FROM CIVIL SOCIETY TO POLITICAL PLURALISM
This chapter cannot conclude without an attempt to define the role of civil society in the self-destruction of communist societies. Civil society emerges during a certain stage of decomposition of the bureaucratic-authoritarian system in all the countries of the Soviet bloc, including the Soviet Union itself. In some countries, because of political traditions and lack of permissiveness on the part of the ruling elites, the growth of the civil society proceeded more slowly than in others. In all these countries, however, the process of social differentiation and the formation of various interest groups have contributed decisively to the creation of a public sphere autonomous or semi-autonomous in its relation to the government. To be sure, the bureaucratic regimes did not welcome those developments and tried to arrest them, but their attempts were doomed to failure. What the historian Moshe Lewin wrote with regard to the Soviet system applies a fortiori to the East European states:
The political façade of monolithic uniformity can no longer be taken seriously by anyone. Complex urban networks shape individuals, filter official views, and create an infinite welter of spontaneities. Baffled, the conservative leaders were left with the choice of trying to control the uncontrollable or disregarding, and thereby mishandling, the spontaneous. Either recourse would inevitably produce great downturns and put the entire state system under crippling pressure. The coalescence of a civil society capable of extracurricular action and opinion making, independent of the wishes of the state, marks the start of a new age, from which there is no turning back.27
Civil society can thus be defined as the ensemble of grassroots, spontaneous, nongovernmental (although not necessarily antigovernmental) initiatives from below that emerge in the post-totalitarian order as a result of a loosening of state controls and the decline of the ideological constraints imposed by the ruling parties. KOR or, more recently, the “Orange Alternative” semi-anarchist group in Poland; Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia; various forms of dissident activities in the Soviet Union; the “Peace and Human Rights Initiative” in the GDR; and all the independent peace and human rights activities, including the underground presses, samizdat publications, and the flying universities as they existed especially in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, can be considered components of the growing civil society. By channeling and catalyzing long-repressed social aspirations, civil society undermines the party-state’s monopoly on power. To be sure, in a country like Poland, where the Catholic Church represented a viable alternative to the state’s ideological pretense, civil society continued to exist, although in a limited form, even during the heyday of Stalinism. Later, after Stalin’s death and the beginning of liberalization, clubs and discussion circles mushroomed in Poland and Hungary and led to the political and cultural ferment of 1956. The reaction against ecological degradation and the movements for the protection of historical monuments were also part of this rising phenomenon that we call civil society. Civil society should not be considered the opposite of state power, but rather an effort to control it and to limit its expansionist drive. Moshe Lewin is therefore right in describing it as “the aggregate of networks and institutions that either exist and act independently of the state or are official organizations capable of developing their own spontaneous views on national or local issues and then impressing these views on their members, on small groups and, finally, on the authorities.”28 The flexibility of official institutions, their readiness to embrace public demands and to criticize government decisions, no doubt depends on the degree of tolerance shown by the authorities. But even in the case of hyper-Stalinist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, there were forms of opposition within the existing institutions. For instance, the Writers’ Union, created as an instrument of party control over the literary community, became increasingly critical of the leadership’s interference and protested the official chauvinism. As a result of the unrest within that association, Romanian writers were unable to organize any national congress after a turbulent gathering in the spring of 1981. Similar actions took place in 1989 within the Czechoslovak official Union of Actors and Drama Writers, whose members decided to support the mounting criticism of the Jakes regime expressed by Charter 77 and other dissident groups.
The creation of civil society proceeded in several stages. Initially, under mature Stalinism, the very idea of autonomous initiatives from below was unthinkable. The very point of Stalinism was to annihilate such unofficial nuclei of resistance. All the propaganda and secret police systems operated in high gear to create the uniformity that would allow the party to establish what the Hungarian political philosophers Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, and György Markus aptly called the “dictatorship over needs.”29 The failure of the communist regimes to secure mass support once the open terror started to subside, as well as the erosion of their ideological foundations, shows the limits of the totalitarian paradigm. Indeed, it is now clear that even in the most oppressive conditions there remained forms of resistance to what Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the totalitarian claim to all-inclusiveness.”30 For those who invoke the potential nuclei of autonomy as an argument against the original relevance of the totalitarian model, it is important to say that the model deals with what the rulers were trying to achieve rather than with their actual performances. As Robert C. Tucker has shown, they were regime-movements aimed at completely reconstructing human nature in the name of a universalistic ideology. Once the elites started to question some of the ideological dogmas, it was impossible for the regimes to maintain their missionary zeal. The ideological crisis contributed to what Tucker aptly called the “de-radicalization of Marxist regimes,” indeed their gradual secularization.31 After all, even one of the most pessimistic interpretations of totalitarianism did not exclude the possibility of transcending what claimed to be eternal subjugation. But the sources of the antitotalitarian revolt, according to Hannah Arendt, coincided with precisely those premises that made possible the ascent of totalitarianism in modern society: fear, loneliness, and despair. Ideological manipulation cannot forever triumph over the human quest for individual dignity:
Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. Just as fear and the impotence from which fear springs are antipolitical principles and throw men into a situation contrary to political action, so loneliness and the logical-ideological deducing the worst that comes from it represent an antisocial situation and harbor a principle destructive for all human living-together.32
Indeed, if the experience of reconstructing the civil society in East European communist states has taught us something, it is that no police state and no ideological universalism can forever annihilate the human need for autonomy and self-assertion.
