Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

just a tactic, a device for embarrassing Communism’s rulers. In closed societies where everything was political—and politics as such were thus precluded—‘rights’ offered a way forward, a first breach in the curtain of pessimism shrouding Eastern Europe in the ‘silent Seventies’, an end to the regime’s monopoly on language-as-power. Moreover the constitutional rights of persons, by their very nature, bear formal witness to the existence of persons as such, with claims upon one another and upon the community. They describe a space between helpless individuals and the all-powerful state. The movement for rights (‘human rights’), as the young Hungarian theorist Miklós Haraszti conceded, was an acknowledgement that the necessary corrective to Communism’s defects was not a better Communism but the constitution—or reconstitution—of civil (i.e. ‘bourgeois’) society.