The Devil in History

parliament. However, this hardly means that the ideas that sustained it for so many years have disappeared from the public sphere.

Leninist regimes kept their subjects ignorant of the real functioning of the political system. Tony Judt observed that “by concentrating power, information, initiative and responsibility into the hands of the party-state, Communism had given rise to a society of individuals not merely suspicious of one another and skeptical of any official claims or promises, but with no experience of individual or collective initiative and lacking any basis on which to make informed public choices.”⁷⁰ Furthermore, the chasm between official rhetoric and everyday reality, the camouflaging of the way decisions were reached, the anti-elective pseudo-elections, and other rituals of conformity neutralized critical faculties and generated a widespread wariness toward the validity of politics as such. Furthermore, anti-Communism tended to be just another supra-individual, nondifferentiated form of identity. The problem now is that the aggregation of social interests needs a clarification of the political choices, including an awareness of the main values that people advocate. As Martin Palous put it, “The most important and most dynamic factor in post-totalitarian politics has to do with the way people in post-communist societies perceive and conceptualize the social reality and political processes they are a part of.”⁷¹ The difficulties and ambiguities of the left-right polarization in post-Communist regimes are linked to the ambiguity and even obsolescence of the traditional taxonomies.

With the private sector and entrepreneurial class still in the making, political liberalism and the civic center associated with it are under siege. Most political parties in the region are coalitions based on personal and group affinities rather than on an awareness of common interests, leading to fragmentation, divisiveness, political convulsions, and instability. One reason for the rise of populist movements is the paternalist temptation, a response to the felt need for protection from the destabilizing effects of the transition to competition and market. Another significant factor is the perception that the civic-romantic stage of the revolution is over and the bureaucracy now is intent upon consolidating its privileges. The campaigns against historic figures of Solidarity (including Adam Michnik, Bronislaw Geremek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Lech Walesa) as “traitors” and “protectors of the establishment” were an expression of the search for a “second revolution” that would legislate morality. Critical intellectuals seemed to have lost much of their moral aura and were often attacked as champions of futility, architects of disaster, and incorrigible daydreamers. Their status was extremely precarious precisely because they symbolized the principle of difference that neo-authoritarian politics tends to suppress. In the context of widespread disenchantment with political involvement, their moderation remains a crucial element of social equilibrium. It is essential to avoid mass hysteria, to recognize the need for constitutional consensus, and to foster a culture of predictable procedures. If these kinds of attacks gather momentum, they could jeopardize the still precarious pluralist institutions. Ralf Dahrendorf poignantly expressed this imperative: “Where intellectuals are silent, societies have no future.” In a deeply fragmented social and public environment, under the constant pressures of globalization, Dahrendorf believed that, despite its diminished appeal, the nexus of ideas and action had in no way lost its revitalizing potential as a force of freedom.⁷²

Political reform in all these post-Communist societies has not gone far enough in strengthening the counter-majoritarian institutions (including independent media and the market economy) that would diminish the threat of new authoritarian experiments catering to powerful egalitarian-populist sentiments. The main dangers in this regard are tendencies linked to statism, clericalism, religious fundamentalism, ethnocentrism, and militaristic Fascism. These themes appeared clearly in the discourse of ethnocratic populism, as evinced by Vadim Tudor’s Greater Romania Party, but also among supporters of Slovakia’s Vladimir Meciar, Serbia’s Radical Party, and the xenophobic groups and movements in Russia generically associated with Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party or Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Even Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has resorted to such rhetorical strategies to weaken his liberal and socialist adversaries. Some observers have foreseen a split in the region, with the more advanced countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states) developing a culture of impersonal democratic procedures, while the Southern tier was supposed to be beset by what Ken Jowitt has called “movements of rage.” Yet developments in Hungary, Poland, or Latvia in recent years have shown that such regional divisions are not so clear-cut. Marc Howard’s insights on the demobilized nature of the civil societies within the countries of the former Soviet bloc offer a persuasive explanation for the absence of a middle path between apathy and violence. The comprehensive penetration of society by the state under Communism produced a “monstrous autonomy of the political,”⁷³ leading to disengagement, mistrust of voluntary associations, and deep engagement in private rather than public spheres of interaction. Democratic protest and opposition in Central and Eastern Europe have been shaped by a combination of inherited disaggregation and a general disappointment with the reality of nonpaternalistic social life.

