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
Communism was indeed a fantastic scenario of human self-aggrandizement, an exercise in unbounded magic and self-delusion, an attempt to escape from the constraints of alleged bourgeois pettiness and an offer for millions to vicariously live in “another country.” If one maintains a number of ethical criteria in interpreting the main traumatic experiences of the last century, it is hard not to agree with Anne Applebaum:
Now, at the end of the twentieth century, it finally makes sense to look back at the evolution of communism as a single phenomenon. While we have not perhaps reached the end of the end of the history of communism, the story already has a clear beginning and a clear middle: it is now possible to trace the direct lines of influence, ideological and financial, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Ho Chih Minh to Pol Pot, from Castro to the MPLA in Angola. It is also possible to trace the links between their remarkably similar systems of repression…. Communism now looks bad enough by itself.107
Undoubtedly, for long decades Karl Marx's ideas were distorted almost beyond recognition. But it is impossible to completely separate the Bolshevik praxis from these ideas. There is a temptation to present the Soviet experiment as an aberration in the history of the revolutionary, socialist left, and to exempt the basic Marxist schema from any culpability for this experiment. Those so tempted (from French Socialist politician Jacques Attali to influential American historian Geoff Eley) often invoke the role of modern social democratic movements and parties in advancing the causes of both political democracy and social justice. Yet the undeniably profound achievements of social democracy in the West have more to do with the legacies of Ferdinand Lassalle and Eduard Bernstein, Léon Blum and Willy Brandt, Olaf Palme and Michael Harrington—all committed democrats—than with the revolutionary chiliasm and dialectical critique of law and morality that are deeply rooted within Marxism and can be found in the Communist Manifesto.