In From The Cold: Post-Soviet Legacies in America

In 1945 two very different types of imperial project met on the continent of Europe. Despite all that might have seemed chaotic and spontaneous in the last years of the Second World War, nothing in this meeting was left to chance:

In Europe the demarcation lines had been drawn between 1943-45, both by agreement at various summits between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, and by virtue of the fact that only the Red Army could defeat Germany.¹

In the town of Plzen the triumphant Sixteenth Division of the Third Army rolled in, only to stop and wait for the Red Army to take Prague. By any standards of realpolitik, such casual ceding of ground to an imperial rival looks absurd. Yet as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out there were real affinities between the US and the Soviet Union at this point of the War, united as they were against the Fascist enemy.² Not only this but the prominence of local communists in resistance movements across the continent produced, for the first time, several mass Communist Parties - notably in France and Italy. In Czechoslovakia the Communist Party had long been a mass political force, but elsewhere small, previously persecuted bands of party cadres were elevated to hero status. Yet as the postwar order began to take shape - in the midst of mass expulsions, expropriation of property, and sometimes ongoing armed insurgency - it was not the heroes of the resistance who took up roles in government, but increasingly a small band of what were known as 'Moscow Communists'. Meanwhile, in the western portion of the continent an epoch-defining plan was being put into effect by the highest brass of the American state. The delayed internationalisation of the Soviet model of rule (not by revolution but by stealth) would coincide with the internationalisation of the American state in the particular form it was given under FDR's New Deal. A global division of power was emerging that, until at least the early 1970s, looked absolute. This division would shape the foreign policies of the two empires in very different ways, and would ultimately produce very different results.

The Two Empires

To what extent is it academically useful, let alone theoretically cogent, to label either the USA or the USSR empires? Certainly neither was overtly colonialist in its ambitions, and formal colonial administration never played a defining role in either of their regional hegemonies. As is often noted, both were revolutionary states that defined themselves in opposition to traditional power hierarchies. While the USA tacitly supported an end to colonialism, the Soviet Union went all out for Third World liberation movements. Even formal colonies like the Philippines were regarded as anomalous, and certainly only temporary. Insofar as the Soviet Union inherited the geographical boundaries of the earlier Tsarist empire it could not help resembling its predecessor. Yet Lenin had from the earliest stages supported the right of national self-determination. The American riposte was President Wilson's Fourteen Points. The Soviet Union and the USA didn't merely voice opposition to Great Power imperialism, they acted differently to those old powers, through entirely different institutional structures of governance. The Soviet Union was a sort of radicalised autocracy which, though reminiscent of Tsarism, was much more brutal in its lack of tolerance for liberal institutions and bourgeois models of incorporation and inclusion of different classes. The Soviet state reflected very little of the kind of "class compromise" that characterised bourgeois liberal states, even those that existed before universal democratic suffrage. Meanwhile, the US had historically needed a much weaker national state, its attentions largely turned towards its own continental divisions. It was only with the recovery from the Long Depression (1873-79) and the creation of the Federal Reserve (1907) that US state capacities began the process of coming up to the levels of centralisation of the European powers, whose warring histories and often expansive empires necessitated more integrated governmental power.

Though they certainly did not resemble past empires, both the Soviet Union and the USA increasingly after 1945, and perhaps even since the Crash of 1929, were forced to take on the role of overseers and regulators of vast territories falling under their informal jurisdiction. Though Stalin's policy of 'Socialism in One Country' had always represented a certain confession of weakness - i.e. that the USSR could neither export its revolution abroad directly - the extraordinary victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War supplied ample space into which previously suppressed political ambitions, along with paranoias, could expand. Eastern Europe was never strategically all that useful to the USSR, and at least initially was met with some lack of enthusiasm. Yet it was widely felt that the Soviet Union had to be compensated for its losses during the War with Germany, and that the territories it now occupied seemed most suitable. Thus Churchill's famous "Soviet sphere", the so called Iron Curtain, was at least partly a matter of his own devising. It was in this "informal" sense that the Soviet Union exerted imperial influence over Eastern Europe. Despite the return, in some form, of most of the east European states to "independent" status, the Soviet union exported its own practices to the region almost immediately. Its principal weapon of coercion and influence was not the state (widely undermined by Nazi occupation) but the formation of secret police forces on the model of the Soviet NKVD. Anne Applebaum writes:

Everywhere the Red Army went - even in Czechoslovakia, from which Soviet troops eventually withdrew - these newly minted secret policemen began to use selective violence, carefully targeting their political enemies according to previously composed lists and criteria.³

Combined with coalition in government (along with communist loyalists infiltrating the interior and defence ministries of the region's states) Moscow-backed communists could soon begin to develop a hegemony that was only narrowly autonomous from the Soviet Union. Descended from the kind of highly secretive, clandestine cells that had also spawned the Russian Bolsheviks, many of the 'Moscow communists' (Walter Ulbricht in East Germany, Matyas Rakosi in Hungary, and Boleslaw Bierut in Poland) were utterly ill-equipped to deal with mass politics. The pervasive presence of Soviet advisers in the region practically guaranteed that the USSR would effect some form of domination over it. The reasons it intended to do this are complex, though undoubtedly the need to buttress itself against the perceived threat of a renascent capitalist Europe was one of them. The name 'People's Democracy', given to the states in the diplomatically negotiated Soviet sphere, was important - it distinguished them from the true home of socialism, the USSR. In this sense, the Soviet Union was merely aiming to turn the its surrounding region away from capitalism.

As with the USSR, the USA's new empire was informal, though much like the carefully orchestrated division of the continent, its acquisition was systematically planned, this time by American minds alone. By 1942 the idea had already filtered through to important elements within US civil society (specifically the leading businessmen who took part in Fortune, Time and Life's joint roundtable discussion and subsequent 'American Proposal') that it would be crucial for the survival of postwar capitalism that America take a leading role in the system's reconstruction. Not only this, but liberalism's catastrophic failure - and the real attraction of socialist policies, along with Fascist and 'economic nationalist' ones - would require that the system be built on very different foundations to the those that had led to the Great Depression. It was also clear to some within the state, like Dean Acheson, that the US would have to direct capital to needy, strategically important states. US capital could no longer take shelter behind British naval pre-eminence. In this both American business and government were in accord. The future for capitalism lay in the building of a "stable international monetary system", one whose channels would be American finance and investment and whose guarantor would be the American state. This would require that the US sacrifice some if its extraordinary competitive advantage whilst funding the redevelopment of the rest of the capitalist world. The trade off, however, was the emergence of an "informal" capitalist hegemony with the US at its centre, in charge of an increasingly integrated world system which, though operating with ever more centrifugal force on small states, also had the potential for extraordinary costliness.

How the West Was Won

By the 1870s the US economy had already overtaken Britain's in terms of industrial output. However, the breakdown of British global hegemony would not be complete until during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the US would not be in a position to take over Britain's mantle until after the Second World War. Thus what happened in the intervening years is essential to an understanding of the global order that emerged following the war.

