all populations, a truly civil society has no chance of emerging in Romania. And as long as the economy of that country remains dysfunctional, any movement towards ethnic reconciliation will be fighting upstream.

Given all of these cautionary notes, we must recognize that at no point in history have the two nations of Romania and Hungary had at the diplomatic level anything close to this opportunity for fostering the growth of civil infrastructure that might lead to an easing of tensions over Transylvania. We may find it hard to believe that some of the leaders involved actually possess the wisdom to see the potentially positive consequences, but life is strange, and sometimes the most human among us-- even an Ion Iliescu-- actually stumbles in the right direction. Given the political past of Romania and Hungary, and the headlong charge in wrong directions that has for so long characterized the diplomacy of those two nations, we should not allow our professional cynicism to dismiss the significance of this event, and the opportunities it presents-- particularly now, with the election in November 1996 of Emil Constantinescu as Romanian President. The relatively high level of approval given the treaty by peoples of both nations, in concert with their political representatives, indicates the ground, though filled with stones, may be as fertile for proactive efforts at peace as it will ever be. As a Romanian friend told me: "We don't have real caviar. We probably never will. But we have cabbage; so let's make cabbage soup".

But what in that cabbage soup can serve as a glue to hold people together in ways that co-opt, overcome, outcompete the deeply rooted bonds of ethnic nationalism that have held Hungarians and Romanians in their grasp for so long? In Bogdan Denitch's words: "what is to bind complex multiethnic states and communities into polities that could be legitimate parameters within which to make political decisions?" (Denitch, 1994:80) To push the Balkan culinary metaphor: who will be the cooks, what will be the ingredients, who will supply them, and what will be the recipe?

The task, as in all of those other zones of contention in Europe, is monumental. And as Eugene Hammel mentioned in regards to the tragic case of the former Yugoslavia, the "underlying structural problems in the achievement of peace... could have been overcome only with the most extraordinary luck and diplomatic skill." Yet I am compelled to ask what might have happened in Yugoslavia had a comparable breakthrough occurred when there was in place an international and academic community actually poised to respond? U.S. and Western European foreign policy-makers at least have their attention now drawn to the region. International NGOs, such as the International Crisis Group and IREX, are currently prepared to participate in the process of building that elusive civil society of Havel's moral imagination. And there are plenty of social scientists with the knowledge and expertise and local connections to help guide programs of tension reduction, if they possess the will and persistence-- and are given the opportunity.

I would like to offer here two very concrete, very local proposals regarding conflict prevention in Transylvania. Underlying them are some simple concepts fundamental to mediation work. One is that the focus must be on the future and not just on the past, on addressing current needs of individuals and social groups, and not only on determining historical truth. If thousands of academic reports, hundreds of academics, and a century of argumentation over theories of Daco-Roman continuity cannot resolve that historical question, it is unlikely we will have much greater success in the millenium to come. We should neither abandon the task of inching closer to an understanding of "what happened", nor allow academic convictions to seal off pathways towards healing the consequences of those events. I hear Elie Wiesel's cry that history cannot be forgotten, but for East Europeans (who have an overabundance of it) it must not be remembered too much.

Another fundamental principle is that the benefits accruing to those playing the roles of brokers must be made secondary to the primary goal. If we as anthropologists privileged to know what we know about these peoples and their cultures are driven by potential personal and professional gains, the "stuff" that we carry with us can contaminate the process. So we must do something that does not come easy to academics, be prepared to dissolve egos and competition in a common effort in which the anonymous contribution ultimately will pay more dividends than just another item added to the resume, so that the best possible programs for conflict prevention can emerge.
That being said, here are two of my ideas proposed for implementation in Transylvania. They may well not be original nor entirely practical, but they might at least provide a starting point for discussion. As I describe them, I hope you will do two things: first, critically evaluate their potential to actually work , and second, think about other alternatives that might work better, in Transylvania or elsewhere.

In the capital city of Transylvania, Cluj-Kolozsvar, a multitude of Non-Governmental Organizations have sprung up over the past seven years. As Bob Minnich, Steve Sampson, and others have so correctly pointed out, it has unfortunately been assumed by many in the West that any NGO-- as an expression of civic awareness-- is as good as any other in terms of fertilizing the soil for pluralist democracy (Sampson, 1995). Of course this is not the case. In the past, many voluntary organizations of Cluj, as those documented by Minnich in the Three Country Region, have been manipulated by secular and clerical authorities (sometimes in competition with each other) in order to further ethnic nationalist agendas. Indiscriminate support (however innocent) of such groups by outside agencies, may therefore actually promote interethnic tensions and strengthen ethnic divisions. Oftentimes exclusivist groups, supported by elites with superior authority and resources, have sufficient funds to develop active and growing memberships. The current hyper-nationalist mayor of Cluj-Kolozsvar, Gheorghe Funar, epitomizes how power structures can divert scarce resources to such organizations that perpetuate ethnic antagonisms.

In contrast to such groups are those voluntary associations that transcend, because of the common interest that unites them, ethnic and religious divisions and political partisanship. One such ethnicity-transcending NGO is the group called DAO. Founded in 1990 and formally registered by the Cluj municipality as a civic association in July 1991, DAO's formal name is "The Association for Initiation into Traditional Oriental Spirituality". The process of organizing DAO began almost immediately after the revolution. The founding group was composed of nine individuals: three physicians, three professors, a student, a writer, and a translator-poet. Three were women, one Magyar, one Jew, one Frenchman. The original membership list consisted of seventy individuals: twelve physicians, six nurses, nine university professors, six lyceum professors, eight lyceum students, twenty-five university students, nine engineers, nine other professionals. Seven Magyars, one Jew, thirty-seven females.

In their original petition to the municipality, the founders of DAO stated that the association is guided by the following principles: "a) being organized on the basis of the free consent of its members; b) to propagate respect for human dignity and freedom; c) to stimulate fundamental research into the principles of traditional eastern spirituality; d) to militate for access to the authentic literature of this field and for the knowledge of traditional oriental spirituality through the offering of courses and symposia with the participation of specialists in the field." (I:4)

Since its founding, DAO has provided hundreds of Clujeni with a multitude of occasions for participating in activities that enlarge and expand their social identities-- thus weakening what Eugene Hammel identified as those "links between easily identifiable and traditionally marked social categories (like gender and ethnicity) and particular loci in the socioeconomic system." The group's activities have been viewud, not surprisingly, with suspicion and official concern. One member, a 39 year-old Magyar professor of Chemistry at a Cluj lyceum, recounted how some residents of the city have misunderstood the intent and character of DAO, dismissing it "in a hostile tone" as an exotic religious cult. She says "in our association each person embraces the belief that his or her conscience dictates... Our association is not a sect, is not a religious association...The fact that over the last three years I have had the opportunity to be among people with similar interests has made me have greater patience and to accept more easily my fellow creatures as they are." These are precisely the kinds of ideas and cultural ties that can buttress other kinds of social bonds (such as between neighbors, age mates) that have proven too tenuous in themselves elsewhere (such as in the former Yugoslavia) to resist pressures towards polarization in times of crisis. Perhaps most notably, DAO has managed to mobilize members of one of the most alienated segment of the Transylvanian population-- the youth-- and fill the vacuum in ideas, noted by Bogdan Denitch (1994:96), "about how society should be organized... and about how people should live their lives" .

Voluntary associations have long been the subject of study of social scientists, who have distinguished different types, identified their functions, and understand their internal dynamics. Certainly we could play a role in identifying and securing support for those, such as DAO, that have such a potentially important role to play in regions such as Transylvania. As both of our earlier speakers noted, it is clear that one of the most critical tasks in building civil society in Eastern Europe is how to couple economic development with the emergence of civil infrastructure. In even more specific terms: how can power and control of resources be shifted away from local exclusivist elite into the hands of new social networks whose members would not immediately benefit from exploitation of ethnic nationalist animosities. A key is to prevent this from being perceived as a direct attack or threat, and to craftily "co-opt" thu leverage from those power elite. To offer a suggestion on how this might be done, let me shift the venue north to the provincial town of Sighetul Marmatiei/Maramarosszighet.

Part of the post-1989 opening to the East has been seized by Western entrepreneurs who have seen opportunities for considerable short term profit. Much of this activity, and the formulation of relationships with East Europeans, has gone unregulated. In the private sector this is not surprising, but it is disconcerting that there has not been mre careful scrutinizing of joint venture partners and business grant applicants for qualities other than entrepreneurial aptitude. In the same way that "any NGO is thought to be as good as any other", so too is there the mistaken idea that "any talented venture capitalist" is as good as any other. For one thing, the playing field is hardly level. Much of the domestic capital currently available for investment is in the hands of those few who benefited materially from the centralized economies of the Communist era, i.e. members of the nomenclatura . Not surprisingly, the latter typically assume the highest profiles in international business contacts. They or their family members are most likely to develop these contacts and gain access to grants for developing skills in accounting, marketing, computer use, and so on. Furthermore, such individuals are quite likely to remain closely linked to entrenched power structures that more often than not, can be counted on to play ethnic nationalist cards in a pinch.

The problem is how to develop new kinds of socio-economic networks that both contribute to economic development and ethnic reconciliation, without jarring extant power structures and ruling elite into destructive reaction and defense of their interests. One option is to encourage the development of multiethnic business ventures by the simple strategy of giving them special advantages in gaining access to loans, training, and information. In multiethnic Sighet, there currently exists a cut-throat atmosphere regarding business development-- and a deep resentment of the advantages monied former nomenclatura have. Although interest in business development is high, capital is insufficient to support all but a small number of business enterprises. Modest amounts of venture capital, training programs, and information could be made available to enterprises composed of people of mixed ethnic backgrounds (Magyar, Romanian, Ukrainean)-- tapping into the many mixed marriage partnerships that lack almost any other means of socioeconomic and community support. Entrepreneurs I know there tell me that the multiethnic criteria should not be based solely on the identity of the owners, but also on the makeup of their workers. This would shift some leverage away from the upper management echelon to the working base, and also be more likely to promote maximal diffusion of interethnic cooperation within the community.
A perfect example of such an enterprise is a small but flourishing photography studio in Sighet currently owned and operated by a Magyar couple, who have four employees-- two Magyar, two Romanian. The owners, hardworking and honorable people, are genuinely interested in building a sense of community citizenship that overarches ethnic bonds-- and are realistic enough to know that profit sharing is a crucial spur to that process. Identifying such enterprises and offering them modest financial support seems a simple but effective way of nourishing a healthy sense of civic identity.

The owners of the photographic studio tell me that the most difficult problem to overcome in such a program is the local administration and supervision of the enterprises. Any local person, however honorable, selected to serve as coordinator for such a program (with discretion to nominate candidates for grants), would be put in a nearly impossible situation, with immense pressures to support family and friends-- and therefore likely to reinforce ethnic lines and entrenched local power relations. One way to resolve this might be the buildi~g of "integrity networks" connecting individuals in neighboring cities and towns. These multiethnic networks would be made up of respected and trusted individuals living in different communities, who would serve as program administrators in communities other than their own. Such people tend to know each other, and the network could build itself, with minimal interference from the outside, and serve as a counterbalance to entrenched, exclusively ethnic power structures.
These are just two, admittedly tentative, proposals for action that might, if implemented broadly, contribute to the reduction of ethnic-based tensions in Transylvania. In devising them, I have drawn on knowledge gained over almost a quarter century of involvement in the region. Thousands of other social scientists, including many of you in attendance, possess comparable insights into the local conditions of dozens of other zones of potential conflict in Europe. What remains for us to do is to pool that knowledge, share local strategies, and refine the theoretical frameworks that illuminate specific processes.

*In December, 1996, the Hungarian Parliament ratified the Hungarian-Romanian bilateral treaty, and since that time a number of other agreements have been signed. Relations have continued to improve, led by diplomatic cooperation in efforts to incorporate both nations into NATO and the European Union. Since the decision in July to admit Hungary (along with Poland and the Czech Republic), but "delay" the admission of Romania, the Hungarian government has continued to champion Romania's eventual inclusion. A joint communique from Prime Ministers Horn and Ciorbea issued in March, 1997 spoke of a "new chapter" in Hungarian-Romanian relations, a sentiment echoed in June by Romanian President Emil Constantinescu's depiction of "relations between the two countries" as a "model" for other Central Europeans to follow. Progress continues to be made in the area of educational reform and civil rights regarding minority populations in Transylvania (e.g. bilingual signs, minority language instruction, opening of provincial consulates) in spite of incidents provoked by extremists. One must wonder how this extraordinary movement towards interethnic reconciliation might have been further strengthened and consolidated had there been in place established mechanisms of harm reduction in local communities.

References

Denitch, Bogdan. 1994. Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia. University of Minnesota Press

Kurti, Laszlo. Briefing on the Current Conditions for Human Rights in Romania Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The Anthropology of East Europe Review 10:1:4649)

Sampson, Steven "Romanian Political Culture and 'NGOs'" The Anthropology of East Europe Review 13:1:6165, Spring 1995

FROM CRISIS REACTION TO CONFLICT PREVENTION: A SESSION RETROSPECTIVE
Joel Marrant
Linfield College

When invited to prepare a brief retrospective on the session I initially felt little enthusiasm. In the first place, capturing the living character of a conference session a year after the fact is nearly impossible; the shelf life of an academic gathering expressly devoted to "immediate problems" is notoriously short, and the fresh conversational tone of paper presentations and discussions often gets stale in print. But more importantly, from the standpoint of process, the session came nowhere near achieving its goals. The papers, as reproduced here, can speak for themselves in terms of whatever substantive value they may hold. Taken together as a set, they may provide a number of potentially useful insights into ways future European conflicts might be averted. These points merit highlighting, which I will offer at the conclusion of these comments.

But the less satisfying news first. In terms of realizing, within the format of a AAA session, an open forum for the productive exchange of practical strategies for crisis prevention, embarking from the central question of the gathering: "given this complex and conflictual reality, where can we go from here?"-- the session felt short. Those in attendance could testify that the nearly forty minute discussion period was characterized more by heat than light, serving less as an investigation of solutions than a polemical debate (however interesting) over contrasting depictions of objective historical reality and professional positioning relative to it. Rather than this be dismissed as peripheral, inconsequential (and for AAA conferences, predictable) background noise, I would submit that it raises issues central to the participation (or lack thereof) of academics in conflict resolution, harm reduction, and mediation projects. As with past AAA conference discussions of European conflicts I have attended, it is unlikely the transcript of the session would offer governmental officials and professional mediators compelling evidence that academics, anthropologists included, are well disposed to participate productively in such programs. One mediator, working for years in Bosnia, has gone so far as to say she "gave up long ago" on regional specialists in academia being able to put aside their partisan inclinations (be these the blind advocacy of "one's people", defense of theoretical turf, or protection of professional status), for the sake of resolving present and future conflicts. The American academic and university system socializes us to compete for positions of advantage, and to defend them, often moralistically (Miskolczy, 1992:148). These patterns of behavior cultivated by our professional training may contribute to the functioning of the human sciences, but run counter to the goals and procedures of mediation work (Fisher et al, 1994). More than a few in the audience, including its organizer, left the session with a far less sanguine view of the role social scientists could realistically be expected to play in such work. This was punctuated by perhaps the most compelling comments of the discussion, made by Pamela Ballinger, who, in drawing from her work in Yugoslavia, raised important questions about the emergence of conflict resolution as "a cottage sub-industry", that may actually help to perpetuate conflicts rather than resolve them. She cautioned that this process of conflict “monitoring” could in and of itself reinforce claims about ethno-national identities, and that we as scholars needed to recognize the implications of our own “Knowledge production” in political processes of identity formation and mobilization (Stedman 1996).

Having said this, let me offer a bald and brief recapitulation of the conflict prevention proposals that emerged from the papers and discussion period of the session. Underlying all is a recognition that such general strategies should be implemented without coercion and must be attuned to local cultural and historical conditions.

Social mobility and the "sharing of symbolic systems" across ethnic boundaries (e.g through intermarriage) should be promoted.

Representations of present and past social identities and intergroup relationships should be devised that are simultaneously meaningfu| and non-polarizing.

Efforts at promoting intergroup reconciliation should be linked with efforts (and funding) targeting economic development. Overarching bonds having legitimacy among multiple populations within specific states should be strengthened (to outflank the bond of ethnic nationalism, generally identified as the Great Bogey).-
A "culture of civil rights and citizenship", detached from locality and territorial associations, should be cultivated.
Efforts should be made to attenuate the ties between specific ethnic groups and specific territories, including the promotion of internal geographic mobility.

Key players, including outsiders, in the process of building "transcendant" loyalties, structures, and associations must possess mutually recognized authority and legitimacy.

It would be disingenuous to dress up these proposals as novel and groundbreaking. Most have been proposed in similar form in a multitude of places over the past decade, including Kurti's seven-year old report appearing in this same publication. Most of them remain generalized suggestions, without specific, implementable, testable vehicles. As members of the other AAA, we seem to be well-stocked with map-makers and tour guides telling us where we should go, when maybe what we need are more truck drivers motivated with the sense of urgency that goes with carrying a perishable load.

References

Fisher, Roger, Elizabeth Kopelman, and Andrea Kupfer Schneider. Beyond Machiavelli: Tools for Coping with Conflict. 1994. Harvrd University Press

Miskolczy, Ambrus. "Lend Me Your Ears" (Review of: Verdery, Katherine. National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s romania. Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1991.) Budapest Review of Books II:4:1428, Winter 1992

Stedman, Stephan, “Alchemy for a New World Order”, Foreign Affairs 74(3): 14-20. 1996

REDEFINING THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE BOUNDARY: NATIONALISM AND WOMEN'S ACTIVISM IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Ana Devic
University of California, San Diego

In a socialist nation, men and women are equal, but women are different.

The task of this article is to discuss the ways in which nationalism was practiced by the political elite in the former socialist Yugoslavia since the 1970s, and the ways in which this process coincided with the stages of women's activism in Yugoslavia during the same period. The decentralization of authority within the Communist party and between regions of Yugoslavia had a profound impact on the trajectories of social life, including women’s initiatives.

I would like to start with an apparent paradox. It seems, ironically, that ethno-nationalist ideology and Western feminist studies, namely, some aspects of the post-modernist approach, often regarded as 'enemies', share a similar focus on the politics of collective identity and the blurring of the boundaries between the public and private spheres of life. Both ideologies, it seems, assume a direct relationship between the two spheres, a relationship in which private sphere exhibits an unmediated influence on the sphere of public-political life. Collective identities of women, ethnic identities in particular, are assumed to be unmediated by civic structures. In addition, and especially in the context of the post-socialist change of the role of women in the public sphere, they both exhibit a tendency to speak on behalf of women, as a group of victims, without allowing any 'local knowledge' to become part of legitimate political or academic discourse. This neglect of women's self-evaluation of their roles results, as many of us witnessed in the past several years in some serious misunderstandings between Western and 'local' East Central-European feminist researchers and activists on the issue of "what the post-socialist women want" from the democratization processes, and how they should react to the roles assigned to them by ethno-nationalist ideology. I will return to the problems of Western feminist analyses in the closing sections of the article.

The Stages of Women’s Activism in Former Yugoslavia

The case of the former Yugoslavia appears to be unique in several aspects. Feminist initiatives in Yugoslavia started emerging since the late 1970s; the Communist party did not seem to put any efforts in suppressing them. Another aspect of Yugoslavia's uniqueness is that, despite the apparent vitality of the alternative scene in Yugoslavia, the country disintegrated in the most violent way, generating, so it seems, only one form of collective identity -- the ethno-national one. A closer look at the most recent women's initiatives in the successor states of former Yugoslavia reveals some new developments that seem to fit quite poorly in the mentioned post-modernist scheme of the construction and influence of collective identity.

In this article I will argue that the post-WW2 Yugoslavia lived through two stages of official nationalism (in the sense of the term suggested by Benedict Anderson): republican, that lasted between the early 1970s and mid- 1980s, and ethnic official nationalism, that lasts until today. These stages of official ideology correspond with the three stages of women’s activism: 1) 'Modernist' stage of the socialist Yugoslavia, sharing the dominant socialist ideology's perspective on the priority of public sphere over the private, 'traditional' one; 2) 'Reactive' stage of women's anti-war protests where the perspectives on the divide between public and private oppose each other: ethno-nationalist ideology insists on the private roles of women being an essential part of an ethno-national collective being', while women's activists act in defense of the relative safety of the socialist (and all-Yugoslav) private sphere; and the 3) Stage of 'New Activism', where women's initiatives in all former republics of Yugoslavia start, as I will argue, rebuilding the public sphere based on the skills and communicative patterns of everyday life, and thus, altering the roles assigned to them by ethno-nationalist ideology.

I will further argue that the research on the stages of women's initiatives in relation to the stages of official ' nationalism complicates the 'correspondence' between the nationalist ideology and feminist post-modem approaches to collective identity, by departing from their common essentializing tendencies. Studies of collective and individual identities practiced in the stage of new women's activism in the former Yugoslavia may point to the dangerous overlap between post-modernist and ethno-nationalist approaches to the motives and goals of post-socialist women's mobilization. This thesis is schematized in the following Table 2.

I would also need to emphasize here that my definition of the 'private' sphere does not include simply everything that does not belong to the realm of the State, including the market. I prefer the definition of the 'private' used by Gregorz Ekiert, where it is described as a sphere of 'domestic' life, marked with 'familial' and 'emotional' networks of solidarity.

My research method combines several lines of data collection and analyses: first, the political and historical sociology of the disintegration of Yugoslavia; second, the use of women's issues in the dominant ideologies of Yugoslavia and ex-Yugoslav states; third, the statistics on women's participation in the labor force and political stratum; fourth, the history of women's groups in Yugoslavia between the late 1970s and late 1980s; and, most importantly, my semi-participant observation of the work of some fifteen women's and anti-war groups, mostly those from Serbia and Croatia, and a few from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia since 1991. This article is a smaller, condensed part of this research.

Let me now explain in more detail what I mean by the stages of Yugoslav 'official' nationalism and their correspondence with stages of women’s activism since the late 1970s.

Although few sociologists and political scientists today would argue that Yugoslavia's violent collapse was caused by some 'ancient' ethnic hostilities and national loyalties, there is enough evidence to conclude that nations are still being defined as 'real', fixed cultural and political entities by various proponents of the modernization and world-system theories. Instead of analyzing the Yugoslav 'nation', and its constituent ,nationalities' is a set of institutions and their ways of building social constituencies, these post-primordialists borrow the definition of the nation from the practice of the states that disseminate nationalism as their dominant ideology. Whose "false consciousness" is, then, nationalism? Of the ‘bourgeois’, or of the researcher trying to de-construct it?
Post-primordialist narratives of nationalism also tend to suggest that the line between the public and private sphere in the age of nationalism is virtually non-existent, meaning that the power of nationalist sentiments subsumes all aspects of group and individual identity. The case of women's activism in Yugoslavia can be used as a de-mystifying window to the landscape of private and public lives of some living constituencies of nationalism.
My approach takes nationalism as a group-making process. In the case of former socialist Yugoslavia, the motion of national 'groupness', or collective, has moved through two stages -- republican, and ethno-nationalist --, that accompanied the failing agendas of the Yugoslav League of Communists to solve economic and political crises since the early 1960s. After its break-up with Stalin in 1948, the Yugoslav League of Communists attempted to introduce the system of workers' councils in industrial enterprises. The 1965 economic reform planned to institutionalize the autonomy of industrial enterprises, as well as cultural and educational institutions, and reduce the power of federal planning agencies. On the ideological level, this agenda meant the dismantling of the Soviet model, denounced for its detachment from the 'working people'. Between 1965 and the promulgation of the new federal Constitution in 1974, proposals for the regional autonomy of industrial complexes, as well as cultural institutions came from the liberal-minded Party cadres in all Yugoslav republics. However, what took place in practice, instead of the actual decentralization of decision-making, was a vertical devolution of political power: it was transferred to, multiplied, and 'rounded off within the six republics and two provinces. Instead of the monopoly of one federal League of Communists, eight Party establishments were now endowed with the power to control economic and cultural policies within their regions. Since the transfer of political power from the federation to the republics turned out to be the only substantive result of the "self-management decentralization" reform, it would be difficult to argue that the new system actually allowed for a greater expression of (objectively increasing) social and economic grievances. In fact, the new Constitution expunged the "interests of the working people" even from its text, replacing it with the idea of the republican and provincial citizenship. Thus, group interests of each individual citizen in Yugoslavia were formulated as the interests of his/her republic and province, according to both (!) territorial and nationality criteria. (Sekelj, 1993: 4-18).

Since the mid- 1970s, when the growing army of the unemployed and semi-employed started threatening the legitimacy of the League of Communists, party oligarchies began to define the deepening economic crisis in terms of the problem of inadequate responses of particular regional (one or another republics' or provinces') bureaucracies to the pressures of modernization. Since each republics' titular nationalities were identified with certain territories, the deepening economic crises could be officially interpreted as a problem of a certain 'national territory'. Since the attempts for solving the deepening economic crises were replaced with the efforts to create full autonomy of administrative-territorial units, six republics and two provinces soon became autarkic, --more than autonomous. (Sekelj, 1993:97-101; 227-226). The ensuing rivalry between the republic’s Party leaderships, and its ideological expression – multiple republican nationalisms –were further exacerbated in the late 1970s, when another shift took place in the international terms of trade. In response to the shifting terms of trade the federal government's austerity measures attempted to make the country's exports more competitive on the international market, favoring the producers of manufactured exports in Slovenia, developed regions in Croatia, and some producers in Serbia. Agricultural exports from Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia, the beneficiaries of numerous subsidies and foreign loans in the previous period, were no longer favored. As a response to the pressures for reunification of the Yugoslav autarkic markets and financial systems, pressures coming from the International Monetary Fund advisors, the Yugoslav political oligarchies developed two competing strategies: 1) 'Federalist' strategy sought to reunite the Yugoslav market and allow for the free flow of capital and labor across the republics' boundaries; 2) 'Anti-federalist' strategy, instead, demanded protection of the most profitable industrial producers, located in the northwestern regions of the country (Woodward, 1995: 58-63; 82-88). It is within this context of the pressures from the IMF, on the one hand, and the competing strategies of economic reform, on the other, that we must understand the role of the republican official nationalisms, practiced by the Yugoslav republics' elites. It is within this same context that the debates between the Slovenian and Serbian Leagues of Communists about the proposals for new constitutional amendments took place between 1987 and 1988. The coming to power of Slobodan Milosevic in 1987 and his quick moves to abolish the constitutional autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina, could be, then, regarded as a 'federalist' response to the shifting terms of international trade, but also as an attempt to reunite the disintegrated market and polity in Serbia. On the other hand, it was also an assertion of the monopoly of the Serbian League of Communists over the territory of the entire republic, the process that was taking place in all republics since the 1974 Constitution.

