Ivan Krastev

AS AN OLD SOVIET JOKE GOES, three men are sitting in a cell in the KGB prison in Moscow. The first is there because he criticized the Bolshevik political leader Karl Radek (later murdered by Stalin). The second is there because he spoke out in favor of Radek. The third man is Karl Radek. Now take a TV studio or a parliamentary hall instead of prison, and replace the name “Karl Radek” with “George Soros” and you will get a sense of the role George Soros plays in Eastern Europe today. But while it is relatively easy to be a critic or admirer of Soros, in a political and intellectual environment in which George Soros is the major dividing line, the one impossible position is to be George Soros.

Soros is an Eastern European for whom the ideal of open society has been a guiding philosophy, not only in his private thinking but also in his public actions. He came to this belief in large part because of his experiences as an Eastern European, but when the post-Soviet era failed to bring open society to the region, Soros came to be seen more as a problem than an asset.

To tell the story of George Soros and Eastern Europe requires us to start at the beginning.

ON DECEMBER 23, 1939, a guest arrived at the editorial offices of the Budapest newspaper 8 Orai ujsag (8 O’Clock News). The next day, a short article bearing the headline “George Soros Brings a Donation” was published. It dutifully reported:

He enters the room and skillfully shuts the door behind him. Standing on tiptoes, he reaches up to the high doorknob and turns it comfortably. Hatless but with a leather bag flung over his shoulders, our smiling guest is a ray of sunshine in the office.

“My name is George Soros,” he says, clicking his heels. We admit that it is not every day that we have dealings with young gentlemen from the fourth grade of elementary school.

“I just dropped in after school,” says George and slides open the wooden dual-compartment pencil case clutched in his palm. From an assortment of erasers and pen wipers he digs out two pieces of paper the size of a standard postage stamp. Two tiny hands start unfolding the pieces and place two ten-pengö notes on the counter. “There you go!”

“George,” I address him sternly. “What is this supposed to mean? What do you intend to do with all this money?”

With his angelically mischievous blue eyes sparkling, he turns to me. “I brought this money for the Finnish people. There is a war in Finland at the moment, Daddy told me.”¹

Most probably this was George Soros’s first ever political contribution. And if you ignore the size of the donation (twenty pengö, about $74 in today’s money), you find in it all the core characteristics of his later political philanthropy—moral clarity, acute sense of timing, and a firm belief that his contribution can make history. The charitable act was made in the midst of an existential crisis for the young Finnish state, a small distant country that few could point to on a map.

Soros’s first political donation also captures well the Eastern European sources of his future philanthropy. Being born in post-Habsburg Eastern Europe means that you are inevitably residing in a small nation-state—one whose independence is perilous and contingent. Anxiety and insecurity are a constant frame of mind. The Czech writer Milan Kundera captures this sense of insecurity by defining a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put into question at any moment.” Kundera makes clear that a citizen of a large country fails to ponder his country’s survival, as “his anthems speak only of grandeur and eternity.” By mordant contrast, he writes that “the Polish anthem … starts with the verse: ‘Poland has not yet perished.’”²

In 1946 the Hungarian intellectual István Bibó offered a similar perspective. Historical trauma, he suggests, makes Eastern European societies fear and resent external powers; it also produces a belief that “the advance of freedom threatens the national cause.”³ Eastern Europeans have learned to be suspicious of any cosmopolitan ideology that traverses their borders, whether it be the universalism of the Catholic Church, the liberalism of the late Habsburg empire, or Marxist internationalism.

George Soros’s intellectual sensibility is a product of these circumstances. He is a cosmopolitan reared in an environment suspicious of cosmopolitanism. He is also a product of the 1940s, a turbulent and often dizzying decade that inspired a reading of history as emblematic of revolutionary waves. “My experience with revolutionary moments started when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944,” Soros once wrote. “I was not yet fourteen years old. By some measures, it started even earlier, when I used to join my father in the swimming pool after school and he would regale me with tales of his adventures in Siberia during the Russian revolution of 1917. If I add my father’s reminiscences to my own experiences, I can claim to have a memory going back a hundred years.”⁴ An assimilated Jew reared in a society in which people are prized for having roots rather than legs, Soros has an elective affinity for history and ideas that clashed with the social strictures imposed around him.

The stark contrast that Soros makes between open society and closed society derives from two almost polar opposite ways to understand the world and two distinct regimes of solidarity. “What do we owe each other?” asks the moral philosopher Tim Scanlon in his important book of the same name. Do we owe our support to the most vulnerable in our community, or to the most vulnerable people in the world? Soros’s answer, almost instinctual, is that humankind is our natural community.

Soros’s father, Tivadar, the truest of cosmopolitans, learned Esperanto while in the trenches of World War I; it was his way to keep faith with the ideals of a liberal universalism so badly scarred after that conflict. For George Soros, the discourse of human rights and open society become the language through which he communicates with the world.

