The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Václav Havel and other Eastern European dissidents proposed an alternative in his project of “moral politics,” which would “teach both ourselves and others that politics does not have to be the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculating, calculating, intrigues, secret agreements, and pragmatic maneuvering, but it can also be the art of the impossible, that is the art of making ourselves and the world better.”89 The demise of Leninism made it possible to change all the established political paradigms. Nevertheless, the legacy of the twentieth century into the twenty-first is the imprint of the totalitarian ethos lurking under the surface of our daily interactions. I am referring to the symptoms of ur-Leninism or ur-Fascism. They are two sides of the same coin: the temptation of palingenesis and that of the chosen agent of history (i.e., the search a new proletariat or the return to the perfect ethnic community).90 The specific nature of these specters should reinforce our agreement on the centrality of Havel's quest: how to exit the castle? His answer is as simple as it is difficult to enact: by regaining the authenticity of human existence. Following Patočka, Havel considered that living in truth was premised on the care of the soul, which in its turn gave the latter a clear sense of order, self-consistency, and inner beauty.91

  The transition from state socialism took place against the background of a universal disparagement of conventional political dichotomies, including a widespread crisis of self-confidence on the part of Western liberalism. In my view, the main ideological successor to Leninism and the principal rival to liberalism was ethnocentric nationalism. One could argue that, taking into account most of the twentieth-century tradition of conceptualizing power in Eastern Europe, the ideal of instituting a society on the basis of procedural norms and against a neutral backdrop of minimal rights and duties had little chance to materialize. On the contrary, a “thick” notion of citizenship based on ideals that require allegiance to the community because of a presupposed “pre-political commonness of its members” seemed more likely to take shape.92 In the struggle between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, the former had a considerable head start. After two decades of post-Communism, in what concerns the dominant visions of membership and identity in Eastern Europe, the results are mixed.

  No political myth in the twentieth century has proved more resilient, protean, and enduring than nationalism. A comprehensive and potentially aggressive constellation of symbols, emotions, and ideas, nationalism also offers a redemptive language of liberation for long-subjugated or humiliated groups. It would therefore be simply misleading to reduce nationalism to one ready-made interpretation. Conductor Leonard Bernstein used to say that whatever statement one makes about Gustav Mahler's music, the opposite is equally true. This is also the case with nationalism. It is often described as archaic, antimodern, traditionalist, in short reactionary. Other interpretations see it as a driving force of modernizing liberation, an ideology of collective emancipation, and a source of human dignity and pride. Overall, it can be said that nationalism “offers a kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions, but given a new activist social and political form through political action, mobilization, and institutions.”93 Whatever one thinks of it, its ubiquitous presence at the end of the last century and the beginning of the new one is beyond any doubt. The problem, therefore, is to find ways to reconcile it with the democratic agenda. Once the nation becomes the master symbol of identitarian narratives, structures of power and regimes of knowledge are determined by who defines and how are defined the communalities perceived to represent the bedrock of that particular community of people. In other words, how can one tame that violent propensity which a Georgian political philosopher aptly called “the illiberal flesh of ethnicity”?94

  The return of ethnocentric politics, especially during the 1990s, the agonizing search for roots, and the obsession with identity were major trends of the turn of the twenty-first century in Eastern Europe. They often collided with the inclusive, civic values advocated by former dissidents such Havel or Michnik. The post-Communist first wave of primordial passions and the appeals of the new exclusionary discourses remind us that neither the premises nor the outcomes of modernity have been universally accepted. As tragically demonstrated in the former Yugoslavia, the revival of this specific form of politics can prove noxious to civic-liberal development in the post-communist societies. In most of East and Central Europe ethno-nationalism has fundamentally altered the left-right ideological spectrum.

  Usually, it was intellectuals who manufactured discourses that justified nationalist identifications and projections, then the mobilized masses gave these discourses the validation of practical realities. This is, to employ for a moment Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, a process of the naturalization of a nation-centered habitus, meaning a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representation.” This way, nationalism, understood as both structures of power and a regime of knowledge, is transformed into self-reproducing and self-referential reality. Nationalism becomes the “the obvious way of doing and thinking about things.”95 The community ordered in such fashion will not only be “known and imagined; it will also be deeply felt and acted out.”96 While in the 1960s nationalism appeared at least in the West as an extinct myth, the end of Communism and the new era of international ethnic conflict that followed the Cold War have made nationalism the main competitor to liberalism and civil society. Its most important strength comes precisely from its ability to compensate for the loss of certainties and to offer immediate explanations for failure, confusion, and discomfiture. Nationalism caters to painful collective anxieties, alleviates angst, and reduces the individual to the lowest common denominator: the simple fact of ethnic belonging. At its core lies a revivalist myth (or, to use Roger Griffin's term, a palingenetic one). As many scholars have shown, such a myth is “an archetype of human mythopoeia which can express itself in both secular and religious forms without being ‘derived’ from any particular source or tradition.” Its most important function is to provide the groups employing it in cultural and political practice with new sources of meaning and social function. The main danger inherent to its activation is that it can bring forth an “organically conceived nation to be cleansed of decadence and comprehensively renewed.”97

