Children of the Gulag

By Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky

(Yale University Press, 496 pp., $55)

Several years ago, a friend who helped me to find my way around the Russian State Archives in Moscow asked if I would like to meet another woman who was also working there. She was not doing research for a book, and she was not a scholar. Instead, she was indulging her curiosity and her nostalgia. Forty years earlier, she had worked as a baby nurse in a children’s home inside one of Stalin’s labor camps. Now she wanted to find out what had happened to some of the people she had known there, to jog her memory of names and dates.

A meeting was arranged, and we talked for perhaps an hour—without a tape recorder, because she wanted to remain anonymous. In the course of the conversation it became clear that she had in fact sought me out. Our mutual acquaintance had told her that I was an American writing about the Gulag, and she wanted to make a few things clear. Most of all, she wanted to impress upon me how clean and orderly had been the children’s home, and to tell me how happy the children had been within its walls. She also wanted me to know that these children’s mothers were criminals who were all too happy to abandon them, that the nurses and caretakers had saved them from a terrible fate. She had even brought a photograph, which she gave to me.

The picture showed a group of children standing around a holiday tree, with neatly dressed caretakers in the background. I looked at the picture, and agreed that yes, the children were not starving, and yes, the caretakers did look professional in their white uniforms. But there was a problem with the photograph: all of the children in it were dressed alike. All of them had shaved heads. They were not smiling. And thus the effect of the photograph on me was precisely the opposite of what the former nurse had intended. The children looked exactly like little prisoners—which, in fact, is what they were. Their nursery lay within the perimeter of the zona, the prison zone, and would have been surrounded by mud and barbed wire.

Yet the former Gulag nurse was unwilling, or unable, to see the horror of this. I looked at the picture and saw sad children, growing up in a terrible place. She looked at the picture and saw the greatness of the Soviet state, which took care even of the children of criminals.

Of all the odd things about the Soviet Union, perhaps the oddest was the way in which official propaganda—which told people what the world was supposed to look like—so often triumphed over everyday experience, which revealed that things were different. In this case, by “official propaganda” I do not mean the vague fibbing that goes on during the election seasons of mature democracies. Soviet propaganda was blared from radios and televisions, posted on walls, printed in newspapers, repeated at party and Komsomol meetings. It was constant, it was repetitive, it was specific. During Stalin’s lifetime, it could be very dangerous to contradict any of it in public, and many people were afraid to do so in private as well. Yet some people believed it, or wanted to believe it, or reckoned it was a good idea to believe in it. And thus it was not ineffective.

When the propagandists said that Soviet citizens were becoming ever richer and better fed, many people were inclined to think that this could be true, even though they themselves lived poorly and badly. When the propagandists said that factories were booming and the harvest was successful, some people accepted this too, even though industrial products were unavailable and bread was rationed. And when the propagandists said that all Soviet citizens should thank Comrade Stalin for their happy Soviet childhood, many could not refuse this either. Even if they knew from personal experience that not all Soviet childhoods were happy, they could imagine that some really had been.

This strange relationship between real life and official fiction is one of the central subjects of Children of the Gulag, a significant and sickening book, which contains several different kinds of documentary evidence, as well as commentary. Much of the archival material here was published in Russian, in a volume (Deti Gulaga 1918-1956: Dokumenty) edited by Semyon Vilensky, one of this book’s co-authors. For that volume and this one, Vilensky also supplied some memoir material from the private archive of Vozvrashchenie (“Return”), an organization which he founded, and which is dedicated to the preservation of the memory of Stalin’s victims. Cathy Frierson, the other coauthor, has added some new material—notably interviews with survivors and with the children of survivors. This combination of sources allows Vilensky and Frierson to show the stark contrasts between official policies toward Soviet children and their actual experiences.

The book’s scope is broad: the word “Gulag” in the title is here used as a general term for the Soviet experience, and Children of the Gulag is really a history of Soviet policy toward children. As a result, Frierson and Vilensky touch upon an ambitiously wide range of subjects: children of political prisoners, children of collectivized peasants, children of deportees, as well as children living and working in labor camps. They also describe many different eras—not only the Stalinist period but also the revolution, World War II, and the post-Stalinist period.

They keep returning to the stark contrast between public image and private reality, which was a fact of Soviet life from the very beginning. One of the first public discussions of child policy in the Soviet Union was launched in 1924 by Nadezhda Krupskaia, the widow of Lenin, who made a public appeal on behalf of homeless children. As a result, more than 650,000 people joined the “Friends of Children Society,” a charity dedicated to that cause, and Krupskaia became its public face. At that time, there were thought to be some 80,000 children living on the streets of Moscow. More than 200,000 children were living in various kinds of orphanages. All of them had lost their parents to revolution, civil war, terror, and famine, and the conditions in which they lived were often horrific.

Yet even as she appealed for more resources, Krupskaia was defensive. She was not a critic of Soviet orphanages. On the contrary, her instinct was to praise them—not because they were good or clean, but because they were Soviet. While not denying that some of them were lacking in basic facilities, she declared that “our children’s homes are under public supervision, [and] this alone protects them from a series of pedagogical errors.” Talking to a foreign journalist, she also made excuses: “We are building socialism … and as long as we are building socialism but have not yet built it, we will also have homeless children.” She even went so far as to denounce a phrase then in wide use. Soviet orphanages, she said, were not “angel factories,” or places where children went to die. This phrase had been used in the czarist era as a description of foundling homes for poor children, but it was not appropriate any longer, now that the foundling homes had been nationalized. “We have no angel factories,” she stated categorically.

Krupskaia never retracted those words. But over the subsequent decade, she and other Soviet officials received hundreds of letters testifying to the horrors of childhood within the orphanages and outside of them. Several of those letters are reprinted here. In 1925, a political prisoner wrote to her on behalf of “my little daughter Ia, the youngest inhabitant of the Chelyabinsk isolator,” asking for two pairs of tights and some oatmeal. In 1926, the inhabitants of an orphanage in the village of Moika also penned a letter, describing their living conditions as “very bad”:

We have meat rarely, and then only a little bit. The bread is rye, we haven’t seen sugar for three months. The little ones can’t hold out, they gather potato peels and eat them. Sometimes, because there’s no produce, we boil porridge, it’s something like pig slop…. Children wear the same underwear for months, and sometimes even longer, without taking them off, because they have nothing to change into. They heat up the bathhouse two times a month, and even then children wash without soap, so that children are getting parasites. There is no bed linen, there are mattresses but not cleaned for a year, the blankets are in shreds, teeming with lice.

Not only was this a typical description of a Soviet orphanage, it was one that could have been written at any time in the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s. In 1934, for example, children from a colony near Moscow were still eating only 600 grams of bread per day, and still washing and changing their clothes only once a month. “We ask you,” they wrote to Krupskaia (calling her “our dear mamasha”), to “help us in our bad life.” In that same year, another group of children wrote to Krupskaia and asked her to organize the dismissal of their orphanage director, who “beats children for the slightest act.”

Not all of the requests were on paper. One woman approached Krupskaia at an official reception and told her that the arrests of her daughter and her son-in-law had left two small children without parents. Krupskaia told her that she could not do anything about the daughter, but would happily try to find a place for the woman’s grandchildren in an orphanage. “Give up your own children to an orphanage,” the woman snapped. This was a harsh insult, since Krupskaia famously had no children of her own. The grandchildren in question experienced no repercussions. But neither did Krupskaia, the self-designated defender of children, ever help them.

The story of that particular family is unusually well documented, largely because the arrested mother, Olga Zakgeim-Sliozberg, was also a talented memoirist. Her book, My Journey, first appeared in the underground press in the 1970s. Parts were published in English in another collection, called Till My Tale Is Told, edited by Vilensky using the author’s pen name, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg. For this book, Frierson tracked down Zakgeim’s children and interviewed them, making it now possible to tell that family’s story from several perspectives. The children describe what they experienced when their parents disappeared (unknown to them, their father was executed soon afterwards); and Zakgeim herself writes eloquently about the emotions of arrested mothers. In one particularly horrific scene, she describes what happened when a new prisoner entered her prison cell. The woman was wearing a low-cut, flimsy pink dress and had a flower in her hair; she had been taken directly from a party, and she kept calling out the name of her young son:

She rattled on, cried, and incessantly screamed: “My Levochka, Levochka!”…

Suddenly, in one corner, a woman became hysterical, wailing, “My Yura, my Yura!”

And it spread:

“My Irochka!”

“My Mishenka!”

Half the cell had become hysterical. I covered my head with a shawl and experienced an overwhelming desire to cry out too, “My Shurik, my Ellochka!” But I bit my hand until it bled, covered my ears and closed my eyes.

The Zakgeim family story illustrates also another theme central to Frierson and Vilensky’s work: the manner in which the Soviet state came to treat whole families as “enemies.” Once again, official policy on this subject was perfectly clear. In 1935, Stalin declared that “a son should not answer for his father,” and this phrase was often repeated by party and Komsomol leaders. In practice, however, Stalin treated the designation “enemy of the people” like a genetic disease: if one family member was “guilty,” then others would be as well—and of course children would inherit the same suspicious genes. It often happened that husbands, wives, and children were arrested at the same time—sometimes to be followed later by brothers and sisters and cousins. In the late 1930s, special camps were set up for wives of Enemies of the People. In the 1940s, Polish and Baltic families were deported and forcibly resettled in villages—fathers, mothers, grandparents, and grandchildren all together.

But if children were guilty, then it followed that some of them must be imprisoned. That is why, alongside the hundreds of thousands of children in Soviet orphanages, there were also children living in actual labor camps—not the metaphorical Gulag of this book’s title, but the literal one. They lived behind barbed wire, served out sentences, and worked as forced laborers. In 1944, Lavrenti Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police, proudly informed Stalin that the Gulag’s juvenile camps had contributed impressively to the war effort, among other things producing mines and grenades.

Not all of the children in the camps had themselves received sentences. Some arrived as infants, along with their mothers, like the woman who wrote to Krupskaia begging for two pairs of tights. A number of memoirists describe the horror of finding themselves inside a cell with a nursing mother—though it was even more horrible to be in a cell with a nursing mother who had been separated from her infant during arrest. And many children arrived in the camps because they were born there—living proof that the strict rules prohibiting contact between male and female prisoners (and between female prisoners and guards) were not observed.

Unwanted though they might have been, the children’s presence was officially acknowledged, and the Gulag’s central bureaucracy at different times sent various instructions to camp commanders designed to ensure that they “grow up and develop normally,” some of which Frierson and Vilensky have included. According to one particularly chilling directive, “toys which are not spoiled by washing and boiling, made of rubber, celluloid and bone, shall be permitted.” According to another, breastfeeding “shall take place for 20-30 minutes according to a schedule set by the nursery doctor. At these times, the wardens shall bring the imprisoned mothers from their cells to the nursery.” Anyone who has ever cared for an infant will know just how difficult such a “schedule” would have been to keep, and will not be surprised to learn that under those circumstances children died of starvation and neglect, even before they were sent away from their mothers. Krupskaia may not have liked the expression “angel factories” to describe Soviet orphanages, but the term is entirely appropriate to many nurseries within the camps.

But there were also children and teenagers who found themselves in the special juvenile labor camps, or even in adult camps and prisons, because they had themselves been arrested. These were often Krupskaia’s orphans, who had grown up to become pickpockets and thieves. Solzhenitsyn describes them as totally amoral, having “no concept of good and evil,” and other memoirists write about them with equal horror. In the juvenile camps, they formed gangs and sometimes beat up the staff. In the adult camps, they often served as mascots and errand boys for the older criminals.

Others were, to put it simply, political prisoners. Frierson and Vilensky document the extraordinary case of fifteen-year-old Vladimir Moroz, who entered an orphanage after the arrests of his parents and elder brother in 1937. Moroz himself was arrested in 1938. His crime was keeping a diary, and daring to put his feelings into words. He wrote with loathing and disgust of the orphanage, and he mourned the tragic arrest of his parents. He also insulted the Soviet leadership, describing them as “a small heap of satiated, fattened people” running a state “90 percent of whose population are miserable people.” In response, his investigators angrily accused him of having “carried out counterrevolutionary activity among the wards of the orphanage” and of having “slandered the leaders of the Bolshevik Communist Party and of the Soviet government, in particular Comrade Stalin.”

Even then, this fifteen-year-old could not prevent himself from writing what he believed to be true. Following his arrest, he wrote a letter to Stalin, in which, among other things, he quoted the founder of the Bolsheviks: “Lenin said, ‘In the Soviet nation there should not be any unfortunate children. Let there be young happy citizens.’ But am I happy? No.” For voicing these kinds of opinions, Moroz was condemned to a labor camp, despite being underage. He died there soon afterwards. His story contains its own moral: Moroz had dared proclaim that official propaganda was not reality, and that all Soviet childhoods were not happy. He paid the ultimate price.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate, and the author of Gulag: A History (Doubleday).

Molotov’s Magic Lantern

By Rachel Polonsky

Faber, 416 pp.

Above all, it is the inhuman scale of things which impresses the visitor to Moscow: the vastness of Red Square, the width of the uncrossable streets, the implacability of the traffic. The city’s history seems equally inhuman, haunted as it is by centuries of tyrants, millions of political prisoners, countless wars. Impossible to navigate and impossible to know, Moscow doesn’t exactly embrace the casual tourist.

But Rachel Polonsky was not a casual tourist. A scholar of Russian literature who lived in Moscow for a decade, she knew better than to start looking for the essence of the city in Red Square. Instead, she began on a single street, inside a single flat.

The street was her own: Romanov Lane. The flat was inhabited by her upstairs neighbour, an expat banker with a Texas drawl. But in a previous era it had belonged to Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s greyest and most loyal henchman. Molotov’s daughter had rented it to the Texan banker and — no doubt certain that he would never touch them — she left her father’s carpets, books and magic lantern inside. ‘You’re the scholar, you’ll know what to make of it all,’ said the banker, and handed Polonsky the key.

Instinctively keeping silent, Polonsky crept up the stairs (the concièrge had recently told the nannies tending foreign children in the courtyard that ‘This house is listened to. It always has been, and always will be’). Once inside, she found Dante, Edgar Allan Poe, Pushkin and The Theory of Historical Materialism. Also a special Russian edition of Churchill’s History of the Second World War — translated solely for the benefit of the party elite — with the passages on Molotov underlined by Molotov himself. He was, Churchill had written,

fitted to be the agent and instrument of the policy of an incalculable machine … I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.

From the flat, Polonsky branched out further: to Romanov Lane, with its roots in 19th-century Russia; to Lutsino, one of the dacha enclaves near Moscow; to the Siberian city of Irkutsk, a traditional place of political exile. And everywhere she went, she brought a metaphorical rucksack filled with books. Dostoevsky accompanies her to Staraya Russa, a once-fashionable spa town. The writings of Likhachev, a Russian literary scholar and political prisoner, echo in her head when she visits Arkhangelsk in the far north.

Though it doesn’t call itself that, Molotov’s Magic Lantern is a travel book, and it shares the flaws and virtues of that genre. As this is neither history nor journalism, Polonsky can switch from historical anecdote to literary analysis to description. Her deep knowledge and enthusiasm are evident, but the result is sometimes hard to follow, and things get left out. At one point Polonsky writes entertainingly about Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzina, who allegedly reacted to the news of Hitler’s invasion of Russia by calling for her hairdresser. Some 40 pages later, Polonsky mentions Zhemchuzina’s 1948 arrest, almost as an aside. This struck me as odd. Molotov’s wife spent several years in the Gulag while her husband, then the second most important person in the country, could do nothing to help her. Doesn’t that tell us rather a lot about his character, and the nature of his political system?

I would have liked a clearer narrative and some footnotes too, but perhaps that is pedantic of me. After all, this book is not designed to describe the Soviet political system or Molotov’s character. The purpose is to investigate the relationship between books and places, between history and the present. Even if Polonsky sometimes moves too rapidly for my taste between Soviet poets, 19th-century architecture and the experience of a Russian steambath, I do see why she is doing so. Her intention is to describe the strange way in which so many aspects of the Soviet past still hang over modern Russia — to explain why certain Moscow street corners make one’s spine tingle — and this requires many different kinds of information.

Knowing the history of a place always makes it look and feel different, and it is this knowledge Polonsky wants to convey. In her epilogue, she revisits Molotov’s apartment after the banker has moved out and the flat has been sold to a wealthy Russian. The books are gone, the magic lantern has been removed, and the window ledge of Molotov’s study — the room where he might once have read letters from his wife in a labour camp, or accounts of the political executions he had ordered — is now covered with photographs in wood and silver frames. Polonsky dutifully admires the new furniture, and her hostess is pleased:

“My neighbour caught me looking at a picture of her, captured in a shining moment of absolute glamour, arm in arm at a party with the Italian designer Miuccia Prada. ‘Shoes!’ she said, breaking into English. ”

For those who know what Polonsky knows about that place and its history, nothing more needs to be said.

Of course a few fringe Web sites might make that claim, and the odd politician might voice it. But the Russian and Polish governments, the Russian and Polish media, and the vast majority of Russians and Poles believe the culprits to be pilot error and fog. More to the point, discussion of these potential causes has been open and frank. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, immediately flew to the crash site, accompanied by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Polish forensic investigators were on the ground within hours. The Russian government is offering assistance and waiving visa requirements for all families who want to travel to Russia. There are television cameras everywhere. Russian airport officials have been speaking in public, answering questions, talking to journalists.

To the Western reader, none of this will seem unusual: Those kinds of things are expected after plane crashes, especially those involving prominent public officials. But in this part of the world — and especially in this particular piece of haunted forest — the open discussion of a tragedy represents a revolutionary change. The woods around Smolensk are filled with unmarked graves. They contain not only the bodies of the Polish officers, murdered at Katyn and other sites nearby, but possibly also victims of Stalin’s purges, partisans and rebellious peasants. Nobody knows for certain. For decades, the history of these grave sites has been concealed, denied or deliberately manipulated for political purposes. At times, Western leaders went along with these lies, too: Although they knew the truth, British and American judges allowed the Soviet Union to falsely list the Katyn massacre among the crimes of Hitler at the Nuremberg trials.

In this part of the world, the sudden death of a politician has often sparked conspiracy theories, too. Poland’s wartime leader, Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, also perished in a plane crash. His death in Gibraltar, in 1943, removed Poland’s most trusted and competent leader at a crucial moment, easing the way for the Soviet takeover of the country. The lack of a proper investigation at the time and the sinister course of subsequent events mean that, rightly or wrongly, an air of mystery hangs over the incident even now.

If they were just bones of contention for cranks and historians, these secrets and distortions might not matter. But they are more than that. For half a century, the failure to tell the truth about Katyn created a profound lack of trust between Poland and Russia, one that continues to hamper political, economic and cultural ties between the neighboring countries even today. The ongoing distortions of Russian history have helped create a climate of public apathy and cynicism in Russia, too. The official lack of frankness in the past and about the past helps explain, for example, why so many Russians doubt that that their government has told them the truth about the terrorist attacks that periodically shatter the peace. Indeed, Russian officials are showing more transparency in the wake of this tragedy than they have shown after some of their own.

And yet there is no law that says the past has to strangle the present: Countries can change, political cultures can grow more open, politicians can learn not to shroud difficult events in mystery and deceit. Over the past 20 years, both Russian and Polish officials have begun to acquire the art of speaking with the public, even if they don’t always choose to do so. This is a real change, and we have seen over the past few days what kind of impact it can have.

Although there is not much to be grateful for this week, I am thankful, at least, that the families of the dedicated public servants who died on that plane will not have to wait 70 years to learn what really happened. This terrible disaster, in that strange and bloody forest, contains eerie echoes of the past. But it is not destined to become yet another “blank spot” in this region’s dark history.

