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.

Anti-Corruption – a Great Game no longer

Other societies and their cultures are strange – so we invent stories to help us understand their behavior. Thus the French are argumentative and the Germans methodical…Some people indeed have made careers from explaining local behaviour to visitors eg Geert de Hodstede, Richard Lewis and Frans Trompenaars. Add in some scandal and wrongdoing, and you soon have a full-scale industry – namely that of anti-corruption. This post is my attempt as an outsider to offer an overview of that literature of the past 30 years.….

When, in the late 1990s, I first noticed this development, my judgement was that the “best practice” being offered was very much what the sociologists, rather euphemistically, call “an ideal type” ie a version of reality one rarely finds in practice. This is what I wrote at the time – 

A lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice.

Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. But civil service appointments and structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. In those cases a system which is otherwise rule-based and transparent has had minor adjustments made to take account of strong social realities and ensure consensus. 

But in the case of countries such as Northern Ireland (until recently) the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public good had been completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20^th century, made in favour of Protestants.

The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all  

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration – the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform. And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country.

In many countries, local government appointments systems were, until very recently, strongly politicised - and it is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing.

Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold – first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. 

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. And the acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way! 

The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

A later post will pursue this post-modernist disenchantment with the western institutions of which we used to be so proud.

For the moment, it's the situation in the new member states I want to focus on. Ralf Dahrendorf was probably the first to suggest (in 1990) that it would take the newly independent states of central and eastern Europe at least two generations to develop full Rule of Law and a properly functioning civil society. I vividly remember in the mid-1990s the EU’s first Ambassador to Romania (Karen Fogg) giving every visiting consultant such as me a copy of a review of Robert Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work” which contrasted northern and southern Italy and suggested that the latter’s emphasis on family connections put it several centuries behind the north (This little article in the current copy of NLR would suggest that was an overoptimistic interpretation of the North!). This is the same Robert Putnam who coined the concept of “social capital” which was taken up with great enthusiasm for a decade or so by the World Bank and academics but is critically assessed here. Although Robert Putnam gets the credit for making the idea of “social capital” or “trust” a central one in the mid 1990s, it was Francis Fukuyama who, for me, wrote the most interesting book on the subject – namely "Trust and the creation of prosperity” (1995)

Putnam’s book was based on an earlier work by an older American political scientist – Edward Banfield – who had, with his Italian wife, spent two years in the mid 1950s in a small Italian village in the south and subsequently produced a famous book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (1958) which fixed the peculiarities of Italian society in the popular mind – until the Godfather films came along. “The never-ending debate about the moral basis of a backward society” is an excellent 2009 article by Emiliane Ferragina which explored the influence of the books. 

The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists

Further Reading

Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric

Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative work here

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies

Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist

Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

Crowds and Power in Sofia and Bucharest - III

 How, 30 years on, is post-communism doing?

I’ve been living in Bulgaria and Romania since 2007 – for a decade I enjoyed crossing the Danube, with the last 100 km stretch of the drive on the highway through the Balkans and the sight of the Vitosha mountain which dominates Sofia always bringing a particular thrill.  

The last post focused mainly on the Sofia street protests of the past 3 months – with a brief reference to the fact that only in Romania has the Crowd succeeded in toppling governments – three times in 30 years…and twice in the past five years.

This post looks at what two recent books by well-known authors born in these countries have to say about the “progress” the two countries have made since 1989 and considers the prospects for effective change

 

In the 1990s there was an interesting body of literature known as “transitology” which was effectively a retraining scheme for those in redundant Soviet and Eastern European studies University Departments as they tried to adjust to the new reality of “liberal democracy” and “free-market capitalism”.

The integration of many of these countries into the European Union seemed to leave the others in a state of suspended animation – still “transiting”.