The conflict between the Serbian and Slovenian Party leaderships about the content and goals of the republics' constitutional amendments in 1989 is significant because it presents a departure from the stage of official elite republican nationalisms. For the first time since WW2, the language of ethnic chauvinism, elaborated as the themes of ethno-national exploitation of one region by another, entered the pages of the daily press and other mass media in Yugoslavia. The stage of populist (and popular) ethnic nationalism, as a sentiment to be assimilated by all citizens in a, needless to mention, multi-ethnic state, was orchestrated from above, as the last stage of the all-Yugoslav ideology, and its Nemesis at the same time. The fact that the federation's political and economic institutions, as well as their media and cultural institutions, were thoroughly divided by republics and provinces since the early 1970s, provided an ideal structure for the dissemination and assimilation of ethno-national group sentiments. To summarize: the Yugoslav territorial and ethnic nationalisms, defined as ideologies of the rivaling republics' Leagues of Communists, and then, as sources of group identification in the late-socialist Yugoslavia, developed as the result of the long-time autarkization of the country's political, economic, and cultural institutions, -- not the other way around. Ethnic mobilization of the 'masses' had its roots in a successful orchestration of legitimate social and economic discontents, not in some grassroots 'liberal' or grassroots 'aggressive' nationalist ideas, surviving since the nineteenth century or earlier. Prior to the first multi-party elections in 1990, and arguably, not even after the elections, the 'masses' (urban and rural, and in all regions of the former Yugoslavia) had few means to imagine themselves as individual political subjects (with economic, communal, ethnic, or any other interests). The 1990 polls show that, despite the several- years-long orchestration of ethno-national hostilities, only a small percentage of the population expected their country to break-up (Oberschall, 1996).

What was, then, happening with private lives of the 'ordinary' Yugoslavs, what was the distance between them and the rivaling elites? Numerous studies document the rise of alternative civic initiatives in tile republics of former Yugoslavia since the late 1970s. Unfortunately, some former experts on the cultural and political ethos of these alternative initiatives have succumbed to the pressure to explain the success of ethno-nationalist mobilization, and have argued that nationalism simply had proven to be the most powerful source of group identity, rather than trying to understand how the nationalist elites utilized some of the cultural repertoire of numerous alternative initiatives. First of all, it is important to say that alternative initiatives in the former Yugoslavia were never oppositional movements, to the extent that it could be said of the Solidarity movement in Poland or Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. Since the late 1960s, the criticism of the Yugoslav political system by 'critical' intellectuals was firmly embedded in the discourse of a return to the true essence of socialist self-management (Sekelj, 1993: 149-152). The same could be said of the political attitudes of the early feminist groups, comprised of professional women from the fields of social sciences, literature, and journalism. One should not forget that Yugoslavia in the 1970s was the only socialist one-party state that had open borders and relatively free access to foreign periodicals and programs of international academic exchange. In this atmosphere, feminism developed as a critical discipline among the non-Party-affiliated professional women in the form of discussing the trends in Western feminism, but also as a critique of the inequality between sexes in the socialist Yugoslavia. The critique of the socialist forms of patriarchy, developed by the feminist groups in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, was at first received with suspicion by the party-sponsored Socialist Conference for Women's Activities, but soon found its way not only to academic workshops funded by the Yugoslav official academic associations, but also to the popular weekly and academic press (Papic, 1989: 91-97). The permissive authoritarianism of the Yugoslav Party was cautious in suppressing such alternative initiatives, especially since they did not question the legitimacy of "self-management democracy". The reputation of Yugoslavia as a state different from all others, especially from its 'oppressive' East European neighbors, seemed to play some role in the Yugoslav Communist elites' decision to leave the new feminist initiatives alone. After all, the Yugoslav legacy of the anti-fascist struggle during WW2 had always contained an emphasis on the inclusion of women of all classes and nationalities in the building of the socialist state. To what extent the Yugoslav elites were ideologically permissive (or unstable) can be shown by the slogan of one of the first feminist discussion forums in Belgrade in the late 1970s: "Proletarians of all countries, who is washing your socks"'? -- a slogan that passed without a comment on the part of the official ideologues, but was applauded in the popular weekly cultural and political magazines.

Although these early feminist groups worked in close cooperation with each other, the staging of an all-Yugoslav feminist movement was not easy, due to the fact that financing academic and cultural exchange across the republics' and provinces' borders was more and more difficult since the early 1970s. Most feminist conferences were sponsored by the so-called Unions of the Socialist Youth that allowed feminist forums to use their facilities and charge some of their travel and other expenses to the local (Serbian, Croatian or Slovenian) Socialist Youth. At the same time, Croatian feminists organized a "Woman and Society" section within the official sociological association of Croatia, which enabled them to apply for research and travel funds: feminist studies thus became sponsored by official academic bodies. Between the late 1970s and late 1980s, research was conducted on the diminishing access of women to high political posts, on the discrepancy between the high academic achievements of women and their invisibility in the top echelons of academic establishments, and on the patterns of occupational segregation, typical of all socialist states at the time. (Jancar, 1985; Slapsak, 1996). Women were concentrated in low-skilled administrative jobs, or, as university graduates, as teachers in kindergartens, elementary and high schools. New job areas that became stereotyped as 'female' were soon acquiring low status and resulted in lower pay and benefits.

What is interesting about the first stage of women's activism is that it focused on the poor representation of women in the high-paid and high-status jobs more than on the studies of everyday lives of ‘ordinary’ women. This tendency was observed by some feminists in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade already in the 1980s: they claimed that feminism became an elitist trend, while the field was in need of empirical studies and direct communication with those sixty per cent of women who were presented in the official statistics as dependents or semi-employed persons.

What the first feminists seemed to be less sensitive about at the time were the reasons behind the growing interest of the political elites in constructing the image of the Yugoslav woman. In the late 1980s, when Fadil Hoxha, a representative from Kosovo in the Federal Presidency of Yugoslavia, allegedly suggested that the Yugoslav women of Christian background should be allowed to work as prostitutes in Kosovo because Muslim Albanian women could not do that, Yugoslav intellectual feminists at first failed to analyze this event as a construction of the collective identities of both Albanian and Serb and Montenegrin women in Kosovo. With a typical contempt for everything taking place in the realm of high politics, they regarded both the alleged comment of Fadil Hoxha and the following construction of his 'anti-Yugoslav ethno-nationalism' by the Serbian media as symptoms of 'male chauvinism'. The event was, in reality, much more complicated. When the Serb demonstrators in Kosovo started carrying some slogans such as "Serb mothers are not whores", demanding Fadil Hoxha's resignation, the feminist circles defined it as demonstrations of poor 'traditional women', worried about their rural (meaning ethnic) values of 'honor'. What the intellectual feminism of the 1980s failed to observe is the peculiar relationship between the rivalries of the republics 'Party leaderships, rising unemployment, and declining social benefits on the one hand, and the rise of the pro-natalist discourse and the celebration of the role of women as carriers of family and national stability on the other. Nation, as I mentioned before, was being increasingly defined as ethnic entity.
The same elements of the pro-natalist discourse can be found in all other East-Central European states at (lie time, which shows that ethno-nationalization of official politics, occurring in Yugoslavia at the time, was not the sole reason for tile socialist regimes' interest in women. The crumbling of the welfare state, taking place in all late-socialist states, was accompanied by the concern for moral and cultural ‘well-being’ of both women and children, that, supposedly, needed to be protected from the harmful effects of public life. In reality, on the other hand, public life did contain some unpleasant changes: unemployment and the deterioration of child care facilities. The way in which the pro-natalist regimes of the 1980s addressed the 'well-being' of women-- an ambiguous view of women as being 'burdened' with their work outside home, and at the same time, as the beneficiaries of socialist policies -- extended to the post-socialist period. In fact, the post-1989 restructuring of the welfare system, employment policies, and the regrouping of the new political elites, provided new incentives for the pro-natalist and paternalistic discourse (Gal, 1994; Verdery, 1994).

It comes as no surprise that the intellectual feminists in Yugoslavia observed the victory of the mono-ethnic nationalist parties in the collapsing federation in a similar fashion that other non-empowered constituencies reacted to it: with revolt, disbelief and consternation (Slapsak, 1993 and 1996). Unlike the dissident circles in the rest of East-Central European states, the alternative networks in Yugoslavia had not perceived themselves as opponents of the regime. It could be argued that many of the anti-ethnonationalist feminists thought that the Communist Party converted to nationalism (as a destructive ideology) only in the few years preceding the 'collapse of Communism'.

The all-Yugoslav intellectual feminist networks could not survive the Yugoslav federation. The next stage of women's initiatives, developing between 1991 and 1992, was, in fact, the period of anti-war initiatives in all ex-Yugoslav republics (I call it the reactive stage). Individuals demonstrating against the war in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia, were mostly women: among them, old-time Yugoslav feminists were gradually getting outnumbered by students, mothers of soldiers, and refugee women. The motivation to participate in the anti-war demonstrations, under the pressure of the increasing hostility of the post-Yugoslav nationalist regimes toward any anti-war sentiments, obviously required more courage than the earlier feminist mobilization. Since the majority of anti-war demonstrators did not belong to the strata of women with a developed 'feminist consciousness', constructed in the professional milieus of the early feminists, we should seek a more sensitive explanation of the reasons behind the entry of these 'new women' in the public arena.

Anti-war protests in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia reached its apogee in 1991, and faded away during the escalation of the war in Bosnia. However, between 1992 and 1995 new groups of women emerged, absorbing the members of the anti-war protests and drawing new participants, particularly from refugee women, women who had lost their jobs (or were on what is called in ex-Yugoslavia ‘unpaid vacations'), and students. The third stage of New women's Activism was characterized not only by an elaborated work among the refugees, but also by organizing shelters for the victims of war rape, domestic violence, and providing legal aid to draft-dodgers. Although it may seem that many of these activities are ‘typically feminine' and should be welcomed by the nationalist-conservative regimes, I would suggest that the motivation of these women to work in various humanitarian relief groups is, in fact, a subversion of the paternalistic nationalist ideology. First, it is true that the nationalistic regimes attempted to use the 199 I1992 revolt of the mothers of soldiers for its own purposes. The examples of the Croatian Rampart of Love, the Serbian Mothers Against the War, and most obviously, the use of the mass rape by Serb soldiers against the Bosnian Muslim women in the Bosnian govemment's pleas for international military intervention, are the instances of overt instrumentalization. Moreover, the identification of women with the "wounded bodies of the nation" was appropriated even by some prominent Western feminists and 'critical intellectuals', such as Catherine MacKinon and Alain Finkelkraut.

Despite all these attempts of the nationalist regimes to create their versions of women's issues as public (belonging to the realm of state intervention) and private (as the site of sacred loyalties to family, husbands, and children) at once, the activities of women's groups between 1992 and 1995 show a much greater propensity for autonomous ideas and self-perceptions than presented by the ruling parties and the media. In fact, many groups that I studied combine their humanitarian relief work with writing petitions against their governments’ anti-women's policies in the sphere of employment and social services, while some, like Women in Black in Belgrade and Rijeka, continue to stage anti-war protests, condemning the warring ethno-nationalist regimes. Even in the war-tom Bosnia, women's groups insistence on their urban, cosmopolitan identity alters the images of submissive, frightened, in short, ‘traditional’ women celebrated by the Bosnian government. Another feature that makes the work of these groups different from the image of women’s private sphere, assigned by the nationalist governments, is their dedication to work with and for other women. Those working in the numerous shelters and counseling centers for battered women and children not only confront some enraged husbands who come to their doors, but also conduct and publish studies of the detrimental effects of nationalism and war psychology on the aggressive behavior of men. Women's' grassroots refugee relief groups, in contrast to state-run refugee agencies, try to promote economic self-reliance among women, by organizing special training and work programs, and by selling books, drawings, sweaters and accessories produced by refugee women.

The overwhelming majority of women working in these groups express their dissatisfaction with both the realm of partisan politics and with the attitudes toward war and ethnic nationalism held by their male family members, neighbors, and work mates. While many women tend to essentialize the differences between women and men with regard to their attitudes toward war and nationalism, this essentialization serves as an important impulse for criticizing the policies of nationalist governments, and for making the activities of these groups more attractive to many women who may feel suspicious or awkward about 'Western' feminist insistence on individual career goals and competitive behavior.

The Problems of the Observers

Before I start synthesizing my findings about the impact of the official ideology and policies of the Yugoslav regime and its successors upon women’s groups, I would like to suggest paying closer attention to the conceptual and methodological problems found in some influential Western feminist literature on the East-European transition. I suggest to return to this topic, mentioned in the opening paragraphs, because I wish to problematize further the problem of the lack of field studies of the boundary between the public and private spheres in the East-European transition.

The examples of the misunderstandings and 'clicheing' of East European women and feminists are numerous. The debate about who the East-European women are culminated in the writings about the mass rape of the Bosnian women by the Bosnian Serb soldiers in 1992-1993. A prominent American feminist Catherine MacKinnon argues that the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian women could be identified with the fate of their new nation-states, borrowing the metaphors from the local politicians' pleas for international military intervention. In the same piece, MacKinnon suggests that the pursuit of mass rape as part of the ideology of (male) Serbs comes should not be surprising since the production of pornography in txe former Yugoslavia was run by the Serbs (?!) (MacKinnon, in Mass Rape, 1994). Perhaps more disturbing than the ignorance and rage that inform her article, and more striking than her identification of women's suffering with the ‘pain’ experienced by their nation-states, is MacKinnon's disinterestedness in the real lives, past and present, of women who survived the war rape. As the Serbian-Slovenian feminist anthropologist Svetlana Slapsak points out, the patterns of women's solidarity networks, formed by their past private lives (in the rural and suburban Bosnia), translated and changed in the refugee context, seldom attract the curiosity of foreign observers, even those motivated by the most humanist-feminist causes, as in the case of MacKinnon’s involvement (Slapsak, 1996).

The relationship between the rise of ethno-nationalism in East-Central Europe and the marginalization of women and women’s groups is one important testing ground for concepts and methodologies applicable to the post-Communist women and their activism. The problems found in the volume on the mass rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina resurface in another form in Sabrina Ramet's work on alternative movements in Eastern Europe. Although Ramet spent many years studying women's groups in the region, she explains their marginalization in the former Yugoslavia in a 'commonsensical' fashion: patriarchal nationalism was revived in Serbia since the advent to power of Slobodan Milosevic; this event then unleashed conservative ideologies in other ex-Yugoslav republics, sweeping away women’s and other alternative movements (Ramet, 1995: see chapters on Yugoslavia). It follows from this scheme that the post-socialist anti-women’s backlash is a reaction to the ‘socialist-modernist’ policies on women. This simplistic explanation of the backlash implies that conducting field work on some fledgling post-Communist forms of women's activism is not a priority task as long as nationalism is the dominant ideology. After all, they (the post-1989 women's groups) may be just 'residues' of the nostalgia for the public space of women during socialism.

A new comprehensive understanding of the past and present identities of East-European women means, first of all, a research on their institutional and cultural contexts. Only such in-depth analysis may legitimize the suggestions about "what to fight for and against". Some relevant criticism of the Western ‘modernist’ and 'post-modernist' (identity politics- colored) views of East-European feminism has been already articulated by the local sociologists and anthropologists. Jirina Smejkalova-Strickland, a Czech feminist researcher, calls for a study of the "socialist female and male subject', suggesting that the 'modem dominant male' started emerging in the post-Communist Europe only recently: ordering a battle against him in the same way that it has been done in the West may confuse and revolt many women and men. Maja Povrzanovic, a Croatian anthropologist, shows that Western NGOs in Croatia, and feminist groups in particular, have been classifying local women's groups into the categories of 'civic' activists (Western-like) who are eligible for foreign support, and 'nationalist conservatives' (those who are not critical of the Croatian regime) (Povrzanovic, 1995). In a remarkably similar fashion, Western feminist discourses on East-Central European women and ethno-nationalist rhetoric of the local politicians that the former seem to abhor, essentialize the identities of local women, depriving them from the voice of their own. The problem might be overcome by more field studies: this paper is a sign in that direction. By offering multi-layered definitions of who the East-Central European women were in their private and public lives before 19991990, i.e. by finding out how they were defined officially and in other, less visible, contexts, we may start understanding not only what the local women want, but also what kind of feminism might become successful in their midst. Limiting oneself to the studies of local feminists' discourses may shed too little light on the context of the disintegrating public sphere in East-Central Europe (employment structures, welfare and social service facilities, health care) and the ways in which women's private sphere (inherited from socialism) copes with the change and thus changes itself. This comprehensive approach may also help answer the question of why and how some women become tokens of nationalist ideologies or even their spokespersons.

Synthesizing Remarks

In order to historicize and theorize the findings of my research in a more schematic way, I suggest to look again at Table 1, where the relationship between the stages of official nationalism of the Yugoslav regime and its successors, and the activities and ideas of women's groups is presented. This scheme also illustrates my attempts to de-ideologize the fluid boundary between the public and private spheres, and rescue it from the stiff definitions found in both nationalist ideologies and some feminist approaches.

The permissive authoritarianism of the Yugoslav League of Communists in the late 1970s, lasting until the mid-1980s, lead allowed for the emergence of a Yugoslav brand of intellectual feminism, focusing on the place of women in the public arena and the detrimental impact of patriarchy that was discovered to have persisted in socialism. At the same time, the early feminists did not dispute the distinction between the private and public sphere of women’s lives, sharing the orthodox Marxist (developmentalist) contempt for women's role of the 'sentimental' care provider. Little effort was put at the time in trying to understand the tension between the role of women as 'socialist workers' and guardians of family 'safe havens'. Only recently some feminist writers from East-Central Europe pointed to the conflictual role of women during both socialism and post-socialism, neglected not only by the socialist and nationalist regimes, but by many ex-dissident intellectuals (Slapsak, 1996; Gal, 1994). During socialism, the sphere of private was regarded as a safe arena of anti-regime gatherings by both male and female dissidents. The celebration of women as guardians of that safe 'oppositional' space incidentally, at one point, started corresponding with the nationalist regimes’' depiction of women as 'natural' links between the family and (ethnic) nation (seen as a 'big family').

The nationalization of women's issues that paralleled the crumbling of social services and employment opportunities for women, and their 'sublimation' in the pro-natalist rhetoric, were taking place in all East Central European states during the 1980s. (I should mention here that in most socialist states pro-natalist rhetoric, as a concern for the dropping birth rate, in fact, appeared already in the 1970s: however, at that time it was within the context of the regime's concerns for the diminishing pool of labor force.) During the 1980s, the feminists in Yugoslavia focused primarily on the diminishing presence of women in the public arena. This focus did not provide them with a sufficiently broad vision that would help them understand the potential of the emerging ethno-nationalist homogenization to usurp all areas and institutions that seemed to have secured some autonomy during socialism: family, schools, neighborhood networks, etc.

During the second stage of women's initiatives, in the anti-war phase, women rebelled against ethno-nationalism as a morally repugnant ideology destroying the fabric of everyday life, and as concerned mothers, sisters, lovers, and wives of the soldiers of the new armies. Although they were at times manipulated by the nationalist leaders and the media, this manipulation ceased to exist as soon as the regimes sensed that most women's groups were not comfortable with their image of the 'national mothers'. During this second stage the dominant ideology insisted on the unity of public and private sphere, justified by the needs to sacrifice private interests to the goals of the war and liberation. Participants of the anti-war groups, on the other hand, presented a different picture of both public and private lives. Although they drew their motivation to participate in the anti-war protests form their role of the guardians of the 'family peace', and as if they would be able to communicate it to the public sphere, they obviously crossed the boundary between the sphere that was ‘theirs’ according to the dominant discourse, and the space that belonged to men -- the sphere of political visibility.

The subversion of the boundaries assigned by the nationalist narratives became even more obvious during the third stage, the one that is still at work. It is perhaps interesting to mention that the third ('humanitarian') stage is marked by a growing financial support of foreign philanthropic and women's organizations. In Serbia, for example, it was not possible to receive foreign aid between 1992 and 1996 for any other purpose except for humanitarian relief due to the international economic sanctions. During the third stage women in all ex-Yugoslav states have engaged in the activities that are even more discomforting from the point of view of the nationalist ideology. Not only they have often helped refugee women of all nationalities, not only they have tried to make women financially independent, but they have, in addition, engaged in some unspeakable crimes: the organization of workshops that feature women from all ex-Yugoslav 'warring nations'. In the last four years, the Belgrade-based Women in Black have organized annual workshops and anti-war protests in Novi Sad, whose participants include not only women from Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia, but also from all confederate units of Bosnia. Ironically, some Western feminist writers few years ago claimed that women of the 'opposing sides' of the Yugoslav war cannot be expected to sit side by side (Helke Sander, in The Mass Rape, 1994).

In the third stage of women's activism, the boundaries between the private and public experiences are blurred, again in a different fashion. Women are expunged from the public-political arena more than ever, but they also develop a new critical sense of the meaning of their marginalization. They draw their sense of subjectivity from the skills and habits of their 'double shift', a subjectivity inherited from socialism, but they do not live it within their family space alone. They react to the encroachment of war ideologies and the rules of economic restructuring on the spheres where some autonomy existed before, and redefine their public and private roles.

The apparent lack of obstacles to the proliferation of women's alternative and genuinely non-ethnonationalistic activities seems to be due to the inherently unstable ideologies of the post-Yugoslav states. What kind of future could we predict for women's initiatives in this region? The fading of ethno-nationalist-nationalist ideology could lead to the 'demobilization’ of women's activism and their further marginalization from the sphere of career jobs and political posts. The 'normalization' of the war-stricken states could also lead to the gradual movement of women's initiatives towards the sphere of political decision-making. We may expect that women's activism would contribute, and, in fact, has already contributed to the new forms of separation and connection between the public and private sphere, this time built from bottom to top, from scratch.

References

Susan Gal. Gender in the Post-Socialist Transition: the Abortion Debate in Hungary, in East European Politics and Societies (EEPS), Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 1994.

Robert Hayden. The Beginning of the End of Federal Yugoslavia, in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, No. 1001, December 1992.

Barbara Jancar. The New Feminism in Yugoslavia, in Yugoslavia-in the 1980s, Pedro Ramet, ed., Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1985.

Catherine A. MacKinon. Rape, Genocide, and Women's Human Rights, in The Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. by A. Stiglmayer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Anthony Oberschall. The Breakup of Yugoslavia, paper presented at the American Sociological Association Conference, New York, August 1996.

Zarana Papic. Sociologija i feminizam. Belgrade: Istrazivacko-izdavacki centar SSO Srbije, 1989.
Maja Povrzanovic. Facing the Future: Women in Post-Socialist Croatia, paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Conference, November 1995, Washington, D.C.

Sabrina P. Ramet. Social Currents in Eastern Europe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995.

Laslo Sekelj. Yugoslavia: The Process of Disintegration. Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Monographs, 1993.

Svetlana Slapsak. Bestial Words, Bestial War, in The New York Times, May 25, 1993.

Svetlana Slapsak, Zene i rat u bivsoj Jugoslaviji, in Republika, Belgrade, Nos. 145/146, August 1-31, 1996.

Jirina Smejkalova-Strickland. Do Czech Women Need Feminism?, in Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 17, Nos. 2/3, 1994.

Katherine Verdery. From Parent-States to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe, In EEPS, vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 1994.

Susan L. Woodward. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995

THE NATION AND ITS MARGINS: NEGOTIATING A NATIONAL IDENTITY IN POST-1989 BULGARIA
Tim Pilbrow
New York University

My aim in this article is to illuminate key aspects of how the nation is represented in public discourse in Bulgaria, both as an abstract concept and as a grounded locus of social and cultural life and identity construction.1 I do this through examining the anomalous position and lack of legitimacy accorded to ethnic and religious minorities through the dominant discourse on national identity, that of the Orthodox Christian majority. I shall focus in particular upon one central element in the discourse on national identity, namely, the claim to identity as a nation within the symbolic space of Europe. I examine this discourse as it plays out in the practice of history teaching in Bulgaria and in the wider public arena.

Much of the work of producing an over-arching national identity and of producing personal identities as Bulgarian national subjects involves distancing both the individual self and the "national self" from practices and traits that are considered un-European, while adopting such that are considered European. Marginalizing minorities who display such un-European traits, I will argue, is integral to this process of defining Bulgaria as a European nation.
Ethnic and religious minorities constitute a significant demographic presence in Bulgaria. While census figures vary considerably from year to year 2, ethnic Turks (together with Tatars) comprise almost 10% of the population, Gypsies somewhere between 3.5 and 6.5%, Pomak-s (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims) about 3%, and others a little over 1%3. However the place of these minorities within the Bulgarian nation-state is fraught with ambiguity. Official policy regarding minorities has undergone wide fluctuation, and negative stereotypes abound. The socialist-era government swung from an initial position of promoting minority cultural development to one of aggressively pursuing brutal assimilation policies, directed particularly against Muslims and Turks (see Bates 1994)4. The Pomak-s and Macedonians have been variously granted and denied separate group identities, and a "fictive" Macedonian identity was imposed on Bulgarians in the Pirin region (adjacent to the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) for a while in 1947. Since the passing of state socialism in 1989, many of the earlier injustices have been redressed. Yet, in both official policy and public opinion, the existence of minorities constitutes a problem central to the task of defining the Bulgarian nation-state.