In Central Europe, the outstanding example of this phenomenon is the discussion of the Katyn massacre, the memory of which continues to shape the relationship between Poland and Russia. At issue is an event that took place 70 years ago: the Soviet Union’s murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940. The officers had been captured by the Red Army, which invaded eastern Poland in 1939 just after Nazi Germany invaded from the West. Soviet secret police murdered them on the direct order of Joseph Stalin. Later, Stalin switched sides, joining the Allies against Hitler, and he blamed the Germans for the officers’ murder. That lie remained part of official Soviet and Polish communist history until communism collapsed and the Soviet Union fell apart. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet communist leader, took responsibility for the murders. In 1991, the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, published the archival documentation.

Seventy years is a long time: The grandchildren of the officers who died at Katyn are now middle-aged and elderly. Yet only last month, a Russian magazine sued a Polish magazine for “extremism” and “anti-Russian sentiments” because, among other things, it had published historically accurate articles about Katyn. A couple of years ago, a Russian archivist told me that some members of parliament had been pressing him to work on the story, too: They wanted him to prove that the Germans had committed the murders and that Yeltsin had faked those archival documents to curry favor with the West.

In fact, “Katyn denial” has become, among certain Russian politicians and journalists, a vehicle for expressing anger at Poland’s wholehearted embrace of Western institutions and of Western-style democracy — and this is how Poles understand it, too. In 2007, a Russian government-owned newspaper printed a nasty review of a Polish movie about the massacres — “Katyn,” by Andrzej Wajda — and Russian cinemas subsequently refused to show the film. Rightly or wrongly, Poles interpreted these decisions as proof that Russia still harbors imperial designs on its neighbors. This is not, in other words, an argument about history but, rather, an argument about contemporary politics, conducted in the form of a historical debate.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why the broadcast of that film on Russian state television last Friday was so surprising. There is wide consensus that “Katyn” could not have been shown without the personal approval of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. And the timing was not accidental: On Tuesday Putin will attend the 70th anniversary commemoration ceremony in the Katyn forest, along with his Polish counterpart. Putin is the first Russian leader ever to attend such an event, and this is the first time such a ceremony has had any official Russian patronage. Afterward, the two prime ministers will meet with the wonderfully named “Polish-Russian Committee on Difficult Matters” to discuss archives, monuments and history more generally.

Why is this happening now? Putin hasn’t shown any previous inclination to dwell on Soviet atrocities — on the contrary, his official policy has been to play them down. His government has sponsored history textbooks describing Stalin as “the most successful Soviet leader ever,” and he has brought Soviet flags and songs back into Russian public life. He also has a lot on his plate at the moment. Surely last week’s terrorist attacks in Moscow, Russia’s economic troubles and the rumblings of popular protest across the country take precedence over the commemoration of a crime committed seven decades ago — unless, of course, these accumulating difficulties are themselves the explanation for the change of heart.

Perhaps Putin, having more difficult issues to worry about, has tired of this ancient quarrel. Perhaps he wants something — oil and gas concessions — from the Polish government. Or perhaps the Russian elite has finally worked out that their country cannot be modernized if Russia’s citizens maintain a Stalinist mentality and a Stalinist interpretation of history. If that is the case, then this will be the first of many such ghosts that will need to be laid to rest. But maybe, just maybe, a different Russian foreign policy would follow.

That was it: My first, last, and only meeting with the sort of person who spends his days dressing celebrities. By the time it took place, it was already clear that my husband would not, in fact, be his party’s candidate for the presidency of Poland. (He’s called Radoslaw Sikorski, he’s still the Polish foreign minister, and he conceded on Saturday.) This meant that I would not, in fact, be the candidate for the first lady of Poland. Which was just as well, really: I didn’t like the pink jacket the stylist picked out for me, and I never wore it.

Blissfully, it was a very short primary, only five weeks. But it was long enough to give me just the barest whiff of what genuine hell presidents’ wives must endure in countries where elections last for years. It was also an interesting lesson in how wrongly we perceive the wife-of-the-candidate experience. Perhaps it sounds surprising, but listening attentively on the side of the stage while your husband speaks is probably the least difficult aspect of the whole thing: He talks, you smile, everyone cheers. How hard is that?

Much harder is the business of actually talking yourself. I’d never done anything like it before: Nobody cares very much about the Polish foreign minister’s wife, and rightly so. But as soon as my husband became a presidential candidate, the emotional chemistry abruptly changed. Even in Poland, where the president is far less powerful than the prime minister, people have a deeper and more atavistic relationship with the person who is a serious contender to become head of state. They want their national leader— the tribal chief—to look like them, to live like them, to reflect their values. They want his wife to do all of that too—especially if she is, like me, a foreigner. There is no neutral way to deal with this: If you say nothing you are “unhelpful,” if you give no interviews (my initial instinct) it means you don’t really speak Polish, or perhaps you have something to hide.

And when you talk, you are expected to talk about yourself. As it turned out, I wasn’t very good at this. Ask me about, say, the energy policies of the European Union or the significance of the Ukrainian election and I can talk all day. But ask me “why I fell in love with my husband” and I am utterly tongue-tied. What is the correct answer? Isn’t the truth—”I don’t remember, really, it’s all rather a blur” —too vague for breakfast television?

Somewhat too late, I worked out that it’s not what you say that matters, it is how you say it: Complexity, like ambiguity, sounds bad on camera. Additional details—such as “at the time of our first meeting he was with his girlfriend, whom I rather liked”—tend to spoil the story. I don’t mean that you have to lie; on the contrary, that would be fatal. But in order to sound “natural” you have to be very well prepared, perhaps with a brief but clever story about how you met. The Obamas have one involving ice cream. I was able to achieve this “naturalness” only with practice and heavy editing.

It isn’t enough just to say nice things, either: Michelle Obama has raised the bar further, and now political wives are expected to observe that the husband also has a few “faults,” such as leaving wet towels on the floor. Not wanting to sound like a Stepford wife, Samantha Cameron, wife of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron, recently declared that she had to be “quite firm about him not fiddling with his phone and his BlackBerry too much.” Ah yes, so he works too hard, does he? I really admired that one.

Even harder than talking, however, is the whole business of the news cycle. Before the campaign, my husband was the most popular politician in the country. According to some polls, he still is. But after declaring himself a candidate for national office, a tsunami of negative emotion suddenly emerged from nowhere and washed over both us. Upon declaring himself a presidential candidate, it suddenly became OK to invent the most ridiculous stories about him— and me—and to place them in the newspaper. They could not be contradicted because to do so would sound silly (He did not say that! I did so drive the car myself! That meeting with Dick Cheney never happened!)

As a result, mythological versions of history attained the status of “fact,” and people on television talk shows argued about them with extraordinary passion. As a journalist, I know what it is like to incur the self-righteous wrath of people who denounce you for things you didn’t say or didn’t mean. When you add TV, the car radio, and the morning newspapers to the permanent fury of the blogosphere, the echo chamber effect can be overwhelming. I’ve seen this happen to people from the outside, but never from the inside. And I can promise that it is very unnerving—almost spooky—to watch an utterly unrecognizable version of someone you know rather well emerge into the public sphere. Of course I wouldn’t vote for that Radek Sikorski , the one with the dubious citizenship and the fake diploma. But then I’m not married to him either, because he doesn’t exist.

I am absolutely not complaining about this, and I do not consider anything about the campaign unfair. Clearly, the qualities Poles admire in a secretary of state—foreign languages, diplomatic experience, even sense of humor—are emphatically not those desired in a head of state: So be it. But although one ought to have expected that rapid shift in perceptions, and one should have been prepared for those negative emotions, somehow one didn’t and one wasn’t.

And perhaps one never is. Possibly for the first time ever, I find myself in solidarity with Hillary Clinton: “If you don’t like him, don’t vote for him.” Just don’t tell me about it, OK?

I am not writing this because David Frum is my friend, although he is. I am writing this because I have just come back from London, where I got a close-up look at the state of the British Conservative Party, once the intellectual motor of free-market economics in Europe and the rest of the world. After almost two decades in power, the British Conservatives lost in 1997 to Tony Blair’s slicker, smoother, Labor Party—a party that had accepted the basic premises of Thatcherism and moved on.

At the time, the Tories reckoned they would be in opposition for a couple of years at most. All they had to do was return to their basic principles and declare them with greater fervor and more self-righteous anger than ever before. They knew, they told one another, what the British people really wanted, and they ran two angry campaigns that reeked of xenophobia. The result: The Tories have been out of power since 1997. Thirteen years.

After the second, decisive election loss, the Conservatives finally made some changes. They elected a new leader, younger and “modernizing.” They changed their social policies to match the views of the majority, supported the green movement—hugely popular among their own heavily rural supporters—accepted the basic premises of Blairism, and moved on. Above all, they changed the way they spoke: No more shouting. No more anger. No more arrogance.

And the result? The Tories are once again real contenders. But only barely. The latest polling shows that even now, with Britain ruled by one of the most unpopular prime ministers in recent memory, they are still not assured of a victory, and recent polls have them slipping. I can’t think of anything worse for the United Kingdom than another term in office for Labor, a party that has left Britain with a vast public deficit, an awkwardly (but irreversibly) reformed constitution, and heavily restricted civil liberties. But the Tories’ nasty public image—arrogant, mean, small-minded—is proving very, very difficult to discard.

I haven’t asked him, but I’ll bet Frum had this example partly in mind when he wrote, a couple of days ago, that the American Republican Party had just had its Waterloo, even though it doesn’t apparently know it. As a fully paid-up member of the mushy political center, I am in favor of universal access to health care and also horrified by what President Barack Obama’s bill is going to cost. So who should I be voting for? If congressional Republicans are determined to fix this bill by, say, reforming the medical malpractice laws that drive up costs and put doctors out of business, they’ve got my vote. If, instead, they are going to scream “Communist” and “fascist” at our democratically elected president—thereby achieving nothing at all—then I want nothing to do with them.

In the coming days, many conservative pundits will surely echo the words of another pundit I know and like, Tunku Varadarajan, who has dismissed Frum as a “polite company conservative” and argues that Frum is wrong about that nasty talk-show rhetoric, on the grounds that “passionate extremism is part of any political debate.” Well, “up to a point, Lord Copper,” as a certain British novelist would put it: The history of the British Conservative Party shows that if by exciting your base you lose the center, then you lose the next election, too.

Sometimes they cut to the essence of the story, those tabloid headline-writers, even when they haven’t got the quotation exactly right. What the German politician being quoted in the Bild article cited above actually said was, “A bankrupt party must use everything he has to make money and serve his creditors. … Greece owns buildings, companies and several uninhabited islands, which can now be used to repay debt.”

What he meant, though, was more accurately reflected in that Bild headline: The Germans are fed up with paying Europe’s bills. They don’t want to bail out the feckless Greeks with their flagrantly inaccurate official statistics; they resent being Europe’s banker of last resort; they object to the universal demand that they plug the vast holes in the Greek budget deficit in the name of “European unity”; and for the first time in a long time they are saying it out loud. Not only are tabloids demanding the sale of the Acropolis, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s deeply serious paper of record, has pointed out that while the Greeks are out protesting the raising of the pension age from 61 to 63, Germany recently raised its pension age from 65 to 67: “Does that mean that the Germans should in future extend the working age from 67 to 69, so that Greeks can enjoy their retirement?’

With an unerringly poor sense of timing, the Greeks have, in response, chosen precisely this moment to flaunt their own set of resentments. One Greek minister complained to the BBC that the Nazis “took away the Greek gold that was in the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back.” The mayor of Athens has demanded 70 billion euros for the ruins the Nazis left behind after the war. The Greek consumer organization, not exactly thankful for the German bailout or Europe’s demands for Greek budget cuts, has called for a boycott of German products. Officially, the Germans have described these comments as “not helpful.” Unofficially, the German press is foaming at the mouth (see above), for once reflecting accurately the views of both German politicians and German voters.

More curious is the question of why this is happening at this particular moment: After all, the Germans have been paying for European unity—not just the currency but the farming subsidies, the assistance to poorer regions, the highways in Spain and Ireland—for decades without ever complaining much. In Warsaw, one sees children’s playgrounds proudly bearing signs declaring that they have been “built with European money,” most of which presumably comes from German taxpayers. So why are those German taxpayers suddenly complaining about the Greeks?

The obvious answer is to do with that poor timing: Germany is still effectively in recession; unemployment is relatively high; and the new ruling coalition has sworn to curtail spending. That means that for the first time in a long time, Germans are feeling a direct pinch on their incomes, on their pensions, and on state institutions, including schools. If they don’t feel like bailing out other people at this particular moment in the economic cycle—particularly people with an earlier retirement age—no one can blame them.

The less obvious answer is related to those comments about Nazis. The driving force behind the creation of the European Union, back in the 1950s, was Germany’s guilt about the war. Although other countries had different motives, the whole point of European economic and political unity, from the German point of view, was to drown the German nation and its singular history into something larger and more palatable.

Along the way, Europe also acquired other reasons for its existence: The euro—the European currency that has been rendered wobbly by the Greek national debt—was created to help the single European market compete with the United States. But political feelings run deeper than economic needs, and without that fundamental German urge to sacrifice national sovereignty, the whole thing will fall apart.

Which is why this wave of German indignation over the Greek bailout is so important. After all, Germany is now run by a generation with no personal memories of the war. Germany’s historical debate is now focused on the fate of Germans who suffered from wartime bombing and postwar deportation, not with the fate of Germany’s victims—in Greece or anywhere else. Sooner or later, the Germans will collectively decide that enough sacrifices have been made and that the debt to Europe has been paid. Thanks to the ungrateful Greeks with their island villas and large pensions, that day may arrive more quickly that we thought it would.

Yet the comparison is unavoidable, which is why so many people have already made it. After all, two large and unusually debilitating earthquakes have just struck not far from the capital cities of two Latin American countries within a very short period of time. In both countries, political leaders were left struggling for metaphors to convey the extent of the catastrophe. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet called the earthquake “an emergency unparalleled in the history of Chile.” Haitian President René Préval compared the destruction in Haiti “to the damage you would see if the country was bombed for 15 days.”

But the effect on the two respective populations is clearly not going to be identical. An earthquake always comes out of the blue, and in that sense, it is always a piece of bad luck in the geological lottery, as David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post in January. Yet the short- and long-term aftereffects of an earthquake—the extent of the damage it wreaks, the speed with which the population reorganizes itself and rebuilds—have nothing to do with luck. Those who study famines have long argued that they are created by bad politics and bad economics as well as bad weather: There is always food somewhere, so if a particular country doesn’t have any, there must be an explanation other than “It was very hot last summer.”

A society’s ability to recover from a natural disaster is also a reflection of its economic and political culture. There will be “looting” in Chile this week as people struggle to survive in the ruins, but the Chilean army and police, not the U.S. Marines, will control the situation. There will be weakened apartment blocks that abruptly collapse, but there will be inspectors on hand to help assess which ones might be safe.

Before the quake, Chile also had regulations in place that required contractors to construct all new buildings to earthquake-resistant standards. Not every structure met the standards, but many did. And residents of those that did not will have some recourse: In the city of Concepción, residents of a new building that collapsed completely are threatening to take their builders to court, according to one report. The fact that they are even discussing this option implies that these apartment owners believe they have a court system that works, a legal system that could force builders to pay compensation, and a building regulatory system that is generally respected. Haiti has none of the above.

Though it is not especially fashionable at the moment to note these things, Chile, unlike Haiti, is also a working democracy. In recent elections, the center-left ruling party lost to the center-right opposition for the first time in two decades. Power is expected to change hands without incident when the new president, Sebastián Piñera, is inaugurated next week. Although Piñera is a billionaire, he directed his campaign at small-business owners, promised to sell off some of his assets so as to avoid conflicts of interest, and has just appointed a Cabinet that includes a number of independent and even center-left ministers. Of course, we don’t know what kind of president Piñera will ultimately turn out to be, but it is clear that in order to become president, he had to appeal to millions of people and not just to a wealthy, partisan elite.

In the aftermath of a natural catastrophe, this matters: To call Chile a democracy is another way of saying that Chile is a country whose political leaders have to take voters’ concerns into account. Chile’s earthquake response will have to reflect the same values as Chile’s famed pension system (designed by the president-elect’s brother, Jose Piñera), which is intended to assure ordinary workers a decent retirement income. In the coming months, the state may not be able to help all of the poor citizens who have suffered, but it cannot ignore all of them indefinitely either.

Disasters have no logic, and no political significance, either. But the recovery process that follows a disaster is always deeply political. Despite a stronger earthquake and more damaging aftershocks, Chile will return to normal faster than Haiti. Luck has nothing to do with it.

The president will not bomb Iran’s nuclear installations for precisely the same reasons that George W. Bush did not bomb Iran’s nuclear installations: because we don’t know exactly where they all are, because we don’t know whether such a raid could stop the Iranian nuclear program for more than a few months, and because Iran’s threatened response—against Israelis and U.S. troops, via Iran’s allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Lebanon—isn’t one we want to cope with at this precise moment. Nor do we want the higher oil prices that would instantly follow. No U.S. president doing a sober calculation would want to start a new war of choice while U.S. troops are still actively engaged on two other fronts, and no U.S. president could expect public support for more than a nanosecond.

But even if Obama does not bomb Iran, that doesn’t mean that no one else will. At the moment, when Washington is consumed by health care and the implications of the Massachusetts Senate special election, it may seem as if Obama’s most important legacy, positive or negative, will be domestic. In the future, we may not consider any of this at all important. The defining moment of his presidency may well come at 2 a.m. some day, when he picks up the phone and is told that the Israeli prime minister is on the line: Israel has just carried out a raid on Iranian nuclear sites. What then?

This is hardly an inevitable scenario: If the Israelis were as enthusiastic about bombing raids as some believe, they would have carried them out already. They had no qualms about sending eight jets to take out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 or about bombing a purported Syrian facility in 2007. Both are now considered model operations. They were brief and successful, they provoked no serious retaliation, and they even won de facto acceptance from the outside world as legitimate defensive measures.

The Iranian context is different, as Zeev Raz, the squadron leader of the 1981 raid, readily concedes. “There is no single target that you could bomb with eight aircraft,” he told the Economist (in a strangely tragic article that says Raz “exudes gloom” while his children apply for foreign passports). The Israelis have the same doubts as everyone else about the efficacy of raids, which is why they have focused on covert sabotage and even off-the-record diplomacy, despite having no diplomatic relations with Iran, in the hopes of slowing down the nuclear development process. They have also quietly studied the ways in which Iran could be deterred, knowing that they will have the advantage in nuclear technology for the next couple of decades. Though they keep all options on the table, they have so far concluded that bombing raids aren’t worth the consequences.

At some point in the future, that calculation could change. Since Americans often assume that everyone else perceives the world the same way we do, it is worth repeating the obvious here: Many Israelis regard the Iranian nuclear program as a matter of life and death. The prospect of a nuclear Iran isn’t an irritant or a distant threat. It is understood directly in the context of the Iranian president’s provocative attacks on Israel’s right to exist and of his public support for historians who deny the Holocaust. If you want to make Israelis paranoid, hint that they might be the target of an attempted mass murder. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does exactly that.

If that ever happened, the 2 a.m. phone call would be followed by retaliation, some of which would be directed at us, our troops in Iraq, our ships at sea. I don’t want this to happen, but I do want us to be prepared if it does. Contrary to Palin, I do not think Obama would restore the fortunes of his presidency by bombing Iran, like a character out of the movie Wag the Dog. But I do hope that this administration is ready, militarily and psychologically, not for a war of choice but for an unwanted war of necessity. This is real life, after all, not Hollywood.

By this I do not mean that the Midwest will soon be covered with ancient ruins or that Texans will swap hamburgers for feta cheese. I mean that the ongoing Greek financial crisis is the same kind of crisis the United States might face a few years from now if we continue to make the same kinds of mistakes the Greeks have made over the last decade.

