Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  The great rebellion of 1989 shattered many deeply imbedded beliefs and forced us to question much of the conventional wisdom with regard to those regimes. When we refer to the causes of the 1989 convulsions we have to mention the following factors: First, the upheaval was linked to the complete loss of legitimacy of the ruling elites in the region. True, that phenomenon had started in the mid-1950s, but it reached its zenith during the times of profound pessimism and even despair of Brezhnevism, when socialism in its Soviet version appeared to be a hopeless historical cul de sac. The communist parties had lost all self-confidence and had suffered irresistible political decay. All attempts to instill new life into the old dogmas, all endeavors to engage in what the Catholics did with the strategy of aggiornamento, did not work in Eastern Europe. There was no reservoir of faith for those who believed in the salvation of the existing structures. In other words, the Marxist myth had exhausted its galvanizing power, and there were no social groups interested in perpetuating the matrix of domination as it had functioned for decades. Second, as the communist elites demonstrated their absolute ineptitude, new social forces were coming to the fore and proposing alternative solutions. In a broad sense, those were the segments of the emerging civil societies, that is, collective efforts to create parallel institutions and activities, challenging the government’s claim to control the whole of human life. Third, the decline of the Marxist myth and the rise of the civil society were linked to the overall political, social, economic, and moral crises experienced by all those countries. The most palpable catalyst of the imminent collapse was the economic bankruptcy of state socialism and the awareness that only a free market could guarantee economic recovery. The command economies had failed to provide the goods that would have justified the sacrifices ceaselessly imposed on the population. Fourth, the external factor cannot be underestimated: Without the sweeping changes in the Kremlin and the redefinition by the Gorbachev—Yakovlev—Shevardnadze team of Soviet international strategy, including the new doctrine of the de-ideologization of international relations, the changes in Eastern Europe would have been much slower and certainly more disruptive and violent. The threat of foreign intervention had ceased to function as a deterrent, especially after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. It appeared clear to civic activists in Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union would not be interested in any new adventure that would jeopardize its new image and the relations established by Gorbachev with the West. The “Gang of Four”—Nicolae Ceausescu, Milos Jakes, Erich Honecker, and Todor Zhivkov—opposition to Soviet-inspired reforms was actually counterproductive from the viewpoint of local communist elites, who completely lost any chance to play a significant role in a post-totalitarian transition period.

  The nature of the upheaval needs a special analysis, because it also explains the difficulties encountered by these countries during their transition period. First, one must notice that the 1989 revolutions challenged a false principle of authority, based on universally execrated lies and pseudo-legitimacy. The changes were revolutionary because they replaced one form of political power with another: All those regimes were mythocratic dictatorships whose only reason to stay in power was the ideologically defined predestined role of the working class and its vanguard party. Once that ideological fallacy was exposed as a mere rationalization for the usurpation of power by an incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy, there was no foundation for their survival (except fear, apathy, and inertia). The upheaval was a synthesis of two trends: on the one hand the anticommunist surge and on the other the search for alternative institutional and axiological solutions. What has happened in Eastern Europe since 1989 has been the simultaneous self-destruction of the communist political culture (with its traditions, habits, attitudes, mentalities, values, and behavior patterns) and, on the “positive” side, the reconstitution of civil societies (atomized and almost destroyed by communism) and the structuring of genuinely political forms.

  Communist regimes had appropriated the rhetoric of the left, although in reality they were authoritarian dictatorships based on the manipulation of both nationalism and internationalism. Hungary’s Kadar was somewhat different, with his old-fashioned indifference to national symbols, which played into the hands of the mounting opposition. With the exception of Albania, Romania, and Yugoslavia, they were all ready to toe the Soviet international line. It was therefore logical that their repudiation had to be antitotalitarian (or, in the East European political language, anticommunist). Since communism had turned ideology into a state religion and since Leninist ideology appeared to the people as the name of their oppression, the revolts were also anti-ideological Most of the rebellions originated in widespread frustration with the political cynicism of the ruling elites and therefore acquired antipolitical dimensions. That distrust of anything smacking of behind-the-scenes, Machiavellian arrangements explains the current reluctance of people to engage in political activism: Politics is perceived as the market place of social climbers, opportunists, impostors, and adventurers. In all those countries, there was a general suspicion of government attempts to organize personal life and invade any domain of privacy. That explains the antistatist and antihierarchical dimensions of the upheaval as well as the ongoing difficulties in building up new principles of authority. Although it is not named frequently, there is a current “anarchist” temptation in Eastern Europe that runs parallel to the search for state protection and can be called the paternalistic temptation.

  In Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the long-beleaguered underground groups and movements spearheaded the spontaneous outbursts of discontent and provoked the nonviolent collapse of communist autocracies. The roundtable negotiations and the peaceful transitions to protopluralist forms of government in those countries were guaranteed by the relative maturity of the civil societies and the disintegration of communist elites, symbolized by the inevitable split between the “hawks” (Stalinist conservatives) and the reform-minded (Gorbachevite) liberals. At the same time, it is the tension between moral apprehensions (the antipolitical viewpoint) and institutional obligations that explains certain hesitations and reservations among former opposition groups.

