The demise of the communist regimes did not mean the immediate collapse of the communist political cultures—all the habits, mentalities, attitudes, symbols, and values that had permeated social life for decades. The principal dilemmas for the new elites in Eastern Europe can be posed in a series of “how to” questions. How to create a democratic polity in the absence of a culture tolerant of differences or able to integrate conflicting trends without resorting to authoritarian methods of control and coercion? How to instill a sense of common responsibility and overcome the selfish and more often than not immoderate advocacy of particular interests to the detriment of the public good? How to replace the almost total state monopoly of the public realm with a different form of organization in which the exclusive logic of Leninism can be supplanted by the common search for compromise? How to transform the long-dormant or even nonexistent civic virtues into social energies able to contribute to the limitation of government arbitrariness without becoming a perpetual source of unrest, anarchy, and nihilism? Or, in countries where different ethnic groups compete to promote their values and aspirations, how to protect the rights of the minorities threatened by ethnocentric trends within the majority?
The East European dilemma is aggravated by unrealistic expectations about what it means to adopt Western values. The belief that the end of the communist parties’ monopoly on power automatically amounted to the end of communism and the birth of democracy contributed to a continuously growing gap between the rising expectations of the populations and the limits of the existing system. In fact, what happened in these countries signified less the establishment of full-fledged democratic regimes—such an occurrence would have been sociologically impossilble after so many years of dictatorship—but rather the gradual reconstruction of the political space. After decades when politics had been seen as the realm of demagogy and duplicity, a perfect springboard for opportunists, it now became possible to approach politics as the domain where the individual could freely exert his or her civil and human rights. New political movements emerged in addition to the former opposition groups that had challenged the communist governments. After the lethargy and desperation of previous years, when it had seemed that history had come to an end in that part of the world, there was a general sense of exhilaration and hope. The first months of 1990 were dominated by enthusiasm and romantic dreams of national solidarity. The new politics emerged as an attempt to restore historical traditions, but in none of those countries did the new formations claim that the nascent political system should be a simple reproduction of the precommunist ones. In all those societies the general trend has been a frantic pursuit of Western models for a rapid transition to democracy.
For many it appeared that the immediate transition to a democracy with a market economy would be a panacea for the evils associated with central planning. There was a kind of intoxication with the virtues of a free market. As privatization proceeds and millions find themselves unemployed, one can predict the rise of populist demagogic movements that will promise everything to everyone in the hope of winning political power. It is therefore critical for those countries to identify what guarantees, institutional and cultural, will diminish the danger of a relapse into a brand of authoritarianism different from the Leninist one only because it does not necessarily incorporate Marxism’s ideological mystique. In other words, those nations have to build their civil societies in order to avoid the calamitous slide from oligarchic tyranny to the tyranny of the mob. In the words of Ralf Dahrendorf:
“We are the people” is a nice slogan, but as a constitutional maxim it is a mirror image of the total state that has just been dislodged. If the monopoly of the party is replaced merely by the victory of the masses, all will be lost before long, for the masses have no structure and no permanence …. The key question is how to fill the gap between the state and the people—sometimes, as in Romania, one of frightening dimensions—with activities which by their autonomy create social sources of power. Before this is achieved, the constitution of liberty and even the market economy, social or otherwise, will remain suspended in midair.3
In countries with little experience of democratic procedures, there is a potential for the manipulation of the mass of gullible and often confused individuals by cynical adventurers or irresponsible opportunists who can exploit collective anxieties and frustrations in order to seize power. Communism is dead in Eastern Europe, but its legacy includes a yearning for immediate reward and compensation, and that impatience leaves the door open for oracular political movements rooted in hopelessness and insecurity. Take for instance the overwhelming majority that the National Salvation Front won during the May 1990 elections in Romania. The NSF won by pledging to avoid the shock of a painful transition to a market economy and by playing up the NSF strongman, Ion Iliescu. Another example is the populist overtones employed by Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic in his political performances, which are outmatched by his even more nationalist opponent, Vuk Draskovic, leader of the radical Movement for Serbian Renewal. Draskovic uses the following stereotypes referring to the Croats: “Most Croats have an irrational hatred of Serbs. The only feeling the Croatian people have is hatred.”4 Such movements can win temporary majorities in new parliaments and can impose their intolerant visions on a nation’s beleaguered minorities. To understand the nature of those intolerant visions, created by the sudden leap into pluralism without the existence of institutional foundations for an orderly democratic process, one can turn to Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis on the tyranny of the majority and the right of the individual to resist it: “When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right which the majority has of commanding, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.”5
The risk that the new political formations that emerged from the ashes of communism would be unable to use their authority in a reasonable and cautious way should be neither exaggerated nor underestimated. There remains, however, the real danger that, in order to ensure their electoral success, many of the new groups, with inchoate ideological preferences, will cater to the crowds and indulge in populist fantasies.