Given the prominence of this "minority problem" in government policy and public opinion, it appears surprising at first glance that the Bulgarian school history curriculum, a major vehicle for the transmission of official national ideology (as cultural policy), reserves little place for minorities, whether religious or ethnic, and that these are consequently largely absent from history classroom discussions. However, it is a mistake to treat cultural policy or official ideological pronouncements as constituting ideology in and of themselves. Ideology, rather, emerges as much in the silences and gaps of such official discourses (see Herzfeld 1987: 14, 21). If, following Fox, we understand national ideology as officially-sanctioned conceptions of what constitutes national "peoplehood" ( Fox 1990:3), we must nevertheless approach national ideologies as socially constituted, i.e. as emerging through the social, cultural, economic and political practices of the members of a national society. Ideologies inform yet are also shaped by such practices ( Giddens 1984, Verdery 1991, Fox et al. 1990), and official discourses (cultural policy, ideological pronouncements) do not necessarily represent explicit statements of the ideology that they sanction. The silences and gaps, as much as what is explicitly stated, constitute the symbolic field within which ideology emerges through the practices of institutional and private agents. Ideology in this regard may be considered as a kind of "practical consciousness" (Giddens 1984)5. Thus, the absence of ethnic and religious minorities from the official discourse on national identity and their marginality within the wider public discourse must be considered as (in part) constitutive of national ideology. Indeed, the ways in which ethnic and religious minorities (as the obverse of "the national") are marginalized within the discourse on national identity reveals much about how what constitutes "national" identity is defined. This production of the nation through the marginalization of the ethnic and religious "other" is particularly poignantly illustrated in terms of the way Bulgarian identity is framed as a European identity.

As "interested discourse[s]" central to a particular social order (Eagleton 1991:10), ideologies are open to renegotiation when such practices and/or configurations of power change. The post-state-socialist transition in Bulgaria has entailed substantial resignification of the historical underpinnings of national ideology. Official cultural policy -- as expressed through the school history curriculum -- has been adapted rather quickly to change, taking on a more "European" (i.e. humanistic) image and portraying in principle a more inclusive nation. However, other aspects of institutional reform that affect the transmission and reproduction of cultural policy (e.g. retraining of teachers, rewriting of textbooks, scholarly production under new paradigms) occur at a slower pace. Textbooks are being continually rewritten, but few are yet considered by their users to be both of "European" standard and suitable pedagogically.

The official history curriculum of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education for the year 1995-96 outlines among the aims of history education for grades IV - XI the following:

the formation of national historical consciousness [natsionalno istorichesko s?znanie] and national self-confidence [natsionalno samochuvstvie] ... through outlining phenomena, processes and events that demonstrate the inseparability of Bulgaria from European cultural values, the values of European civilization;
the formation of historical memory and the development of an awareness of national identity [os?znavane na natsionalna identichnost] through placing accents on eminent figures and events of pertinence to concrete periods and historical perspectives, with accents also on enduring, historically instransient factors of meaning and import to the historical development and fate of the Bulgarian people [narod];
instruction in tolerance and national and human dignity through acquaintance with the history of culture and the contribution of all peoples [narodi] to it, and the development of general human morals and cultural-historical values (Ministerstvo na obrazovanieto... 1995:10, emphasis mine).

These aims are further woven into the curriculum descriptions for particular grades such that demonstrating the Europeanness of Bulgarian culture and history occupies a prominent position both for grades studying Bulgarian history and for grades studying general history, regardless of the historical period in question. The prime subject of history is the Bulgarian nation, both in the sense of "people" (i.e. "narod" in Bulgarian, comparable in meaning to the German term "Volk") and in the historically-specific sense of the modern territorial-political nation (Bulg. natsiya) -- which is conceived of as an organic outgrowth of the narod6. However, the primary agent in history is stressed as being the individual human being, rather than either the nation or the working class.

Some room is reserved in the curriculum, particularly that of the lower grades, for studying the development of a specifically "Bulgarian" ethnic and "national" identity in the Middle Ages. Indeed, narodnosti7, or ethnic groups (in the sense of culturally-distinct groups) are presented in the curriculum (and widely understood) to have been formed once and for all in the Middle Ages and to be inviolable. Pupils in a variety of grades were able fluently to outline the categorical distinction between narodnosti (ethnic groups), which were formed in the early Middle Ages, and nations (in the modern territorial-political sense), which were formed during the Renaissance. Moreover, I heard repeatedly among pupils and teachers the view that neither "ethnicity-proper" (as in the term "ethnic origin", Bulg. etnicheska prinadlezhnost), i.e. ethnicity understood in a biological, racial sense, nor language are crucial factors in the formation of a nation (or narodnost). Rather, national self-consciousness (natsionalno samos?znanie) is the key. This would seem to contradict both observed practice (marginalization of minorities seemingly on linguistic and ethnic grounds) and common Western understandings of identity issues in the Balkans. However, under further scrutiny this apparent contradiction dissolves.

Bulgarian history itself involves the erasure of ethnic and linguistic distinctions between the Bulgar and Slav ethnic groups (and other groups) that merged, ostensibly unproblematically, in the Early Middle Ages to form a unitary Bulgarian narodnost (nation, people, culturally-ethnic group) during the time of the first Bulgarian Kingdom. History teachers and academics, textbooks and pupils alike referred to the formation during this period of a "national/ethnic (self-)consciousness" (narodnostno (samo-)s?znanie) which has served to unify the nation since the Middle Ages. The formation of narodnosti (ethnic groups) is seen as a uniform process characteristic of the Middle Ages (at least in Europe). This is presented in sharp contrast to the Ancient World, which is characterized by pure and separate racial-ethnic groups (etnosi, sg. etnos). Narodnosti (peoples, culturally-ethnic groups) are seen as more fluid groupings of people based on consensus and political expediency (not to mention invasion and domination). Modern nations are understood to have arisen on the basis of such culturally-ethnic groups (narodnosti) during the Renaissance as a new form of political integration. There is, however, no general admission that such identities or the nations they reference can be constituted in the present. Only those nations, such as Bulgaria, based on a culturally-ethnic group (narodnost) formed in the Middle Ages, have a legitimate claim to national status now. This results in Macedonian and Bosnian-Muslim national identities being considered almost unanimously by Bulgarians as fictions. Regional or religious descriptors, yes, but not in any sense national or ethnic. People I asked were unanimous in the case of Bosnia: Islam, or indeed religion, as the basis for a national state in Europe is unthinkable. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is a sore point for most Bulgarians as it is considered an integral part of Bulgaria historically, culturally, and linguistically (though never part of modern (post-1878) Bulgaria). This organic Bulgaro-Macedonian connection is stressed in the school curriculum. Indeed, officially the Macedonian state is recognized, whereas the existence of a distinctive Macedonian language, culture and history is not8.

Let us now return to the question of the marginalization of minorities. Despite their numerical presence (Turks alone comprising almost 10% of the population), minorities are largely excluded from the public discourse on national identity (see Bates 1994). This is not to suggest that members of minorities are denied access to social, legal, economic and political institutions (though at times under the state-socialist regime certain of them were (Eminov 1990)). However, structural discrimination against members of perceived minorities persists (Eminov 1990, Bates 1994), as do widespread prejudice and negative stereotypes. Where minorities seek redress through collective representation, dominant streams within the public discourse on national identity rally against them. What emerges in examining such instances is that they are sites where conflicting visions of Europe9 meet: one that regards Europeanness as an exclusive, historically-ordained, organic right; the other as an idea, somewhat synonymous with modern humanitarian values (Donna Buchanan, personal communication), that has to be nurtured, achieved, and demonstrated through the establishment of democratic institutions, the observance of minority rights, etc.

This clash between competing visions of Europeanness was readily apparent when a Turkish candidate of the primarily Turkish/Muslim political party, The Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF), won mayoral office in the predominantly Turkish town of K?rdzhali (in the Rhodope Mountains of Southern Bulgaria). There was considerable public outcry from "ethnic" Bulgarians, which resulted in an inquiry into the election procedure. In the meantime the Mayor was removed from office, although finally reinstated months later, a move that was widely considered a blow to democracy. A newspaper article in a major national daily, Pari (Money), appearing shortly before the election, attacked the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), the main opposition party to the incumbent Bulgarian Socialist Party, which had vowed support for the Turkish candidate (Panayotov 1995a). The article was interpreted by Turks as inflaming enmity between Bulgarians and Turks (Apostolova 1995). In response, the author of the first article, wrote another article in which he stated: "In reply I can only say that to the best of my belief, in Bulgaria there live Bulgarians", i.e. Turkish identity has no place in Bulgaria. He asserted further, that the MRF party, instead of trying to politicize ethnicity, should "go back to where it naturally belongs, back to where it came from -- the political dunghill of contemporary Bulgarian history" (Panayotov 1995b). This view seems to be widely shared, that a political party based on ethnicity has no place in Bulgaria. The rest of the article, however, is devoted to exhorting "ethnic" Bulgarians to get up and vote for the only viable Bulgarian (in this case, Socialist) candidate.

Similar invective was unleashed periodically during my fieldwork period (1995-96) against the President of Bulgaria, Zhelyu Zhelev, his advisors on minority issues, and the international foundations supporting minorities research. Especially controversial was the raising of the Bulgarian Muslim community (Pomaks) to minority status, when traditionally they have been considered fully Bulgarian in all respects except religion. Minority status is equated with separatism (e.g. Haytov 1996), and in this regard, Pomak minority politics are widely considered to derive from foreign "propaganda" interests believed to be operative in the Pomak region of the Rhodope mountains: Turkish, American, Middle-Eastern, and Greek10. Pomaks have also a variety of autochthonous theories as to how they ended up as Bulgarian Muslims, and these usually involve a migration from the Middle-East. Officially, however, Pomaks are considered to be Bulgarians who converted to Islam during the period of Ottoman rule (early XVth to late XIXth century); they are thus Bulgarian beyond doubt, members of the Bulgarian narodnost. Minority status would in this view imply a greater distinction from the dominant culture than does religion alone, and would achieve legitimacy for Islam as a component of ethnic identity. For this reason, Bulgarians I spoke with often downplayed religion as a component of national and ethnic identity. Language, similarly, is downplayed as a component of ethnic identity, so as to further undermine ethnic Turks' claims to minority status. What makes Bulgarians Bulgarian is thus not their language or religion, but their national self-consciousness. And this is precisely what the dominant discourse on national and ethnic identity denies to the "so-called" minorities. In the case of the Turkish minority, public opinion and government policies over the last decades have moved between two poles: 1). asserting that they are turkified Bulgarians, the stance behind the socialist-era assimilation campaigns; and 2). recognizing them as members of the Turkish nation, the stance behind the periodic mass expulsions of Turks (see Bates 1994, Eminov 1990). In practice, however, there is widespread recognition of the importance of Turks to the economic well-being of the country (another factor behind the assimilation campaigns). A hybrid Bulgarian-Turkish identity, nevertheless, does not sit well with ethnic Bulgarian understandings of inviolable ethnic identity (narodnost). The Turkish minority must be either Bulgarian or Turkish. Pomaks, for their part, have no claim to a separate narodnost formed in the Middle Ages, having been Bulgarians who converted to Islam.

Indeed, a prominent public figure charged the president's office and foreign foundations with having promoted research asserting the existence of a Pomak ethnicity (in the racial/biological sense, Bulg. etnos) (Haytov 1996). This would be to assert that Pomaks had never been Bulgarian, that they had always been separate. What really upset people across the board, however, was the publication in June 1996 in Greece of a Pomak-Greek/Greek-Pomak dictionary and a grammar of the Pomak language (Standart 1996). Greece, too, has a small population of Pomaks, who speak what Bulgarians would maintain is reasonably pure Bulgarian. Thus, treating their language as a language in its own right (i.e., denying its Bulgarianness) was seen as a deliberate attempt to destabilize Bulgaria. If Pomaks on one side of the border are a nation, then what does that imply for the other side of the border? Moreover, the sinister intent ascribed to the Greek government (which ostensibly had nothing to do with the publication of the books) was heightened by the fact that Greece has usually maintained that it is an ethnically-pure state without ethnic minorities (ibid.). This incident commanded a great deal of public attention in Bulgaria, and Greek-Bulgarian diplomacy was decidedly barbed for some time.

These events I have outlined bring into sharp focus tensions and contestation in the public discourse on Bulgarian national identity. Marginalization and exclusion of minorities from the discourse on national identity has often been explained in terms of an imperative to view the nation as a homogeneous whole (for instance Eminov 1990). This explanation fits reasonably the state-socialist-era brutal assimilation policies -- coerced name-changes, restricted civil and language rights. Indeed, Eminov ( 1990:8) cites government-sponsored research from 1988 that asserted the 'racial purity' of the Bulgarian people, with the implication that Turks and other minorities in the Bulgarian state were in essence Bulgarians who had "lost" their essential Bulgarian identity (through coerced assimilation under Ottoman rule). Turks supposedly all voluntarily reassumed their Bulgarian identity during 1984-85 (Eminov 1990:9). Such an explanation -- the imperative of a homogeneous nation -- may still hold some validity. It is still be adhered to by many Bulgarians. However, the context within which the assimilatory policies were developed was, as Eminov points out ( "Eminov 1990"1990:3), that of the pursuit of a unified socialist community, which was to be achieved through the standardization of culture within national boundaries. This was in part predicated on what Baki(-Hayden and Hayden refer to as "the ideology of bounded nations that has for so long driven European thought" (1992:15), and I suggest here that the present situation can be elucidated further by viewing the quest for national homogeneity as part of an assertion of European identity. The archetypical (Romantic) European nation is conceived as homogeneous. In this light, Islam and Turkish (oriental) culture are denied a constitutive role in the production of national identity as they are non-European. They are, nonetheless, partially constitutive of the nation through defining negatively that which is not European/Bulgarian11.

National identity in Bulgaria is thus predicated on the existence of a reaching of consensus in the past concerning common interest. This has become solidified as narodnost (cultural-ethnic identity), but the processualness of this identity construction is disregarded in favor of the result. This enables such process to be devalued in the present (e.g. the denial of legitimacy to Macedonian claims to nationhood; Pomak identity recognized only in terms of (relatively insignificant) religious difference; Turks understood as either Turkified Bulgarians or as non-Bulgarian others). The nation is conceived also in terms of Europeanness, which is understood as entailing the imperative of ethnic-cultural homogeneity. Bulgarian identity is presented as having been unproblematic throughout history, while that of the minorities on the Bulgarian (especially those inhabiting border regions, such as the Turks, Pomaks and Macedonians) is considered inherently problematic. This is because they are neither completely Bulgarian nor completely other. Their location within state (=national) boundaries precludes their otherness, yet their religious and/or cultural practices and/or language preclude their full Bulgarianness. However, the discourse on Bulgarian national identity is by no means monolithic. The institution of the presidency and the higher levels of the judiciary throughout the six years of Zhelyu Zhelev's tenure were dedicated to the promotion of civil rights and ethnic and religious tolerance, and continue to be so under President Pet(r Stoyanov. The Turkish and Pomak examples I presented before testify to the existence of counter discourses, based in a different vision of Europeanness, where equal rights are accorded despite difference, rather than on the basis of claims to sameness.

These two visions of Europe exist in tension in Bulgaria, as two sides of one coin. However, it is the latter, that of a Europe to which Bulgaria belongs organically, that is stressed most in the school history curriculum. Reference to minorities in the curriculum is almost exclusively restricted to discussion of the sorry fate of Bulgarians in the border regions of neighboring countries, which are presented as having openly flouted international conventions regarding minority rights.

The orientalizing nature of such a Europe-centered discourse on national identity has been discussed by Buchanan (1995, 1996) in terms of the paradigms of musical expression given valence under state-socialism. It accords also with the situation in Yugoslavia described by Baki?-Hayden and Hayden ( 1992) and that in Greece described by Herzfeld (1987, 1997), in that it is a self-orientalizing discourse. Both visions of Europe are implicated here. While the vision of an organic connection to Europe barely hides a self-consciousness about the failure of Bulgaria to measure up to European standards, both visions of Europe concur on the point that Europeanness constitutes a desirable status. They define this differently, yet it is the perception of an external measure that drives, on the one hand, dignified claims to a European heritage, and, on the other hand, dire self-criticism. I suggest that the marginalization of minorities acts largely as a displacement for self-criticism. Minorities, particularly the sizable Turkish and Roma (Gypsy)12 communities, personify that which is un-European13. Marginalizing and excluding them from participation in the production of a national culture as constitutive minorities is thus a cathartic measure, that serves to ennoble the dominant, Bulgarian culture, and renders the minorities as scapegoats bearing the shame (un-Europeanness) that separates Bulgaria from Europe. Moreover, the counter-discourse of Europeanness and humanistic values is no less an orientalizing discourse, in that it presents Bulgaria as "not quite Europe" in terms of a perceived set of criteria that define Europeanness in terms of human rights and democratic institutions.

Approaching the phenomenon of ethnic and minority conflict and marginalization in this way challenges the oft-heard view that such conflicts are the result of pent-up animosities that go back generations. Indeed, as Creed suggests (1990:17) such conflicts may be generated in the present historical juncture. Such an approach -- focusing on the way Europe gets symbolized at the margins of Europe -- may also provide the means for a critical analysis of the production of "Europe" itself as a symbolic space -- a challenge raised by Baki?-Hayden and Hayden (1992). Moreover, this analysis highlights the problem of equating explicit ideological pronouncements and cultural policy with the reproduction of ideological systems, showing rather how competing ideologies of Bulgarian national identity emerge in the public sphere, wherein official ideological pronouncements are but one constitutive factor. Discursive practices, as well as other social and political practices, are also constitutive of these ideologies.

Endnotes

1. A version of this paper was presented at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. I am grateful for the constructive comments and criticisms of Susan Rogers, Donna Buchanan and Gerald Creed. My thanks go also to the many Bulgarians who facilitated my research through their generous gift of time and companionship, especially the history teachers I came to know, and the faculty and staff of the History Faculty of Sofia University. All translations are my own, though I am indebted to Donna Buchanan, B. Panayotova and R. Gradeva for suggestions they made. I alone bear responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here and any errors. My field research in Bulgaria (1995-96) was supported by Wenner-Gren grant #5859 and the Open Society Foundation (Sofia).
2.This is due both to changing official categorization practices and, especially in the case of Roma, a degree of fluidity in self-definition.
3.Based on 1989 and 1993 figures. For more detail, see Bates 1994:206. Other minorities include Armenians, Greeks, Macedonians, Albanians, as well as Alevi Muslims and Gagauz.
4."Assimilation" carries a negative connotation in the Balkan context, involving the (forceful) erasure of existing identity. The assimilation campaign did not make Turks feel more integrated into the Bulgarian nation. On the contrary, as Bates (1994:212) observes, the policy of name-changing caused Turks to withdraw from social contact with Bulgarians, since such a violence against their persons made them feel utterly other.
5.This term allows of greater reflexivity on the part of the agent than does Bourdieu's similar term "habitus" (1977).
6.Narod and natsiya are in fact defined in terms of each other in one popular Bulgarian dictionary (S?vremenen t?lkoven rechnik. Veliko T?novo: ELPIS (1994)). In general usage, however, natsiya appears as the marked term, i.e. as more narrowly defined. Narod is defined variously as "inhabitants of a state", as a "nation" (natsiya), "people/ethnic group" (narodnost). Narod was, moreover, the term used to mean "the people" (the laboring classes) during the state-socialist period, and is still used to mean the "general public".
7.The singular form, narodnost, is essentially an abstract noun meaning "the property of being a people", and in current usage refers usually to cultural distinctiveness. By extension it means also the people so constituted.
8.Interestingly, a group of Bulgarian politicians and intellectuals descended en masse but unofficially on Ohrid, Macedonia (one-time cultural and religious capital of Mediaeval Bulgaria) at Easter 1996, in a covert symbolic return.
9.Eleanor Smollett makes a similar observation (1993 America the Beautiful: Made in Bulgaria. Anthropology Today 9(2):9-13): different political groupings approached differently the question of European identity. The socialists saw Bulgaria as already European. Pro-free-market forces spoke of the necessity to become European.
10.Each of these purportedly has an interest in destabilizing Bulgaria and/or Europe. The same suspicion of foreign involvement is true in the case of Turkish minority politics.
11.See Pilbrow (In press).
12.Roma are in a sense less problematic, given that they do not identify with a homeland across the border. Nevertheless, they are seen as epitomizing that which is un-European.
13.Other minorities (e.g. Armenians) are not seen as so problematic, as they have tended to blend into the dominant society more, and do not identify with a homeland that poses a political threat to Bulgaria.

References

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Fox, R. G. 1990 Introduction. R. G. Fox, ed. Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures. Pp. 1-14. Washington: American Anthropological Association.

Fox, R. G., ed. 1990 Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures. Washington: American Anthropological Association.

Giddens, Anthony, 1984 The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Haytov, Nikolay 1996 Intervyu: "I Prezidentut Zhelev e zhertva na suyuznitsite si" [S predsedatelya na Suyuza na bulgarskite pisateli Nikolay Haytov razgovarya Nedya Popova.] (Interview: "Even President Zhelev is a victim of his advisors" [Nedya Popova speaks with the President of the Union of Bulgarian Writers Nikolay Haytov.]) Standart No. 1217 (5 February 1996):15.

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GOD'S RUSSIAN EXPERIMENT: HOPE IN THE WAKE OF DECONSTRUCTION OF GENDER AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
Clementine Creuziger
US Naval Academy

Umom Rossiiu ne poniat'
Arshinom obshchim ne ismerit':
U neii osobennoya stat'
V Rossiiu mozhno tol'ko verit'.
F.1. Tiutchev
(1864)

At a recent gathering, in response to American tourists and businessmen complaining that Russians just simply don't seem to care about helping their society as a whole to develop economically, Elena F., an actress from St. Petersburg replied: 'It's not that we don't care, but when it comes to making a difference, Russians are ambivalent or fatalistic. Our approach to life is guided by the maxim of "avos'"". When asked to define the term "avos'", Elena said that she could only describe it by way of an example: 'Russians don't worry about whether or not a certain number of people will fit into an elevator, they simply step in and wait to find out". Not just Elena, but scholars of Russia since the 19th century have commented on this notion of "avos'". Scholars have gone further to link "avos'" to Russians' lack of sense of cultural or national identity and have faulted Russians for taking on other nations' identities in search of their own. In this paper, I suggest that quite to the contrary of the view that Russians lack a cultural identity, Russians' common identity can be found in such notions as, for example, "avos", suffering and finally, victimhood. Such concepts are not results of a lack of culture and national identity, but are rather linked to Russia's deep-rooted sense of identity, an outcome of a series of historical events and socio-political climate.

In the following pages, we will analyze the term "avos'" as more than simply ambivalence or fatalism. Rather, we will come to view it as deeply linked to a feeling of victimization or even "victimhood", as an inevitable experience of Russian life which entails the experience of "terpenie" (patience) and 'stradanie" (suffering). However, unlike previous Western scholarly examinations of "avos", "terpenie" and 'stradanie" which saw such notions as hindering Russian social progress and development, we will find that these terms contribute to the development of society by evoking a sense of communitas, thereby liberating the individual in times of economic and political turmoil.
This paper relies on information from the fields of history, literature and philosophy as well as ethnographic data collected from 1991 to 1997. A discussion of the background to the notion of "avos"' and common suffering will lead into a brief review of debates among Russian philosophers and social thinkers on the subject of Russian culture. These debates will ultimately help to formulate an understanding of the commonalities among Russians in their belief in being a chosen peoples and on Russian culture in general. A particular Russian perspective on these themes will be depicted through personal memories of Russians interviewed, poetry and prose. Finally, this paper hopes to enlighten readers on the value placed on a common Russian "stradanie" and notions of victimhood.

Background

When asked to describe what is Russian, citizens of the former Soviet Union inevitably will remark that Russia has lost her identity, that the only Russia one can speak of ended in the 19th century. Men and women alike commonly enjoy describing the two centuries prior to the revolution as a period of high culture and education. Yet, travelers and scholars have noted a general sense of fatalism even during the 19th century.

Travelers visiting Russia in the 1800's commented on the fundamental attitude of "avos"'. Dillon (1892) tried to define the term as a fatalistic attitude basic to Russian behavior. He, like many people today (including Elena, mentioned above), was not satisfied with a simple definition of the term, turning instead to proverbs for explanation. Proverbs he used to describe "avos'" include: "If a dog is to be beaten, there will be no lack of sticks" or "What is to be cannot be avoided" and finally, "Sin and sorrow overtake all alike" (Dillon 1892: 102). This final proverb is just one example which demonstrates that avos' is more than just ambivalence or a fatalistic attitude, but incorporates a certain degree of suffering.

Western social scientific scholarship has often referred to Russia's sense of common guilt and suffering which originally sprang from the Judeo-Christian theme of redemptive suffering (Billington 1992: 42). Furthermore, it has been linked to the notion that Russia has been chosen by God to be "The Third Rome" or arguably "The New Israel' (Rowland 1996) and that "Russia is destined by her Muscovite past to behave in certain ways' (Rowland 1996: 591). While the so-called "expected behavior" of a chosen people remains unclear, the fact that 1. they need to embody spirituality and 2. they acknowledge being chosen, do appear as imperatives. It can further be argued that such common beliefs form one basis for a common sense of cultural and religious identities.