The rise of the civil society cannot be separated from the decline of the authoritarian-ideological state. Since communist regimes are based on the fallacy of the ruling party’s omniscience, once the belief system that underlies them is shattered the regimes enter a stage of deep crisis. They try to adjust their dogmas to reality but refuse to go beyond limited changes in the institutional system. Reforms are half-hearted and inconsistent. The paradigm for such experiments is presented by Khrushchevism in the Soviet Union, with its most crystallized East European version, Kadarism in Hungary.33 The Hungarian writer Miklos Haraszti, who is now one of the leaders of the Alliance of Free Democrats and a member of Hungary’s Parliament, offered an interesting classification of the stages in the evolution of civil society. The first phase coincides with the liberalization of the party-state and the beginning of isolated forms of dissident activities. In that stage the opposition remains inchoate, without an alternative platform to express the society’s demands. Haraszti calls this phase post-Stalinist and sees its essential quality in the struggle against fear and the rise of independent initiatives, independent opinion, and social activity free from the party-state.
It is only during the second stage, which Haraszti calls posttotalitarian, t
hat civil society in the full meaning of the term, as a collective effort to reduce the impositions and prerogatives of the authoritarian state, emerges. This phase was analyzed by Havel and Michnik in their writings about the creation of parallel structures and the “new evolutionism.” The system has lost its self-confidence; the elites are demoralized, unable to cope with the growing popular dissatisfaction; and the economy is a shambles. The old political model is obviously falling apart, and the search for a new one starts at the level of the autonomous enclaves of social initiative. Ideology, the main underpinning of communist authoritarianism, is nothing but an empty ritual, and the prevailing symbols are not trusted by either rulers or ruled:
Democratization replaces liberalization as the central issue of politics; and while the latter was dictated by the will and the timetable of the party-state, democratization takes place under the pressure of the emerging public opinion. The regime is on the defensive. There is an attempt to put the economy on a pragmatic foundation, and therefore there is a struggle against the old structure even within the establishment …. The life of society is characterized by legal and other battles—by conflicts in the areas of democratization of everyday life, individualism, pluralism, the principles of popular representation and minority rights. The fear of our own actions dissipates and large masses acquire the ability to accept conflict openly and also to manifest self-limitation in regard to these conflicts.34
The third stage, which Haraszti defines as postcommunist, is marked by the complete breakdown of the party-state and the creation of a multiparty system. At the moment the Hungarian author wrote his essay in 1988, that was still a hypothesis, but one with strong justification in the developments taking place in countries where the civil society had evolved and reached a higher degree of maturity:
Having lost its rationale, the party-state must collapse in its macrostructure. True democracy emerges, which builds on the forms, energies, experiences and pluralization that were already given shape in civil society. It is a secondary issue whether this process takes place along the lines of Juan Carlos’s Spain, as an orderly transition, or through smaller or larger revolutionary shocks. It is also immaterial whether this transition occurs in the context of a European reorganization or prior to it in a more hasty manner. What is significant is that without the evolution of civil society in the preceding two phases, this transition cannot be successful.35
Indeed, in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, where the civil society had developed to a greater extent, the disintegration of the communist state proceeded in a smoother way than in Bulgaria and Romania, with their periodic flareups of violence even after the elimination of the old-style dictators Zhivkov and Ceausescu at the end of 1989.
For the countries of the “southern tier” the challenge of creating a lawful state based on the accountability of the government and the separation of powers is further aggravated by the relative weakness of political traditions of independent activism during the phase of the civil society. After the December 1989 revolution, Romanians often complained that their country was missing a historic personality like Vaclav Havel to embody national consensus. But the real issue is not the role of exceptional individuals but the absence of a political infrastructure comparable to that erected in Czechoslovakia on the basis of Charter 77. In other words, Romania under Ceausescu experienced not the transition to a post-totalitarian stage, but rather, especially after 1971, the strengthening of party-state controls and the return to a traditional version of totalitarianism, which included and carried to an extreme the cult of the leader and reprisals against any form of criticism and opposition. Romanians did not experience the luxury of Kadarist enlightened authoritarianism or even Jaruzelski’s militaristic regime’s experimentation with economic reforms. The strategy of civil society is predicated on gradualism, nonviolence, and social education through participation in nonregulated activities.
