The Devil in History

an increasingly aggressive version of neo-Stalinist and neo-i mperialist restoration. The high school history textbook (dealing with the period 1945 to 1991) commissioned by the Kremlin and published in 2008 symbolizes the return to some of the most egregious Stalinist falsifications and a radical break with the legacies of glasnost. Putinism is an ideological conglomerate bringing together Great Russian nationalism, imperial authoritarianism, and a drive to restore the lost grandeur of the Stalin era.⁸² The narrative about the past offered by the Putin administration is the quintessential formula of “reconciliation without truth.”⁸³ In other words, we are dealing with an apocryphal reconciliation.

The ideological syncretism of Stalino-Fascism capitalizes on delayed political justice. Think of Russia, where much ado about the trial of the old party has not resulted in anything significant. Demagogy, overblown rhetoric, and continual scapegoating undermine the legitimacy of the existing institutions and pave the way for the rise of ethnocentric crackpots. The harmful effects of long-maintained forms of amnesia cannot be overestimated. The lack of serious public discussions and lucid analyses of the past, including an acknowledgment by the highest state authorities of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Communist dictatorships, fuels discontent, outrage, and frustration and encourages the rise of demagogues, leading to vindictive references to the need for purification through retribution. Thus we see the creation of new mythologies to explain the current predicament: “Judeo-Masonic conspiracies” that endanger “national interests.”⁸⁴ Nations are presented almost universally as victims of foreigners, and the Communist regimes are described as engineered by aliens to serve foreign interests. Russian nationalists, including some of the most gifted fiction writers belonging to the Siberian School, have not tired of blaming the Jews for the Bolshevik destruction of traditional values and structures. Some of the most frantic propagandists for such dark visions are former Communists, including a number of former Communist intellectuals. Writing primarily about the tragic events in his native Yugoslavia, American poet Charles Simic touched a depressing and unfortunately accurate note when he observed, “The terrifying thing about modern intellectuals everywhere is that they are always changing idols. At least religious fanatics stick mostly to what they believe in. All the rabid nationalists in Eastern Europe were Marxists yesterday and Stalinists last week.”⁸⁵

Several years before the end of Communism in Europe, political scientist and historian Joseph Rothschild argued that “ethno-nationalism, or politicized ethnicity, remains the world’s major ideological legitimator and delegitimator of states, regimes, and governments.”⁸⁶ Since nationalism provides the fuel of identity myths of modernity, more so than Marxist socialism, liberal universalism, or constitutional patriotism, one must see what its main forms are in the post-Communist world. Is nationalism a fundamental threat to the emergence of politically tolerant structures? Is it necessarily a poisonous form of chauvinism, a new totalitarian ideology, a destructive force inimical to liberal values? Are these societies hostages to their past, doomed to eternally reenact old animosities and conflicts? In reality, one needs to distinguish between varieties of nationalism: the inclusive versus the exclusive, the liberal versus the radical, or, as Yael Tamir proposed, the polycentric versus the ethnocentric.⁸⁷ Ethnocentrism is a form of nationalism that turns the real distinction between the in-group and the others into an insuperable attribute, a fact of destiny that places one’s nation into a position superior to all the others.

Under post-Communism, ethnocentric nationalism, rather than the liberal version, prevailed. Resistant to rational analysis, it appeals to sentiment, affect, and emotion. Truth-content is practically irrelevant in narratives intended to foster dignity and pride. Beliefs, values, and mores are thrust into the straitjacket of a specific “regime of truth” that produces and sustains specific power alignments. The social framing of nationalism crystallizes into “ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.”⁸⁸ It therefore functions as universal truth. Idealized interpretations of history turn into identity markers because they provide us with gratification, satisfaction, and perceived magnitude. They create a sense of authenticity. Considering that for Central and Eastern Europe the past is “not just another country, but a positive archipelago of vulnerable historical territories,”⁸⁹ the incessant reliance on mismemory rather than on Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) deepened the already widespread cynicism and the privatization of memory. Such escapism in counterhistories produces divisiveness rather than cohesion and regional antagonism rather than integration. Nostalgia in the former Soviet bloc often took the form of “regret for the lost certainties of Communism, now purged of its darker side.”⁹⁰ These falsified narratives have the function of remaking and denying the facts. The truth is argued away and the characters of the traumatized and guilty past are deprived of their real identities. Victims and heroes are assigned pejorative counterimages, while perpetrators and bystanders find refuge in the absence of atonement.⁹¹