The subject of Russia as chosen remains fraught with inconsistencies and has been argued as counterproductive to understanding a culture due to resulting stereotyping of an entire nation.' Nonetheless, the behavior of a "chosen peoples" has continued to be analyzed as a significant component of a nation's national character. Berdyaev (1874-1948) is one such philosopher criticized by modem Russian philosophers for his tendency to type Russian personality (Lossky 1951: 247). While in scholarship Berdyaev is often denounced, among laymen Berdyaev is widely read and seen as a conveyer of Russian identity since the breakup of the Soviet regime. According to Berdyaev, Russians hold in common a characteristic known as "yurodstvo" or "being a fool for Christ's sake, accepting humiliations at the hands of other people... " (Berdyaev 1948: 5). He explains this characteristic, along with others, as developing out of Russians' double faith or "dvoeverie" which Berdyaev simply defines as "a combination of the Orthodox faith with pagan mythology and folk poetry" (Berdyaev, p.5) Dvoeverie allows for both the veneration of the Motherland and that of God. Yet, in the end, Mother earth is strongest: "The image of Christ, the image of God, was overwhelmed by the image of earthly power" (Berdyaev, p. 7)'. Men and women alike felt bound to nature's cycles and celebrated

1. This argument is especially strong in the context of National Character Studies as conducted by anthropologists during World War II and on.
2. Western scholarship by such authors as Hubbs (1988) explains more precisely that Yurodstvo or "Holy Foolishness" originated in the north and northeast Russia, where the "volkhvy" were in power with the Varangian rulers. According to Hubbs:

"The Fools assumed the kenotic role once occupied by the princes... the narod through its Holy Fools reminded both church and state of their lapsed duties... "(Hubbs 1988: 193)

The Yurodivye combined in their appearance and behavior "a Christianized continuation of pagan shamanic practices" (Hubbs 1988: 193). Their deep connection with the earth's suffering through ritual songs and celebrations. Petrov Den', for example, was celebrated by women prior to the harvest. It was also called the stradnaia pora or "time of suffering' symbolizing "their own hard labor and that of the grain cut and "killed by scythes" (Hubbs 1988: 79). Earthly suffering is thus seen as part of fate bestowed upon Russians, a fate which needs to be tolerated.

Berdyaev goes on to explain how tolerance of suffering lead to a "messianic consciousness" among Russians, a consciousness which sprang form the ideas of a monk, Filofei of Pskov, who declared the Russian Tsar a Christian Tsar. Moscow thus became known as the Third Rome (Berdyaev, p. 8). Beginning with the notion of "yurodstvo" and developing into the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome, Russians, according to Berdyaev, came to see themselves as chosen to serve in the name of God (Berdyaev, p. 10). While the fact that Russians have in the past considered themselves a chosen peoples remains, Berdyaev's particular analysis of how Russians came to see themselves as chosen has been argued extensively (see Rowland 1996).

Regardless of how Russians view themselves as chosen, the notion that being chosen is somehow interconnected with Russians' fives as at the mercy of fate, is reflected in much of 19th and early 20th century literature. This fatalistic attitude and "avos'" is fundamental to literary and philosophical portrayals of the Russian character and soul. Perhaps most accepted by Russians as defining the Russian persona is Goncharev's novel Oblomov (1859). In this work, the hero, Oblomov, is depicted as dreamy and unable to cope with the harshness of reality (Terras 1985: 178). He is a man who would rather let fate take its course than act in any way to change the state of affairs. Russians reading this novel quickly came to see themselves reflected in this character and "oblomovism" became the term used to describe Russians in general.

Oblomovism and the role of fate, while naively viewed as a hindrance to personal and social development, may also be seen as a positive force, for in Russians common fate is embedded the Russian life, the spirit of the culture. As Tyutchev so eloquently describes, one can only believe in Russia, even if at times she seems incomprehensible. A belief in a Russian soul, in mother Russia, hope that she will not fail her people, these are the ideas that unite Russian communities and give rise to a cultural identity.

From avos to victimhood: the loss of religious and gender identity

Today, as Russians are experiencing uncertain times in terms of social, economic and political development, Russians find themselves returning to the ideas of 19th century Russian philosophers. While in scholarship, notions of any one common Russian character are generally shunned, among laymen, such notions offer a sense of security and one which unites Russians from the most disparate backgrounds even as émigrés in foreign countries.
While the Russians interviewed do acknowledge a notion of avos' as perhaps one characteristic attitude, they are eager to support the claim that an acceptance of fate does not necessarily mean a blind acceptance of fate. As Billington points out: 'In the Soviet Union, where both the guilt and the suffering have been greater and more long lived, repentance has provided a rediscovered theological dimension for freeing people to consider an altogether different future" (Billington 1991: 42). On the one hand, what emerges among many Russians is a social consciousness, an awareness of the harshness experienced as well as an overwhelming feeling of victimization. On the other hand, it is a feeling that furthermore unites Russians, offering them an avenue for self-definition in a time when little else unites them. Billington points out that: 'Out of the shared suffering that resulted from the atomization of society and degradation of morality under totalitarianism has grown a sense of common opportunity in the reassertion of small human communities gathered around shared spiritual ideals" (Billington 1991: 42). This common historical consciousness I call "victimbood”, is a notion which envelopes Russian communities, allowing for the definition of a common identity and further providing ground for personal and communal development.

Victimhood in its purely negative sense, is not one which is easily accepted as a necessary part of life. Rather, it is in its more positive sense of common suffering, of commonality, that it leads people to move on to political and social mobilization. In the following pages, I will show through excerpts from a collection of life histories, how victimhood is in fact felt, digested and expressed in contemporary Russia. Many of the accounts quoted throughout this paper have been selected not simply for their factual renditions of experiences, but also for the mood they evoke. It is my belief that, deeply embedded in the experience of victimhood is a feeling, an attitude or a common way of expressing the actual events. Much like Geertz' notion of ethos (1973), it is the mood, created by the style of rendition that unites people in their self-definition. I begin with a quote by a Leningrad blockade survivor:
“In front of me lie the photographs of my former days, dim and grey, yellow at the edges due to the years. On one there is a girl... She is eight.. On (her) feet the (girl is) wearing stockings and sandals. I look into the face of that girl in an awkward white hat which resembles half of an egg shell, and I cannot see myself in her. Between us lies an entire life, but I pity her - in a few days she has to go to school... and this school, to which their little girl Oliusha will go, is not very good .. I feel especially sorry for her because she has to leave the countryside for the city, a city which is so new and frightening to her, as is the school. Throughout her life, this girl will change, she will come to know her surrounding world, she will search for friends, she will learn to live among people and to work, she will grow up and grow old, and only then will we meet. Can I really talk for her and about her? Have we not grown apart in time? I close my eyes and I feel how my feet slide around inside those sandals due to the corns on my old toes; ... I'm already not so scared. I remember, remember everything about her! Most importantly, however, I must not confuse where she is and where I am (Creuziger, 1996: 2-3).

In her memories of the Leningrad blockade, Olga Nikolaevna and her peers describe the period under Stalin and sovietization as marked by their losses. To Olga, this period was not only a social change, but also a personal one; one in which her rural childhood became urban, individual freedom became social slavery and with that, her vision of the purity of human existence was transformed to an experience of human decay and war. The romantic novels and poetry that nurtured her intellectual curiosity in her country village as a child were to be abandoned in the new urban school she describes with contempt. Paralleling these personal changes were changes in her environment and education. As she describes:

“By September 1, my mother, my brother and I had moved to Leningrad, having left our dog, Kashtanka, and cat, Vasya, with father at Irinovka. In the city, there was a strange smell of strange food, smoke and metal. Nights I was kept awake by the rumblings of carts on the cobblestone streets. With my head all wrapped up, I would cry, remembering Irinovka. Mother gave me valerian, but nothing could mitigate the hatred I felt for this frightening city. Moreover, I had to go to school and get used to a whole new way of life... there was only one book for all subjects which was called "SSSR na Stroike” (The USSR Under Construction). It was very big, with thick pages in a red cardboard binding, and tied in the front with white ribbons. And oh, what it contained! Wild poems by proletarian poets which we were forced to learn, such as:

"Stuchu, stuchu la molotkom
I strike, I strike with my hammer-
Verchu, verchu trubu na lome,
I turn, I turn the pipe
i otgovarivaetsia grom
at the crowbar/ and from
v vozdukhe i v kazhdom dome
it resounds thunder/ both
in the air each home
This went on for two pages of rhythmic idiocy.... and that after I had been used to Pushkin, Tyutchev and Pleshcheev!…” (Creuziger, 1996: 7-9).

Experiences like Olga's of sovietization have been described in great depth by many survivors to evoke feelings of pity. Contemporary poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya has, as have many other poets, memorialized the experience to further show the harshness of life under Soviet rule:

We won’t argue.An extra million condemned, tortured, battered, is no more than a number.The million tears haven’t flowed together, haven’t caused a flood, and haven’t thawed the permafrost…
(Gorbanevskaya in Smith 1993: 109)

In this poem, Gorbanevskaya underscores the suffering and losses of an entire nation. She furthermore points out how these memories continue to live in the soul and tears of Russians, much like a permafrost takes over land. Indeed sovietization, while defeated in 199 1, continues to influence the lives of people to this day. The memories live on.

To both the spiritual and secular, this period often seems inexplicable. To many, the suffering by far outweighs any potential social benefits of the Soviet regime and war which, in the end were not obtained anyway. Those who do not consider themselves religious may lament their godless existence as yet another loss experienced under the soviet regime. Forced to ignore religious readings, these people were merely made aware of the existence of religion; enough to evoke curiosity and make them wonder whether they were being deprived. A woman remembers:

“We did learn the prayer "Our Father” and occasionally we were taken to the village church at least to receive the eucharist... (my parents) did not dare totally renounce their faith. On this weak religious foundation, it was easy to accept later anti-religious teachings in school... ' (Ibid., p. 5)

Whereas the secular feel deprived of potential spiritual satisfaction gained by religion, the religious have explained this depravity of not being allowed to revere God as part of the experience of a chosen peoples. Rather than lament the lack of religious knowledge which prevents them from living out the teachings of the Bible, they have come to perceive their forced ignorance as a possible message from God Himself. To these people, the Russian experience is a lesson to the world of the evil that subsides in all of us and of the potential harm that may come of such evil. As one man explains: "We are God's experiment to show the rest of the world how not to live" (Creuziger, p.209).'
To those who see the Soviet regime as the victimizer, sovietization as a period, has come to symbolize more than suffering. From a wider perspective sovietization has come to represent the deep sense of victimhood felt by those who see their lives as stripped of their culture, their heritage, religion, education, and on a more personal level, their self. Besides religion and education, people also feel deprived of fully experiencing their self: their individuality and even their gender. Women especially over the past few years, have voiced the perceived stripping of their feminine identity during and after World War 11.

Contemporary writer Marina Palei has been noted for her social commentary on the sexlessness that was imposed on women under soviet domination. For example, Palei is quoted by one scholar, Heaton, as evoking the "harsh Soviet way of treating sex" (Heaton 1997: 75). Palei writes: "All these exemplary model wives and bashful housewives are just as intractable [...], cold and businesslike in their intimate lives as they are at the meat counter' (in Heaton, p.75). Under the Soviet regime, sex appeared as a "social and civic duty" (in Heaton, p. 75), women became subservient martyrs, as described by A.N. Tolstoy in his "Russkii kharakter' (1972) (in Heaton, p. 75), thereby ignoring all sense of feminine pleasures.

Olga Nikolaevna, like A.N. Tolstoy, in her memoirs, ignores any mention of a coming of age, of a first love, or of any issues a young girl may encounter in her formative years. 3. Even those who do not lament the loss of culture, religion or personal fulfillment under the Soviet regime still feel victimized: Their victimhood is now. These are the women and men who long for a return to the Soviet lifestyle. While they do not identify with victimhood under sovietization, they do join the cultural lament that victims, they are-- only for them it is under the "criminal regime" of capitalism.

Instead, she stresses the complete absence of gender differentiation among the children at that time:
'Girls were not differentiated from boys, and the schools simply did not (observe) the difference in gender, even though the norms in sports were lower for girls. Society now viewed femininity as an old (outdated) emphasis and unnecessary. Brave, agile and fearless girls 'patsanki' were valued. To speak of or even dream about a family, marriage or children was considered improper (Ibid., p. 44).

Contact with ones feminine side was felt to be an unfortunate occurrence. The natural thus seemed unnatural, the pure impure and the self one knew as a woman appeared as an ogre. Such was the perception one group of children had of their teacher who came to expect a child. As one of the children, now a grandmother herself, recalls:
"Pregnancy slowly weakened her demanding formality and even her posture became "nonpedagogical": she would lounge instead of sit, holding herself up on her elbows, would walk with a heavy gait, like a duck. Her hair hung straight. We noticed all this and were surprised at how she changed and (we) did not approve of her behavior. Finally she hid for a long time.

Many of the memoirs collected completely ignore the transition of girl to woman. According to the accounts, girls during the blockade, for instance, experienced natural phenomena of womanhood such as menstruation and pregnancy as negative or burdensome. The sense of victimhood is perhaps strongest among women who share in the belief in fate. Francine du Plessix Gray captures the gendered view many women hold which masks fatalism with a belief in biological determination. As one of her interviewees claims: 'For we are biologically determined to think about domestic issues, about nurturing others...' (Gray 1989: 193). According to Gray's subjects, because the Soviet regime did not allow women to follow their predispositions, women cannot be happy (Gray, p. 192). Today, women feel that through their forced ignorance under the Soviet regime, they missed their coming of age.

It should be noted however that the strong sense of being deprived of ones femininity is a response by those who were able to, in fact, preserve a sense of femininity in the face of harsh times. Ironically, the very circumstances to which Olga attributes the deprivation of her femininity have forced her to reflect upon it in a way that a girl growing into womanhood under gender conditions might not have. This paradox extends to the relationship between Russians and their 'lost identity" in general: the sense of a lost identity can only spring from a sense of identity (Creuziger, pp. 63-64). Bulat Okudzhava, bard singer and poet, neatly condenses this Russian ethos in his poem "To the memory of A.D. Sakharov" (in Smith, p. 37) in which he describes the hope that arises out of a peoples' willingness to suffer and die together:

When a speech begins, saying that spirituality has been lost,
that the way for people from now on lies through darkness,
in their astounded eyes and in their souls, a holy readiness
to go forth and perish trembles like a new flame.

And this is not delusion or error,
it is the genuinely proud flame of a bonfire,
and in this just flame a smile of hope
comes over pale lips, and conscience is keen.

Their midnight silhouettes scare one with their enigma.
Of fortune you mustn't ask; she keeps her secrets.
And it's too early yet to relish sweet victory,
it's still a long way to dawn... And my heart aches.

As people acknowledge their fate of common suffering, their plight inspires hope and fear in one. Through a shared experience of victimhood, which is defined by its nature to inhibit personal growth, Russians have found a venue for reflexivity and have arrived at a social consciousness that now allows for self identification both on personal and cultural levels.

References
Berdyaev, N. 1948. The Russian Idea, New York: The Macmillan Co.

Billington, J. 1991. Russia's Fever Break, Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Creuziger, C. 1996. Childhood in Russia: Representation and Reality, Lanham: University Press of America.

Geertz, C. 1973. Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Hubbs, J. 1988. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lossky, N. 0. 195 1. History of Russian Philosophy, New York: International University Press Inc.

Riha, T. ed. 1969. Readings in Russian Civilization, volume 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rowland, D. 1996. "Moscow - The Third Rome or the New Israel" in The Russian Review, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press.

Smith, G. 1993. Contemporary Russian Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Terras, V. ed. 1985. Handbook of Russian Literature, New Haven: Yale University Press.

RULING BY DIFFERENT “SCRIPTS”: HEGEMONY IN MARXIST AND DEMOCRATIC EAST GERMAN LOCAL POLITICS.
Patricia Heck
University of the South

Democracy is . . . an ‘essentially contestable concept.’… Like ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘human rights’, and so forth, ‘democracy’ is a term which . . . will always signify for many a cherished political principle or ideal, and for that reason alone it is never likely to achieve a single agreed meaning (Arblaster 1987, 5).
The inspiration for this paper occurred in 1994, when I was deep in the archives of the city of Reußstadt, following events in the former German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik/GDR) -- from the first public demonstrations of the late summer of 1989 to the opening of the Berlin wall on november 9th of same year -- the beginning of the Wende1 that was to result in a reunified Germany on October 3, 1990 (Bahrmann & Links, 1994 & 1995; Jarausch 1994, Knopp & Kuhn 1990, Teltschik 1991). As I was reading through the city council minutes for early 1989, I stumbled on quite a surprise: There was a ‘script’ issued three to five days prior to each council meeting, one that listed speakers, their speeches, and voting results of elections yet to be held. I hadn’t realized how completely the regional and national Social Unity Party officials (Sozialeinheitspartei, hereafter SED) had controlled local politics, a control that allowed no input, whatsoever, that deviated from the current political line. From that point on, I began to view council minutes as a script capturing local political history from which the evolution of power relationships could be evaluated, especially in Reußstadt, that was undergoing such drastic change.

This report will trace the development of power relations in Reußstadt, using minutes from council meetings -- intentionally scripted in the beginning -- as the primary data. Patterns revealed in these meetings will form the basis of my discussion of shifting local hegemonic forces. For brevity, I will not discuss the definitional complexities or the usefulness of the concept of hegemony (Scott 1985; Roseberry 1989), but will follow William roseberry's recent (1996) formulation of its nature, which is "not . . . a finished and monolithic ideological formation but . . . a problematic, contexted, political process (emphasis in the original) of domination and struggle" (77).

The Setting

Reußstadt2, with approximately 30,000 inhabitants, lies in southeastern Thuringia, less than 50 km from the Czech border, 5 km from the Saxony border, and about 70 km from Bavaria. In GDR times the city had been an industrial center whose factories manufactured textiles, chemicals, paper, and other products. Formerly a tiny principality ruled from 1306 until 1918 by various branches of the Reuß family, Reußstadt has retained characteristics that reflect this historical background, especially the two palaces and a Rococo summer residence set in the extensive park within the city (Crummenerl 1990). Prosperity, linked to 19th century industrial expansion, resulted in thriving factories, luxurious villas, and gracious, tree-lined streets, with worker housing located at the periphery. Early in the twentieth century the city expanded, sprawling outward to the Saxony border, engulfing small agrarian villages in the process.

Fortunes reversed, however, as World War II placed demands on human and material resources, and defeat brought refugees to the town3 at a time when food, shelter, clothing, and medical supplies were practically nonexistent. The Soviet army dismantled factories, plundered villas, froze funds in banks, which accelerated a decline that brought chronic economic problems including substandard housing4 and nutrition, that lingered for decades.5 Though the city remained an important chemical and textile center, little new investment occurred, in part due to the government’s focus on heavier industries, in part because of the city’s location close to two ‘foreign’ borders: Czechoslovakia and Bavaria. By 1989, a woefully shabby Reußstadt, with a marginally functional, aging industrial base, had become a haven for artists and writers, some of whom took to the streets and hastened the bloodless revolution that brought the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

Reussstadt council meetings:6 then and now

1. Puppets of the SED
In January 1989, Reußstadt local politicians virtually rubber stamped regional and national SED directives. According to the predetermined script, they addressed the minutia of local politics: from approving the ominous state-issued petitions that citizens, registered as criminally "endangered," be put in "protective custody" (incarcerated); to lesser concerns such as reviewing requests to open small businesses;7 organizing local elections and political celebrations;8 supervising minor repairs and beautification projects scheduled around these elections and celebrations;9 establishing plans for sports events and youth delegations; and implementing new contests to motivate work brigades.10 In reality, many of these plans were never completed due to lack of raw materials and/or government funding. While politicians continued their optimistic and mostly fictitious projections for the future, however, the general population had become increasingly restive.

As Gorbachev’s pleas for openness were realized in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and East German officials tightened their political control, the apparently apathetic East Germans “voted”: sometimes with their feet11 (Knopp & Kuhn 1990; Jarausch 1994, Merkl 1993); others refrained from voting in the May 7th local elections. This spontaneous protest meant that, for the first time, a significant minority in East Germany, in effect, ‘voted’ by not voting. Subsequently, most Reußstadters were shocked when the government reported a 98.85% turnout for these elections (Fisher 1995, 110). Anger at this voting fraud, among other things, fueled the growing exodus from the country12 and the first attempts at organized protest. On September 4, 1989, a few young people left the sanctuary of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig to demand ‘’an open country with free people’’ (Bahrmann & Links 1994; Jarausch 1994, 33). At first, they experienced arrests, detention, even physical violence. By October 2, twenty thousand peaceful demonstrators caused police, army and secret service personnel to question the official explanation that only a few ‘rowdies’ and ‘deviants’ were involved. By October 7th things reached a head when police openly beat demonstrators at the SED 40th anniversary celebrations in Berlin, while water cannon forced back the crowd of mostly young people. Two days later, in a church service infiltrated by SED officials and Stasi undercover agents, Lutheran bishop Hempel cautioned those assembled not to respond with force. Attending SED members urged open public discussion and, instead of the feared violence, 70,000 peaceful demonstrators were allowed to march unhindered (Jarausch 1994, 33-52). The SED had changed their policies after many police and army personnel refused to resort to violence; demonstrators were not harmed after that event.

How did Reußstadt officials react to these events? Initially, business continued as usual: In the first council meeting following the fraudulent local elections, the SED script was carefully followed. Indeed, the mayor claimed the elections ‘gave an unambiguous demonstration of the power of the workers and farmers’ and of their unwavering support for SED policies over the last forty years. By September, in a much shorter speech, the mayor accused West Germany of ‘wooing away’ East German citizens, with Hungary as a willing accomplice.
Whereas citizens of Leipzig bravely took to the streets in early September, the more cautious Reußstadters waited until mid-October to protest in the plaza in front of city hall. There they challenged the mayor, other local politicians and administrators to improve city conditions. On November 1st, the council rejected the script prepared on October 20th; instead, 20 council members addressed problems and complaints from their constituencies -- from the inconvenient location of the People’s Festival, inadequate parking facilities, and the early closing hours of many state-owned stores, to complaints about absent council members and demands for open council discussion.

In December, the script was replaced by a standard agenda. For the first time since 1950, seven council members voted against an agenda item and four council members were recalled.13 More revolutionarily, the parties and organizations belonging to the National Front and subsumed under the SED "unity" list, formed separate caucuses to develop independent positions on the issues. The mayor, instead of reading his usual prepared speech, approved by regional headquarters, gave an extemporaneous, honest evaluation of local problems. He focused especially on the crisis in the public service sector, with hospitals, nursing homes, and schools unable to operate, as more and more young and skilled East Germans fled to the West. He also expressed his bitter disillusionment with the corruption and extravagance of SED party leaders, revealed since the Wall had fallen.

By the fifth meeting, scheduled for February 14th, apathy had replaced the energy unleashed by protest: Less than half of the council was present; without a quorum, the meeting degenerated into a discussion session. The mayor announced that sixteen West German towns and cities were seeking city partnerships, the first hint of West German hegemony. No additional minutes from that electoral period have been preserved; unable to reach a quorum, the council waited for the forthcoming May elections.

2. Copies of the CDU14
On May 6, 1990, Reußstadt held its first fully democratic local elections since 1932. Under conservative CDU control, the city fared poorly over the next four years, in spite of new freedom and West German resources flowing into city coffers. West Germans rushed to the city and prospered,15 as Reußstadters continued their westward migration. The rapid move towards reunification complicated the political situation: From blind obedience to scripted policies, the Reußstadt council had to adhere to the complex West German legal code in order to create a new "script."

Skilled administrative personnel were at a premium: Reußstadt’s population, relatively stable at about 37,000 since the 1970s (Crummenerl 1990), declined to 32,408 by the end of 1990 (Statistisches Landesamt Th?ringen, 191)16 Public officials who were formerly affiliated with the Stasi17 were denied employment; especially hard hit were university professors and elementary and high school teachers. Low and minimally skilled workers, especially women, swelled the ranks of the unemployed as the Treuhandanstalt closed most of Reußstadt’s antiquated factories within two years18 Reußstadt’s economic misery was exacerbated by the general European recession of the early 1990s; while retail stores and construction firms flourished, the industrial sector had all but vanished19. By February 1995, the Reußstadt unemployment rate (20.1%) was the highest in the state.

Minutes of the first council meeting following the June 7, 1990 elections exhaustively detail the optimism and hopes that were so quickly to disappear. Forming a grand coalition, the CDU, the Socialists (SPD), and a small local party hoped for consensus, although the New Forum20 remained independent. These four parties united against the SED successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), not awarding it any vice mayorships or other elected office21 Terse, hand-written minutes documented the next few meetings, revealing little. After the early months of 1991, printed summaries indicated a growing disorder and eventual shut-down of much of the city's planned projects.

The original CDU mayor, a popular choice, was recalled in October 1990 because he had been a Stasi informal collaborator22 His CDU successor, a West-German import, brightened Reußstadters' hopes. Perhaps, in spite of a decayed industrial base and impending closure of most of these factories, Reußstadt could benefit from this Westerner’s expertise. The 1991 minutes record new problems: Initially, the new mayor had been given council trust and support. Most issues were dealt with professionally; most were passed unanimously. The first rift is apparent in the April 1991 minutes, when the vacated office of honorary vice mayor remained unfilled because of a CDU/SPD stalemate. By May, members were questioning the mayor's allegedly authoritarian decisions. Each month the challenges became more persistent:23 in the December 1991 council meeting, the exasperated mayor complained:

I see no end to this campaign against my person; I have never experienced anything like it. As an individual, I have nothing to hide, but also nothing to excuse myself or to justify myself for.

The new year began with the CDU recall of the mayor. His replacement, the CDU candidate for vice mayor, served until the end of the legislative period in June 1994, in spite of a poorly-developed public persona, and a lackluster performance.

By September 30, 1992, tensions created by increased party polarization led to the formation of two opposing coalitions, a conservative group consisting of the CSU and DSU and a liberal group consisting of the SPD, NF, and FDP24 The PDS remained isolated: On social issues they generally voted with the liberal coalition, which often resulted in 50/50 splits. With new state directives, this split meant an automatic rejection of pending legislation. From October 1992 until the June 12, 1994 elections, practically no controversial issues were resolved, and little legislation was passed25 Such was the situation when I arrived in Reußstadt in early February 1993 for my sabbatical research.

