Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  But enthusiasm is bound to wither away at the moment the masses recognize the scope of the official lies; therefore, it is expected that new cycles of violence in the country will occur, eventually breaking the NSF’s hold on power. At that moment, one of the alternatives to chaos might be a return to a precommunist political formula represented by constitutional monarchy. The NSF has already sensed this danger; in December 1990 it expelled Romania’s former King Michael, who had come for a short visit to his country, after an exile that started with his forced abdication in December 1947.44 Again, the Spanish experience is worth a comparative look: One can see the advantages of constitutional monarchy, because it resumes an interrupted tradition and provides a political culture of cleavage with a suprapartisan arbiter capable of presiding over national reconciliation. Indeed, in December 1990 the Civic Alliance issued a statement calling for a nationwide referendum to decide whether Romania should again be a constitutional monarchy. For many in Romania, the King was the symbol of the country’s short-lived democratic experiment in the aftermath of World War II, as well as the possible guarantor of a return to a long-denied normalcy in public life. The democratic constitution adopted in 1923 thus has been seen increasingly as the legitimate foundation for the establishment of a pluralist order in that country.

  Yugoslavia: Ethnic Strifes, Separatism, and Disintegration

  During 1990 the League of Communists of Yugoslavia renounced its monopoly on power and suffered almost complete dissolution. During its Fourteenth Congress, the party admitted that it could no longer invoke its constitutional privileges and recognized that in a democratic society no one can claim to be the holder of absolute historical truth. Those concessions were not sufficient to assuage the radical reformers from Slovenia, who asked for a complete restructuring of the party. When their demands were rejected, they walked out of the Congress, thus consecrating the collapse of the once cohesive federal party. In May the Congress resumed in an atmosphere of general confusion. Calls were made for the complete transformation of the party into an umbrella organization for all the leftist groups in Yugoslavia. The change of heart and the acceptance of a redefinition of its status, however came too late. In the meantime the rebellious Croatian and Slovenian communist parties had been defeated in multiparty elections, so in two of the country’s most developed republics the communists ceased to be the ruling force. Unable to keep pace with breathtaking changes, the communists tried to reorganize themselves as a movement committed to the survival of the Yugoslav federation. In other republics the communists continued to lose ground: In November the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina was defeated by the Moslem Party for Democratic Action, and one month later the Macedonian communists lost in a third round of voting.45

  Federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic tried to oppose the apparently invincible centrifugal trends and championed immediate reforms. He even announced his intention to organize an all-Yugoslav Alliance of Reformist Forces and enjoyed great popularity among the many citizens who did not endorse the idea of a complete breakup of the federation.46 But political diversity and even incompatibility between the social and national agendas of the different republics’ governments continued to deepen. As a result of elections in Slovenia and Croatia, those republics were run by center-right coalitions, while during the December 1990 elections the communists managed to stay in power in Serbia, the country’s largest and most powerful republic. As an all-Yugoslav institution, the army continued to oppose the separatist trends, but for many in Slovenia and Croatia the military was seen as an instrument of the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic’s domineering appetite. Meanwhile, in Slovenia a reform communist was elected President, but the parliamentary elections were won by the center-right coalition of five parties called Demos. In December 1990 Slovenes overwhelmingly voted in a referendum for their country’s independence from Yugoslavia, thus inaugurating a pattern that boded ominously for the federation’s future. That did not necessarily mean secession, but rather a gradual process that would permit the Slovenian republic to take control of military, foreign, and monetary policies that had been the prerogative of the federal government in Belgrade. Some Slovene officials sought a formula of confederation similar to that of the European Community, but others contemplated the possibility of complete secession. For instance, the former dissident activist Dimitrij Rupel, who after the elections became Slovenia’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, declared: “This country is disintegrating. There is great instability especially from the point of view of the legal system, se we are forced to search for a new form of coexistence.”47 In Croatia, the former wartime partisan and retired general Franjo Tudjman became the first noncommunist President of a republic in Yugoslavia’s history. He had run as a candidate of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union. His rhetoric was no less inflammatory than Milosevic’s bellicose statements about Serbia’s possible questioning of the existing interrepublic borders if Yugoslavia were to become a confederation. The preexisting bitterness and suspiciousness between Serbs and Croations was only exacerbated by Milosevic’s crusading nationalist activism. Indeed, the Serbian President looked to many in his country, and to foreign observers, like a cynical practitioner of populist authoritarianism, “a late communist-nationalist reactionary who tried to turn back the clock, but succeeded only in hastening an anti-communist Balkanization of Yugoslavia.”48 In June 1991 the Slovene and Croatian parliaments proclaimed the independence of those republics. An ultimatum was sent by the central government in Belgrade to the rebellious Slovene leaders, who proudly refused to accept it. The army intervened and attacked public institutions and private units in Slovenia. For many, the army appeared as a tool for the imposition of Serbian hegemony. The country was caught in turmoil, intense fights opposed the military to the Slovene defense forces, and many were killed and injured. The beginning of a compromise was reached when the Serbs accepted a Croatian politician as President, but the real issues that provoked the crisis remained. Without a thoroughgoing rewriting of the country’s constitution and allowance for the component republics’ real sovereignty, Yugoslavia cannot survive. At the same time, the intervention of the army in political affairs—actually an undeclared coup—inaugurated a disturbing pattern for postcommunist Eastern Europe.

