Let us end by noting the vital role played by international factors in the process of the democratization of Eastern and Central Europe. Without NATO's enlargement and accession to European Union, the fate of the region most probably would have been very different. Because of normalization by integration into a democratically validated supragovernmental organization, the political, cultural, economic, and social environments in these countries have received a huge boost in their struggle with mytho-exclusionist fantasies. In this sense, external intervention was as important, if not more important, than domestic dynamics. What seemed in the early 1990s a somber future turned into an extremely favorable present. Ken Jowitt rightly diagnosed that only adoption by a richer sister from the West could save the tormented Eastern sister from a new wave of salvationist authoritarianism. And indeed his doomsday vision of colonels, priests, and despots was proven wrong. This was a surprise, though, for none of us thought that NATO and the European Union would turn eastward. There were calls for this, but they seemed more like hoping against hope. It is no surprise, then, that Jowitt emphatically stated in 2007 that integration in the EU was the best news that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had received in five hundred years. One should not forget, however, the part played by the shock of Yugoslavia's secession wars. This tragic and violent example made both the EU and NATO understand where ignorance of the dangers of nationalism, populism, and demagogy in the region can lead. Their push eastward had as great a civilizing role as the exercise of democracy within these societies. The specter that one should be wary of now is, to invoke Jowitt once again, the transformation of the former members of the Warsaw Pact into the ghetto of a united Europe.94
Any assessment of the last two decades should raise the question, What is it left of 1989? This turning point was the most powerful shake-up in the twentieth century of the seduction exerted by millenarian ideologies. The teleological utopias of the last century were fundamentally rebuked by the revolutions of 1989, which were their polar opposite. They were anti-ideological, antiteleological, and anti-utopian. They rejected the exclusive logic of Jacobinism and refused to embark on any new chiliastic experiments. In this sense, they can be called non-revolutionary. Indeed, the Leninist extinction could be explained, following Stephen Kotkin for instance, by appealing to “a narrative of global political economy and a bankrupt political class in a system that was largely bereft of corrective mechanisms.”95 But this would ultimately overlook (or significantly diminish) the equally relevant tale of a slow but unstoppable awakening of society by reinstating the centrality of truth and human rights (especially after the 1975 Helsinki Agreement). The uncivil society was not merely confronted with the erosion of its Leninist worldview. It also imploded in the face of an alternative set of values that inspired independent reflection, autonomous initiatives, and mass protest. In other words, the upheaval of 1989 was not only the result of the agency of the uncivil society. It acted in the presence of a powerful political myth—civil society. political myths are to be judged not in terms of their truthfulness, but of their potential to become true: speaking about civil society led to the emergence of civil society. In East Central Europe, exhilarating new ideas, such as the return to Europe, destroyed obsolete ideas. People took to the streets in Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, Budapest, and Timisoara, convinced that the hour of the citizen had arrived.
In 1989, public demonstrations did not lead directly to the collapse of the Communist elites in power. Maybe civil society was not the immediate cause of the demise of Erich Honecker, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Todor Zhivkov, Miloš Jakeš, and Gustáv Husák. But the dynamics, the ideas, and most important, the aftermath of the events accompanying the shattering of Communist parties' rule across the region cannot be understood without emphasizing the significance of civil society as a constellation of fundamental ideas, as a political myth, and as a real, historical movement that accompanied the implosion of Eastern European party-states. To take my point even further, the very idea of revolutions in 1989 rests on the impact of civil society, which replaced the existing political, social, and economic system with one founded on the ideals of democratic citizenship and human rights. Yes, there were many masks, travesties, charades, and myths involved in the events that took place in Bucharest, Prague, and Sofia. In most countries, the resilience of the old elites prevented a radical coming to terms with the Communist past. But this obfuscates the fact that the core value restored, cherished and promoted by the revolutions of 1989 was common sense. The revolutionaries believed in civility, decency, and humanity, and they succeeded in rehabilitating these values. This is the most significant lesson of 1989. The illusions of that year ought not to be discarded: they were crucial for the defeat of Leninism. In 1989, people were not afraid anymore; their moral frustration, social numbness, and political impotence disappeared. The individual finally regained a central role on the political stage. The years passed and ultimately those nightmarish scenarios for Central and Eastern Europe have been invalidated. Far from being over, the revolutions of 1989 remain a symbol of contemporary times—an age of diversity, difference, and tolerance.