It is one thing to vanquish communist bureaucracies and another to construct a world where individuals cease to distrust each other. The restoration of politics, the discovery of the public arena as a place for the competition of values, and the appearance of different interest groups signified the opening of the public space. Democracy, however, with its impersonal procedural culture, had to be built upon a still fragile foundation haunted by the demons of the past. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”6 Because the past had been suspended for decades, it was now coming back with all the complexes and neuroses that had created the drama of East European history for centuries before the advent of communism.
Although the dominant rhetoric throughout Eastern Europe now included references to ideological preferences, the new parties constituted themselves on the basis of personal affinities and shared experience. The new political elites are made up of different groups that have participated in similar activities and have long-established, strong interpersonal connections. Ideology matters, but it is subordinate to sentiments. For example, to understand the accusations and recriminations in contemporary Hungary and Poland, one has to be familiar with the history of the Democratic Opposition and the KOR. Many of the current senators and ministers in both countries were once involved in the underground actions of the heroic dissident period. Others were among the uncommitted spectators who, without endorsing communist power, did not directly engage in anticommunist activism. Regarding the Hungarian and the Polish political scene, Timothy Garton Ash observed:
In present-day politics, you have the class of ’48, the class of ’56, the class of ’68, the class of ’80, and (largest of all) the class of ’89, and both between and within each class there is a complex
personal history of friendships and rivalries. You cannot begin to understand the personal alignments of today unless you know who did what to whom over the last forty years …. [T]he only serious path to real understanding is a detailed historical and, in the case of the leading actors, biographical narrative.7
The transideological nature of those affinities is striking if one considers that a cultural and political conservative like Gaspar Miklos Tamas is one of the leaders of the Alliance of Free Democrats in Hungary, a political formation that is quite liberal in its values. Tamas, however, had been a driving force of the samizdat opposition and a close friend of the Beszelö circle headed by the current chairman of the Free Democrats, Janos Kis. At the same time, György Bence, a philosopher who in the past stood together with Kis and was a young member of the Lukacs school of critical Marxism, is now an informal but close adviser to the FIDESZ leadership. One can identify a similar role of personal relations in Polish political life, where the Warsaw and Krakow intellectual elite tended to side with Tadeusz Mazowiecki rather than with Lech Walesa during the presidential elections in December 1990. Unless one pays attention to the “prehistory” of those relations, one can barely understand the bitterness of certain charges and the intensity of what often looks like senseless fratricidal strife.8
In most of these countries one of the most important issues has been the fate of the former communist parties. In Romania, for instance, the communist party, as previously mentioned, seemed to vanish without a trace following the spontaneous anticommunist uprising in December 1989. But was that disappearance an accurate perception? Can one seriously believe that a political movement that numbered almost 4 million members before the December 1989 revolution had simply left the historical scene without leaving any legacy? For many, the National Salvation Front, the formation that rose to prominence during the vacuum of power that followed Ceausescu’s flight from Bucharest, was simply a reincarnation of the old communist party. Later, in December 1990, a group of former leaders of the vanished but not defunct communist party announced the party’s restoration under the name Socialist Labor Party.9 In other words, even in an anticommunist society institutions, beliefs, and thought patterns characteristic of the old regime do not die out overnight.
In the avalanche of confusing signals coming from Eastern Europe, one can distinguish a number of significant common features of the wondrous upsurge that swept away the corrupt and incompetent communist regimes. The thrust of the 1989 revolutions was anticommunist, anti-authoritarian and anti-ideological. It was precisely because those revolutions defied the communist politicization of the public sphere that most of the new leaders maintained a skeptical attitude toward the formation of political parties in the aftermath of their victory. The tension between institutional obligations and moral apprehensions explains the hesitation expressed not only by Vaclav Havel and the Civic Forum but also by Hungarian activists to solidify their efforts in the form of political parties. Indeed, it took a number of years for the former members of Hungary’s samizdat opposition to form first a Network of Free Initiatives and later the Alliance of Free Democrats—a genuine political party, with its statutes, hierachy, and grassroots organizations, including a youth branch. In the past, the opposition had justified its activities by reference to the universalist vision of human and civil rights. Most of its leaders were distinguished intellectuals who had decided to live in truth regardless of the price they had to pay for this East European form of civil disobedience. Since human rights transcend national and social boundaries, for many of those activists it was a great surprise—and not a pleasant one—to discover that underneath the frozen totalitarian monolith the old (and ugly) passions and animosities had lingered and were ready to explode as soon as police pressure ceased to be exerted. Communism had not solved any of the region’s problems in terms of social and national injustices. On the contrary, those problems had only been denied, and therefore exacerbated through neglect and symbolic manipulation, as in the case of the chauvinistic populism practiced by Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian communist leaders.
