HOW CAN GERMANY DEFUSE ITS NEIGHBORS' FEARS?
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style.
Yes, Tudjman has indeed been engaged in the rehabilitation of cer–
tain abominable practices of World War II, although he himself fought
against fascism. Yes, he has been involved in a kind of "moderate Holo–
caust revisionism." But as Ambassador Zimmerman stated in
Foreign
Af
fairs,
Tudjman also listened to what he was told by the West. Since
1991, neither Milosevic nor Karadzic ever listened to what they were
told by the West. So from time to time, as Hugh Seton-Watson said in
1939, both the Serbs and the Croats are mad.
Patrick Kelly:
Next question, please.
Mitchell Ash:
To Vladimir Tismaneanu: Jens Reich wrote about the
self-delusions of intellectuals in Eastern Germany. He suggests that the
East German dissidents were not really antipolitical but profoundly
unpolitical. They insisted on a moral position and confused that with
political thinking. Therefore, they could not understand the political
forces that were released by the movement they themselves began, after
the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is to say, the dissidents seem to have
removed themselves from the political stage even in advance, as it were,
of their actual physical removal. So it's not that they were unpopular,
but that they had no connection with the people of East Germany.
Vladimir Tismaneanu:
Yes, they had a poor perception of what the
average East German citizen may have thought; however, under state so–
cialism, communication between the dissidents of culture and society at
large would have been unthinkable. The only form through which the
dissidents could communicate was through the West German media, or
West Berlin communities. The second form, and here I would agree,
was the religious, the Protestant community. Although the Protestant,
Lutheran, and Catholic communities also had many doubts about their
involvement with the East German dissident movement, they actually
supported it. They offered a protective shield to the peace movement,
and to the conscientious objectors. But with the exception of Poland's
Solidarity in its early phase, none of the dissident movements had a plan
for the future. Dissident cultures are the discourses of dissent. Gaspar
Tamas has been directly involved. He wrote an extremely critical piece
about the dissident legacy, in
The Times Literary Supplement
last year. I
think the problem of the dissident movements was that they stuck very
much to human rights, which is extremely abstract. They didn't address
the reorganization of economic stuctures, for example, of state-owned