  The collapse of Yugoslav communism, the irreversible political and economic decentralization, and the growth of powerful nationalist movements, including some extreme chauvinist groups, led to an explosive situation where the intervention of the army appeared likely. Albanians in Kosovo persecuted by Serbs, Serbs in Croatia threatened by Croatian fundamentalism, Slovenes increasingly attracted by a dream of a Central European federation, Moslems hating Christians, Christians attacking Moslems, endemic working-class unrest, some 2 million workers faced with the prospect of becoming unemployed as the result of drastic economic reforms—the Yugoslavia of the 1990s was a powderkeg whose explosion and disintegration was likely to be halted only by a drastic, Pinochet-style military coup. But even then, how could such an action prevent the country’s further slide into anarchy and even civil war? Nothing but grudges and resentments seems to remain of Marshal Tito’s Utopia of equal republics united by their ideology and their desire to build the socialism of self-management.

  Albania: A Farewell to Stalinism?

  As the dominoes of the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe were falling one after the other in the revolutionary year 1989, Albania looked like an impregnable fortress, sticking adamantly to its refusal to liberalize and its stubborn defense of Stalinist orthodoxy. Speaking in November 1989, the communist party leader Ramiz Alia insisted that his country was opposed to the changes initiated by Gorbachev and warned against those who were seeking to emulate them. Sounding very much like such diehard enemies of reform as Nicolae Ceausescu and Fidel Castro, Alia said:

  We especially emphasize this when we bear in mind what is happening now in the countries of the East. There, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists have joi
ned forces and unified their tactics and strategy to abolish socialism as a social order. With demagogic slogans about freedom and democratic rights, which ignore the toiling masses in favor of certain antipeople individuals and social strata, and under the pretext of correcting mistakes that they themselves committed, they are reimposing the laws of a capitalist-like society.49

  To prevent infection with the “revisionist” ideas, harsh security measures were taken in Albania at the beginning of 1990. But to no avail: The impact of the changes in the other countries was more powerful than the communist propaganda machine. In June 1990 thousands of Albanians took refuge in Western embassies in Tirana, and in July, recognizing its weakness, the communist government allowed them to leave the country.50 In October 1990 the regime suffered another defeat: The country’s most prominent writer and a cult figure for young Albanians, Ismail Kadare, applied for political asylum in France. In a letter addressed to Alia, the celebrated intellectual, who in the past had been supportive of Hoxha’s break with Khrushchev and had contributed to the building of the late leader’s mystique as a nationalist hero, stated:

  Until today I have tried to soften the regime to the extent that it is authorized in Albania. In the course of my meetings and an exchange of letters which I had with the President last spring I expressed very clearly the necessity for a rapid, profound and complete democratization of the country. Because there is no possibility of legal opposition in Albania I have chosen this course which I never wished to take and which I will not recommend to others.51

  Several months later, noting the start of opening in his country, Kadare declared that in the case of the democratic process in Albania, “the pace of change is a matter of life and death.”52 As if to bear out this reading of Albanian realities, a wave of student demonstrations for democracy led to a dramatic political shift.

  As mass unrest developed, Alia showed that he had drawn the necessary lessons from Ceausescu’s infamous end: The one-party system was abolished; opposition groups were allowed to form; the widow of Enver Hoxha, Nexhmije, stepped down as leader of the People’s Democratic Front; and for the first time in twenty years after Albania had proclaimed itself an atheistic state, Masses were celebrated in Greek Orthodox Churches. The symbolic end of an era of zealotry and fanaticism came on December 21, 1990. The occasion was the 111th anniversary of Stalin’s birth. Instead of the traditional pledges of orthodoxy, a crane moved into Tirana’s Stalin Boulevard at midnight and loaded the dark bronze statue of the Soviet tyrant onto a truck, its head hanging off the back of the vehicle.53 Soon thereafter political parties were formed and mass rallies took place in support of democracy. The government allowed multiparty elections to take place in March, but some of the opposition leaders detected the same trick used by Romania’s NSF in its rush to exploit the lack of information and confusion among the population. For instance, Genc Pollio, a spokesman for the main opposition Democratic Party, said: “There has been so much indoctrination and political intimidation, the Stalinist legacy is so strong, that we do not think there is enough time for us before the elections to develop an alternative frame of mind among the majority of the electorate. We are therefore avoiding being excessively optimistic that we can win.”54 All those apprehensions notwithstanding, it was clear that the ruling party had come to the conclusion that the old methods of terrorist coercion had to be abandoned and that Albania’s leaders had to move away from the uncompromising Stalinist model they had so jealously guarded in the past. Actually, in the March elections the opposition managed to win the majority of votes in the urban areas, while the communists succeeded in the countryside. This indicated that the transition to pluralism would involve a long process of civic awakening, especially in the regions less exposed to information. Another element noticed during the Albanian elections was the government’s systematic attempts to intimidate the opposition and the use of the regime-controlled media to slander the opposition. In this respect, again, there were similarities between Albania and Romania.

