The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Even after NATO's eastward enlargement and the entry of most East European countries into the European Union (with the notable exception of the Western Balkans), there is a striking tension between pluralist-democratic and ethnocratic or radical parties and groups in these societies. Often during post-Communism, it seemed as if there was a yearning for new figures for the future, an expectation of the materialization of what Walter Benjamin called the “Messianic time.” The search for new eschatologies was more visible in the East, where all social contrasts are exacerbated by the breakdown of old identities. But the return of myth was part of the universal uneasiness with the cold, calculated, zweckmassig rationality of the iron cage: prophets and demagogues (often the same persons) did have audiences in the East as well as in the West. The latter is, however, better protected: institutions function impersonally, procedures are deeply embedded in civic cultures. In the post-Communist world they are still under construction or yet to entirely meet requirements of a fully functioning liberal democracy. Things are of course extremely complex: there is a feeling of exhaustion, of too much rhetoric, a sentiment that politicians are there simply to cheat. On the other hand, it is precisely this exhaustion of traditional worldviews, this postmodern syndrome of repudiating grandiose teleological constructs in favor of minidiscourses that is conducive to ennui and yearning for alternative visions that would not reject boldness and inventiveness. Yes, this is a secularized world, but the profane substitutes for traditional mythologies still have a future.

  After the extinct period of “legitimation from the top” (through ideological rituals of simulated participation, mobilization, and regimentation), in most of these countries nascent legal-procedural legitimation was paralleled (or countered) by something that, echoing Eric Hobsbawm's insightful analysis of the new discourses of hatred, could be called legitimation from the past.49 The more inchoate and nebulous this past, the more aggressive, feverish, and intolerant were the proponents of the neoromantic mythologies. The rise of nationalism as a compensation for perceived failure and externally imposed marginality, as flight from the complexities of modernity into the politics of collective salvation, was linked to this ambiguous Leninist legacy of distorted modernity and dictated human needs, and to the pre-Leninist ethnicoriented cultural forms in the region. In other words, the discomfiture with democratic challenges and the prevailing constitutional pluralist model was linked not only to the transition from Leninism but to the larger problem of legitimation and the existence of competing visions of the common good, as well as the coalescence of movements and parties around different and frequently rival symbols of collective identity. To put it simply, the post-Communist first wave of primordial passions and the appeal of the new exclusionary discourses remind us that neither the premises nor the outcomes of modernity have been universally accepted. This point was correctly raised by S. N. Eisenstadt in a path-breaking analysis of the revolutions of 1989: “These problems, however, do not simply arise out of the breakdown of ‘traditional’ empires, the transition from some ‘premodern’ to fully modern, democratic society, or from a distorted modernity to a relatively tranquil stage which may well signal some kind of ‘end of history.’ The turbulence evident in Eastern Europe today bears witness to some of the problems and tensions inherent in modernity itself, attesting to the potential fragility of the whole project of modernity.”50

  POST-COMMUNIST PARADOXES

  I think that in the first ten years of post-Communism we dealt with a resilient, persistent form of barbarism that was situated in the very heart of modernity. Radical nationalism was the absolute exacerbation of difference, its reification, the rejection of the claim to a common humanity, and the proclamation of the ethno-national distinction as the primordial fact of human existence. As Franz Grillparzer wrote many years ago, “From humanity, through nationality, to barbarity”—a maxim dear to the hearts of intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Adam Michnik, who rehabilitated the notion of pariah and emphasized the nobility of exclusion in contrast to the humiliation of forced inclusion. Jack Snyder's by now classical thesis still holds valid: the political elites' willingness to be accountable affects the degree of nationalist instrumentalization during the transition to democracy. To avoid surrendering their authority, these elites hijack political discourse, while hampering and taking advantage of the citizens' reduced capacity for political participation.51

  The main threat in some (if not most) of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe is that of a lapse into “competitive authoritarianism,” where “formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” As Levitsky and Way point out, up until the second decade of post-Communism, Croatia, Ukraine, and Serbia were textbook examples for this model, and Russia and Belarus still seemed to fall in this category. It could be argued that better terms for this democratic degeneration are delegative democracy and illiberal democracy.52 I chose the first to stress the fundamental danger of a deep-seated, persistent, and widening gap between political and civil societies in the former Soviet bloc. It is not surprising that, in most of these countries, critical intellectuals (many of them former dissidents under the Communist regime) insist on the need for moral clarity. The political class, however, remains narcissistically self-centered and impervious to such injunctions to live truthfully. After all, it was Karl Marx who said that any new society will carry for a long time its birthmarks, in this case the habits, mores, visions, and mentalities (forma mentis) associated with the Leninist faith.