My account draws heavily from Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's book The Making of Global Capitalism. In it these two leading Marxist economists map in detail the various intersections between an increasingly Americanised capitalist class and the American state. The latter developed through a long series of improvisatory, policy-led responses to real and perceived challenges to its hegemony, not all of them consistent, though most of them directed at developing the tools to govern capitalism and even to direct it towards certain ends. To a certain extent there was a confluence, if not identity, of interests between capital and the American state, and Panitch and Gindin demonstrate that, the more it could be shown that novel state institutions could contribute positively to capitalist accumulation, the more the state was entrusted to do so. In this sense the American state operated under conditions of increasing "relative autonomy" from the capitalist and other pro-capitalist classes it largely represented. In short, during the first third of the 20th century, the American state finalised its ability to deliver harsh medicine to the capitalist system in the name of that system's own interests.

The transformation started at home with "organisational innovations that American companies introduced in both production and consumption" (industrial decentralisation within big corporations; productivity increases through technological innovations and intensifications). Factory productivity alone grew by 75% in the first decades of the century. By the end of the 1920s America's share of total global production stood at 40%. Thus the US was financially transformed from a debtor nation, heavily dependent on Britain, to an export-driven creditor. Yet as contemporary China shows, industrial pre-eminence does not amount of itself to any kind of global hegemony. Not only this but basic weaknesses in the state's ability to manage America's economic expansion were not overcome. Uneven development within the US - especially in the underdeveloped south - along with a lack of income-support programs, growing income inequality, and a wage-productivity gap, making mass consumption vulnerable in a system increasingly reliant on it, left the economy open to shocks. The 1929 stock market crash became a global depression precisely because of the US state's inability, along with the British Treasury, to coordinate an effective global financial response. Deflationary protectionist measures were taken up throughout the capitalist world.

However accurate Giovanni Arrighi's observation that, by contrast to the British "extensive" (naval; imperial; financial) hegemonic cycle of capital, the American was "intensive" (domestic; industrial), the US clearly could not assert its obvious strength until it could coordinate world financial markets to its benefit. Though tentative to begin with, the Democratic government elected in 1932 was returned triumphantly to office in 1936 largely owing to the "social turn" of the New Deal in 1935: the Wagner act legalized union campaigns, collective bargaining and the right to strike; the Social security Act created the US welfare state. Yet, despite Roosevelt's private claim that it was time for America to "turn radical for a generation", the President was a committed capitalist and in many ways a budgetary conservative. More than this (never having voiced public support for the Wagner act), Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau (his Secretary of State) soon set about smoothing over relations with a flustered capitalist class. Not only this but the most militant sections of the working class were (in the era of the Popular Front) at least momentarily submerged within the Democratic Party. According to Panitch and Gindin:

This shift in the balance of class forces effectively ended the reforms of the New Deal's second phase. Nevertheless, a transformation in the capacities of the American state had been effected which the halting of the New Deal's momentum did not undo.⁴

However, there was no "dichotomy of purpose and function between state and capitalist actors" - true to Roosevelt's insistence, the state concerned itself with stimulating investment and stabilizing and rejuvenating capitalist markets. Financial regulation, in which a symbiotic relationship developed between public, semi-public and private bodies, was mostly insulated from democratic pressures. By creating such a complex the "commanding heights" of finance were elevated above the working class, the grounds for the integration of which were laid by the new model of mass consumption. Unions would increasingly trade off workplace control and economic democratisation for negotiated pay increases. For Panitch and Gindin the state had increased its relative autonomy from particular capitalist interests, integrated a broad section of the working class into capitalism (with the promise of steadily increasing wages, home-ownership, and mass consumption), while taking control of many aspects of financial regulation.

After US entry to the Second World War, plans for the internationalisation of the American state were officially laid. As the potential for US hegemony over global financial markets increased, so too did the state's capacity to coordinate markets. The US government continued to believe in free trade and market liberalisation as the key to prosperity. Yet the administration was quick to realise that America's future prosperity and stability lay in the ability of other key countries to catch-up with America's dominance. Thus "trade could only be liberalized on the basis of an international monetary arrangement that would also allow for economic growth and domestic consumption on other countries". This would not be a colonial form of dependency, nor would it rely on the subordination and impoverishment of rivals, but rather the supervision of financial flows to a capitalist 'core' aided and coordinated by the American state. In a sense the New Deal itself was to be internationalised. Less interventionist than regulatory, the planners would become liberal "custodians of an economy owned by the capitalists."

In early drafts of the famous White plan, the World Bank was envisaged as a public lender to redeveloping states. But owing to Roosevelt's desire to integrate Latin America into the word system and align its with the US, and also the need for the US public monies not to be directly responsible for European debt, the Bank became an incentiviser of private investment. J.M. Keynes' proposal, at Bretton Woods, for an international clearing fund and special international currency to facilitate lending to indebted countries on relatively easy terms was summarily ditched. Instead policy-makers within the US administration insisted on tight conditionality of borrowing, thus ensuring a continuous pace of capital liberalisation and expansion of free trade, regardless of the social cost to debtor nations.

In neither Giovanni Arrighi's account of what he calls the "hegemonic cycle of accumulation" of US capital, nor in the economist Robert Brenner's account of America's return to growth do peculiar class composition and alignments play such a central role. Brenner mentions the "containment" of militant US labour, but this appears to play little part in the developing story of American political consensus and disensus. The depression, Brenner confirms, was a major source of 'creative destruction', following which:

The way was prepared for the new epoch of growth by the huge reductions in the costs of production that were achieved during the crisis - by way of the enormous shake-out of obsolete capital stock, the strong downward pressure on real wages that resulted from record levels of unemployment, and the building of a backlog of unused innovations.⁵

For Brenner the huge potential of this process was only realized with the onset of the equally extraordinary mobilisation of the War economy. Nowhere does he mention the integration of the labour movement and the working class as a whole in political terms; nor does he account for what Panitch and Gindin see as the broad development of US state capacities (in the form of New Deal regulatory and institutional expansion) in the making of postwar US hegemony.

The neat division of the postwar era - into the industrially productive, Keynesian Golden Age (1945-1973) and the financialised, monetarist Age of Turbulence - prove to be deceptive. As Panitch and Gindin stress, state regulatory capacity and financial markets grew concurrently, if at different speeds at different times. The immediate postwar years - which spawned such extraordinary rates of growth throughout the capitalist and non-capitalist world - should be understood, they argue, as laying the foundations for the "explosion of global finance that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century." This took place, they stress, "within the framework of the New Deal and Bretton Woods regulations." The reason for this development - and the alliance that quickly developed between postwar European Social Democratic governments and the Democratic Party of the New Deal and Civil Rights era - was the need for urgent redevelopment of a liberal capitalist 'core'. Japan and the rest of South East Asia would later be ushered into this core. And with the expansion and deepening of financial markets as the crucial conduits of developmental capital, so too would the rest of the world become part of capitalism's periphery. Thus western European states found themselves at the centre of a newly globalised capitalist empire, not solely as client states but as competitors within an arrangement of reciprocal expansion.