  Because the civil society was underdeveloped or frail in Romania and Bulgaria, and because the communist elites were unable to offer any alternative to their disastrous policies, the transitions were significantly different in those two countries. In Romania, the euphoria of the first days of the post-Ceausescu period was followed by the bitter realization that the National Salvation Front, instead of identifying itself with antitotalitarian ideals, had only self-servingly and pragmatically appropriated them. In a speech at a conference in Timisoara on “Power and Opposition in Post-Communist Societies” (March 25-27, 1991), Nicolae Manolescu, one of Romania’s prominent intellectuals and currently the chairman of the Civic Alliance Party, a political formation similar to the Czechoslovak Civic Forum, gave the following analysis of the situation in his country as well as an idea of the path to be pursued:

  [W]e had a revolution driving out the dictator, but failing to destroy communism. The old structures were restored with new names. Sometimes, even the same people can be met there …. Where East European societies consider themselves to be traveling the road of reform, they should know they are chasing an illusion. For communism is not reformable—it can be only destroyed. And until the last germ of communism has been removed, our societies will have no peace and no chance to establish democracy. 1

  According to Stelian Tanase, another influential Romanian civic activist and editor of the weekly Acum (Now), the basic contradiction in post-Ceausescu Romania is the conflict between the embryonic civil society (most of which is represented by the extraparliamentary opposition) and the state, which has inherited the totalitarian structures. 2 As for the Bulgarians, their opposition managed to organize and to overcome internecine strife. However, according to the civic activist and political philosopher Dimitrina Petrova:

  The hope for real political pluralis
m is rooted in an awareness of fluidity: the whole process has just begun. Opposing interest groups are not yet clearly defined, insofar as the relations of property are not yet constituted and the specific form of market awaiting us in the future is not yet fixed. At the moment we live in an open situation, not in a system of any kind; we experience the responsibility of trying to understand it, while participating in the creation of the political stereotypes of tomorrow. 3

  At this moment, intellectuals from all the postcommunist countries are engaged in a soul-searching investigation of long-obscured social and historical realities. Communists, in spite of their internationalist rhetoric, have always encouraged the nationalists’ autarky. It is therefore vitally important for civic activists and critical intellectuals in all the former communist states to embark on an open and uninhibited dialogue. If it is true that Serbia and Romania lag behind the Czech and Slovak Republic in terms of pluralist development (or, some may argue, Slovakia lags behind Bohemia, and Serbia behind Slovenia), it is nevertheless obvious that all these societies have experienced similar torments brought on by similar causes. They were all victimized in the name of a pseudo-univeralistic teleology according to which a classless Utopia could and should be constructed, regardless of the people’s will. They are all faced now with the enormous challenge of creating the legal framework that would grant the procedural expression of the most important underpinning of democracy: popular sovereignty. An illuminating statement was made by Agnes Heller, who took issue with Timothy Garton Ash’s frequently quoted argument that nothing new (no new idea, institution, or phenomenon) has come out of the antitotalitarian upheaval in Eastern Europe: “Political revolutions happen or take place by the change in sovereignty. In these terms, a political revolution took place in all previous Soviet satellite states in the year 1989, for popular sovereignty has been substituted for party sovereignty in all of them, at least de jure, if not necessarily also de facto.”4

  All those societies have been deprived to a greater or lesser extent of civic culture. In all of them the individual has been repressed, regimented, and manipulated as a simple pawn by the powers-that-be. Those countries today are all experiencing the revival of politics as the liberated space where the most humane features of the individual find their natural expression. And, one might add, all have rediscovered the value of the revolutionary experience and, as a corollary, morality as a primary source of political behavior. To those who claim that no new ideas have emerged during the antitotalitarian upheavals in Eastern Europe, one is tempted to answer that it was precisely during those uprisings (revolutions, revolts, insurrections, rebellions—the best term remains to be found) that concepts like popular sovereignty, European consciousness, civil rights, and many others reacquired full semantic justification. During such momentous times people have a chance to become part of the dream for the Great Republic or, to use Hannah Arendt’s term, they rehabilitate the “revolutionary tradition and its lost treasury.”5