  Furthermore, as Karen Dawisha has argued, electocracies should not be automatically regarded as liberal democratic communities.53 Thus, in reality constitutionalism remains marred by its very universalistic formalism (its coldness, and its often decried tediousness) and the subsequent failure to adjust to pressures resulting from collective efforts aimed at reverting, subverting, and obliterating the project of modernity (by which I tentatively understand the substantive construction of politics in an anti-absolutist, individualistic, and contractual way).54 But the return of the repressed, real and often disturbing, does not exhaust the picture. Indeed, despite all the setbacks, the ongoing debates in Europe (and in Eastern Europe in particular) remain fundamental to the attempt at a reinvention of politics. Julia Kristeva is thus right: “The problem of the twentieth century was and remains the rehabilitation of the political. An impossible task? A useless task? Hitler and Stalin perverted the project into a deathly totalitarianism. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, which calls into question, beyond socialism, the very basis of the democratic governments that stemmed from the French Revolution, demands that one rethink that basis so that the twenty-first century will not be the reactionary domain of fundamentalism, religious illusions, and ethnic wars.”55

  This clustered experience is best described by what Hanson and Ekiert identified as the key paradox of post-Communism: “The ‘Leninist legacy’ mattered both less and more than scholars originally expected.” In other words, the impact of the common Communist experience has been mediated by specific “choices made by strategically located actors in various critical moments of the unfolding processes of change.”56 Moreover, similar challenges posed by the past produced varying policies and institutional frameworks. Nevertheless, the ideological extinction of Leninist formations left behind a vacuum to be filled by syncretic constructs drawing from the pre-Communist and Communist heritage (from nationalism, in both its civic and ethnic incarnations, to liberalism, democratic socialism, conservatism, populism, neo-Leninism, or even more or less refurbished Fascism). We see a fluidity of political commitments, allegiances, and affiliations—the breakdown of a political culture (that Leszek Kołakowski and Martin Malia correctly identified as Sovietism) and the painful birth and consolidation of a new one. The moral identity of
the individuals has been shattered by the dissolution of all previously cherished—or at least accepted—values and icons. In the immediate aftermath of 1989, individuals seemed eager to abandon their newly acquired sense of autonomy on behalf of different forms of protective, pseudosalvationist groups and movements. This was emphasized by Havel: “In a situation when one system has collapsed and a new one does not yet exist, many people feel empty and frustrated. This condition is fertile ground for radicalism of all kinds, for the hunt for scapegoats, and for the need to hide behind the anonymity of a group, be it socially or ethnically based.”57 Assumed responsibility for personal actions, risk-taking, and questioning of institutions on the base of legitimate claims for improvement are still developing.58 All established ranks, statuses, traditions, hierarchies, and symbols have collapsed, and new ones are still tottering and quite problematic. Envy, rancor, and resentment have replaced the values of solidarity, civility, and compassion that once drove the East European revolutionaries. As Polish sociologist Jacek Kurczewski noted, “Poverty is accompanied by envy, a feeling that becomes dominant in times of economic change. The feeling expresses itself not so much in a striving for communism, but in a defense of socialist mechanisms of social security under conditions of a capitalist economy and suspicion of everyone who has achieved success in these new conditions.”59 Instead of enjoying promises of emancipation and revolutionary change, many individuals are now sharing a psychology of helplessness, defeat, and dereliction.

  There are immense problems in the continuity of both social and personal memory. Without a complete legal, political, and historical reckoning in relation to the totalitarian Communist experience, civic consensus and political trust can hardly mature. Despite the ever-widening rescue operation of and working through fragmented memories (both individual and collective), transparency about a guilty and traumatic past by means of “politics of knowledge” (to use Claus Offe's term) has yet to be achieved. Few years ago, Timothy Garton Ash was struggling to find an explanation for this state of affairs: “Any explanation for the absence of wider truth commissions must be speculative. I would speculate that part of the explanation, at least, lies in this combination of the historically defensible but also comfortable conviction that the dictatorship was ultimately imposed from outside and, on the other hand, the uneasy knowledge that almost everyone had done something to sustain the dictatorial system.”60 The externalization of responsibility (the delocalization of the history of the Communist regimes by blaming them on either the Soviets or alien groups) and the forgetting of “the millions of Lilliputian threads of everyday mendacity, conformity and compromise” (in the words of T. Garton Ash) can sustain only a vague recognition of the need for a shared vision of the public good—a point that has been emphasized by Václav Havel, George Konrád, and Adam Michnik. The willingness to assume responsibility for one's actions, to take risks, and to question institutions on the basis of legitimate claims for improvement is still embryonic.61 This may explain the political turmoil and antigovernment demonstrations in Hungary in the fall of 2006 or the parliamentary putsch in April 2007 against Romanian president, Traian Băsescu, in full disregard of the Constitutional Court's decision.62

