Ten years after the Helsinki Accords of 1975 had been signed by all the European states (except for Albania), together with the US and Canada, Budapest hosted the European Cultural Forum from mid-October till the end of November 1985. The event followed a series of conferences in Belgrade and Madrid, themselves designed to monitor compliance with the Helsinki commitments. The theme of the Budapest fete was freedom in culture and art, which formed the third “basket” of the Helsinki Accords. The conference promised to be challenging, in view of the fact that open and disguised censorship were practiced in the communist countries, in contradiction with the principles of the Helsinki Accords, thus offering an easy target for the Western delegations.
For the official Forum, altogether some 850 participants were accredited to Budapest. For six weeks, the city was home to a legion of diplomats and experts. The Soviet delegation consisted of 90 members, the Czechoslovak of 74, the West German of 72, the Polish of 54, the American of 52, and the Romanian only of 7. Delegations of the Soviet Bloc countries were led by ministers—with the exception of the Romania—while the Western delegations were led either by ex-ministers or ambassadors. According to an unspoken agreement, no East European emigrants were selected to serve on the Western delegations.
Hosts and guests and official and unofficial groups had long prepared for the event, which was expected to meet with a great deal of attention in the press. Dissidents, human rights activists, agents, secret police, party bureaucrats, and journalists were all ready to do their best. Even some artists were busy preparing for the Forum, for instance the artists of the Inconnu Group, Budapest, who were young, inventive talents with daring political messages. They printed large numbers of stickers depicting Mona Lisa in a Hungarian police uniform, and these stickers were posted all over the city during the conference: on buses and trams and in public telephones and shop windows, suggesting a bizarre but rather realistic image of Hungary as a “charming police state.” A samizdat poster was also printed with the same design of “Constable Gioconda,” with the slogans: ”Culture without Police!––Art without Censorship!” Few people knew that Péter Bokros, who had designed the image, had been forcibly conscripted to the army right before the Forum started and spent those days in “splendid isolation” in a military jail.
The Western delegations could not be blamed entirely for the Forum’s failure to use the opportunity to spark fiery debates and express fervent criticism of communism. The agenda of the conference practically smothered all hope of any debate. The Eastern Bloc delegations insisted on the extremely detailed agenda they had set. Thus, only the selected delegates could take the floor; they were allowed to speak only on the subject which they had already specified as the focus of their talks, and there were no informal discussions afterward. Although the Western delegations motioned to change the rules so as to allow time for informal discussions, their proposal needed an unanimous “yes” from all those present. Since the communist delegates opposed it, the proposal was defeated.
Indeed, the events which took place in the field of international politics in the ten years after Helsinki gave very little cause for celebration, as was indicated by the “lack of progress” at the Budapest Forum. Still, the Cultural Forum of Budapest became a significant stage in the Helsinki process, not so much on account of the official events, but as a consequence of the initiative launched by the International Helsinki Federation. The Federation wanted to hold a parallel event during the first three days of the official Forum. This came to be known as the “Alternative” or “Counter-Forum.”
The Hungarian security forces were well aware of the preparations many months prior to the planned event. In the last moment, it therefore secretly instructed the management of the downtown hotels to refuse to make the reserved banquet room available and deny all new requests for rental of conference spaces. Thus, the Helsinki Federation was denied the chance to hold a public meeting. However, thanks to the Hungarian opposition, the meeting still took place. On 15 October, the participants gathered at poet István Eörsi’s flat, and on the next two days they met at film director András Jeles’ apartment. Thus, the event became a private affair, which the state secret police was unable to prevent, although it tried to monitor it by all possible means from the beginning till the end of the third day.
After a long historical break, “West met East” freely and with a rather keen interest in each other in this temporary asylum of a downtown flat full of fairly informally dressed local intellectuals, students, some well-known writers, human rights activists from the “free world,” and friendly Western diplomats, a bit more than a hundred people in total. Sitting on the floor, seated on chairs, or standing behind them, the members of the audience listened carefully to the speakers, who spoke mostly in English and sometimes in German, French, and Hungarian. The lectures touched on the question of writers’ integrity, the role of writers in society, and the future of European cultural and political heritage. The most sensitive issue, however, was that of censorship, a topic hardly mentioned at the official forum.
The Counter-Forum was attended by, among others, Susan Sontag, Per Wastberg, Danilo Kis, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Timothy Garton Ash, Amos Oz, Pavel Kohut, and Jiri Grusa, as well as by a number of Hungarian writers, including György Konrád, Sándor Csoóri, György Bence, Miklós Mészöly, and Miklós Tamás Gáspár. The Helsinki Federation was represented by Gerald Nagler, Jeri Laber, Aryeh Neier, and Karl von Schwarzenberg, who had recently been elected President of the IHF. Three television channels, several radio stations (including the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe), and countless correspondents from the Western media took part in the symposium, producing reports and making interviews with the participants.
In the Western press, the alternative forum was given far more attention than the official forum. The great Western dailies, weeklies, and magazines, including the Austrian Profil, the German Die Welt, Die Weltwoche, and Die Presse, the prestigious Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the French Liberation, and the Italian La Reppublica published detailed articles on the counter-forum. An essay by Danilo Kis was published in the New York Times Book Review. Garton Ash sent a report to Spectator and wrote a longer study for The New York Review of Books. In the latter piece, which was entitled “The Hungarian lesson,” he revealed that although censorship in Hungary may have seemed liberal from a distance, in reality it was characterized by chaos and unpredictability. It was impossible to tell what exactly the authorities would consider a breech of the rules or how far their patience would extend.
A rich collection of sources survives about the events and debates of the Forum and Counter-Forum consisting of the one-time publications (articles published in the Eastern and Western press, gassizdat, samizdat, and tamizdat), the records of the Hungarian diplomatic, police, and party organs (secret reports, instructions, etc.), and some private and personal recollections (in the form of memoires, oral history interviews, etc). The theme is of both Hungarian and international interest. The arguments which were put forward in the formal and informal debates clearly reveal what the creators and managers of culture thought about public fora, human rights, and political freedoms and responsibilities. The people who took part were writers, journalists, artists, scientists, diplomats, and politicians from both East and West just a few years before the decline of the bipolar world order.
