In just a couple of weeks it will be the 30
th anniversary
of the Fall of the Berlin Wall – with the precise date of any single country’s “liberation”
from communism varying according to local events. Here in Romania it will be
partly the Timisoara protests of early December but you can actually w
itness
for yourself the dramatic collapse of the regime
two and
half minutes into this video of the supportive demonstration of 21 December
1989 which had been organised for Ceausescu. The trial and
summary execution of the Ceausescu couple on 24 December stirs uneasy memories
in the country.
The trigger for today’s post was an
excerpt from one of what may be an
avalanche of books about the extent to which the past 30 years have realised (or
not) the hopes and fears of the citizens of central and eastern Europe.
The new book is called
The Light that Failed – a reckoning and has two highly qualified authors –
Ivan Krastev,
a high-profile Bulgarian political scientist based in Vienna and his own Think Tank
in Sofia, and
Stephen Holmes,
professor political science and law and specialist in liberalism and
post-communism
their arguments got a
preview in an article in last year's "Journal of Democracy"
This excerpt is a useful intro -
In the first
years after 1989, liberalism was generally associated with the ideals of
individual opportunity, freedom to move and to travel, unpunished dissent,
access to justice and government responsiveness to public demands.
By 2010, the
central and eastern European versions of liberalism had been indelibly tainted by two decades of rising
social inequality, pervasive corruption and the morally arbitrary
redistribution of public property into the hands of small number of people.
The economic crisis of 2008 had bred a deep distrust of business elites and the
casino capitalism that, writ large, almost destroyed the world financial order
……
Focusing on
the corruption and deviousness of illiberal governments in the region will not
help us understand the sources of popular support for national populist
parties. The origins of populism are
undoubtedly complex. But they partly lie in the humiliations associated with
the uphill struggle to become, at best, an inferior copy of a superior model.
Discontent
with the “transition to democracy” in the post-communist years was also
inflamed by visiting foreign “evaluators” who had little grasp of local
realities. These experiences combined to produce a nativist reaction in the region, a reassertion of “authentic” national
traditions allegedly suffocated by ill-fitting western forms. The
post-national liberalism associated with EU enlargement allowed aspiring
populists to claim exclusive ownership of national traditions and national
identity.
The wave of
anti-liberalism sweeping over central Europe today reflects widespread popular
resentment at the perceived slights to national and personal dignity that this
palpably sincere reform-by-imitation project entailed……
- the so-called “revolution” of 1989 was nothing of the
sort – just a takeover by the old-guard masquerading in the costumes of the
market economy and democracy
- Which, after 30 years, has incubated a new anomie –
with the “mass” and “social” media dominating people’s minds
- After 30 years, there is not a single part of the
system – economic, political, religious, cultural, voluntary – which offers any
real prospect of positive change
- Even Brussels seems to have written the country off
- The country is locked into a paralysis of suspicion,
distrust, consumerism, apathy, anomie
- No one is calling for a new start – let alone
demonstrating the potential for realistic alliances
The process
was called by different names – democratization,
liberalization, enlargement, convergence, integration, Europeanization –
but the goal pursued by post-communist reformers was simple. They wished their
countries to become ‘normal’, which meant like the West. This involved
importing liberal-democratic institutions, applying western political and
economic recipes, and publicly endorsing western values. Imitation was widely
understood to be the shortest pathway to freedom and prosperity.
Pursuing economic and political reform by imitating a
foreign model, however, turned out to have steeper moral and psychological
downsides than many had originally expected.
The
imitator’s life inescapably produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority,
dependency, lost identity, and involuntary insincerity. Indeed, the futile
struggle to create a truly credible copy of an idealized model involves a
never-ending torment of self-criticism if not self-contempt.
What makes
imitation so irksome is not only the implicit assumption that the mimic is
somehow morally and humanly inferior to the model. It also entails the
assumption that central and eastern Europe’s copycat nations accept the West’s
right to evaluate their success or failure at living up to Western standards.
In this
sense, imitation comes to feel like a loss of sovereignty.
Thus, the rise of authoritarian chauvinism and
xenophobia in central and eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory,
but in political psychology. It reflects a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989
‘imitation imperative’, with all its demeaning and humiliating implications.