A Belated “Third Way”: The SPD Approach

During 1992 to 1994, the SPD honorary Vice Mayor, Dr. Katz, began to develop a reputation as a consensus builder, though he was an outspoken opponent of the CDU mayor. Increasingly, committee chairs from other parties as well as his own turned to Dr. Katz for advice. He then used his wide-ranging knowledge of city problems to campaign for mayor in the 1994 local elections, a campaign focusing primarily on Reußstadt issues. SPD campaign rallies tended to be sober, issue-oriented discussions; CDU rallies, by contrast, were much more lively. Hundreds of Reußstadters attended the CDU key-note event on June 7,1994, five days before the election, where a folk band preceded the charismatic Thuringian Minister President,26 whose speech demonized the opposition while potential voters munched on low-cost sausages and enjoyed free beer.27 Only two people came to Dr. Katz's rally, scheduled two hours later.

While such discrepancies in attendance might suggest a CDU victory, Reußstadt voted for reform; Dr. Katz (one of four candidates) received 47% of the vote, and won handily in the run-off two weeks later, receiving 75%. The SPD also received a plurality, which many council members perceived as a mandate to concentrate on finding solutions to local problems. Dr. Katz acknowledged this mandate at the inaugural meeting, when he pleaded for cooperation and consensus, a plea received enthusiastically by all parties except the CDU. Under the new communal ordinance, passed by the state legislature in 1993, and designed to be effective with the 1994-1999 legislative period, the mayor was granted far-reaching powers.28 Dr. Katz took steps to limit his new power, allowing council members to continue as committee chairs, sharing his official duties equally with the SPD paid and NF non-paid vice mayors, and encouraging open council discussion periods, where Reußstadt citizens could address politicians and administrators with their questions and concerns.

Since June 1994,29 Reußstadt clearly is being governed by a new script. By resolving issues by consensus, the mayor has offered an effective alternative to polarization; by sharing his power political infighting and public allegations of power abuse have virtually disappeared. Unfortunately, problems of high unemployment and declining population continue to threaten economic stability. Still, many deferred projects are now completed or are underway: New shopping centers dot the city, and the Elster bridge, unconnected to city streets for three years, is now helping to relieve serious traffic problems.

The city of Reußstadt has had a number of different ‘scripts’ -- in eight years each successive "script" has either contributed to the city's chaos or has offered solutions to its many problems. Do the ‘scripts’ mirror a wide range of hegemonic forces that have swirled around Reußstadt for so many years? If so, what do they say about the structure and function of hegemony in local political systems? It is to these forces we now turn.
Hegemonic forces, East and West

Roseberry (1996, 75) has alerted us to the power relationships behind the spoken word. I want to use his approach in discussing both the literal and figurative "scripts" that have been the focus of this report, dealing with power issues on two levels: 1) those reflected in the public arena, revealed by the scripts I have described, and 2) those existing informally, which I discovered through my interviews with informants.

For forty-four years, the GDR communist party controlled the public arena, a control that lasted until May 1989. This formal control, however, masked a parallel set of informal power relationships in the churches, the work brigades, and the leased gardens that offered "safe zones"30 for the exchange of ideas, the barter of scarce materials, and individual expression, symbolically and materially (Gibson 1993). These groups were infiltrated by Stasi informers, but were relatively free from SED control. It was only when "in anticipation of moments of crisis and command, when spontaneous consent (had) failed, (that) force (was) openly resorted to" (Gramsci, cited in Scott 1985, 316). The safe zones were the crucible for the first, hesitant protests; demonstrators from networks extending far beyond these zones joined the fight, until hundreds of thousands of them took to the streets, destroying, in just a few months, a regime that had seemed so permanently entrenched.

In contrast to the evolutionary postwar takeover by the SED described elsewhere (Gibson 1994), the peaceful revolution of 1989 had no foundation on which to establish a power base. Early attempts at finding a "Third Way,"31 favored by intellectuals and members of the New Forum, found no voter support. Instead, the West German conservative CDU, personified by Helmut Kohl, offered a substitute power base, overwhelmingly chosen by East Germans in the state and local elections of 1990, and the choice of Reußstadters. Yet the rapid imposition of a highly-structured West German democratic system forced on East German politicians, ill-equipped to use such a system, an overreliance on West German advisors. The SED script had been supplanted by a West German script. Neither allowed for much local input.

Not every small East German city has experienced the political instability described above, In Reußstadt, however, this instability retarded the establishment of legitimized power. Once polarization set in, local parties lost any hope of influencing outcomes in the public arena. West German political and economic domination, moreover, severely hampered the ability of Reußstadters to wrest control from the council until the elections of 1994; by using the polls as a remedy for local discontent, the voters gave their support to the fledgling democracy. Although only time will disclose whether East Germans will eventually develop their own political scripts, in Reußstadt the SPD mayor seems to have taken an important first step.

Conclusion

In the ongoing German debate over the responsibilities of the West to the East, and the appropriate response of the East to the West, this brief excursion in "Political Anthropology from below" (Vincent 1990, 400) offers a new dimension. The hegemonic forces of the SED government have been relatively easy to delineate. The more subtle hegemonic control of the West, however, may be more pernicious. In welcoming their Eastern cousins into the democratic community, West Germans imposed upon them a political and economic process that slowly had gained widespread acceptance in the West. In so doing, West Germans sent a message not dissimilar from the one promulgated by the Vatican to faithful Roman Catholics: There is strong emphasis on free will, choice, and responsibility. However, there is little opportunity for the electorate to influence the structure or the rules. The "infallibility" of the West German democratic system may create some of the same problems that the Roman Catholic Church is being forced to address today.

Endnotes

l. This term, meaning "tuming point" in German, is used frequently by both German and U.S. social scientists to designate the period following the opening of the Berlin Wall.
2. I am using a pseudonym for the city and for the people mentioned in this paper.
3. By 1946, the city was bursting with 49,000 people.
4. Construction materials were scarce or non-existent throughout the GDR era and artfficially low rent controls made renovation impractical in any case.
5. In the westem, non-communist portion of Germany the 1948 currency reforms, the Marshall Plan, and other events led quickly to a repeal of "90 per cent of the existing price regulations ... as of July 1948" and the last foodstuff (sugar) was removed from the rationing list in April 1950. In the east, however, food rationing persisted until May 1958, and informal rationing of meat and dairy products continued, in some areas, until 1966 (Hardach 1980, 125, 145). Of course, central planning and the rigid imposition of minimal supplies and/or high prices on certain foodstuffs such as coffee and bananas and on most consumer goods, throughout the GDR period, served as an informal rationing principle (Hardach 1980, 135-138).
6. Research on local political themes is facilitated, in Germany, by the tendency of most cities to record and retain all the paperwork involved with local government. Reu?stadt materials dated to the period after the last major fire of 1802, but these records were in a sorry state in the early years after reunification. City administrators hired ABM (Arbeitsbeschafftingsmassnahmen) workers, a temporary work force similar to the U.S. C.C.C., to organize and catalogue the archives. Those records form the basis for the subsequent discussion.
7. Until the fall of 1989, almost invariably, these requests were denied. The only private entrepreneurial firms allowed were small ones providing a service unavailable through statecontrolled operations.
8. For example, the 40th anniversary celebration of the GDR had been planned for months by the SED ruling elite. It was to be a major demonstration of East German strength, both economically and politically. In addition, it was to be a response to the 40th anniversary celebration of West Germany that was scheduled to predate their own by four and a half months.
9. A standard practice in the GDR, such investments varied in accordance with the significance of the event: National elections and celebrations generally provided the most concrete improvements while local elections generally warranted only minor window-dressing -- the repair of a street or two, a few new trees planted in the public park, a small donation of equipment to a Kindergarten or school.
10. This is technique, once more effective, had long since been ignored by all but the most zealous party members. Campaign slogans, contests, prizes, and other incentives were supposed to motivate people to provide voluntarily some services such as cleaning the streets, improving extemal facades of their rental houses, and beautification projects, which the city could not afford to provide.
11. At first only a few hundred were able to make their escape
12. In July, 11,700 East German refugees fled as their neighbors'borders became more permeable. Each month the numbers increased: 21,000 in August, 33,300 in September, 57,000 in October, 133,400 in November. Once the wall fell, this "exodus" slowly subsided, but it was not until June of 1990 that it fell to 10,700. In this one-year period, 567,900 East Germans fled to the West (jarausch 1994, 62).
13 Some had requested their resignation because they no longer felt competent to fulfill their office; others were recalled because of non-appearance at meetings.
14. T'he Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the conservative party to which Helmut Kohl belonged, enjoyed surprising victories at the local, state, and national levels, in part because Kohl had acted quickly and decisively in the period after November 9, 1989, to hurry the reunification process (Knopp and Kuhn, 1990; Teltschik, 1991). He had also made extravagant promises about the "blossoming countryside" that would achieve prosperity in little more than four years. Many naive East Germans took these campaign speeches at face value.
15. Many wished to profit from new markets and, to some extent, from the inexperience of the elected officials unable to protect their city from unscrupulous individuals.
16. Although at a somewhat reduced rate, this decline continues; the most recent available population figures (December 31, 1995) are 29,402, a 20.5% loss in just eight years (Amtsblatt der Stadt "Reussstadt," 1997).
17. This is the common name for the secret police, which was officially called the State's Security Police (5taatssicherheitspolizei -- hence Stasi).
18. While more than 10 million people were employed in East Germany in 1989, by the end of 1992 this number had shrunk to 5.2 million, an alrnost 50 per cent reduction. Of the "official" unemployed of 1,168,732, women accounted for 720,000 (61.6%). Many other women had removed themselves from an active job search and were reclassified as housewives, not a viable option in GDR tiines (Wermter 1993,15).
19. Ninety per cent of factory workers lost their jobs with the massive closing of the textile factories and other manufacturers; the remaining ten per cent worked mostly as skeleton crews of remaining industries still seeking new investors (Frau jenennchen 1993, personal communication).
20 This party, the first to be recognized by the GDR government, has consistently followed a "third way" in its political dealings, losing the support of most pragmatic voters in the subsequent years (Bahrmann and Links, 1994).
2I The post-Wende council was similar in structure to that prescribed by the GDR Communal Constitution (Fuhrmann 1990). This structure was changed by the August 24,1993 Thuringian Communal and County Ordinance, comprising elements from Bavaria and Hesse; a major change was the direct election of the mayor and the county executive (Landrat) (Kommunale Fachliteratur Thilringen, 1993).
22 As of 1997 Stasi files still have not been completely catalogued; much evidence suggests that countless files were destroyed making difficult an accurate assessment as to the number of individuals involved in this activity. Jarausch (1994, 35) gives a conservative estimate of 300,000 while Merkl (1993, 101) suggests more than 700,000 individuals may have been spying on their family and friends. If Merkl is correct, more than four per cent of the total population were so involved. From my research, new evidence continues to tum up: In the summer of 1996 my landlord had just been uncovered as a Stasi IM and was dismissed from the local high school a result.
23. CDU members played a major role in such attacks.
24. The DSU and the FDP affiliations developed subsequently to the 1990 local elections and reflect the volatility of the council, reported in more detail elsewhere (Gibson 1994).
25. A curious aside: The conservative local paper, whose long history included support for the nobility, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi party and the Communist SED regime, moved smoothly at first towards support of the local CDU. However, as more and more electorate dissatisfaction with CDU conservative policies surfaced, the paper became more neutral during the 1994 campaign and shifted their support to the SPD once the election was over, following their established pattern.
26. He himself is a westem outsider.
27 The CDU, with its superior financing, four years of experience at all levels of Thuringian governance, and its electoral know-how borrowed heavily from the tactics of Helmut Kohl, hoping to overcome the bad reputation of the local party for querulousness and personal enrichment, especially since the new mayoral candidate had spent four years as a respected county council member, with a reputation for hard work and commitment to local issues. VVhile he, too, tended to be issue-oriented during the campaign, his somewhat aggressive tone and his occasional attempts to link Dr. Katz with the communists because of the latter's prior SED membership hinted at a continued support of confrontation as a political strategy. His ungracious behavior at the constituting council meeting in July 1994 tended to strengthen this impression. Unfortunately, he died of a massive heart attack six months later. His successor, the former mayor, has taken a slightly more conciliatory approach
28. Modeled on the Bavarian system, the mayor is supposed to chair all committees but the on auditing city finances, to organize and run these and all council meetings (with the help of his administrative staff), and to represent the city in all significant public functions.
29. I retumed to Reu?stadt in the sununer of 1996 and continue to monitor local newspaper accounts of council developments, and read the monthly Reu?stadt Administrative Newspaper, both of which I receive on a regular basis.
30 During their long political domination, the SED refrained from direct intervention in the Church and in the private lives of their citizens, though unfavorable reports could ultimately lead to imprisonment or expulsion. The typical way average East Germans dealt with such ubiquitous infiltration was to assume that at least one visitor or guest was an informer, and act accordingly. So even in the "safe" zones one never felt completely safe.
3l Knopp and Kuhn 1990, and Bahrmann and Links (1994 and 1995) delineate the hopes and disappointments of a number of the early East German parties or groups that were forming right before and after the Wende; members did not favor a quick reunification, and were highly suspicious of capitalism and the free market economy. They hoped the former East Germany could retain its independent state status and come up with a new system, borrowing the best from both socialism and capitalism.

References

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Bahrmann, Hannes, and Christoph Links 1994 Chronik der Wende: Die DDR zwischen 7. Oktober und 18. Dezember 1989. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag.

1995 Chronik der Wende 2: Stationen der Einheit ; Die letzten Monate der DDR. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag.
Crummenurl, Rainer 1992 "Reußstadt." Erfurt: Verlagshaus Th?ringen.

Fisher, Marc 1995 After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Fuhrmann, Ursus 1990 Kommunalverfassungsgesetz DDR mit kommentierenden Erläuterungen und ausführlichen Mustern einer Geschäftsordnung und einer Hauptsatzung. Erfurt: Deutscher Kommunal-Verlag-

Gibson, Patricia R. 1993 "Symbols of Violence, Symbols of Peace: East German Local Political Response Four Years after the Wende." Paper presented at the 92nd Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, DC, November 17-21, 1993.

1994 "Developing Democracy? Local Political Response to German Reunification in Thuringia. Paper presented at the Council for European Studies Ninth International Conference of Europeanists in Chicago, Illinois, March 31-April 2, 1994.

Hardach, Karl 1980 The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hickel, Rudolf, and Jan Priewe 1994 Nach dem Fehlstart: Oekonomische Perspective der deutschen Einigung Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.

Jarausch, Konrad H. 1994 The Rush to German Unity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jenennchen, Frau 1993 Personal Communication

Knopp, Guido and Ekkehard Kuhn 1990 Die Deutsche Einheit: Traum und Wirklichkeit. Erlangen: Verlag Dr. Dietmar Straube GmbH.

Kommunale Fachliteratur Th?ringen 1993 Thüringer Gemeinde- und Landkreisordnung. Bornheim/Bonn: Deutscher Kommunal-Verlag.

Merkl, Peter H. 1993 German Unification in the European Context. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Reußstadt, City of, 1984 "Reußstadt: Park- und Schloßstadt." City map.

1997 "Haushaltsplan 1997." Amtsblatt der Stadt "Reußstadt. 5 (3): 3.

Roseberry, William 1989 Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Politica Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

1996 "Hegemony, Power, and Languages of Contention" in The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power, Edwin N. Wilmsen and Patrick McAllister, eds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Scott, James C. 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Teltschik, Horst 1991 329 Tage. Innenansichten der Einigung. Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag.

Thoss, Alfred 1991 Die Geschichte der Stadt Reußstadt, 2nd ed. Reußstadt: Verlag Weisser Stein. (Orig. publication 1933).

Vincent, Joan 1990 Anthropology and Politics. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

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PROFESSION AND PROPAGANDA: UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN THE GRIP OF IDEOLOGY AND POVERTY.
Leszek Dziegiel
Poznan University
[Autobiographical Note: First of all I have my Home Page in the Internet: http://www.uj.edu.pl/IE/DZIEGIEL.HTM
Our Institute of Ethnology: http: www.uj.edu.pl/IE/EUROPA.HTM

I was born in 1931. I spent World War Two in Lvov. In 1945 I had to move from Lvov to Katowice (Upper Silesia). There I finished the secondary school in 1950 experiencing political chicanery towards those young people who declined to join organization of communist youth. My situation was by no means exceptional. Most of my friends experienced several kinds of political pressure and intimidation. In spite of our very good results we were divided into several social categories while we were applying for the university studies. Being sons and daughters of middle class (my father was a teacher and he died in the Nazi concentration camp), we were obviously non-privileged. In 1950 most of us were denied to study at the Krakow University those faculties chosen by us. I wanted to study history. Then I begin to study archeology and ethnology. In 1955 I got my MA diploma in ethnology with excellent results. I observed the university life during those five years and I shared plenty of rather awkward adventures with my pals being rather nonconformist youngsters. As I did not decide to join the Polish Communist Party, my application for doctoral studies was rejected. Being jobless I worked in many strange places, as the worker, mountain tourist guide etc. In 1955-1959 I founded with my friends (similar jobless graduates) illustrated monthly magazine. It was closed by the authorities because of political reasons. I had to move from Krakow to Upper Silesia. There I worked as a teacher and free lance journalist. After my return to Krakow in 1970 I was offered post of researcher at the University of Agriculture. I got my Ph.D. diploma at the Krakow University, Fac. of History & Philosophy. In 1977, 1978, and 1980 I did my field research in Iraqi Kurdistan as the member of Polish agro-economic team of experts. My task was anthropological survey of five chosen areas in Dohuk, Sulaimania, and Arbil governorates. Then I wrote (in English) book "Rural Community of Contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan Facing Modernization" Krakow 1981. One copy of the book is available at the US Congress Library also. In 1982 I got my habilitation diploma at the Poznan University.

From 1983 I work at the Institute of Ethnology as full professor of ethnology and the director. Inside the Institute, I am the head of the Dept. of European and Middle Eastern Studies. I am also the member of some editorial boards and the all-national Committee of Ethnology.

In the middle of the 1990s I decided to begin research on the cultural aspects of every day life in the Communist Poland, using my own experiences and observations of my generation, as well as the memoirs published here and there. I am interested in the perspective of a common, unprivileged citizen, not necessary involved in any political conspiracy but in the same time objecting the imposed system of oppression. Then I decided to focus my attention on the urban educated class, well known for me. It is my idea to begin such studies in Poland but also to persuade that sphere of research to my colleagues from neighboring post-communist countries. Some of my papers are now in print in Prague, Zagreb, but also in Poland. One paper is going to be published in international journal Ethnologia Europea. My idea is not to present the communist everyday in Central Europe like a kind of period of martyrology. But in the same time I think there is high time to provide historians of culture with basic cultural facts in some way resembling Richard Grunberger's book on the social history of the Third Reich. I plan to publish in English a book on the every day life in Polish People’s Republic and that paper sent to you is only one chapter of it. That study is almost completed now. It covers such subjects as: The civilization of everlasting need and poverty (food and other commodities shortages, attitudes, limitations, illusions and cheating). Policy of indoctrination of the secondary school students in big cities and their answer. Western films as the kind of idealistic illusion of the West in the minds of Polish young generation in the Stalinist Era. Profession & Propaganda: Polish students in the communist political system. Polish students in the cultural milieu of the university city. Living realities, peculiar local elites, customs, entertainments, students’ dormitories, and their subculture. Western fashion as the form of political protest among Polish students. Hiking and alpinism as the form of political escapism of the Polish educated milieu. Communist philosophy toward the big cities. Policy of making of obedient urban-dweller. Private car as one of means of political corruption. Poland's immediate neighbors (Czech, Slovaks, Hungarians, East Germans and Soviets) - official stereotypes and popular mythology. I hope that you are more or less informed about the general idea of my research now. I am sorry I know about your issue only from the Internet. I am conscious also, that those subjects are by far more interesting in Central Europe than in America. ]

There are many reasons why young people decide to go to university. In the early 1950s in Poland, one of the motives - at least for young men just out of secondary school - was the aversion to military service. Besides, hardly anyone would be thrilled by the prospect of taking up some poorly paid job, usually at an office, in one's home town. The alternative was the university: a couple of years of study, usually in a different, bigger and more interesting city, new friends, an interesting career afterwards - all this fascinated hundreds of thousand secondary school graduates in the bleak reality of Stalinist Poland.

The communist authorities were well aware of those fascinations and dreams, and made admission to the university a rare privilege and a special favor granted by the "state of workers and peasants". One would be constantly reminded that thanks to "people's rule", university education was provided free of charge - an instance of generosity which merited an everlasting gratitude. And since the all-powerful state paid for the education, it had the right to select those who would be allowed to go to university. Needless to say, it was up to the state to decide what exactly the unfortunate recipient of that benefit was to study and what role in the "building of socialism" he or she would be assigned afterwards. One would not be allowed to pay one's way through the university: the system would not leave the individual any margin of choice.

By the time of the final exams in secondary school, the prospective students would have learnt that the school community had been divided - in strict accordance with the regulations in force - into a number of social categories. They had heard about similar arrangements before: in history and literature classes dealing with the remote past. Now they were told that the enrolment procedure at universities and polytechnics gave priority to sons and daughters of workers, regardless of their actual knowledge or abilities. It was called the principle of historical justice. Next in line were children of farmers. In their case, however, the "worker-peasant alliance" did not include offspring of rich peasant families - only "middlers" and "paupers". The classification was based on the amount of arable land owned by the candidate's parents: the less hectares, the better! The unfortunate children of richer farmers - dubbed kulaks by Party bureaucrats who had borrowed the term from the political jargon of their Russian comrades - had a very slim chance to be admitted. Sometimes, as a form of punishment to their parents, they would be sent to special military labor battalions instead, where they would do slave labor in a coal mine, side by side with political prisoners, prisoners of war from the Wehrmacht and common criminals.

The third group of candidates - usually most numerous in the big university cities - was made up of representatives of the so-called "working intelligentsia stratum". This social group did not deserve the name of a "class". According to the theorists of Marxism-Leninism, it merely "penetrated" the working and peasant classes and was not to be treated with undue lenience under the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a matter of fact, members of this underspecified stratum were in a sense obliged to give constant proof of their loyalty and ideological commitment. They were supposedly susceptible by nature to the evil influence of bourgeois ideology. Thus the "working intelligentsia" members were seen as a kind of social material to be molded by the social engineers from the Party. Too numerous in any milieu for effective control, they became a kind of necessary evil. Thus in the contest for university admission, the sons and daughters of teachers, accountants, mail or bank clerks, booking clerks, and all the other members of the clerical populace - proliferating under communism - were a kind of third estate, an inferior kind of people, a barely tolerated social weed.

At the very bottom of the ladder were the miserable children of so-called "independent professionals" - that is, doctors and lawyers with a private practice - and small shopkeepers and craftsmen with workshops of their own. Miserable indeed, for their applications were as a rule considered at the very end and turned down. After all, the bureaucrats from the admission boards had to demonstrate "class vigilance" to their bosses from the Party committees. And anyway, the social and occupational groups in question, most heavily discriminated against in Poland, was dwindling from year to year. Doctors found jobs in state-owned hospitals and health centers, lawyers were forced to join state-controlled agencies, and pharmacists were expropriated from their pharmacies. Small shopkeepers were driven out of business by tax chicanery, and some craftsmen took refuge in pseudo-cooperative production units or found jobs in state industry. This process took several years. Meanwhile, the stigma of "incorrect" origin attached to thousands boys and girls.

Selection of candidates and elimination of those "of incorrect origin" took more refined forms, too. Regardless of the actual class origin of a candidate, his or her application could be turned down for dozens of reasons, some of which went back even to quite remote past. It had to be verified that the son or daughter of some unimportant clerk did not in fact come from a family of expropriated landowners or former industrialists or entrepreneurs, whose property had been lawfully confiscated under "the people's rule". A father, whether alive or dead, who had been a professional army officer or policeman before the war automatically blocked the son's or daughter's access to university. Likewise, the possession of relatives abroad - in any non-communist country - put the Party sentinels on the alert, and if someone tried to withhold this kind of information, he could have been accused of deliberately misleading the authorities and open disloyalty, which often carried stiff penalties. It happened on occasions that members of the communist youth organization would take satisfaction in "exposing" thus a fellow student and having him expelled from the university.

Regardless of social background, a candidate's file contained confidential reports concerning his or her political views, attitudes towards religious practices, membership in the state-controlled youth organizations and, if applicable, evidence of loyal obedience to the regime.

The whole system was permeated by corruption and there were frequent instances of bogus documents, nepotism, and degrading moral compromise, on the part of both the candidates and their desperate parents. The authorities must have been aware of all this and tolerated such corrupt practices which facilitated the control of society and fostered conformist attitudes. Besides, communists in Poland never fully succeeded in subduing the people by means of a formalized system of commands and prohibitions.

Having neither the means, nor the intention to have the selection system described above applied in every detail at all the institutions of higher education and to all fields of study, the authorities concentrated instead on selected specialties - on the one hand, the most popular ones, and on the other, those which were assigned a special role in the plans of communist indoctrination and consolidation of power. A real apple in the eye of the communist party and government were - following the Soviet example - selected technical branches of special direct or indirect importance to certain branches of the heavy industry, such as mining and defense. Thus the authorities spared no expense for the development of technical universities or the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy in Krakow.

Education of military and police personnel, which at least until 1956 was conducted under close supervision of Soviet specialists, as well as recruitment for diplomatic service training and institutions dealing with ideology and political science were particularly strictly controlled by the highest-level authorities. Candidates were carefully selected: they came mainly from primitive, uprooted families. Another criterion was that of blind obedience to the forces of political repression and propaganda. Especially welcome were individuals who had participated in the suppression of the opposition, in propaganda campaigns in favor of the communist system in the country or among factory workers, in the organization of local informant networks etc. They often originated from the city or country Lumpenproletariat or pathological families. Interestingly, one could occasionally meet in those circles sons and daughters of Polish repatriates from the north-east, industrial departments of France (Nord, Pas de Calais) - simple-minded communist converts whom the authorities in post-war Poland had promised socialist well-being and lucrative employment in the industrial region of Wa?brzych. Some of those misguided young men became engaged as guards to watch over imprisoned soldiers and officers of the underground Home Army from the wartime years. They were told those were Nazi war criminals.