Eastern Europe, with its often ill-defined geographic borders—in the best Habsburg tradition, he would always call the region Central Europe—has at least three distinct meanings for George Soros. It is the place of his upbringing and where his philosophy was shaped. It is also the setting upon which Soros’s global influence was forged. But Eastern Europe is also where the most ardent anti-Soros conspiracy theories originated. Soros, in this sense, can never be decoupled from his native region. His very political identity was fashioned through the promulgation of false identity documents on the black market in Nazi-occupied Budapest. And although his foundations have supported the identity aspirations of different ethnic and political groups, for him the most valuable identity was always the one that saves human lives and human dignity.

A focus on human dignity, not only human rights, was central to Soros’s conceptual framework. It was this preservation of human dignity that he revered in the hard-fought struggles of Eastern European dissidents. The anti-politics of dissidents—the primacy placed on moral conduct over alignment with established political institutions—was the landscape into which Soros threw himself in the 1970s and 1980s. The sovereignty of the individual and the autonomous power of civil society were the parameters for Soros’s new thinking on how to effect change.

Soros’s decision to invite Aryeh Neier to become the first president of his Open Society Foundations set the stage. Neier was not simply one of the legendary figures of America’s civil rights movement. He was also one of the founders of Helsinki Watch (what would eventually merge into Human Rights Watch) and a bridge between Eastern European dissidents and the American human rights community. Neier was no stranger to the intellectual and physical plight of dissidents in both domains.

Neier’s galvanizing of the human rights movement coincides with the period the Yale intellectual historian Samuel Moyn provocatively calls “the last utopia.”⁵ Moyn posits that human rights do not represent the culmination of humane, enlightened Western thought; nor, as is customarily thought, was the human rights movement a reaction to the carnage and genocide of the Second World War. For him, it is only in the 1970s (and not following 1789, 1848, 1918, or 1945) that human rights emerged as a force of its own. The present ideological form of international human rights is not some progressive evolution of Enlightenment precepts, but largely a reaction to (and an attempt to regroup after) the exhaustion of the utopian social visions of the postwar period, especially anti-colonialism and Marxism. Human rights by the 1970s represent a retreat to an individualistic ethic of rights against states.

This new ideological formation can be illustrated by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which turned out to be a rotten bargain for communist regimes. What the Soviet Union gained in Helsinki was the recognition of its post–World War II borders. The cost, however, was a recognition of the primacy of individual rights irrespective of the position of the state. This defense of individual rights swiftly became a core ideological component in the East-West confrontation, and in the struggle of Eastern European and Soviet dissidents against communist regimes.

George Soros’s political philanthropy became a striking expression of the autonomous power of the human rights movement. Soros and Neier contributed to a process whereby the human rights movement after the Cold War affirmatively embraced internationalism as the preferred vehicle for its own “utopian” vision, alongside an ever more expansive, progressive, and substantive human rights corpus of international law. In this dynamic, the Open Society Foundations would become among the most powerful and effective advocates for institutions like the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Soros’s vision of the open society envisioned not only the transfer of power from nondemocratic to democratic governments but also the supplanting of the nation-state by international institutions.

Soros’s detractors have maligned him for advocating some form of global government. This is a distortion of his actual views. Soros has long championed global governance—never government—namely, the empowerment of international law and norms of cooperation as features of a functioning international order. His commitment to international justice and global solutions to global problems emerge directly from these convictions.

For Soros, post-communist Eastern Europe was not simply the place where his philosophy originates, but the dreamland where the open society would find its most fervent advocates. Soros’s personal experience living in a closed society led him to embrace the ideal of an open society; so, too, did the fact that Soros is an Eastern European, and in his words, “People in Eastern Europe care much more about poetry and philosophy.”⁶ Some could rightly argue that his romantic vision of the region as one in love with poetry and ideas was rooted in the fact that when Soros arrived there in the 1970s and 1980s, he encountered two types of people: anti-communist dissidents and communist spies—and both belonged to the intelligentsia.

SOROS HAS OFTEN remarked that The Open Society and Its Enemies, the magnum opus of his intellectual mentor, Karl Popper, “struck me with the force of revelation.” But his revelation in reading Popper calls to mind the epiphany of Molière’s character Monsieur Jourdain, who discovered that all his life he was speaking prose without knowing it. Popper’s open society philosophy resonated with Soros because it best articulated in philosophical terms what Soros had learned on the ground in Hungary from 1944 to 1947. Facing, in turn, the Nazis followed by the Soviets, Soros was particularly drawn to the notion that those who make claims on ultimate truth put their societies on the road to dictatorship. Popper just made this point more forcefully than anybody else.