Dismantling the Cold War

Though stalemate was the default political position of the Cold War balance of forces, from every consideration in the economic sphere the USA was quickly dominant. Although engendering its own contradictions (through which the American state and economy accepted debtor status in orderto maintain its increasingly chaotic financial hegemony), American power - both coercive and consensual - over the world system was never in doubt. While the 1980s generation of neoliberals in Washington, and their bastard offspring the neoconservatives, saw the war of position against the Soviets as vitally strategic, it was in the Third World that American elites found they could fight an ever-spiralling war of manoeuvre. Though the former grabbed more headlines in the neoliberal decade, it was the latter which from our perspective appears more relevant for contemporary struggles. It was, however, the existence of the Soviet empire which inadvertently allowed America to effectively police global order. In an international division of gendarmerie, the American state could allow a drawn out Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to cripple its rival while funding jihadist proxies and engaging in multiple fronts elsewhere. The Soviet collapse would end not only the Cold War stalemate but also the global balance of forces structurally weighted in America's favour.

Though successive Washington administrations were deeply committed to ending the Cold War and subjugating and stabilising the postcommunist states through NATO, these efforts could not stop the spread of ex-Soviet arms, the loss of Soviet demand in the world economy, nor the rapid loss of authoritarian Soviet power. All of these factors would force the US to thrust itself deeper into Middle Eastern and Asian geopolitics with a verve that would once have seemed impolitic. Even if the dollar was ultimately maintained by extraordinary efforts in the State Department and the Foreign Office, via the Plaza Accords and beyond, there was nonethless a creeping fragmentation of global political order. Thus the American state was left to carry the burden of Wall Street's bullishness, its own costly currency hegemony, and a raft of growing economic competitors it could no longer outflank. Not only this but military-industrial complex developed initially to combat communism was now constantly engaged in global fire-fighting efforts in the world communism had now vacated. With the defeat of a long wave of Third World liberation movements have emerged sectarian fundamentalisms promising no hope of a brighter future. A world conjured in the shadow of an American hegemony that is slowly taking on elements of a more straightforward kind of military domination, one certainly familiar to the KGB old guard. This is surely one irony not to escape them.

1Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 226-7

2ibid., 166-67

3Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, xxxi

4Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism,

5Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, 10

Ukraine - A Human Trafficking Case Study

In the wake of Maidan, what future awaits a renewed wave of Ukrainian migration?

A few weeks ago I wrote in Dissent Magazine about human trafficking, labour exploitation, the vulnerabilities faced by migrant workers, and the misplaced criticism of migration by Europe's far-right. In the article I argued that increasingly punitive legal regimes, driven by right-wing reaction, help increase the risks run by vulnerable migrant workers and help expand the informal labour markets on which traffickers thrive. Furthermore, I argued that inter-regional inequality and uneven labour market development compel migrant workers to seek work abroad in increasingly tumultuous conditions. Uneven labour market development - i.e the concentration of demand for certain profitable skills in certain geographical locations at the relative expense of other areas - at once forces migrant workers into seeking unstable work in foreign markets and increases the pressure on national governments to protect their domestic labour markets from foreign workers, thus compounding the problems. Capital benefits from the cost-saving effects of such a social division of labour while governments accrue cheap political capital by punishing foreign workers with legal sanctions. Those who benefit over all are the traffickers, not the workers. What follows is a short case study of Ukraine, a country which perfectly exemplifies the contradictions of the social division of European labour. While immigration as such is both socially and culturally beneficial, the contradictions driving migration from Ukraine at the moment are hardly benign. While welcoming new arrivals, we should bear in mind the price often paid to bring them here.

Much like the Czech Republic, Ukraine has recently become a destination as well as a source and transit country for trafficking victims. According to research by CARIM East, 22,000 Ukrainians were enslaved abroad in the mid-2000s. Approximately 10% of respondents knew victims of human trafficking. Since the mid-2000s there has been a dip in the number of prosecutions for trafficking, though with the political situation as it is in Ukraine, emigration can be expected to increase and not necessarily peaceably.

Most depressingly for Ukrainians hoping to join the European Union, the highest numbers of trafficked individuals come from recent EU member states - namely, Bulgaria and Romania. This suggests that, in the short-term at least, membership of the EU can actually facilitate trafficking rather than dampen it. A "clear majority", in the words of the Eurostat paper, of trafficking victims in the EU are in fact EU citizens (61% according to their data for the years 2008-2010). The EU itself is not able to solve the contradictions of trafficking because of the inequalities that exist between states and different states' abilities to combat the phenomenon at multiple levels. Add to that a rising tide of xenophobia and immigrant bashing in the EU core states and it is easy to see why people are not getting the protection they need. Then there is the matter of sexual exploitation. In a survey of European countries, one research paper found that 62% of victims were trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation with 68% of the total number of victims being women. More pervasive and even more dangerous than exploitation of labour, exploitation of sex is less visible and harder to keep track of.

According to the US State Department, which regularly publishes its global findings on trafficking, Ukraine is a "second tier" country: that is, a country actively engaged in making its institutions meet minimum global standards but which hasn't met them yet. Because of the Ukrainian state's long history of corruption, compliance in these areas has always looked unlikely. Now, given the revanchist mood in Russia and the seeming descent towards civil war, effective action looks impossibly distant.

The Ukrainian state lacks both the institutional capacity and the willpower to assert even a minimum level of effective control over trafficking. Furthermore, Ukraine is caught in a peculiar core-periphery market transition, whereby it is gradually becoming a de facto part of the wider European polity and economy, even as Russia makes aggressive demands on its political and cultural allegiances and attempts to reassert its fading economic and geopolitical influence. The result of such contradictory development in human terms is the widespread exploitation of people, in the form of both sexual slavery and forced labour, in the context of unstable and coercive legal regimes.

The scale and extent of organised crime is often shocking. Terry FitzPatrick of Free The Slaves informed me of the following case, described in detail here by the US Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The crimes are all the more impressive for their unlikely bypassing of the EU and concentration on the US. Omelyan Botsvynyuk, a fifty-two year old Ukrainian national, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in an elaborate trafficking cartel which smuggled Ukrainian labourers into the US via flights to Mexico. Most astounding was their strategy for negotiating the US-Mexico border. Botsvynyuk and his brothers coached Ukrainians on how to approach border guards, dressed them in "US-style" clothes, and had them march straight through border control points. Those caught without papers were merely issued with a court summons, released, and subsequently picked up again by the Botsvynyuk organisation. Once they were back in the hands of the Botsvynyuks on the US side of the border, the workers could easily be transported to the borthers' base in Philadelphia. Keeping their victims in unsafe and dirty living conditions, the whole range of coercive and violent trafficking techniques were then conducted: personal documents and court summons were confiscated; physical force, threats of violence, sexual assault and (in at least two cases) rape were used to cow workers; debt bondage was used to keep victims in their place; threats against family members were used to keep people quiet.

Though extreme in almost every sense - not only in terms of human cost but organisational scale, flagrant defiance of the law, as well as defiance of some of the world's most tightly monitored borders - the case of the Botsvynyuk gang cearly demonstrates the inadequacies of a narrowly legalistic, often border-focused and anti-immigrant approach to ending human trafficking. Police action, with its entrenched institutional and practical biases and ideological limitations, can do little to prevent trafficking. The material conditions which allows traffickers to step in - upheavals and declines in national and regional economies; the mass redundancy by shifts in capital concentration of huge swathes of otherwise able workers; political and social tumult on the capitalist periphery - will have to be addressed by a clearly articulated, political anti-trafficking program. In increasingly strained international regulatory conditions, in which foreign labour is already grossly exploited, more and more Ukrainians will be driven into the arms of opportunist traffickers.   