The special training facilities for the elect offered the students or cadets extremely comfortable conditions; they were, of course, isolated from the rest of society and were worlds apart from the usual troubled circumstances of student life in Poland those days. People knew about them but usually took no interest, unless one aspired to a career in the party and politics. But even among normal universities, which were in theory open to broader circles of young people, there were places where the official political and ideological selection criteria, together with informal links of corruption and favoritism, reigned supreme. This was true first of all of Medical Schools, newly established or detached from existing universities. The profession of a physician or pharmacist was thought of as prestigious and at the same time remunerative.

Candidates invariably swarmed into such fashionable studies as architecture, history of art, and the fine arts. Here again, what the examination boards looked for was not so much the candidates' gifts as their correct social background. Thus the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts rejected the application of the granddaughter of a famous painter, stating that "the party will not lend support to the formation of artistic dynasties". Law studies, in their turn, were to supply the regime with "new type" judges and prosecutors, who in criminal cases would stick not so much to the letter of the law as to the current guidelines of the communist party. This kind of career was frequently offered to "deserving" agents of the political police, whose past could have been very sinister.

An apparent peculiarity was the extremely careful selection of prospective students of humanities. The proportion of well-prepared candidates, even from ideologically acceptable classes, whose applications were turned down, was particularly striking in the case of history and Polish studies (Prokop 1996). It soon turned out that those two disciplines were largely reserved for people with special political credentials: graduates of so-called one-year university preparatory courses. Young Stakhanovites from steelworks and mines, trusted up-country party comrades, or even long-term informers of the political police were sent to special courses where 12 months of instruction was deemed enough to make up for the missing years of education and secure the matura (secondary education certificate). Specially reserved places were waiting for them at universities, for it was this group that was meant to become teachers-indoctrinators of the future. Whether they did is a different question, altogether.

Other candidates of this type - appointed by local party committees - ended up after some brief remedial courses at technical universities, too. Usually they gave up pretty soon; cursing the moment they had agreed to play the role of a mediocre student instead of that of a work champion respected by the entire factory.

In modern language faculties, priority was given to Russian studies: teachers of Russian were badly needed as that language was soon too become an obligatory part of primary and secondary school curricula.

A new doctrine should be disseminated by the press. Therefore, studies for journalists were placed under tight control of the party in the early 1950s. In contrast, sociology disappeared as an academic discipline for quite a few years. It was absorbed by the hastily established chairs of "ideological disciplines" whose function was to propagate so-called Marxism-Leninism and the communist version of political economy at all institutions of higher education, regardless of their profile. The sole function of the new economy was to demonstrate the superiority of communist theory and practice over all the previous economic systems existing in the world.

Issues of propaganda and politics made up at least fifty per cent of entrance exam contents in the early 1950s - written as well as oral - and were intended to provide the main evaluation criterion for the examination boards. Besides, the boards relied heavily on information found on the candidates' files.

The centrally controlled, complex enrolment system, admission limits set up by the party for particular types of studies and categories of candidates (by origin), and abolition of some disciplines and establishment of others proved too much for the bureaucratic machinery of universities. Chaos, corruption and arbitrary, politically motivated decisions resulted in hundreds of young people being turned down despite the passed exam, ostensibly because of "lack of vacancies". The rejected candidates would be offered a chance to study some entirely different discipline (supposedly with too few students), of no interest to them.

Thus in order to promote research on the early years of the Polish state and its thousand-year-long history, heavily publicized by the propaganda, archaeology was given an unheard-of-before prominence at Polish universities. By administrative decision, the discipline would absorb the many candidates for whom no place was found at the dentistry, engineering or law faculties (Dziêgiel 1996:100).

Those who had no intention of studying anything that was offered or could not even dream of admission to any state-run university in Poland went to the Catholic University of Lublin, functioning somehow under the aegis of the Church, despite the chicanery on the part of the communist regime. This small institution, with just a few faculties and a restricted choice of disciplines proved the last resort to many a person. But it was not possible for everyone to take advantage of this opportunity. Some regions of Poland are a long way off from Lublin. Besides, rumors were that the university would sooner or later be closed down. It was also feared that graduates might find it difficult to get a job.

Conformist attitudes were far more easily fostered at universities newly established after the war than in old academic centers with a pre-war tradition. The staff of the new institutions largely consisted of lecturers who had just been promoted in recognition of their loyalty and obedience. For decades the communists tried to break the unity of the academic milieu by establishing small, provincial university branches and rump academic centers called "consultation points" - academically inadequate and fully dependent on their sponsors from the party and ministry. The development of higher education in post-war Poland has been studied in detail by historians of science. In the years 1937-38 there were 32 institutions of higher education in Poland. Their number had increased by the late 1940s to 54 (Bielecki 1967:147). In the 1970s Poland had 90 educational establishments with a formal university status (Paczkowski 1996:455). One should, however, take note of the specific atmosphere surrounding the formation of such new schools, which would automatically, increase competition for funds from the budget. The possession of a university or technical college was certainly a matter of regional ambition and certainly simplified things for the thousands of local education seekers. But it was not their ambitions and desires that were taken into account. The decision rested with local party lobbies, which had their own vested interest in the establishment of a school of a given type. In the end, the new institution of higher learning would be opened amid much celebration; the rector and deans would be appointed and a numerous administrative staff would find work there as well. The inaugural ceremony would be attended by dignitaries from Warsaw, dressed up in quasi-historic gowns and equipped with appropriate insignia. The newly engaged bureaucratic apparatus would ensure obedience to the authorities for as long as years to come, and, most importantly, it would control the students. Meanwhile, some of the local party officials would seize the opportunity to obtain surreptitiously higher-education diplomas under a hasty and cursory procedure supervised by the newly appointed professors and deans. Young people from the neighboring towns and villages would try - in a disarmingly awkward manner - to imitate the old university tradition of annual student celebrations, fancy-dress processions in the streets or dances, all of which was dutifully reported by the local press.

In some places, on the other hand, the decision to open a university was being postponed indefinitely so as to avoid creating an intelligentsia milieu in areas of strategic importance for the party. Year after year, the obsequious Katowice press kept extolling the "dynamic scientific community of Upper Silesia" concentrating on industrial and technical problems and repeatedly emphasized the lack of interest in the humanities and abstract basic research which allegedly characterized the regional culture. Szczecin, the capital of Western Pomerania received an embryonic technical college immediately after the war, but it was not until the 1980s that the organization of a university met with the approval of the authorities (and received a token financial support). Communists in Poland always viewed universities, politically, as high-risk establishments, far less predictable than vocational-type institutions of higher education. A university could easily turn into a hotbed of criticism, breeding ferment among the students and lecturers alike, for all the painstaking ideological and political supervision. Control was rendered even more difficult by the varied profile of instruction and the tendency to remove the corset of ministry-imposed curricula.

The legacy that the communist regime took over in 1945 included the Jagellonian University in Krakow, established in 1364, the early-19th Century University of Warsaw, and the Universities of Pozna? and Lublin, dating back to the interwar period. Two old universities ceased to exist as Polish schools after the annexation of Wilno and Lvov by Stalin. Most of their professors ended up in Wroc?aw, vacated by the Germans, or at the newly established after 1945 University of Toru?. The most difficult task was the organization of medical and law studies in Wroc?aw, as nearly all the professors of those faculties at the University of Lvov had been exterminated by the Nazis in 1941 (Ordyeowski 1991:213).

The establishment of a university could be seen in some circumstances as an act of political subversion. In Lublin, for instance, the hastily opened, state-run Maria Curie-Sk?odowska University was intended to compete with the private Catholic University of Lublin, established in 1918. In Katowice, it was decided at last in 1968 - in the wake of massive student protest in Krakow - that a university would come into being in Silesia. It was meant to be obedient to the regime, and most of the posts were taken by candidates proposed by the local party committee. They were expected to be docile and, at the very least, to create a kind of counterbalance to the Jagellonian University, which was deemed reactionary. But both Universities, in Lublin and in Katowice, freed themselves in due time from propaganda and ideological obligations. That was by no means an easy task to accomplish, and the early generations of students could have complained about their aspirations being disregarded.

Since the late 1940s, the authorities attempted to control the universities and the student community by means of specialized institutions and services, which remained active in this field (even though the working methods may have changed) until 1989. For instance, as late as in the mid 1980s, any official trip of a university research worker to the United States or to West Germany required - in addition to the passport issued by the police and acceptance by the minister - also a consent in writing from a party official responsible for this kind of foreign contacts at the University. This requirement applied to all research workers, whether party members or not. And, it should be borne in mind, that was a time of pronounced atrophy of the communist regime in Poland.

In the early 1950s, the Association of the Polish Youth (ZMP) kept detailed records of all new arrivals at the university, and particularly of those students who had been members of that organization while still at school. The ZMP wished first of all to control the attitudes of its members and to force them to participate in various forms of propaganda. These included in the first half of the 1950s the virtually obligatory Sunday trips to nearby state farms in order to help the farmers (not too hardworking, for that matter) dig potatoes. In summer, camps were organized the aim of which was to assist the collective farmers and state-farm-hands in the harvest. Once there, it usually turned out that the drunken and demoralized farm workers had failed to provide the students with tools and protective clothing. And besides, they wanted no assistance from town. Out of necessity then, a propaganda event soon turned into a chaotic picnic, occasionally enlivened with no small amounts of alcohol.

Non-members were far less susceptible to the pressure of indoctrination. The communist party ordered the ZMP to carry out various campaigns among the students and held the university activists responsible for their success. An atmosphere of tension and apprehension was being constantly and artificially maintained among ZMP members. It was reinforced with incessant appeals for "vigilance" in the face of the ideological enemy and propaganda subversion. Meetings dragged on, often for the better part of the night, during which activists denounced one another and performed acts of political self-accusation. This led to nervous breakdowns or even, as was the case on one occasion in Krakow, to suicide.

Today, in the 1990s, the opinion is often voiced (convenient to some) that "everyone had to be a ZMP member". In reality, however, it was an organization which, resorting to ruthless pressure and blackmail, had managed to round up a little more than a million members by 1949 and about 2 million - that is, not more than 40 per cent of all boys and girls - by 1955. The latter number translated into some 50 per cent of young workers and 60 per cent of secondary school and university students. In the country, the organization was less successful, as membership was in the order of 15 per cent (Paczkowski 1996:248). It is thus clear that blackmail and other forms of organized pressure worked best among learners, but even in their case those measures were only partially successful.

Most ZMP activists originated from among students coming to the university from provincial towns - uprooted, lost, and troubled by an inferiority complex about their more affluent colleagues. A career in the ZMP invested one with a sense of authority. It also facilitated progress at the university and promised better career opportunities in the future. Downright opportunists who viewed their involvement in the organization as just a rung of their political career were not uncommon in those circles - the next stage was membership in the communist party and various functions in its apparatus. Hardly out of the university, they acquired the haughty manner of dignitaries, combined with a pseudo--proletarian coarseness, sometimes bordering on vulgarity. The supposedly "working-class-like", rustic manners, ostentatious scorn for politeness and correct language and the affected air of a simpleton in authority: those were the hallmarks of the apparatchik of the 1950s. His style was marked by a disgusting, primitive servility in contacts with superiors. Bad manners and even propensity to drink were seen by those people as proof of their loyalty to "proletarian principles". Quite possibly, it was for them a means of protection against the less numerous but highly dangerous group of promotion seekers from the intelligentsia: tough and cunning players who displayed at meetings and courses a far greater aptitude in quoting the several dozen lines by Stalin they had memorized.

The official marches organized on a giant scale on 1 May or other communist holidays created huge demand for naturalist portraits of communist leaders, first of all, Josef Stalin. This was a source of extra income for students and graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts. The party bosses hired them well in advance, in view of the magnitude of their task, and provided them with paint, canvas and stencils. The artists received (in secret) remuneration for their work. Apparently, the authorities feared that an attempt to have those services performed free of charge might have ended in a disaster that would put the entire celebration in jeopardy. The communist "leaders" had to look the same in all the portraits, in accordance with a specimen approved by the highest-level government bodies. No margin of variation was allowed. A more creative approach was possible, on the other hand, in the case of larger-than-life caricatures of "enemies of the international proletariat". At any rate, no artist would boast about getting such highly questionable commissions (Kobyli?ski1990: 140-148).

Participation in those quasi-spontaneous street marches was in practice obligatory, yet - apart from ZMP activists - it was mainly the frightened first year students who showed up in greater numbers. Rule number one was never to carry banner or flag: it would have to be handed back to the organizers at the very end of the celebration. And a person who walked empty-handed had a chance of taking refuge in the first house entrance on the way. Another strategy was to get lost in the crowd. It was a fashionable thing to do among a group of trusted friends, to say: "As for me, I've never in my life participated in any street march."

Thus in the early 1950s, many a student commencing education at a Polish university felt disappointed, frustrated and embittered. Those reactions were aggravated by the law (also originating from 1950) on "socialist study discipline". It deprived students of a chance to study at two faculties simultaneously and made attendance at all lectures mandatory. It was to be checked by students specially appointed by the university, who had to use special forms to this end. All this was happening in an atmosphere of official propaganda enthusiasm and slogans comparing the university to a "personnel factory" with production plans of its own and strict penalties for breaking the discipline. As a matter of fact, it was not the student's intellectual effort that counted, but his or her "involvement in the student group". The arbitrary plans of some university ideologues stipulated that the group should study together before examinations and make sure that every member (no matter how lazy or thickheaded) would obtain similar results. The others should do "ideological work" with their less successful colleague, to encourage him to obey the discipline.

That kind of discipline was applied to professors, too, who were made responsible for examination results and dropouts. Poor marks - particularly when they affected some less hard-working or gifted ZMP activists or, worse still, "comrades" from the Polish United Workers' Party - could mean trouble for the overly demanding professor, or even cost him his right to lecture or his job. Following the Soviet practice, the old, pre-war professors were carefully screened for "remnants of bourgeois ideology". In some schools there were lecturers, too, who tried to curry favor with the authorities and obtain promotion by means of obedience to the regime or even informing against their colleagues.

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of particularly heavy dependence of Polish science and culture on Soviet patterns. This was also the case in the neighboring communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The subsequent rejection of this imposed model, on the other hand, took different forms and proceeded at a different pace in each of the countries concerned. It was the functioning of that model in practice and its gradual erosion that determined the specificity of the culture of each of the captive nations, including the Poles (Connelly, Suleja 1997).

Although the model of the university imposed by the authorities, based on the concept of a centralized, uninspired "personnel factory", was rapidly deteriorating, it nevertheless led to an intellectual stagnation among students, who were not motivated to seek knowledge on their own, while the university was becoming a distorted replica of an inferior secondary school. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that the libraries had been destroyed during the war, and the intentional isolation of communist countries from the rest of the world resulted in a lack of modern teaching materials and excluded the academic circles from the normal international circulation of ideas. Both in secondary schools and in higher education, new textbooks took long to appear. They usually followed the official pattern pertaining to a given discipline. National congresses were held - of various branches of culture, humanities, literary studies, and science - during which the most obedient representatives of the milieu, (chosen by the communist party), declared (or, in a sense, decreed) a "Marxist-Leninist breakthrough" in research methodology and teaching. The attainments of Polish philosophers and sociologists were rejected. Infallibility in this area was an exclusive attribute of Soviet interpreters of Marxist thought, led by Josef Stalin. In Poland, only their imitators had a chance to be recognized; one of those was Prof. Adam Schaff, whose swift career soon secured him the position of an archpriest of the social sciences. The humanities had solemnly renounced "bourgeois objectivity". The leading role in the interpretation of history was played by a certain Prof. Zhanna Kormanova. In the field of modern languages, attempts were made to implement the ideas of another Soviet scholar, Kairov, and eliminate English, French, Italian or Spanish culture and literature from instruction and thus protect students from ideologically alien contents. Linguists were being encouraged to peruse the linguistic enunciations of Stalin, whom the press had meanwhile begun to hail as an all-science coryphaeus. In biological sciences, the existence of chromosomes was denied, and so was the validity of Mendel's theory of heredity: introduced in their place were the ideas of Michurin, Lysenko, Lepeshinska and other Soviet charlatans. Reflection on culture was dominated by the unearthed evolutionary concepts of Morgan, which had so impressed Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. Architects, art historians and students of the fine arts were encouraged to emulate the bizarre model of so-called "socialist realism". Whatever the discipline, Soviet science was inevitably the model to emulate.

During the congresses mentioned above - which amounted in reality to little more than political briefing - the other participants either remained silent, or apprehensively declared their support for the officially approved science. The few who protested soon had to vacate their posts at the university or at least to resign from any lecturing. In such an atmosphere, new university textbooks represented - once again, in accordance with the Soviet model - joint work of many authors, hidden behind the name of the "editor in chief". Usually it was a scholar trusted by the party bosses from Warsaw. Such new textbooks were not always to be treated with undue seriousness: on some occasions a new ideological convert - a Marxist professor - would immediately on publication of his textbook fall victim to devastating criticism on the part of even more orthodox dignitaries from the ministry, and the book itself would be withdrawn. Such was the fate of the famous textbook on Marxist aesthetics by Stefan Morawski, published in Krakow in the early 1950s.

Sometimes an influential professor with good party connections would impose on younger research workers and students an ideological model of science interpretation, but at the same time he would provide a kind of umbrella over his institution or even the entire discipline, tapping government sources to finance the employment of new staff or to fund research. There were scholars of this kind (jocularly called in the 1960s "academic overlords") who held several academic and administrative posts at the same time and totally neglected their professorial duties for lack of time. This phenomenon became widespread after the establishment of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1951, which offered a colossal number of posts. A similar situation prevailed in many disciplines, also in other countries of the communist block. In those undemocratic regimes, "courtly" science flourished, whose function (at least in the humanities) was to provide the arbitrary actions of the authorities with "scientific" justification, rather than open up new horizons (Patologia..., 1994).

As new textbooks were unavailable and the existing few consisted mainly of ideological gibberish, those professors who represented a higher professional integrity referred their students to pre-war literature, or what was left of it after the wartime destruction and looting. In practice, particularly in the case of certain humanistic disciplines and philologies, many books from the 1930s or even from pre-World-War-I days were still used. Technical disciplines were slightly better off: students could occasionally resort to German textbooks, and besides, more and more publications of Western specialists were available in a Russian version published in Moscow. They were translated in large numbers, in violation of the copyright law, and printed on poor-quality wood-pulp paper. Future engineers and their professors laughed to tears hearing the propaganda tirades about the leading position of Soviet technology - which plagiarized, promptly and clandestinely, all new achievements of Western thought. In 1952, when Warsaw officially celebrated the completion of the spired Palace of Culture and Science - a gift of the Soviet authorities and the top achievement of Moscow builders, in the innovative style of socialist realism - students of architecture in Poland would show one another old photographs of the strikingly similar Terminal Tower in Cleveland, Ohio, built decades earlier in a similarly pompous and eclectic style.

Other disciplines were not so fortunate. With textbooks lacking (not even mimeographed copies of teaching materials, produced by universities - so-called skrypty - were available) all one had to rely on was lecture notes. It thus paid off to attend regularly all the lectures and seminars, or at least to be on good terms with ones who did. To be sure, no such thing as a Xerox machine was heard of in those days. Troubled by a persecution mania, the system jealously guarded access even to the simplest duplicating machine. University publishing houses which were supposed to produce skrypty were inefficient. Some teachers used archaic "episcopes" - which had seen the pre-war days or at least the Nazi occupation - allowing one to project an image of a printed page or photograph on screen for a couple of seconds (after a couple more the thing would catch fire). Verbal instruction reigned supreme.

Standards of learning at universities were kept up by the staff: pre-war professors and lecturers tried hard to prevent total demoralization of science. They often met, therefore, with more or less open chicanery and provocation attempts, inspired, in many cases, by communist youth activists. Their books and skrypty would remain unpublished for years or else would be censored, with entire chapters and sections being removed. Participation in conferences abroad was out of the question, which meant isolation from the worldwide trends in a given discipline. This was particularly true of provincial universities, and province meant in those days all places except the capital. Warsaw was always privileged in terms of contacts with the world. Information about possibilities of applying for foreign scholarships or participation in international conferences was sent to other centers of learning so late that any prospective candidate would have no time to submit all of the many required questionnaires, certificates and diploma excerpts. And if by any chance they did make it on time, the documents would be lost forever in the filing cabinets of anonymous ministry clerks. Such practices, in varying forms and degrees of intensity, were not altogether eliminated until 1989.

I mentioned in the opening paragraph aversion to military service as one of the motives for young men to take up studies - sometimes any kind of studies whatsoever. From 1950, the Ministry of National Defense organized a system of military training for students at all Polish universities, integrated into the curricula. At Medical Academies, the training was obligatory for girls, too. Special regulations applied to Roman Catholic seminarians, who had to go into service on completion of their education. In the army, they were subjected to atheistic indoctrination. This form of chicanery was a matter of controversy between the Church and the authorities.
Military training of students of lay schools was conducted at fortnightly intervals over a span of three years, at the end of which there was a 30-day field exercise and a final examination, leading to the students' promotion to officer ranks (Dziêgiel 1996:171-186). It was a system which survived, with certain modifications, until 1989. Only then was it decided, upon thorough analysis, that the whole idea of "Military Classes" was not only costly, but inefficient. Indeed, the officers who conducted the instruction were not always appropriately qualified, even though their posts of university instructors were much coveted among their colleagues, who generally preferred big university centers to barracks. Unfortunately, inability to work with students often made them a laughing stock, which ruined their authority. Generation after generation of students held them up to ridicule. The training equipment they used - old and dilapidated - did not help much, either. Also the field exercises made the sorry organizational, technical and frequently also moral condition of the army all too plain. No wonder this form of military service was finally abolished. All in all, however, it was beneficial for students, at least in comparison with regular military service.

Within three years after 1950, the notorious "socialist study discipline" became weakened and practically ceased to exist. An old student habit was back: regular attendance was once again restricted to classes and seminars (as opposed to lectures). The rigid system of ideological lectures on Marxism-Leninism and political economy was increasingly looked upon as a mere formality. Even the lecturers themselves did not seem convinced about the force of their arguments. Some of them even started to flatter the audience with cautious liberalism, expecting a relaxation of the ideological stringency. Years later, many of them ended up in the West and made a name for themselves in Oxford or Paris as "philosophers sensitive to the human condition", moralizing from entyrely different positions. Anyway, upon Stalin's death in March 1953, political terror in Poland began to die down, at least at universities. The commands and prohibitions imposed by the system were more and more openly defied. In violation of formal regulations, students were beginning to look for unofficial sources of extra income. Gradually, the more enterprising ones began to embark on professional careers. After graduation, they wished to find jobs in the town where they had stayed for years, made friends and, some of them, formed emotional attachments of a more serious kind.

The official system adopted after World War II was that of so-called "job assignment", yet another Soviet import, based on the assumption that every university graduate will be given (mandatory) employment in his profession for three years. A person would be directed to one place or another by a special commission, and the employer was to provide lodgings. The reason why the state had paid the students' scholarships for so long was that it needed supply of qualified labor which could be allocated at will. In theory, the decision of the commission was final and allowed for no appeal. At least that was the way the system worked - or so we heard - in the Soviet Union. This was also how it was meant to work in People's Poland, eliminating in the process the threat of graduate unemployment. That, however, was but a promise. The reality - as early as in the 1950s - looked quite different. And so mandatory job assignment applied only to technical professions and some other disciplines where specialists were in short supply indeed. But even in their case it often turned out that there were no lodgings and sometimes even no work for the coming graduates, who could thus either return home or go job-hunting on their own. In the case of graduates with diplomas in humanities, job assignment was never introduced. Looking for a job was their own problem.

For those who went to university in 1950, the authorities had yet another surprise in store: two-stage studies. It was decided in advance that after the third year, 90 per cent of the students should go to work, as People's Poland supposedly badly needed labor. They would not be allowed to obtain a diploma. Few students managed to stay on for another two years and complete an MA program. Hundreds or even thousands of young people were thus forced to leave, with only a certificate of incomplete higher education in their pocket, which made finding a job a particularly difficult task. Later on, they would need many years to make up for that unwarranted backlog. A year later all students were allowed again to complete an MA program: the regulations had been hastily changed. The party bosses never hesitated to experiment.

Students, on their part, were learning how to deal with the bureaucracy of the regime and how to survive in an insane system. And the system ruthlessly ruined - in the name of internal power struggle - the career prospects of hundreds of highly qualified graduates.

References

Bielecki, F.
1967 "O?wiata" [Education], (entry in:) Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna, Vol.9, pp. 139-147, Warszawa

Conelly J., Suleja T.
1997 , Projekt reformy personalnej polonistyki uniwersyteckiej Stefana ?ó?kiewskiego z 1950 roku [Stefan ?ó?kiewski s project of cadres reform of the univeristy Polish studies in 1950] (in:) ARCANA, no. 14 (2) , pp. 93-113.

Dziêgiel, L.
1996, Swoboda na smyczy. Wspomnienia 1946-1956 [Freedom on leash: Memoirs 1946-1956], Kraków

Kobyli?ski, S.
1990, "O tamtych plakatach" [Posters of those years], (in:) Paranoja, zapis choroby [Paranoia: A medical record], pp. 140-148, Warszawa

Ordy?owski, M.
1991, Zycie codzienne we Wroc?awiu 1945-1948 [Daily life in Wroc?aw: 1945-1948], Wroc?aw

Paczkowski, A.
1996, Pó? wieku dziejów Polski 1939-1989 [Half a century of Polish History; 1939-1989), Warszawa

Prokop J
1996 , Polonista jako utrwalacz w?adzy ludowej [Task for the teacher of the Polish literature: to consolidate the communist rule] (in:) ARCANA, no. 9 (3) 1996, pp. 68-102.