  SPECTERS OF NATIONALISM

  Romanian exiled writer Norman Manea, who survived the Holocaust as a teenager only to be later persecuted because of his Jewishness and nonconformist ideas under the Ceaușescu regime, gave a powerful description of this ethnocentric temptation as the main rival to the civic vision of the community associated with modernity and liberalism:

  The increased nationalism all around the world, the dangerous conflicts among minorities in Eastern Europe, and the growing xenophobia in Western Europe emphasize again one of the main contradictions of our time, between centrifugal, cosmopolitan modernity and the centripetal need (or at least nostalgia) for belonging…. The modern world faces its solitude and its responsibilities without the artifice of a protective dependency or a fictive utopian coherence. Fundamentalist and separatist movements of all kinds, the return of a tribal mentality in so many human communities, are expressions of the need to reestablish a well-ordered cohesion which would protect the enclave against the assault of the unknown, of diversity, heterogeneity, and alienation.98

  Ethnic nationalism appeals more often than not to primary instincts of unity and identification with one's own group: foreigners are often seen as vicious destabilizers, dishonest breakers of traditions, and agents of dissolution. Nationalism, indeed, sanctifies tradition, once described by Gilbert K. Chesterton as the “right to vote granted to the dead people.” Especially in times of social frustration, foreigners tend to be demonized and scapegoated. A Ukrainian nationalist, for instance, would see Russians (or Jews) as forever conspiring to undermine Ukraine's independence an
d prosperity. A Romanian would regard members of the Hungarian minority as belonging to a unified body perpetually involved in subversive and irredentist activities. A Croatian militant nationalist would never trust Serbs, while Serbian ethnic fundamentalists would invoke Croatia's alliance with Nazi Germany as an argument against trust and ethnic coexistence. Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian nationalisms are colored by the memory of the Soviet (and previously Russian) occupations of the Baltic states. National discourses not only preserve a sense of ethnic identity but also continuously “reinvent the tradition” (Hobsbawm), regenerate historical mythology, infuse an infrarational, transcendental content into the sense of national identity. During imperial collapse, nationalism becomes an ideological balm used to calm sentiments of despondency and rage.

  With its shattered identities and wavering loyalties, the post-Communist world allowed delusional xenophobic fantasies to thrive and capture the imagination of millions of disaffected individuals. National homogenization became the battle cry of political elites, for whom unity and cohesion were the ultimate values. The Leninist exclusionary logic (“us” versus “them”) has been replaced by the nationalist vision, which sanctifies the ethnic in-group and demonizes “aliens.” Those who criticize this trend are immediately stigmatized as a “fifth column” made up of “inside enemies.” For the late Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, for instance, it was only the intellectuals supportive of the “national spirit and self-determination” who deserved the name of intelligentsia. All others, he maintained, were just Pharisees.99 The continuous invention of enemies and hatreds aggravates the climate of insecurity and makes many honest individuals despair about the future of their societies.

  In this context, it is no surprise that post-Communism was, and still is, defined by a lasting tension between national(ist) consciousness and the emphasis on “post-conventional identities” (Habermas), continuing the project of universalization of rights that was unleashed in the eighteenth century.100 There is still a scarcity of “social glue,” because existing political formations have failed to foster the consensus needed for the sustenance of a constitutional patriotism (Verfassungpatriotismus).101 Contemporary ethnic nationalism is less a resurrection of the pre-Communist politics of intolerance than an avatar of the Leninist effort to construct the perfectly unified body politic. To be sure, the past is often used to justify the resentful fantasies of nationalist demagogues. This “return of history” is, however, more of an ideological reconstruction meant to respond to present-day grievances than a seemingly primordial destiny of nations destined to continuously fight with and fear each other.102 The strange synthesis of national ambition and ideological monism explains the intensity of nationalist passions in the post-Communist world: ethnic exclusiveness is a continuation of the Leninist hubris, of its adversity to anything smacking of difference, uniqueness, or otherness. Antiliberalism, collectivism, and staunch anti-intellectualism blend together in the new discourses of national self-aggrandizement.

  Nevertheless, the Europeanization of Eastern Europe, without being the illusory end of politics, can be envisioned as the first clear break with the last century's dreadful cycle of ideology and utopia in this region. Indeed, a substantive democracy, which takes truth and emancipation as its core values, can also be defined as post-democracy: “By post-democracy I mean nothing more, and nothing other, than a democracy that has once again been given human content, which is to say that it is not just formal, not just institutional, not just an elegant mechanism to ensure that although the same people govern, it appears as though the citizens are themselves choosing them again.”103 The pedagogical dictatorship of Marxism turned out to be a false solution to the dilemmas of Enlightenment and modernity, with catastrophic consequences. French Marxist structuralist thinker Louis Althusser once wrote that Marxism was not a form of humanism because, in his view, dialectic materialism had overcome abstract-anthropocentric conceptualizations. It was situated beyond the pale of empirical altruism, for it sought the fundamental laws and constants of development. We can detect here a secret connection between the sophisticated syllogism of the Althusserian school and the conservative imperatives of neo-Stalinist dogmatism: humanism was merely a pellicle, a treacherous surface hiding the real ideological priorities. Therefore humanism was to be always concrete, to serve the interests of the revolution. Havel's answer to such fantasies of revolutionary praxis, and the essential lesson of the 1989 revolutions, is self-empowerment through citizenship. Thus the subtitle of the Power of the Powerless is “citizens against the state.”