For those who haven’t followed this saga, let me reassure you that the story is quite straightforward: Greece is bankrupt. And although Greece’s bankruptcy is headline news this week—Greece’s weak finances threaten the stability of the euro, the common European currency—the truth is that Greece has been bankrupt for years. Its budget deficit in 2009 was 12.7 percent of GDP. Overall debt was 113.4 percent of GDP. Those are not figures that can be achieved overnight.

Some of Greece’s economic problems are highly specific. The country has an unusually old-fashioned legal system, a bureaucracy straight out of a Kafka novel, and a byzantine system of regulation worse even than our own. The Wall Street Journal points out that—extraordinarily—Greece, practically alone among developed economies, does not have a centralized and computerized land registry, which means, for example, that farmers can surreptitiously cultivate public land and eventually become de facto owners. By European standards, Greece also has an exceptionally closed economy. Barriers to doing business, both legal and informal, are very high, which is part of why Greece has one of the world’s lowest levels of foreign investment.

More to the point, Greece has borne all these burdens for a long, long time. Yet nothing has been done, because the country’s deeply partisan political system is totally paralyzed. Try to carry out any social security reform in Greece—raise the pension age, stop early retirements—and watch what happens: Mass rioting followed the passage of a pension reform bill in 2008, and the government became so unpopular it lost the next election. The land registry cannot be modernized, because those who possess land illegally will fight back. The barriers to investment cannot be lowered, because business lobbies are more powerful than politicians.

The political class is aware of the country’s economic problems, but it denies them. Last month, the European Commission issued a report accusing Greece’s finance ministry and statistical service of “severe irregularities” stemming from “the submission of incorrect data.” In eurospeak, that means the commissioners think the Greeks have been lying: That 12.7 percent budget deficit was originally forecast to be 3.7 percent, and plenty of other figures coming out of Greece seem to have been way off. No country makes accounting errors like that by accident.

Greece shares its financial weaknesses with several other European countries (nowadays referred to—really!—as the PIGS: Portugal, Italy—or sometimes Ireland—Greece, and Spain). But in a different sense, Greece’s weaknesses are also shared by the United States. Though we do not have precisely the same problems, we do have a similar level of political paralysis and a similar level of partisanship. It is not possible to reform U.S. Social Security: President Bush tried halfheartedly and gave up before he started. It may not be possible to reform health care, either: Hillary Clinton failed, and President Obama, despite throwing in expensive sweeteners, may well fail. The influence of lobbyists cannot be reduced. The power of interest groups to influence legislation cannot be tamed. We might not have farmers squatting on state land, but we do have farmers dependent on huge, distorting agricultural subsidies that apparently cannot be reduced.

Fortunately for American politicians, we do not have to submit our financial statistics to a European Commission, and thus we do not have to lie about them outright. But aside from our very large budget deficit—at the moment, 9.9 percent of GDP and climbing—we also have liabilities that are rarely acknowledged. The costs of Medicare and Medicaid are going up, as is the cost of veterans care. Markets assume that the vast debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are underwritten by the government, and someday the government might be called upon to pay them. No one is lying about these things, but no one is talking about them very much, either.

The good news is that the American government’s bankruptcy is not on the front pages, and it won’t be for many years: Our sheer size, our entrepreneurship, and our relatively open business culture will keep us going for a long time. But the Greek crisis shows that the combination of debt and political deadlock can be deadly. The catharsis we feel as we watch it unfold—that Aristotelian combination of pity and fear—should shock us far more than it has so far.

Fast-forward to 2010, and many things look different: Yushchenko was a bitter disappointment to his countrymen. The recession hit Ukraine hard; many difficult decisions were not made. The Ukrainian government still has not gotten around to privatizing land or removing Soviet-era subsidies from the budget. Tensions between the western and eastern halves of the country have not decreased. As things got tougher, politicians began squabbling among themselves, making reform impossible; the value of the currency has halved.

The only thing that has remained consistent over the past four years is the democratic process itself. Far and away the most striking thing about this Ukrainian presidential election is that we genuinely did not know who would win it. By contrast, the only mystery about Russian elections is the question of why they bother to hold them, since the winner is known long in advance. Six years after the Orange Revolution, Ukrainian political culture remains open, unpredictable, and interesting—so much so that formerly prominent Russian journalists have now moved to Kiev to ply their trade. “The difference between Russian politics and Ukrainian politics,” one of them told the New York Times, “is the difference between a cemetery and a madhouse.”

And who has been the biggest beneficiary of this madhouse? Yanukovych, the original bad guy: Two parliamentary elections and one presidential election have been held since the Orange Revolution, and he has won them all. The Ukrainians are not an illogical people: The only real advantage of democracy is that it enables people to throw out leaders they don’t like. When the various “orange” coalitions failed to deliver the expected reforms, the Ukrainians took full advantage of their voting power to throw them out. Anyone else would do the same.

The test now, of course, is whether Yanukovych will respect those who elected him and ensure that democratic elections continue to be held into the future. His success will be easy to measure: If he is evicted from office in due course, as all politicians eventually are, then he has respected the spirit of the Orange Revolution. If he tries to stay on past his term by falsifying votes, intimidating the opposition, and killing journalists, then we will know that the counterrevolution has come to power. And it is by these terms that we should judge him. Whether he tries to join NATO (he will not) or befriend the European Union (he might well) matters less to Ukraine’s political future than the simple question of whether Ukrainians will be allowed to replace him if they disapprove of his choices.

That does not mean his choices are irrelevant: Ukrainians, like everyone else under the sun, will select their future leaders based on their perceptions of how well their country is run. “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” is not a uniquely American slogan. In the coming months, the Ukrainian government will be (and should be) far more concerned with what one regional analyst calls “geo-economics,” as opposed to geopolitics. The Ukrainians need to expand their relationship with the International Monetary Fund; they need to negotiate stable and reasonable gas agreements with their Russian neighbors to the east; they need to conclude visa and trade agreements with their European neighbors to the west. They are in need of practical and literate politicians, not ideologues. For their sake, we must hope that Yanukovych is the former, not the latter.

The big questions—will Ukraine ultimately be “Western” or “Eastern”; will its political culture come to resemble Europe’s or Russia’s; will Ukraine eventually join European and transatlantic institutions—have not disappeared with the election of an “Eastern” president. But they have been put on hold, at least for the moment.

Snow is falling, but that isn’t the only explanation for this traffic jam: The more experienced passengers in our car assure me that this sort of thing happens outside Zurich every day. The drive from Davos—for we are traveling from that fabled mountain resort to the airport—is supposed to take two hours, but sometimes it takes four. The drive from Bern is always double what it is supposed to be as well. Don’t think you can get from anywhere else to Zurich in a hurry, either.

The traffic is the result of a paradox. Extraordinary construction skills were needed to build Switzerland’s long Alpine tunnels; meticulous planning was required to create those pristine highways through remote valleys, those clean and precise road signs. The Swiss highway system is one of the engineering wonders of the modern world, and that’s why everyone travelling across the country, or across the continent, wants to drive on it. Build a really good road, and sooner or later you get more traffic.

This phenomenon is well-known among those who study the science of transportation, but it also reflects a more general truth: Sometimes, if you fix one problem, you create others. Coming from the World Economic Forum—which I attended in the exalted capacity of trailing spouse—it was hard not to see a deeper metaphor: Davos is a conference that specializes in generating Big Ideas, preferably Big Ideas that can be outlined in a single sentence and thus translated into a single language. At these sorts of gatherings, there is always a Big Problem looming, too: Poverty is growing, or Europe’s influence is waning, or the climate is changing.

Usually there’s a Big Solution on offer: The United Nations must act, or the European parliament must act, or the White House must do something. At dinner one night, I sat next to a woman who was convinced that Western civilization would be saved by massive government investment in green technology. I suspect she stole this idea from Tom Friedman, but never mind: The Chinese government, she declared, had already invested billions, and they were going to leave us behind unless we lobbied our respective governments to do the same. She dismissed all counterarguments with real passion, and a version of her thesis appeared the next morning on the front page of the International Herald Tribune.

Maybe she was right, and maybe green technology will save us. Or maybe massive state investment in the wrong sorts of technology will bankrupt us, send us scrambling in the wrong direction, and waste years that could have been spent, say, getting people to use more trains. Or maybe both will prove true. Myself, I favor a carbon tax that would raise the prices of oil and gas across the board, forcing markets to find the most logical solutions. But I’m willing to concede there would be unfortunate side effects, and I’m willing to hear other arguments.

But Davos, an event dominated by a strange combination of business tycoons and international bureaucrats, is a conference for people who don’t have time to hear other arguments or worry about long-term side effects, which is probably why it so often generates headline news. For the same reason, it is a conference whose participants like to draw grand conclusions based upon the annual guest list. The first time the Russian oligarchs showed up, back in the 1990s, the resident press corps declared a Russian Revival. This year the Chinese attended in large numbers, and thus this is the Year of Asia. Americans were thin on the ground, so it is the Year of America’s Decline, as well.

And if you’re really short of time, you can even reduce those one-sentence solutions to three-word phrases. I learned this at another dinner, where the man sitting next to me declared he was “long on Iceland,” the man across from me was “short on America,” and a third was “long on China.”

Myself, I’m short on conferences, long on complexity, and suspicious of single-minded plans to save Western civilization. And yes, I made the plane, barely.

Tourism is a luxury, one that is now available to millions of Indians thanks to two decades of growth, open markets, and global trade. It is also a sign of the times. People become curious about their own country when they are proud of it. They pay to hear the history of their own landmarks when they are no longer pining to go abroad. Indian tourists are thus part of a larger phenomenon: All around the world, rising prosperity and rising patriotism go hand in hand, and India is no exception. But what sort of patriotism is India’s going to be?

In India’s immediate neighborhood there are many models on offer. Chinese leaders, expressing a self-confidence born of export wealth, frequently convey their patriotism using nationalist rhetoric. They treat all internal criticism as treason, declare themselves impervious to world opinion, and demonstrate their power by snubbing President Obama at a climate summit. Russian patriotism, meanwhile, often takes on a neo-imperialist coloring. Russian leaders, expressing a self-confidence born of oil wealth, indulge in frequent saber-rattling and sometimes physical attacks on their neighbors. Indeed, the conjunction of Russia’s invasion of Georgia with the Beijing Olympics in the summer of 2008 was instructive: Two new models of national self-confidence were on display that week, along with two different ways of expressing it.

Indian patriotism could very well develop in either of those directions. Saber-rattling is not exactly unheard of here, and nationalist sentiment can appear in unexpected places. This week, Indian newspaper headlines featured the national cricket league’s recent refusal to draft any Pakistani players, a decision widely attributed to politics and prejudice. Resistance to internal criticism and even the repression of dissidents are not unknown here, either, especially in the poorer provinces. Indian editor Tarun Tejpal can list several such incidents off the top of his head: His energetic magazine, Tehelka, has reported on policemen who rape women travelers with impunity in one particularly violent region of the country as well as on local laws that violate rights guaranteed in the national constitution. This reporting, he says, has had no political impact whatsoever.

I heard Tejpal make these points down the road from the Amber Fort at this year’s Jaipur Literary Festival. From a large stage in a crowded room, he also declared that India’s new elite had been “bought off” with consumer goods and had slid into political complacency as a result; India’s new wealthy had ignored the continued suffering of the Indian poor, and in particular the ongoing violations of human rights. He made these points passionately, and many heads nodded. After he finished speaking, the elite, wealthy crowd rewarded him with hearty applause.

This was, in other words, a patriotic crowd: not nationalistic, not imperialist, not aggressive, but rather self-critical, focused on what is still wrong as well as what has gone right. I don’t want to make too much of a single session at a single festival, but it was clear that no one was remotely intimidated by being there, no one was afraid to say anything aloud. It’s that sort of patriotism, so hard to find in China and Russia, that gives India its lively novelists, its open public culture, its energetic film industry. It’s that sort of patriotism that, if it can be encouraged and maintained, will keep Indian politics diverse and democratic over time—even if the economy stops growing.

It’s also that kind of patriotism that makes tourists like me feel so energized by a brief visit. Like economic cycles, political trends come and go. At the moment, democracy is out, authoritarianism is in, and it is fashionable, in many parts of Asia, to claim that rapid economic growth requires censorship and central political control. India presents a real alternative to that model. I know that many Indians will violently disagree with that assessment, and that makes me more optimistic still.

Though the earthquake was a powerful one, its impact was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of rule of law in Haiti. As Roger Noriega has written, “You can literally see [the] dysfunction from space”: Satellite photos of Hispaniola, the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, show green forests on the Dominican side and bare, deforested hills on the Haitian side. Mudslides and collapsing houses were routine in Haiti, even before this disaster. Laws designed to prevent erosion, and building codes designed to prevent criminally shoddy construction, were ignored. The rickety slums of Port-au-Prince were constructed in ravines and on steep, unstable hills. When they collapsed, they collapsed completely.

So weak were Haiti’s public institutions, literally and figuratively, that nothing is left of them, either. Parliament, churches, hospitals, and government offices no longer exist.* The archbishop is dead. The head of the U.N. mission is dead. There is a real possibility that violent gangs will emerge to take their place, to control food supplies, to loot what remains to be looted. There is a real possibility, within the coming days, of epidemics, mass starvation, and civil war.

I don’t remember feeling this utter hopelessness about previous natural disasters. Following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, or Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there were equally horrific scenes, and equally terrible stories: Whole villages swept away, people drowned in their houses, American families wading through water with their possessions on their heads. But—following the initial chaos in both places—it was possible to coordinate basic assistance. In fact, the victims of Katrina were moved quickly out of New Orleans: Remember the buses to Texas, the Americans who offered their spare rooms to homeless families, the churches and schools that “adopted” refugees from the Gulf coast. Although I would never claim that the result is satisfactory—neither the city nor the adjacent coastline will ever be rebuilt as it was, hundreds of thousands of people will never truly recover—at least there were no epidemics, no mass starvation, no civil war.

The same is true in Indonesia. It is even possible to read assessments of the worst-hit places, such as the province of Aceh*—from the World Bank, for example—that describe life there as better than ever before. I am certain that many disagree. However, there are no scenes there of what everyone always calls “biblical” tragedy. Indonesia is not a society of utopian perfection, and neither is the United States. But both have enough social cohesion to support indigenous charities, both have enough educated people to plan reconstruction, both are capable of absorbing lessons learned, of rebuilding villages and cities with an eye to future floods, of helping their own refugees resettle.

Haiti does not have these kinds of internal resources, which means that all the reconstruction expertise will have to come from outside. Most of it will come from the United States. Yet for all the obvious historical reasons, this outside expertise will be unacceptable to many Haitians, who will see it as a colonial imposition, unwarranted interference in local affairs, cultural imperialism. Armed U.S. Marines may wind up in fire fights with those violent gangs. Local elites—those who remain—may plot to swindle the aid missions out of their food and money.

I hope I am wrong. I am sure there are optimists out there, people who think this is Haiti’s chance to reconstruct itself, literally and figuratively, to rebuild government institutions, to attract donors and investment. Bill Clinton is such an optimist, and I am very, very glad that he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Haiti. How fortunate, at this moment, that the country has such powerful friends. Yet I also know that a successful recovery and reconstruction will require not just friends, not just money, and not just optimism, but a profound cultural and political change, the kind of change that normally takes decades. And Haiti does not have decades, it has days—maybe hours—before fresh disasters strike.

“My husband was anti-American; so am I.” That was what Bayrak told the editors of Newsweek’s Turkish edition last week. Bayrak is a 31-year-old Turkish journalist and Turkish-Arabic translator who says she met her late husband in an Internet chat room. Her publications include articles for Islamist periodicals as well as a book called Bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East. Unlike others in her family, she wears a black chador, which in Turkey is not merely religious clothing but a political symbol. She is no shrinking wallflower. “I am proud of my husband. He carried out a great operation in this war. I hope Allah will accept his martyrdom, if he has become a martyr,” she told reporters in Istanbul.

Bayrak is a shining example of what might be called the international jihadist elite: She is educated, eloquent, with connections across the Islamic world—Istanbul, Turkey; Amman, Jordan; Peshawar, Pakistan—yet not exactly part of the global economy, either. She shares these traits not only with her husband—a medical doctor and the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians—but also with others featured recently in the news. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for example, who grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family, studied at University College London, and then tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day. Or Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (Sheik Omar), who was born in Britain, studied at elite high schools in Pakistan and Britain, dropped out of the London School of Economics, and then murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Or even Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was born in Arlington, Va.; graduated from Virginia Tech; and did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed before killing 13 people in a shooting spree at Fort Hood.

These people are not the wretched of the earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven’t emerged from repressive Islamic societies, such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, “Westernized” parents who sacrificed for their education, though they are also often people who, for one reason or another, didn’t “make it” or didn’t feel comfortable in their respective societies. Perhaps it sounds strange, but they remind me of the early Bolsheviks, who were also educated, multinational, and ambitious and who also often lacked the social cachet to be successful. Lenin’s family, for example, clung desperately to its status on the lowest rung of the czarist aristocracy.

Bayrak draws a similar kind of comparison by linking the names of jihadist guerrilla Osama Bin Laden and Communist guerrilla Che Guevara. Alas, I haven’t read her book, but I can see what she means: Both Osama and Che claimed to fight in the name of the poor and oppressed, meanwhile appealing very deeply to the wealthy and disgruntled.

In recent years, the emergence of this international jihadist elite has often been blamed on European immigration and assimilation policies, or rather the lack of them. Several of the 9/11 bombers were radicalized in Hamburg, Germany; the London Tube bombers were born in Britain; and there are other European examples. But the case of Bayrak, who was educated in a secular Muslim society—and that of Hasan, who is American—suggests that this elite has a much broader base, and radical Islam potentially a much wider appeal.

The case of Bayrak and her ilk also suggests the need for another kind of anti-terrorist strategy. Too often, we think of public diplomacy as a sort of public relations activity, the “promotion” of American values. Instead, we should be thinking about it as an argument. The Bayraks and Balawis of this world are engaged in constant debates—in Internet chat rooms, in the halls of publishing houses, in mosques. Are they hearing enough counterarguments? Are we helping the people who make the counterarguments? I suspect that they don’t, and I’m certain that we aren’t—and that has to change. Intellectuals may wear glasses and read books, but neither attribute prevents them from throwing bombs—or from strapping them inside their underwear if need be.

Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
by Michael Scammell
Random House, 689 pp., $35.00

He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn’t die (though Benjamin, denied passage into Spain at the French border, took them and did).

Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.

It is difficult, in other words, to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era.

Nor were these shallow passions. His belief in communism led him to fight in Spain and travel in the USSR. His Zionism led him to a kibbutz near Haifa. At different times, he advocated the use of violence, whether to bring about a Communist utopia or to create the state of Israel. Even when he turned against his previous causes (and against his previous friends who still believed in them) he did so with real fervor. He is, after all, best known as an anti-Communist, not as a Communist, largely because of his best and most influential book, Darkness at Noon, a fictional account of the interrogation of a leading member of an unnamed Communist party. His involvement with Revisionist Zionism is also probably less well known than The Thirteenth Tribe, a book that argues that modern European Jews are descended from the Central Asian Khazars, and not from the Jews who lived in the Palestine of antiquity—a thesis which, whatever its merits, is hugely popular among the enemies of Zionism. Even so, when in the grip of one particular mania he was incapable of seeing the counterarguments: in the face of all rational argument, he even stuck to his late passion for telepathy and ESP—so much so that he left most of his estate to fund a professorial chair in parapsychology.

