Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Many sister parties in North West Europe took the same line and a
coordination mechanism called SCANDILUX was set up to promote
a common position. As the acronym suggests, it brought together
the parties from the Benelux and the Scandinavian NATO
countries. But also the British and, in particular, the Germans played
an active role. I attended many meetings and remember the very
important contribution of Egon Bahr, architect of the German Ostpolitik,
to our work. One of the initiatives of SCANDILUX was to
enter into a dialogue with some of the ruling parties in Eastern Europe
in an attempt to develop a joint policy on the missile issue.
These conversations were interesting but we were not in control of
government policies and it was official diplomacy that eventually
found a way out of the threatening armaments race. However, the
contacts were maintained. I was sceptical about this continuation
because many discussions between the two sides ended up in Orwellian
confusion, in particular when talking to our counterparts in
the GDR. My impression did not change when later I participated
in discussions between the SPD, Western German social democrats,
and the SED, the ruling party on the other side.
After having been elected International Secretary of the Dutch
Labour Party in 1987, I followed the approach of my predecessor,
Maarten van Traa, who while being a partner in the above mentioned
dialogue was at the same time an active supporter of the
dissident movements in Eastern Europe. We used our official contacts
to get into countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia where
we smuggled books and medicine or gave lectures at dissident
gatherings in obscure apartments. I have to admit that for some
time we had the illusion that we could build bridges between the
communist parties and the opposition movements. This in the end
only happened when the collapse of the system had already begun.
The events of 1989 came as a complete surprise and drastically
changed the historical perspective. Instead of wondering how we
could improve the situation in Europe step by step and change the
system from within, we now had to deal with something quite different;
the communist bloc had suddenly fallen apart and the new
independent states entered a period of radical transformation.
Whilst everybody had to get used to the new situation – this took
a while -, I started working on the role of the left in the recently es-
239 Jan Marinus Wiersma