DRAFT, NOT FOR QUOTATION
Shlomo Avineri (The HebrewUniversity, Jerusalem)
CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL TRANSFOMRATION AND
DEVELOPMENT
Theoretical and practicallessons from Eastern Europe
and prospects for the Middle East
The question to what degree do cultural and historical contexts facilitate or hinder developments, especially towards democracy and market economy, has moved into the center of both academic and policy discourses in the last decade and a half mainly due to two sets of occurrences: the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Soviet-style communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe in the years 1989-1991, and the terrorist attacks of September 11th , 2001 and the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both sets of cases, blanket linear deterministic projections have slowly – and sometimes reluctantly – beenreplaced by more nuanced (and knowledgeable) analyses.
The euphoria which accompanied the disintegration of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe was twofold, relating both to the collapse of a totalitarian ideology as well as to the hope for a seamless future development towards political democracy and the introduction of a market economy. Conventional wisdom linked the two with an almost umbilical cord.
One should not overlook the fact that the rapid – and mainly peaceful collapse – of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe took practically everyone – politicians as well as academics, journalists as well as intelligence analysts – by surprise. When Mikhail Gorbachev began introducing the changes into the Soviet system which eventually became known as Glasnost and Perestroika, a lot of skepticism accompanied these developments among Western observes. Even those who saw in it the final vindication of the possibility of loosening up of the system by appearing to introduce something like “Socialism with a human face” à la Dubcek’s 1968 brutally suppressed reforms, had great doubts whether these attempts will not ultimately fizzle out, as did so many of Khrushchev’s steps, due to the entrenched power of Soviet bureaucracy and the recaltricance or inability of totalitarian systems to reform: Jeanne Kirkpatrick was perhaps the most eloquent and influential of these doubters(1).
Others expressed their skepticism in an even more radical fashion, arguing that Gorbachev’s reforms were nothing else than a trick to lull the West’s vigilance: communist tigers will never change their stripes.
Similar reactions could be discerned when General Jaruzelski’s militarized government (by itself a testimony to the weakness and loss of legitimacy of communism at least in Poland), signed in 1989 the Round Table agreement which introduced partially free and multi-party elections in a complex system of power sharing with the Solidarność opposition. This too was seen by many observers in the West as a merely tactical
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defensive mechanism, aimed to endow a totally discredited regime with a semblance of legitimacy – without really giving up the commanding heights of political and economic power.
When the final crash occurred in a reverse of the classical domino theory, epitomized by such high visibility dramatic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague’s Velvet Revolution, the flight and execution of Ceausescu and the final denouement of the failed Moscow coup followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself into 15 independent republics – one could well understand the almost messianic (“End of History”) tones which accompanied this Goetzerdaemmerung. The communist idol, so much worshipped on the one hand as a universal ultimate redemption of all humanity, and so much feared and demonized as an ‘evil empire’ on the other, has eventually turned out to be not only a God That Failed morally and intellectually – but also having feet of clay. Never had such an apparently powerful system collapsed so quickly and decisively - and with so little violence.
One should bear this atmosphere in mind in order to understand the somewhat uncritical euphoric triumphalism of the early 1990’s: it appeared that the sky was the limit. The fall of communism was understood not only as a failure of a deeply flawed system, which never managed to live up even to a minimal fulfillment of its own promises and ideological claims – but was also seen as a vindication of itsideological alternative: absent the totalitarian repression inherent in the Soviet system, democracy and the market would now automatically, as if guided by the hidden hand of the March of History, flourish and triumph. Ironically, this deterministic approach of seeing democracy and capitalism as the inevitabletelos of all mankind, was in a strange way a mirror-image of the old Marxist-Leninist determinism which claimed that all societies are doomed to follow the path of socio-economic development of the West, leading from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.
That Milton Friedman and Karl Marx had, methodologically, much in common has been pointed out before. Overtime, however, the poverty shared by these two opposing examples of this economically-driven model became even more apparent.
Paradoxically, those who believed that societies emancipated from the Soviet yoke would automatically move towards democracy and market economy shared one of the major flaws of Marxist ideology: the almost total overlooking of cultural and historical societal ingredients which cannot be reduced deterministically to what the Marxists used to call “economic infrastructure”. Such a blindness to the relative autonomy of culture and historical heritage was even more ironical when one takes into account the fact that much of Soviet failure had at its base the misguided attempt to transpose to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist 1917 Russia the analysis – and vision – embedded in Marxist theory which were based, after all, on the experience of the industrialized capitalistWest(2).