The weakness of the region’s political parties is primarily determined by the general crisis of values and authority. There is an absence of social glue, and the existing formations have failed to foster the consensus needed in order to generate constitutional patriotism. The Leninist “misdevelopment” left the region’s societies with the difficult task of reconstituting normal communitarian bounds that allow for overt and unmitigated social interaction. The unmastered past of the totalitarian experience of the twentieth century in Central and Eastern Europe prevents these countries from institutionalizing the logical connection between democracy, memory, and militancy. Joachim Gauck argued that “reconciliation with the traumatic past can only be achieved not simply through grief, but also through discussion and dialogue. ”⁷⁴ In this sense, Charles Villa-Vicencio, the former director for research of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, defined reconciliation as “the operation whereby individuals and the community create for themselves a space in which they can communicate with one another, in which they can begin the arduous labour of understanding” painful history. Hence justice becomes a process of enabling the nation with the aid of a culture of responsibility.⁷⁵ A new identity can be based upon negative contrasts, “on the one hand, with the past that is being repudiated; on the other, with anti-democratic political actors in the present (and/or potentially in the future).”⁷⁶ This process of putting into question the “actual intersubjective liabilities of particular collectives” can lead to a redefinition of “anamnestic solidarity.” The latter would be based upon an ethical framework circumscribed by both the knowledge of the truth and the official acknowledgement of its history. The destructive power of silence and of unassumed guilt would in this way be preempted. To paraphrase political scientist Gesine Schwan, the fundamental abilities and values of individuals are nourished so as to sustain their well-being, social behavior, and trust in communal life. The moral consensus over a shared experience of reality is preserved, making possible the democratic life of the specific society.⁷⁷ Though some have argued along these lines, I don’t believe that some sort of collective communicative silence (kommunikatives Beschweigen) about the past can enable post- Communist countries to evolve into functioning democracies.⁷⁸ I agree with Tony Judt that radical evil can never be satisfactorily remembered, but, as proved by the German experience, a consistent appeal to history can function simultaneously as exorcism and therapy.⁷⁹

The transition from an illegitimate and criminal regime to democracy and a culture of human rights is indeed a process dependent on the specific conditions of each postauthoritarian society. It implies a series of compromises and negotiations, but the act of healing a community must not be confused with moral consensus about a traumatic past. The history of violence must not legitimize transition. There is a need for unfettered transparency and total truth. After 1989, the present and the future must “stand up to the scrutiny of a gaze educated by the moral catastrophe”⁸⁰ produced by the totalitarian experience of the twentieth century. Otherwise, the web of lies becomes oppressive and the imperturbable fog extends infinitely into a state of moral perplexity. Political radicalization in the guise of historical retribution (“righting the wrongs of the past”) is often used to achieve mass mobilization and delegitimize adversaries. This is not to say that the politics of amnesia, deliberately pursued by former or successor Communists, has resulted in any needed catharsis. On the contrary, as demonstrated by the furious reactions in Romania to President Basescu’s condemnation of the Communist regime as “illegitimate and criminal,”⁸¹ the past does not fade away and often strikes back with a vengeance. There prevails a feeling of having been betrayed by the politicians, as well as a quest for a new purity. This is the rationale both for the “radical revolutionism” of the Kaczynski brothers in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary (at the right end of the spectrum) and for the political resurrection of Communist parties in Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria. It also explains the power of Putin’s neo-authoritarian politics of “managed democracy” in a memory regime of institutionalized amnesia and historical falsification. As for Putin himself, he has abandoned the Yeltsin era’s adamant anti-Leninism and has become, especially since 2006, the proponent of