REINVENTING POLITICS
REINVENTING POLITICS
Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel
Vladimir Tismaneanu
THE FREE PRESS
NEW YORK OXFORD SINGAPORE SYDNEY
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Maxwell Macmillan Canada
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Copyright © 1992 by Vladimir Tismaneanu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Tismaneanu, Vladimir.
Reinventing politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel/Vladimir Tismaneanu.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Europe, Eastern-Politics and government-1945- I. Title
DJK50.T57 1992
947-dc20 91-42878
CIP
ISBN 0-7432-1282-7
ESBN 978-1-439-10595-5
www.simsonspeakers.com
To all those who, hoping against hope, made the revolutions of 1989 possible.
Contents
Preface
ONE Victims and Outsiders: Eastern Europe Before Communism
TWO Children in the Fog: From People’s Democracies to “Developed Socialism”
THREE From Thaw to Freeze: Eastern Europe Under “Real Socialism”
FOUR A Glorious Resurrection: The Rise of Civil Society
FIVE The Ethos of Civil Society
SIX The Triumph of the Powerless: Origins and Dynamics of the East European Upheaval
SEVEN The Birth Pangs of Democracy
EPILOGUE Fears, Phobias, Frustrations: Eastern Europe Between Ethnocracy and Democracy
Notes
Index
Preface
The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously.
—Leszek Kolakowski
This book is an attempt to explain the origins and the dynamics of one of the most important events in this century: the breakdown of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. More than just a historical account, the book was written while the events were still unfolding and the author became what Raymond Aron once called a committed witness (spectateur engagé). After all, as we know from Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, or Vaclav Havel, one cannot write dispassionately about a phenomenon like totalitarianism. We can, of course, simulate objectivity. We could dissemble an au-dessus-de-la-mêlée attitude to Ceausescu’s pageants, say, depicting them as exercises in political leadership, but that would not improve the quality of our investigation. On the contrary, that could only make it look abjectly toothless.
Communism was not simply a variety of political regime, one of the many forms of dictatorship mankind has experienced since ancient times. It was unique in its attempt to mold the human psyche, in its mythological hubris, in its endeavor to regiment people and to force them to behave in accordance with Pavlovian recipes of happiness. In comparison with my previous book on the fate of Marxism in Eastern Europe (published by Routledge in 1988), this one is meant to be less “subjective.” Years of American academic experience have convinced me that it is important to convey the message in a more facts-oriented way. That may reduce its emotional charge, but in exchange I can hope to gain in persuasive power.
To write this book I used numerous primary materials from East European democratic movements. Special praise should be given to the London-based East European Reporter and to the New York-based Uncaptive Minds for their efforts to help Western readers follow the sweeping changes in the former Soviet bloc. Since the 1989 upheaval, I have traveled frequently to the region and have been able to interview many of the principal actors in this ongoing drama. Most of my hypotheses were discussed with colleagues in the field, and the main theses were topics of my lectures in the courses I taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland (College Park) over the past six years. My students turned out to be my accomplices in the attempt to make sense of events that, in their speed and unpredictability, came close to the miraculous.
I must confess that my approach differs in some respects from the long-prevailing direction in the field of communist studies. For years I have believed (and hope I am not wrong) that studying communist elites is only a fragment—and not necessarily the most significant one—of the field of comparative communism. More important for understanding those societies, it has seemed to me, is to focus on the less visible, definitely less powerful and impressive—in terms of authority—nuclei of autonomous social and cultural initiative. I vividly remember that when I wrote a study for Problems of Communism on the nascent civil society in the German Democratic Republic, more than one of my colleagues in the discipline smiled skeptically. How can tiny independent communities affect the fate of a well-controlled police state like Erich Honecker’s model of barracks socialism? With regard to Hungary, many thought that Kadarism, with its promise of an enlightened version of authoritarianism labeled “gulash socialism,” could last a long time. The exponents of the Budapest School were in that respect the exception. The dissident enclaves were described, even by some of their representatives (as for instance Miklos Haraszti in his book The Velvet Prison), as quixotic examples of political naïveté. As for Romania, I clearly recall the friendly reproach of a distinguished British professor, indeed one of my mentors and the author of a classic study on Romanian communism, who once asked me if I really believed it was worthwhile to pay so much attention to the ideas of dissidents like Mihai Botez, Paul Goma, Dan Petrescu, and Dorin Tudoran. After all, in light of the monolithic image of the Ceausescu regime, what could those argonauts of dignity symbolize except the failure of a society to resist the most irrational dictatorship Eastern Europe had known since Stalin’s time? I do not claim that my interpretation is the only appropriate one. However, now that the communist elites have ingloriously left the limelight, and the political stage in those countries is dominated by figures long regarded as irrelevant, such an approach seems to have been historically vindicated. Who could have predicted that Kadar’s place would be taken by an obscure historian of medicine called Jozsef Antall? Who would have thought that the ruling party in the GDR would willingly give up power, or that those who would launch the onslaught on the terrorist state that claimed to represent the interests of workers and peasants would be painters, physicists, and Lutheran pastors engaged in nonviolent, antimilitaristic movements? Who could have imagined that Jaruzelski, the bespectacled Spartan general who proclaimed Martial Law in December 1981 and imprisoned the flower of the Polish opposition, would shake hands with his nemesis Lech Walesa and ensure a smooth transition to a procedural democracy?