The Death of Solidarity

As the wisdom of the age goes, there are no final victories in politics. When the leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement (Solidarnosc) sat down with the long reviled Communist Party authorities to hammer out the timing and logistics of a genuinely contested election, however, they were faced with a most peculiar anomaly: a victory so final that even their enemies willed it. In the end, the totalitarian world was finished off not with a bang but with a firm handshake and an international press release. Realpolitik trumped idealism in an apparent validation of the old adage that politics is "the art of the possible."

The enemies of Solidarity - in the form both of the deep state calcified over decades of Communist Party rule and Soviet foreign policymakers -  may have been obliging in the end, but the victory, and Solidarity's subsequent pacification, was the product of the movement itself along with its internal conflicts.

To transplant a phrase of Rousseau's to a very different context, where the intensity of clashing interests makes social movements necessary, the agreement of those interests makes them possible. Invariably, a social movement is comprised of internal factions with different aims and different methods of achieving them. What longevity the later consensus achieves cannot be determined normatively, but is subject to the particular differences internalised at the outset. This internalised heterogeneity is at once strength and weakness. Inevitably, social movements must become acquainted with one form or other of defeat. The question is always, defeat of what kind? In the case of Solidarity defeat took the form of an encroaching respectability, one which allowed a centralised leadership eventually to make peace with the crooked, authoritarian regime. 

The Solidarity movement had formed in 1980 in the wake of price hikes by the central government on basic foodstuffs, undertaken in a delayed and inadequate attempt to restrain economic pressures emanating from indebtedness to the West. In a process that I have described as "contradictory subsumption" of the Polish Party leadership - and its extended network of economic stewards and institutional cronies - within Western financial markets, the centrally-managed economy and the so called "socialist basis" of production was being undermined from within. Solidarity took shape against this backdrop of a self-reinforcing debt trap and the consequent internal transformation of the functionality of the Polish state. The movement was based not on a unitary, organised class or class-political ideal (as the Communist Party had, in its own distorted way, once been), but on the mutual recognition of an overlapping space of interests by all those who, for whatever reason, opposed the regime. To return to Rousseau, heterogeneous social strata were brought together through recognition of a single "common element." Opposition to the communist regime, once recognised, became a binding "social tie" of the movement.

The key question is, then, whose interests were counted in the movement of 1980-81 and how evenly or unevenly were they weighted? Cemented by an initial, astounding set of concessions following the 1980 strikes, the movement managed to recruit ten million members in its first year of existence. Already the most bullish voice in the now formal civic opposition, Lech Wałęsa said: “We have achieved everything that was achievable under the circumstances. We will achieve the rest as well, for we have what’s most important: our independent, self-governing trade unions. This is our guarantee for the future.” Wałęsa and other worker-dissidents, among them Andrzej Gwiazda and Anna Walentynowicz, had been campaigning for some time for bread-and-butter worker protection and safety issues, as well as the freeing of political prisoners. Yet the real strength of the movement came from the working class itself, which had never been fully subordinated to Party rule and had caused major disruptions in Poznan in 1956 and Gdansk in 1970. Primarily workerist in composition, Solidarity emerged out of the September 1980 conference of union delegates following the decision to form a single, national union.

Whatever socialist ideology was expressed in the strikers' list of demands, it remained necessarily inchoate and, couched as it was in language acceptable to the regime, incoherent. Indeed, the communist system placed an effective block on the sharpening of ideological daggers, effectively displacing and dispersing any nascent unity of outlook. Though policy itself - from wage increases to increased press freedom - was easy to come by (the list of grievances being long; the weight of disapproval evenly shared), forming a homogeneous identity was necessarily difficult. This also worked to the movement's advantage. Though composed overwhelmingly of an industrial proletariat concentrated in Gdańsk, Katowice, Wrocław and the Mazowsze region, the emerging leadership had a distinctly Catholic flavour. This was understandable: Polish Catholicism ran deep in the cities and the countryside, and had never fully been suppressed by the Party. In part, Polish Catholicism had liberated itself by announcing early on its tactical toleration of the regime. Its survival as a truly non-communist civil society organisation was both a necessary linkage in communist hegemony and, in moments of crisis, a threat to that hegemony. Both Lech Wałęsa and his later rival, and first postcommunist Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki were explicit about their Catholic allegiances. This made them at once acceptable to what civil society existed as well as making them comprehensible to the Party authorities. After all, a long tradition of Catholic independence had been semi-manageable, even partly incorporated into the Party's reign. In a society divested of articulate political dissent or public debate, there was little cultural space besides the Church into which Solidarity could insert its own discourse.

Despite the extraordinary mobilisation of proletarian workers, the ideological content of the movement was always up for grabs. Debate still rages today as to whether the 1980-81 union upsurge constituted a movement with revolutionary intent. For historians like Tony Judt, unions achieved little of significance with regard to concrete reforms and change to the system. According to the editor of Polish Le Monde Diplomatique Przemyslaw Wielgosz, however, the first mobilisations were the first stage of a "workers revolution", with the 1989 Round Table talks, which led to the first semi-free elections and the re-installation of capitalism, acting as a kind of counter-revolutionary Thermidor. His evidence is based on strong support among Polish workers (80% in 1984, he claims) for "self-management" style socialism rather than capitalism. Solidarity, or at least its significant proletarian element, was intended to achieve real socialism through democratising ownership of the workplace, not installing a free market and liberal democracy. What halted the mass movement was the implementation of Martial Law and the banning of Solidarity by the Jaruzelski government:

In these new conditions, Solidarity had to lose its’ mass-movement character. Nevertheless, most of the trade union structures survived in secret, but the logic of the mass movement which had kept them animated, was shattered. Opposition leaders and activists became effectively cut off from their social base. Under these new conditions, their support came not from the factories and industrial plants, but the church.

The wave of strikes and stoppages in the spring of 1988, resulting from a fresh debt crisis, was not a victory lap but a final death spasm of the original movement. By now, a centralised leadership had had time to develop a coherent ideology combining the popular appeal of the Church and deep Polish national and anti-Russian sentiment, with endorsement of hyper-modern, Reaganite free markets and liberal democracy. According to Wielgosz, liberalisation had already begun in 1987, under the communist regime. The 1989 Round Table talks completed by the Solidarity leadership and the Party merely secured a tacit agreement over the reintroduction of capitalism by the elites of the two camps.

Though Wielgosz is far from completely wrong, the very heterogeneity of the Solidarity movement - with shared appeals to socialist, nationalist, and religious sentiment - made its eventual transformation into a "locomotive of capitalism" possible. Moreover, the very "contradictory subsumption" of Communist Party leaders into western financial markets meant that, in debt-laden Poland above all, authorities were inadvertently engaged in reintroducing capitalism even as they honestly struggled to maintain the authoritarian system. Only in China, where the Party formally and openly adjusted the economy to capital markets, did the regime manage to hang on to power. Otherwise, the process went on behind the Party's backs.