Conclusions
Totalitarianism was a novel political, social, and cultural construct that first suspended and then abolished traditional distinctions between good and evil. An imperfect concept, to be sure, it was not an empty signifier or a mere Cold War propaganda weapon, as some have suggested in recent years. Those who developed the concept of totalitarianism during the interwar period knew what appalling realities it designated: from the exiled Mensheviks to the emigré scholars from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, these intellectuals knew that something unprecedented and quite terrifying had occurred.1 The concept of totalitarianism offered important and still valid interpretive keys for understanding the unique blending of ideology, organization, and terror in unprecedented attempts to create perfectly homogenized communities through genocidal methods. All these experiments included quasi-religious, unavowed yet palpable mystical components. In fact, they were political religions, with their own rituals, prophets, saints, zealots, inquisitors, traitors, renegades, heretics, apostates, and holy writs. The totalitarian story began with the Bolshevik dream of total revolution and became a global phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise to power of totalitarian party-movements in Italy and Germany. For example, the Romanian Iron Guard was a totalitarian movement that combined political radicalism and religious fanaticism. Its short-lived stay in power (September 1940-January 1941) was marked by a frantic attempt to carry out, using murderous violence, what historian Eugen Weber once called the archangelic revolution.2 Whereas these Fascist dictatorships collapsed as a result of World War II, Soviet Communism lasted for more than seven decades and ended only in December 1991 in the USSR. The catalyst for this final wreckage was the liberal, anti-Leninist revolutionary upheaval of 1989. In transformed incarnations, it is still alive in China and a few other countries.
To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, during the reign of these totalitarian movements, conscience broke down. Furthermore, “the insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed.”3 Communism was a radical economic, moral, social, and cultural doctrine centered upon the accomplishment of radical transformative ends. Fascism appeared as its arch rival, yet it shared with Communism the collectivistic, antiliberal, anticapitalist approach, the neoromantic dream of the total community, and the longing for a completely purified existence.4 With its universalistic goals, eschatological promises, and totalizing ambitions, it was often described as a political or secular religion (and so was Fascism in its Italian, German, and Romanian incarnations). The ultimate purpose of Communism was to create a new civilization founded upon a New Man. Two factors were fundamental for this doctrine: the privileged role of the party and the revolutionary transformation of human nature. One of the main distinctions between radicalism of the extreme Left and the extreme Right is the emphasis the for
mer placed on the institution of the party as an immanent incarnation of absolute, transcendental historical knowledge. In the words of historian Walter Laqueur,
The Fascist experience in Italy and Germany has shown the crucial role of the Duce and the Führer. Hitler and Mussolini created their parties in their image, and it is perfectly legitimate to talk about the Hitler and the Mussolini “movement,” for theirs were not political parties in traditional sense…. But Stalin's role in the Soviet Union was initially less decisive. Communist power was already firmly established. There is every reason to believe that if Stalin had been shot or died of a disease or had never existed, the party would have still remained in power in the 1920s and 1930s.5
Communism advanced a new conception of human existence (society, economy, social and individual psychology, art). According to this conception, building the New Man was the supreme goal of political action. Communism's ambition was to transcend traditional morality, yet it suffered from moral relativism. It assigned to the party-state its own morality, granting only to it the right to define the meaning and ultimate aim of human existence. The state became the supreme and absolute value within the framework of an eschatological doctrine of revolution. Through the cult of absolute unity on the path to salvation by knowledge of history, Communism produced a new, total social and political project centered on purifying the body of the communities that fell under its ideological spell. Its revolutionary project was total and totalizing. As a potent political myth, Communism promised immanent deliverance, the chance to achieve prosperity, freedom, and equality. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, the Communist Weltanschauung was the foundation for ideologically based totalitarian political experiments with terrible human costs.
As for Fascism—and especially its paroxistic version, National Socialism—it emphasized the lack of equality between biologically defined groups and a predestined mission for the Aryan nations. At the same time, it praised heroism, youth, and valiance and despised bourgeois modernity as much as the Communists did. Placing Fascism at the right end of the political spectrum masks the strong socialist origins of these movements based on ethnic ressentiment.6
Marxism's fundamental thesis was the centrality of class struggle (historical violence) in the development of society. For Marx (and later for twentieth-century Marxist philosophers Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukács), the revolutionary class symbolized the viewpoint of totality, thereby creating the epistemic premises for grasping historical truth. In the name of proletarian (authentic) democracy, formal liberties could be curtailed, even suppressed. Marx's myth of the proletariat as the messiah class, the heart of Communism, nurtured a revolutionary project imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatic-heroic predestination. This became an immensely appealing mythological matrix embraced by intellectuals worldwide.7 Marx gave an ultimate apocalyptic verdict: since the bourgeoisie is guilty of the barbarous distortion of human life, it deserves its fate.8 Marx viewed the social universe primarily (but not only) in terms of social and economic determinism. Freedom meant for Marx and his disciples “understood necessity,” that is, efforts to carry out the presumed goals of history. All human reality was subordinated to the dialectical laws of development, and history was projected into a sovereign entity, whose diktat was beyond any human questioning. He declared his social theory the ultimate scientific formula.
The ingredient that allowed the realization of the revolutionary mission was revolutionary class consciousness.9 Through it, mankind's pre-history would end and its real history could begin. According to the young Marx, the revolutionary intellectuals were those who created the doctrine, but the proletarians were not perceived as an amorphous mass into which a self-appointed group of teachers had the duty of injecting the consciousness of the historical truth. Nevertheless, Karl Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach best expressed the revolutionary mission of critical thinking: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”10 With the rubble of the past cleared away, the chosen agent of history would point the way to a new society that would bring about the complete fulfillment of the human spirit.