Koestler was equally likely to succumb to extreme passions in his personal life—notoriously so. He was variously in thrall to Jabotinsky, to his analyst, and to an extraordinary series of women. He was also consumed by violent hatreds—starting with his mother—and pursued many vendettas, against fellow writers (he was fiercely jealous of Hemingway, loathed Bertrand Russell) as well as romantic rivals (including Edmund Wilson) and ex-husbands. Eventually, he offended almost everyone he knew, but only after getting drunk with them first.

Even his entertainments often went to extremes, as this superb new biography well illustrates. Far and away my favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler moments—is Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which Koestler and his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife, Francine. The festivities began with dinner in an Algerian bistro, continued in a dance hall “lit with pink and blue neon lights,” and then, at Koestler’s insistence, progressed to Schéhérazade, a nightclub filled with “violinists wandering about playing soulful Russian music into the guests’ ears.” There were arguments about communism, and about friendship. “If only it were possible to tell the truth,” exclaimed Camus at one point.

At about 4 AM, Koestler was pried away from the nightclub, and the group “repaired to Chez Victor in Les Halles for onion soup, oysters, and white wine.” Roaring drunk, Koestler threw a crust of bread across the table and hit Mamaine in the eye; Sartre, equally drunk, poured salt and pepper into napkins that he put in his pocket and said he had to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne in the morning on “The Responsibility of the Writer.” Camus said, “Well, you’ll have to speak without me” (”Alors, tu parleras sans moi “). Sartre said he wished he “could speak without me too” (”Je voudrais bien pouvoir parler sans moi “) and collapsed into giggles.

Scammell, whose fine-tuned sense of irony serves him well here, describes that evening’s conclusion:

They broke up at dawn. Alone with Sartre, Beauvoir sobbed “over the tragedy of the human condition,” then leaned on the parapet of a bridge over the Seine and said: “I don’t see why we don’t throw ourselves in the river.” “All right,” agreed Sartre, “let’s throw ourselves in,” and began to cry himself. In another part of the city, Koestler too burst into tears as he stared into the Seine. Then he disappeared into a pissoir and shouted to Mamaine, “Don’t leave me, I love you, I’ll always love you.” They got home at about eight o’clock and slept all day, except for Sartre, who stuffed himself with pep pills and dragged himself off to the Sorbonne to give his lecture. It wasn’t possible even for an existentialist to address the students “sans moi.”
Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone weeping over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the Seine at the end of it. Hollywood starlets and pseudo-celebrities behave that way in our culture, not serious people.

More to the point, Koestler was, in our contemporary definition of these things, an alcoholic, as were many of the people around him. He was also, in our contemporary definition of these things, a sexual predator. He was blatantly unfaithful to all of his three wives, as well as to the other women he lived with. He flirted outrageously, and sometimes aggressively, with other men’s wives too. Just a few days before the evening at Schéhérazade and Chez Victor, Koestler actually went to bed with Simone de Beauvoir.

David Cesarani, a previous biographer of Koestler, has even described him as a “serial rapist.”[1] Scammell disputes that accusation at some length. In the end, only one woman—Jill Craigie, the wife of the British Labour leader Michael Foot—ever actually accused him of rape, and there are some ambiguities about her story. She made the charge when she was in her eighties, and Koestler was dead. Others, including her husband, remembered the incident differently. Scammell notes these discrepancies, and convincingly dismisses some of Cesarani’s other accusations as unfounded. He also notes that the charge has nevertheless deeply tarnished Koestler’s posthumous reputation. This is not at all surprising. Even if “rape” is not the right word, some of the sexual behavior Scammell describes would, in the contemporary world, be considered absolutely beyond the pale—and probably illegal as well.

Nor are the rules of public behavior the only things that have changed. The professionalization of literary and intellectual life was underway even in Koestler’s lifetime, and he chafed against it. He disliked the lecture circuit and never had any real interest in teaching. He had very little time for universities in general. He also refused to be categorized as a simple “novelist” or “journalist,” and in the latter part of his career wrote books about science, philosophy, history, and psychology. He understood the term “intellectual” in a much broader sense than we do today, and felt comfortable ranging over a huge number of fields in which he had no professional expertise whatsoever. This approach to the life of the mind, perfectly acceptable in the Vienna of Koestler’s youth, simply looks amateurish from the perspective of the present. As a result, many of his later books have slipped off the radar and are long out of print. Others, notably The Thirteenth Tribe, are considered curiosities that appeal to conspiracy theorists, not scholars.

The most important change, however, is political. To put it bluntly, the deadly struggle between communism and anticommunism—the central moral issue of Koestler’s lifetime—not only no longer exists, it no longer evokes much interest. Thanks to the opening of archives, quite a few Western historians are, it is true, still investigating the history of the Soviet Union and of the international Communist movement. But outside of a few university comparative literature departments, Soviet-style Marxism itself is not a living political idea anywhere in the West. In the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash in the autumn of 2008, there were calls for a government bailout of the auto industry. No one—no major newspaper columnists, no leading politicians, no popular intellectual magazines—called upon the vanguard of the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois capitalist exploiters. In the Europe of 1948, somebody would have done so.

What that means, though, is that the entire political context in which Koest- ler, Sartre, and Camus functioned—and in which Koestler’s most important works were written—is now gone. In the years following their debauched evening in Paris, Sartre and Koestler actually stopped speaking to each other. Partly this was personal: Sartre tried to seduce Mamaine, Koestler did seduce Beauvoir, and there were bad feelings all around. But the more important reason was political. After Darkness at Noon became a best seller in France, Sartre distanced himself from its author, on the grounds that Koestler, by publicizing the crimes of the repressive Soviet regime, was putting himself at the service of American imperialism and blocking the progress of the left. It was not that Sartre did not know about the horrors Koestler described—the prisons, the torture, and the labor camps of the Soviet Union—it was that he did not find them politically convenient. They gave too much encouragement to the bourgeoisie.

What was true of Sartre was true of many, many others, and not only those on the far left. In his superb recent account of the publication of Darkness at Noon and its impact on the Western public, Princeton literary scholar John Fleming writes that any appreciation of the heated international debate about the book “requires the reconstruction of some modes of thought nearly vanished from the earth.”[2] Concepts like “belief” and “faith” do not figure very often anymore in contemporary Western politics—and even when they do (as perhaps they did in the 2008 American presidential election) they are almost always a preface to disillusion. In the 1930s and 1940s, by contrast, belief and faith mattered a great deal, and true Communists and fellow travelers did not become disillusioned. They simply altered their analysis of the current situation, put their trust in the ultimate wisdom of the Party, and progressed onward toward the construction of utopia.

Koestler had an almost unique ability to shake such people to their foundations. Unlike right-wing and even liberal critics of communism, he had a certain status on the cultural left. He was a victim of fascism, an ex-refugee, a familiar face in Comintern circles, a former combatant in the Spanish civil war. His devastating critique of the Soviet Union therefore had to be taken seriously by his former comrades. To some of them, he was a heretic, a defector, a traitor to the cause. To others, he became a hero.

As for Darkness at Noon, it was not just a popular book, it was one of the primary reasons that the Communist Party never came to power in France, a real possibility at the time. Hard though it is for us now to imagine, it was not at all obvious, in 1946 or even 1956, that Western Europe and the United States would remain solidly united for fifty years. Nor did it seem at all inevitable that the West would win the cold war. Along with Orwell’s Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, Darkness at Noon was one of the books that helped turn the tide on the intellectual front line, and ensured that the West prevailed. But unless one understands all of that, the political and literary achievements of Arthur Koestler are, to a contemporary reader, easily outweighed by the extravagance of his sexual and personal transgressions.

For all of those reasons, Michael Scammell cannot have found this an easy book to write, and indeed it took him a very long time to write it. Scammell is the author of the definitive and deservedly celebrated biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in 1984.[3] A few years after it was finished, he set out to follow up with a biography of Koestler. This turned out to be a major feat of endurance scholarship. By his own admission, he “followed [Koestler] to fourteen countries on three continents,” interviewed hundreds of people, and read through many boxes of archives. This effort has certainly paid off.

Because he has looked at all possible forms of documentation, he is able to reconstruct complicated scenes from Koestler’s life with real historical and literary flair. More than once, he tells us what is happening from several perspectives: what Koestler said, what Koestler’s then girlfriend said, what another person at the party remembered twenty years later, and how another writer depicted the event in his diaries. Scammell is also a scholar of Russian literature, and this shows too. Although this is a long book, it feels compact. None of the carefully selected details or quotations seems extraneous. The main characters are shown from every angle, with all of their faults and virtues. Koestler himself seems at times so alive he might leap off the page.

And yet the passage of time is a problem, if not for Scammell then for his readers. An elderly Central European acquaintance recently told me that in his youth, nothing was considered so tacky and outdated as art nouveau furniture. Something similar has happened to Koestler. At the moment, he still seems like yesterday’s man, unfashionable and obsolete. His better qualities might eventually be visible to a younger generation, just as an elegantly restored art nouveau table now appeals to collectors and connoisseurs. But a good deal of historical and literary work will have to be done, and more time may have to pass, before that is possible.

In the case of Koestler, a number of other things are also working against his posthumous reputation. One of these is the nature of his death, a double suicide, carried out in tandem with his wife. Koestler himself was seventy-seven years old and dying of leukemia. But his wife, Cynthia, was fifty-five and healthy. Unlike his previous wives, she was neither beautiful nor accomplished. She had been his secretary—in effect his servant—before they were married. Above all he admired her ability to take dictation. Though it seems that in the last part of their lives the power balance between them evened out, and though it is very clear that she was in full possession of her faculties at the time—she even had the presence of mind to cancel the newspapers—it is impossible to escape the suspicion that somehow, in an effort to achieve a spectacular grand finale, he bullied her into killing herself alongside him.

Cynthia’s death was not only distasteful to the public, it left Koestler’s literary estate without an obvious manager. Having persuaded numerous women to have abortions, he had no children, with the possible exception of one unacknowledged daughter (who had nothing to do with him, or he with her). By the time of his death he had fallen out with those of his contemporaries who were still alive. Most of his later books were financially and critically unsuccessful. His final legacy, that gift of money for the study of parapsychology, didn’t exactly enhance his reputation either. Nor did he have, as Orwell did, an obvious national audience. As a Hungarian Jew and native German speaker who wrote in English, he isn’t a natural part of anybody’s literary canon. There is an Orwell Society at Eton, but I doubt very much that there is a Koestler Society at any school in Budapest.

As a result, Koestler’s reputation has waned dramatically since his death. Although Darkness at Noon remains high on lists of “great books of the twentieth century,” his journalism, which in its time was at least as significant as that of Orwell, is hardly known at all. Before coming to write this review, I had not read Scum of the Earth, Koestler’s autobiographical and journalistic account of the fate of refugees in wartime France. I can’t remember anybody ever telling me to read it either. But because Scammell praises it, and because Scum of the Earth is still in print, I bought a copy. It was a revelation: astonishingly fresh, clear, and relevant, not only explaining the rapid collapse of France in 1940, but also illuminating some of the difficulties that France and other European countries still have in absorbing “foreigners” even today. After I’d finished, I lent the book to somebody else. And this, it occurred to me, is how a literary reputation revives.

Scammell has clearly set out to make this happen, and in that sense, this is more than a biography. It is an argument in defense of Koestler’s literary oeuvre, if not entirely in defense of Koestler himself. Scammell does not make excuses for his subject, and does not gloss over his many faults. But by recreating the historical setting in which Koestler lived and worked, by fitting him squarely in the middle of the great debates of the twentieth century, he makes his achievements much clearer to a contemporary reader—and thus there is a chance, at least, that he will succeed.

Notes
[1]David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Heineman, 1998).

[2]John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos ( Norton, 2009), p. 65.

[3]Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (Norton, 1984).

When someone invents a way to hide explosive powder inside a toothbrush case, prepare to remove your toothbrushes, too. And while you’re at it, throw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder as you walk onto the plane. But never, at any moment, imagine that the rigmarole of airport security is guaranteed to make you safer, for no one knows which of these measures, if any, is necessary.

Worse, no one has any financial or political incentive to find out. Since their hurried and heavily politicized creation, the fact is that neither the priorities nor the spending patterns of the Department of Homeland Security and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration, has ever been subject to serious scrutiny. They have never been forced to make hard choices. On the contrary, both have been encouraged, by their congressional funders, to spend money on more elaborate equipment every year in reaction to every perceived new threat, real or otherwise. So full-body scanners, unacceptable as recently as last summer, will now be rushed into use. In just a few years—under a Republican administration and mostly Republican congresses—these institutions thus grew into vast, unruly bureaucracies, some of whose activities bear only a distant relationship to public safety.

So customary has it become to repeat old, familiar lists of ludicrous public projects that readers who cannot bear to read the litany one more time are allowed to skip to the next paragraph. For, yes, it is true: Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and in the process of its lavish expansion, the organization found it had money for all kinds of extras. As I wrote in 2005, some $350,000 of its $6 billion budget once got spent on a gym; $500,000 went toward artwork and silk plants; and untold millions are spent every year in overhiring, since the determination of when there will be long security lines at an airport has never really been the sort of thing at which the federal government excels. As for the Department of Homeland Security, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion, some of which (according to economist Veronique de Rugy, writing in 2006) will invariably be spent on things like the $63,000 decontamination unit in rural Washington, where no one was trained to use it; more biochemical suits for Grand Forks County, N.D., than the town has police officers to wear them; and $557,400 worth of rescue and communications equipment apparently needed for some 1,500 residents of the town of North Pole, Alaska. Not to mention what is spent on the “needs” of the constituents of other important members of Congress.

But it is not the employees of the DHS and TSA who are at fault for these kinds of decisions. From the very beginning, security experts and even their own inspectors have been pointing to the absurdity of TSA’s and DHS’s spending patterns, many of which are driven by the latest scare story. (I wish I’d been at the celebratory New Year’s party undoubtedly thrown by the manufacturers of those full-body scanners.) And from the very beginning, Congress has fought back against the critics, repeatedly allocating money to unnecessary local projects, reacting to sensational news stories, spending money in ways that suit its members, and then declaring itself shocked—shocked!—to discover that our multibillion-dollar homeland-security apparatus was unable to stop a clearly disturbed Nigerian from boarding a Detroit-bound plane.

Imagine, instead, that the TSA’s vast budgets were dedicated to the creation of a cutting-edge computer network, one that could have made the security officers in Amsterdam instantly aware of the warning from the underwear bomber’s father. Imagine that, instead of full-body X-ray scanners or long-haul-flight blanket deprivation, we had highly paid and trained consular officers in places like Nigeria. Even then, security would not be perfect. (I’m not even sure that airborne terrorism is the worst thing we have to worry about.) But it would make sense to have a smaller, less expensive, and less wasteful system. It would make sense to have a system based on real risks and priorities instead of the stories featured on cable news. It would make sense to fight the next battle, for once, instead of the last one. Sense, though, is not the criteria by which public money is spent in this country—and it hasn’t been for a long time.

Watching the news from Copenhagen last weekend, it wasn’t hard to understand where he got that idea. Among the tens of thousands of demonstrators outside the climate change summit, some were carrying giant clocks set at 10 minutes to midnight, indicating the imminent end of the world. Elsewhere, others staged a “resuscitation” of planet Earth, symbolically represented by a large collapsing balloon. Near the conference center, an installation composed of skeletons standing knee deep in water made a similar point, as did numerous melting ice sculptures and a melodramatic “die-in” staged by protesters wearing white, ghost-like jump suits.

Danish police also arrested about 1,000 people Saturday for smashing windows and burning cars, along with 200 more—they were carrying gas masks and seem to have been planning to shut down the city harboron Sunday. Nevertheless, in the long run it is those peaceful demonstrators, the ones who say the end is nigh, who have the capacity to do the most psychological damage.

I should stop here and point out that I enthusiastically support renewable energy, believe strongly in the imposition of a carbon tax, and am furthermore convinced that a worldwide shift away from fossil fuels would have hugely positive geopolitical consequences, even aside from the environmental benefits. It’s true that I’m not crazy about the Kyoto climate-negotiation process, of which the Copenhagen meeting is the latest stage. But I’m even more disturbed by the apocalyptic as well as the anti-human prejudices of the climate change movement, some of which do indeed filter down to children as young as 9.

There have been many radical statements of this latter creed. In the infamous words of a National Park Service ecologist, “We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” One of the founders of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also allegedly declared that “Humans have grown like a cancer. We’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” But it is a mistake to think that this is only the language of a crazy fringe.

Look, for example, at the Optimum Population Trust, a mainstream organization whose patrons include the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, the scientist Dr. Jane Goodall, and professors at Cambridge and Stanford and which campaigns against, well, human beings. Calling for “fewer emitters, lower emissions,” the organization offers its members the chance to offset the pollution that they generate, merely by existing, through the purchase of family planning devices in poor countries. Click on their PopOffsets Calculator to see what I mean: They reckon every $7 spent on family planning generates one ton fewer carbon emissions. Since the average American generates 20.60 tons of carbon annually, it will cost you $144.20—$576.80 for a family of four—to buy enough condoms to prevent the births of, say, 0.4 Kenyans.

The assumption behind this calculation is profoundly negative: Human beings are nothing more than machines for the production of carbon dioxide. And if we take that assumption seriously, a whole lot of other things look different, too. Certainly weapons of mass destruction must be reconsidered, along with the flu virus: By reducing the population, they might also reduce emissions as well. Perhaps they should be encouraged?

Coupled with a firm conviction that the end of the world is nigh, you can see how homework is rendered pointless. As for hopes for the future and faith in humanity—forget about it. But while we’re at it, we might as well forget about re-inventing our energy sources, too.

For while it’s true that human beings are often greedy, stupid, and destructive, it’s also true that we got to where we are at least partly thanks to human creativity, ingenuity, and talent. Electricity is a miracle, an invention that has literally brought light and life to millions. Modern communication and transportation systems are no less extraordinary, helping create economic growth in places where poverty and misery were the norm for centuries.

All of them depend on fossil fuels, but they don’t have to: A profound change in the nature of human energy consumption can be achieved—thanks to the entrepreneurship that created the Internet, the compassion that lies behind the advances in modern medicine, and the scientific reasoning that sent men into outer space. As for nihilism and hatred of humankind, it teaches us nothing, except to give up. And we shouldn’t be passing it on to our children, either.

What is true of Nyon is true of most of Switzerland, a nation in which there are very few mosques — no more than 150 in the whole country, apparently, including tiny “prayer rooms” — virtually no burqas and hardly any headscarves. The vast majority of Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims are from Turkey and Kosovo, and women from these countries generally do not follow the conservative dress codes commonly seen in places such as Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, people in places just like Nyon recently voted decisively — 57.5 percent — in favor of a referendum that will ban the construction of minarets on mosques throughout Switzerland. This decision has been interpreted across Europe, and particularly in the United States, as evidence of Swiss bigotry and rising religious intolerance. But it was not — or at least not entirely. More important, it was evidence of fear, though not fear of “foreigners” or “outsiders” as such.

There is very little evidence that separatist, politically extreme Islam is growing rapidly in Switzerland. The Swiss, however, read newspapers and watch television. And in recent years separatist and politically extreme forms of Islam have emerged in every European country with a large Muslim population: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Sweden. In all of these countries there have been court cases and scandals concerning forced marriage, female circumcision and honor killings. There have been terrorist incidents, too: Think of the London Tube bombings, the Spanish train bombs, the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. Remember that the Sept. 11 pilots came from Hamburg.

There are many explanations for this phenomenon (the best is found in Christopher Caldwell’s recent book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”), but, to put it very crudely, they boil down to one thing: Because of mistakes made by Europeans and by the Muslim immigrants who live beside them, the two groups have, over the past several decades, failed to integrate. Two or even three generations after their arrival, some European Muslims still live in separate communities. They often go to separate schools. And a small but vocal minority openly refuses to respect the laws and customs of their adopted countries.