"Solidarity," according to Frances Millard, "did not emerge from a vacuum but drew upon existing social networks and shared Polish national-religious cultural traditions." (Politics and Society in Poland, 8) The elite, though having already informally granted concessions and having brought the wolf of international finance closer to the door, had no choice in 1988 but to draw up the 'Anti-Crisis Pact', for the first time accepting the opposition into an informal co-governing position. The Party may have anticipated winning the semi-free June 1989 elections which were the result of the Round Table negotiation period, but in the end it was trounced (famously losing every contested seat bar one). The election did not reaffirm the Party's legitimacy, bringing a rebellious social opposition to heel, but in fact affirmed their irrevocable loss of stature.

Tadeusz Mazowiecki, from the conservative leadership of Solidarity, was made Prime Minister in the Sejm with Jaruzelski narrowly maintaining the Presidency for the Party. Mazowiecki led a Grand Coalition from Solidarity, the Communists, and two former satellite parties. The Communists, with their eyes fixed on the Soviet Union, kept hold of the Defence and Interior Ministries. By Spring 1990, however, Wałęsa was moving against Mazowiecki in the Sejm. In the suddenly open ideological playing field, confusion reigned among Solidarity's ranks. Radical economic liberals, gradualist interventionists, political liberals, and conservative nationalists vied for position in a movement now substantially funded by the USA (see 1989's SEED Act). Not only this but the new political class assumed power during a deep economic crisis, fostered in part by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the ravages of capitalist finance.

Yet in some respects there was startling consistency on the part of the Solidarity and ex-dissident leadership. Within a fortnight of the new government's formation in 1989, Minister of Finance Leszek Balcerowicz had submitted a plan to marketise the Polish economy to the IMF. In a program of merciless, government-backed reconstruction, Poland would remodel its devastated, heavy industries following advanced, western models. In a gesture of extraordinary vanguardism (contradicting the idea that neoliberalism was all about relinquishing human controls on the economy), Balcerowicz promised to skip the "middle-income" development phase and join western Europe as quickly as possible. Even the IMF must have understood the improbability of such a rapid reconstruction, though they surely relished liberalisation for its own sake. Indeed, no international body had been more important in generating financial subservience of the Socialist bloc economies and their leaderships to the West than the IMF. Balcerowicz's plan was, then, timely tribute to them.

Despite the many changes of government under the democratic system after 1989, the deep liberalisation trends unleashed by the first Solidarity regimes remained pretty constant. Wałęsa, having got the presidency, installed the relatively unknown small-time Gdansk entrepreneur Jan Bielecki as prime minister, and together they stuck to the Balcerowicz path. The now familiar syndromes of economic shock therapy soon set in - harsh public spending cuts, never deep enough for international creditors; a constant cycle of public and private sector corruption; and recurrent strikes and protests.

"Precisely because the Polish revolution began with a compromise," the historian Timothy Snyder has claimed, "many Poles have trouble seeing it as an achievement." It is not the compromise that leaves a sour taste, but the actors who made it and the consequences it helped instigate. As early as 1980 Lech Wałęsa was heard to maintain that, "We will have to build capitalism." The lifelong dissident and Solidarity activist Karol Modzelewski's reply was equally telling: "I wouldn't have spent eight and a half years in prison for capitalism."

This month that bastion of liberal thought the UK Economist celebrates twenty-five years of Polish success, though they are careful to remind Poland of the need for further and deeper liberalisation. For a country that went further and faster than anyone else, one is left wondering if any extent of liberalisation will ever be satisfactory. The magazine sounds another note of caution: Poland will have to build new high-tech industries and services if it is to keep up with Germany and the like. It doesn't take the most historically reflective of economic commentators to realise that such an outcome is unlikely. Just as the dream that lay behind the Balcerowicz plan, the dream formulated in the shadow of Solidarity's destruction, was unattainable, so today's liberalisers will inevitably be confronted with the dead-end of "endless accumulation" and global competition. Tacitly, even the Economist is now highlighting the approaching limits of the economic catch-up regime instituted by the early Solidarity governments. When growth rates of four percent finally dry up, there will be little left for the liberal-democratic state to tout as major achievements of its twenty-five years of competitiveness.         

"The No Bullshit Approach": Orban and Authoritarianism in Hungary

"As I get older [he is still only 50], I tend to be more sceptical. Values are more important than money. National sovereignty is more and more important in my mind. The question 'Who is governing us?' is the key question."

-- Hungarian Prime Minister and Leader of the Right Wing Hungarian Fidesz Government in a roundly collegiate interview with the Daily Telegraph

Viktor Orban came to power in 2010 promising liberal reforms and firm western-oriented stewardship of the Hungarian economy, with perhaps a few crumbs thrown towards his supporters on the Hungarian nationalist Right. Since then the steady din of European Union condemnation has been unrelenting. Despite various moves to liberalise the economy, Fidesz has been messily authoritarian, suppressing dissent and restricting media freedom. Such are the tensions and limitations of Orban's electoral success: an angry electorate, high on old school Magyar nationalism, demands significant improvements in their welfare. EU macro-policy, however, is too inflexible to allow any significant growth in government expenditure. The comfortable synthesis of national sovereignty and EU-financed prosperity that Orban anticipated has evaporated. What remains is an increasingly reactionary nationalism caught in a financial sinking-hole out of which it can find no means of escape.   

It is by no means exceptional to find a former anti-communist dissident in power in Eastern Europe tacking to the Right. More interesting is the fact that Orban and his Fidesz party rule over a more economically centralising and politically authoritarian regime than their Communist predecessors. Orban denounces the EU while depending on its largesse (precisely $42 billion from the next seven-year budget). Decades of mass consumerism, always debt-financed, meant capital markets failed to wow Hungarians after the collapse of the old regime. Orban's rise to power, then, was closely related to a growing weariness with liberalism and its associated internationalism. Less a reactionary force in the mould of the west's Eurosceptic Far Right than old fashioned national conservatives, Fidesz's closest predecessors are the Magyar nationalists of the Dual Monarchy.

Though that tradition is deeply cemented in the Hungarian psyche, in personal appeal Orban reflects a certain international zeitgeist, the possessor of a no bullshit, tough guy approach whose generic tropes are manifest in a whole sweep of global leaders, normally burly, hectoring and claiming the "common touch" - from Putin to Sarkozy to Bush. However, Orban's closest resemblance is to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erogan, whose steadfast electoral coalition is mutatis mutandis very much the image Orban's own. What is most innovative in both the approaches of Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz is their wielding of a tight bond between peasants, entrepreneurs, and the devout at the ballot box. Though forged in very different contexts, both had the advantage of capitalising on their respective countries' adaptation to membership of the capitalist semi-core. The authoritarian streak is common to both, as is the taste for favourably adapted electoral systems. On just over 44% of the vote in 2014, Fidesz took 133 of 199 seats in the Hungarian parliament. The Left coalition was smashed. Jobbik, on the Far Right, experienced no squeeze, increasing its result to over 20%. A long reign of the Right seems unavoidable in such conditions. By all accounts, the Left is rudderless.