Open society was never a doctrine or a simple institutional arrangement; it was a way of thinking. It is realizing the fallibility of your own positions; the readiness to change your views when the facts change. John Maynard Keynes’s famous crack, “When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do?,” is redolent of Soros’s own judgment. “If there is anything really original in my thinking,” he writes, “it is this emphasis on misconceptions.”⁷

Already a successful investor in the late 1970s, George Soros steeled himself after trading hours to finish his decades-long philosophical study The Burden of Consciousness, a project he had started while a student at the London School of Economics thirty years earlier. He would eventually send the manuscript to Popper, who “did not remember me but responded enthusiastically.” Soros traveled to see him in London and upon introducing himself received an unanticipated response: “I am so disappointed.” “When I received your manuscript,” Popper noted, “I thought you are an American who understood what I was talking about when I described the dangers of totalitarian society. But you are Hungarian; you experienced them at first hand.”⁸

Both Popper and Soros are rationalists who reject a deterministic view of history and believe in the power of reality to bite. Both are cosmopolitans. Yet in one vital sense, Popper’s view of the world differs significantly from Soros’s. Popper left Eastern Europe when the 1920s and 1930s were still considered “postwar.” For George Soros, by contrast, the 1930s were his prewar years. The Open Society and Its Enemies is written by a Habsburg intellectual who bore witness to the horrors of Europe’s self-destruction from the leafy precincts of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. By contrast, Soros was a survivor of these regimes. Soros’s theory of reflexivity was tested repeatedly in 1944 as he watched how people’s expectations, more than anything else, became the motor of history and how deadly wrong these expectations could be. The conviction that a single individual can change the course of history was an insight that Popper lacked.

“1944 was the formative experience of my life,” Soros has written more than once. It was in this crucial year during the war that he first experienced what he would later define as a “far-from-equilibrium situation.” “Nazi persecution, Soviet occupation and being penniless in London,” he asserts, “all qualify as far-from-equilibrium situations.”⁹

Soros credits his father’s and his own experiences in Nazi-occupied Hungary for his particular aptitude in contending with “far-from-equilibrium situations” or “revolutionary situations.” His father impressed upon him “that there are times when the normal rules do not apply, and if you obey the rules at those times you are liable to perish.” “My father,” he explains, “who had lived through the revolution of 1917, had told me that in revolutionary times anything is possible and I was guided by his advice.”¹⁰

Soros’s success in the market was the most convincing evidence that his father was right. Yet Soros’s political philosophy is focused on the idea that revolutions are never the answer to the problems of the world, and that the only way to improve the human condition is by piecemeal social engineering, one of Popper’s core concepts.

BEING A PERSECUTED minority is an intrinsic element of Soros’s Eastern European experience. And he is historically sensitive to the fact that persecuted minorities often become the scapegoats of revolution. His unwavering commitment to the Roma community in Europe is the best expression of this sensibility. What all Eastern Europeans have learned from history is that relying on the nation-state to defend you is a fool’s errand. Jews in particular have learned the hard way that the state can become your worst enemy. In the interwar period Eastern Europe was haunted by the specter of betrayal. For Jews, it was a double betrayal: nationalist elites accused Jews of disloyalty, while Jews were betrayed by the nation-states of which they were citizens.

A groaning bookshelf documents the complex and variegated experiences of the assimilated Jews of Central Europe. Their sin was not that they refused to integrate into the culture of the newly born nation-states, but that they did it so well. It was the success of their integration rather than its failure that was the real “Jewish problem” in places like Budapest. As the historian Amos Elon demonstrated in the case of Germany, the successful assimilation of the Jews posed a troubling question for the cultural majority: If non-Germans can embody German culture better than Germans, what precisely does it mean to be German? Does German genius even exist anymore?

Sympathy with the fate of small nations and identification with persecuted minorities—those who can easily become stateless persons—are an integral part of Soros’s Eastern European inheritance. But while many Jews who survived the Holocaust were ready to blame universalism and cosmopolitanism as the utopia that cost them dearly, George Soros escaped the horror of the Holocaust recommitted to these same universal values. “I don’t think that you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe,” he has written. “The only way to overcome it is if you give up the tribalness.”¹¹ Fittingly, it is here that the philosopher Henri Bergson, from whom Karl Popper borrows the concept of open society, comes into play. Bergson’s polarity of tribal and universal resonated for Popper, and, in turn, Soros, who saw the tribal as dissonant and inconsistent with the imperatives of modern society.

Soros’s conceptual framework and political beliefs are rooted in the philosophy of liberal universalism born in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His worldview is shaped by what the anthropologist Ernest Gellner defines as the “Habsburg dilemma”—the tension between individualist liberals, often Jews, defending the idea of a pluralistic, tolerant, patchwork empire, and nationalist intellectuals offering the alternative of a “closed, localized culture, idiosyncratic and glorifying its idiosyncrasy, and promising emotional and aesthetic fulfillment and satisfaction of its members.”¹² For Soros, Soviet communism and the interwar nationalistic regimes in Eastern Europe were no more than different articulations of the ideal of a closed society.