Patologia
1994, Patologia i terapia ?ycia naukowego [Pathology and therapy of academic life], ed. by Janusz Gokowski and Przemys?aw Kisiel, Kraków

Roszkowski, W.
1994, Historia Polski 1914-

Prof. dr habil. Leszek Dziegiel
Institute of Ethnology, Jagiellonian University
Grodzka 52, 31-044 Krakow, Poland

"A POLE CAN DIE FOR THE FATHERLAND, BUT CAN'T LIVE FOR HER": DEMOCRATIZATION AND THE POLISH HEROIC IDEAL
Marysia Galbraith
University of California, San Diego

An apparent contradiction has emerged between popular characterizations of Poles as patriots and the striking lack of enthusiasm Poles have shown toward the nation in recent years. These different orientations toward the nation can be reconciled, however, by examining underlying attitudes toward authority and freedom. Simply put, the difference depends on whether or not there is a clear enemy to fight, hence the expression, Polak potrafi sie bi? dla ojczyzny, ale nie potrafi dla niej zy? (a Pole can die for the fatherland, but can't live for her).1 In this essay, I view Polish notions of heroism during a particular historical moment--the early 1990's, as post-communist reforms were set into motion--and from the perspective of a particular generation--young Poles in or just completing secondary school. I argue that even within this very particular period of state and supranational reform, certain cultural frames, themes, and dispositions remained prominent in young Poles' negotiations about their national identity, and help to explain the decisions they made about their present and their future. The article helps to fill a gap in recent scholarship on nations by focusing on national identity as it is experienced in everyday life. I shift the focus downward, to explore the effects of social movements on individuals whose attitudes and actions in turn shape higher levels of organization.

Poles have a story they tell themselves about themselves--that they are strong when they face an enemy, but during 'normal', peaceful times, they are argumentative, they cannot agree, and everyone looks out for their own interests. The article explores displays of Polish heroism, including sacrificing one's life for 'great ideas', maintaining one's convictions regardless of the circumstances, and appearing to be compliant with the system while continuing counter-hegemonic activities through unofficial channels. It also examines periods of disenchantment when Poles splinter into the smallest0units, doing what is best for themselves and their families. Both the heroism and the disenchantment reveal Poles' assumptions about individual and state responsibilities.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Krakow, the historical and cultural 'heart' of Poland, and Lesko, a small town in the Bieszczady Mountains of southeastern Poland, I examine young Poles' perceptions of heroism and the nation in relation to specific contexts of learning, including films, school lessons, and family histories. Particular cases show how national ideologies are changed or contradicted by the situations young Poles find themselves in, and provide an explanation for generational, regional, and class differences in perceptions and experiences of national identity. The contrasts between romantic notions of heroism and the experience of everyday life are particularly great for those living in rural Bieszczady.

Although the Poles with whom I worked tended to criticize the concept of nation, they nevertheless made use of certain cultural frames to help them understand the nation and their responsibility to it. The understandings youths developed about themselves and others are likely to have long-term effects on the kinds of institutions that become established in Poland and on Poland's relations with other national and ethnic groups. The article thus provides a baseline for continued research on the adjustment to democratic and market reforms by examining not only official rhetoric about the nation, but also how these messages are used by members of the nation.

Nation: the state vs. the people

My first conversations with young Poles illustrate the challenge of investigating national identity 'on the ground'. I was in Kraków, a city reputed for its strong affiliation with pro-national policies, valued for its historical and cultural artifacts, and often regarded as the symbolic 'heart' of the nation. Nevertheless, my first tentative questions about to?samo?? narodowa---national identity--were more often than not met with sarcasm. "Why are you asking us about that?" young Poles asked, "those are old ideas, nobody cares about them really. They are just not interesting to us." This tendency to reject the nation as a significant category is in itself interesting, especially in the context of Poles' reputation for strong patriotism. It leads to questions about the conditions which promote or discourage identification with the nation. It also highlights the need for a reexamination of the dynamics of political legitimacy, ideology and belief.

Elsewhere, nations and nationalism have been examined with little regard for how individual members of the nation understand and negotiate nationalist rhetoric in their everyday lives (notable exceptions include Borneman 1992 and Sutton 1997). Gellner (1983), Anderson (1983), and Hobsbawm (1990) emphasize the historical conditions which caused the nation to become a significant category of identification. They show how the past is retold and reshaped to suit the purposes of institutions of leadership. Anderson (1983), for example, focuses on generalized subjects whom he calls the 'cultivated middle class' who learn from 'print-capitalism', state bureaucracies, and centralized school systems. Thus, from this perspective, it is the state that constitutes the nation, defining which traditions and symbols frame contemporary experiences.

Taking such a 'top down' perspective makes it difficult to explain why certain stories, symbols, and memories make sense to people and provide the basis for a feeling of unity among members of a nation. A number of authors have argued for the importance of reflexivity in the analysis of national identity, and even in self-identity (see Anderson 1983, Giddens 1991, Hobsbawm 1990, Mach 1994, and Smith 1991). But upon what basis do people consider themselves members of the nation? Anderson develops a compelling, yet abstract argument for the correspondence between attachment to nation and religious or kinship ties, in that all three have a strong affective dimension that can motivate self-sacrificing loyalty. My point is that understanding how this occurs requires examining the nation from the perspective of individual experience, because what constitutes identity is so often situated and personal, and thus wrapped up in locality and kinship. As Smith contends, "it may be possible to manufacture traditions and to package imagery, but images and traditions will be sustained only if they have some popular resonance, and they will have that resonance only if they can be harmonized and made continuous with a perceived collective past" (1991:159).

Recent events in Poland show the limited persuasiveness of state rhetoric that does not resonate with popular beliefs and experiences. Kubik (1994) illustrates that the state's attempt to coopt national symbols in the 1970's and 1980's failed to inspire the support of most Poles. Instead, the juxtaposition of the ideal of national sovereignty and the universalism of communist ideology only highlighted the contrast between them. Those same national symbols, when used by the opposition instead of by the state, helped to create the remarkable unity that characterized the Solidarity movement. The new twist to the story is that the popular opinion of Solidarity plummeted when Solidarity was elected into positions of leadership in 1989 and 1991, and in 1993 and 1995 the former communists gained the majority in parliamentary and presidential elections. These shifts in leadership suggest that Poles' distrust of the state is more deeply rooted than their dislike of communism. A powerful theme in Polish national identity is resistance toward any kind of centralized authority.2

The issue of national consciousness (?wiadomo?? narodowa) has been of central interest to Polish social scientists. Often, they have taken a social psychological approach, and examined identity in terms of 'attitudes' (postawy) or 'mentality' (mentalno??), (see Gryko 1989[on the sociological theory of Cha?asinski]; Ossowski 1967; Znaniecki 1990). Thomas and Znaniecki, in their classic study of the Polish peasant, define attitude as ä process of individual consciousness which determines real or possible activity of the individual in the social world”(1984:58). Their project is to link psychological processes and social action to economic and social conditions. Mentality refers to less conscious ways of thinking and feeling that derive from collective experiences, conditions, beliefs, and customs (Buchowski 1994a, 1994b; Koralewicz and Zi??kowski 1990; Opara 1992). Sociologist Stanis?aw Ossowski wrote extensively on the concept ojczyzna (fatherland) which he treated as "the correlate of certain psychic attitudes, together with the cultural heritage of the social group" (1967:203). Thus, he defined fatherland in terms of affective, cultural distinctions rather than territorial boundaries.

Ossowski's definition of national identity (he used the Polish term ojczyzna, which may be translated as 'patria' or 'fatherland') highlights both ideological and local attachments; 'ideological ojczyzna' corresponds to nation constructed through collective rhetorical forms, while 'private ojczyzna' is based on direct experience of locality. In the early 1990's, young Poles tended to disregard, or even reject, the ideological dimensions of national identity. Nevertheless, their private attachments remained strong. Significantly, sentiment toward place tended to be expressed in terms of attachment to the people who live there and only secondarily in terms of the terrain itself. Thus, young Poles in post-communist Poland tend to reject national ideology while remaining loyal to their 'private ojczyzna'.

Recent studies of Polish national consciousness continue to focus on psychological tendencies shaped by shared historical experiences and conditions (Buchowski 1994a, 1994b; Marody 1991; Opara 1992; Wawrzkiewicz 1990). Specifically, Buchowski (1994a, 1994b) shows the relevance of nationalism, Catholicism, and consumerism to anti-communist resistance and to recent systemic reforms. Marody (1991, 1992a, 1992b) emphasizes that new factors, in particular economic conditions, perpetuate Poles' sense of alienation from institutions so that even freely elected leaders fail to overcome the traditional distrust felt towards government officials. She also emphasizes the tension between individual versus collective interests which frame so many debates in Poland. It is important to emphasize that while these studies identify long-standing patterns, they do not assume inherent, primordial traits. Rather, these patterns emerged under particular historical circumstances, and continue to provide a model for behavior even though conditions have changed considerably.

Nation and the Heroic Ideal

Overlapping discourses in Polish literature, social commentary, and popular journalism grapple with the issues of what constitutes the nation and how members of the nation should act. Often, poets and novelists have acted as public, political figures responsible for shaping the affective community of the nation (classical authors include Adam Mickiewicz and Henryk Sienkiewicz, contemporary authors include Tadeusz Konwicki and Czeslaw Milosz). Usually, the politicization of literary figures has been attributed to Poles' limited access to institutional political power in the context of foreign domination. Poland was partitioned among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires from 1795 to 1917, occupied by Germany during World War II, and controlled by the Soviet Union after the war. Polish writers have defined the nation as the 'true' affective community in opposition to the state and other institutions of power associated with illegitimate foreign control. Classic patriotic texts such as Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) emphasize the importance of keeping the idea of the nation alive in literature and everyday thought, even when the fact of a sovereign nation is unattainable. In these texts, the primary characteristic of the Polish hero is that he (or sometimes she) willingly renounces his individualism for the benefit of the group, but he does so through profoundly individual action.

When Poland regained its sovereignty in 1918, writers and scholars began to problematize the category of 'the nation'. Authors debated what makes Poles different from everybody else, while simultaneously questioning the importance of the nation. Witold Gombrowicz, one of the most celebrated and controversial literary figures of 20th century Poland, argued that any schematic framework that defines a person's characteristics also limits freedom and creativity. He criticized Polish nationalist writers such as Mickiewicz who romanticized self-sacrifice for the collective good, calling on individuals, and artists especially, to resist being fit into preexisting categories. At the same time, however, his journals (written for publication) contain extensive meditations about the influence of his nationality on his writing (see Gombrowicz 1973, 1988, 1989, 1990). The issues that Gombrowicz raised about the individual's relationship to the collectivity remain current in Poland today. In an interview with American anthropologist Michael Fischer, Polish philosopher Leszek Koczanowicz explains "Polish identity is to some extent...in a constant state of schizophrenia, you know, to show some sources of identity and at the same time to show that the sources are exhausted or meaningless" (Fischer 1993:231).

In The Polish Complex, Tadeusz Konwicki (1982, originally published as Kompleks Polski in 1977) juxtaposes 19th century resistance fighters who sacrificed their lives in the battle for an autonomous Poland with conditions in communist Poland. The place of heroism was less clear in the 1970's, when much of Poles' energy was sapped by the absurd situations they faced every day, including interminable lines and unpredictable shortages. Nevertheless, the novel asserts that defeat comes only when people accept their fate in silence, when they no longer ask questions nor complain. Resistance, even if futile, is portrayed as worthwhile. The central problem for Konwicki remains the influence of history and habit on the Polish character, and the political implications of this relationship. In a 1991 interview with political journalist Adam Michnik, Konwicki criticized Poles for forgetting "facts from our history which are uncomfortable to us, which don't fit our always molded portrait of a society of angels in the center of Europe, ceaselessly wronged by bad neighbors" (Michnik 1991:10). He expressed concern about the "spiritual poverty" (ub?stwo duchowe) and "impoverishment of internal dispositions" (niezamo?no?? dyspozycji wewn?trznych) of Poles.

During the early 1990's, issues under debate in popular periodicals included Poland's relation to the rest of the world, the harm done to Poland by forty-five years of communism, and the changes necessary for success (as individuals and as a nation) in the new system. Many articles challenged traditional characterizations of Polish national identity. For instance, they criticized collective feelings of innocence about ethnic discrimination (Michnik 1991), justifications of kombinowanie, or finagling (Mokotowksi 1992), messianic claims that Poland has sacrificed itself to save the rest of Europe (Bie?kowska 1993), patriotic pride based on the activities of a few historic heroes (Bratkowski 1992; Zaworska 1992), and feelings of inferiority in contrast to the more developed West (Bie?kowska 1993; Ma?ewski 1993; Ogorek 1992). Less commonly, articles called for a return to romantic patriotism as the only means to improve Poland’s position in the world (Ma?ewski 1993).

In sum, reflections about the relationship between individuals and the collectivity, as well as the influence of historical experiences and conditions, are central discourses in Polish literature, scholarship, and journalism. Patriotic claims and metaphors remain a counterpoint in most discussions, even when authors assert that traditional patriotism does not work in the present context. One recurring motif (which proves central to my discussion of the national identity of young Poles) is the separation between the institutional and 'the people', where the former is regarded with distrust by the latter. In contrast to unreliable institutions, one's personal social connections can be trusted and depended upon.

Further, Poles' basic attachments to locality and to kin groups are most strongly enlisted in support of the nation when there is an enemy that clearly threatens both the local and the national realms; once that enemy is gone, so is the primary motivation for uniting as a nation. Instead, support remains focused on the narrowest of groups: friends and close friends. The following cases consider young Poles' responses to the messages they receive about the nation and heroism. They show that loyalty to the nation through honor, bravery, and resistance makes little sense in post-communist Poland because there is no enemy to fight, but orientations toward freedom and authority continue to underlie strategies for dealing with new kinds of restrictions on economic prosperity and individualism.

Polski Honor

Polish honor was portrayed to me in a film, Pan Wo?odyjowski , which I watched with Kuba, a twenty-two year old trade school graduate from Lesko. The film is an adaptation of the third novel in Henryk Sienkiewicz's patriotic trilogy. In these 19th century novels, historic struggles for Polish sovereignty provide the backdrop against which idealized Polish heroes fight foreign villains. Kuba told me that he saw Pan Wo?odyjowski once during a history class at school. In Pan Wo?doyjowski, the hero (Wo?odyjowski) and another knight are sent to protect a castle on Poland’s eastern border against Turk and Tartar invaders. In a church ceremony, the knights vow they will not abandon their post until they triumph over their enemy or die trying to protect Poland. After withstanding several attacks by the invaders, the knights receive a message from the king to abandon the castle because a compromise agreement gives the Turks control of southeastern Poland. Rather than retreat, the two knights, in compliance with their oath, blow up the castle and commit suicide. Kuba called the film a lesson for every Pole about how to love his country. I told him I didn't understand. Wouldn't it have been better if the knights had chosen to live so they could continue to defend the country? Kuba explained that the knights acted with bravery and honor and that keeping one's vow is the most important thing.

The film, and Kuba's reaction to it, illustrate several aspects of Polski honor. First, honor is closely related to defending the nation in armed conflict and not hesitating to die in battle. Second, it involves placing the collective good before one's own, as demonstrated through loyalty, honesty, and responsibility. Third, honor is not simply a matter of acting appropriately, it also requires thinking and believing the right things. Those 'right things' are defined by both social convention and the Church. In other conversations I recorded, young Poles linked honor with acting morally, listening to one's conscience, and prioritizing collective benefit over personal profit. Similarly, in her linguistic analysis of Polish terms related to bravery, Wierzbicka says that their strong link with warfare and predominantly positive connotation emphasize the "important role that memories of struggles for freedom and independence play in Polish culture and in the Polish collective consciousness”(1992:216). Compromise, by contrast, tends to have strongly negative associations, as seen in Wo?odyjowki’s refusal to hand the castle over to the enemy (see also Wierzbicka 1992).

If this were the end of the story, it would appear that the Polish heroic ideal continues to provide young Poles with a valued model for behavior. I return to Kuba to demonstrate that while the idea of honor continues to be a significant evaluative concept for youths, young Poles have rarely, if ever, faced situations that demand honorable behavior of them. As a result, the concept gets transformed in ways that seem to contradict the ideal entirely. Over the summer of 1992, and through the following winter, Kuba expressed his patriotic feelings to me. He called Poland the 'best nation' and spoke proudly of Polish go?cinno? (hospitality) and bravery in warfare. In February 1993, he said he is used to life in Poland and does not want to live anywhere else. In March, he took a bus to Paris. When I finally received a note from him the following autumn, I learned that he had joined the French Foreign Legion. I have not seen him, so I have not been able to ask him directly how his recent actions relate to his patriotism, but I have a hunch that he would still defend the value of honor.

Knowing more about Kuba's situation helps to explain why he acted as he did. When I first met him, he was trying to avoid mandatory service in the Polish army which he considered a waste of his time. He complained that the Polish military is poorly equipped, weak, and does not do anything. Instead, he lived at home and went on long bike rides. He did not want to work either, he explained, because during the summer there is too much to do which does not require earning or spending money. Still, his mother was getting tired of supporting him while he 'did nothing'. Once it started getting cold and bike riding lost its appeal, he found a job as a clerk in a friend's store. He liked working because it got him out of the house and away from his mother's complaining, but he was barely earning $100 a month, too little to help out with the family finances. By contrast, Kuba's younger brother was sending considerable sums of money home from France where he was a legionnaire. Kuba said he could not understand why his brother would willingly join a foreign army, but he also expressed envy and jealousy. Kuba had been the 'good' son when he had a job as a miner in Silesia, and would send money to his parents. Now, his brother was favored. More and more, Kuba talked about the challenge of basic training for legionnaires, where only the strongest both physically and mentally succeed. He said they open a bank account for you and put money in it every month which you don't even need to spend because they give you everything you need--food, clothes, and a place to sleep. He contrasted the poor conditions in the Polish military where soldiers are paid only a few dollars a month.

I do not want to minimize the obvious contradictions in Kuba's life choices, but I do want to emphasize some underlying consistencies between his claims and his actions. Ideally, honor entails doing good works for the nation, and even renouncing one's individualism for the good of the group. But ideal honor also involves defending the nation against real adversaries. Kuba seeks adventure, to confront challenges, and to prove himself, as have many Polish freedom fighters and knights. No such opportunities present themselves in the Polish army. If Poland were fighting a war, Kuba would probably have joined the army eagerly. However, during this period of peace, the primary challenge for most Polish families is earning enough to pay basic expenses. Mandatory military service makes it impossible to do a better paying job and, as Kuba found, the work that is available for unskilled workers in Poland does not pay enough to live on anyway. As a foreign soldier, Kuba can help in the honorable task of supporting his parents. In a recent letter to me, Kuba wrote, "I had to emigrate and I have resigned myself to that. I don't think I would want to stay in France, but who knows?"3 All things being equal, Kuba would have remained in Lesko gladly. With the demise of state supported industry, however, he had little chance of making a reasonable living in his native town. Since the nation has regained its sovereignty, he has no opportunity to defend it in battle. Instead, his loyalty to his family remains paramount. In a way, he renounced his individualism for the good of his family, but like the ideal hero, he did so through individual action. He serves in an army he has chosen rather than be forced into mandatory military service he considers useless.

Without a clear outside enemy to fight, young Poles find little opportunity to express classic notions of heroism, nor do they find those ideas especially applicable to their everyday problems. Instead, different priorities emerge, particularly a preoccupation with material well-being. For instance, Staszek (a technical school graduate) observed that instead of modeling themselves after the "knight" as they did in the past, now Poles seek to emulate the "businessman". For the businessman, the motivation for profit supersedes honor. Another student explained that an earlier generation believed in "B?g, honor, ojczyzna", (God, honor, fatherland) but young people now owe nothing to Poland because it does not provide them with the means to satisfy their basic needs. He and his classmates complained that the Catholic Church forces them to believe and the government forces them to serve in the army, but both institutions are mostly interested in maintaining their own political and economic power. Similarly, Wierzbicka (1992) comments on some graffiti that changed the patriotic slogan to "B?g, handel, ojczyzna." As she explains, "handel basically means 'trade', but in everyday Polish it has the negative connotations of undignified profiteering and an absence of ideals" (1992:443). The altered meaning of the expression is striking, and suggests an ironic awareness of the way material concerns have replaced patriotic ones.

Learning to Wait, Learning to Fight

Much of what young Poles know about Polish heroism is based on the patriotic struggles of earlier generations. Many have grandparents who fought to free Poland during World War II; some were killed, and some who survived were deemed 'traitors' by the communist regime and thus arrested or deported. Others have parents who faced arrest and discrimination for their opposition to communism. Such stories shape young Poles' perceptions of the nation, but their lack of first-hand experience of war contributes to their uncertainty about the place of heroism in contemporary Polish society. Nevertheless, extensive discourse about the subject persists in history and literature classes at school. Below, I examine a literature lesson on the patriotic classic Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz. The discussion shows that certain messages about passive resistance, waiting, and freedom remain current today. Because Poland is no longer dominated by a foreign regime, however, classic modes of resistance provide the basis for attacks on the freely elected Polish government.

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is considered one of the greatest Polish Romantic poets. He, together with other Romantic authors, helped to develop an idealized concept of the nation which was distinctly linked to Catholicism and to political sovereignty. He advocated resistance to the foreign occupiers of Poland, and argued that freedom should be preserved as a psychic state within people if it could not be manifested politically. Significantly, Mickiewicz spent most of his life outside of Poland, even though he considered himself a Polish patriot. Born in Lithuania, he never even saw Warsaw or Krakow. He was exiled to Russia for his activity in a secret society, and then in 1829 moved to Western Europe, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He wrote most of his patriotic texts while in exile (as have many Polish literary figures since then). A strong advocate of independence movements for all nations, in his final years he fought for Italian Independence and fought against the Russians in the Crimean War.

I observed a lesson entitled "the portrait of Polish society and its evaluation in scene three, part three of Dziady." at a technical school in Nowa Huta, a workers' district on the outskirts of Krakow (it was built in the 1950's as the ideal city within the communist workers’ state). Throughout the literature lesson, Pani Su?kowska had her students read passages from the play, and then asked questions about the historical context and the symbolic significance of the text. She encouraged students to draw meanings from the play, and relate them to the contemporary situation. Scene three of Dziady takes place when Poland is under control of the Russian czar. First, the class discussed a passage where poor Poles stand by the door, representing their marginality, where they debate what they can and should do about Russian domination. Pani Su?kowska asked, "a romantic drama need not have a sharp connection with what?” and the students responded in unison, “reality.” The discussion of the passage continued; Poland is not free, but direct armed opposition to the czar will lead to death. For the time being the most effective protest against the czar is through poetry because it keeps the goal of freedom alive until armed conflict becomes possible. One student pointed out the messianic nature of the story. When encouraged to explain, he continued that "Poland lives in the land of darkness," but God sees Poles' suffering and will reward them. Also, since God is the highest authority, it is not important for others to know they are heroes.

Kubik (1994) identifies three underlying conceptions of Polish romanticism: the power of words (and hence the poet), the power of human will and emotions which proves to be equal to or greater than reason, and the characterization of Poland as the "Christ of Nations" whose suffering ensures the safety of the rest of Europe. Similarly, the literature lesson emphasized that fighting may take many forms, and that conversation and poetry can be the most effective way to build awareness until an opportunity arises to take more radical action. Further, Pani Su?kowska stressed that romanticism need have nothing to do with reality, but rather may be equated with feelings greater than life and death, or even a kind of ecstatic insanity. For instance, Norwid, the hero of Dziady, is possessed by spirits and sees visions, but this allows him to recognize the value of fighting for the oppressed nation. The play emphasizes the spiritual side of opposition which encourages people to act on the basis of their own convictions; those who do so are promised a reward in the afterlife. Throughout, the ideal of fighting against an enemy that denies the nation its freedom remains the central aspect of Polish heroism.

At the end of the lesson, students were asked to relate Dziady to the present situation in Poland. They discussed a passage which compares the nation to lava--the nation appears cold, hard, and dry on the surface, but a fire burns underneath. Pani Su?kowska encouraged students to reflect on the symbolic significance of the comparison. One student said that though the nation may appear stable on the outside, inside it is hot and ready to burst. Another student explained that the nation is ready to fight when aroused. Pani Su?kowska prompted them, “they [Poles] never agree to…”, and a student finished “niewola (captivity)." When asked to relate the passage to the present, students discussed Poles’ negative orientation towards government due to the lack of stability and political disputes. Pani Su?kowska suggested this means the fire is on the outside now. At the end of the lesson, she asked whether Poles can unite only in tragic situations. No one answered so she herself replied that the situation need not be tragic, though often Poles do not unite unless times get difficult.

Students' interpretations of the present suggest that the play provides no direct model for what should happen when patriotic goals are achieved by the living (as opposed to those whose sacrifices are rewarded in the afterlife). It is like trying to learn about marriage from romances that elaborate the courtship and the first kiss, and end with the proposal. What follows is supposed to be paradise, so no clues are given as to how to make it so. Regarding the present, youths say that Poles expected their lives would get easier and better if communism were replaced. They wanted a higher standard of living like they saw in capitalist countries in the West. Few were prepared for unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, or high prices. As a result, the lava continues to bubble, even after the goal of national autonomy has been attained. Poles are still waiting for liberation in the form of their own economic security. In the meantime, certain patterns associated with periods of waiting persist. Young Poles express reluctance to think about the future. Their long-term goals are only vaguely formulated, and they make little overt effort to achieve them. They prefer to 'wait and see' what opportunities might emerge and enjoy their free time with family and friends. But they are not completely passive; like the poor Poles at the door in Dziady, they stand ready to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves.

Contemporary Anti-heroism

The two cases I have presented so far show the problematic relation between historic models of heroism and the situations young Poles face in post-communist Poland. Nevertheless, certain underlying orientations toward individualism and collective responsibility continue to shape responses to everyday situations. In this final case, I focus on Aneta, a student at a lyceum in Krak?w, who has the attributes of a new kind of leader, only partly modeled after the romantic hero. Although she criticizes traditional models of patriotism, she remains concerned about the nation and anticipates helping to shape the future of Poland. I discuss Aneta's life story in relation to a recent film that captures the disillusionment of the post-communist period. I contrast her aspirations with the mother-hero ideal, and consider her opinion of two contemporary political figures.