Communism was simultaneously an eschatology (a doctrine of mundane salvation) and an ecclesiology (a ideology of the revolutionary party or movement). Reality as it stood was fatally reified; it was to be superseded, on the one hand, by the emancipation and revolution of the proletariat, and on the other hand, by the utopia of the classless society. Subsequently, Communism's vision of the future society relied upon a “dictatorship over needs” (Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, and György Márkus). It presupposed the dissolution of the autonomous individual within the all-devouring framework of total control, the disastrous politicization of the psyche, the manipulation of the subjective field, the attempted obliteration of the private sphere as an ultimate sanctuary of the ego. It was a total experiment in social engineering. Once it constructed its vision of modernity on the principle of a chosen, socially homogenized community crossing the desert of history from darkness into light, there could be only one solution for those who failed to qualify to their inclusionary criteria: stigmatization, elimination, and eventually, extermination
The Marxist eschatology was a rationalized theodicy: history replaced God, the proletariat was the universal redeemer, and the revolution meant ultimate salvation, the end of human suffering. History had only one direction, as it unfolded from scarcity to abundance, from limited to absolute freedom. Freedom, in turn, was understood as overcoming necessity via revolutionary praxis. Hegel had said that all that was real was rational. For Marx, all that was real was historical, and history was governed by dialectical laws. The kingdom of necessity was the realm where economy could not ensure full equality among human beings, where the political was dependent on partisan interests and the social sphere was painfully atomized. In contrast, in the kingdom of freedom there was an identity between existence and essence, antagonism disappeared, men and women recovered their lost sense of work as joy, as unfettered creativity. In this context, human existence could fully reach its development, and the condition for the freedom of all lay in each individual's liberation. At the basis of Communism, therefore, lay a teleological fundamentalism. Its final station was the City of God on earth, that is, the triumph of the proletariat.
Marxian social theory's cult of totality as the ultimate explanatory archetype set the stage for its degeneration, in Bolshevik (Leninist) terms, into dogma and the ruthless persecution of heretics. Marx's emphasis on human emancipation as the conscious absorption of society by the individual and his equation of social conflict with class antagonism resulted in advocacy of the elimination of “superstructural” intermediaries (laws, institutions, etc.) regulating the relationship between civil society and the state. Marx failed to give instructions on the achievement of social unity. The utopian, eschatological vision of Marx's body of political thought was translated into a revolutionary program of action by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (born Ulianov). Lenin operated a creative understanding of necessity that led to the Bolshevik version of man's salvation. In Lenin's vision, the monolithic vanguard party became the repository of human hope, a tightly knit fraternity of illuminated militants, and therefore the true vehicle of human freedom. The combination of Marxism with party/power set the Communist body politic on the path to self-purification (permanent purge and revolutionary offensive).
For Lenin, the fate of the Communist revolution predicted by Karl Marx depended on the maturity and political will of the revolutionary party. His vision of the new type of party was formulated in the pamphlet What Is To Be Done (1902), which articulated the Leninist concept of revolutionary practice in the twentieth century. Lenin's notion of the party led to the split within Russian social democracy between moderates (Mensheviks) and radicals (Bolsheviks). Leninism consists fundamentally of Lenin's theory of the vanguard revolutionary party, the doctrine of proletarian revolution in the age of imperialism, and
the emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat as a new type of state emerging from the collapse of the old, bourgeois order. From the outset, the Leninist regime in the Soviet Union was based on abuses, violence, and repression directed against any form of political opposition. Bolshevism was the opposite of a rule-of-law state.11 These authoritarian features of Leninism were further exacerbated by Stalin, who transformed the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. Bolshevik humanism was conditioned only by the success of the cause it was engaged in. The individual's existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of social utopia.
Like Marx, Lenin saw the proletarian revolution as a global phenomenon, but he modified some basic tenets of the Marxist theory. Lenin noticed the passivity of the workers in the advanced industrial countries and explained it as a consequence of the ability of the bourgeoisie to co-opt the working class within the system. According to Lenin, the bourgeoisie succeeded in ideologically corrupting the proletarians and their parties. It was therefore important to create a new type of political party that would refuse any form of collusion with the existing dominant forces and would eventually exert exclusive political power. For Lenin, a tightly knit, phalanxlike revolutionary organization, structured almost like a military order, was needed to inject revolutionary consciousness into the proletariat and direct the workers in the revolutionary battles. The party was the embodiment of historical reason and militants were expected to carry out its orders without hesitation or reservation. Discipline, secrecy, and rigid hierarchy were essential for such a party, especially during clandestine activities (like those in Russia). The main role of the party was to awaken proletarian self-consciousness and instill the revolutionary doctrine (faith) into the dormant proletariat. Instead of relying on the spontaneous development of consciousness in the working class, Leninism saw the party as a catalytic agent bringing revolutionary knowledge, will, and organization to the exploited masses. It was with Lenin that the mystique of a new type of party became an indelible feature of radical politics in the twentieth century.
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