IN 1989—THE annus mirabilis that saw Germans rejoicing on the rubble of the Berlin Wall—Francis Fukuyama, a US State Department official, neatly captured the spirit of the time in an influential essay. With the end of the Cold War, he argued, all major ideological conflicts had been resolved. The contest was over, and history had produced a winner: Western-style liberal democracy. Taking a page from the philosophy of Hegel, Fukuyama presented the West’s victory in the Cold War as a favorable verdict delivered by history itself. The overthrow of communism was the most marvelous of all revolutions not only because it was liberal and peaceful but also because it was a revolution of the mind. “The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal,” Fukuyama insisted, “insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.”¹³

Soros was never a devotee of the “end of history” consensus. He never was a triumphalist. While many in the West were busy celebrating the free world’s victory in the Cold War, Soros was worried that the West risked wasting a rare historical moment.

What made Soros’s conception of the events of 1989 different from most other participants and observers was his understanding that the end of communism meant not only the remaking of the communist world but the remaking of the world itself. Soros never signed on to the delusion that 1989 could remake the East while the West stayed as it was. Soros always perceived the dynamic and dialectical element in human development, as reflected in his doctrine of reflexivity.

In understanding Soros’s quest to support political reform in Eastern Europe, it is important to remember that even though he left Eastern Europe in 1947, he never evolved into the archetype of an Eastern European political émigré. Unlike, say, Zbigniew Brzezinski or Madeleine Albright, Soros did not spend the Cold War years preoccupied by the fate of Eastern Europe and the struggle against communism. Certainly, Soros still had friends in these countries, but he wanted to be considered American. What attracted him to the United States was principally the universalism of its worldview, and he sought to embody it in his own self-presentation. Unsurprisingly, then, Soros’s first act of political philanthropy started not in Eastern Europe but in South Africa, in 1979. He may have hoped for the West’s triumph in the Cold War, but he was not a classic Cold Warrior.

Most political émigrés from Eastern Europe in the 1980s were suspicious of Mikhail Gorbachev and his grand plans for reform. That skepticism was born of previous attempts at change that lasted only for intermittent periods, such as Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, and were later suppressed. Soros, by contrast, was attracted to the Soviet leader’s sincerity and advocated supporting him despite being unsure about his chances of success. It didn’t hurt that Soros saw some of himself in the great communist reformer.

“Just as a man created God in his image,” Soros wrote in 1990, “I shall do the same with Gorbachev. I believe that Gorbachev’s view of the world is not very different than mine.”¹⁴ Along with the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Soros shared a fascination with “heroes of retreat.” “It was Clausewitz,” Enzensberger wrote, “the doyen of strategic thinking, who showed that retreat is the most difficult of all operations. That applies in politics as well. The ne plus ultra in the art of the possible consists of withdrawing from an untenable position. But if the stature of the hero is proportional to the difficulty of the task before him, then it follows that our concept of the heroic needs not only to be revised, but to be stood on its head. Any cretin can throw a bomb. It is 1,000 times more difficult to defuse one.”¹⁵ This is an apposite description for how Soros saw Eastern Europe and the role of Gorbachev in the late 1980s.

Even so, Soros’s admiration for Gorbachev’s undertaking never made him a wholesale enthusiast about the Soviet leader’s enterprise. In 1989 he stated that he had “decided to go all out with my foundations in 1990, exactly because I am so pessimistic.”¹⁶ As is clear from Soros’s words, he would never be capable of following in lockstep with Gorbachev—or, frankly, with anyone. He focused his attention not on the success of Gorbachev’s reforms, but on their unintended consequences.

Soros would later face the accusation that a number of his grantees were dissidents who came from communist families or were themselves communists, rather than longtime anti-communists like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This should come as no surprise. Soros has always maintained a particular affinity to those who stand ready to change their mind, and who have the courage to challenge themselves—and sometimes to risk their lives for the truth they have learned. He has never been warm to fanatics or cynics. Andrei Sakharov, the legendary Soviet dissident, is an example of a heroic figure for Soros. Sakharov combined the qualities that Soros valued most: firm moral principles, personal courage, intellectual openness, and internationalism.

Most difficult for an outsider to apprehend is that Soros’s agenda in Eastern Europe was always changing. There never was a master plan—how could there be?—but he was instead, in the classic Popperian sense, improvisatory. This is what has made Soros singular. Writing with the wisdom that comes from both history and the markets, Soros once noted that “it is characteristic of revolutionary periods that events outpace the ability of the participants to understand them.”¹⁷ “I have tried,” he concedes, “to keep abreast of the revolution, adjusting both my interpretation and my objectives to the circumstances.”¹⁸ For Soros it is not just what he sees, but, far more significantly, his ways of seeing.

The concept of a “fertile fallacy” is central to Soros’s conceptual and practical worldview; he deploys psychological explanation to account for human behavior. “We are capable of acquiring knowledge,” Soros writes, “but we can never have enough knowledge to allow us to base all our decisions on knowledge. It follows that if a piece of knowledge has proved useful, we are liable to overexploit it to areas where it no longer applies, so that it becomes a fallacy.”¹⁹ Likely better than anyone else, Soros realizes that we fall victim not to our failures but to our successes. Unlike those American administrations that universalized the experiences of Eastern Europe, he chose never to do so. Policies that were efficacious in Poland in 1989 need not be—indeed most likely could not be—efficacious in Iraq in 2003. Soros always treated such simple transpositions of ideas and practice with skepticism.

