Will Firth
Building bridges
From August 5 to 15, some 550 people from 30 countries met in Kaunas, Lithuania, to discuss nationalism in central and eastern Europe.
The record participation at this 65th annual congress of the World Anti-Nationalist Association (SAT) shows how seriously this issue is treated in the former east bloc. Founded by socialist anti-nationalists in Prague in 1921, SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda) has for decades been a forum for fighting nationalist intolerance and building internationalism.
SAT's congresses run successfully without interpreters because the sole working language is Esperanto. Created in 1887 by a Russian Jew, Ludwik Zamenhof, Esperanto is a neutral international language with a community of users estimated at up to a million worldwide. It is comparatively easy to learn and further differs from English, French, Russian etc, in being politically/culturally neutral.
The SAT congress in Kaunas was not without conflicts. A core of older activists from Western countries (perhaps 20% of the participants) adhered to a strict anti-nationalist position and were at loggerheads with some of the east European participants. Although the dividing line between nationalist excesses and a moderate revival of national culture may be thin, many east Europeans felt the latter to be understandable and even necessary after decades of hypocritical national "unity" under Russian cultural hegemony in the Soviet Union.
As to whether Esperanto has a role to play in bringing together the peoples of the ex-USSR amidst the current turmoil of wars, secessions and splits, most participants agreed that this goal was unattainable in the short term.
Not least, this is due to the relative weakness of Esperanto in the ex-USSR. Stalinist repression has taken its toll on the once influential Esperanto movement, which was at its height in the late 1920s. Furthermore, the allure of consumerism has made a bastardised English very popular amongst youth in the east European countries. There is little understanding of potential solutions to the problem of a finding a common language (in the literal and abstract sense!) with neighbouring nationalities.
In any case, the congress in Kaunas heartened participants in the wearing work of fighting nationalist fanaticism in the crisis-ridden countries of Eastern Europe.
[Will Firth is an Australian anarchist resident in Berlin.]