  It is thus tempting to assume that the major difficulties in the articulation of ideologically differentiated political platforms in Eastern Europe were connected not only to the absence or weakness of clear-cut interest groups and lobbies, but also to increasing atrophy of the Western sources of inspiration (“models”) for such endeavors. The famous law of political synchronization (of the East with the West) may this time play against the revival of ideological politics.63 The difficulty of identifying clear divisions between left and right polarization in post-Communist regimes is linked to the ambiguity and even obsolescence of traditional taxonomies. As Adam Michnik and other former dissidents have often argued, the question after 1989 is not whether one is left or right of center, but whether one is “West of center.” Liberal values are sometimes seen as left-oriented simply because they emphasize secularism, tolerance, and individual rights. At the same time, as shown by the new radical-authoritarian trends (often disguised as pro-democratic) in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and elsewhere, lingering habits inherited from Leninist and pre-Leninist authoritarianism continue: intolerance, exclusiveness, rejection of all compromises, extreme personalization of political discourse, and the search for charismatic leadership. Karen Dawisha has identified a few of the features of the “surviving past” of what she called “communism as a lived system”: the respect for centralized power, a large sphere for private interactions, and horizontal networks of mutual cooperation and informal connections, and finally, fixation on a supposed “separateness” from the West.64 We deal with the same impotent fury against the failure of the state to behave as a “good father,” part of a patrimonial legacy characteristic, to different degrees, of all these societies (less so perhaps in Bohemia). Peter Reddaway correctly labeled this a yearning for the state as a “nanny.”65

  For instance, Romanians felt regret not for Nicolae Ceaușescu but rather for the age of predictability and frozen stability, when the party-state took care of everything. For many, the leap into freedom has turned out to be excruciatingly painful. What disappeared was the certainty about the limits of the permissible, the petrified social ceremonies that defined an individual's life itinerary: former prisoners are now free to choose between alternative futures, and this choice is insufferably difficult for many of them. The Leninist psychological leftovers can be detected at both ends of the political spectrum, and this explains the rise of new alliances between traditionally incompatible formations and movements. In Russia, we see a Stalinist-nationalist coalition, with its own national-Bolshevik traditions. In Romania it t00k the form of a rapprochement between Romania's allegedly pro-Western Social Democratic Party (whose honorary chairman is a former ideological apparatchik, ex-president Ion Iliescu) and the Greater Romania Party headed by former Ceaușescu court poet, the rabid xenophobic demagogue Corneliu Vadim Tudor. In the Czech Republic, the ideology of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia merged nostalgia for dogmatic Leninism with chauvinistic stances. Simply put, the old Marxist internationalist dream has long since been abandoned.

  It would be a serious fallacy to view these trends as marking the rise of neo-Communism. For such a development to take place, ideological zeal and utopian-eschatological motivation are needed. Neither former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski nor former Hungarian primeminister Ferenc Gyurcsányi, both linked to the post-Communist Left, can be described as ideologically driven. Instead, the successors to the Leninist parties have to cope with widespread sentiments of disaffection from socialist rhetoric. The Serbian socialists, East Germany's Party of Democratic Socialism (now part of die Linke), and Romania's Social Democratic Party are emblematic of the ongoing trend toward cooperation between radical nationalist forces and those who yearn for bureaucratic collectivism. Another indication of the weak institutionalization and shallow social insertion of post-Communist parties is the phenomenon of “electoral volatility.”66 The mainstream political parties are still challenged periodically by “unorthodox political formations” (e.g., Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania). The status quo remains fragile because of its unpopularity among sections of the population still attracted by ever-resurgent fantasies of salvation.

  This tendency is a result of the ideological chaos created by the collapse of state socialism, which left populism as the most convenient and frequently the most appealing ersatz ideology. It was relatively easy to get rid of the old regime with its spurious claim to cognitive infallibility, but much more daunting to install a pluralist, multiparty order, a civil society, rule of law, and a market economy. Freedom, it turned out, was easier to gain than to guarantee. Uprootedness, loss of status, and uncertainties about identity provide fertile ground for paranoid visions of conspiracy and treason; hence the widespread attraction of nationalist salvationism. Lesze
k Kołakowski points to a paradoxical attitude toward prophetic stances in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: the intellectuals' disillusionment with redemptive-apocalyptical teleologies led them to retreat from political matters, which generated an ethical pauperization of politics, as there remain fewer intellectual teachers. The door is wide open to pseudodoctrines and negative political eclectisms.67 Marching with Stalin's (or Ceaușescu's) portrait is an expression not of Stalinism (or Ceaușescuism) but rather of disaffection with the status quo, perceived as traumatic, anarchic, corrupt, politically decadent, and morally decrepit. Especially in Russia, where this disaffection is linked to the sentiment of imperial loss, cultural despair can lead to dictatorial trends. Exaggerated though they may be, references to “Weimar Russia” capture the psychology of large human groups whose traditional collectivistic values have disappeared and who cannot recognize themselves in the new values of individual action, risk, and intense competition. Recent developments in Russia strengthen the impression that the experiment of open politics in Russia lost out to the push for the reaffirmation of imperial status.68 Following Martin Krygier, I consider that, twenty years after the demise of Communism, in the former Soviet bloc we are experiencing a new ideosphere, which is by definition comprehensive, inclusive, and provisional. Moreover, the postmodern political condition renders transitory even organicist, syncretic, and redemptive radicalisms (as political movements).69 For instance, the last Romanian general elections (in 2009) produced encouraging results: the xenophobic, chauvinistic Romania Mare Party did not amass enough votes to get into parliament. However, this hardly means that the ideas that sustained it for so many years have disappeared from the public sphere.