No European government has found a way to deal with this phenomenon. Those that have tried often find themselves running up against their own civil rights and legal traditions. The Danes, determined to limit the number of foreign spouses entering Denmark through arranged marriages, decided that they had no choice but to make it more difficult for all Danes to marry foreigners. The French, realizing that the headscarf had become a symbol of political affiliation in some French schools, found themselves limiting the rights of all students to wear religious clothing, including yarmulkes, to school.

There is, therefore, nothing especially Swiss, or especially isolationist, about the recent referendum result. A similar question, put in a similar way, might well have led to a similar result anywhere in Europe. In fact, fear of Islamist extremism shapes all European politics far more than anyone ever acknowledges. The growth of the “far right” parties in the recent past is almost always connected to fear of Islamist extremism. The opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union — which would mean that Turks could eventually work freely in any member state — stems from the same set of fears, though almost no one ever says this.

The referendum on the construction of minarets is no different. No one quite says what the real issue is, but everybody knows: As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don’t have much Islamic extremism — and they don’t want any.

Over the centuries, some societies have been more susceptible to these sorts of swindles than others. Catherine the Great’s Russia, for example, was positively swarming with phony English duchesses and Italian princes: Imperial St. Petersburg was aspirational enough to want the company of “real” European aristocrats but far away enough from London or Naples to make it difficult to check their pedigrees. One also thinks of Edith Wharton’s New York, for similar reasons: Her characters are precisely the sort who would fall into a mésalliance with a dodgy Polish aristocrat, just off the boat, who invariably turns out not to be what he seems.

To that notable group of societies we can now add 21st-century Washington. Like 18th-century Russia, it is a world of neophytes, a society whose members have only recently “made it” into an elite magic circle and who don’t necessarily know the other members all that well. Like 19th-century New York, it is also a world where appearances matter: You get invited to the event — whether the White House Hanukkah party or the state dinner — not just because of who you are but because of what you represent, which costume you wear, which ethnic group you come from.

Above all, it is a world that seems to offer wealth and fame to those outsiders who manage to enter it. And it was in pursuit of both that Tareq and Michaele Salahi bamboozled their way into last week’s White House dinner for the Indian prime minister. Just like all charlatans and swindlers over the centuries, they managed it by looking and acting the part. He appears as if he could be South Asian, which seemed right; he also wore black tie and what looks, in the photographs, like a state decoration or medal. She is a striking, professionally coiffed blonde and wore a sari — a glamorous, red, expensive sari. Having managed to get previous meetings with Prince Charles and Oprah Winfrey (Michaele even finagled her way into Redskinettes alumni parties), they knew how to behave around the contemporary aristocracy: Simply act as if you belong, don’t stare too hard at the celebrities, don’t eat or drink too much, and do engage your neighbors in light chit-chat about the Kashmir conflict and the Indian gross domestic product. Since hardly anyone knows anyone else at this kind of party, you can get away with it.

But there are differences between the Salahis and, say, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, a self-described “Spanish aristocrat” who set himself up as a glamorous “faith healer” in 1770s St. Petersburg, made his living by borrowing money from gullible courtiers (and possibly by renting out his wife, the “Princess di Santa Croce,” to Prince Potemkin).

The Salahis are hoping to cash in faster — a lot faster. It has been less than a week since they crashed the president’s party, and already they are demanding six figures for the exclusive television appearance in which they will either declare themselves to be be offended, on the grounds that they “thought” they were invited to the White House — or else will boast of having pulled off the social-climbing coup of the century.

They also have a lot more help than did the swindlers of yesteryear. Michaele had a television crew film her preparations for the party at a Georgetown beauty salon, so there is footage ready for whoever has the money to pay. A publicist has been booked and is prepared to negotiate. Plenty of “legitimate” news outlets are ready to play: According to The Post, a CBS reporter has already slipped a note under their door, offering an interview with Katie Couric. Next will come the book contract, the movie rights and — who knows? — maybe the television talk show. I can just see it: “Famous for Being Famous: At Home With the Salahis.”

Unless, of course, they meet the same fate as their many predecessors. The Spanish Count Cagliostro was eventually expelled from St. Petersburg, after the empress learned that he was neither Spanish nor a count. The “King” and “Duke” in “Huckleberry Finn” were tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

A century ago, the Salahis, too, would be shamed, embarrassed and finally banished from the elite world that they had contrived to enter. Even now, they ought to expect to be under arrest, for lying to the Secret Service, if nothing else — unless the rules of polite society have changed so much that there are no longer any rules at all.

In China, President Obama met his counterpart, President Hu Jintao. He also met the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. The former got more attention, but the latter was more interesting: According to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, Wen told Obama that “China disagrees to the suggestion of a ‘Group of Two.’ ” China is “still a developing country,” Wen said, and “we must always keep sober-minded about it.” China is delighted to continue its economic relationship with the United States, but China “pursues the independent foreign policy of peace and will not align with any country or country blocs.”

Translation: China will not cooperate in placing sanctions on Iran; China will not hinder North Korea’s nuclear missile program; and China will not help solve the problems of Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else. China has decided that, in short, it will not become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

At approximately the same time, the leaders of Europe were locked in proverbial smoke-filled rooms (nowadays empty of smoke) arguing over who should be granted the job of “president” of the European Union and who should become Europe’s new “high representative,” or foreign minister. These talks represented the culmination of a decade’s worth of diplomacy, debate and national referendums, all designed to produce a more united European foreign policy and to give Europe a single phone number, so that Obama can call when he wants to chat. The result: The president of Europe will be Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a politician unknown outside his own country. The foreign minister of Europe will be Britain’s Catherine Ashton, a bureaucrat unknown even inside her own country. Candidates of far greater experience and influence — including the former British prime minister Tony Blair and the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt — were rejected, apparently for fear they would have more experience and influence than the powers that be. Germany’s Der Spiegel heralded this news with the headline “Europe Chooses Nobodies.”

Translation: Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. “Europe” will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

And thus we are left with a curious situation: America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower and in fact America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower. Yet America has no obvious partner with which to share its superpowerdom, and if America were to cease being a superpower, nothing and no one would take its place.

This might not be the end of the world — there are quite a few trouble spots that could do with a long period of benign neglect — and it might not last forever. Europe, when counted as a single entity, is still the world’s largest economy. China, whatever else it might be, is still the world’s fastest-growing economy. Sooner or later the simple need to defend their economic interests might persuade one or both to start taking the outside world more seriously.

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe — never mind a military operation — will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, along with a vast army to match. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism, too?

In China, President Obama met his counterpart, President Hu Jintao. He also met the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. The former got more attention, but the latter was more interesting: According to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, Wen told Obama that “China disagrees to the suggestion of a ‘Group of Two.’ ” China is “still a developing country,” Wen said, and “we must always keep sober-minded about it.” China is delighted to continue its economic relationship with the United States, but China “pursues the independent foreign policy of peace and will not align with any country or country blocs.”

Translation: China will not cooperate in placing sanctions on Iran; China will not hinder North Korea’s nuclear missile program; and China will not help solve the problems of Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else. China has decided that, in short, it will not become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

At approximately the same time, the leaders of Europe were locked in proverbial smoke-filled rooms (nowadays empty of smoke) arguing over who should be granted the job of “president” of the European Union and who should become Europe’s new “high representative,” or foreign minister. These talks represented the culmination of a decade’s worth of diplomacy, debate and national referendums, all designed to produce a more united European foreign policy and to give Europe a single phone number, so that Obama can call when he wants to chat. The result: The president of Europe will be Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a politician unknown outside his own country. The foreign minister of Europe will be Britain’s Catherine Ashton, a bureaucrat unknown even inside her own country. Candidates of far greater experience and influence — including the former British prime minister Tony Blair and the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt — were rejected, apparently for fear they would have more experience and influence than the powers that be. Germany’s Der Spiegel heralded this news with the headline “Europe Chooses Nobodies.”

Translation: Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. “Europe” will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

And thus we are left with a curious situation: America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower and in fact America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower. Yet America has no obvious partner with which to share its superpowerdom, and if America were to cease being a superpower, nothing and no one would take its place.

This might not be the end of the world — there are quite a few trouble spots that could do with a long period of benign neglect — and it might not last forever. Europe, when counted as a single entity, is still the world’s largest economy. China, whatever else it might be, is still the world’s fastest-growing economy. Sooner or later the simple need to defend their economic interests might persuade one or both to start taking the outside world more seriously.

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe — never mind a military operation — will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, along with a vast army to match. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism, too?

How did we get to this point? That is, how did we get to a point where outbreaks treated with the utmost seriousness by the World Health Organization — swine flu has been officially declared a “pandemic” — receive vastly different levels of respect in different countries, different cities and even among different social groups within them? Some seem convinced that the current flu epidemic is a modern version of the Black Death. Others — including a number of elected politicians and health bureaucrats — suspect a hoax perpetrated by Swiss drug companies. Although the wide variety of reactions has been present since the virus first appeared in the spring, the subsequent failure to come to any global consensus about how swine flu should be treated is producing as many medical reactions as there are national governments.

Look at Ukraine, for example, where public awareness went from “zero” this summer to “panic” this autumn. Late last month, politicians began to speak of mass illness and mass death. The government quarantined several provinces, shut down parliament and banned mass gatherings. When the dust began to settle last week, it appeared that, yes, there had been a small outbreak of swine flu, but also that, no, most of the people who got sick didn’t have the H1N1 virus. Swine flu death rates in Ukraine are no higher than those for flu or pneumonia in other years.

None of this has stopped the flu panic from spreading westward faster than the virus itself — though, again, all of Ukraine’s neighbors have behaved differently. Slovakia closed most of its border crossings with Ukraine. Hungary did not close its borders but launched a campaign for mass vaccination. Poland did neither and has so far bought no vaccine, on the grounds that swine flu is actually more benign than ordinary flu and that the vaccine might therefore do more harm than good.

Each of these countries has produced different medical explanations for its actions, and each medical explanation is widely perceived to be a cover for political machinations, at least by the opponents of the relevant government. In Ukraine, a second wave of rumors has it that the flu panic was spread by one or more presidential candidates (elections are scheduled for January), seeking to gain an advantage; the current president has accused the prime minister, who is seeking the presidency, of spending more on her election campaign than on flu response. In Hungary, widespread distrust of a very unpopular government has led to mass refusal to use the expensively purchased vaccine. In Poland, some accuse the health ministry of plain stinginess.

The politicization of disease response is not unique to Eastern Europe; nor are arguments about who gets which treatment. In the United States, an outcry followed the news that employees of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup got their vaccines before others; a similar scandal erupted in Germany when it emerged that two kinds of vaccine are available — and that the one perceived as “safer” is going to government officials and the military. Few of the world’s democracies will avoid a partisan debate over disease response this flu season, while few of the world’s autocracies will avoid wild rumors.

I’ve written before that a touch of media panic never hurts — at least it teaches people what the disease in question might be — but what we’re seeing is something different: Not media panic but official panic, inconsistent information and rapid policy changes that seem inspired by political demands, not medical need. It turns out that hardly anyone, anywhere, has thought through the logistics or the morality of rapid vaccine distribution. And hardly anyone knows what to make of the WHO or its Web site. Is the word “pandemic” just medical bureaucratese for a cough and a sore throat? Or does it mean that everyone who isn’t vaccinated will die?

Presumably the answer lies somewhere in between, but the WHO hasn’t figured out how to explain that. Neither have most national governments. You can train all the doctors you want, but if they can’t explain to the public concepts such as “high-risk groups” and “probability” and “some people really need this vaccine but most don’t,” then every epidemic, severe or mild, will become a public relations disaster. So far, swine flu is not a medical emergency, though no one says that very clearly. And if it becomes one, how will we know?

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

By Christopher Caldwell

(Doubleday, 422 pp., $30)

As its subtitle makes clear, this is a book about immigration, Islam, and the West. But at the same time this is also a book about a particular moral culture, a set of attitudes, habits, and beliefs that has developed in Western Europe over the past sixty years. There isn’t a good shorthand way to describe this moral culture. Sometimes it is called “political correctness,” though politics as such does not define it. Sometimes it is called “the culture of tolerance,” though at times it is not tolerant at all. Christopher Caldwell mostly winds up calling it the “European project,” which is not bad, since it implies that it is something that Europe is still building, an ongoing but incomplete enterprise, a “project” for the future.

The focus on the future is correct, for the source of these attitudes, habits, and beliefs–the European mentality that is Caldwell’s subject–is a deep desire both to forget and to atone for the past. At the heart of the European project lies a set of memories: of the vast physical destruction left in the wake of World War II, of the cycles of hatred and violence that followed the Nazi invasion of most of the continent, of the tyrannies of communism, and above all of the Holocaust. The primary task of this project is to purge these memories. This may be done in two ways: by rejecting anything reminiscent of traditional nationalism and traditional religion, and by promoting a halcyon form of cultural relativism. Early in his book, Caldwell explains:

The war supplied European thinkers with all their moral categories and benchmarks, whether the issue at hand was the progress of civilization, criteria for ethical statesmanship, or rationales for military intervention. Avoiding another European explosion meant, above all, purging Europe’s individual countries of nationalism, with “nationalism” understood to include all vestiges of racism, militarism, and cultural chauvinism–but also patriotism, pride, and unseemly competitiveness. The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans. 

Raymond Aron inquired into the same phenomenon back in the 1970s, observing that Europeans “would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood.” The most obvious achievement of this project, the European Union itself, is explicitly designed to do just that. Indeed, it is no accident that among the EU’s original founders–Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy–were nations whose elites felt deep guilt about their wartime aggression or collaboration. For some, the sacrifice of a part of their sovereignty seemed a small price to pay for the chance to become “European” instead of, say, “German.”

Caldwell is not the first to describe this culture, though he does so in a blessedly objective way–his interest, he says, is “neither to defend it as common sense nor to reject it as claptrap,” and his book lives up to this stringent standard. This is important, in this context. For many of the arguments about Islam in Europe are really arguments about the European project–and about racism, militarism, cultural chauvinism, patriotism, pride, and competitiveness–which is why they often become so quickly inflamed. Frequently they deteriorate into name-calling, as one side accuses the other of different forms of fascism. I am not sure that Caldwell has avoided all of the pitfalls of this difficult debate, but at least he has tried to do so. This is a book written in good faith.

What does all this have to do with Islam? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Caldwell’s central argument is that the European project, which was never designed with immigration in mind, let alone Muslim immigration, became the foundation upon which millions of Muslims came to live permanently in Europe. Certainly the European project shaped the conditions under which Muslims and others were initially invited to the continent. In the past this would not have happened, if only because immigration officials would never have allowed so many people, and certainly not from such foreign cultures, to settle permanently in their countries. In postwar Europe, however, bureaucrats did not allow themselves to take into account cultural differences, even when considering immigration requests in large numbers: cultural differences were not supposed to matter anymore, because that way lies fascism and its corpses.

Postwar guilt was also closely related to post-colonial guilt, and post-colonial guilt was the reason why some countries, notably France and Britain, initially opened their doors so widely to Algerians, Tunisians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis, among others. Surely, the argument went, their former imperial rulers owed something to the inhabitants of the British Commonwealth and the Francophone world. This argument even worked in countries that had never possessed any colonies, as all immigrants coming from ex-colonial countries were automatically classed as members of oppressed cultures who deserved the assistance of modern, anti-racist, anti-colonial, secular Europeans. In this sense, the postwar European project represented an admirable attempt to transcend Europe’s old and ugly anxieties about sameness and otherness. The European project also nurtured an admirable instinct to welcome asylum-seekers–people who had a justifiable fear of persecution in their own countries. Some European Jews had been saved during the war, after all, because they had successfully sought asylum elsewhere–and many had died because they had been refused.

Over time, however, European enthusiasm for the offering of asylum was dampened by the exponential expansion in numbers of asylum seekers, not all of whom, as it turned out, were truly suffering from political persecution. Still, the real problem for European immigration services was never the “bogus asylum-seekers,” as the British tabloids call them, but the real ones. At the end of 2008, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees counted more than sixteen million legitimate refugees, all of whom technically have a right to European asylum. Particularly when the humanitarian need to reunite them with their spouses, parents, and children is taken into account, along with the need to make amends for colonial cruelty, this is potentially a very large number of people.

Indeed, a very large number of people–in fact, an unprecedented number–arrived, and are still arriving. Some 1.5 million of the nine million people who live in Sweden are immigrants or the children of immigrants, as are some three million of the sixteen million inhabitants of the Netherlands. At current rates, one-quarter to one-third of the population of most Western European countries will be of non-European origin by the middle of this century. In many major cities–Rotterdam, Marseille, Leicester–Muslims may soon be in the majority. In some districts of major cities, including London and Amsterdam, they already are.

Once the immigrants had arrived, the complicated morality of the European project also made it hard, rather paradoxically, for Europeans to absorb the newcomers, especially those from the Muslim world. Europeans who were trying to abandon their own national identities were not going to thrust those identities on immigrants. After all, who was to say whose culture was better? No one saw the need to promote assimilation–to teach Turks to be German, or Moroccans to be Dutch. The very idea was embarrassing. Strangely, in retrospect, very few Europeans even felt that it was necessary to induct newcomers into the European project itself. No one explained to them that being “Dutch” now meant respecting womens’ rights, or that being “German” was incompatible with Holocaust denial, or that open distaste for homosexuals would be considered socially unacceptable. No one felt comfortable inflicting any moral or historical lessons upon them at all. This led to a great deal of mutual incomprehension. As Caldwell writes, 

Just because they were migrating to Europe did not mean immigrants accepted, understood, or even noticed the European project to leave behind “the history written in letters of blood.” On the contrary, many immigrants, and many children and grandchildren of immigrants, considered it a duty to shout from the rooftops their wish for a Palestinian state or a Kurdish homeland or an Islamist Algeria. They kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans’ universalism because they were beyond the reach of Europeans’ understanding. The misunderstanding was mutual.

Worse, when some European governments belatedly came to the conclusion that they would have to make active efforts to assimilate their immigrants, they often found that it was too late. The immigrant communities had taken the rhetoric about cultural relativism to heart, and immediately perceived any such efforts as “racist.” When David Blunkett, the British home secretary in the late 1990s, began for the first time to criticize the practice of forced marriages among some British Asians and to advocate the mandatory teaching of English, his remarks were considered biased and beyond the pale. Shahid Malik, a former member of the British Commission for Racial Equality, accused him of “unsettling hundreds of thousands of non-white Britons.” Blunkett’s remarks, Malik said, “felt like a kick in the teeth.”

But if the immigrants were not going to be German or Dutch or British, but were no longer Turkish or Moroccan or Pakistani, what were they going to be? The answer, as it turned out, was that many of them were going to live in ghettos, where their identity as “Muslims” would matter far more to them than it might ever have done in their country of origin, and where many of them would begin to practice the politics of fundamentalism. Finding the fuzziness of the European project unappealing, they returned to–or, among the young, discovered–their Islamic roots. And here is the tragedy of the story: for all its well-meaning secular earnestness, for all its determination to avoid the mistakes of the past, the European project wound up creating an angry and alienated religious minority where none had existed before.

 Caldwell’s account of how we got to where we are today is elegant and accurate, and I am sorry to simplify some of his arguments here. His discussion of the continually evolving explanations that European politicians have given their countrymen about the necessity of maintaining a continually growing immigrant population–the explanations are sometimes economic, sometimes moral, sometimes gastronomic–is particularly splendid. He also goes through many familiar controversies–veils, cartoons, the interpretation of September 11–adding both amusing and telling details to all of them. There is a lot of hypocrisy in the debate about the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, and he exposes all of it.