  EPILOGUE

  Fears, Phobias, Frustrations

  Eastern Europe Between Ethnocracy and Democracy

  —Isaiah Berlin

  To be the object of contempt or patronising tolerance on the part of proud neighbors is one the most traumatic experiences that individuals or societies can suffer. The response, as often as not, is pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues, and resentment and hostility towards the proud, the happy, the successful.

  From Warsaw to Tirana, and from Bratislava to Sofia, Eastern Europe has moved beyond the communist-led past and entered a new era. The present and future belong now to diverse national actors, and it is up to them to build democratic or authoritarian polities. No one can lay down guidelines for the transition. There is no error-proof blueprint to ensure the smoothness of this huge transformation. It is obvious, however, that in all these societies a struggle is being waged between the partisans of democracy and those of authoritarianism. The triumph of the latter would result in bloody domestic and international confrontations. On the other hand, one cannot ignore that in all these countries there are strong groups and parties who cherish pluralist values and who are ready to fight for their assertion.

  For many in my generation, communism appeared to be immortal. We grew up in Eastern Europe (in which I also include the Soviet Union) with the belief that the order of things as dictated by the powers-that-be could be challenged, but not radically overthrown. Thanks to the epochmaking events of 1989, that conviction has ceased to have any justification. The spectacle offered to our astonished eyes was almost unhelievable. It was the miracle of the sudden breakdown of a formation that had claimed to embody millennial expectations of earthly redemption. At least in its leftist version, radicalism was a shambles and could find no resource (or disguise) to conceal its wreckage. This collapse meant the end of a Utopian dream of universal salvation and the rediscovery of the long-despised values of individual freedom. The closed society celebrated by various “engineers of human souls” disbanded under the onslaught of forces fascinated by its opposite, the open society, with its respect for differences, minorities, and nuances.

  The process started perhaps with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s cult (the “Secret Speech”) at the historic closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. During that night of February 1956, the myth of the monolithic unity of world communism received a mortal blow. What followed were long periods of exaltation and dereliction, passionate recriminations and frantic polemics. In all East European societies, the holistic mystique of the party as a collective pedagogue met the defiance of new social movements that did not identify themselves with either the traditional right or the left. Communism was perceived as an enormous hypocrisy, an attempt to regiment and control the human mind and human needs in the name of a mortifying ideology devised by a young German philosopher in the mid-nineteenth century. With incredible speed, people realized that it was in their power to get rid of the ideological straitjacket, to tear it off, and to create liberated enclaves of human communication. In this century, when information has become a most powerful weapon, an ardent yearning for transparency and communication exploded the tissue of lies and superstitions that had ensured the persistence of communist tyrannies.

  Some four years ago I participated in a conference in New York City on the topic “Will the Communist States Survive? The View From Within.” That was in October 1987, and Gorbachev’s reforms had generated a widespread state of euphoria. The rise of a revisionist leader in the sanctum sanctorum of the empire seemed to justify high expectations of rapid change. It was obvious that the margin of permissiveness or, rather, the limits of the Kremlin’s tolerance of experimention with reform had dramatically changed. What had been absolute heresy under Brezhnev was enshrined as the new party line under Gorbachev. For instance, the slogan of socialism with a human face was embraced by the Soviet General Secretary and designated as one of the main goals of perestroik
a. But among us there were also some skeptics. I remember that the well-known Soviet dissident writer and logician Alexander Zinoviev ironically titled his contribution “Crocodiles Cannot Fly.” Miklos Haraszti, the Hungarian maverick intellectual and human rights activist, sent a paper titled “The Paradigm of the Boots,” referring to Stalin’s monument in Budapest and maintaining that the totalitarian boots had been internalized to an extent that made any hope of liberation a simple illusion. Ivan Svitak, the Czech philosopher, argued that Gorbachev’s reforms were nothing but dust in the eyes, another propaganda exercise bound to save, not to abolish, the system. The Romanian dissident Mihai Botez spoke of the rise of the national-communist state as the most likely development one could foresee even under Gorbachev. At that moment Kadarism, described by Georg Lukacs’s students Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher as an enlightened version of Khrushchevism, appeared to be the best one could expect for Eastern Europe. Others, including myself, thought the new elbow room created by the revisionist czar in the Kremlin had suppressed the barriers that for decades had prevented the triumph of Eastern Europe’s “long rebellion against Yalta” (to use the telling formula proposed by these lucid Hungarian philosophers). That approach focused on the rise of the civil society in most of these countries, including such fortresses of Stalinism as East Germany and Bulgaria.