to some 300,000 people who applied for clearance: an estimated 9,000 of them did not pass, a strikingly small number compared to the half a million Czechs and Slovaks who lost their jobs or were purged from the Party after 1968. But the more lasting impact of the legislation was the bad taste it left behind, contributing to a widespread cynicism in Czech society about the way in which the ‘velvet revolution’ had played itself out. ‘Lustration’ in the Czech Republic seemed to be more about legitimizing an incoming elite than dealing honestly with the outgoing past.
In July 1993 the Czech parliament adopted a ‘Law on the Illegality of and Resistance to the Communist Regime’, in effect declaring the Communist Party a criminal organization. In theory this should have criminalized millions of former Party members, but its impact was purely rhetorical and no action followed. Far from discrediting Communism and legitimizing its overthrow, the law merely reinforced the skeptical detachment of the public at whom it was directed. Ten years after the law was passed, opinion polls revealed that one Czech voter in five favored the unreconstructed (and perfectly legal) Communist Party, which remained the largest political organization in the country, with 160,000 members.
XXII. The Old Europe—and the New
‘You have to wonder why Europe does not seem capable of taking decisive action in its own theatre’.
‘Si c’etait a refaire, je commencerais par la culture’ (‘If I were starting over, I would begin with culture’.)
‘It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness’.
‘What is the explanation of this curious combination of the permanent unemployment of eleven percent of the population with a general sense of comparative prosperity on the part of the bulk of the population?’
The fissile political temper of the Nineties was not confined to the countries of the former Communist East. The same urge to escape the bonds of centralized rule—or else to relinquish responsibility for impoverished fellow citizens in distant provinces—was felt in the West. From Spain to the United Kingdom the established territorial units of Western Europe were subjected to extensive administrative decentralization, though they all managed more or less to retain at least the form of the conventional national state.
In some places this centrifugal propensity had already surfaced decades earlier, as we saw in Chapter 16. In Spain, where the longstanding demand for autonomy in Catalonia or the Basque region had been recognized by the new constitution, Catalonia especially had emerged within a generation as virtually a state-within-a-state, with its own language, institutions and governing councils. Thanks to a 1983 Law of Linguistic Normalization (
None of the other Spanish regions was to acquire quite this level of national distinctiveness; but then none of them carried the same weight within the country as a whole. In 1993 Catalonia, one of seventeen Spanish regions, accounted for a fifth of the country’s GNP. Over a quarter of all foreign investment in Spain came to Catalonia, much of it to the flourishing provincial capital, Barcelona; per capita income in the province as a whole was more than 20 percent above the national average. If Catalonia were an independent country it would count among the more prosperous states on the European continent.
One reason for the rise of a distinctive Catalan identity was an easily stoked resentment at the substantial contribution Catalans were expected to make to the national exchequer, thanks in part to the setting up in 1985 of an Inter-Territorial Compensation Fund to assist Spain’s poorest regions. But Catalonia—like the Basque country, Galicia, Navarre and other newly assertive autonomous provinces—also benefited from the hollowing out of ‘Spanishness’. Franco had exploited to exhaustion the traditional gamut of national claims—the glory of Empire, the honour of the military, the authority of the Spanish Church—and after his fall many Spaniards had scant interest in the rhetoric of heritage or tradition.
Indeed, rather like an earlier generation of post-authoritarian Germans, the Spanish were decidedly inhibited about ‘talking national’. Regional or provincial identification, on the other hand, was unpolluted by authoritarian association: on the contrary, it had been a favorite target of the old regime and could thus credibly be presented as an integral aspect of the transition to democracy itself. This association between autonomy, separatism and democracy was less clear in the Basque case, where ETA pursued its murderous path (even mounting assassination attempts in 1995 on both the king and the prime minister). Moreover, whereas the six million Catalans were prospering, the old industrial districts of the Basque country were in decline. Unemployment was endemic and income levels in the region were lower than in Catalonia, hovering close to the national average.
If Basque nationalists failed to capitalize on these problems it was in large measure because many of the region’s two million inhabitants were new to the area—by 1998 only one person in four could even speak
In Spain, the splintering of the nation-state was driven by past memories. In Italy it was more often the product of present discontents. The traditionally dissident regions of Italy were in the far north: frontier zones where the local population had been assigned Italian identity within living memory—often as a result of war and usually against their will—and where most of them still spoke French or German or Slovene in preference to Italian. Much of the discontent in these areas had been mollified thanks to a series of agreements establishing newly autonomous regions: the Val d’Aosta in the Alpine north-west where Italy, France and Switzerland converge; the Trentino-Alto Adige, abutting Austria’s Tyrol; and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in the ethnically uncertain borderlands along the Yugoslav (later Slovene) frontier. Such regions also benefitted (as we have already seen in the case of the Alto Adige) from a range of regional subsidies and other encouragements from the European Union in Brussels. By the 1990s, with the further help of Alpine tourism and the passage of time, Italy’s northern frontier lands had faded from political view: regional pockets in a regionalized continent.
Their place, however, had been taken by a decidedly more threatening form of regional separatism. Since 1970, in belated accordance with a provision of the post-war Constitution, Italy had been sub-divided into fifteen regions, in addition to five autonomous provinces (the three frontier districts together with Sardinia and Sicily). There were certainly sufficient precedents: Piedmont, or Umbria, or Emilia had at least as strong a claim to historical distinction as Catalonia or Galicia, and although the regional linguistic distinctions that had been so striking just a few decades before were now fading, they had not yet completely disappeared.
But the new regions of Italy—in contrast to those of Spain—were largely an administrative fiction. For all that they boasted their own elected councils and authorities—and employed large numbers of people—the regional