Except that the “integration” had not gone as planned – some countries (such as Hungary and Poland) had clearly reneged on their commitments and were challenging the “rule of law” canons; and others (such as Bulgaria and Romania) had been unable to satisfy the monitors that they had even got to the required judicial standards. Indeed Philippe Schmitter, one of the doyens of the field, went so far in 2012 as to talk of “ambidextrous democratisation”

 

Bulgaria's world-renowned political scientist Ivan Krastev has (with US Stephen Holmes) written one of the surprisingly few books which attempt to assess the fortunes since 1989 of the eastern countries – although it’s primary concern seems more that of “the crisis of modern liberalism”. It’s entitled "The Light that Failed – a Reckoning” - published last year, with the Bulgarian translation appearing next month.

The book starts with a chapter on the psychological effects on central European countries of the “imitation game” they were forced to play and the demographic shock as millions left the country for a better future elsewhere; followed by one on how Putin’s Russia moved on in 2007 from imitation to “mirroring” Western hypocrisy; a chapter on Trump’s America; and a final one which takes in China.

 

The authors argue that part of the nationalist reaction in Hungary and Poland was the shock of realising that the European "normality" they had hoped for had been transformed into an agenda which included homosexuality, gay weddings and rights for Romas. But their emphasis on the “psychology of imitation” totally ignores the brazen way west European countries and companies exploited the opening which the collapse of communism gave them to extend their markets in both goods and people - with the consequences touched on in the first post and brilliantly dissected by Alexander Clapp in a 2017 New Left Review article “Romania Redivivus”.

 

Talk of “transitology” disappeared more than a decade ago and was absorbed into the Anti-Corruption (or governance integrity) field which grew into a "name and shame" industry - complete with league tables and Manuals. But the world seems to have perhaps grown weary even of its talk…  

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a Romanian social psychologist - appointed, in 2007, as Professor of Democracy studies of the prestigious Hertie School of Governance in Berlin - with a unique understanding and knowledge of the issue. This was her blunt assessment in 2009 of the situation in Romania

 

Unfortunately, corruption in Romania is not only related to parties and businesses, but cuts across the most important institutions of society. Romanian media has gradually been captured, after having been largely free and fair at the end of the 1990s. After 2006, concentration in media ownership continued to increase in Romania. Three owners enjoy more than two-thirds of the TV political news market.

 As long as Romania was a supplicant for entry to the EU, it had to jump through the hoops of “conditionality” to satisfy Brussels it was behaving itself. When Poland, Hungary et al were let in in 2004, the pressures started to relax - but The European Union’s Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) replaced that conditionality in 2007 and Bulgaria and Romania are still subject of an annual check of their legal and judicial health. Mungi-Pippidi therefore concluded her 2009 assessment with a simple observation - 

At the end of day, “democracy promotion” succeeds by helping the domestic drivers of change, not by doing their job for them. Only Romanians themselves can do this.

 Her latest book  "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" (2020) is a must-read for anyone who wants to know why a quarter of a century of trying to build systems of government that people can trust has had so little effect in ex-communist countries. It starts with a sketch of Switzerland’s political development which reminds us that Napoleon was the catalyst for a 50-year period during which the Swiss embedded the basic structures we associate with that country.

It is, however, Denmark to which most countries (according to Fukuyama) aspire to – although a study of its history suggests that, contrary to Dahrendorf’s optimism, that was more like a 100 year journey.

 

Her description of her own country, Romania, is quite damning –

·         From 2010-17 there were 600 convictions for corruption EACH YEAR – including 18 Ministers and one Prime Minister, Generals, half of the Presidents of County Councils and the Presidents of all the parliamentary parties

·         The Prosecution system became thoroughly politicised through its connection with the powerful intelligence system – the infamous Securitate which was never disbanded

·         The level of wiretapping used is 16 times the level of that used by the FBI

·         Romania heads the league table of cases brought to the European Court of Human Rights dismissed for breaching the right to a fair trial – with a half of its cases so failing

·         The annual CVM reports on the country are always positive and make no mention of any of this – on the basis that “questions about the intelligence services are outside our remit”!!