George Soros did not approach the challenges facing Eastern Europe with the intention to dismantle the Soviet Union or the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On the contrary. Unlike most Western politicians, who saw the end of the Cold War in geopolitical terms, Soros was afraid that the dissolution of these two multiethnic empires might give rise not to democracies but to claustrophobic authoritarian regimes, particularly in Central Asia. Yet when Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union began to implode, he did not press his foundations to try to re-embroider nations that had lost their historical legitimacy, but rather to help consolidate the newly emergent democratic states. The most important condition to influence the direction of the train is never to get off the train.

In 1990 Soros moved to London to be closer to these places where history was taking shape. While there, he did more than simply operate a handful of national foundations in Eastern Europe: he became Eastern European once again. His Hungary Foundation was established in 1984 and the strategy was to give thousands of small grants to support every initiative that had the potential to subvert the communist system. Unlike the slew of Western advisers and technicians who would soon flood the region, Soros realized that “the people living in the countries where I had foundations understood their countries better than I did … and I deferred to the judgments of the local boards. If I seriously disagreed with their judgment, I changed the board.”²⁰ Local knowledge, a hallmark feature of the Soros worldview, was hereby established. “The foundation in Hungary worked like a charm,” he wrote later. “It was exempt from all the pitfalls that beset normal foundations because civil society adopted it as its own.”²¹

Soros’s effectiveness over time may best be explained by his openness to fund scores of diverse (sometimes even contradictory) initiatives concurrently, and to discontinue them when expectations fell short. A striking example was in China. Soros had been enthusiastic about Chinese economic reforms in the 1980s. Yet even before the slaughter at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he realized that the communist authorities had duped his foundation, and there was grave risk that the foundation could unwittingly legitimize the regime rather than subvert it. Soros then closed its operations. “Be ready to get involved, and be ready to get out” was his credo, and this took form both as an investor and as a philanthropist.

George Soros did not come to Eastern Europe with a plan. He came with a curiosity. He is a strange mixture of a philosophical mind that is in love with abstract ideas and an anthropologist’s sensibility and keen interest in small details. Whereas many in the West were convinced that the future of Eastern Europe was to imitate slavishly the West and its institutions, Soros’s hope was that the revolutions of the East could also transform the West. In his subconscious, perhaps, 1989 was not exclusively about Eastern Europe: it was about Europe as a whole. Already in 1990 Soros was convinced that “there is only one way. Existing frontiers must be respected, but frontiers must lose their significance. What distinguishes Europe today from the interwar period is the existence of the European Community.”²² For Soros the defeat of communism would ultimately have been wasted if it did not encourage the enlargement of the European Union, and the transformation of the EU into a model of the open society of the future. This would remain his insistent commitment for the next three decades.

WHAT MAKES GEORGE SOROS’S CODE so difficult to crack is that while he is messianic, in a sense, he is not (nor has he ever been) a missionary. The two concepts need to be understood as related yet distinct.

A messianic sensibility is a common trait of many philanthropist-billionaires, be they named Rockefeller, Gates, or Soros. The world, they think, is waiting for them, and improving it is somehow their presumed responsibility. While many on the left tend to believe that what motivates the super-rich is nothing but material self-interest, the reality, for good and for bad, is different. Society’s wealthiest have, like any social class, both values and interests. To think otherwise would be a sociological mistake. Many of the richest seek not only to earn profits but also to shape the world. George Soros is no different. “I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from my childhood,” he has written, “which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin. But when I had made my way in the world I wanted to indulge myself in my fantasies to the extent I could afford.”²³ Soros received ultimate “satisfaction to be involved in historic events” and parlayed the prominence he enjoyed from his extreme success in the financial markets to get a hearing in the field of international politics.

Still, Soros never saw himself as a salesperson for an open society ideology. He stands by an open society as an ideal, never as dogma. His insistence that not only others but he himself is wrong much of the time in the interpretation of historical events makes him distinctive among those high-net-worth individuals who share his aspiration to change the world. And so at the moment when many Westerners, besotted by the momentous possibilities in the region, insisted that there was no alternative to the political and economic model of the West, Soros demurred. He defined freedom differently. To him, freedom was not a synonym for capitalism; it was the availability of legitimate alternatives and the capacity to choose between them. This necessary but subtle point was lost on many observers. Reflecting later on his own achievements, Soros remained steadfast: his views landed well not because he was wiser but rather because “I recognize my mistakes more quickly.”²⁴

EASTERN EUROPE WAS also the central stage on which the myth of George Soros, the stateless statesman, emerged. The best illustration of the improvisational approach that Soros adopted in his effort to contribute to the transformation of Eastern Europe is the fact that he did not keep an archive of his grant-giving before 1994. One clear-cut explanation was his concern that this information could be misused by the communist secret police. Another reason has greater resonance for Soros’s distinctive approach: a revolutionary time, when the system is navigating disequilibrium, is not the moment to account for past performance. Instead, accelerating the pace of grant distribution was deemed of the highest importance.

