IN PERSPECTIVE 20: BUDAPEST AND FREE SPACE FOR CULTURE

In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: the 1985 Budapest Cultural Forum and a renewed cold war.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only a short time before that, intense discussions between Warsaw Pact and NATO countries on security, disarmament and free cultural exchange took place. Contrary to expectations, a permanent path of relaxation did not take off after the fall of the Wall. Security as well as armaments are again highly topical as a topic. For free cultural exchange, political or commercial manipulation sometimes gets in the way and objections that lead to cancellations.

Glass and wood from the Eastern Bloc

The room was as a conference hall in Eastern Europe should be: lots of everything. Lots of shiny wood, lots of light from lots of glass lamps, lots and lots of thick rugs. Twice metre-long tables, facing each other. On the pseudo damask tablecloths were heavy water carafes and large glass ashtrays. At the tables opposite sat the Eastern European delegations. On 'our' side the representatives of the NATO bloc.

Here in the hall was one of the sessions of the European Cultural Forum, Budapest 1985. The conference lasted six weeks. Conference delegates relieved each other and rotated one or two weeks. Now it was the turn of the visual arts, then film, and so on. This 'Cultural Forum' under Hungarian hosting had been decided in Madrid. It was there, in 1983, that the countries of the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, met to reduce tensions between East and West. And Madrid in turn flowed from the Helsinki accords that the CSCE had delivered in 1975¹. 'Helsinki' was, for example, about 'abstaining from the threat or use of force', 'inviolability of borders' or 'non -interference in internal affairs'.

Old fare, in other words, from 50 years ago! Helsinki concluded with four so-called 'baskets': the agreement covered not only disarmament and security, but also economics, science and technology, environmental issues as well as the free exchange of information and culture. In Madrid, five years later, the countries again agreed to make maximum efforts to restore trust and stability in mutual relations. In two years' time, therefore, there was to be an expert meeting in Ottawa, Canada, on human rights and fundamental freedoms. A year earlier, the countries were to meet in Stockholm on security and disarmament. In this line of engagements, the conference in Budapest fitted.

Grass and Bernlef

All 35 CSCE countries had sent delegations, diplomats, but also "leading personalities in the field of culture": representatives of cultural organisations, architects, visual artists, writers, film makers, museum directors. Among them, for instance, Italian filmmaker Fellini, French political philosopher Régis Debray, German author Günter Grass. From our country, participants included writer, poet (and jazz connoisseur) Henk Bernlef and museum director Liesbeth Brandt Corstius. I myself had been recruited for the broader 'mutual cultural knowledge exchange' component. That I participated precisely in the week when the Dutch government - 'Helsinki' or not - signed the placement decision for US cruise missiles² was, to my mind, bizarre.

Under the title "Write or Unwrite", Bernlef published a report in NRC Handelsblad after his return. He wrote "What was I supposed to do here? Nothing special was actually expected of me. As long as it was constructive, they had said in The Hague. I was allowed to make proposals that would help intensify contact between the different countries of Europe." ³

The fall of the Berlin Wall would not be long in coming, but now the Cold War was still in the stage of freezing temperatures. The free exchange of views that government leaders and diplomats had perhaps naively intended or cunningly said to aim for was largely a game of volleyball in practice.

The West bloc spent a lot of speaking time on the lack of freedom of speech. There fell on the eastern side, as if rockets were being fired incessantly, a permanent rain of reproaches in this regard. Eastern bloc officials replied with an ingenious repertoire of denial, non-understanding, you-bake, "clarification of misunderstandings" or formalistic reasoning. Conversely, Eastern Bloc countries expressed concern, if not disgust, about the power of commerce, increasing decadence and lack of social cohesion in Western culture.

This was reflected in the nature of many of the dozens of proposals submitted by delegations or individual representatives. For example, the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union advocated ensuring cultural human rights through the "democratisation of culture. Democratisation here had its own definition. The Soviet Union called on filmmakers to take an active stand against "anything that pollutes the soul of the viewer and brings down his dignity. Hungary, Poland and again the Soviet Union wanted to safeguard the diversity and uniqueness of different cultures and protect them from the harmful effects of the culture industry. From the United States, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, in turn, there was a call to put nothing in the way of those who stood up for the interests of artists and arts organisations.

No free exchange over free exchange

That it was not going to be a very free exchange of views was already evident at the start of the conference. Members of the informal International Helsinki Delegation had reserved rooms in the neat Dunas Interconinental Hotel for an open discussion between writers from east and west. But on arrival, the reservations turned out to have been cancelled by higher-ups. The group found shelter in a large private flat on the Danube where she allowed a shadow conference to take place. Although she had earlier issued a ban on gathering, in the end the Hungarian government tolerated it. The host was caught between expectations from Western Europe and pressure from Soviet authorities,

Rembrandt offered an apt illustration of the existing tension between the Eastern Bloc and the West and how it also touched culture. " Poor Rembrandt would not have been able to believe that his works would be barred from America because they came from the Leningrad Hermitage. At least, that is what the Soviet Union gives as the reason why an exhibition did not go ahead."⁴, wrote the Algemeen Dagblad in October 1985.

You involuntarily associate this with the recent demise of the Amsterdam Hermitage, following the invasion of Ukraine.

East or West, we all tried very hard. We drafted resolutions and recommendations, boasted of our countries' cultural achievements, exuded the expectation that Europe would become one - and preferably our Europe - and that we would consume each other's cultural offerings with the greatest ease. But the Russians in particular said that we did not know their true and meaningful artists at all and that we were chasing the wrong people who had been arrested or hindered in their work because they apparently had something criminal on their record.

