The second theme, The Rise of Civil Society, provides a comparative approach to strategies and methods adopted by independent movements (Poland’s Solidarity, Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, Hungary’s Democratic Opposition) and analyzes how those groups emerged in the repressive conditions of the post-Stalinist authoritarian regimes. Illuminating platforms and other political documents are discussed to identify the theoretical and moral options of the opposition forces. For instance, it would be impossible for a student of Eastern Europe to understand the origins and the direction of the current changes without referring to Vaclav Havel’s pathbreaking essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” After all, the revolution in Eastern Europe has been the creation of the powerless, and the event was anticipated in the works of critical intellectuals like Havel, Janos Kis, György Konrad, Milovan Djilas, Leszek Kolakowski, and Adam Michnik.
The third theme, The Triumph of the Powerless, deals with the revolutionary dynamics in Eastern Europe during the 1989 upheaval and explains in concrete detail why the communist regimes fell apart. To understand the changes, the historical peculiarities for each country and for the region as a whole are most important. This theme focuses on the electoral victory of Solidarity and the formation of the first noncommunist government in Eastern Europe’s post-Yalta history; the end of moderate reformist illusions and Hungary’s transition to pluralism; the domestic and international dimensions of East Germany’s “gentle revolution”; Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution” and the victory of the Civic Forum; Bulgaria’s awakening and the overthrow of Todor Zhivkov’s dictatorship; Romania’s abducted revolution and the National Salvation Front as a reincarnation of the communist party; and the disintegration of Tito’s legacy in Yugoslavia, with the rise of ethnic, separatist parties and movements.
The fourth theme, The Birth Pangs of Democracy, discusses the chances for democracy in each country and in Eastern Europe as a whole. Again, the approach is comparative, providing the reader with an indepth exploration of the political ideologies and inclinations of the new parties in the region. Here we discuss the obstacles to democratic development, including the inertia of the government bureaucracies, the dangers of neo-authoritarian solutions, the existence of populist temptations, and the resurgence of long-denied ethnic passions. As Kenneth Jowitt once put it, the future of Eastern Europe does not inevitably belong to benign social democratic and liberal democratic parties. It is quite possible that the region will experience unprecedented convulsions provoked by the rise of neofundamentalist “movements of rage,” rooted in political despair and economic frustration.
The fifth theme—Democracy or Ethnocracy?—investigates the growing tension between self-centered, anti-Western, and anti-intellectual ethnic movements and the democratic groups and parties inspired by liberal values. I want to emphasize, once again, my conviction that Eastern Europe’s future is not foreclosed and that the breakdown of communism has opened a multitude of possible avenues to be pursued by these long-victimized nations. One cannot ignore, however, that the ongoing changes are taking place in dramatically impoverished countries and are affecting morally traumatized populations. Crossing what Ralf Dahrendorf has called a historical vale of tears is not an exhilarating experience, which explains the current disenchantment, among many in the region, with the slow pace of economic and social recovery. Instead of the expected cornocupia, people are asked to tighten their belts further. That in turn creates opportunities for populist adventurers, charlatans, and pseudo-prophets.
I want to express here my warmest thanks to all those who made possible the completion of this project. First, my heartfelt thanks to the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bradley Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute and its director, Daniel Pipes, for all the understanding and support so generously offered to me. I want to thank my research assistants, Joydeep Bhattacharya, Marco Bianchini, and Brett Kinsella, for having patiently and enthusiastically kept track of the amazing changes in Eastern Europe as reflected in the myriad sources I had to consult. They succeeded in organizing and keeping my files under strict control, in spite of my perpetually confusing interventions. I am also indebted to the University of Maryland’s Department of Government and Politics, where I found a congenial atmosphere and great interest in my analysis of postcommunist societies.
The theoretical depth of this book owes an enormous amount to my discussions with Mihai Botez, Matei Calinescu, Daniel Chirot, Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, Bartek Kaminski, Maria Kovacs, Kenneth Jowitt, John Lampe, Juliana Pilon, Alvin Rubinstein, Sandor Szilagyi, Sonia Sluzar, Dorin Tudoran, and many other colleagues and friends who shared their insights with me on issues with which I was wrestling. Some of them made important suggestions that definitely led to improvements in the manuscript’s clarity and poignancy. I also want to thank my Romanian friends Vasile Gogea and Mircea Mihaies, editors of the independent magazines Astra in Brasov and Orizont in Timisoara, who during their trips to Washington found the time and energy to accompany me creatively in the revision of the manuscript. Peter Dougherty, my outstanding editor at The Free Press, deserves more than special thanks for having come up with encouraging suggestions that definitely added to what was valuable in my text and certainly diminished what was superfluous or confusing. I am deeply grateful to Johnathan Sunley for providing invaluable photographs from the archives of the East European Reporter (London and Budapest). Finally, but most warmly, let Mary Sladek be thanked for having done all she did to make this book what it is. For her editorial, computer, and human skills, both the book and the author owe her more than words can say.