Delays in the coalescence of a political class in the region are linked to the weakness of a democratic core elite: political values remain vague, programs tend to overlap, and corruption is rampant. Think of the short life expectancy of some political parties in the region. In fact, parties that were dominant in the first years after the collapse have either lost electoral significance (e.g., the Hungarian Democratic Forum [MDF] or the National Peasant Christian and Democratic Party), or significantly altered their orientations and allegiances (e.g., the Hungarian Civic Union [FIDESZ] or the National Liberal Party in Romania). Other problems are related to delays in the coalescence of a political class. This is particularly dangerous in Russia, where there is a conspicuous absence of political competition between ideologically defined and distinct parties. The public is thus inclined to see privatization as the springboard for the rise of a new class of profiteers (a transfiguration of the old political elite into a new economic one). The political arena is still extremely volatile, and the ideological labels conceal as much as they reveal. The decisive choice is between personalities, parties, and movements that favor individualism, an open society, and risk-taking, and those that promise security within the homogeneous environment of the ethnic community. Strategy is as important as tactic, and the will to reform is as important as the articulation of concrete goals.

MEANINGS, OLD AND NEW

I would like to return now to Ralf Dahrendorf’s memorable statement that citizens of Central and Eastern Europe are still trying to make sense of their existence. As mentioned earlier, a constant of the recent history of the region is the recurrence of charismatic politics and of pseudo-party politics. If these societies are to move past these problems, they must overcome two fundamental elements of the legacy of the Communist past: anomy (which led to fragmentation, neotraditionalism, and uncivility, to what Romanian philosopher Andrei Ple?u termed “public obscenity”) and lies (which led to dissimulation and the disintegration of consensus, and ostentatiously brought forth a human type characterized by Russia sociologist Yuri Levada as homo prevaricatus, the heir of homo sovieticus). Since forewarned is forearmed, I believe that it is better to look into the real pitfalls and avoid them rather than play the obsolete pseudo-Hegelian tune of the “ultimate liberal triumph.” Indeed, what we see here is not the strength but rather the vulnerability of liberalism in the region—the backwardness, delays, and distortions of modernity, as well as its periodic confrontation with majoritarian, neoplebiscitarian parties and movements.⁹² The lesson of the 1989 revolutions is therefore multifarious. It refers to the rebirth of citizenship, a category abolished by both Communism and Fascism,⁹³ but it also involved re-empowering the truth. What we have learned from 1989 represents an unquestionable argument in favor of the values that we consider essential and exemplary for democracy today.

Let us end by noting the vital role played by international factors in the process of the democratization of Eastern and Central Europe. Without NATO’s enlargement and accession to European Union, the fate of the region most probably would have been very different. Because of normalization by integration into a democratically validated supragovernmental organization, the political, cultural, economic, and social environments in these countries have received a huge boost in their struggle with mytho-exclusionist fantasies. In this sense, external intervention was as important, if not more important, than domestic dynamics. What seemed in the early 1990s a somber future turned into an extremely favorable present. Ken Jowitt rightly diagnosed that only adoption by a richer sister from the West could save the tormented Eastern sister from a new wave of salvationist authoritarianism. And indeed his doomsday vision of colonels, priests, and despots was proven wrong. This was a surprise, though, for none of us thought that NATO and the European Union would turn