The “Light” that Failed

Communism was, of course, for that special generation of Western intellectuals from the 1930s-1950s “the God that failed” and there is indeed an entire book with that name, published in 1949, with contributions from Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, Richard Crossman and Stephen Spender.

The last post may have borne the same title – but the God in this case who has disappointed the region in which I live – at least according to the title of “the long read” in yesterday’s The Guardian - is not Communism but Liberalism.

It was, typically, a long post which took some time to reach its point since I found Krastev and Holmes’ 2018 article Explaining Eastern Europe – imitation and its discontents a much more satisfactory analysis than the Guardian “long read” with which I had started the post.

Let me therefore try to summarise what I found the three most original and important points of that analysis – and remember I have lived in the countries concerned for the entire 30 years period (apart from the first year – and the 7 years I spent in central Asia).

I will then explore briefly the question whether Liberalism has indeed failed the wider region.

- 1. The newer members of the EU feel their inferior status. When, a couple of years ago, a friend used the term “colonial”, I resisted it but I now realise he was right both literally (in a scale of economic takeover which is nothing short of exploitative) and in the extent to which they have had to comply with EU legislation. As a consultant I was very aware of the utter insensitivity of my colleagues with their perceptions of “best practice” – in which the EU systems were as much as fault as the individual arrogances….I don’t think outsiders can begin to understand how much this has hurt proud and well-educated people    

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.

- 2. Krastev and Holmes, secondly, explore what the expectations were in the beginning, emphasising the importance of the word “Normality” – and how these have changed….

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 of identity – racial and sexual and of multiculturalism. 

As a result, Central and East Europeans are becoming mistrustful and resentful of norms coming from the West. Ironically, eastern Europe is now starting to view itself as the last bastion of genuine European values.

There’s a parallel (of a sort) with the Brits who feel that they joined in 1973 a “Common Market” or economic union which, as the European Union, has developed into something very different…

- 3. A Very different “Open society”. Perhaps no phrase has changed its meaning within a decade as greatly as this one

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 (by scale of emigration of their country’s qualified young professionals), and loss of national sovereignty.

We rarely hear the voice of ordinary people in this sort of geo-political analysis but

Aftershock – a journey into Eastern Europe’s Forgotten Dreams 2017) is based on interviews with people the author, young American journalist John Feffer, met in the early 90s and then, 25 years later, went back to interview. The interviews can actually be accessed here   

But let me return to the question of whether it is Liberalism that has failed the central and eastern Europeans…..

It has become quite fashionable to argue against liberalism – I first noticed this some five years ago and the trend has intensified recently with books such as “Why Liberalism Failed

My argument in the 90s was that it was neo-liberalism which was the false god – with bodies like the World Bank pushing for the minimal state

Certainly “conditionality” was always a demeaning relationship for a country to have with bodies such as the EU, the IMF and the World Bank but I have to say I saw it at the time as a not unreasonable process - and was therefore struck with this section of the Krastev and Holmes article -

”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. [End Page 118]

The origins of the region’s current illiberalism are emotional and pre-ideological, rooted in rebellion at the humiliations that must necessarily accompany a project requiring acknowledgment of a foreign culture as superior to one’s own. Illiberalism in a strictly theoretical sense, then, is largely a cover story. It lends a patina of intellectual respectability to a desire, widely shared at a visceral level, to shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization.

This is indeed a fascinating argument – if not quite an attack on Liberalism in itself. Its focus on psychology actually reminds me of the Romanian tutor, Zevedei Barbu, I had at University in 1963/64 who had written “Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology and patterns of life” (1956) a book whose three parts were entitled “The psychology of Democracy”, “The psychology of Nazism” and “The psychology of communism” respectively. This must have made use of Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950) one of the first of a stream of books produced in the immediate post-war period to try to make sense of the power of the totalitarian model eg Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and JT Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy(1952). They were all required reading on the small Political Sociology class I took under Barbu who had defected in 1948 from the Romanian Legation in London (despite being an avowed communist who spent a couple of years in prison for the cause). He was a great teacher – it was he who introduced me to Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies – let alone Michels and Pareto – all of whose insights still resonate with me.

It’s an interesting reflection on our individualistic and egocentric times which have seen such a huge expansion in psychological book titles that such political psychology seems to have disappeared?

Except they haven’t – but they’ve morphed their focus into studies of left and right voting behaviour if Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” and Lakoff’s “Moral Politics” are anything to go by.
Rather different from studies of the authoritarian personality!
Or, indeed, from the writings of Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch or Richard Sennett about whom I wrote recently

background reading

Eurozine has a useful overview of the region’s political developments

1989 at 30; an interesting 30 page essay which focuses a bit too much on the earlier period

A recent (and rare) global history of the area

A famous English historian living in California offers useful insights on a younger one let loose in central europe
interview with Krastev -

https://www.eurozine.com/the-future-was-next-to-you/