Vladimir Tismaneanu
Washington, D.C.
July 18, 1991
ONE
Victims and Outsiders
East Europe Before Communism
Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx, that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history of conquerors. The people of Central Europe are not conquerors. They cannot be separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the wrong side of history; they are its victims and outsiders.
—Milan Kundera
The revolutionary upheaval of 1989 that led to the collapse of apparently well-entrenched communist regimes was one of those epochmaking events that shape the world. Long-established perceptions and beliefs about the stability of communist states were suddenly contradicted by the social and political explosions in the region. The spectacular breakdown of the Berlin Wall, the single most conspicuous symbol of the separation between East and West, contributed to this dramatic alteration in the political geography of Europe. The significance of the upheaval cannot be exaggerated: Following those events, Europe looks different. The unfettering of social and political energies in Eastern Europe and the resurgence of long-denied ethnic passions are things that matter for all those interested in the building of a peaceful and prosperous international order. If those nations manage to achieve the transition to a market economy and a pluralist political order, the world would only benefit from such an evolution. If not, and new conflicts emerge in the historically spasmodic area that we call Eastern Europe, the future of the continent will be plagued by rivalries, tensions, and strifes. We should not forget that two world wars started in the heart of Europe. The conflicts that preexisted communism have not been abolished during the four decades of state socialism. On the contrary, they continued to exist underneath the bogus veneer of Marxist-Leninist propaganda. It was only in the minds of doctrinaire communists that such things as proletarian internationalism and a socialist community of nations existed. In reality, the traditions and memories of the past continued to inspire individual and collective efforts to get rid of the totalitarian regimes. The distinction between East-Central and the rest of Eastern Europe can serve to clarify the different levels of oppos
ition to communism. The latter region includes countries like Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and, to a certain extent, Yugoslavia, and the former refers to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and what used to be called the German Democratic Republic. History, including a knowledge of the religious and political traditions of these countries, can help us understand their different dynamics both under communism and in the current situation. Communism could not erase distinctions that were rooted in centuries of different political, economic, and cultural evolution. It was one thing to belong to the Hapsburg or the German empire, and another to be part of the Ottoman and Russian spheres of domination. In the Balkan part of Europe, political development during the nineteenth century was late and convoluted. In East-Central Europe, institutions were founded upon a Western concept of law and individual rights. In Southeastern Europe, civil society was underdeveloped and extremely fragile. The foundations of pluralism were precarious and vulnerable to dictatorial encroachment. In order to grasp the amplitude of and the obstacles to the current search for a democratic reconstruction in that part of Europe, history is an indispensable tool. All the countries in the region are relatively new state constructs, the product of the great national awakenings characteristic of the nineteenth century. They all owe their current size and shape to the international arrangements that followed the two crucial conflagrations of this century. At the same time, for the nations in that part of the continent, the very term “Eastern Europe” sounds like discrimination. The 1989 revolutions, among other effects, had revived the European identities of these nations. When people took to the streets in Prague, Leipzig, Timisoara, and Sofia, they did so not only for economic reasons. Perhaps more than the economic disaster of state socialism, the universal boredom and the enclosing of the political and social universe within an asphyxiating bureaucratic dictatorship made people unhappy and frustrated in those countries. Following the euphoria of the first postrevolutionary months, it appeared that the old problems were back: Croatians protesting Serbian hegemony, Serbs indicting Croatians and Slovenes for their secessionist drive, ethnic Hungarians in Romania denouncing infringements on their minority rights, ethnic Turks in Bulgaria scapegoated by advocates of a homogeneous Bulgarian nation, Slovaks jeering President Vaclav Havel as a champion of Czech supremacy, Czechs deploring the nationalism of the Slovaks, Lech Walesa using anti-Semitic innuendo during his presidential campaign against his critics and challengers, and so forth. In all these countries, democracy appeared to be more an ideal than a procedural reality. In Southeastern Europe, the former communist parties managed to survive the first revolutionary shock. In East-Central Europe, they changed not only names but also habits and appeared to have converted to the values of social democracy. The cleavage within the region ran between the countries that had completely broken with the communist system and those that remained somewhere in the middle of the road, as in the case of Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, none of these countries could invoke a consistently democratic tradition. At the same time, one must not forget that the changes were taking place against the background of European integration and that the price for engaging in new forms of authoritarian politics could be international isolation and a perpetuation of the state of underdevelopment that had provoked the end of communism. The competition between the two tendencies—the ethnocentric versus the democratic temptation—is the most important development taking place in the aftermath of the communist defeat. In the words of Polish journalist and activist Adam Michnik:
On top of the clash between different cultural perspectives and understandings of civilization are added controversies which turn round problems of a more concrete kind. How best should one steer politics? By means of evolution, without the use of force, or by following the logic of revolutionary upheaval and purges? Should society be open or, on the contrary, enclosed within its own particular forms? Should the new order rest on the adoption of all the conditions imposed by democracy, or on observance of a principle of revenge against members of the former regime? In other words, should the road taken be that of Spain when released from the rule of Franco, or that of Iran whereby they escaped the dictatorship of the Shah for that of the Ayatollah?1
As the East European countries emerge as important actors on the international stage, their future is far from certain. Optimists would maintain that democracy is their only rational choice. Pessimists would argue that rational choices are infrequent in history and that political and cultural traditions as well as enduring mythologies could result in the rise of new authoritarian regimes based on collective anguishes and neuroses. One thing is sure: The 1989 antitotalitarian revolution opened many avenues. Whether these countries will become democracies or ethnocracies is a question that remains unanswered.