SIX The Triumph of the Powerless
Origins and Dynamics of the East European Upheaval
I had come to the conclusion—and it may seem overly dramatic to put it like this, but I swear I mean it—that it is better not to live at all than to live without honor.
—Vaclav Havel
The causes of the East European upheaval and the collapse of the Soviet bloc cannot be reduced to one unique factor. For such a world-historical process to take place a multitude of causes had to interact and create a set of circumstances that made change both urgent and inevitable. One element was the disappearance of the Soviet scarecrow. For many years the clear and present danger of Soviet intervention to quell domestic unrest in the satellite countries was a serious obstacle to the rise of powerful mass movements. The widespread psychology of resignation to what many referred to as the legacy of Yalta—a feeling that the 1945 international arrangement between the superpowers had made any resistance movement in the Soviet bloc a quixotic struggle doomed to inevitable failure—stunted and made fragile the growth of a mass base for opposition movements. The Soviets’ realization that they could no longer dominate the East Europeans by using the obsolete Stalinist forms of intrabloc discipline led to a reassessment, during the Gorbachev era, of the very legitimacy of externally imposed communist regimes in the so-called outer empire. On various occasions, supporters of glasnost, including such influential members of Gorbachev’s entourage as Georgy Shakhnazarov, the head of the CPSU international department and currently one of the Soviet President’s closest advisers, made clear that the old concept of socialism, based on coercion and monopolistic rule by a tiny bureaucratic group, had lost any moral or political justification. That was the theoretical premise for the renunciation of the Brezhnev doctrine and the adoption of a new course in Soviet relations with their former satellites. Once the use of force and violence was condemned by the highest authority in the Kremlin, there was no reason for the Soviets to stick by the legends of the popular revolutions that allegedly had brought the East European communist parties to power in the aftermath of World War II. Once the Soviets announced their decision to overhaul their strategic assumptions and to reconsider the ideological underpinnings of their so-called world socialist system, the obstacle of fear among citizens of the bloc began to dissipate.
Under the new Soviet interpretation of socialism proposed by Gorbachev and his closest allies, including Aleksandr Yakovlev, a Politburo member and chief ideologue of perestroika, the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact tanks would have been unthinkable. Indeed, many in Eastern Europe realized that the Prague reformers had anticipated the search for humane socialism as advocated by the partisans of perestroika in Moscow. The self-propelling dynamics of reform in the Soviet Union placed the East European communist leaders in the unenviable position of lagging behind their Soviet patrons in terms of systemic opening. Ideological orthodoxy at that moment was simply a relic of the Stalinist past:
Always before, whatever the Soviets called “socialist” had been defined as efficient; now the Soviets were saying that practical efficiency, how things actually worked, would be the criterion for viable socialism. This in turn removed the fixed Soviet reference point for domestic debate on what was efficient and what was needed to be conserved. Indeed, to the extent the Soviet Union was still a model, it was becoming a model for the political reform needed to make economic reform work; for glasnost; for democratization; for legitimate public roles for intellectuals and for hitherto repressed groups, including national groups; for experimentation with new forms of political debate and political action. To the extent that late Stalinism was no longer a model, its inefficiencies and tyrannies became all the harder to justify, and they had to be justified increasingly on grounds of national specifics.1
Although necessary, the transformation of the Soviet variable from a deterrent into a catalyst of change was not sufficient for determining the rapid disintegration of the communist regimes in the bloc countries. The transition to postcommunism was linked to the deterioration of th
e communist elites’ self-confidence, which was itself a reflection of the moral and ideological crisis of those regimes. Also significant for the success of the transition was the existence of political groups and movements that could articulate the social grievances and propose economic and political alternatives to the prevailing bankrupt policies. In Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and to lesser extent in the GDR, the opposition had long reflected on the main elements and challenges involved in the dismemberment of the communist regimes. In Hungary and Poland, reform-oriented groups had emerged within the top leaderships to champion views similar to those promoted by Gorbachev and his team in the Soviet Union. Even in Yugoslavia, a country that had not been formally integrated into the Soviet bloc, the changes occurring in the Soviet Union and the East European states prompted democratic forces in Croatia and Slovenia to launch daring campaigns for reform and the assertion of their national identities. In Romania and Bulgaria, where repression had been more systematic and the opposition less organized, such premises associated with the existence of a developing civil society were only in the infant stage. In those countries, civil societies that had long been subjected to systematic attacks had been left crippled and fearful. Albania, the most isolated of the East European countries, appeared to stick stubbornly to the legacy of Enver Hoxha’s radical Stalinism. Hoxha’s successor as party General Secretary, Ramiz Alia, who had spent his whole career as a loyal apparatchik, continued to keep the late leader’s widow, Nexmije, as a chairperson of the National Front, and the cult of the departed leader seemed to be intact. But as events in 1990, when opposition parties were formed in Albania with the approval of the ruling communists, show, even that country could not completely escape contamination by the reformist movement spreading through the whole of communist Eastern Europe.
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