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
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