Fifty-two years ago Germany’s invasion of Poland and subsequent occupation of the region led to the long war between the Axis (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the Allies (Great Britain, France, and, after 1941, the Soviet Union and the United States). World War II left all of Europe devastated, economically and politically, creating the perfect environment for Stalinism’s rapid expansion from the Soviet Union. The spread of communism through the Eastern half of Europe frightened many policy-makers and citizens in the nations of Western Europe and helped precipitate the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War in turn led to the proliferation of nuclear weapons globally and to McCarthyism in the United States, among other consequences. Hence understanding Eastern Europe is directly related to global security and national ideology issues. The nations of Eastern Europe, to cite the old children’s parable, are like the small, vital nails that hold a horseshoe on a hoof: “For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost, for want of the shoe the horse was lost, for want of the horse the rider was lost, for want of the rider the message was lost, for want of the message the battle was lost—all was lost for want of a nail.” For fifty years, the world limped along without the full participation of the nations of Eastern Europe, but the world had adjusted itself to the instability. The adjustment was fairly easy, for the region appeared to operate under essentially monolithic communist policies; foreign governments and businessmen understood that relations with the nations of Eastern Europe were regulated by Moscow and local communist parties. The reemergence of the multifaceted character of those nations, the distinctiveness of their peoples, cultures, and politics, has left many policy-makers, businessmen, and average citizens around the world looking for new ways to understand the region. This book provides an orientation to the politics of the nations of Eastern Europe.
An understanding of the politics and peoples of Eastern Europe and how the dynamics of that region relates to global stability requires some knowledge of history at least as far back as the beginning of this century. The post-1989 revival of Central European nostalgia, with its Hapsburgian overtones, is more than a mere cultural phenomenon. There is a tendency to idealize the times of the empire and to perceive pre-World War I Austria-Hungary as the model for a possible Central European Confederation. Opposed to that “cosmopolitan” trend, the resurrection of old myths and illusions about the predestined role of the national community, presumably endangered by foreign influences, and other archaic tribal passions long considered vanished, as well as the frequent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Slovak public life, show that the precommunist chauvinist traditions did not disappear. Politically, there is an encouraging search for the legacy of the state of law (Rechtsstaat) that existed in that region before the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. There is also a widespread yearning for the times when Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Warsaw were truly European capitals, cradles for daring cultural experiments situated in the vanguard of artistic modernity. To give some examples: During the first decades of the twentieth century it was in Prague that Franz Kafka wrote his stories and novels; Budapest was the headquarters of hectic intellectual ferment exemplified by names like Georg
Lukacs, Arthur Koestler, and Bela Bartok.2 As for Bucharest, it was there that such authors as Eugène Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, and Emil Cioran made their literary debuts during the interwar period.
In that part of the world, the phantoms of the past continue to haunt the collective imagination. Sometimes they contribute to peace and reconciliation; at other times they inspire and mobilize resentments and animosities. To be able to comprehend the present mosaic of ethnic, political, and cultural strains and its implications for the future, it is vitally important to revisit the historical experience of the East European countries between 1918 and 1945, before the advent of communist regimes, in the aftermath of World War II. It may seem like a cliché, but for the nations of Eastern Europe the precommunist past is prologue. Those nations whose citizens entered communism with some limited experience with democratic values, such as free speech, will be better able to organize political systems that are tolerant and nonauthoritarian. At the same time, democratic reconstruction in those countries depends on their ability to cope with the legacy of many unresolved ethnic, social, and political issues. The exit from communism generates the eruption of long-contained explosive forces, but as the French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel has noted, the old problems are at the same time new problems, characteristic of the twenty-first century—that is, insoluble in the absence of democracy and the state of law.3
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