Charles Gati has complained in the Washington Post that no European leader since Napoleon had changed his spots more often than Orban. This backhanded flattery aside, there is more than a whiff of disappointment among western political commentators about Orban's apparent flightiness. More relevant than the Corsican for Orban is the fate of another likeminded turbo-president, this one more recent. At the time of his election, Nicholas Sarkozy was meant to bring market liberalisation and a slimmed down state and welfare receipts to the French economy, finally accepting the country's special-but-subordinate role in European politics. In the event he did none of them, resorting to nationalist hand-wringing, promoting industrial champions, and even practising a bit of religion, though just for the regions. Orban's trajectory has been no less earthward in this sense. Starting out as a liberaliser he has quickly fallen back on long-term Hungarian political tropes, chief among them its victim status. This Oxford alumnus and admirer of such sceptical Anglo-Saxons as John Locke and Margaret Thatcher would have liked to plant the seeds of a liberal renaissance at home. Electoral coalitions, as well as his own dislike of dissent, would have it otherwise. 

At once conservative and nationalist, Fidesz's base imposes a caricature of earlier Magyar national struggles upon it. In 1848 the great Magyar nationalist Lajos Kossuth could no more hold the young nation together under the weight of European revolution than could Metternich, whose overthrow meant the transformation of the old order. Kossuth was ultimately undone by the external contradictions of imperial confrontation and the internal contradictions of a nascent ethnic nationalism. Orban has much the same difficulty, though in less combustible circumstances. Groping towards a more stable, less truculent electoral coalition will take real changes not to the relative international standing of Hungary but to the welfare of its still poor population. Orban can grandstand over the former; he can do nothing but remain silent (in light of a flat tax rate of 16% and wage suppression to promote exports) about the latter.         

Where reality has no doubt failed Orban's ambitions most is in the bile of the western media. This may ultimately have less to do with his authoritarian tendencies - which are dissected on a near daily basis in American and European papers - than his courting of Russia. Indeed, so long as Erdogan danced to the EU's tune on trade relations and NATO's on US military operations, he was free to deploy all manner of coercive and Islamist policies on the secular opposition. Orban's greatest misstep might be buried in the very tactics that have won him two elections. By tacking too far to the right he risks isolation from the moderate international consensus he once represented. Yet to retain his majority - declining even in the face of tight media controls and a massaged electoral system - Orban cannot risk ditching his Magyar chauvinism. Without it he is indistinguishable from the spineless Centre Left and the technocrats he rails against.      

The High Tatra Mountains, Slovakia: "All the Way to the Snowy Bit with My Shopping"

A distinct odour of boiled eggs and old shoes hung on the air. In the corridor's semi-gloom a bandana wearing teenager shuffled past, too engrossed in a bowl of cereal to cast us even a sulky hint of acknowledgement. In the adjacent kitchen people sternly buttered bread and muttered awkwardly to each other about clean towels and forthcoming stop overs in German villages. A man with a too-big-laugh blurted whinnying, nervous expulsions at the sole staff member. Skis and signed t-shirts and drapes and pizza eating-league-tables clung to every available surface. Everything exuded an air of dampness. So, exactly the kind of hostel we'd come to dread.

We were a little surprised to find this familiar feeling chunk of backpackers' paradise in a far flung corner of the Slovakian mountains. Despite the nearby slopes of the Beliankse Tatry - making up a craggy panorama visible from the front porch - one of the guest's signally failed to leave the hostel throughout our whole stay. There in the living room when we arrived, and still there when we left three days later, he seemed far more interested in the hostel's DVD collection than the scenery.

Still, one guest did make a good point: "When I'm staying by myself all the time I go kinda crazy. It's lonely; I need people." One woman, we were sagely informed, was in the midst of two years' "intensive journeying". If that was me, I'd want any company I could get. And we had to admit we benefited a great deal from our hostel hosts, whose generosity and patience were ample (perhaps because, this being the mountains, there was nothing else to do).

"It's a bit of a slog. About half an hour uphill," the aforementioned friendly host said.

Fresh off the Prague sleeper train, a good six hours' clattering, rhythmic sleep under our belts, this seemed doable.

The thick black clouds curling around the highest peaks of the Vysoke Tatry (the High Tatras) promised rain. But we weren't going up that high, so what did it matter?

We followed a medium level blue trail for the first half an hour, traipsing over foot-hills still half buried in the wreckage of the 2004 storms that took apart over a third of the forest. Felled trees rested everywhere. It was a bit like the video to 'Earth Song' by Michael Jackson. A scene of Hollywood-esque devastation.

Following the storm the Slovakian Environmental Ministry declared that, since the Tatras had suffered so much, their protected status should now be downgraded and tourist development accelerated. Quite the terrifying example of a government turning crisis into opportunity. There was, however, decreasing evidence of development as we scrambled higher up the mountainside.

We were jubilant as we reached the checkpoint that led us off the blue trail and onto its red cousin. Now we had joined the so called Magistrala - the only trail that runs the whole length of the Tatras, themselves a part of the greater Carpathian range. Almost stopping to drink the beers we'd brought with us, we decided to wait until we reached the rumoured frozen lake. It would probably only be another half hour, I gamely told myself.

Fatefully it hadn't occurred to me to wonder why the lake was still frozen in May, the sort of commonsensical query I've got a frustrating habit of avoiding. Nor did I really wonder why everyone else we passed on the trail was in proper hiking gear and thermals. I, on the other hand, had just my trusty Primark hoodie and a bag of shopping with said beers and some cheese in.

The trail cut remorselessly uphill, delving under thick foliage as the now low-hanging clouds began to spit. Then, after scrambling over rocks, we emerged blinking from the underbrush to be confronted with the magnificence of the plain below. Perched on the sheer crest of an outcrop poking out of the side of Lomnicky stit (the range's tallest peak), the vastness of the land rolled out around us in a thick balm of green. The rain was now a little icy, prickling the back of my neck, but worryingly we still had higher to go.

As the elevation increased so did our vague sense of disquiet. Less confident of our speed, this drawn out slog, winding ever higher up the side of the mountain, gave me plenty of time to reflect.

"About half an hour uphill," we had been told.

This was ostensibly true: the immediate ascent had taken about half an hour. But the red path was now winding upwards in deceptive and increasingly craggy increments. Siobhan - who has a distinct tendency to go a bit 'jibbly-wibbly' in the knees when confronted with heights - was scaling the endless system of rocky promontories with admirable firmness.

"How is it?" I asked as she scrambled over one particularly jarring ledge.

"Good if you're a mountain goat."

I followed carefully, trusty shopping bag in hand, just a tiny bit unbalanced. Even the plant-life had changed, reduced from the rain-forest-density below to thick clumps of low-lying shrubbery clinging tenaciously to the unforgiving rock face.

Below stretched a vast expanse; distances I was more accustomed to enjoying from the comfort of a plane seat than when standing upright on an icy, windswept ledge. The Slovakian countryside rolled out, unbroken save for the occasional copse and a few winding roads, for miles.

