Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Across the East European countries there was a feeling that it was enormously important to divulge the workings of the police state and to make public identification of former security police collaborators. Those exposures were particularly dramatic in the former GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. President Havel issued a decree calling for the screening of all public officials. It was revealed that even leaders of the reconstituted anticommunist parties had collaborated with the secret police and belonged to the category of “tainted people.”11 Punishment of the human instruments of totalitarianism was part of the necessary coming to terms with those societies’ past. It was part of the revival of a political culture ready to assume both its failings and its accomplishments. The learning of democracy had to coincide with the renunciation of the modes of thought and the behavior patterns instilled during more than forty years of Leninist regimes. People had to get rid of their readiness to expect all decisions to be made by an external authority and to realize that no charismatic leader would magically save them from poverty and insecurity. The emergence of new elites, able to perform in a culture based on merit and competition, was thus a barrier to the slide toward new authoritarian experiments.

  The main task, therefore, in all those countries was to build up a political culture solid and self-confident enough to counter the rise of new fundamentalist movements. As Karol Modzelewski, the well-known Polish historian, opposition activist, and, after 1989, senator, put it:

  Dictators don’t become dictators by themselves; they don’t dominate countries simply because they have dictatorial tendencies. People make a dictator—the people who advise him and who take orders from him and especially the people in society at large who support him. In other words, whether a country has a dictator or not depends primarily upon the political culture of the country in cause.12

  The consolidation of a constitutional framework that would prevent the rise of populist movements supportive of demagogic “strongmen” has to be accompanied by continuous efforts in the field of everyday politics and the “illuminist” struggle with the obscurantist, superstitious, and highly intolerant practices bequeathed on those societies not only by communism but also by the nondemocratic or semidemocratic cultures of the interwar period. Among other things, that includes the recognition and protection of minority rights, a major irritant for those who would like to assert the primacy of the “organic” ethnic community over the individual.

  As the shock of modernity is inevitable in all these countries, the risk exists of a coalescence of “movements of disenchantment” driven by fear and despair. Communism is definitely extinct in those countries, but democracy is not necessarily its successor. There is danger of a baroque synthesis between nostalgia for the protective shield of the police state and readiness to accept the promises of social demagogues able to manipulate the symbols of national salvation. In this respect, Ralf Dahrendorf has wisely emphasized the pitfalls of the painful first stage of the transition to an open society: “I hate to think of the combination of military leaders, economic planners and racist ideologists which might be brought to power by dislocated and disenchanted groups. Guard against the beginnings! Fundamentalists are waiting around many corners to collect their contributions from those who have lost their nerve on the road to freedom.”13 Indeed, the reinvention of politics takes place against the background of many immoderate and often unreasonable expectations. As the first stage of triumphant ecstasy fades away, people realize that the next one would be marked by new hardships, especially in terms of economic recovery. It will take the new elites’ courage, imagination, and strong commitment to pluralist values to defend the democratic institutions against authoritarian attacks. The precedents of Spain and Portugal, countries ruled by dictators for decades, show, however, that such a transition is feasible. Pointing to the dangers, including the fascist one, should not make us skeptical about democracy’s chances to establish itself in Eastern Europe.

  BETWEEN EUPHORIA AND RAGE

  After the spectacular breakdown of the communist structures of domination, all the countries in Eastern Europe engaged in a feverish search for new political formulae that would facilitate the establishment of demolum when the time has come to denounce the failures of the previous dynasty.48

  When Haraszti wrote his book in the early 1980s, Hungary appeared to be the most advanced country in the Soviet bloc in terms of domestic liberalization. Compared with Romania, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, dissidents were treated with kid gloves, although the state machine did not spare efforts to thwart their efforts to get out of the political ghetto and establish contacts with the larger society. The underground presses were systematically ransacked by the police, dissidents were interrogated and even beaten up. The regime avoided, however, massive organized crackdowns. As the economic situation deteriorated and the changes in the USSR spurred higher political expectations, Kadar’s Hungary ceased to be “the most joyful barrack in the socialist camp.” Its youth were radicalized, and the democratic opposition became a national political force. Far from being assigned to eternal marginality, dissidents, Haraszti included, became the architects of the transition to postcommunism. Actually, in the postscript to his book, written in 1987, Haraszti admitted that the changes introduced by Gorbachev in the functioning of the Soviet system and the new wave of de-Stalinization made some of his gloomy predictions invalid. But, at the same time, he insisted that Gorbachevism represented an adoption by the Soviet elite of the same techniques that had ensured the partial success of the “velvet prison” experiment undertaken by Hungary under Kadar:

  I have called this model the “post-Stalinist” or “soft” or “civilian” version of Communist rule, in contradistinction to the “Stalinist” or “hard” or “military” style …. Indeed, the Hungarian model might welt represent a more rational, more normative, and more enduring version of directed culture. Mr. Gorbachev understands that in order to have a truly successful society with a modern economy he must boost the intelligentsia’s sagging morale by giving it a stake in administering the future.49

  Antipolitics strives to put politics in its place and make sure that it stays there, never overstepping its proper office of defending and refining the rules of the game of civil society. Antipolitics is the ethos of civil society, and civil society is the antithesis of military society.