I suspect, though, that the strongest objections to Caldwell’s book are not going to lie in his description of the status quo ante, but in his discussion of “where we go from here.” For the essence of the second part of his argument–stripped, again, of Caldwell’s subtleties–is not merely that European Islam is now incompatible with European culture, but that it always will be. Having explained why no efforts at assimilation were made in the 1960s and 1970s, and why such efforts are not succeeding now, he goes on to predict that they will never work at all. This line of argument is aimed directly at those Europeans and Americans who have fondly and naïvely placed their hopes in “moderate Islam,” and who assume that Islam will eventually evolve into something more compatible with contemporary secular Europe–something, perhaps, like European Christianity, which in fact plays only a minor role in public life.

Caldwell’s is a complicated argument, with both religious and social elements, not all of which I am qualified to judge. Among other things, he notes that Muslim dislike of European attitudes to women and sex leads Muslim men–even second-generation Muslim men–to import wives from their home countries. The imported wives, who often do not speak European languages, in turn tend to preserve the customs of the home countries in their adopted countries for another generation. He also observes a phenomenon that historians of American immigration would certainly recognize: in practice, contact with European culture has tended to make Muslims more conservative, not more liberal, about the culture they remember from the past. Their children and grandchildren, meanwhile, are able to keep in touch with that culture in a way that previous generations never could, through the easily manipulated world of satellite television. Back in Bangladesh, young people may long to be “modern” and go to nightclubs, but in the Bangladeshi enclaves of London, one sees a much different sort of Islamic world on Al Jazeera. As Fouad Ajami recently remarked, in connection with Caldwell’s book,

In its original habitat, there could be an honest reckoning with Islam. Men and women could wrestle with the limits it places on them; they would weigh, in that timeless manner, the balance between fidelity to the faith and the yearning for freedom. But it isn’t easy in Amsterdam or Stockholm. There, the faith is identity, and the faith is complete and sharpened like a weapon. 

Caldwell also analyzes the writings of Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic philosopher often hailed for his advocacy of “European Islam.” Although Ramadan does speak of finding ways for the two cultures to become compatible, Caldwell believes that he means something different from what many of his admirers think he means. In Caldwell’s reading, Ramadan argues that Islam will be a force for the purification of a spiritually bankrupt and materialist civilization. The cultures will thus one day become compatible–because Islam has changed Europe, and not the other way around.

In different places in different ways, this transformation of Europe is already under way, made more difficult by the fact that the rules of the European project make the discussion of this fact taboo. When the Danes decided that they wanted to limit the ability of Muslim immigrants to import wives from abroad, they passed a law making it difficult for any Danish citizen to marry anyone from outside the EU. The law did indeed reduce the number of immigrants entering the country by marriage. It also stripped all Danes of some of their historic civil liberties.

France’s notorious decision to ban headscarves in schools followed a similar pattern. The decision was taken because authorities feared that the veil was becoming a symbol of an international political movement. But in order to avoid accusations of racism–in free societies, it is not easy to ban a scrap of cloth–they banned not only headscarves but other religious symbols as well, including “large crucifixes,” whatever that means, and yarmulkes. “Again,” writes Caldwell, “over the long term, the price of managing immigration is paid by the broader society in the form of rights. Jews attending violent public schools may have considered the loss of the right to wear a yarmulke a small price to pay for some sign of state action against the Islamization of institutions. … The non-Muslim public understood that this was the best deal it was likely to get.”

And now, of course, a real fear of immigrant violence–as witnessed in Madrid, London, Berlin, and Paris in recent years–plays a role as well. A Berlin opera house set off a passionate debate a few years ago when it decided to cancel a performance for fear of terrorism. The director had decided to illustrate the “death of the Gods” by placing the heads of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and, yes, Muhammad in the final scene. This was not political correctness, it was fear. (The same was true, incidentally, of Yale University’s recent decision to omit the offending images from a book about the controversy over Danish cartoons.) If police are afraid to enter certain parts of Paris or Birmingham, it follows that the people who live in those areas are going to feel less pressure to assimilate over time, not more. Second-generation, even third-generation immigrants are growing up far more radical than their parents.

In effect, Caldwell is saying that things are bad, and they are going to get worse, and there is nothing to be done about it. He does hint that it might help if Europeans went back to their Judeo-Christian roots, and became more robust about religion. He suggests that a more unified European approach might help. He implies that Europeans ought to think about having more children. But since neither a revived Christianity, nor European unity, nor a demographic boom, is in the cards, the logic of the situation seems unalterable: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

 Perhaps because I belong to the group of people who fondly and naïvely imagine that Islam may evolve–every other monotheism has–I am not entirely persuaded by Caldwell’s elegant pessimism. There are multiple examples–many multiples of examples–of Muslim immigrants who have integrated seamlessly into Europe. I am thinking of the secular and sophisticated Iranians of Paris, the Pakistani shopkeepers on British high streets, even individuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of Europe’s most fervent exponents of Enlightenment values. All have succeeded because some elements of European life–the entrepreneurial tradition and the blandishments of capitalism; the cosmopolitan cultural scene; the large role given to public intellectuals, particularly those who have something new to say–are well suited to the absorption and the cultural adaptation of outsiders. I do not see why Muslim immigrants will remain magically immune to all the integrationist influences that have shaped other immigrants into contented citizens of Western societies.

There are also some historical precedents. As noted above, the habit of importing spouses from the old country was also practiced by American immigrants–Jewish, German, Irish–some of whom also remained isolated in their own communities into two, three, or more generations. But these groups were finally integrated, partly through the lure of prosperity–in the end you had to speak English in order to get on–and partly through schools and peer pressure. Caldwell is right when he notes that Europeans always underestimate how deeply conformist American society is, and how much overt pressure there has always been to assimilate; but it is not impossible to imagine that a few changes in Europe could make a big difference. Indeed, that ban on the veil in schools in France is now widely perceived as an enormous success, precisely because it has tended to accelerate the assimilation of Muslim girls (and thus it might eventually be possible to drop it). Nor is it impossible to imagine that Europe could recover from the current recession–from which, with the exception of Britain and Ireland, it has suffered less drastically than the United States–and that a subsequent burst of economic growth could pull immigrants into the mainstream.

At times Caldwell underestimates the power of the European project itself, which for all its frequent stupidity, hypocrisy, and fluffiness does have some cultural and even moral attractions. The very mildness of modern Europe, the absence of extremes, the irony and the distance from national symbols, the low-key and humble attitude to the past: all of this has an appeal. And over time, as the consequences of rampant ethnic and religious passion become clearer, that appeal may grow. It is true that Christianity in Europe is anemic, and it is possible that a religious revival might be good for the souls of many Europeans. But I am not so sure it would be a useful “response” to Muslim immigration. Who wants a renewal of religious conflict in Europe?

I remember once flying into Heathrow airport on my way back from a dusty and fatiguing trip to the Middle East. As we were landing, I looked down and saw suburban London–green, rainy, boring, polite, agnostic–and felt a kind of relief. I was living in England at the time, and I suddenly felt a rush of happiness to have returned to precisely this culture of mildness and moderation, to those damp hedgerows. The chances are, of course, that Christopher Caldwell is right; and Bernard Lewis has predicted that Europe will be Islamic by the end of this century. But I wonder whether the liberal order is really quite so weak and inept, whether the story is quite over just yet.

Here in Berlin, there are conferences, books and dignitaries in abundance: Everyone who is anyone is in town, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Hillary Clinton, and plenty of kitsch is in evidence as well. A Berlin culture committee has set up a “long line of oversize dominoes” — painted in graffiti-style designs — that also will be knocked down, symbolizing “the power of people to bring change.” Traffic doesn’t pose the cosmic problem in Berlin that it does in Los Angeles, so this event was scheduled to take place during working hours.

Myself, I celebrated the anniversary Sunday, on the day before the great events, simply by doing something that would have been impossible on Nov. 8, 1989: I walked down Unter den Linden — a street I first visited on a freezing cold day back when it was still the dark and deserted centerpiece of East Berlin — and through the Brandenburg Gate, which once stood stranded in the no man’s land between East and West. I passed people sitting in cafes, eating lunch, window shopping. And I thought about what an extraordinary, almost unbelievable success it has all been.

This view — that the past two decades have been, in a friend’s words, the “best in Central Europe for 300 years” — is not universal. On the contrary, the majority of those books and conferences have focused on the many unsolved problems, the mistakes that were made and the resentments that are still felt all across the former Eastern bloc. The majority of the news focus — in Germany, Poland and Hungary, as well as in the United States — has been on the persistence of Eastern poverty, on the perception of Western indifference, on the “invisible walls” that still divide people.

But what did we think Central Europe would look like 20 years after Nov. 9, 1989? I can promise you, having been in Berlin then myself, that no one had the slightest idea. Angela Merkel herself has said that she thought it was ridiculous even to speculate on the possibility of a united Germany, so absurd did that idea seem — even after the fall of the wall. Indeed, so outlandish did the notion of NATO expansion seem that when officials in the new democratic government of Poland first raised the idea, American diplomats in Warsaw angrily told them to forget about it.

Back then, most of those who did make predictions saw a dark future. The rise of virulent, angry nationalism was forecast by more than one expert. Others foresaw the rise of anti-Semitism and the growth of neo-Nazism; Germany was going to become “the Fourth Reich.” Many in the West protested, preemptively, against the “witch hunts” that might be conducted against former communists. Now that he is a revered symbol of freedom, nobody remembers that the Polish Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, was tapped as a potential right-wing demagogue, too.

Some truly awful things did happen: In Yugoslavia there was a bitter war. In Russia, revanchism has returned. Authoritarian dictators run several of the former Soviet republics. But the heart of Central Europe — Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria — is peaceful and democratic. More than that: The inhabitants of Central Europe are healthier, more prosperous and more integrated with the rest of the continent than they have been for centuries.

This, then, is what I think was bothering me about the commemorations: Too many of them treat too much of the past two decades as a foregone conclusion, focusing on what didn’t happen rather than what did. Too many have taken the achievements for granted. Too many of us forget that there are few historical precedents for the past two decades. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” When Wordsworth wrote those words about the French Revolution, the post-revolutionary terror was a recent memory, the Napoleonic wars were still raging and his poem was an ironic comment on the naivete of youth. But we are now as far from the events of 1989 as Wordsworth was from 1789, and here in Central Europe there is no need for irony at all: Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

Stephen Kotkin

Uncivil Society

(Modern Library, 240pp)

Konstantin Pleshakov

There is no Freedom without Bread

(Farar, Straus and Giroux, 304pp)

Everything comes around again, in the end; every debate needs to be held twice. For the past few years, the Russians have been conducting an extraordinary national argument about whether Stalin was bad, a question one would have thought was settled long ago. And now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 1989, we have two books, both by eminent historians, both seeking to start an argument about whether there was an anti-Communist opposition in Central Europe. In Uncivil Society Stephen Kotkin, a Soviet historian at Princeton, makes an unusually strident version of the case that there was not. Konstantin Pleshakov, a Soviet historian at Mount Holyoke, presents a milder and more complicated version in There Is No Freedom Without Bread.

Both titles take aim at 1989 “clichés.” “Uncivil Society” is, of course, a twist on the term “civil society,” a phrase Kotkin dismisses as nothing but “catnip to scholars, pundits and foreign aid donors … .a vague, seemingly all-purpose collective social actor.” Pleshakov’s “No Freedom Without Bread” is an ironic inversion of the phrase “there is no bread without freedom,” which was used by the Solidarity movement in Poland. At the time, it was partly an answer to the Polish Communist Party’s attempt to pacify the population with imported consumer goods, paid for with borrowed dollars.

Pleshakov wants to make a more complex point: that the “correlation between prosperity and liberty is never simple,” and that people wanted bread just as much as they wanted freedom. Pleshakov’s broader revisionist argument is that it is wrong to imagine that everyone was an anti-Communist in Central Europe: There were Communists, and at times they were very popular. Indeed, he implies that with the exception of Poland, where there was a real civil war between Communists and anti-Communists, they were even accepted as legitimate by most people.

For the record, I remember the revolutions of 1989: I was living in Poland that year and traveled frequently around the region. Among other things, I was in Berlin when the wall was opened. So while reading these two books, I could not resist checking the authors’ claims against what I remember seeing and hearing at the time, annoying though that reflex may be. (Kotkin, for example, talks about demonstrators massing “at the Berlin Wall checkpoint, near the remains of Hitler’s bunker.” Well, actually there was more than one checkpoint, and actually Hitler’s bunker wasn’t especially near any of them.)

Much stranger than the occasional errors, though, is how often Kotkin’s account is accurate—and therefore at odds with his own thesis. In brief, Kotkin is trying to demonstrate that the fall of communism in 1989 was not a revolution, let alone a “people’s revolution.” With the possible exception of Poland, he says, the collapse was simply a function of Mikhail Gorbachev’s inexplicable decision to give up the ghost and of the financial insolvency of the Eastern bloc. He calls this thesis a new “narrative of global political economy and a bankrupt political class,” as though no one had ever heard of Gorbachev or global markets before he came along. Of course, he is at one level correct: Without Gorbachev’s decision to let the Berlin Wall fall, there would have been no 1989. Had Central European governments been able to borrow billions and fill the shops with Coca-Cola, as they did in the 1970s, they might well have sated some of the mass dissatisfaction, too. Nevertheless, Kotkin is utterly wrong in imagining that there were no other factors at all.

Whatever you want to call it, there was something else, in Communist Central Europe—something other than the government, the state-owned companies, the bankrupt political class. And there wasn’t supposed to be anything else: Along with the arrest of political opposition and the nationalization of industry, one of the first things Communist regimes did when they came to power in the late 1940s was destroy social institutions. As early as June 1946, the Hungarian Communist leadership outlawed dozens of independent youth, church, and other groups. Polish Communists hit hard at Catholic charities—as Kotkin points out—while the East Germans from the start absolutely forbade hiking organizations. Of course private publishers, art galleries, and independent schools were banned or heavily restricted as well. The idea was that ultimately there would be no organizations of any kind, except those sanctioned by the state.

What that meant, however, was that anybody who formed any kind of organization risked being treated as a political opponent of the regime. Kotkin himself acknowledges that “the regime’s stubborn denials of the existence of any social conflict made elementary conflicts into an existential threat.” Well, yes, precisely: That was why the Czechs formed jazz bands, the Hungarians created academic discussion clubs, and the Poles went to church. Kotkin sneeringly dismisses the various anti-Communist East German groups as too minor to matter. But he forgets that there were other, nonpolitical forms of opposition, even in conformist East Germany. I recently interviewed a man who spent his entire life struggling to keep open a private clothing shop in the town of Wittenberg. He was as proud of his bravery as any dissident would be.

I would call such people, together with the chains of friends and connections who sustained them, “civil society.” They weren’t necessarily organized into neat political parties—how could they be? But they existed, as even Kotkin obliquely acknowledges, for example when he talks about the regime’s “lack of political capital” to carry out reforms. (Why would a regime without opposition need political capital?) Indeed, because he doesn’t believe in civil society, he is forced to think up other names for the same phenomenon. At one point he uses the word niches to describe the tight-knit groups of opposition-minded friends whose links with one another accounted for the rapid emergence of mass crowds in 1989. I’m sorry, but a rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

And whatever you want to call it, these alternate organizations mattered. They helped form the crowds and then helped the crowds create change (impelling Vaclav Havel to the presidency of the Czech Republic, for example). Maybe more importantly, they affected the midlevel bureaucrats, the people who had been following orders all along but, with the threat of a Soviet invasion withdrawn, no longer wanted to do so. People like the policeman who spontaneously opened the barrier at the Berlin Wall, just to take one famous example, were moved to switch sides by, yes, the civil society that had been growing around them.

In contrast to Kotkin, Pleshakov isn’t denying the existence of civil society. Instead, he challenges the notion that Central Europe was always a hotbed of anti-Communist activity, from the end of the war to the fall of the wall. He wants to show that there was indigenous support for the Left in 1945 and that at some level it persisted up until the present. He makes an exception for Poland, which, as I say, he accurately describes as a country locked in a kind of civil war from 1945 onward. But even there he shows that there were Poles who supported communism, or anyway socialism, from the very beginning, and that they fought hard against the church, the intelligentsia, and the “civil society.”

Again, Pleshakov is absolutely right that there was indigenous support for communism, not only in Poland but in Hungary and Czechoslovakia—and, for that matter, in Italy and France. This was a region with wide gaps between rich and poor before the war, and social inequality led to demands for redistribution of wealth after the war. But Pleshakov goes too far in implying that the civil war over communism was somehow unique to Poland, or that no one else was much interested in freedom so long as they had enough bread.

In Hungary there was real opposition to the regime, and not only from former landowners: Hundreds of small demonstrations followed the nationalization of church schools in 1948, for example. Though crushed, civil society in Hungary kept secretly re-forming itself, culminating in the 1956 revolution. In Czechoslovakia anti-Communist opposition took its signature form in the Prague Spring of 1968. In East Germany, widespread opposition initially took the form of escape to the West but after the construction of the Berlin Wall took other forms, too. I know these are very obvious points. But just as we have to remember, from time to time, that Stalin was bad, it seems that we also have to remember that some people did want freedom as well as bread.

Which bring me to the puzzle of why these two historians, both of whom know most of their facts perfectly well, have succumbed to this sort of revisionism. Clues are found in their introductions. In his, Kotkin suddenly veers off the subject at hand and attacks the “spectacular incomprehension, lucrative recklessness, and not infrequent fraud” of American financial elites over the past two decades. Pleshakov, after explaining what sort of book he wants to write, also momentarily changes tacks and attacks Western leaders who were “profoundly misled by the post-1989 euphoria” and thus began “aggressively pursuing the free-market, free-elections solution in other ‘nonfree’ areas.” This I take to be an allusion to the war in Iraq.

What both men really dislike is what they perceive as right-wing triumphalism in the wake of 1989—a perfectly legitimate subject for discussion but one unrelated to the history of that year itself. In fact, reading both books helped me understand why the events of 1989 are somehow still in play, in a way that is no longer true of the entire cold war. Most people don’t think about the Berlin airlift or the Cuban missile crisis in the light of current events, which is why they can be described by historians with something approaching neutrality. By contrast, the events of 1989 are still part of contemporary politics. They cause angry debate in Central Europe itself, simply because the means by which power changed hands in that year—or failed to change hands sufficiently—remains controversial. But even on our side of the Berlin Wall, the debates are still ideologically polarized, charged by attitudes toward Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—or toward George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. That makes history more difficult to write. Perhaps we need another 20 years to think about 1989 after all.

The Eitingnons

Mary-Kay Wilmers
Faber, 476pp, £20

Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. That generation formed an important part of the intellectual and mercantile elite of Europe, but not the political elite — which is partly why some of them wound up in the radical communist anti-elite instead.

In some families, various members dabbled in all of these worlds. The Eitingons were precisely that sort of family, albeit unusual in that they achieved real status in all of the professions open to them. Max Eitingon was an actual protégé of Freud, and can be seen in photographs peering out from behind the great man’s head. Motty Eitingon was a millionaire fur trader, not just rich but very, very rich, partly because of an exclusive import contract with the Soviet Union. Leonid Eitingon, meanwhile, was a notorious KGB assassin and killer. On the scene in Mexico when Trotsky was murdered, in Spain during the civil war, Leonid had a hand in some of the most notorious crimes of the 20th-century — before ending up in a Soviet prison himself.

As fate would have it, Mary-Kay Wilmers, the mild-mannered editor of the London Review of Books, is also an Eitingon on her mother’s side: Leonid, Motty and Max are all, one way or another, her great-uncles or cousins. Part of a later, luckier generation, she grew up in a world with ‘no wars, no revolutions, no civil unrest or military coups, no famines or tidal waves’. Clearly, she would have preferred something more exciting, and so delved into the lives of her relatives. Over the years, she hunted them down, piece by piece and story by story. This book — which describes both her search and what she found — is the result.