·         TV stations run by those convicted of corruption have provided damning evidence of the prosecution service threatening judges and fixing evidence

 

One of Romania's most famous political analysts gave an extensive interview a couple of years ago which was important enough for me to summarise as follows –

·         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 “social” media dominating people’s minds

·         “European integration” has destroyed Romanian agriculture and industry - and drained the country of 4 million talented young Romanians

·         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

 

Dorel Sandor has clearly given up on the politicians and confessed to a hopelessness for the prospect of any sort of change in his country

 

“The stark reality is now that we do not have political parties any more. The Romanian political environment is in fact an ensemble of ordinary gangs that try to survive the process and jail and eventually save their wealth in the country or abroad. That's all! Romania has no rulers. It has mobsters in buildings with signs that say "The Ministry of Fish that Blooms".

One of the reasons why the EU is not too concerned about us is that it is that they reckon that you can only reform a driver with a car that works. We are a two-wheeled wagon and two horses, a chaotic space, broken into pieces. What's to reform? So it's a big difference.”

 

But he was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward

 

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.

It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.

 

I have a lot of sympathy for such approaches – embodied, for example, in the "Future Search" method. But effective social change rarely comes from such an elitist approach; any such effort would have to demonstrate exactly how it would propose to deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others in the country.

In 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany).

 

The revelation of the collusion between the infamous Securitate and the Anti-Corruption Agency (DNA) has understandably fanned the flames of paranoia for which the Romanians can be forgiven - given the scale of the surveillance of the population the Securitate enjoyed under Ceausescu. Little wonder half of the population are Covid sceptics

 

Conclusion

In the 1980s it was Solidarity in Poland; Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia; and reformers in Hungary who were challenging the power structure – I remember taking the opportunity of being in the country to visit the Party’s “White House” in Budapest in 1987 to talk with a spokesman for the latter.

Bulgaria and Romania, on the other hand, were monolithic and frozen societies – with the only sign of discord being the odd Romanian poet – and on the Danube where protestors against a chemical plant included a few establishment figures such as Svetlin Rusev.

 

But the street has become much more active in the past decade – even if it is the more educated and “entitled” who are prominent there. And it is “the Crowd” that the power elite has always feared – particularly in the last century eg the infamous “Revolt of the Masses” (1930). And who can ever forget the moment when the massed crowd turned against Ceausescu in December 1989 – within minutes, he had been hoisted from his balcony by helicopter and, within days, summarily tried and shot.

 

It’s noticeable that the figures whose words I’ve quoted – Dahrendorf, Canetti, Krastev, Mungiu-Pippidi and Sandor – all represent the intelligentsia. I was brought up to take their words seriously - but they are not activists!  

The sadly-missed David Graeber was one of the very few such people prepared to get his hands dirty… to work across the barriers that normally divide people and to try to forge new coalitions…

 

The Crowd needs people like Graeber who understand how to bridge such barriers…………..particularly between the “downtrodden masses” and the “entitled”

Where is Bulgaria’s Graeber? There are, actually, several eg Vanya Grigorova – the economic adviser of the labour union “Podkrepa” (Support) and leading left-wing public figure – who has been travelling the country to present her latest book on labour rights and how to claim them. A year ago she gave this interview to Jacobin, which positioned her on the side of social change in Bulgaria and the region.

 

Both Covid19 and the greater concern about global warming - as embodied, for example in the recent Extinction Rebellion – suggest that the “normality” being sought by the entitled is a will o’ the wisp.

The Sofia protestors would therefore be well advised to widen the scope of their agenda. After all, smaller countries generally seem better able to “do” change viz Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Singapore, Estonia, Slovenia – particularly when they have women at their helm who have a combination of trustworthiness and strategic vision!!

 

Especially for them I updated my list of essential reading for activists – adding my own “opportunistic” theory of change which emphasises the element of individual responsibility as well as the dynamic of the crowd viz

 

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity – through proper analysis, mobilisation and integrity. It involves– 

·         speaking out about the need for change

·         learning the lessons of previous change efforts

·         creating and running networks of change

·         which mobilise social forces

·         understanding crowd dynamics

·         reaching out to forge coalitions

·         building credibility

 

I grant you that the time for preparation is over in Sofia; and appreciate that some of this may come across as rather elitist but the process it describes is still a crucial one – prepare, analyse, network, speak out, build coalitions, mobilise, no hidden games…..It’s a tough combination……

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/