  The development of civil societies in the states of the Soviet bloc cannot be separated from the existence of autonomous centers of independent thought. Living within the truth, although often seen as a gesture of moral idealism with little social significance, has turned out to be the driving force behind the creation of alternative ways of thinking and acting. It is thus clear that the foundation stone of the countersociety is the individual’s decision to proclaim his or her mental independence. In Havel’s words: “What is this independent life of society? The spectrum of its expressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes everything from self-education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied free, civic initiatives, including instances of independent social self-organization.”1 The new politics, which relies on informal citizens’ initiatives as an antidote to the paralyzing pressure of the bureaucratic Leviathan, which encourages the emergence of multifaceted experiments in grassroots activism, and which maintains that change comes from spontaneous move-intact the sense of obedience and conformity as well as the traditional Prussian militaristic values. In other words, the problem with the East Germans was that they had never experienced either genuine de-Nazification or de-Stalinization. Certainly their integration in the constitutional-pluralistic system of the Federal Republic diminished the dangers of mass outbursts of fanaticism and intolerance. The rise of two varieties of neo-Nazi activities, which provoked the immediate response of the democratic forces, however, was evident. One varietal trend that rose as the political repression disappeared consisted of viciously xenophobic, thuggish gangs
that started to disseminate anti-Semitic, racist tracts and even organized assaults on foreign workers, primarily Vietnamese. During demonstrations in East Berlin, Leipzig, and other large cities, anti-Polish and generally anti-Slav slogans were heard. Following the disintegration of the fake consensus of the totalitarian state, the first variety tended to capture the attention of public opinion. The fringe extremist movement of East German neo-Nazis was made up predominantly of male youths. Their activities were often violent, and their targets were those considered alien elements threatening the “purity of the German race”: Jews, Poles, and Asians.15 The second trend arose under the impact of the West German far right, especially that of the Republican Party headed by the former SS member Franz Schönhuber. There was growing support for the political groups inclined to champion the aspirations of the extreme right.

  As the Republican Party and other far right formations intensified their campaigning in the GDR, the former communists, grouped in the Socialist Unity Party—Party of Democratic Socialism, made the struggle against fascism a prominent theme of their electoral propaganda. “We didn’t fight against Stalinism to make room for neo-Fascists,” Gregor Gysi declared. But the communists had lost any credibility, and all their efforts to revamp their image as a Eurosocialist party failed to attract significant popular support. They were actually outflanked by the recently formed Social Democratic Party, which during the March elections won eighty-eight seats in the four-hundred-member parliament. The leader of the Social Democrats, Ibrahim Böhme, himself a former communist, challenged the communists by advocating rapid reunification.16 As for the New Forum, the anti-authoritarian group that had been in the forefront of the demonstrations in October—November 1989, it lost its appeal because of the reluctance of its leaders to turn it into a real political party and the hostility they expressed toward German unification. For many in the New Forum, the rush of the Eastern Germans to support unification seemed a betrayal of the ideals of the October uprising. For instance, Sebastian Pflugbeil, a dissident physicist and one of the leaders of the New Forum, declared: “We became revolutionaries because we were fed up with party dictatorship and had no chance to influence things around us—we wanted a real democratic state of affairs here.”17 One of the striking effects of the four decades of communist rule in East Germany was precisely the generally conservative orientation of the electorate and the lack of real appeal of the left-wing formations. Once integrated into a united Germany, the former GDR evolved in a different pattern from that of the other postcommunist states, which had to act on their own in the attempt to reshape the economy and restore the civic sphere. The rest of Eastern Europe had no Western “Big Brother” to invest munificently, and there were no political parties to export their know-how in terms of building a democratic culture. As for the bitter political and moral legacy of forty years of Soviet-style socialism on German soil, one could sum it up in three words: lies, corruption, and terror. As was noted by an editorial in an influential West German newspaper:

  We know now that much in the GDR was far worse than even those people who lived under the dictatorship themselves had sensed and the critics of the regime had ever imagined. The ostensible values that underlay the socialist society of the GDR have been dissolved into nothing and are now shown to have been a mere fiction …. What remains of the policies of peace and disarmament that seemed so crucial to Honecker’s claim to legitimacy? What remains of the communist declaration against the use of force and terror now that the links with the West German terrorists, the dead in the concentration camps, and the widespread surveillance of citizens have been revealed? What can remain from this legacy even for those who were prepared to look beyond the arbitrary and dictatorial ways of the party and who ignored the realities of socialism as it was practiced in order to cling to the idea of some purer form of socialism?18

