The recollection of the oppression under Communist regimes is used to bolster a sense of uniqueness. Suffering is often exploited to justify a strange competition for what I call the most victimized nation status. No less important, because Communism was seen by many as an alien imposition—a dictatorship of “foreigners”—contemporary radical nationalism is also intensely anti-Communist. The memory of trauma and guilt under Leninism, along with the duty of remembrance regarding the Fascist past of some of these countries can provide the historical and moral benchmarks necessary to sustain a constitutional patriotism that can challenge communitarian reductionism. Instead, we are witnessing an ethnicization of memory and an externalization of guilt. The evils of the Communist regimes are assigned to those perceived as aliens: the Jews, the national minorities, or other traitors and enemies of an organically defined nation. Or, we encounter the “mismemory of Communism” that creates “two moral vocabularies, two sorts of reasoning, two different pasts”: that of things done to “us” and that of things done by “us” to “others.” This is what Tony Judt called “voluntary amnesia.”46
Former Communists did make sometimes spectacular comebacks. This was possible because after 1989 there were no tribunals and no recourses to state-endorsed vengeance. This shows that the refusal to organize collective political justice was after all the correct approach. Let me say that the controversies regarding the treatment of the former party and secret police activists and collaborators were among the most passionate and potentially disruptive in the new democracies. Some argued, together with Poland’s first post-Communist and anti-Communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, that one needed to draw a “thick line” with the past and fully engage in a consensual effort for building an open society. Others, for reasons that went from unconditional anti-Communism to cynical manipulation of an explosive issue, argued that without one form or another of “purification” the new democracies would be fundamentally perverted. The truth, in my view, resides somewhere in between: the past cannot and should not be denied, covered with a blanket of shameful oblivion. Confronting the traumatic past, primarily via remembrance and knowledge, results in achieving moral justice.47 Real crimes did take place in those countries, and the culprits should be identified and brought to justice. But legal procedures and any other form of legal retribution for past misdeeds should always take place on an individual basis, and preserving the presumption of innocence is a fundamental right for any human being, including former Communist apparatchiks. In this respect, with all its shortcomings, the lustration law in the Czech Republic offered a legal framework that prevented mob justice. In Romania, where no such law was passed and access to personal secret police files was systematically denied to citizens (while these files were used and abused by those in power), the political climate continued to be plagued by suspicion, murky intrigues, and dark conspiratorial visions.48
Even after NATO’s eastward enlargement and the entry of most East European countries into the European Union (with the notable exception of the Western Balkans), there is a striking tension between pluralist-democratic and ethnocratic or radical parties and groups in these societies. Often during post-Communism, it seemed as if there was a yearning for new figures for the future, an expectation of the materialization of what Walter Benjamin called the “Messianic time.” The search for new eschatologies was more visible in the East, where all social contrasts are exacerbated by the breakdown of old identities. But the return of myth was part of the universal uneasiness with the cold, calculated, zweckmassig rationality of the iron cage: prophets and demagogues (often the same persons) did have audiences in the East as well as in the West. The latter is, however, better protected: institutions function impersonally, procedures are deeply embedded in civic cultures. In the post-Communist world they are still under construction or yet to entirely meet requirements of a fully functioning liberal democracy. Things are of course extremely complex: there is a feeling of exhaustion, of too much rhetoric, a sentiment that politicians are there simply to cheat. On the other hand, it is precisely this exhaustion of traditional worldviews, this postmodern syndrome of repudiating grandiose teleological constructs in favor of minidiscourses that is conducive to ennui and yearning for alternative visions that would not reject boldness and inventiveness. Yes, this is a secularized world, but the profane substitutes for traditional mythologies still have a future.
After the extinct period of “legitimation from the top” (through ideological rituals of simulated participation, mobilization, and regimentation), in most of these countries nascent legal-procedural legitimation was paralleled (or countered) by something that, echoing Eric Hobsbawm’s insightful analysis of the new discourses of hatred, could be called legitimation from the past.49 The more inchoate and nebulous this past, the more aggressive, feverish, and intolerant were the proponents of the neoromantic mythologies. The rise of nationalism as a compensation for perceived failure and externally imposed marginality, as flight from the complexities of modernity into the politics of collective salvation, was linked to this ambiguous Leninist legacy of distorted modernity and dictated human needs, and to the pre-Leninist ethnicoriented cultural forms in the region. In other words, the discomfiture with democratic challenges and the prevailing constitutional pluralist model was linked not only to the transition from Leninism but to the larger problem of legitimation and the existence of competing visions of the common good, as well as the coalescence of movements and parties around different and frequently rival symbols of collective identity. To put it simply, the post-Communist first wave of primordial passions and the appeal of the new exclusionary discourses remind us that neither the premises nor the outcomes of modernity have been universally accepted. This point was correctly raised by S. N. Eisenstadt in a path-breaking analysis of the revolutions of 1989: “These problems, however, do not simply arise out of the breakdown of ‘traditional’ empires, the transition from some ‘premodern’ to fully modern, democratic society, or from a distorted modernity to a relatively tranquil stage which may well signal some kind of ‘end of history.’ The turbulence evident in Eastern Europe today bears witness to some of the problems and tensions inherent in modernity itself, attesting to the potential fragility of the whole project of modernity.”50
POST-COMMUNIST PARADOXES
I think that in the first ten years of post-Communism we dealt with a resilient, persistent form of barbarism that was situated in the very heart of modernity. Radical nationalism was the absolute exacerbation of difference, its reification, the rejection of the claim to a common humanity, and the proclamation of the ethno-national distinction as the primordial fact of human existence. As Franz Grillparzer wrote many years ago, “From humanity, through nationality, to barbarity”—a maxim dear to the hearts of intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Adam Michnik, who rehabilitated the notion of pariah and emphasized the nobility of exclusion in contrast to the humiliation of forced inclusion. Jack Snyder’s by now classical thesis still holds valid: the political elites’ willingness to be accountable affects the degree of nationalist instrumentalization during the transition to democracy. To avoid surrendering their authority, these elites hijack political discourse, while hampering and taking advantage of the citizens’ reduced capacity for political participation.51