Two of Soros’s philanthropic initiatives of the early 1990s—his support for Soviet scientists and his efforts to reestablish gas and electricity supplies in besieged Sarajevo—provide the clearest examples of how Soros’s interventions worked at scale.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had a devastating effect on its scientific institutions, as there were no funds to pay scientists’ salaries. For a time it seemed as if Russia’s entire scientific infrastructure would implode, and institutions from Moscow to Novosibirsk to Vladivostok might vanish overnight. These scientists, who played a vital role in the dismantling of the communist system, were facing a simple choice: they could either leave their country or leave their vocation. It was during this moment that George Soros stepped in and committed $100 million to support approximately thirty thousand research scientists across the former Soviet Union who had lost official research funding. Any scientist who had published at least three articles in a leading scientific journal during the previous five years would receive $500, or more than a year’s pay. The money that the scientists received so unexpectedly reminded Soros of the cherished bounty of fifty pounds that he had once collected from the Quakers when he was an impoverished student at the London School of Economics in the late 1940s. Securing that check without any fuss or bother led him to conclude at the time that this was an ideal way for charities to function. (A later example of Soros’s adoption of this approach would come following the 2008–9 financial crisis, when he gave $200 to school-age children on welfare in New York State for back-to-school supplies.)

“My objective was not only to save the best of Soviet natural science, which I considered one of the crowning achievements of the human intellect,” Soros recalled, “but also to demonstrate that foreign aid could be administered effectively.”²⁵ To this day, he calls this intervention perhaps the greatest achievement of his philanthropic life.

It is also worth noting that the idea to provide cash supplements to Soviet scientists was not the brainchild of Soros’s Moscow foundation. Just the opposite. The foundation had not been a particular fan of the idea. Soros delegated considerable decision-making autonomy to his national foundations, but he was also always on the hunt for compelling ideas that emerged from outside of it. Priority should be given to local knowledge, yes, but good ideas should be available from as many sources as possible.

Around this same time, the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia had become one of the most disheartening places on the map. Bosnia had declared its independence, but the country’s Serb minority took up arms against the Muslim majority, with military assistance from the rump Yugoslavian government in Belgrade. The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo had been cut off from the rest of the country, and its residents were not only starving: they were subject to constant shelling, sniper fire, and other acts of violence. The West was hesitant to intervene and people were losing hope.

George Soros never believed in traditional charitable giving, but what he learned from his experience in Budapest in 1944 was that fatalism, a sense of ultimate powerlessness, is the worst humiliation a person can endure. At all costs, such powerlessness must be challenged. Thus during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996, Soros committed $50 million to support the population of the Bosnian capital by reestablishing gas and electric service during the bitter winter, setting up an alternate water source, and bringing in desperately needed supplies.

“The mere fact that I had to spend $50 million on it is a defeat,” Soros said of his Bosnian efforts. “I consider humanitarian spending as a defeat, in the sense that we failed to prevent disaster, that things deteriorated to the point where spending on humanitarian activities became necessary. I’m opposed to humanitarian spending. Generally, I think there is a time when CNN comes with the pictures, and people become aroused, and by then it’s too late. The Open Society Foundation has got to be ten years ahead of the curve.”²⁶

The Sarajevo operation may have been a defeat in Soros’s calculus, but it was a hallmark example of his ability to influence international politics. Soros was never one to sink into his armchair. His stock-in-trade has been direct involvement—and once involved, he advances ideas that politicians will customarily claim cannot be achieved, or are too risky for the moment. The effect of such engagement has often been that public pressure on Western political leaders increases in turn.

On his support for the civilian population in Sarajevo, Soros has commented: “It was a political gesture, meant to bring in U.N. troops to protect the nongovernmental organizations.”²⁷ His calculus was that the money would attract NGOs to Sarajevo to carry out programs he would then underwrite. Their presence, in turn, would pressure Western governments to send UN peacekeeping troops to the city to protect the aid workers, thus internationalizing matters on the ground. For Soros and his collaborators, “the whole goal was to make Sarajevo work again … to make it a viable city—not a city of helpless victims, but a city of survivors, and to do that you had to involve the locals.”²⁸

Vital and necessary actions like this placed Soros and his foundation on the political map of Eastern Europe. Empowering civil society, and acting on those often small insights that only participant-observers can acquire, equally helped the foundation distinguish itself from the democratic assistance industry that flourished after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was after such interventions that the media started using such grandiloquent framings like “George Soros’s foreign policy.”