Looking at the Eastern and Central European scene a dozen years later, one has to account for the differentiated picture which has emerged in the post-Soviet orbit: far from moving forward as a more or less unified phalanx towards democracy and market economy, post-communist societies present a most variegated picture. This should be even more surprising to those thinking in deterministic terms, as after all around 1990 all
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these societies were proceeding from more or less the same starting point: Soviet-style communism – with, one should admit, some variations (e.g. Poland and Hungary), but basically all were in the same one-party state, command economy mould. Why the enormous differences?
Today one can discern four types of post-communist regimes:
(1) Countries which basically succeeded in transforming their politics into working democracies and more or less achieved functioning market economies: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia – and to a lesser degree Slovakia, Lithuania and Latvia;
(2) Countries that encounter difficulties on the road to successful transformation and consolidation, but appear at least on track: Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia; Serbia should probably also be classified under this category;
(3) Countries with some achievements yet with what appears a fundamental difficulty in achieving a meaningful transformation: to this category both Russia and Ukraine should belong, despite significant differences – Russia evolving under Putin into an “authoritarianism with a human face”, while Ukraine still unable to create a viable and functioning state structure based on a open society.
(4) The failures: they range from such reconstituted autocracies like Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, to much more complex cases like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Albania and the rest of the CentralAsianRepublic. This category includes a great variety of different regimes, but they have one characteristic in common: none of them can be classified as a functioning, consolidated democracy. (3)
The question then arises how to account for these vast differences in development and achievement. While development towards democracy and the building of a viable market economy are obviously two distinct subjects and have to be discussed by different methodologies, it should be granted that they are, ultimately, somewhat related – even if one does not subscribe to a simplistic model of the link between the two. In what follows we shall focus mainly on political development, though – mutatis mutandis – some of the same analysis could also be applied to the economic sphere.
There can be no purely economic explanation for the great differences and disparities in development enumerated above: degrees of industrialization and urbanization, regional differences in education or GNP per capita, population density or other quantifiable data do not explain the differences among the countries – and any attempt to relate them to such criteria can be very easily faulted. Because of this, there has been great reluctance to ask these questions and many observers preferred to focus on individual policies adopted – or not adopted – by various post-communist governments, or to focus on the merits or defects of individual leaders – be it Yeltsin or Putin, Lukashenka or Kerimov. The fallacies of such an approach are obvious, though they are driven by the personality-centered public reporting intrinsic to the TV-age as well as the inability of many analysts to relate to issues and problems beyond daily developments.
If one looks carefully at those countries which have experienced successful transition to democracy and also managed to consolidate the transition institutionally, and compare
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them to the less successful cases, one would find one criterion which would ultimately be the best predictor for a successful development toward democracy: the history and political culture of each of these societies before the communist takeover – be it the initial Soviet revolution of 1917 or the post-1945 imposition of Soviet-style communism on Central Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army from German Nazi occupation or local variants of fascist orsemi-fascist regimes. To use a variation of a metaphor sometimes mentioned in this context: once the Soviet Siberian permafrost was lifted after 1989, in those countries where there flowers had been blossoming before – they came up again, and where there was dirt, it too came back to the surface.
Let us look first at Central Eastern Europe. There were not many countries with a full-blown democratic tradition in the region prior to 1939 or 1945, but the examples of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are illuminating, for all the differences among them. Between 1918-39 Czechoslovakia was the one new Central European country with the best democratic record - a multi-party democracy, free press and religious tolerance. It also was the most industrialized country in the region, Bohemia and Moravia having been the major industrial heartland of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Obviously, Czechoslovakia’s politics were not free from serious problems (e.g. Slovak-Czech relations, the position of the German-speaking minority), yet compared with its neighbors it practiced a system which was certainly the most democratic and liberal one in the region. The Czech lands also had a long-standing tradition of political representation – going back to the medieval Bohemian estates and, later, active participation in the post-1867 Austrian Reichsrat in Vienna; this was coupled with a deeply entrenched culture of secularization and religious tolerance, going back to Jan Hus and the Reformation. Both these traits were lacking in the Slovak case, given its different history as part of the HungarianKingdom.
