It would be a serious fallacy to view these trends as marking the rise of neo-Communism. For such a development to take place, ideological zeal and utopian-eschatological motivation are needed. Neither former Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski nor former Hungarian primeminister Ferenc Gyurcsányi, both linked to the post-Communist Left, can be described as ideologically driven. Instead, the successors to the Leninist parties have to cope with widespread sentiments of disaffection from socialist rhetoric. The Serbian socialists, East Germany's Party of Democratic Socialism (now part of die Linke), and Romania's Social Democratic Party are emblematic of the ongoing trend toward cooperation between radical nationalist forces and those who yearn for bureaucratic collectivism. Another indication of the weak institutionalization and shallow social insertion of post-Communist parties is the phenomenon of “electoral volatility.”66 The mainstream political parties are still challenged periodically by “unorthodox political formations” (e.g., Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania). The status quo remains fragile because of its unpopularity among sections of the population still attracted by ever-resurgent fantasies of salvation.
This tendency is a result of the ideological chaos created by the collapse of state socialism, which left populism as the most convenient and frequently the most appealing ersatz ideology. It was relatively easy to get rid of the old regime with its spurious claim to cognitive infallibility, but much more daunting to install a pluralist, multiparty order, a civil society, rule of law, and a market economy. Freedom, it turned out, was easier to gain than to guarantee. Uprootedness, loss of status, and uncertainties about identity provide fertile ground for paranoid visions of conspiracy and treason; hence the widespread attraction of nationalist salvationism. Leszek Kołakowski points to a paradoxical attitude toward prophetic stances in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: the intellectuals' disillusionment with redemptive-apocalyptical teleologies led them to retreat from political matters, which generated an ethical pauperization of politics, as there remain fewer intellectual teachers. The door is wide open to pseudodoctrines and negative political eclectisms.67 Marching with Stalin's (or Ceaușescu's) portrait is an expression not of Stalinism (or Ceaușescuism) but rather of disaffection with the status quo, perceived as traumatic, anarchic, corrupt, politically decadent, and morally decrepit. Especially in Russia, where this disaffection is linked to the sentiment of imperial loss, cultural despair can lead to dictatorial trends. Exaggerated though they may be, references to “Weimar Russia” capture the psychology of large human groups whose traditional collectivistic values have disappeared and who cannot recognize themselves in the new values of individual action, risk, and intense competition. Recent developments in Russia strengthen the impression that the experiment of open politics in Russia lost out to the push for the reaffirmation of imperial status.68 Following Martin Krygier, I consider that, twenty years after the demise of Communism, in the former Soviet bloc we are experiencing a new ideosphere, which is by definition comprehensive, inclusive, and provisional. Moreover, the postmodern political condition renders transitory even organicist, syncretic, and redemptive radicalisms (as political movements).69 For instance, the last Romanian general elections (in 2009) produced encouraging results: the xenophobic, chauvinistic Romania Mare Party did not amass enough votes to get into parliament. However, this hardly means that the ideas that sustained it for so many years have disappeared from the public sphere.
Leninist regimes kept their subjects ignorant of the real functioning of the political system. Tony Judt observed that “by concentrating power, information, initiative and responsibility into the hands of the party-state, Communism had given rise to a society of individuals not merely suspicious of one another and skeptical of any official claims or promises, but with no experience of individual or collective initiative and lacking any basis on which to make informed public choices.”70 Furthermore, the chasm between official rhetoric and everyday reality, the camouflaging of the way decisions were reached, the anti-elective pseudo-elections, and other rituals of conformity neutralized critical faculties and generated a widespread wariness toward the validity of politics as such. Furthermore, anti-Communism tended to be just another supra-individual, nondifferentiated form of identity. The problem now is that the aggregation of social interests needs a clarification of the political choices, including an awareness of the main values that people advocate. As Martin Palouš put it, “The most important and most dynamic factor in post-totalitarian politics has to do with the way people in post-communist societies perceive and conceptualize the social reality and political processes they are a part of.”71 The difficulties and ambiguities of the left-right polarization in post-Communist regimes are linked to the ambiguity and even obsolescence of the traditional taxonomies.
With the private sector and entrepreneurial class still in the making, political liberalism and the civic center associated with it are under siege. Most political parties in the region are coalitions based on personal and group affinities rather than on an awareness of common interests, leading to fragmentation, divisiveness, political convulsions, and instability. One reason for the rise of populist movements is the paternalist temptation, a response to the felt need for protection from the destabilizing effects of the transition to competition and market. Another significant factor is the perception that the civic-romantic stage of the revolution is over and the bureaucracy now is intent upon consolidating its privileges. The campaigns against historic figures of Solidarity (including Adam Michnik, Bronisław Geremek, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and Lech Wałęsa) as “traitors” and “protectors of the establishment” were an expression of the search for a “second revolution” that would legislate morality. Critical intellectuals seemed to have lost much of their moral aura and were often attacked as champions of futility, architects of disaster, and incorrigible daydreamers. Their status was extremely precarious precisely because they symbolized the principle of difference that neo-authoritarian politics tends to suppress. In the context of widespread disenchantment with political involvement, their moderation remains a crucial element of social equilibrium. It is essential to avoid mass hysteria, to recognize the need for constitutional consensus, and to foster a culture of predictable procedures. If these kinds of attacks gather momentum, they could jeopardize the still precarious pluralist institutions. Ralf Dahrendorf poignantly expressed this imperative: “Where intellectuals are silent, societies have no future.” In a deeply fragmented social and public environment, under the constant pressures of globalization, Dahrendorf believed that, despite its diminished appeal, the nexus of ideas and action had in no way lost its revitalizing potential as a force of freedom.72
Political reform in all these post-Communist societies has not gone far enough in strengthening the counter-majoritarian institutions (including independent media and the market economy) that would diminish the threat of new authoritarian experiments catering to powerful egalitarian-populist sentiments. The main dangers in this regard are tendencies linked to statism, clericalism, religious fundamentalism, ethnocentrism, and militaristic Fascism. These themes appeared clearly in the discourse of ethnocratic populism, as evinced by Vadim Tudor's Greater Romania Party, but also among supporters of Slovakia's Vladimir Mečiar, Serbia's Radical Party, and the xenophobic groups and movements in Russia generically associated with Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party or Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Even Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has resorted to such rhetorical strategies to weaken his liberal and socialist adversaries. Some observers have foreseen a split in the region, with the more advanced countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states) developing a culture of impersonal democratic procedures, while the Southern tier was supposed to be beset by what Ken Jowitt has called “movements of rage.” Yet developments in Hungary, Poland, or Latvia in recent years have shown that such regional divisions are not so clear-cut. Marc Howard's insights on the demobilized nature of the civil societies within the countries of the former Soviet bloc offer a persuasive explanation for the absence of a middle path between apathy and violence. The comprehensive penetration of society by the state under Communism produced a “monstrous autonomy of the political,”73 leading to disengagement, mistrust of voluntary associations, and deep engagement in private rather than public spheres of interaction. Democratic protest and opposition in Central and Eastern Europe have been shaped by a combination of inherited disaggregation and a general disappointment with the reality of nonpaternalistic social life.