And Wilmers is very good at conjuring up the atmosphere of their world, with its periodic, earth-shattering events, its sudden runs of luck and its equally rapid falls from grace. She is particularly good at evoking the various double games her relatives were playing and the odd ways in which cash, ideas, and espionage were exchanged in Moscow, New York and Vienna in the 1920s. (‘You can do anything with the Bolsheviki if you have money’, someone says at one point). Even Max, the psychoanalyst, had a habit of going on suspiciously long vacations and leaving no traces. He has been retrospectively accused of spying for the Soviet Union, as has Motty. As for Leonid — that was his profession. 

Along with the well-evoked ambience, there are some marvellous stories here too, such as the one about Leonid’s mother denouncing him in the synagogue after hearing that he had rounded up the prosperous citizens of his native city, Gomel — many Jews among them — and shot them all. Later, however, when he went off to spy in China, she had no qualms about living in his presumably well-appointed Moscow flat. There are also some excellent contrasts: Motty in front of the House Committee on Un-American activity, and Motty enthusiastically promoting his new company, Bonmouton (which, as the name implies, involved lambskin). I also liked Wilmers’ encounters with her living Moscow relatives, two of whom she brought to London — not that they fully appreciated the Euston hotel she arranged for them:

If you spent a good part of your life fantasising about Western abundance it only made you more resentful of the moral and economic rationing to which you were likely to be subjected once you were within physical reach of Bond Street or the King’s Road.

I feel more ambivalent about this book than I would like to feel. This is possibly because the story of Wilmers’ elaborate hunt for information — in Moscow, Washington, Tel Aviv— is simply less interesting than the stories of Leonid, Motty and Max, and it seriously distracts from the plot. Still, The Eitingnons is an honest book. Wilmers isn’t trying to hide any flaw or moral errors — not her own, and not anybody else’s. It took a lifetime’s effort to pull these stories out of mountains of contradictory bits of evidence. And even so, she winds up admitting that she doesn’t know everything that happened. On discovering from a Swiss undertaker that her mother had faked the date of her birth, she concludes that ‘you’re not really an Eitingon without one last trick up your sleeve.’

And yet, partly by default and partly by design, Merkel is now the de facto leader of Europe. Over in Britain, Gordon Brown’s Labor Party is self-immolating. Over in France, President Sarkozy’s attention-deficit issues propel him from one project to the next, to the irritation of everybody. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is under endless investigation, and everyone else is too small or too preoccupied to compete. Even when the European Union chooses its new president later this year, he (and it will almost certainly be a he) will find it extremely difficult to do anything that contradicts the wishes of Merkel, who regularly tops lists of the world’s most powerful women.

In fact, the more I watch her, the more I am convinced that her femaleness holds the key to her success. Under her watch, Germany has continued to grow more powerful, more influential, and more dominant than ever before. Yet not only has no one noticed, they applaud and ask for more. If a bull-necked Helmut Kohl or a flashy Gerhard Schröder were running Germany, there would be rising anxiety and mumbling about the Fourth Reich—just as there was at the time of German reunification 20 years ago, when Kohl was still in charge. But Merkel provokes no jealousy or competitiveness among the alpha males who run large countries, and she inspires no fear among the citizens of smaller ones.

On the contrary, Germany even has good relations with most of its neighbors to the east, many of whom are inclined to distrust Germans as a matter of principle. This is partly because she is so willing to show up when asked and offer mild-mannered words of friendship and apologies for World War II. After which she returns home and works to make Germany stronger and more dominant in the region. And everyone smiles.

This is not to say that she has been an entirely successful chancellor or that she has fulfilled everyone’s expectations. Though she has kept Germany on a relatively even keel throughout the current recession—among other things by refusing to spend what the U.S. administration wanted her to spend—she hasn’t been nearly as forceful about economic reform as she once said she would be. Nor has she fulfilled her foreign-policy promise. At the moment, she is probably the only politician capable of uniting Europeans behind a common energy policy and a common Russia policy. So far, she hasn’t even tried.

Until now, Merkel’s various failings have often been attributed to the fact that she was in a “grand coalition,” one of those dysfunctional, only-in-Europe parliamentary governments, the result of a coalition between the socialist left and the Christian Democrat right—somewhat as if the White House were shared out evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Every tiny issue had to be negotiated between the two major parties, every step in foreign or domestic policy elaborately discussed. But as of October, her coalition partner is another center-right party, the Free Democrats, and she has no more excuses. Perhaps that is why she has suddenly started talking about cutting taxes, which in Germany counts as genuinely radical.

If, in the coming months, she wants a bigger, louder role outside Germany, she can probably have that too. Though I’m not sure that “big and loud” is quite her style. It’s equally possible that she will take over European foreign policy—but so quietly and so politely that no one will notice.

Just a week before, a parallel scene had unfolded across the Channel: In Paris, a soldier wounded in Afghanistan this summer died at a hospital. French Prime Minister François Fillon paid homage to the sergeant, speaking of “the courage of our soldiers, their devotion and their professionalism,” which he said merited the recognition of “the nation.” In the United States, meanwhile, CNN featured the story of an American mother who flew home with the body of her son, another soldier killed in Afghanistan this summer. He died in what was described as “the deadliest battle for U.S. troops since July 2008.”

When Polish, Dutch or German soldiers die, the stories are often much the same. Politicians, and frequently the national media as well, salute their heroism and express the thanks of the nation. Patriotic songs are played at the funerals, which are sometimes featured on the news. Usually a number is mentioned: the 221 British troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001, the roughly 850 Americans, 131 Canadians, 36 French soldiers, 34 Germans, 21 Dutch, 22 Italians, 26 Spaniards, 15 Poles and others.

Sometimes, a political outburst follows, too. In recent days Prime Minister Brown has been attacked by an opponent on the grounds that British soldiers are “fighting and dying for an Afghan government that is deeply corrupt.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy has just been forced to declare that while French soldiers will for the moment stay in Afghanistan, “not one single more” will be sent in the future. Rising summer casualties have led to an intensifying debate in the Netherlands. And of course the American argument rages on.

Only very rarely do the casualties of one country make it into the media, the political debates or the prime ministerial speeches of another country. There has been an international coalition operating in Afghanistan since 2001. NATO has been in charge of that coalition since 2003. Yet to read the British press, one would think the British are there almost alone, fighting a war in which they have no national interest. The same is true in France and in the Netherlands. American media outlets hardly note the participation of other countries, even though some — Britain and Canada — have endured casualties at a higher rate than that of the U.S. military, relative to the size of their contingents.

There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces: Most of the war’s European critics want to know why their boys are fighting “for the Americans,” not for NATO. Most of the American critics dismiss the European contribution as useless or ignore it altogether. As Jackson Diehl pointed out Monday, the central debate about future Afghanistan policy is taking place in Washington without any obvious contributions from anybody else. I’m not going to blame the U.S. administration alone for this: It’s not as if Europe has put forward a different plan — and there was certainly a moment, back at the beginning of this administration, when that would have been very welcome.

The fact is that the idea of “the West” has been fading for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic, as countless “whither-the-Alliance” seminars have been ritually observing for the past decade. But the consequences are now with us: NATO, though fighting its first war since its foundation, inspires nobody. The members of NATO feel no allegiance to the alliance, or to one another. On its home continent, NATO does precious little military contingency planning, preferring to hold summits. Above all, there is no recognizable alliance leader who is willing or able to engage in the national debates of the various member countries, to argue in favor of the Afghan mission or any other. President Obama could in theory do this, but I’m guessing the idea doesn’t fill him with inspiration.

None of this might matter much in Afghanistan, since the outcome of current deliberations may well be some version of the status quo. But the next time NATO is needed, I doubt whether it will be there at all.

Yet by far the most interesting thing about the Italian prime minister is this: Italians keep voting for him. The somewhat ragged coalition he leads — Il Popolo della Libertà, the People of Freedom — won a decisive general election victory in 2008 and trounced the opposition in European parliamentary elections in June 2009. Whether or not you agree with his daughter, who says he “will go down in the history books as the longest-serving and most loved leader in the history of the Italian republic,” you cannot argue with the fact that he has been the dominant force in Italian politics since he first became prime minister in 1994. But why?

There seem to be several answers, some of which are connected to the weird impasse that brought him to power in the first place. In the early 1990s, Italy’s political system unraveled following a series of judicial investigations that revealed profound corruption permeating the entire Italian political class. As a result, all of the major political parties and all of the leading political figures vanished overnight, sometimes literally: Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian socialist party for nearly 20 years, fled to Tunisia to escape prison and eventually died in exile.

Berlusconi stepped into the vacuum, promising to talk about issues no one else had dared touch — notably mass immigration from North Africa — and to deal with problems no one else could solve, including the convoluted tax laws and notorious bureaucracy. But in retrospect it is clear that Berlusconi (whose record on actually carrying out any of his reforms is pretty slim) has also brought the counterrevolution: He had made his career under the old system — as had many other people — and, once in power, he brought an end to the judicial purge. Italians, journalist Beppe Severgnini told me, “were afraid of their own bravery.” They were also afraid of chaos, and in a country that has had, on average, a different government every year for the past six decades, Berlusconi, a familiar figure for many years, has come to represent a kind of stability. The Italian left is disorganized, the center-right is paralyzed, and a lot of people prefer the devil they know.

Of course, Berlusconi also has at least one tool that none of the others have: popular television. He controls three mainstream channels and various digital channels because he owns them. He also in effect controls state television because he is the prime minister. There are newspapers, magazines and late-night talk shows that criticize him, but they don’t reach the same numbers of people: Much like his friend Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, he doesn’t try to exert influence over all of the media, just the media that reach most of the voters.

That may not determine the outcome of elections, but it sure helps. It has also made Italy the center of the largest movement for press freedom outside the former Soviet Union.

But in the end, even that dominance can’t explain all of his votes. There has to be something appealing about Berlusconi himself as well. Severgnini has called him a “mirror” of modern Italy, and one sees what he means: Nouveau riche (like almost everyone in the country) and not afraid to show it off (remember that Sardinian villa); a lover of women and soccer (he owns the team A.C. Milan); loyal to his friends (even protecting them from the law); and clearly enjoying himself at those parties and on his yacht, Berlusconi leads a kind of caricature version of the ideal Italian life. And precisely because he is a caricature, he gets away with things that other people can’t. One hears Italians regale one another with Berlusconi stories and then howl with laughter.

Besides, with Berlusconi as your prime minister, you don’t have to take yourself too seriously. You don’t have to trouble yourself with geopolitics or the state of the planet, or poverty and failed states. You can stay at home, remain unserious and argue about the latest legal scandal. And maybe that, too, is part of the Italian prime minister’s appeal.

Both had changed their minds because they were tired of hearing politicians endlessly urging them to do so. Some also felt that, during the worst recession in recent memory, they might need Europe’s help. Not many Irish seem to have been inspired by the high ideals and lofty aspirations of what is sometimes called “the European project”: Although a whopping two-thirds of Irish voters said yes to the treaty, there wasn’t much audible or visible enthusiasm. A few politicians in Ireland and across the continent hailed the referendum as a “great victory for Europe,” but no one believed them. And thus did Europe take another, limping step toward the creation of a unified foreign policy apparatus, complaining bitterly all the way.

Which is not a bad thing: If Europe is to have a single apparatus to make its foreign policy, it is important that nobody has too many illusions about it. When the referendum failed last year, I wrote that it was for the best, since “European” foreign policy has always been most successful when it represents the wishes of the national governments of at least two or three large countries plus several small ones, and has always been most disastrous when carried out by bureaucrats in Brussels who don’t represent anyone in particular. I hesitate to use the tainted expression “coalitions of the willing,” but actually they work very well, in diplomacy as well as in military conflicts.

Still, since I don’t feel like railing against the inevitable this week, and since I suspect that there really will be a European president and a European foreign minister in the near future, it’s worth contemplating what that might mean. Clearly, the real test of whether Europe’s most powerful countries are taking this new treaty seriously wasn’t the Irish referendum. The question of whether the recalcitrant Czech president will finally be browbeaten into signing the thing is irrelevant, too (and if he does, it will certainly not represent a “triumph of the European ideal,” whatever they say in Brussels).

But do watch closely, over the coming months, to see who is selected to fill these jobs, and, more important, how they are chosen. Traditionally, leaders of multilateral institutions are selected through a process of elimination: The person who is the least interesting, least opinionated and least influential gets the job, precisely because nobody else objects. Yet this is not how the president or prime minister of a country is selected: He gets the job because he has convinced the electorate that he is better than somebody else. I’m not saying that democracy always produces the most gifted leaders, but it does frequently produce politicians who are willing to argue loudly in favor of some things and against others. By contrast, people often wind up running multilateral institutions — and not just European ones — because they are not willing to argue about anything at all.

Here, then, is how to evaluate the Lisbon Treaty: If there really is a coalition of the willing in favor of a common European policy, then it will support the selection of forceful and opinionated leaders. Europe will then have, in Henry Kissinger’s immortal phrasing, a phone number to call when America (or Russia, or China) wants to talk. And if there is no such coalition? Then you won’t hear much about the president or the foreign minister of Europe again, so it doesn’t really matter.

At the same time there is another Iran — a completely different country, as it were. This is the Iran of the democracy movement, the Iran analyzed by human rights activists, the Iran covered by the sort of journalist who takes covert photographs with a cellphone. This is the Iran that made the news more than a week ago when protesters turned a government-controlled anti-Israel march into a spontaneous anti-government demonstration.

The people who care about this second Iran are rarely much interested in the first one, and vice versa. The two groups sometimes seem almost antagonistic. When demonstrations exploded across Iran after the June elections, for example, many well-meaning people urged the American president to distance himself from both the riots and the rioters, at least partly on the grounds that any involvement might affect his ability to deal with the nuclear issue. Indeed, that choice seemed to suit President Obama, a highly rational man who clearly dislikes fuss, mess and emotional upheaval. At that time, the White House made a choice: It would deal with the Iran described by security experts and leave the other Iran to sort itself out. Iranian human rights issues, Iranian democracy — these were domestic matters, the president’s advisers concluded. They repeated their offer to meet Iran’s leaders.

Nothing came of that offer, of course, because Iran is not two countries. And the people who make decisions about Iran’s nuclear program are the same people who order the arrests, tortures and murders of dissidents. Indeed, one can learn quite a lot about how these Iranian decision-makers will behave abroad by observing their behavior at home. It is, for example, unlikely that a regime that publicly and repeatedly describes its opponents as American stooges and British spies is going to change its tune and cooperate with America or Britain any time soon. At the same time, a regime under immense political pressure and losing its legitimacy is not in a good position to break any new diplomatic ground and is therefore unlikely to end its nuclear program any time soon.

If that sounds bleak, it doesn’t have to. For the observation that Iran is one country also suggests that the West has some foreign-policy tools in Iran that it has not yet seriously tried to use. Many, many security experts have pointed out again over the past several days that we don’t have many good options once we officially declare that Iran plans to build a nuclear bomb. There are sanctions, which probably won’t work; there are bombing raids, which might not hit all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, given how many appear to be hidden in mountains; and there is war, which would be a catastrophe.

Very few security experts point out that there is another option. What do Iran’s rulers truly fear? I’ll wager that the answer is not sanctions and that it might not be a bombing raid, either. An economic boycott can be circumvented, after all, with the help of Venezuela or maybe the Russian mafia, and an attack on Iranian soil might help the regime once again consolidate power. By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic? What if President Obama held up a photograph of Neda, the young girl murdered by Iranian police last summer, at his next news conference? What if he did that at every news conference? I bet that would unnerve President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, far more than the loss of some German machine tool imports or Dutch tomatoes.

I do realize that many will roll their eyes at these suggestions and argue, as the Obama administration did over the summer, that an aggressive focus on Iran’s massive human rights violations would allow the regime to cry “foreign meddling” and attack its opponents as spies. But so what? They do that already. Given the potential for disaster lurking behind almost every other policy option, we have nothing to lose by trying.

Let’s be even franker: President Obama’s decision to attend the 65th anniversary observance of the D-Day landings in France in June was mystifying. Why 65th? It’s not even a round number. He was not originally expected to come and, indeed, his presence meant that the guest list — the queen of England wasn’t even on it — had to be rapidly expanded at the last minute. It was nice for the veterans that he was there, particularly as he gave a terrific speech, lauding the ordinary men who, “At an hour of maximum danger, amid the bleakest of circumstances . . . found within themselves the ability to do something extraordinary.” But the political impact was limited, and no more troops for Afghanistan materialized then, either.

Let’s be franker still: It is impossible to escape the impression that, at least in its relations with Europe, the Obama administration is following directly in the footsteps of the Bush administration. For the past decade, the old continent has been treated as a great photo opportunity — the Obama campaign even used the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop for a speech last summer — and as an excellent place to talk about stirring deeds of the past. But neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to consider Europe worthy of experienced ambassadors — Obama, like Bush, has sent a notable number of campaign donors — or of serious diplomacy.

As for Central Europe, it isn’t considered worthy of any diplomacy at all. Last week, the Czech prime minister was roused from his bed after midnight to be informed by the White House of a non-urgent decision many months in the making: the cancellation of the missile defense program. The Polish prime minister refused to take a similar call (and the foreign minister, to whom — full disclosure — I am married, was asleep). But this is nothing new, either: The Bush White House’s original decision to place the missile shield and radar in Central Europe was made before any Central Europeans were consulted — not at midnight and not at mid-day. The official letter from the Pentagon in 2007 arrived with a suggested “response”: The governments in Prague and Warsaw were supposed to sign on the dotted line and send it back.

In fact, missile defense was unpopular then and is unpopular now, all across Europe. Poles and Czechs favored the American bases only because they would bring American troops to their territory. But they favor American troops on their territory only because two successive American presidents have refused to invest in NATO’s presence in Central Europe and haven’t seemed much interested in doing anything else in Europe. This has led some to fear that Americans aren’t as committed to the basic precepts of the NATO Treaty — an attack on one member state is an attack on all — as they used to be. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone out of her way to deny that this is the case, but at a time when Russia and others are making heavy military investments, it is a widespread perception all the same.

All of which makes for a paradox: In Europe, President Obama is still the most popular American leader in recent memory. Yet he has failed to capitalize on this popularity, in part because he has failed to use it. His only message in Europe so far — “send more troops to Afghanistan” — has been clouded by his own ambivalence about the Afghan mission. He has not tried to convince anyone that he’s rethought Afghanistan, and he hasn’t come up with any other joint security tasks for the world’s largest and most powerful democracies. Just for starters, he could tell his European friends that he won’t appear in any more photographs with them unless they agree to talk about the contingency plans and NATO joint exercises that the alliance abandoned years ago.

Europeans are to blame, too. The beginning of a new administration was a chance for them to make a fresh start, to bring ideas to the White House instead of waiting for the White House to speak first. Poleaxed by recession and still unable to speak with anything resembling a unified voice, though, Europeans remain as placid and passive about their defense as always. Yes, it is possible that even the most popular U.S. president in living memory can’t make them sit up and pay attention to the potential threats of energy blackmail from Russia, of a nuclear Iran or of international terrorism in their own back yards. But it would be far more reassuring if he were at least trying.

Item Two: Pick up a copy of the September issue of GQ magazine. Buried deep inside is an article titled “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power,” by Scott Anderson. The article, based on extensive reporting, argues that Russian security services helped create a series of bomb explosions in Moscow in 2000 — explosions that were blamed on Chechen terrorists at the time. But you will not find this article in GQ’s Russian edition. As of this writing, you will not find this article on GQ’s Web site either: Conde Nast, the media company that owns GQ, has ordered its magazines and affiliates around the world to refrain from mentioning or promoting this article in any way.