Bernlef in his report: " Francis King, a British author, drama critic and president of the English section of the PEN club⁵ wonders why it is that so many Russian writers turn out to be mentally disturbed and have to be treated in institutions. His irony falls on deaf ears. The answer is that statistics do not confirm this."

Meanwhile, Western countries spoke highly of their pluralistic media and cultural offerings, but did not have much of a rebuttal when it came to commercialisation, the degradation and manipulation it entailed. Hadn't the West German philosopher Habermas already warned us about this very clearly?⁶ Not to mention that just this month a performance of Fassbinder's "The Dirt, the City and Death " in Frankfurt had to be cancelled due to protests. ⁷ The Western European population apparently did not accept just anything either.

Two times one direction

In practice, the intended open dialogue often amounted to two-way one-way traffic. There came the time when I got tired of the mutual one-sided nagging. So I raised the point that even in NATO countries, the free exchange of views was not always guaranteed. I pointed to the situation in Turkey. The Turkish delegation was sitting far away from me, on the far left at the long table. But the dismay reached me immediately. A day later, the Dutch delegation leader Jalink, former Dutch ambassador in Rome, fatherly admonished me. His colleagues had given him a hard time. The NATO countries had to show unity here; you shouldn't soil your own nest.

Although I continued to believe that critical self-reflection was precisely a Western European strength and that we should therefore also look at ourselves openly, it did not stop me from again diligently joining in with finger-pointing in the eastern direction and co-writing the resolutions advocating free exchange. Or writing them myself, for instance the call for governments, when asked, to at least give open information, "in the spirit of Helsinki", about artists who had been at odds with the government because of their work.

I also arranged for all delegations to receive leaflets from AIDA, the organisation set up from France by filmmaker Claude Lelouche and theatre-maker Ariane Mnouchkine, among others, to stand up for endangered artists. Czech playwright Václav Havel was one of the first and one of the few truly successful adoptions in the collaboration of Amnesty, PEN-International and AIDA. Ten years later, when I got to shake Havel's hand in the courtyard of the Theatre School In Prague, he was now president of his country.

From Budapest to Vienna

The results of the European Cultural Forum In Budapest were nothing to write home about. Almost literally not: on the CSCE's internet archive, nothing like a final declaration can be found. Even though there had been six weeks of talks. Even if so much paper had been handed out. Once again Bernlef: "The diplomats seem satisfied. Busily they walk back and forth, comparing papers, changing wordings, as if this is reality and words equal deeds. Perhaps you have to believe that too, if you want to remain a diplomat." However, the delegations had not met.

There was still Günter Grass' sympathetically received proposal to set up a European Cultural Institute for Permanent Exchange, to be based in Budapest, with offices in Amsterdam and Vienna and with its own magazine and media programmes. It was ultimately not embraced: too much chance of a lot of sand in a small machine.

With that, the only concrete, likely proposal was lost. Perhaps, in the evenings at the informal meetings in the pub, sparks of understanding jumped over and small doses of hope and encouragement that would change something in thinking and doing on both sides of the already almost rusty Iron Curtain.

In 1986, the CSCE countries met again, this time in Vienna. The final document appeared only three years later, in the year the Wall fell.⁸ The four different 'baskets' were there, so the countries also returned to the culture conference in Budapest. They had to admit that no conclusions had been reached in Budapest, but now the many sensible ideas and proposals had been discussed again in Vienna, they were still very grateful to the 'leading cultural personalities' in Budapest, and In practice the countries were already acting on them many times, they said. They again agreed on many fine intentions in the final document. About free exchange of culture, cooperation between people and organisations across borders, encouraging personal contacts and so on.

Reading it will bring tears to your eyes three times. The first time because it is all so well intentioned. The second time because the fall of the Wall, the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc and neoliberal and technological developments mean that you now read those texts so differently and, in part, as outdated. The third time, political topicality is the cause.

The euphoria over the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union is behind us. But here and there nostalgia for the Soviet era flares up again. There are new cold wars, linked to hot get elsewhere: poignant war suffering in different parts of the world. Unchanged and unabated is the superior moralism and lack of critical self-reflection in much of the Western world.

Democratic awareness, meanwhile, is diminishing. In the face of aggressive behaviour by ruling thugs, we know little else to do but cancel and boycott, including citizens who themselves suffer under their leaders or at least feel distanced from them.

Is Russian music still allowed to be heard, Russian literature still read? Are athletes from Iran allowed to compete? Are Israelis allowed to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest?

Where with most boycotts, little or nothing has been achieved and we leave individual fellow human beings out in the cold, it is better to keep alive the free exchange on a personal basis of sportsmen, scientists, journalists, artists and philosophers from any country. Provided they are not the representative of their government. Provided nothing needs to be concealed. However, as a basis for genuine dialogue, mutual respect and curiosity replace biased and superior moralism. Those who cannot listen critically to themselves cannot listen to others either. We then only hear what we already know ourselves.

Nuts

1 Final Act Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Helsinki August 1975, Dutch text published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

2 Daily News of the Hungarian News Agency, 5 November 1985: " Despite mass protest, Netherlands signs missile deal".

3 NRC Handelsblad, 22 November 1985

4 Algemeen Dagblad, 14-10-1985

5 PEN-international is the international organisation that promotes literature and defends freedom of expression for writers.

6 Habermas, sociologist of the Frankfurter Schule, wrote, among others, Strukturwandel der Offentlichtkeit (1962)

7 Daily News Hungarian Press Brueau, 2 November 1985.

8 Concluding Document of the Vienna Meeting1986 of representatives of the participating states of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, Vienna 1989