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ethnically pure state, I would say something very simple. The idea of the
ethnically pure state is a function of economic backwardness. If you have
a prosperous country, you cannot be ethnically pure because people from
other countries will emigrate there. It is precisely because some countries
are still so poor that no one wants to emigrate there; in fact, a large
proportion of the population dream of emigrating themselves. That so
many of the citizens of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe
would leave, if they could, to go to the "West," shows how tragically
anachronistic the value of the ethnically pure state is. I remember being
asked by an interviewer the first time I came to Budapest, "What is the
first thing you notice about the city?" The interviewer expected me to
say something about the handsome buildings or the Danube. I answered
that I was not accustomed to being in a city where there are only white
people.
We can look at what is happening in Japan. Japan is one of the
countries with the strongest idea of an ethnically pure state, but it now
has a foreign population of immigrant workers - very difficult for the
Japanese to accept. If the countries of Eastern Europe do become pros–
perous, they will not be able
to
hold on to these old values. These are
the values of poverty. The people of Eastern Europe will have to live as
the rest of us do, with the fact that all human societies which have
reached a decent standard of living will be multi-ethnic and multi-cul–
tural. How we are going to manage this is a tremendous problem in all
prosperous countries. In America we have more experience in this be–
cause we were a settler country to begin with. But people in all the rich
countries are in a state of shock, for they know that even their local
communities are no longer likely to be homogeneous. The point is that
this, and not the tribal state, is the future.
Vladimir Tismaneanu:
These are ailments, I think, of the transition
period. Speaking of what Adam suggested and I think I suggested myself,
there seems to be a resurgence of ethnocentric movements that can be
seen as well in very prosperous countries, where the vote in this direction
makes up ten or fifteen percent of the total. I think that it has been one
of the myths of sociology that economic prosperity and other de–
velopments of modernization in any way suppress a number of nostalgias
and mythological needs, such as have been seen even in Western Europe
lately - varieties of new or old nationalisms that have been disquieting to
many people.
The second element I link to the French intellectuals, such as
Franyois Furet, who have helped us greatly
to
understand the Jacobin
dimension in that of course polymorphic revolutionary project. They