Even more challenging for reductionist explanations remains the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his tolerance of revolutionary change in what was rightly described as the Soviet Union’s outer empire. The strategic shift in relations between the imperial center and its periphery, between the Kremlin and its former satellites, has created a new political reality. With the exception of Albania, Romania, and Serbia, the East European countries are no longer run by luminaries of the traditional communist bureaucracies. Instead, new political formations ha
ve emerged that seek their sources of inspiration in Western philosophical approaches to the issues of community, public life, and civic rights. When Gorbachev meets East European leaders, he has to deal with people whom he would have normally described as “bourgeois politicians.” In July 1991 the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact during a summit in Prague officially consecrated the end of the old-fashioned alliance and the beginning of a new era in Soviet—East European relations, as well as in relations among the East European countries themselves. The shadow of Big Brother has disappeared, and the small and medium-size states in the region have to cope with this new reality. The threat of Soviet intervention to crush domestic movements for democracy in Eastern Europe seems, at least for the time being, nonexistent. Currently, those countries are faced with internal strife and countless unsolved quandaries. In some of them, ethnic minorities decry persecution fomented by the demographic majority. In Kosovo, an autonomous province in Yugoslavia’s Serbian Republic, the Albanian majority has suffered under discriminatory measures taken by the Serbian government. In Romania, instead of ensuring protection for the Hungarian minority, the government has encouraged a staunchly nationalist movement called Vatra Romaneasca (the Romanian Hearth). In all these countries the wounds of the past continue to bleed, and the newly formed democracies still seem incapable of providing more than moral injunctions for their healing. That is not too pessimistic an assessment, but rather a matter-of-fact description of the existing situation. As the economies continue to plummet, discontent is soaring, and regrets for the paternalistic ways of the communist regimes are beginning to be heard. Yes, there was poverty under communism, some say, but at least everybody had a job and there was no anarchy in the media. Cynical demagogues, including some former communists, have tried to exploit the disarray among the masses. They may try again.
After 1989 Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland seem to have embarked decisively on the road to an open society. The parliaments in those countries have functioned more or less properly, as responsible legislative bodies. Political differentiation has occurred, and parties have emerged to express the interests of different groups. Thanks to rapid privatization, a middle class of technocrats and entrepreneurs is taking shape. A new political elite, committed to pluralism and a free market, is now in charge of the orderly development of the transition. Regardless of possible setbacks, it is likely that those countries will join West European integrative bodies, including the European Economic Community, sooner rather than later. The same can scarcely be said of Albania, Romania, and Yugoslavia. What one sees there is continuous fragmentation of the body politic, endless conflict, and little hope for the creation of a national consensus. Bulgaria stands somewhere in the middle, with the democratic forces still scattered, but also with a declining ex-communist party that has lost both its will for power and the mass basis it once commanded. The new equation in the region thus indicates a widening gap between East-Central (the former G.D.R., Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary) and the rest of Eastern Europe that in the long run might lead to the isolation of the Balkan countries from the mainstream of European politics and the European economy. The remedy for that unsettling trend would be acceleration of the democratic transition in Eastern Europe and the development of strong civic movements that can, in turn, help the emergence of solid democratic parties. Otherwise, the future might confront us with the appearance of two Europes: one prosperous, democratic, and tolerant of political and ethnic minorities, and the other poor, resentful, plagued with chauvinism and civil and ethnic conflicts, and prone to allow the rise of new dictatorships.
The West should not ignore that danger. The Balkans cannot and should not be quarantined as the “unhealthy” area of Europe, a region where nothing can be done to expedite the transition to democracy. In all those countries there are courageous movements that champion precisely the values of democracy. They should be made to feel that the West is resolutely on their side.
This book uses a comparative approach to assess the causes of the disintegration of communist regimes in Eastern Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia), the current state of the political revival in the region, and the prospects for democratic development in the foreseeable future. While comparing the very different paths away from communism, I suggest that, although the obstacles to genuine pluralism remain great, the democratic forces can win the day.