Poland and Hungary had a more complex experience between the two World Wars. The political discourse in both countries was marred by expressions of extreme nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism – drawing on the specific conditions in each country (in Poland the fact that more than 30% of its population was made up of minorities – Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians; in Hungary, the double trauma of Trianon and the Béla Kun communist revolution and the White Terror). Yet both Poland and Hungary maintained between the wars a semblance of parliamentary representation, which while not fully functioning, did allow elections – albeit limited and circumscribed – even under the authoritarian regimes instituted, respectively, by Piłsudski and Horthy. Political parties did exist – despite severe limitations, especially on left-wing parties. Neither Poland nor Hungary, for all the non-democratic traits of their pre-1939 regimes, were straightforward fascist dictatorships.
To this should be added, that both Poland and Hungary had traditions of political representations going back to medieval times: true, they were basically aristocratic in nature (so, originally was also the English parliament); but over centuries they functioned as effective breaks on royal authority and their memory was not totally obliterated. Similarly, while the religious histories of both countries were different, in both of them the Churches – in Poland the Catholic Church, in the Hungarian much more pluralistic
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system mainly the CalvinistChurch – have played an historical role which, for all the difference between both cases –did become a possible counterweight to power. Not totally separate from this was the fact that universities as well as cities had traditionally enjoyed relative corporatistautonomy from the central government.
To endow these historical outlines, rough as they are, with some more coherent theoretical dimension, what has been said here amounts to the claim that countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary did have a centuries-old tradition of civil society – and it is not an accident that in the last decades of communist rule the slogan of “civil society” was a powerful weapon in the hands of dissidents in these countries – Solidarność in Poland, the Civic Forum and People Against Violence in Czechoslovakia and the Democratic Forum (MDF) in Hungary. What turned this term from a mere abstract slogan to a political and social reality was the fact that traditions of civil society didexist in these countries and were not a mere desideratum.
Civil society – which since Tocqueville is considered the mainstay of modern democracy – is the whole network of autonomous organizations and ways of behavior – voluntaryassociations, trade unions and professional associations, churches and religious groups, educational groups and academic institutions – which function independently of state power, have a high degree of legitimacy among the population and draw on significant if not massive participation. Western democracies have been successful precisely in regions where these traditions of civil society have been well developed – the English-speaking world, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries being the prime examples. In parenthesis, part of the weakness of the WeimarRepublic was precisely the fact that civil society in Wilhelmine Germany was relatively weak and many of its components – the professoriat and the students, many spheres of professional organizations on the right, and many working-class organizations of the left – did not view Weimar as a legitimate expression of their political will.
It was this salience of civil society in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary which may at least partially explain why the three attempts to reform communism from within occurred, albeit not successfully, though each attempt left its marks, precisely in these countries: in Poland in 1956 and again in 1968 and 1980, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The existence of a civil society, as well as the memory- whether “real” or “constructed” - of pre-communist structures which could be resurrected or reintroduced, gave dissidents, and later post-communist governments, both an internal legitimacy as well as a program which could appear as restorative in terms of historical experience. “Liberty” could be re-introduced, local traditions re-vived.
If one compares this with the Russian experience one immediately sees the difference. Not only did communist rule last in the Soviet Union longer than in Central Eastern Europe: this is obvious. But pre-1917 Russia had very little of a tradition of civil society and citizens’ participation in government to which the dissidents and reformers could hark back to.
Hundreds of years of Czarist rule created a political and social structure which was highly hierarchical and authoritarian, with very few elements of civil society in existence – by
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itself one of the causes for the failure of constitutional liberalism in Russia between 1905 and 1917. For centuries the country has been run by a hierarchical bureaucracy; there was no municipal or regional self-government; no representative institutions existed (until 1905, and after that their history was one of failure); legal political parties were basically not tolerated; the Orthodox Church was not an autonomous institution vis-a-vis state power, but combining the Cesaropapist Byzantine tradition of Orthodoxy in general with the total subjugation of the Church under Czarist rule at least since Petrine times, became another arm of state control (paradoxically, the only ones relatively free from this yoke were the Jews and the Lutheran Baltic Germans); and – last and not least – the aristocracy, despite its wealth, was not an autonomous social power but was basically a caste in the service of the state, existing at its pleasure and mercy. With very little industrial development, no independent bourgeoisie appeared as an alternative counterweight to state power. The fact that Russian peasants were not freed from serfdom until the 1860’s also meant that the peasantry – which is some Central Eastern European countries could be a focus of anti-state activity – was much more quiescent in Russia (in Ukraine, with its Cossacktradition, the situation was slightly different, as it became tragically and brutally clear in the 1930’s).