Strobe Talbott, then the US deputy secretary of state, told The New Yorker magazine that though Soros’s role in the region was “not identical to the policy of the U.S. government,” it was “compatible” with that policy. “It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not government,” Talbott said. “We try to synchronize our approach to the former communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain and with George Soros.”²⁹

Soros was convinced that the world needs stateless statesmen—leaders who are unconstrained by realpolitik and who see the world through the prism of a persecuted minority. And he saw his role as being such a leader. It was his strategy that by acting in this way, a nonstate actor could force states to redefine their interests.

But while Soros’s contribution to the transformation of the region is widely recognized by admirers and critics alike, more often than not his ideas have been misinterpreted. In the expanding “literature” on Soros conspiracy theories, Soros and his foundations are time and again portrayed as the instigators and organizers of the so-called color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan between 2003 and 2005. In reality, Soros was always skeptical about these mass anti-government mobilizations and about their ultimate efficacy. In fact, Soros was at pains to make clear that the impetus for change was always more complex and lacking easy definition—light years different from how those who are conspiracy-minded hoped to portray them.

Soros certainly sympathized with those citizens taking to the streets (although his son Alex noted to me that like many Jews of his generation, his father feels uneasy about crowds), and many of the foundation’s grantees were among the active participants in these events, protest movements that were forged in the crucible of democratic aspiration. That said, each of these so-called revolutions has been instructive for Soros, guiding him to the realization that the removal of a corrupt autocrat (and his corrupt henchmen) is hardly the same as becoming a democracy. Soros has learned from experience that corrupt, weak states can be as harmful to the rights of ordinary citizens as the dictatorships they replace.

AT THE BEGINNING of the twenty-first century, the general mood in Eastern Europe and in the world began to shift. Illiberal forces were on the march and George Soros became their prime target. In a bitter twist of fate, Soros became the symbol (and the punching bag) of everything that the new activists sought to extirpate: internationalism (globalism), minority rights, autonomous civil society, and the power of nonstate actors. In the far right media bubble, Soros became the dark symbol of both international capitalism and international socialism.

In Eastern Europe the “war on Soros” has become a rallying cry meant to persuade Eastern European societies that any form of internationalism is antithetical to national cultural traditions. While the illiberals acknowledge that funds from Brussels are useful and should not be rejected, they argue that Eastern Europeans must resist the idea of the European Union as a political community. Many people who knew precious little about George Soros or the work of his foundation, people who lived in places where Open Society Foundations had never even been active, now became convinced that humanity’s salvation was predicated upon the defeat of him and his ideas. At a moment when conspiracy theories have replaced ideologies as the instigator of political identity, Soros-related conspiracy writing has become the book club of the far right.

Eastern European populism was already on the rise by the early 2010s, but it was the refugee crisis of 2015 that turned national populists into a major political and intellectual power in the region. Opinion polls indicate that the vast majority of Eastern Europeans are wary of migrants and refugees. A July 2017 study by Ipsos revealed that only 5 percent of Hungarians and 15 percent of Poles believe that immigration had a positive impact on their country, and that 67 percent of Hungarians and 51 percent of Poles think their countries’ borders should be closed to refugees entirely.³⁰

During the refugee crisis, images of migrants streaming into Europe sparked a demographic panic across Eastern Europe, as people began to fear that their national cultures were under threat of vanishing. The region today is made up of small, aging, ethnically homogeneous societies—for example, only 1.6 percent of those living in Poland were born outside the country, and only 0.1 percent are Muslim.³¹ In fact, cultural and ethnic diversity, rather than wealth, is the primary difference between Eastern and Western Europe today. In the Eastern European political imagination, cultural and ethnic diversity are seen as an existential threat, and opposition to this threat forms the core of the new illiberalism.

Some of this fear of diversity may be rooted in historical trauma, such as the disintegration of the multicultural Habsburg empire after World War I and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after World War II. But the political shock of the refugee crisis cannot be explained by the region’s history alone. Rather, Eastern Europeans realized during the refugee crisis that they were facing a new global revolution. This was not a revolution of the masses but one of migrants; it was inspired not by ideological visions of the future but by images of real life on the other side of a border. If globalization has made the world a village, it has also subjected nations to the tyranny of global comparisons. These days, people in the poorer parts of the world rarely compare their lives with those of their neighbors; they compare them instead with those of the most prosperous inhabitants of the planet, whose wealth is on full display in movies, on television, and on the Internet. The French liberal philosopher Raymond Aron was right when he observed in 1961 that “with humanity on the way to unification, inequality between peoples takes on the significance that inequality between classes once had.”³² If you are a poor person in Africa who seeks an economically secure life for your children, the best you can do for them is to make sure they are born in a rich country, such as Denmark, Germany, or Sweden—or, failing that, the Czech Republic or Poland. Change increasingly means changing your country, not your government. And Eastern Europeans have felt threatened by this revolution.