I hope the book will provide students of Eastern Europe with a detailed account of the startling changes in recent years and with an analytical framework for the ongoing political transformations. Considering the striking scarcity of such comprehensive (historical, sociological, and political) approaches, this is a pioneering attempt to sum up one of modern history’s most fascinating chapters: the breakup of communism in the Soviet Union’s outer empire, the dissolution of the political and economic institutions that guaranteed the conservation of communist structures, and the rediscovery of politics in countries where the very idea of citizenry had been consistently trampled underfoot. Those developments have more than immediate significance: They demand a reconceptualization and a search for notions that would capture the true meaning of such changes. Terms like authority, legitimacy, influence, leadership, power, and society now carry different meanings in Eastern Europe from the ones they had through the previous decades. Will the postcommunist democracy be identical with Western-type models of pluralism? What is the legacy of more than four decades of Leninism for the East European psyche? How will the emerging politics of Eastern Europe affect the rest of Europe and the world? Do potential crises in the region have international implications? Is the nascent politics bound to favor more stability in those countries, or less?
The main hypothesis of this book is that the causes of the East European revolutionary upheaval are primarily domestic. The paramount one is the rise and ripening of civil societies in countries long dominated by totalitarian Leninist parties. The civil society comprises the independent, nongovernmental groups, associations, and institutions that have emerged in Eastern Europe in recent year, especially after 1980. It was primarily thanks to the existence of such structures, which the Czech philosopher Vaclav Benda once called “the parallel polis,” that the breakthrough could result in a smooth, nonviolent change. Some of those groups are explicitly political, others are not. By implication, however, they all represent a challenge to the totalitarian ambition of a total grip upon society. One example will suffice to convey the meaning of civil society: In political regimes where all decision-making is hypercentralized and where authority lies in the communist party (whose monopoly of power is constitutionally guaranteed), even an autonomous ecological initative clashes with such all-embracing domination. The civil society was thus a first step in the reinvention of politics outside the existing matrix of power, that is, explicitly outside and implicitly against the communist party. It was thanks to that approach to political change that a strategy was devised to build parallel institutions (independent unions, flying universities, clubs) and even an opposition counterculture in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.
The rise of those new movements cannot be separated from a number of international influences: the communications revolution and the expanding access to free information; the impact of the Helsinki process and the growing pressures from the West for domestic democratization; and the increasing links between independent groups in Eastern Europe and those in the West (such as pacifists and environmentalists).
In addition to the movements from below, the transition to postcommunism was obviously accelerated by the evident collapse of the command economies. The information revolution permitted people in the East to become aware of the immense gap between their living standards and those in the other half of Europe. The government elites, in turn, could offer no more than cosmetic remedies with little appeal to the population. The bureaucrats themselves often traveled to the West and eventually realized that the issue
was not to reform the planned economy, but to get rid of its stifling mechanisms. Disillusionment with the Leninist model was rampant among both the rulers and the ruled. What followed was the complete evaporation of ideological zeal and the emergence of a cynical managerial class whose sole interest was to stay in power. The end of any communist mystique contributed to the breakdown of the existing principle of legitimacy. According to Leninist ideology, communists represented the interests of the workers. But, especially after the rise of Solidarity in Poland, that fallacy had ceased to mobilize anybody. In some of these countries, the reformers took over within the communist parties, changed their programs, and claimed to embrace the ideals of Western Social Democracy. In Romania, a violent explosion of social anger led to the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime, but not necessarily to the end of communism. This book deals extensively with the factious struggles within communist elites and their impact on society at large. Since those communist parties derived their legitimacy to a great extent from their special relationship with Moscow, it is important to focus on the Gorbachev factor and to highlight the interplay of change in the Soviet Union and the democratic renewal in Eastern Europe.
The book focuses on five major themes. They are neither exclusive nor exhaustive. They give an idea, however, about the main hypotheses of this approach, which tends to avoid the pitfalls of anecdotal history or monographic descriptivism.
The first theme, Communism in Eastern Europe, is primarily historical. The book examines the diversity of the precommunist traditions in Eastern Europe; the establishment of communist regimes in the aftermath of World War II; the dynamics of the Soviet bloc; Nikita Khrushchev’s aborted de-Stalinization; and the main crises in the history of the bloc (Yugoslavia in 1948, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980). This theme embraces as well the evolution of Soviet—East European relations and the impact of the Soviet transition from Brezhnev’s period of “stagnation” to Gorbachev’s perestroika and “new thinking” in international relations. An effort is made to familiarize the reader with the significant reference points in post—World War II East European political history.
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