Item Three: If your knowledge of written Chinese characters is up to it, type the word “Tiananmen” into Google.cn (www.google.cn). I do not know Chinese myself but am reliably informed that your search will retrieve little or no useful information on this subject, nor will it tell you much about Taiwan or Tibet or democracy. This is not an accident: In 2006, Google agreed to a modicum of censorship in China, in exchange for being allowed to operate there at all.

These three incidents are not identical. Yale Press refused to print the cartoons because the university fears retaliatory violence on its campus. Conde Nast refused to promote an article on the Russian secret service because it fears a loss of Russian advertisers. Google refuses to let its Chinese users search for “Tiananmen” and other taboo subjects because Google wants to compete against Chinese search engines for a share of the huge Chinese market. All three companies exhibit greatly varying degrees of remorse, too, from Conde Nast (none) to the Yale Press (a lot) to Google (ambivalent: Google founder Sergey Brin initially argued that the company would at least bring more information to China, if not complete information).

Nevertheless, the three stories lead to one conclusion: In different ways, the Russian government, the Chinese government and unnamed Islamic terrorists are now capable of placing de facto controls on American companies — something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In a world that seems more dangerous and less profitable than it did in the past, either greed or fear proved stronger than these companies’ commitment to free speech.

By caving to pressure, they have not made the world a safer place, however, either for themselves or for anyone else. Google’s submission to Chinese censorship in 2006 has not prevented the Chinese government from continuing to harass the company, allegedly for distributing pornography. On the contrary, it may have encouraged China to attempt, quite recently, to force companies to place filters on all computers sold in the country. By the same token, Conde Nast’s climb-down will only encourage Russian companies — many of which are de facto state-owned — to exert pressure on their Western partners, making it harder for others to publish controversial material about Russia in the future. The fact that Yale’s press, one of the most innovative in the country, will not publish the Danish cartoons only makes it harder for others to publish them, too. [Declaration of interest: I am editing an anthology for Yale University Press and have long admired its commitment to opening Soviet archives.]

In fact, each time an American company caves to illiberal pressure, the atmosphere is worse for everyone else. Each alteration made in the name of placating an illiberal group or government makes that group or government stronger. What seems a small lapse of integrity now might well loom larger in the future. All of these companies are making it much harder for everyone else to continue speaking and publishing freely around the world.

There is no law or edict that can force these companies, or any American company, to abide by the principles of free speech abroad. But at least it is possible to embarrass them at home. Hence this column.

Given how different the political cultures of North America and Europe are sometimes alleged to be, the similarity of the arguments is striking. In the States, George Will has just pointed out that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has lasted longer than its participation in World Wars I and II combined. In Germany, the defense minister caused an uproar by predicting that German troops might be in Afghanistan for another decade; opposition leaders immediately started calling for a much faster withdrawal. Faced with public disapproval, the Canadians have had to promise to withdraw troops by 2011. The Dutch are supposed to pull out in 2010. At a conference I attended in Amsterdam last weekend, a large audience cheered when a panelist denounced the war. Demands for a time frame — “two more years and then out” — can be heard almost everywhere.

Equally universal (and bipartisan) are complaints that the war’s aims are unclear or unrealistic. A British defense official resigned last week, saying he no longer believed the nation would accept the government’s justifications for the war, which have ranged from “fighting terrorists” to controlling heroin exports. Tom Friedman this week demanded to know “what it will cost, how much time it could take, what U.S. interests make it compelling.” Others grumble that we should be focused on the “real” problems, such as Pakistan, or on an “achievable” solution, whatever that may be.

Which is, if you think about, all rather strange, since the goals of the war have never been in doubt in any European or North American capital. “Winning” means we leave with a minimally acceptable government in place; “losing” means the Taliban takes over and al-Qaeda comes back. No one has ever pretended it would be easy. But this is a war that has never been properly explained to most of the populations fighting it. For years it has simply been the “good war,” as opposed to the “bad war” in Iraq, and no one felt the need to argue further.
The results of this silence are most visible in those European countries whose people have been conned into believing that their troops aren’t really fighting in Afghanistan but, rather, participating in an extensive armed charity operation. Germans, for example, were deeply disturbed to learn that a German commander called for the NATO airstrike that killed some 90 Afghans in Kunduz last week. This news surprised those Germans who thought their troops in Afghanistan were doing reconstruction work. Americans seemed shocked to discover that Marines were fighting this summer to retake previously safe areas, that the election was not going smoothly and that the government of President Hamid Karzai was corrupt. All of that has been clear for some time. But who was talking about it?

Following the lead of one of the region’s most clairvoyant experts, Ahmed Rashid, I would argue that the situation in Afghanistan is not yet hopeless. As I wrote on the eve of the election, there is still a definite Afghan majority that wants not only peace but also some version of democracy. The central government still has a modicum of legitimacy, though it may not last long. The plan to increase troop levels in the near future to give the Afghan army time to grow stronger in the long term is not naive, particularly if accompanied by sensible investments in roads and agriculture. But such a plan cannot be carried out without public support, and public support will not be forthcoming unless politicians agitate for it.

This, then, is the moment for Barack Obama to demonstrate that he knows how to persuade. One or two quick trips to Europe and another behind-the-scenes plea for “more troops” aren’t going to do it: Europeans may like Obama better than George W. Bush, but they don’t yet believe he is any more committed to Afghanistan than his predecessor was. Nor will Americans be convinced by a speech or two, however soaring the rhetoric or elegant the turns of phrase.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Obama needs to cajole and convince, to produce plans and evidence, to show he has gathered the best people and the most resources possible — to campaign, in other words, and campaign hard. If the health-care debate will determine his domestic fortunes, the outcome in Afghanistan will make or break his foreign policy. He has said many times that he supports the Afghan war in principle. Now we’ll see whether he supports it in practice.

None of these basic facts is in dispute. And two generations have passed since the war ended. Nevertheless, all of its signature events continue to be remembered, contested and commemorated in every anniversary year ending with 5 or 0. I remember joking with a friend on May 8, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the Nazi capitulation, that now, finally, we had reached the end of the anniversaries. But we had not. On Tuesday, the chancellor of Germany and the prime ministers of Russia, Poland, France, Britain and 20-odd other European countries will meet near Gdansk to launch the cycle of 70th anniversaries — with those of the 65th barely over. Why?

The answer cannot lie in the personal experiences of any of the statesmen involved, since none was alive at the time. It lies, rather, in the way that memories of the war have come to be central to the national memory and, therefore, to the contemporary politics of so many of the countries that fought in it.

Certainly everything about modern Germany is the way it is because of the war, from its devotion to the European Union and its pacifism to the architecture of its capital city. War guilt is built into the political system, and it only becomes controversial when some Germans seem to want to abandon it: The new wave of interest in the fate of Germans who fled or were expelled from Central Europe after the war, for example, or the popularity of books about Allied bombings of German cities, worries many in the region. Hence, Angela Merkel’s presence in Gdansk (and she was the first to confirm): No German chancellor wants any of Germany’s neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany’s neighbors to fear German aggression today.

For Poles, this 70th anniversary has a different significance: It’s the first time this particular event has been commemorated by a Polish government that is firmly a member of both the European Union and NATO. The British and the French will be there for the same reason — Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions. By and large, they have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Senior U.S. politicians presumably will be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously and increasingly don’t mind demonstrating that fact. Generally speaking, the former Allies prefer to remember the bits of the war — D-Day, for example — that contribute to their memory of the 1945 Triumph of Democracy, preferring to forget that the war’s initial raison d’etre, the independence of Poland and the freedom of Central Europe, was not really achieved until 1989.

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, seems to have rather different reasons for attending. Last weekend, Russian state television ran a long documentary essentially arguing that Stalin was justified in ordering the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Baltic states — and in making a secret deal with Hitler — on the grounds that Poland itself was in a “secret alliance” with the Nazis. Putin will probably not defend this startling and ahistorical thesis himself — judging from an article he has written for the Polish media — though he may well try to “contextualize” the pact between Hitler and Stalin by comparing it to other diplomatic decisions. Lately other Russians have expressed similarly positive views of the events of 1939 in a well-coordinated attempt to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. (That is, if they have any views: The majority of Russians, a recent poll shows, do not know that the Soviet Union invaded anybody that year.)

But from the perspective of the Russian ruling elite, such interpretations make sense: By praising Stalin’s aggression toward the Soviet Union’s neighbors 70 years ago, they help justify Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors today, at least in the eyes of the Russian public. Certainly they serve to make Russia’s Central European neighbors anxious — precisely the opposite of the effect Merkel hopes to achieve. Thus can the same event have multiple meanings, thus do Germans and Russians express their radically different feelings about their place in Europe — and thus do the anniversary celebrations carry on, every five years, without fail.

It was a stark message, but in one sense a very useful one. Sometimes, when one stares too long at Afghanistan, all one sees are tangled webs of complexity: hundreds of ethnic groups; dozens of languages; political clans pulled in different directions by corruption, drugs and billions of dollars of Western aid. As a result, even people who have been there a long time have trouble defining who, exactly, we are fighting against. The Taliban is sometimes described as an ideological force, sometimes as a loose ethnic coalition, sometimes as a band of mercenaries — men who fight because they don’t have anything else to do. But perhaps with this election, we can start to use a narrower definition: The Taliban is the organization that wants to blow up polling stations.

The threat is useful in another sense: It reminds us of what we are fighting for — by which I don’t simply mean “democracy.” We are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia, after all, but an Afghan government that is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans — a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps. If there were someone acceptable to all factions, we might presumably consider helping the Afghans restore the monarchy. For that matter, if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I suspect, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn’t, and they won’t. Which means that democratic elections — which the majority of Afghans support — are the only means of establishing any Afghan government’s legitimacy. It isn’t that we are setting the bar “too high” by holding elections in Afghanistan; it’s that we don’t have anything better to offer.

And that is why the Taliban is trying to scare Afghanistan’s voters. It won’t be able to stop the elections altogether, and it won’t be able to shut down all the polling stations. But that isn’t the Taliban’s intent: Its goal is to make the elections appear illegitimate, so that doubts about the president’s right to rule will haunt the winner throughout his term of office. If it can lower the turnout dramatically in the southern part of the country; if it can intimidate women and prevent them from voting; if it can cast a shadow over the fairness of the counting; above all, if it can convince Afghans that the election was inconclusive, it will have achieved a great deal.

Without doubt, whoever wins carries baggage. Hamid Karzai, the current president, has many detractors (who accuse him of corruption) and a few admirers (who think he is a conciliator). Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister, is a brilliant economist but somewhat remote from ordinary Afghans. Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister, Ramazan Bashardost, the former planning minister, and all of the other 41 candidates have their pluses and minuses, but that isn’t the point: It doesn’t matter who wins. It matters how the victor wins and that the outcome is accepted by most Afghans.

The American and NATO troops who will guard polling stations this week are crucial to that outcome. So are the efforts of Radio Free Afghanistan, which co-sponsored the country’s first live, televised presidential debate this week. (The station director, Akbar Ayazi, described the process of persuading candidates to participate as so difficult that “I could take people to Mars probably by now.”)

All of that, however, pales next to the importance of what we do after the voting. Our policy — meaning, that of the Western world and the United Nations — must be to endorse and support whichever candidate emerges the legitimate winner, lending the victor further credibility and weakening further the Taliban leaders who opposed the election. We should do what we can (not much, I realize) to encourage Afghanistan’s neighbors — Iran, Russia, Pakistan — to do the same. And if, for any reason, a legitimate president does not emerge? Then the tangled webs will once again unfurl themselves, the clans and the tribes and the paid mercenaries will start choosing sides, the people who blow up polling stations will have gained credibility — and we will have to think hard about whether to stay in Afghanistan at all.

Yes, nothing happens in August — except, as we all know, when something really terrible happens in August. World War I began in August, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait began in August, al-Qaeda was preparing to bring down the World Trade Center in August. Nor is this an accident: If you want to surprise any American administration, do something nasty while the president is on vacation.

August, in other words, is the time when all of us should prepare our backup plans, chart our reversals of course, think through possible paradigm changes — which no one does, because they are all at Martha’s Vineyard or at least Ocean City. So for the interns who are manning the shop while everyone is out of town, here is a list of crises that are simmering on the back burner, one (or more!) of which could bubble over this month:

 – Iran. There are show trials going on right now in Tehran. The revolution is devouring its children.   Dozens of mid-level opposition leaders, many of them members of the former elite, are acting out an extraordinary piece of public theater, begging forgiveness and admitting impossible crimes. A former vice president of the Islamic Republic has asked a jury to give him the maximum punishment. French and British “spies” are in the dock as well, perhaps as a “test” of the West: Maybe the mullahs want to gauge how we might react to another, imminent wave of arrests, this time to include top-level opposition leaders such as Mir Hossein Mousavi, the “failed” presidential candidate, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president. And how will we react, exactly? Plan A was to talk to the Iranians in a reasonable tone of voice. What is Plan B?

– Russia and Georgia, again. It’s been a year since Russian tanks crossed Georgia’s borders and traveled within a few hours’ striking distance of the capital, Tbilisi. To mark the anniversary, South Ossetian “separatists” threw grenades into both Georgian and Russian border checkpoints while mysterious hackers, presumably Russian, temporarily shut down Twitter and Facebook all over the world, apparently in an effort to block a single Georgian blogger. Both Georgia and Russia are accusing one another of stoking a new conflict, which is exactly what happened before the last round of hostilities broke out. What if Russia invades again? Plan A was to press the “reset button” in relations with the Kremlin. What is Plan B?

 – Afghanistan. The surge is underway, and elections are scheduled for Aug. 20. Although the Taliban melted away into the hills when new waves of American troops poured into the southern provinces, they are taking their revenge in other ways, moving into the cities now as well as the previously peaceful north and western parts of the country. Some think the Taliban’s main goal, at the moment, is to disrupt the elections and therefore discredit whoever wins: Stability in Afghanistan requires a legitimate government, and everybody knows it. In Kandahar, three female parliamentary candidates have been forced out of their homes; another woman’s home was burned down because she dared to run for office. Insurgent attacks are increasing, not decreasing, nationwide and are expected to get worse just before and just after the voting. Plan A was to rout the Taliban, once and for all, with a single, massive infusion of troops, leave some kind of more or less acceptable government in place — and then go home. What is Plan B?

 – Iraq. I’m not going to belabor this one, since it’s been simmering on the back burner for years, and there’s no particular reason this August is any different from those past. But since I’ve already ruined your day on the beach by listing all of these dire scenarios, why not throw Iraq in the mix? After all, our current policy is to hand over power to Iraqi troops and go home. But what will we do in the event of a spectacular incident — say, the bombardment of one of the remaining American bases, or the kidnapping of American troops? Will we retake command? Go home anyway? Has anyone thought about it? I hope so.

At least, I hope someone was thinking about it before they went on vacation. Happy August.

As it happened, Bloom did have some ideas. He is a classically trained pianist who can mix a rap song, a composer whose work has been performed by the Israel Chamber Orchestra, Def Jam records and everything in between. Tinkering with musical instruments is the kind of thing he does for fun. Bloom went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, met the drummer and rigged up a drum set. Then he went back — again, and then again — until finally he founded a program, Musicorps, designed to teach music to disabled soldiers. It wasn’t just the appeal of “helping veterans” that drew Bloom in. It was also what he learned about what one of his proteges has memorably described as “the healing power of death metal.”

As that phrase perhaps conveys, Bloom’s project isn’t standard music therapy. On the contrary, after working with a few patients at Walter Reed, he realized that a severely injured person doesn’t need just a few guitar lessons or some soothing sounds but, rather, what he calls “real” music: serious, one-on-one, customized training; ongoing collaboration; and professional mentors who can give their co-musicians a sense of purpose, of moving forward. In pursuit of this idea, he persuaded donors to give him instruments, got Apple’s Steve Jobs to donate computers and set up what looks like a mini-recording studio in one of the residential houses at Walter Reed. Bloom started hanging around the house, ready to teach, practice or produce original music with the vets — or, if so required, to rewrite a piece of piano music so that a one-armed veteran could play it with his artificial hand.

The result? Well, there are halls of residence at Walter Reed where depressed young men sit in their rooms and stare at the walls. And then there is the music session I watched recently, during which a young soldier with an artificial leg, shrapnel wounds and no prior musical training practiced complex electric guitar riffs to the pace of an electronic drumbeat. A visiting guitarist kept setting that beat faster and faster, forcing the vet to play faster and faster, until all broke out in howls of laughter. Meanwhile, another soldier, who also has an artificial leg, tinkered with his rap lyrics. He hopes to get one of his songs, mixed and recorded at Walter Reed (”it’s about being blown up in Iraq”), played on the radio.

It was a cheerful scene, but it was more than that, too. Many of the soldiers at Walter Reed sustained some level of brain damage in the explosions that ripped off their arms or legs. Allen Brown, director of brain research and rehabilitation at the Mayo Clinic — and a Musicorps adviser — reckons that because the process of learning to play music requires using so many different parts of the brain, it may literally help the brain recover, to compensate for severe injury. Brown is working with Bloom, he told me, to devise a way to “clinically evaluate this process,” not least so that it can be repeated elsewhere. So far more than a dozen veterans have been helped by Musicorps; dozens more want to join. Thousands more could benefit. The word is spreading — the country singer John Rich visited last week — but nothing involving professional musicians can run on volunteer energy forever.

The project is extraordinary on its own — look on the Musicorps Web site  http://musicorps.net for more details — but it carries a constellation of implications. In the spring of 2007, Congress agonized over the fate of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, following a Washington Post investigation into shabby buildings and shabbier bureaucracy at the nation’s main military hospital. The fresh paint and better services that resulted from that scandal are only the beginning of what needs to be done.

It’s been a long, long time since there have been so many wounded Americans to care for, and neither our military nor our government are good at inventing customized recovery programs like Musicorps. Entrepreneurs like Bloom can come up with new solutions; the question is whether our health-care system, and our philanthropic organizations, have become too ossified to support them. In its narrow way, the fate of Bloom’s program will tell a lot about how well we are going to care for the thousands of men and women severely wounded in the wars of the past decade, men and women who will go on needing care for many decades to come.

“I don’t pay a lot of attention to what is said,” she told an interviewer before setting off on a trip to Asia, during which she seemed deliberately to court media attention and to care a lot about what was said. “I broke my elbow, not my larynx,” she pointed out. And then, defensively, “I have been deeply involved in the shaping and implementation of our foreign policy.”

 Hillary take off her burqa. Yes, it was memorable. And yes, it reflected just how hard it is to understand how, exactly, foreign policy gets made in this country. If only President Obama really were sitting in the White House, scheming with his inner circle, dreaming up diabolical plots, sending out detailed instructions to Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and the director of the CIA—issuing metaphorical burqas—then at least we’d all find things easier to analyze. But that’s how foreign policy gets made in North Korea, not the United States.
The fact is that the post of secretary of state is a fabulously ill-defined job. If she so desires, Clinton can engage the world in multiple ways. She can visit, she can write, and she can speak, knowing full well that everyone will hang onto her every word. She can hold town hall meetings in the countries she visits, and indeed she has done so. She has also done TV interviews, both in the United States and abroad. One presumes that she consults with the president on major speeches and key issues, but other than that, she sets her program.

Not only has she not been kept forcibly silent, in other words, but she possesses an extraordinary number of ways to set the agenda, and she has done so on several occasions. She created a small fuss in February by declaring that human rights debates with China aren’t very important, because “we already know what they are going to say.” Since then she’s gone out of her way to talk about human rights and its central importance to Americans. Last week in Asia, she caused a fuss by discussing a “defense umbrella” that the United States could theoretically create to protect the Middle East, in case Iran gets nuclear weapons. Since then, she—and others—have backpedaled: Leaving aside any implications for Iranian nuclear policy, her comments surely came as a surprise to other members of the administration who have been telling other people that missile defense programs are all on hold.