Slovakia is an interesting national case. Plucked from Hungarian territory post-WWI, it was partly defined by the ambitions of their neighbours, the Czechs, and partly by the Slavic linguistic minority who had resided in the territory for centuries. It had once been incorporated in a Moravian empire which unified the Slavs of the region and which produced the first cyrillic alphabet. After the disintegration of that empire Slovakia was swiftly annexed by the growing power of Hungary. The city that now serves as Slovakia's capital, Bratislava, for a time became the Hungarian capital, under the name of Pressburg, after the Ottomans took Buda. A small reminder, then, that territories and the sovereignties declared over them are composite, contingent things. The panorama around us had changed hands multiple times - its earth subject to multiple constructed sovereignties. These remain unresolved for a few staunchly nationalist politicians on both the Slovakian and Hungarian sides of the border. "Let's get in our tanks and bulldoze Budapest," nearby Zilina's former mayor and all round extremist, Jan Slota, has suggested. 

At last we were in view of the frozen lake, which was indeed still frozen. And now snow lay at our feet. A final scramble along a much flatter path - to the evident amusement of other hikers, clad in winter-style gear - led us to it. Finally stopping, it struck me just how cold it had become.

"Shall we save the beers?" Siobhan said.

"Probably not a bad idea, yeah," I said, putting on my jumper.

After all, we had to get all the way back down.

We stayed in: Zdiar, a surprisingly sizeable village in the Belianske Tatry mountains with copious accommodation. Our hostel was the Ginger Monkey.

"The Swastika on Jan Kubis's Ass" - Laurent Binet, Hegel, and Historical Judgement

Lidice

Unsuspecting eyes might mistake Lidice, a pleasant strip of countryside just outside of Prague, for an oddly situated national park. From the viewing platform on the crest of its northern slope a few nondescript public artworks - grey statues ringed with stone met by a few winding paths - can be made out at the bottom of the valley's shallow basin. A bright spring day has brought people from the neighbouring villages out to play frisbee and tussle with their dogs on the grass. If people remember what this place is famous for it goes unspoken. On the night of 10th June 1942 German soldiers arrived in the then-village to destroy it. They gathered the men together at Horak's Barn and proceeded systematically to shoot them. Nine other men, who were not from Lidice but whose bad luck it was to be stranded after dark in the village, were met with a brief reprieve. The local mayor, tasked with pointing out the men to the SS troops, let it be known they were not locals. They would be taken to Prague and later shot anyway. As soon as his work was done the mayor was also shot. The women were taken to Ravensbruck; most of the children were sent to the extermination camp at Chelmno, a decision made personally by Adolf Eichman. The buildings themselves were not only ruined but literally pulled from the ground. Nothing was to remain. In the middle of Lidice's bare northern slope stands a memorial - its text in English, Czech and German - to the children. On the day of our visit a few flowers set around it are tugged lightly by a fresh spring breeze. Second-hand toys addressed from England sit looking up at the huddled statues. The eyes of the children gaze past us in either fear or reproach.

Almost immediately after its destruction, Lidice became a cause celebre. A famous campaign in Stoke-on-Trent galantly, if naively, pledged to rebuild the village entirely. Streets, towns and factories around the non-fascist world were renamed in tribute to it. The reason for this propaganda victory - considering the relative quiet surrounding other Nazi crimes at this point in the war - was its direct relation to the successful assassination of Rienhard Heydreich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, in Prague just days before. Though the two assassins bore no connection to Lidice, the occupying Nazi regime, in a blind fury coaxed on by Hitler's extraordinary viciousness, decided vengeance was necessary no matter the victims. This was hardly an isolated conclusion in Nazi history (another being the desperate, orgiastic destruction of Warsaw following the 1944 Uprising), but it lit a very specific torch. The Czechoslovak Government-in-exile, still headed by the frenetic plotter and pre-war President Edvard Beneš, had been behind the startling, courageous murder of Heydrich by two Czechoslovak agents. Flown over from London, and parachuting into the Bohemian countryside, Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík, later joined by Jozef Valčík, had studied the movements of Heydrich for months before confronting his unprotected limo on a bend in a road in the Libeň district of Prague. It was Kubiš who hurled a bomb at the Blond Beast, already on his feet and aiming at Gabčík, whose English Sten had jammed in his hands. The bomb destroyed the car and chaos quickly ensued. Heydrich looked at first to have survived. Then, after an operation removing his spleen, he was hit by a fever and shortly died. Apoplectic with rage - apparently at Heydrich's naivety as much as the gall of the Czechs - Hitler ordered revenge. Nazi investigators had soon 'uncovered' conspiratorial connections of the Resistance with Lidice.

The story has been told many times, a fact repeatedly recounted in Laurent Binet's own racy, buoyant effort, HHhH. Throughout Binet's book, established fact intersects with the reports of others and the author's own memory:

[New information] has forced me to qualify my opinion of Seven Men at Daybreak, the Allan Burgess novel I had previously thought rather fanciful. I had been particularly skeptical about the swastika branded on Kubis’s ass. I also condescendingly picked up on a glaring error regarding the colour of Heydrich’s Mercedes which the author claimed was green.... Anyway, I’m probably attaching too much importance to what is, at the end of the day, just a background detail. I know that. In fact, it is a classic symptom of neurosis. I must be anal-retentive. Let’s move on……

...I asked Natacha about the Mercedes. She remembers it being black as well.

With some cunning, Binet transforms his own neurosis into a narratorial device. By framing this obsessive concern with detail as a quest for truth, however, Binet dodges over-familiar postmodern reflexivity. Though the novel's pre-history, its method of production and its factual and textual shortcomings, are made explicit parts of the story, this is done for quite specific ends. Here truth is expressed in the form of scrupulous self-doubt and self-qualification. Motivating Binet's modesty is a thoroughly traditional, realist concern with justice and the passing of historical judgement. Memory - that notoriously unreliable relayer of facts - constantly interweaves itself with established truths, undermining them and also adapting them. Thus the author's own memories of Košice, the Slovakian town where he was once stationed as a French teacher to the Slovakian military, forms the basis of Jozef Gabčík's introduction to the story. As it turns out, Gabčík couldn't have been in Košice in 1938 because it had already been absorbed by Hungary. How and when did Gabčík and Kubiš first meet? Binet asks himself. "I'm not yet sure if I'm going to visualize (that is, 'invent') this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything." Inevitably the novel ends with Gabčík and Kubiš meeting for the first time on a rusty boat on the moonlit Baltic ("like in a Nezval poem").

By assuming that all fictional intrusions on the facticity of history are artificial, Binet permits himself errors but only insofar as he tries to atone for them. The overriding goal is to overcome one's factual shortcomings by acknowledging them, and through such acknowledgement pass judgement on history itself. Thus by passing judgement, Binet can bring the protagonists of the past to justice. It is in the grey areas between which parts of history - Tukhachevsky's defeat outside Warsaw and Heydrich's role in his later downfall under Stalin; or the ghosts of the thousands of anonymous Czech resistance members who are "haunting" Binet with their demands for inclusion - truly form part of the story that Binet's concern with justice is most pronounced. Here the author explicitly takes on the role of a historical judge.