  Communism cannot be considered completely dead. True, in its traditional form, as a messianic, militaristic, fanatic movement, it has been defeated in the historical sense. With the grotesque exception of those who are incurably possessed, no one takes the communist ideology seriously. On the other hand, recent events in Slovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the growth of populist-authoritarian movements in most of the countries of Eastern Europe, have shown that democracy is not the inevitable successor to communism. One of the prevailing illusions during the postcommunist euphoric stage was that xenophobia and other outbursts of the tribalist, pseudo-communitarian, and mystical-romantic spirit would remain merely a marginal phenomenon. As the economic situation has continued to deteriorate and the new elites have failed to offer persuasive models for a rapid transition, those movements have gained momentum. They have recruited primarily among the frustrated and disenchanted social groups by stirring responsive chords among those unable to overcome the traumatic effects of a sudden break with the past. In countries with large national minorities, the demagogical movements play upon ethnic resentments and phobias. We sometimes have the disturbing feeling of a historical déjà vu: Histrionics and hysteria commingle in explosions of intolerance and exclusiveness. Indeed, the dividing line now seems to separate the pro-European parties, inspired by liberal values, from their counterparts who look for inspiration in the exaltation of collective nouns like fatherland, nation, ancestry, or even blood community. The conflict, if one can say so, is less between communists and anticommunists than between collectivism and liberalism. The latter is pro-Western, tolerant, interested in dialogue, and supportive of rapid marketization. The former is atavistic, resentful, xenophobic, militaristic, and exclusive. Ralf Dahrendor was not the only one to mention the risk of derailment into new forms of dictatorship, including fascist ones. Adam Michnik wrote:

  Nationalism is reborn, and with it national conflicts, xenophobia and the nightmare of anti-Semitism. The conspiracy theory of history makes its return …. Countries with a weak democratic tradition, which are in the midst of regaining their national identity, are rehabilitating their national history. They have rehabilitated that which in the communist period was banned, everything which was supposed to have been removed from the pages of national history and from the collective memory. Today the rehabilitation goes on even when it is least deserved, when there are the most disgraceful crimes on its conscience, including collaboration with the Nazis. Consider the conflict over the future in post-communist states. This conflict, in which one finds the same terms with which we are familiar from debates in the West, is in fact quite different. Its origins lie not in a conflict between left and right, even if there are forces on the political scene which use these terms to denote their direction. Nor is it a conflict between conservatism and liberalism, any more than it is one between radicalism and moderation. What it is is a conflict over the form the new country is to be given: whether it is to imitate European models, or whether it is to follow its own road by elaborating a radically different kind of model.6

  Think of the exclusiveness displayed by the Romanian fundamentalists, often linked to the ruling formation in that country (the National Salvation Front), and the appearance of such phenomena as “Party X,” under the eccentric Peruvian-Canadian emigré Stanyslaw Tyminski in Poland. Their only ideological ingredient is an ill-defined sense of historical malaise, a rejection of the consequences of modernity, and a celebration of the presumably pristine values of the preindustrial agrarian life. All those who advocate integration in democratic Europe are targets for smear campaigns and are stigmatized as agents of a universal Zionist-plutocratic-Masonic conspiracy.

  One should not exaggerate, however, the dark colors in this picture and the difficulties of the ongoing evolution from totalitarianism to a different political order based on the rule of law. Compared to 1987, we can now certainly state that the communist states cannot and, in fact, did not survive—at least in the countries of the former Soviet “external” empire. Leninist regimes did irrevocably fall apart. But the legacy of the Leninist system, including its cultural and moral elements, is much more complex and stubborn than anyone had foreseen. For transitions to occur successfully and to result in the emergence of open societies, some factors are indispensable. First, the emergence of a pluralist political space with genuine political parties. Second, the redefinition of the relationship between power and opposition by understanding that the existence of a powerful and dynamic opposition is essential for the healthy functioning of a democracy. Third, the formation of a political elite (class), which despite all natural divergences would be able to agree on the ultimate values characteristic of an open society, including the role of the market, the protection of the individual, and the indispensable guarantees for minorities.

  But while the democratic orientation of the mainstream political discourse seems unquestionable in many of these countries, we should not gloss over the persistence of unavowed fears, phobias, and frustrations, the neuroti
c syndrome that explains the readiness of many individuals to join ethnocentric, nebulously prophetic movements. As the world sadly knows from the experience of Weimar Germany, democracy is not immune to the attacks of such movements. On the other hand, democratic polities can defend themselves if they get rid of their self-serving illusions and identify the social and psychological motivations of populist extremism. To deny those motivations and to confine oneself to the rhetoric of self-glorification is hardly a way to consolidate or strengthen the victories of the last two years. As these societies have exited the communist morass, their alternatives have ranged from real democracy to fundamentalist ethnocracy.

  Hence, in addition to the difficulties created by economic renewal, these societies have inherited the political, social, and cultural crises provoked by communism. To avoid the exploitation of those tensions by movements grounded in resentment and hatred, to prevent the emergence of a combination of extreme right and left “indigenist” radicalism, fledgling democratic institutions need to create a counterbalance at the level of social psychology. Democratic politics is founded not on myths and emotions but on the modest and patient search for those impersonal procedures that foster what totalitarianism wanted to destroy: the accountability of political power and the existence of an independent judiciary and other institutions that aim to protect and not to humiliate the individual. The building of those institutions transcends the will of a political party: It entails the individual in its integrity, because the roots of liberty lie in the awareness that man was born free and that no government has the right to assign to itself the power to limit this freedom.