Volume 35, Number 15 · October 13, 1988
The Opposition
By Timothy Garton Ash
A comprehensive map of the opposition in East Central Europe today would resemble nothing so much as one of those kaleidoscopic multicolored maps of ethnic groups in this region before the war. In both Poland and Hungary, groups or grouplets whose identities or programs arise from specific postwar realities overlap or combine with groups raising almost every flag, slogan, aspiration, or prejudice of the prewar political spectrum (except communism): populists, reform economists, radical sociologists, Smallholders, Lutherans, Catholic 'base groups,' evangelical sects, democratic opposition, democratic youth, democratic academics, Solidarity, Fighting Solidarity, national democrats, liberal democrats, Christian democrats, social democrats, liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics, Christian socialists, Jews, anti-Semites, advocates of workers' self-government, apostles of free enterprise, syndicalists and monetarists, self-styled 'crazy liberals,' 'neorealists,' 'neopositivists': you name it, we have it. And this is merely the surface of explicit opposition. One could produce another rich catalog of official or semiofficial projects for 'reform.' Hungarian political scientists have coined the delightful term 'paradigm ecstasy.'[1]
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