Whatever happened to political psychology?

My last – unusually short - post ended with a question about the curious psychology we seem to be applying to the Russian elite living in its gilded bubble. A couple of years ago I had a post which contained this excerpt - 

The origins (of Polish and Hungarian populism) lie partly 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 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 excerpts were from “The Light that Failed – a reckoning” (2019) by Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian think-tanker and Stephen Holmes, an American academic who had trailed the publication a year earlier in this Journal of Democracy article.

Krastev and Holmes’ emphasis on the psychological aspects of the humiliation involved in having to copy a foreign model has passed unnoticed since then – but is actually much more relevant to Russia. An article of theirs in the Eurozine journal spells out the psychological process. 

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. 

Michael Brenner is about the only analyst I’ve seen in all the commentaries on the war in Ukraine to develop this theme of humiliation.

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. 

And this article by a Czech assesses not only Krastev’s argument but those contained in the books I mentioned in an earlier post - first one by Anne Applebaum (“The Twilight of Democracy?”) and the other by Timothy Snyder in whose “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018) we find a full exposition of Putin’s hero, the nationalist Ivan Ilyin.

And this article from an erstwhile hawk is also important in suggesting that the West, having done too little to oppose Russia risks going to the other extreme.