The main threat in some (if not most) of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe is that of a lapse into “competitive authoritarianism,” where “formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” As Levitsky and Way point out, up until the second decade of post-Communism, Croatia, Ukraine, and Serbia were textbook examples for this model, and Russia and Belarus still seemed to fall in this category. It could be argued that better terms for this democratic degeneration are delegative democracy and illiberal democracy.52 I chose the first to stress the fundamental danger of a deep-seated, persistent, and widening gap between political and civil societies in the former Soviet bloc. It is not surprising that, in most of these countries, critical intellectuals (many of them former dissidents under the Communist regime) insist on the need for moral clarity. The political class, however, remains narcissistically self-centered and impervious to such injunctions to live truthfully. After all, it was Karl Marx who said that any new society will carry for a long time its birthmarks, in this case the habits, mores, visions, and mentalities (forma mentis) associated with the Leninist faith.
Furthermore, as Karen Dawisha has argued, electocracies should not be automatically regarded as liberal democratic communities.53 Thus, in reality constitutionalism remains marred by its very universalistic formalism (its coldness, and its often decried tediousness) and the subsequent failure to adjust to pressures resulting from collective efforts aimed at reverting, subverting, and obliterating the project of modernity (by which I tentatively understand the substantive construction of politics in an anti-absolutist, individualistic, and contractual way).54 But the return of the repressed, real and often disturbing, does not exhaust the picture. Indeed, despite all the setbacks, the ongoing debates in Europe (and in Eastern Europe in particular) remain fundamental to the attempt at a reinvention of politics. Julia Kristeva is thus right: “The problem of the twentieth century was and remains the rehabilitation of the political. An impossible task? A useless task? Hitler and Stalin perverted the project into a deathly totalitarianism. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, which calls into question, beyond socialism, the very basis of the democratic governments that stemmed from the French Revolution, demands that one rethink that basis so that the twenty-first century will not be the reactionary domain of fundamentalism, religious illusions, and ethnic wars.”55
This clustered experience is best described by what Hanson and Ekiert identified as the key paradox of post-Communism: “The ‘Leninist legacy’ mattered both less and more than scholars originally expected.” In other words, the impact of the common Communist experience has been mediated by specific “choices made by strategically located actors in various critical moments of the unfolding processes of change.”56 Moreover, similar challenges posed by the past produced varying policies and institutional frameworks. Nevertheless, the ideological extinction of Leninist formations left behind a vacuum to be filled by syncretic constructs drawing from the pre-Communist and Communist heritage (from nationalism, in both its civic and ethnic incarnations, to liberalism, democratic socialism, conservatism, populism, neo-Leninism, or even more or less refurbished Fascism). We see a fluidity of political commitments, allegiances, and affiliations—the breakdown of a political culture (that Leszek Kołakowski and Martin Malia correctly identified as Sovietism) and the painful birth and consolidation of a new one. The moral identity of the individuals has been shattered by the dissolution of all previously cherished—or at least accepted—values and icons. In the immediate aftermath of 1989, individuals seemed eager to abandon their newly acquired sense of autonomy on behalf of different forms of protective, pseudosalvationist groups and movements. This was emphasized by Haveclass="underline" “In a situation when one system has collapsed and a new one does not yet exist, many people feel empty and frustrated. This condition is fertile ground for radicalism of all kinds, for the hunt for scapegoats, and for the need to hide behind the anonymity of a group, be it socially or ethnically based.”57 Assumed responsibility for personal actions, risk-taking, and questioning of institutions on the base of legitimate claims for improvement are still developing.58 All established ranks, statuses, traditions, hierarchies, and symbols have collapsed, and new ones are still tottering and quite problematic. Envy, rancor, and resentment have replaced the values of solidarity, civility, and compassion that once drove the East European revolutionaries. As Polish sociologist Jacek Kurczewski noted, “Poverty is accompanied by envy, a feeling that becomes dominant in times of economic change. The feeling expresses itself not so much in a striving for communism, but in a defense of socialist mechanisms of social security under conditions of a capitalist economy and suspicion of everyone who has achieved success in these new conditions.”59 Instead of enjoying promises of emancipation and revolutionary change, many individuals are now sharing a psychology of helplessness, defeat, and dereliction.
There are immense problems in the continuity of both social and personal memory. Without a complete legal, political, and historical reckoning in relation to the totalitarian Communist experience, civic consensus and political trust can hardly mature. Despite the ever-widening rescue operation of and working through fragmented memories (both individual and collective), transparency about a guilty and traumatic past by means of “politics of knowledge” (to use Claus Offe’s term) has yet to be achieved. Few years ago, Timothy Garton Ash was struggling to find an explanation for this state of affairs: “Any explanation for the absence of wider truth commissions must be speculative. I would speculate that part of the explanation, at least, lies in this combination of the historically defensible but also comfortable conviction that the dictatorship was ultimately imposed from outside and, on the other hand, the uneasy knowledge that almost everyone had done something to sustain the dictatorial system.”60 The externalization of responsibility (the delocalization of the history of the Communist regimes by blaming them on either the Soviets or alien groups) and the forgetting of “the millions of Lilliputian threads of everyday mendacity, conformity and compromise” (in the words of T. Garton Ash) can sustain only a vague recognition of the need for a shared vision of the public good—a point that has been emphasized by Václav Havel, George Konrád, and Adam Michnik. The willingness to assume responsibility for one’s actions, to take risks, and to question institutions on the basis of legitimate claims for improvement is still embryonic.61 This may explain the political turmoil and antigovernment demonstrations in Hungary in the fall of 2006 or the parliamentary putsch in April 2007 against Romanian president, Traian Băsescu, in full disregard of the Constitutional Court’s decision.62