Justice can be understood in two related senses: on the one hand there is just representation, or the writer's responsibility to do justice to her subject. On the other, there is the need to bring people to justice through the passing of certain normative moral judgements. Binet deals with the former on a regular, explicit basis (though in French justice would be substituted here for honneur). The book is punctuated at steady intervals with Binet's concerns about his own adequacy to the task of representation. More controversial for contemporary readers is the latter notion, conferred by the author and legitimate only if one accepts the right of the author to pose as transhistorical moral judge. Thus naming and describing the families who aided and sheltered Gabčík and Kubiš gives them fitting and appropriate representation and also confers justice on their sacrifices (they would mostly be murdered after Heydrich's assassination). However, it is only when the story comes to the climactic moment of Lidice's destruction that Binet allows his concern with judgement and justice to directly seize the narrative.

As it happens Kubiš and Gabčík were still alive when the Nazis attacked Lidice. In fact, the assassins were hiding in a church on Karlovo náměstí (Charles Square) in Prague. Binet tells us that they knew about the Nazis' terrible retribution. The assassins sat with their comrades in a dank cellar and could do nothing but blame themselves for the town's destruction. No amount of pleading would convince them they were not personally responsible for the slaughter. Indeed they were sure that Heydrich's death had achieved nothing. "Perhaps I am writing this book," Binet says, "to make them understand that they are wrong." The obsessive compiling of facts is thus less significant for Binet than justifying the assassination of Heydrich.

In the same chapter, Binet makes clear what exactly the destruction of Lidice meant for the world resistance to Nazism:

With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world's eyes. In the days that follow, Hitler will understand. For once, it is not his SS who will be let loose, but an entity he does not fully understand: world opinion. Soviet newspapers declare that, from today, people will fight with the name of Lidice on their lips - and they're right... By reacting like the crude psychopath he is (rather than the head of state that he also is), Hitler will suffer his most devastating defeat in a domain he once mastered: by the end of the month the propaganda war will be irredeemably lost.

That was no mean feat in a world where European ruling classes had long been anticipating, and indeed making, compromises with Nazism. World opinion aside, however, the actual job of bringing history's protagonists to justice is undertaken by the novel itself. More than a catalogue of events, HHhH attempts to formulate a moral judgement about Heydrich's assassination and the consequent destruction of Lidice; in other words, a kind of post-mortal redemption of the assassins ("I am writing this book to make them understand..."). Redemption through testimony; justice through perspicacious analysis of the facts; judgement through the exercise of universal moral norms. Binet himself admits he's a scion of Communist parents and a believer in French Enlightenment values. Whatever the self-conscious, postmodern form, Binet's ambition is to conjure a classically modern moral universe.

There is something of Hegel's system of historical judgement to this ambition, the account of which given by Angelica Nuzzo in her book Memory, History, Justice in Hegel (2012) I am entirely indebted to. Nuzzo understands Hegel as having two separate philosophical models of historical process, the cumulative moment of which comes in the Philosophy of Right when Hegel describes how the ethical collective system of historical understanding is "overcome"(aufgehoben) by a properly universal system of judgement - in Hegel's own words, from "objective" to "absolute", in which Weltgeschichte (world history) emerges as Weltgericht (the world's tribunal). This being Hegel, there is no fine line drawn between the working of the logical system and the actual material stuff of history upon which the interpretive intellect acts (ideas being history's motive force). Nuzzo argues that historical judgement and justice are systemically possible because, in a Hegelian way, history is grounded in the logic of the dialectic. In sum, history is not just the accumulation of random effects, of chaos producing further unintended chaos, but proceeds via contradiction, and contains conflictual stages which are themselves subject to the logic Hegel describes as belonging to the dialectic.

What does "absolute judgement" mean in the context of history? Nuzzo separates the dialectical logic of history proper, which achieves universality in art, philosophy and religious representation, from memory, which is always enclosed by particular ethical-collective "national" consciousness. In short, the collective memory of particular national identities - subject to the social structuring of meaning - is not adequate for historical judgement. One cannot adequately write history from a particular, narrow perspective, but must aim for this universal possibility of judgement and justice. To take a concrete example, no adherence to, say, Serbian or Croatian "national consciousness" will provide a convincingly full explanation of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. That task falls to a kind of "absolute" philosophical judgement, though how one articulates such an unbiased judgement is hard to say.

To return to Binet's HHhH, the textual demand for historical justice, or the demand for a kind of redemption of the novel's heroes and condemnation of its villains, stems from just such a Hegelian urge for universality - that is, an urge for a form of judgement not constrained by particular considerations but one able to take a "God's-eye-view" of historical events. Appropriately for a Hegelian project, however, historical judgement is interwoven throughout the novel with its opposite - the act or process of remembrance. Yet whereas the latter always takes place within a particular ideological configuration of social values, history proper exists in a space of "absolute" or universal judgement.

This brings us to a crucial moral impasse pertaining to three events, all of which are covered in Binet's book. Can the decision to assassinate Heydrich be justified, despite the destruction of Lidice and the terror inflicted after it, because of its achievement in mobilizing anti-Nazi sentiment? And does it matter that the widest propaganda success in the wake of the assassination came about as a result of Lidice's destruction? Debates about the wisdom - on the part, especially, of Beneš, comfortably housed in Britain - of the assassination of Heydrich will continue interminably. Aside from Lidice and later the village of Ležáky (which was also utterly destroyed), an estimated 1,357 Czechs were executed and 3,188 arrests made as a result of the Heydrichiada (the month-long terror that resulted from Heydrich's assassination). It was, in the assessment of the historian Mary Heimann, "the most horrifying chapter of the war" for protectorate Czechs "since the brutal assault on the universities at its beginning. Worse, because it resulted in the liquidation of the underground resistance, it represented the loss of the bravest and most steadfast patriots, the flower of the Czech nation." Being the "politically savvy" operator he was, Beneš was able to capitalize on Heydrich's assassination for the benefit of his own propaganda effort. Even at the time UVOD had advised the government-in-exile that the assassination of a Czech quisling would have been a wiser tactical move. But Beneš plumped for a major German target, reprisals be damned. Binet, fulsome in his praise for the exiled Czechoslovak president, will have none of this. He sees the agents of Operation Anthropoid's sacrifice as among the greatest of the war.

At stake here is more than just the tactical salience of Beneš's wartime decision-making or the heroism of Gabčík and Kubiš. The thousands of Czechs murdered in the aftermath of Operation Anthropoid beg a broader moral view. In a certain sense, and despite his streak of heroic romanticism, Binet provides it. Historical fiction of the type he creates in HHhH escapes morally unanswerable questions of historical cause and effect, and instead, by reflecting on the lives involved, produces a representation of the aspect of a priori goodness of certain historical acts without having to measure them against the unintended tragedies which followed from them. This, then, might be the the value behind Hegel's dialectical "absolute" judgement: not to paint the impossibly complex web of historical interconnection, of cause and effect, in its entirety; but rather to pronounce the universal, properly philosophical "goodness" of acts - say, the assassination of Heydrich or the sheltering and protection of his assassins by various families who put themselves at extreme risk and very often died because of it - irrespective of ethical or pragmatic considerations about such actions' effects. It would be impossible to inhabit a day-to-day world ordered only by such "absolute" philosophical considerations; art, however, can provide the space for such reflections.