Interview with Jim Bjork--June 13, 2016

Interview with Jim Bjork, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and Liberal Arts at King's College London. The interview was conducted in London on June 13, 2016. To access an mp3 of the complete interview, click here.

Jim Bjork specializes in the history of nationalism and the social history of religion. His book, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland, 1890-1922 (University of Michigan, 2008), shows the myriad ways religion competed with nationalism for the "souls" of Upper Silesians around the turn of the century. He’s currently at work on a history of religion in postwar Poland. 

Interview Themes

How Bjork came to the study of East-Central Europe; coming of age around 1989 (min. 1:25)
What drew him initially to “Cold War” takes on the communist bloc (4:15)

Bjork’s memories of 1989 as a student at Georgetown - "disorienting but exhilarating" (5:55)

On his first visit to the region in 1993 and what stood out; the unique atmosphere in Romania (9:20)

Learning German, Polish, etc. (14:50)

Bjork's plans when he started grad school at the University of Chicago (16:15)

On Bjork’s starting cohort at Chicago (17:55)

Is there anything that sets his cohort/generation apart intellectually? John Boyer's influential interest in religion and politics; Alf Lüdtke and Alltagsgeschichte (19:35)

Comparing Chicago to Columbia in treatment of the Habsburg Monarchy (24:12)

How he came to his dissertation/book topic (28:20)

On religion as an “independent variable” (31:07)

How his interests were influenced (or not) by secessionism of the moment—Yugoslavia, USSR, Czechoslovakia? (34:25)

Bjork’s view on plebiscites in the post-WWI period, up to Brexit (38:00)

Sovereignty and the problem Westphalia was meant to address (44:00)

Were the partitions of Poland in some sense the original geopolitical sin? (46:57)

How he came to his current book project on religion in postwar Poland (52:30)

On Polish historiographical dichotomies (peasants/szlachta, nativists/Westernizers, Piłsudski/Dmowski, church/nation) and ways of looking at Polish history (58:17)

On Vergangenheitsbewältigung and Jan Gross's Neighbors (1:05:55)

The recent changes in Poland (with the coming to power of PiS) and how (un)expected it was (1:17:46)

On whether there is a desire on the part of East-Central Europeans to stop time (1:23:10)

Where the field is going/should go from here (1:29:05)

What's different about studying East-Central Europe from Britain as opposed to the US (1:40:42)

A Country for Old Men

October 2014 protest in Budapest against the Orbán government.
Photograph: Ronan Shenhav

This was recently published in the Boston Review. 

Last September an article on the front page of a leading Hungarian daily began, "The story of the ever-deepening refugee crisis is taking ever more unexpected turns." A prominent Hungarian intellectual and former dissident, György Konrád, had come out in support of the efforts of the Hungarian government to build a wall to keep out newcomers and to cast them as economic opportunists rather than political refugees. In another corner of the Hungarian media, pundits were citing passages from The Final Tavern (A végső kocsma), a 2014 book by Holocaust survivor and 2002 Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, who passed away last month. In the book, Kertész was sharply critical of liberals' welcoming attitude toward Muslim refugees and migrants. His and Konrád's statements were registered with incredulity in the liberal press and with undisguised relish on the right.

Anyone who has followed the serpentine trajectory of Hungarian politics since the controlled collapse of state socialism in 1989 might be forgiven for throwing their hands up in confusion. For more than two and a half decades, Hungarian political life has been a story of reversals. The party of the Young Democrats (Fidesz), founded in 1988 by a few-dozen college students, has mutated from a member of the Liberal International to the torchbearer of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe. Hungarians who once described themselves as liberal, including the current prime minister and Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán, have shed the epithet. Already in 1994, Orbán favored replacing it with "free-thinking." Twenty years later, his metamorphosis was complete when he wondered whether being part of the European Union was an obstacle to the reorganization of the state into "an illiberal nation state within the EU."

Orbán's liberal critics are quick to insist that he was never one of them. Plucky anti-communist dissidents who trumpeted individual liberties against the paternalistic and overweening socialist party-state merely looked liberal to many Western liberals. But conservatives, too, found soul mates in dissidents, generalizing their anti-communism into a wholesale censure of the left. In short, everybody loved a dissident. It was the left-leaning poet W. H. Auden who helped to bring dissident poet and later Nobel Prize–winner Joseph Brodsky to the United States in 1972; another poet and powerful intellectual force of the U.S. neoconservative movement, Peter Viereck, brought him to Mount Holyoke College in 1974. For every dissident who fulfilled the Western liberal fantasy, there were as many who fulfilled at least part of the conservative one, from union leader and Solidarity figurehead Lech Wałęsa to the Czech playwright, philosopher, and president Václav Havel.

If it was not the dissidents themselves who changed, what explains these reversals? And why has the migrant and refugee crisis in particular become so symptomatic of a crisis of liberalism?

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