  Bulgaria: The Impossible Cohabitation

  In Bulgaria it seemed at first that the former communist party, renamed socialist, would continue to run the country in an effort to preserve its domination and avoid a radical transition to an open society. Despite internal opposition, the Socialist Party continued to control that country for most of 1990. But even the reformed communists were threatened by factionalism because of the emergence of both liberal and conservative trends. The former accused the party leader Aleksandar Lilov of still nourishing Leninist beliefs, while the latter were critical of his abandoning of the party’s monopoly and the tolerance shown to antisocialist forces. After pressure from below forced the party to disband its organizations in workplaces, defections became endemic, and the Bulgarian Socialist Party’s membership dwindled from almost 1 million in February 1990 to some 250,000 by mid-December.19 In January and February roundtable discussions were organized between representatives of the BSP and the opposition. As a result of those negotiations the BSP and the opposition groups signed joint statements regarding the transition to a democratic system and the nature and future of that system. The roundtables culminated in the signing in March of an agreement on draft laws on constitutional changes, the electoral system, and political parties. In the meantime the communists went out of their way to improve their image and to convince the population that they had broken resolutely with the totalitarian past. The party renounced its control over a number of auxiliary organizations, including the trade unions.

  The opposition rallied around the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), an umbrella organization made up of movements and associations committed to pluralism and democracy. After its leader, the philospher and human rights activist Zhelyu Zhelev, was elected the country’s President in August, he was replaced by the leader of Ecoglasnost, Petar Beron. In December, Beron had to resign after it was revealed that he had collaborated in the past with the secret police. Opposition parties in the UDF included the “Agrarians-Nikola Petkov”, a successor to the party suppressed by the communists in 1947, which refused to merge with the larger Agrarian Union, long a satellite of the communist regime; the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party; and the Radical Democratic Party. The independent union Podkrepa, a founding member of the UDF, left the alliance in order to underline its autonomy but preserved its observer status. Meanwhile the previously harassed Turkish minority—which counted about 1.5 million—found a voice for its grievances in the Movement for Rights and Freedoms. The Movement’s leader, Ahmed Dogan, announced his intention to defend human rights regardless of nationality. The Movement won twenty-three seats in the new Parliament, thus becoming the third political force in the country.20

  The most significant event in Bulgaria was the election that took place in June 1990, during which a polarization of the electorate became visible. Although the BSP obtained the absolute majority in terms of parliamentary seats, it won less than 50 percent of all the votes and was strikingly defeated in Sofia and other big cities. What followed was a continuous deterioration of the political system: The opposition charged the Socialist-controlled government with sabotaging the democratization and eventually compelled the Socialists to accept a renegotiation of the power arrangements. In July President Petar Mladenov, the communist who had engineered Zhivkov’s removal in November 1989, was forced to resign after it was disclosed that he had contemplated the use of violent means to quell a protest demonstration. On August 1, after six rounds of voting, the Parliament elected Zhelyu Zhelev as the new President. At that moment the communists still held control, because one of their leaders, Andrei Lukanov, was the Prime Minister.

  On August 26 the BSP headquarters in the heart of the Sofia was set afire. All opposition parties condemned the action as a provocation organized by the unreconstructed communist forces interested in destabilizing the fledgling democratic system. While the Socialist leader, Aleksandar Lilov, claimed that the opposition should be held responsible for the incident, the UDF responded by emphasizing that it was precisely the most reactionary wing of the Socialist Party and the security police that had an interest in compromising the opposition and block
ing the transition to democracy.21 As the political and economic situation worsened, there were more outbursts of popular anger, especially over the refusal of the Socialist Party to renounce its domination. Lack of parliamentary support for the Lukanov government and the intensification of social unrest, including a general strike by the students and the two trade union organizations, forced the Socialist Lukanov to resign. His resignation forced the Socialists eventually to realize that there was no hope for them to continue the one-party government system and that the BSP’s hegemonic role in Bulgarian politics had come to an end. In December a coalition government was formed under the leadership of Dimitar Popov, a respected jurist with no political or party affiliations. Key ministries were divided equally between the BSP and the UDF. The new government inherited a disastrous economic situation, with unprecedented scarcities and a rapid decline in industrial output. It was therefore vitally urgent to reconsider all economic policy and to engage in rapid and consistent privatization. Cooperation between the government and the presidential institution as well as the appointment of respected civic activists in key positions indicated that Bulgaria had a chance to overcome its economic and political predicament.22

  Czechoslovakia: A Faltering Consensus

  In Czechoslovakia the presence of a charismatic, almost unanimously admired figure like President Vaclav Havel helped to preserve an indispensable national consensus. The country launched an ambitious reform program whose outcome would be the full marketization of the economy. Observers noticed, however, that the euphoric mood of the last months of 1989 had been increasingly replaced by skepticism and apathy. For many it appeared that there was little hope of solving the immense problems amassed during four decades of communist misrule. Ethnic tensions intensified during 1990 and 1991, with the Slovaks criticizing the Czechs for their domineering propensities. At the same time there were attempts in Slovakia to rehabilitate the former Nazi collaborators of the short-lived Slovak national state during the interwar period. Those efforts, it should be said, did not necessarily arise from nostalgia for fascist values. It is a sad paradox that the only time in history that Slovaks managed to achieve statehood coincided with the advent of a Nazibacked regime under Monsignor Josef Tiso.