The great irony is that although Eastern Europe today is reacting with panic to mass migration, the revolutions of 1989 were the first in which the desire to exit one’s country, rather than to gain a greater voice within it, was the primary agent of change. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many in the former communist bloc expressed their wish for change by emigrating to the West rather than staying home to participate in democratic politics. In 1989, Eastern Europeans were not dreaming of a perfect world; they were dreaming of a normal life in a normal country. If there was a utopia shared by both the left and the right during the region’s post-communist transition, it was the utopia of normality.

Revolutions as a rule cause major demographic disruptions. When the French Revolution broke out, many of its opponents ran away. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, millions of Russians fled. But in those cases, it was the defeated, the enemies of the revolution, who saw their futures as being outside their own country. After the 1989 revolutions, by contrast, it was those most impatient to see their countries change who were the first to leave. For many liberal-minded Eastern Europeans, a mistrust of nationalist loyalties and the prospect of joining the modern world made emigration a logical and legitimate choice.

As a result, the revolutions of 1989 had the perverse effect of accelerating population decline in the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. From 1989 to 2017, Latvia lost 27 percent of its population, Lithuania 23 percent, and Bulgaria almost 21 percent. Hungary lost nearly 3 percent of its population in the 2010s. And in 2016, around one million Poles were living in the United Kingdom. This emigration of the young and talented was occurring in countries that already had aging populations and low birth rates. Together, these trends set the stage for a demographic panic.

It is thus both emigration and the fear of immigration that best explain the rise of populism in Eastern Europe, which feeds off a sense that a country’s identity is under threat. Moving to the West was equivalent to rising in social status, and as a result, the Eastern Europeans who stayed in their own countries started feeling like losers who had been left behind. In countries where most young people dream of leaving, success back home is devalued.

In the revolutions of 1989, as in the revolutions of 1848, liberals and nationalists were political allies, a coalition that broke the back of communism in Eastern Europe. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a nationalist who had been a recipient of a Soros fellowship to the University of Oxford in 1989, is the best illustration of this conjoining of forces. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as in the last days of the Habsburg Empire, liberals and nationalists have become the worst of enemies.

George Soros, who advocates for international governance, universal human rights, and a progressive migration policy, is now deemed the major threat to the nation-state. What we might label the “Soros Affair”—the nationalists’ obsession to label as a traitor any supporter of the ideas of the open society—plays a lamentably similar role to the Dreyfus Affair in nineteenth-century France. Soros has turned out to be right that the twenty-first century, like the twentieth century, will be defined by the clash between the ideas of open society and those of closed society as an incarnation of the old notion of tribalism.

History is always the world’s best ironist. Many Eastern European nationalists have embraced the current right-wing Israeli government in order to challenge on the plane of symbolic politics their oldest and most bitter enemy—Jewish cosmopolitanism, as embodied by George Soros.

This intellectual paradox is plaintively described by Yehuda Elkana, an Auschwitz survivor and the former rector of Central European University. Elkana wrote in 1988: “Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, ‘this must never happen again,’ and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, ‘this must never happen to us again.’ It is self-evident that, if these are the only possible lessons, I have always held to the former and seen the latter as catastrophic.”³³ Soros fully shares this conviction.

A Hungarian Jew who became an American financial speculator is now the fiercest defender of the European Union. And he is defending the Union on two fronts: against political elites in Eastern Europe who benefit greatly from the generosity of the Union’s subsidies, and against Brussels bureaucrats who resist the need to reinvent the Union. What makes Soros so infuriating to Eastern Europe’s illiberal leaders is that he exposes their biggest lie: that open society liberalism is an alien ideological import into the region. And in order to make their fellow citizens believe the lie, the illiberals have had to turn George Soros into a foreigner, a person not from here.

White, the second film of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy in the early 1990s, masterfully captures Eastern Europeans’ ambivalence about the liberal West. Karol, a Polish hairdresser living in Paris, is left divorced, desperate, and humiliated by his younger French wife, Dominique, on the grounds that he cannot perform sexually. His impotence becomes the symbol of the East trapped in the overexpectations of the West in post-1989 Europe. Miserable, penniless, but still obsessed with his former wife, Karol returns to Warsaw hidden in a compatriot’s suitcase, and spends the remainder of the film seeking to avenge his humiliation by making his ex-wife feel helpless and lonely in the same way he felt in Paris. His plan succeeds: he gets her imprisoned in Poland, only to realize that he is still in love with her. The East has taken revenge on the arrogance and insensitivity of the West, only to realize that the liberal West remains its only point of reference.

It is clear that if George Soros did not exist, the Eastern European nationalists would have had to invent him.

1. In writing this essay, I was continuously reminded of the iconic scene from Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall in which an effete professor tries to impress a young lady by rambling on about the intellectual theories of Marshall McLuhan, only to be interrupted by the sudden appearance of McLuhan himself, who tells the professor to shut up, because he has gotten all his ideas wrong. If it were not for the ongoing conversations with my friend Lenny Benardo, in my view the most interesting interpreter of George Soros’s thinking (and the unnamed coauthor of this piece), I would have never dared to write this essay, out of the fear of sharing the fate of the effete professor from Allen’s movie.