SLAVENKA DRAKULIC
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have a democratic constitution, okay; you have a multiparty system, and
you have free elections. There are the three institutions that you have."
Yet these are no more than formalities, since all the parties are really
working very much within the mentality of a one-party system. Then
you say, "Well, this is giving democracy a bad name, it's somehow
changing the concept of democracy itself, because they are using this
word, this concept, and democracy is not really happening." So what you
have is some kind of a backlash, even a danger that at some point people
will say, "Oh, this is democracy? This is what we were fighting for?
Excuse me, we are losing jobs, we don't have any security, there's an
economic crisis, the people in government are the same people as before
- in many countries, literally - so they are corrupt, they are just putting
the money in their pockets."
Democracy is something that people have to take, that they have to
build - slowly. And for people in Eastern Europe who have been living
all their lives with a totalitarian mentality, it's very difficult. I have seen
how it works. They are afraid to even start doing the little things - hold–
ing gatherings, forming ideas, citizens' groups - and thus it is going very
slowly, because on the one hand you have very authoritarian govern–
ments, and on the other hand, the people don't have the feeling that they
are citizens, that they are individuals, especially not in mass societies like
nationalist ones.
Daphne Merkin:
You began earlier in the evening by saying that one of
the problems with the media representation of the war is its focus on
peasants, which reduces our perception of the population to an "other,"
other than ourselves, a view I don't particularly agree with. But what
surprises me is, I understand American diffidence about intervening;, but
why are you diffident as an observer - not as a politician, which you said
you are not, but as a writer and observer - about the American impulse to
intervene, which is based precisely on the perception that these are not
"others," but humans like ourselves? You did make one rather slighting
remark about American intervention not always being successful, but as
someone else pointed out, in fact it has been successful in major instances.
Slavenka D rakulic:
In the Second World War, yes.
Daphne Merkin:
Counter-aggression is commonly the only way to stop
certain kinds of aggression. So your diffidence puzzles me, more than
American diffidence, and I wonder if you're resigned, more than you
know- this is a question, or speculation- to the "otherness" of this war,
its "in-house" quality. Is your equivocating when you were asked about
American intervention in fact a reflection of your own sense that this is a
