Ethnic nationalism appeals more often than not to primary instincts of unity and identification with one’s own group: foreigners are often seen as vicious destabilizers, dishonest breakers of traditions, and agents of dissolution. Nationalism, indeed, sanctifies tradition, once described by Gilbert K. Chesterton as the “right to vote granted to the dead people.” Especially in times of social frustration, foreigners tend to be demonized and scapegoated. A Ukrainian nationalist, for instance, would see Russians (or Jews) as forever conspiring to undermine Ukraine’s independence and prosperity. A Romanian would regard members of the Hungarian minority as belonging to a unified body perpetually involved in subversive and irredentist activities. A Croatian militant nationalist would never trust Serbs, while Serbian ethnic fundamentalists would invoke Croatia’s alliance with Nazi Germany as an argument against trust and ethnic coexistence. Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian nationalisms are colored by the memory of the Soviet (and previously Russian) occupations of the Baltic states. National discourses not only preserve a sense of ethnic identity but also continuously “reinvent the tradition” (Hobsbawm), regenerate historical mythology, infuse an infrarational, transcendental content into the sense of national identity. During imperial collapse, nationalism becomes an ideological balm used to calm sentiments of despondency and rage.
With its shattered identities and wavering loyalties, the post-Communist world allowed delusional xenophobic fantasies to thrive and capture the imagination of millions of disaffected individuals. National homogenization became the battle cry of political elites, for whom unity and cohesion were the ultimate values. The Leninist exclusionary logic (“us” versus “them”) has been replaced by the nationalist vision, which sanctifies the ethnic in-group and demonizes “aliens.” Those who criticize this trend are immediately stigmatized as a “fifth column” made up of “inside enemies.” For the late Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, for instance, it was only the intellectuals supportive of the “national spirit and self-determination” who deserved the name of intelligentsia. All others, he maintained, were just Pharisees.99 The continuous invention of enemies and hatreds aggravates the climate of insecurity and makes many honest individuals despair about the future of their societies.
In this context, it is no surprise that post-Communism was, and still is, defined by a lasting tension between national(ist) consciousness and the emphasis on “post-conventional identities” (Habermas), continuing the project of universalization of rights that was unleashed in the eighteenth century.100 There is still a scarcity of “social glue,” because existing political formations have failed to foster the consensus needed for the sustenance of a constitutional patriotism (Verfassungpatriotismus).101 Contemporary ethnic nationalism is less a resurrection of the pre-Communist politics of intolerance than an avatar of the Leninist effort to construct the perfectly unified body politic. To be sure, the past is often used to justify the resentful fantasies of nationalist demagogues. This “return of history” is, however, more of an ideological reconstruction meant to respond to present-day grievances than a seemingly primordial destiny of nations destined to continuously fight with and fear each other.102 The strange synthesis of national ambition and ideological monism explains the intensity of nationalist passions in the post-Communist world: ethnic exclusiveness is a continuation of the Leninist hubris, of its adversity to anything smacking of difference, uniqueness, or otherness. Antiliberalism, collectivism, and staunch anti-intellectualism blend together in the new discourses of national self-aggrandizement.
Nevertheless, the Europeanization of Eastern Europe, without being the illusory end of politics, can be envisioned as the first clear break with the last century’s dreadful cycle of ideology and utopia in this region. Indeed, a substantive democracy, which takes truth and emancipation as its core values, can also be defined as post-democracy: “By post-democracy I mean nothing more, and nothing other, than a democracy that has once again been given human content, which is to say that it is not just formal, not just institutional, not just an elegant mechanism to ensure that although the same people govern, it appears as though the citizens are themselves choosing them again.”103 The pedagogical dictatorship of Marxism turned out to be a false solution to the dilemmas of Enlightenment and modernity, with catastrophic consequences. French Marxist structuralist thinker Louis Althusser once wrote that Marxism was not a form of humanism because, in his view, dialectic materialism had overcome abstract-anthropocentric conceptualizations. It was situated beyond the pale of empirical altruism, for it sought the fundamental laws and constants of development. We can detect here a secret connection between the sophisticated syllogism of the Althusserian school and the conservative imperatives of neo-Stalinist dogmatism: humanism was merely a pellicle, a treacherous surface hiding the real ideological priorities. Therefore humanism was to be always concrete, to serve the interests of the revolution. Havel’s answer to such fantasies of revolutionary praxis, and the essential lesson of the 1989 revolutions, is self-empowerment through citizenship. Thus the subtitle of the Power of the Powerless is “citizens against the state.”
Dissidents and critical intellectuals successfully created a horizon of expectation that had not existed in Eastern Europe since the Prague Spring. It is not surprising that John Paul II played a crucial role in articulating this new grammar of opposition to Communism by defining human solidarity and liberty as non-negotiable values. Significantly (and electrifyingly), one of the pope’s most influential encyclicals was titled “The Splendor of Truth.” Historian Stephen Kotkin provided a telling quotation for this state of things: the pope’s message was “the inviolable right, in God’s and man’s order of things, for human beings to live in freedom and dignity.”104 Civil society was the territory of retrieved human autonomy that escaped and countered the grip of Communist partocracy (the “uncivil society,” as Kotkin puts it). The discourse of truth and rights did indeed have revolutionary power. It struck at the heart of the political system itself, for, as Kołakowski once put it, “the lie is the immortal soul of communism.” In challenging it, while simultaneously avoiding conventional ideological dichotomies, the activists of this civil society exploded long-held myths of fatality, futility, impotence, resignation, abandonment, and conformity.
The whole philosophy of dissent was predicated on a strategy of long “penetration” of the existing system, leading to the gradual recovery and restoration of the public sphere (the independent life of society) as an alternative to the all-embracing presence of the ideological party-state. The primacy of the Communist party-states was rejected, for, according to dissident thought, there was “something unconditional that is higher than they are, something that is binding even on them, sacred, inviolable.”105 This was the individual with his and her rights, dignity, and freedom. Accordingly, the successful reconstruction of the life of a nation from the tragedy and destruction caused by a criminal regime depends upon the capability of a society to build upon foundations of trust between freed individuals. Both utopian absolutism and postmodern relativism were rejected through each individual’s possession of doubt by means of knowledge and moral action. The best deterrent for the treacherousness of history remained the permanent reminder of its murderous embodiments. Or, to evoke Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky’s lament on Communism’s totalitarian temptation: “Ah, our beloved Ilich, how many people he has lured into darkness, how many supplied with justification for their crimes! But to me he brought light.” Indeed, for Bukovsky, after reading The Gulag Archipelago, learning about and experiencing firsthand the criminality of Soviet regime, Lenin’s works transformed into “a living history of the crimes of the Bolsheviks.”106