The break with the past was dominated by the overarching emphasis, in the programs and statements of the new movements, on the need to restore morality in public life. It was vitally important to debunk the ideological mirage used by the communists to justify their hold on society. It was also important to create a social environment where the individual would cease to feel threatened and humiliated by an omnipotent repressive apparatus. The accountability of public officials had to be enshrined in new constitutions that would guarantee the thoroughness of the ongoing changes. The nature and dynamics of the transition to genuine politics were determined by the maturity of local opposition groups and their aptitude for offering workable alternative strategies for economic and social recovery. In all those countries the issues relating to political justice and the punishment of people responsible for the calamities of the past became of paramount importance for the national healing and the purification of public life. The ghosts of the past had to be exorcised. The public demands for justice had to be met by the new authorities without giving in to the calls for bloody revenge and unruly outbursts of anger that could degenerate in lynchings and massacres of the former apparatchiks and security police cadres and informers. The treatment applied to the former leaders and their tools, who had helped create and maintain a most inhumane system, was one of the most complex and potentially destabilizing problems of the postrevolutionary regimes. It was often almost impossible to find criteria for separating those had been simple pawns from those who took special delight in persecuting the critical thinkers and the independent working-class activists. What should happen to the judges who had passed long prison sentences upon people who were now members of the government? Timothy Garton Ash pointed to that dilemma of the postcommunist power when he described the new sources of anger in Eastern Europe:
Former censors, former border guards, former apparatchiks, former secret policemen: what is to be done with them? Or rather, what is to be done with Them—Oni—as the Communist power holders, great and small, were universally known. There is the question of justice. At the highest level, this is the Nuremberg question. Should the men at the top be brought to trial for the evil they did, or that was done under them? If so, on what charges and by what laws? At a lower level it becomes almost a question of social justice. Is it fair, people ask, that those who had comfortable office jobs under the communists should still have them today, when ordinary people are having to tighten their belts yet more? Is it fair that members of the nomenklatura are exploiting the unclear legal conditions of privatization to take over as capitalists the enterprises they had previously commanded as Communists?10
The discontent with the slow pace of national purification and the widespread sentiment that the entrenched bureaucracies continued to retain positions of influence, especially in the economic apparatus, inspired new outbursts of popular anger. The construction of civil societies and the restoration of interpersonal bonds of solidarity turned out to be a much longer and more difficult process than anticipated. It was one thing to fight against an easily identifiable enemy—the communist power—and another to create a culture of trust, dialogue, and tolerance. Institutional and constitutional designs became the most important issues. In Romania and Bulgaria, public dissatisfaction with the gradual dismemberment of the old institutions created new crises. There was thus a growing gap between the East-Central European model of political development, which included a palpable and unequivocal break with the communist past and a strong commitment, on the part of the new political actors, to observe the rules of pluralism, and Southeastern Europe, where the legacy of totalitarianism turned out to be more persistent and stubborn and prevented the rapid opening of the public space. Especially in Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia, nationalist movements rooted in resentful myths and atavistic phobias tried to inflame collective passions. Ethnocracy rather than democracy threatened to be the future of those so
cieties.
Romanian extremist movements started to attack the Hungarian minority for nourishing “irredentist” hopes with regard to Transylvania. The former collaborators of the Ceausescu regime, the sycophants of the late conducator, resurfaced and launched a particularly vicious magazine called Romania Mare (Great Romania), in the pages of which no dissident from the time of the dictatorship was spared. Slanders and insults inundated the pages of an increasingly anarchic press. Efforts were made to rehabilitate the military dictator Ion Antonescu, who ran Romania during World War II, and to present him as a defender of national interests. The progovernment media engaged in vicious campaigns against King Michael, who had arrested Antonescu in August 1944 and had established a short-lived democracy before the communists took over. In Serbia, but also in Croatia and Bulgaria, the specter of nationalism loomed ominously. Signs of ethnocentrism were detected as well in Slovakia, where Christian nationalist groups emerged and tried to rehabilitate the proNazi nationalist government headed, during World War II, by Monsignor Tiso. Drawing from that authoritarian-nationalist tradition, a small but vociferous minority advocated an independent Slovak state. In Bulgaria, anti-Turkish nationalism was rampant.
Reinventing Politics Page 35