In 1993, Aneta was in her third year at one of the most prestigious college preparatory schools in Krak?w. Though a talented student, she tended to downplay academics in favor of animated stories about vacationing with friends in Zakopane, acting in a youth theater, and spending time in cafes while na wagary (cutting school). At seventeen, she had already held a variety of temporary jobs, ranging from selling advertising to tutoring English. While students at her school tended to be well informed about politics, Aneta was actively involved in political campaigns and in school politics. For example, during the parliamentary elections in 1991, and again during the elections in 1993, she and her friends put up campaign posters. Aneta explains, "at first we went there to get some work hanging posters to make some money. Later, when we began to talk with these people we decided to get more involved, and now we are going to conduct surveys [about] how to reach us [young Poles] so that we will really go and vote. It sounds pretty interesting." Though initially motivated by financial gain, Aneta quickly became interested in the campaign and in the particular policies of the Democratic Union (UD) because it seemed the most receptive to the concerns and interests of young people.4 Aneta places great emphasis on what she finds 'interesting'. Her models for behavior include what she likes about Polish culture and what she has learned about the West from her own experiences abroad and with foreigners.

Aneta recommended that I see Psy (Dogs) because it shows the real Poland and Poles after communism, where the police (milicja) of the former system have become the police (policja) of the new democracy without changing their beliefs or corrupt methods, and the former communists have access to resources which makes them rich through capitalism. The characters in Psy find little place for idealism in their world. Instead, the film illustrates the confusion that follows the period of enchantment, when it is no longer so easy to determine right and wrong. Franz Maurer, the 'hero' of the story is a policeman under interrogation for his illegal activities. Nevertheless, he does not come across as a 'bad' man; he has ideals and fights for them, but he is not a hero because he can not remain untouched by the corrupt environment in which he lives. The film illustrates a sentiment felt by many Poles--that everyone was compromised in some way by the former system. Maurer shows no particular loyalty to Poland, but he demonstrates a private loyalty to family and friends. Nevertheless, his friends and family desert him. Aneta told me she liked Psy because it made her feel powerful for being Polish. Though Aneta characterized this film as very Polish, others have criticized the director, W?adys?aw Pasikowski, for making American style films. I see both elements--the violence of American cops and robbers films and the Polish ironic humor of scenes where policemen pass around glasses of vodka at lunch time, complaining about how hard it is to get household repairs done and joking about starting their own businesses. The combination suits Aneta, who also borrows from Western models of teenage life.

Aneta's story illustrates that young Polish females tend to know as much as males do about the Polish heroic ideal. This is confirmed in interviews, where both males and females told me about the ideal of fighting for the fatherland. Nevertheless, the vast majority of heroes in Polish literature and films, including the three I refer to here--Wo?odyjowski, Norwid, and Maurer--are male. In her book on women in the Solidarity movement, Long (1996) describes an alternate model of heroism for females. The female patriot is most often characterized as the transmitter of history and traditional culture, just as the primary role for women in Polish society is that of mother. Thus, matka bohaterska, the mother-hero, teaches children (whether her own or others), acts as provisioner, and engages in passive protest at home. She is regarded as an actor in the private realm, not in the public realm. Long illustrates, for example, that women helped in the strikes at the Gda?sk shipyard by locating food and making sandwiches for the striking workers, who were predominantly men. A notable exception, Anna Walentynowicz, was a welder who played an active role within the shipyard during the strikes. Similarly, Aneta has ambitions to act in the public realm.5

Aneta's view of heroism may be seen in her critique of contemporary political figures Hanna Suchocka and Lech Wa??sa. During a group interview in February 1993, Aneta spoke very highly of UD Prime Minister, Hanna Suchocka:

she has an incredible calmness about her, [you can see it] just by looking at her, the way she reads and presents herself. She is so amazingly in control, she is very well educated...More people like this are necessary, and not people who bring their personal biases to government [such as] what someone told them, or how they like this person or don't like that one, like it is at Belweder6 with Wa??sa...all of that should be approached more objectively, not for oneself but for all of Poland.

Aneta's classmates agreed that Suchocka offers the kind of leadership the country needs--intelligent, in control, honest, and 'objective'. I do not think it is an accident that Aneta looks to a strong female politician as her role model. She told me on several occasions that she wants to ‘do something for the country’ and that ‘the future of Poland is in our [young people’s] hands’ even though she made fun of herself for expressing such idealistic sentiments (especially when she was with her friends). By contrast, she criticized President Wa??sa for overstepping his abilities.

Most young Poles I spoke with shared Aneta’s opinion that Wa??sa had the characteristics that make a good charismatic leader during times of oppression: despite the odds, he remained convinced of the righteousness of his goal and refused to compromise. However, in the context of representative government, he lacked the knowledge, objectivity, and cool head necessary for complex negotiation and compromise. Putting it another way, he had the skills to fight for the fatherland, but not to live for it. As Aneta explained in 1992:

Relations toward the president have changed drastically because in the past (even a year ago ) everyone thought that he had a mission to accomplish, and through that Poland changed...It's just that now he should have enough honor, he should be intelligent enough, to withdraw from it all. Not control anymore.

Criticisms of ?Wa??sa reveal a more general tension between individual and collective responsibility. In this case, the essential feature of honor is placing the collective good over one’s personal gain. Instead, Wa??sa used his popularity to gain power for himself, giving his own fame and wealth priority over the good of the nation. In addition, Wa??sa’s popularity was not strong enough to counteract Pole’s distrust of the state; rather than bringing the legitimacy of Solidarity (which until then was seen to represent the nation) to the office of president, Solidarity and Wa??sa lost legitimacy through their association with the state.

In an interesting development in Aneta's story, during a recent visit to Poland, I learned that she has not pursued her political interests. Instead, she quit university after two years because she got a job putting together video clips for the Polish version of MTV. I think this is an accurate generalization about where Poland's most talented young people are putting their energies. Rather than working to improve

Freedom At Last

In order to understand why nation can inspire such passionate actions, it is essential to examine individuals' emotions, motivations, and personal constructions of meaning. Young Poles associate locality with the people they feel the most emotionally attached--family and friends--and with their most intimate experiences--childhood and love. These attachments comprise a baseline for their life stories. The salience of the nation depends on the extent to which these private attachments are appropriated to represent the larger, more abstract, imagined community. In Poland, the attainment of national sovereignty removes the primary condition that motivated assertions of patriotism. Viewing things in this way helps to explain how Polish youth can reject the idea of the nation (the ideological ojczyzna) as having no meaning for them while still feeling passionate attachment to locality, and even to the country (their private ojczyzna).

A similar transition from romantic idealism to pragmatic disenchantment occurred during the interwar period, when Poland regained its autonomy after 123 years. In Ku?nia M?odych (1932), a periodical written for and by youths (most were wealthier urban elite attending college preparatory schools) one student wrote:
In many articles dealing with the question of contemporary youths, they constantly reproach us, that we look on life with terrifying sobriety, that we lack idealism, that we are too materialistic. The ideal of youths in the previous generation, raised in captivity, was to gain independence for ojczyzna... for this ideal they fought and died. For us, raised in Independent Poland, this problem does not exist. We, raised in a free state, do not understand life in captivity. Speaking Polish, our own government, the freedom to express our thoughts--these are for us our daily bread.

In the post-communist period, Aneta and her colleagues express similar sentiments. They, too, have little reason to think about fighting for the nation.

As much as the valiant freedom fighter remains an ideal, Poles are tired of fighting. Now that the enemy has been defeated, they want to devote their energy to creating a 'normal life' for themselves and their family. The Polish heroic ideal supports a kind of individualism that young Poles are using to make decisions about their lives. Most heroes act alone, motivated by their goals irrespective of the structural restraints around them. These attributes are being applied to pragmatic and economic concerns, even though those who do so risk being accused of self interest. In general, prospects for urban youths are much better than for rural youths because jobs and educational opportunities are more readily available in cities. Those who have difficulty finding opportunities take advantage of another lesson learned from patriotic stories; they wait until a chance presents itself.

Poles concur that freedom is important, but they have a much harder time agreeing what freedom entails. I heard young Poles use the argument "now, there's democracy" and "now, we're free" (teraz jest democracja, teraz jeste?my wolni) to justify everything from smoking at school, to watching porno films, to choosing not to vote. It is here that the reluctance to compromise, one characteristic of standing behind one's ideals regardless of the cost, becomes a problem. Without a black and white world view, the basis for collective effort and agreement becomes difficult to find. Poles continue to resist systemic restrictions, even when they are established by a freely elected Polish state.

To conclude, the study illustrates that official rhetoric does not always reveal popular understandings about key concepts such as nations and heroism. Rather, it is important to see how these messages are received and used. This 'on the ground' perspective reveals a more complex, but a much richer portrait of national identity.

Textnotes

This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Poland from September 1991 to July 1993. I gratefully acknowledge IIE Fulbright and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation for funding my research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in November 1996.
1. The term for fatherland is a feminine noun, and thus demands the feminine pronoun.
2. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in Poland from September 1991 to July 1993. I gratefully acknowledge IIE Fulbright and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation for funding my research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in November 1996.
3. Poprostu musia?em wyjechaÁ z czym si¥ pogodzi?em i niewydaje mi si¥ ?ebym chcia? zostaÁ we Francji--ale kto wie?
4. Unia Demokratyczna was a center-left party composed of many of the intelligentsia active in Solidarity including Jacek KuroÉ, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Adam Michnik.
5. During a recent visit to Krakow, I learned that Aneta has not pursued her political interests. Instead, she quit university after two years because she got a job putting together video clips for the Polish version of MTV.
6. Belweder is the official residence of the president.

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BOOK REVIEW: RESCUE IN ALBANIA:ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF JEWS IN ALBANIA RESCUED FROM HOLOCAUST.
Antonia Young
Bradford University, UK and Colgate University

Rescue in Albania:one hundred percent of Jews in Albania rescued from Holocaust. By Harvey Sarner, Brunswick Press, Cathedral City, California; Co-published by the Frosina Foundation. l997. l06p.

Sarner's hardback book is a revision of his pamphlet The Jews of Albania (Brunswick Press, l992. 44p. plus photographic plates) which he wrote with Joseph Jakoel and Felicita Jakoel.

Both publications give a brief history of Jews in Albania and emphasize their exodus in l99l. The later work concentrates on possible reasons for the exceptional situation of Jews in Albania during the Second World War in that not a single Jew was taken to any of the Nazi concentration camps. This accounts for the extraordinary fact that by War's end there were more Jews in Albania than before, due to an influx of Jews fleeing from other countries - not only surrounding countries, Yugoslavia and Greece, but also from further afield, Germany and Austria for example (p. 32-3). Initially Albania was seen (as, more recently, it has been seen by Asians) as a loophole into other parts of Europe. However, as the Nazi stranglehold over each European country tightened it became harder for Jews in transit through Albania to find another destination.

Sarner discusses the extremely tolerant situation between all religions of pre-War Albania, one which has brought frequent comment and citation of the phrase of the publicist and writer Pashko Vasa (l825-92) "The religion of Albanians is Albanianism". This phrase was also used by Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha to disclaim Albanians' need for any religion and the justification for his proclamation of Albania as the world's first atheist state, implemented l967-90. Hoxha's atheist stance placed people practising any religion as equally culpable. Hence anti-semitism did not exist in Albania.

Central to Sarner's history is Josef Jakoel (l922-9l), spiritual head of the Jewish community in Albania, whose perseverance in his faith managed to prevent the very small Jewish community in Albania from completely losing touch with their roots and with each other although travel even within Albania during the Communist period was extremely limited, and the few Jews were scattered between Tirana, Durres, Vlora and Shkodra.

In l990 it was possible for the first time since the War for Albanians to leave their country even for short periods. By this time Jakoel was too sick to undertake investigations abroad on behalf of Albania's Jewish community. His daughter Felicita was chosen and left for Greece to make contact with the Jewish Agency and continue on to Israel, despite this entailing her visiting a country with no diplomatic relations with Albania. She was able to set in motion the exodus of Albanian Jewry to Israel which came about in l99l when 300 "Jews" left for Israel (some were gentiles married to Jews - a situation which the small isolated Jewish community had come to accept).

A second important theme of Sarner's account is the story of Albania's "Righteous" (those non-Jews identified and honoured by the State of Israel as people who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust). Sarner gives details of some of these people and families (Moslems and Christians) who housed and hid Jews, some for years; he remarks on the extraordinary generosity of those hosts, their refusal to accept recompense and their ungrudging giving even in situations of extreme danger. Not only were Jews offered hospitality by individuals and familiies; the Albanian government also heeded the code of honour for guests and refused to obey the command of the Italian occupies to expel all foreign Jews, and even provided a small stipend for needy refugee families (p. 40). Sarner himself was impressed by the indelability of the Albanian code of honour when interviewing members of a family who each confirmed the importance of a guest's life before their own (p. 50); "there are no foreigners in Albania, there are only guests", he was told (p. 63). The author finds the key to this universal care and protection for the Jews in the roots of Albanian civilization: the priority given to The Guest.

This has also been observed by Dr. Kazuhiko Yamamoto in his research where he likens Albanian reverence for guests to the Japanese Guest God. In both societies honour is at stake should there be any question that any guest, for any length of visit, is not given the very best care and attention. This is also at the root of the Kanun (the set of laws codified by the l5th Century nobleman Lek Dukagjin, and strictly adhered to to this day).

These oral laws were finally written at the turn of the twentieth century. Several sections specify the correct conduct of a host. Article XXXI (b) notes that a woman may be shot in the back for betrayal of hospitality.
Legend also has it (p. 8) that 2,000 years earlier a shipload of Jews destined as Roman slaves, but shipwrecked on Albanian shores received traditional hospitality. These would have been the builders of a synagogue whose remains Sarner claims were found at the ancient Illyrian port of Dardania (p. 9).

Sarner's informative slim volume gives a brief history of Albania, a few current statistics, a short bibliography, a useful map (p. 30) showing the four Albanian vilayets within the Ottoman Empire (until l878) (explaining the strong Albanian links with the Jewish community of Janina), and some interesting photographic illustrations. One can ignore several minor typographical errors, but Sarner cannot claim Miranda Vickers as a Jew by naming her Martha in his bibliography!

REPORT FROM AN OSCE MONITOR FOR THE ALBANIAN ELECTIONS:29TH JUNE, 1997
Antonia Young

First published in Illyria, 9-ll July, l997

Amongst a population (approximately 3.2 illion) in possession of an estimated one million guns, mostly kalashnikovs as well as grenades and other more powerful weapons, I personally feel that it would not have been possible for the June 29 Albanian election to have proceeded without the protection of observers and military security.

The climate of violence leading up to the election could be felt from the moment of arrival in Albania, but our observer team all remarked on how quickly we adjusted to acceptance of the almost continuous sound of gunshots and occasional bombs, often at very close hand, the sight of individual armed guards on rooftops of private property, and gangs of men with guns at the roadside even in Tirana.

Throughout election day our team several times encountered a convoy of four private cars and a red van all filled with heavily armed men who were not welcomed anywhere. There was no way of knowing whether they were, as they apparently claimed, Democratic Party (DP) members doing their own monitoring nor how they carried out this duty, or whether they were local vigilantes or thugs taking control of the area. It was this same gang who we found moving in on a polling station as they closed (after a somewhat tense confrontation, they left); and again later on the main road back to Tirana, stopping cars, but permitting our military convoy to pass.

In most cases the Polling Station Committees (PSC's) were composed of members from at least l0 of the l8 listed parties and worked with remarkable cooperation in their desire to discover the true will of their constituents. It appeared that the intimidation came from outside the constituencies in the form of armed gangs who drove around between polling stations making their presence known by shooting into the air in the vicinity of the stations.
The gratitude of the Committee members for our presence and their uninamous requests for our help and direction in conducting the formalities in the most correct manner, was moving. The greatest concern was always expressed in getting the untampered protocols to the Zone Executive Committees (ZEC's) after their offical local counting, and it was mostly at the ZEC's that gross irregularities were observed, confirming the fears of the PSC Committees. Our mandate was only to observe, so our assistance could only go as far as reminding enquirers that they all had official manuals in which were written the exact rules, or asking to see signatures.

As observers (from 32 countries) we were given extremely high security protection by the 7,000 multi-national forces.    My group was graciously hosted in an Italian military camp south of Lushnje. We had excellent food accompanied by wine and beer with meals; the Colonel gave up his private bathroom for us women.   To reach the camp involved a 4-hour drive in convoy in military vehicles. We drove through apparently deserted towns with empty sidewalks and cafes; in fact the fearful populations were holed up in their homes and armed in self-defence.   They made any necessary trading brief and early in the morning.   In a nearby deserted town two burnt-out tanks stood in the main square beside a ruined 4-storey building; 5 police had died in a shoot-out two days prior to our arrival.   In this Socialist stronghold, it was supposed that the aggressors had been DP supporters.
At the military camp we were met by Long Term Observers who had already surveyed as many as possible of the l52 PSC's in the immediate areas in order to assess the best way to cover the stations on election day.   With a strong Italian military escort we started election day at 4.45am in order to observe the opening of a number of PSC's.   Most had not received their ballot papers (printed in Italy) until the morning of the election, although they were due to open at 7am.

The general unfamiliarity with the fairly complicated materials, including two separate ballot papers per voter (one for the parliamentary election, the other for the monarchy referendum), caused delay in opening at many stations.   Voters took advantage of the protection of the military covering our visits, to get to the polls.   No tally was kept on the gender of voter attendance, though it was clearly predominantly male.   At most PSC's I visited, the Committees were made up entirely of men, however, three that I visited each had one woman member.

It was generally agreed that in the circumstances the efforts of the Committees at the over 4,000 polling stations were truly remarkable in their diligence especially as they were faced with very real fears of violent intimidation.
Of the many minor irregularities our team observed at the PSC's, most were considered to be due to inexperience, lack of proper prior instruction and general inefficiency under extremely difficult conditions. For example one polling booth was placed in a toilet cubicle for lack of other privacy, while another station managed with no form of voting booth. Yet another was placed in a maternity ward, but many of the women were unable to leave their beds and it was not permitted to take the ballots to the bedridden voters. Prisoners were deprived of a vote, as was anyone outside the country (thus excluding the thousands of Albanians who have only recently emigrated unless they were able to return to their place of origin at least 24 hours prior to voting). Furthermore the guides and drivers of the OSCE monitors were also deprived of their votes as they were out of their own areas.

On arrival at our first PSC to observe the opening, we found the Chairman (DP) clinging to all the ballot papers and voters' lists, hurrying away from the allocated polling venue. He had taken a personal decision to move the PSC to another building nearby in the interests of safety (it had no windows whereas he feared that the allocated building with windows was more vulnerable). A heated arguent ensued as other members of the Committee forcibly grabbed back the ballot papers. After this violent encounter the Chairman left in fury, taking with him the voters' lists. Fortunately another copy was available and the rest of the Committee set up the PSC without, however, the mandatory signature of the Chairman. On return to the same PSC to observe the counting in the evening, we learned that it had been announced on national radio that the Chairman had been killed (a report, we were assured, that was not true). We were unable to follow up on the story as we were radioed out of the village by our Italian military escort who saw the need to get us all out hastily before nightfall. At this crucial moment we discovered a flat tyre which was speedily mended as tension rose amongst the gathering crowd around us.

Antonia Young is Research Associate at Colgate University and was an observer for IFES/OSCE (International Foundation for Election Systems/Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe)

BOOK REVIEW: THREE ALBANIAN SHORT STORIES FROM WRITING FROM THE EMPIRE BEHIND THE WALL, EDITED BY MICHAEL MARCH
Lucy Young
Manchester University, UK

Allegory and inference: The Soviet legacy in Albanian literature: Ismail Kadare, "The concert"; Mimoza Ahmeti, "The secret of my youth"; Teodor Laço, "The pain of a distant writer"

These three short stories from an anthology of many previously untranslated works by authors from "the empire behind the wall", a term used by the Czech author Ivan Klima whose introduction explains the bitter-sweet atmosphere of Soviet censorship which overshadowed writers of the Soviet period and still continues to affect writers of the former Eastern block even today.

Klima was one of the writers in the Stalin years familiar with the terror of interrogation and charges of anti-statism. Even long after Stalin's death, when the threat of execution was no longer so terrifying a force, many writers knew their works were condemned to remain forever unpublished in their own countries. And so some relinquished the truth for that version of it requested by the state and accepted "the falsifying of history" (Klima, xxii), while others were forced to leave their countries and live in self-imposed exile. Those who stayed saw "the awarding of privileges

to the capable while the able and talented were rejected (Klima xxii). But for still other writers the challenge created by the imposition of laws of state propaganda became a creative force, through which they learned to disguise politycal critique within literature either in ironic, sardonic or allegorical form. In Klima's words "I have often thought that what the empire deprived us of in freedom, it returned to us in the form of experience ... deep experiences do not make a great writer, but I am convinced that great literature seldom arises without it" (xxiv).
And so that legacy continued in Eastern Europe, beyond the crumbling of the Empire, and that literature still contains the creative imagery and multi-textual allegorical references from which the unwritten meaning can be inferred gradually by peeling away the text layer by layer. This is a rich literary tradition with those subtle subtextual references so familiar to readers of works written under the Soviet regime. As though testament to a terrifying past in which speaking the truth could get you killed, often the message is left unwritten, for the reader to infer.
These three Albanian pieces complement each other in that they contain the full spectrum of that Soviet literary legacy, from the subtextual inferences of "pain of a distant writer" to the bafflingly allegorical "the secret of my youth" to the mockingly ironic "the concert".

In "The concert", Kadare ridicules Communist propagandization of the arts. Set in Maoist China, this is an "anti-love story" with the explicit suggestion that Albania be chosen as the model country in which to begin the total elimination of love from society. The idea is proposed by Mao's wife who blames the onset of old age for the loss of love in the aging couple's relationship. Unable to face this as a personal problem, she decides to inflict the same suffering on society by instigating the liquidation of love in society and chooses Albania as the ideal place to begin. The story opens with Mao taking great delight in reading letters from writers deported to the "water and mud" for "re-education", thanking him for "delivering us from the demon of writing" (257). Having successfully brought about liquidation of the arts, Kadare's Mao is keen for the total control of society. In keeping with his political views, Mao's wife's plan to abolish love also provides an excuse for his growing hatred of her. The irony of the ridiculous suggestion to implement a plan to liquidate love is juxtaposed against the actual implementation of laws which eliminate the arts, in the light of which, the frightening possibility becomes less unimaginable. The almost explicit suggestion is a warning that Albania, as the only one of the Eastern bloc countries to maintain links with Maoist China, is the most likely to fall victim to those aspects of the cultural revolution which would force it to lose touch with the romantic elements of society altogether. The use of irony lends the story an element of urgency: imploring Albania to reawaken its romantic past, and outrage: ridiculing those forces who ever imagined they could take it away. "The secret of my youth" is a sad tale of unrequited, unrequitable love and mysogyny. A man develops an obsession with a young woman named "eye", so named because of the beauty and intensity of her eyes. He eventually marries her and is overjoyed, and although she behaves perfectly as a "good wife", he gradually becomes increasingly agitated with her that his reflection does not "fill" her eyes. He is aware that she is not totally fulfilled by him and this awareness of his own shortcomings frustrates him and he begins to torment her, yet she continues to put up with him. Gradually his frustration turns to anger and he begins to insult her. Finally he loses his temper and grabs her, screaming that her eyes were ugly and he didn't want to see her any more.

When she finally leaves, he sees his own stupidity reflected in her eyes and they become beautiful again, but of course it is too late. The insecurities of the narrator are evident in his behaviour. The true source of his frustration is the knowledge of his own impotence in the face of the unnatainabiltiy of his captor in her unspoken refusal of fulfillment.

The story which at first appears to be a kind of "old woman in the vinegar bottle" tale of a husband's selfishness and greed, juxtaposed against the martyrdom of the wife, at closer reading becomes a more complex dilemma, an allegory of Albania's struggle to fulfill its true potential while Albania, forced to become nothing more that the reflection of an imposing order, with little opportunity to fulfil individual potential. Ahmeti is however, hopeful. Just as "eye" finally frees herself of her tormentor, so too can Albania (p. 266).

Ahmeti's underlying voice one is of encouragement to those who are disillusioned with the past and despondent about the future. The notion that Albania's economic and political problems can be surmounted, if people strive for perfection and learn from past mistakes is contained within the narrator's final realizations: "to attain the impossible ... to attain total bliss ... this is the secret of my youth. One more reason for living" (p. 26.)
Laço's succinct but heartfelt anecdotal tale "The pain of distant winter" is reminiscent of Chekhov in its simple realism, where hidden beneath its surface lies a much deeper, human anguish.

The story leaves the reader with a deep sensation of non-fulfillment, the retrospective yearning for a path not taken. The narrator of this tale of melancholy and regret is a lonely ageing writer whose creativity is gradually being drained away by the guilt which is eating at his conscience. The main part of the story is told from the perspective of a small boy, relating an anecdote in the narrator's childhood which he has finally come to see as the source of his guilt. He tells of a life-threatening moment when a bear approaches the boy and his mother in the forest. But it is only in retrospect that his mother had been willing to die to save his life. The straightforward narration of the tale by the writer as a young boy gives all the more poignance to the guilt of estrangement from his mother which the narrator experiences only after her death. His arduous annual journeys to her grave represent his fruitless efforts to change the past.

The three stories are united most strongly by these common themes - regret and guilt for past mistakes. The longing for a second chance, the lessons of history and the despondancy of nonfulfillment, the anger of individual impotence and the anguish of a lost past rendering an unattainable future, are the themes which run through the works of these authors who are both products of and voices of the fate of Albania. And thus these three very different yet inter-connected tales, each one involving the strongest male-female bonds: mother and son, husband and wife, can collectively can be seen as tales of human conscience, bound in the historical struggle of the Albanian people.