  Dissidents and critical intellectuals successfully created a horizon of expectation that had not existed in Eastern Europe since the Prague Spring. It is not surprising that John Paul II played a crucial role in articulating this new grammar of opposition to Communism by defining human solidarity and liberty as non-negotiable values. Significantly (and electrifyingly), one of the pope's most influential encyclicals was titled “The Splendor of Truth.” Historian Stephen Kotkin provided a telling quotation for this state of things: the pope's message was “the inviolable right, in God's and man's order of things, for human beings to live in freedom and dignity.”104 Civil society was the territory of retrieved human autonomy that escaped and countered the grip of Communist partocracy (the “uncivil society,” as Kotkin puts it). The discourse of truth and rights did indeed have revolutionary power. It struck at the heart of the political system itself, for, as Kołakowski once put it, “the lie is the immortal soul of communism.” In challenging it, while simultaneously avoiding conventional ideological dichotomies, the activists of this civil society exploded long-held myths of fatality, futility, impotence, resignation, abandonment, and conformity.

  The whole philosophy of dissent was predicated on a strategy of long “penetration” of the existing system, leading to the gradual recovery and restoration of the public sphere (the independent life of society) as an alternative to the all-embracing presence of the ideological party-state. The primacy of the Communist party-states was rejected, for, according to dissident thought, there was “something unconditional that is higher than they are, something that is binding even on them, sacred, inviolable.”105 This was the individual with his and her rights, dignity, and freedom. Accordingly, the successful reconstruction of the life of a nation from the tragedy and destruction caused by a criminal regime depends upon the capability of a society to build upon foundations of trust between freed individuals. Both utopian absolutism and postmodern relativism were rejected through each individual's possession of doubt by means of knowledge and moral action. The best deterrent for the treacherousness of history remained the permanent reminder of its murderous embodiments. Or, to evoke Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky's lament on Communism's totalitarian temptation: “Ah, our beloved Ilich, how many people he has lured into darkness, how many supplied with justification for their crimes! But to me he brought light.” Indeed, for Bukovsky, after reading The Gulag Archipelago, learning about and experiencing firsthand the criminality of Soviet regime, Lenin's works transformed into “a living history of the crimes of the Bolsheviks.”106

  Communism was indeed a fantastic scenario of human self-aggrandizement, an exercise in unbounded magic and self-delusion, an attempt to escape from the constraints of alleged bourgeois pettiness and an offer for millions to vicariously live in “another country.” If one maintains a number of ethical criteria in interpreting the main traumatic experiences of the last century, it is hard not to agree with Anne Applebaum:

  Now, at the end of the twentieth century, it finally makes sense to look back at the evolution of communism as a single phenomenon. While we have not perhaps reached the end of the end of the history of communism, the story already has a clear beginning and a clear middle: it is now possible to trace the direct lines of influence, ideological and financial, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Ho Chih Minh to Pol Pot, from Castro to the MPLA in Angola. It is also possible to trace the links between their remarkably
similar systems of repression…. Communism now looks bad enough by itself.107

  Undoubtedly, for long decades Karl Marx's ideas were distorted almost beyond recognition. But it is impossible to completely separate the Bolshevik praxis from these ideas. There is a temptation to present the Soviet experiment as an aberration in the history of the revolutionary, socialist left, and to exempt the basic Marxist schema from any culpability for this experiment. Those so tempted (from French Socialist politician Jacques Attali to influential American historian Geoff Eley) often invoke the role of modern social democratic movements and parties in advancing the causes of both political democracy and social justice. Yet the undeniably profound achievements of social democracy in the West have more to do with the legacies of Ferdinand Lassalle and Eduard Bernstein, Léon Blum and Willy Brandt, Olaf Palme and Michael Harrington—all committed democrats—than with the revolutionary chiliasm and dialectical critique of law and morality that are deeply rooted within Marxism and can be found in the Communist Manifesto.

  Marxism failed in the twentieth century because it underestimated the existential quandaries of human existence, the needs of many for deep spiritual or cultural sources of meaning, and thus the profound importance of the human right to privacy. It aimed to create a perfect society whose materialization in the Communist experiments, from Moscow to Phnom Penh, came closer to Kafka's penal colony than to the paradisiacal visions of traditional utopians.108 The myth of a singular world proletarian revolution has long since been dispelled. It was not this myth, however, that made Communism such a poignantly seductive ideology. More important was the promise of universal transformation, the promise that this miserable Vale of Tears will be replaced by an Arcadian world in which all individuals will be happy and free.