And Krastev and Holmes’ Eurozine article goes on make a second crucial
point of huge cultural significance –
In the eyes
of conservative Poles in the days of the Cold War, western societies were normal because, unlike communist systems, they
cherished tradition and believed in God. Then suddenly Poles discovered
that western ‘normality’ today means secularism, multiculturalism and gay
marriage. Should we be surprised that Poles and their neighbours felt ‘cheated’
when they found out that the society
they wanted to imitate had disappeared, washed away by the swift currents of
modernization?
If, in the
immediate aftermath of 1989, ‘normality’ was understood largely in political
terms (free elections, separation of powers, private property, and the
right to travel), during the last decade normality has increasingly come to be
interpreted in cultural terms. As a
result, Central and East Europeans are becoming mistrustful and resentful of
norms coming from the West. Ironically, as we shall see below, eastern Europe
is now starting to view itself as the last bastion of genuine European values.
In order to
reconcile the idea of ‘normal’ (meaning what is widespread at home) with what
is normatively obligatory in the countries they aim to imitate, eastern
Europeans consciously or unconsciously have begun to ‘normalize’ the model
countries, arguing that what is widespread in the East is also prevalent in the
West, even though westerners hypocritically pretend that their societies are
different. Eastern Europeans often relieve their normative dissonance – say,
between paying bribes to survive in the East and fighting corruption to be
accepted in the West – by concluding that the West is really just as corrupt as
the East, but westerners are simply in denial and hiding the truth.
There is a third and even more powerful reason why the Eurozine article
tells the story better. And that is because it emphasises that recent events have utterly transformed our
emotional response to the phrase “open society” -
The dominant
storyline of the illiberal counterrevolution in central and eastern Europe is
encapsulated in the inversion of the
meaning of the idea of an ‘open society’.
In 1989, the open society meant a promise of freedom, above all a freedom to do
what had been previously forbidden, namely to travel to the West. Today,
openness to the world, for large swaths of the central and eastern European
electorate, connotes not freedom but danger: immigrant invasion, depopulation,
and loss of national sovereignty.
The refugee
crisis of 2015 brought the region’s brewing revolt against individualism and
universalism to a head. What central and eastern Europeans realized in the
course of the refugee crisis was that, in our connected but unequal world,
migration is the most revolutionary revolution of them all. The twentieth-century revolt of the masses
is a thing of the past. We are now facing a twenty-first-century revolt of the
migrants. Undertaken anarchically, not by organized revolutionary parties
but by millions of disconnected individuals and families, this revolt faces no
collective-action problems. It is inspired not by ideologically coloured
pictures of a radiant, imaginary future, but by glossy photos of life on the
other side of the border.
But the combination of an ageing population, low birth rates and an
unending stream of emigration is arguably the source of demographic panic in
central and eastern Europe.
Anxiety about
immigration is fomented by a fear that supposedly unassimilable foreigners will
enter the country, dilute national identity and weaken national cohesion. This
fear, in turn, is fuelled by a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse. In the period
1989–2017, Latvia haemorrhaged 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5%, and
Bulgaria almost 21%. In Romania, 3.4 million people, a vast majority of them
younger than 40, left the country after it joined the EU in 2007.
More central
and eastern Europeans left their countries for western Europe as a result of
the 2008-9 financial crises than all the refugees that came there as the result
of the war in Syria.
The extent of
post-1989 emigration from eastern and central Europe, awakening fears of
national disappearance, helps explain the deeply hostile reaction across the
region to the refugee crisis of 2015-16, even though very few refugees have
relocated to the countries of the region. We might even hypothesise that
anti-immigration politics in a region essentially without immigrants is an
example of what some psychologists call displacement – a defence mechanism by
which, in this case, minds unconsciously blot out a wholly unacceptable threat
and replace it with one still serious but conceivably easier to manage.
Hysteria about non-existent immigrants about to overrun the country represents
the substitution of an illusory danger (immigration) for the real danger
(depopulation and demographic collapse) that cannot speak its name……..
To protect
this besieged majority’s fragile dominance from the insidious alliance of
Brussels and Africa, the argument goes, Europeans need to replace the watery
individualism and universalism foisted on them by liberals with a muscular
identity politics or group particularism of their own.
This is the logic with
which Orbán and the leader of PiS in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, have tried to
inflame the inner xenophobic nationalism of their countrymen. The ultimate
revenge of the central and eastern European populists against western
liberalism is not merely to reject the idea of imitating the west, but to
invert it. We are the real Europeans, Orbán and Kaczyński repeatedly claim, and
if the west wants to save itself, it will have to imitate the east.
