REINVENTING POLITICS

The creation of civil society in East and Central Europe, or what I call the reinvention of politics in a non-Machiavellian way, was centrally premised upon a rebellion against the mortifying role of ideology: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”⁷⁵ The moral anesthesia of the population was the most important ally of post-totalitarian Communist power, and one should hasten to add, it is the ally of any bureaucratic-alienating structure. The system worked as long as the prevailing lie was accepted and tolerated by the individual, as long as the average citizen—the greengrocer posting in the shop's window the meaningless sign “Workers of the World, Unite!”—continued to endorse the ideological nonsense, even though he was aware that all this verbiage was nothing but a collection of lies. When Solzhenitsyn asked his fellow Soviet writers to cease lying, that is, to abandon ideology, his point was that moral life starts at the moment we refuse to lie. The world may be full of injustice, but let me not add to it. The problem, therefore, was not simply to identify the source of oppression in the government but also to realize how each individual was tied to the power structure and that it was in his power to emancipate himself. Upon reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, Russian intellectuals heard “a trumpet calling to the terrible court of history.”⁷⁶ The pain of millions recounted in the book shook off the cynicism and the hypocrisy perpetuated by the post-totalitarian order in the East or by ideological folly in West.⁷⁷ At the same time, Soviet leaders realized the potentially irreversible caesura generated by The Gulag Archipelago. In 1974, at a Politburo meeting, none other than Leonid Brezhnev straightforwardly asserted that “we have every basis to imprison Solzhenitsyn, for he has encroached on what is most sacred—on Lenin, on our Soviet system, on Soviet power, on everything that is dear to us.”⁷⁸ Indeed, the revelations spelled doom; as one letter to the Soviet Politburo stated, “The Gulag Archipelago is the indictment with which your trial at the hands of the human race begins.”⁷⁹ Solzhenitsyn, along with those who followed his example, undermined, as one party hack put it in 1988, “the foundations on which our present life rests.”⁸⁰

According to Havel, the system's ability to turn its victims into accomplices made post-totalitarianism different from classical dictatorships. The very idea of change had vanished, and the individuals were faced with the imperative of coming to terms with what appeared to them as the only possible form of life. Emancipation, the birth of an alternative to the all-pervasive lie, came not as an exogenous benefit bestowed by others, but at the moment when some individuals decided to put an end to grotesque forms of self-denial. His or her decision to break the enchanted circle of complicity with the power-that-be and to utter his or her own truth was the premise for the civil society to resurrect itself. Therefore, Havel (along with George Konrád, János Kis, Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik, Martin Palouš, Miklós Haraszti, and others) advanced an alternative discourse on individuality that created the potential for a reconstruction of community and a redefinition of subjectivity. It was to become the embryonic state of a willingness to assume responsibility for one's own actions, to take risks, and to question institutions on the basis of a necessary accountability. Echoing the teaching of his mentor Jan Patočka, Havel asserted that “an act is right not because it is likely to lead to favorable results (utilitarianism) nor because it is the universal duty of the agent to behave thus under the circumstances (deontology), but because it is the essentially human thing to do, a genuine aim of life.”⁸¹ The Central European dissidents provided an identity conceptualization opposed both to the manipulative inclusion of “really existing socialism” and to the “chiliastic trope of the New Man” at the core of Leninism.⁸² Moreover, in post-Communism, the legacy of their writings provided a durable check on “pseudo-chiliastic” fantasies of salvation, based upon the exclusion and marginalization of the very category of otherness; it provided a safety-net against such destructive and stigmatizing collective vanities. It was a critique of those “cows that proclaimed themselves for decades as holy,” thus rejecting “any divine principles” buttressing their sacredness.⁸³

Havel emphasized one fundamental aspect of this notion of individuality: “[The notion of human responsibility] has begun to appear as the fundamental point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity, something like the ‘idea’ that determines its degree and type. It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dies out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart.”⁸⁴ He proposed an “existential revolution” that aimed to “expose the totalitarian colonization of post-traditional identity at the level of its very formation.” It was based upon a vertical interpretation of identity, which was shaped ethically, “constituted in responsibility to the other.” This vertical ethics, inspired by French philosopher Emanuel Levinas, was, according to Martin Matustik, “suspicious towards totalitarian ambitions of ecological freedom; towards historical projection of the ego on revolutionary identity; towards conservative nostalgia for the ego of the nation, party, totem, or the church.”⁸⁵ The revolt of the powerless did not have an explicit political dimension. The politics of antipolitics consisted of a discreet, unobtrusive, almost Mozartian attempt to restore the dignity of the individual. It confronted totality from within, preparing the ground for the actual revolution: “Given the complex system of manipulation on which the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it is also dependent, every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political by excellence.”⁸⁶ This ethical insurrection took place “in the real sphere of potential politics in the post-totalitarian system,” outside the perverse and perverting circle of power. The touchstone of a countersociety was the individual's decision to proclaim his or her inner independence. Commitment to those “eternal values” derided and subverted by Communist (or Fascist) ideocratic dictatorships did become the main strategy for reasserting freedom as a constitutive human and social possibility.

Ultimately, the crucial problem with the projects of the New Man and of Marxian freedom and with post-Communist fantasies of salvation “was not that they were centered on Faith, but that they were centered on Faith pretending to be knowledge.”⁸⁷ In the light of the analysis of Havel's “existential revolution,” Marxism (-Leninism) and post-1989 political mythologies share the quality of “moral blindness” (S. Lukes). They promised to free humankind from specific conditions of morality: from scarcity, from the selfishness or partiality of conflicting individuals and groups, from nonconvergent and incompatible values, and from the anarchy and opacity of a world not subject to collective human control. In pursuing the accomplishment of their promises, they discarded the already existent principles that protect human beings from one another.⁸⁸ Any source of failure was externalized, responsibility existing only at an intergroup level, as the ur-community (e.g., proletariat or nation) pursued its historical mission in counterdistinction to the other-categories (e.g. bourgeoisie, peasantry, Jews, enemy-nation).

Václav Havel and other Eastern European dissidents proposed an alternative in his project of “moral politics,” which would “teach both ourselves and others that politics does not have to be the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculating, calculating, intrigues, secret agreements, and pragmatic maneuvering, but it can also be the art of the impossible, that is the art of making ourselves and the world better.”⁸⁹ The demise of Leninism made it possible to change all the established political paradigms. Nevertheless, the legacy of the twentieth century into the twenty-first is the imprint of the totalitarian ethos lurking under the surface of our daily interactions. I am referring to the symptoms of ur-Leninism or ur-Fascism. They are two sides of the same coin: the temptation of palingenesis and that of the chosen agent of history (i.e., the search a new proletariat or the return to the perfect ethnic community).⁹⁰ The specific nature of these specters should reinforce our agreement on the centrality of Havel's quest: how to exit the castle? His answer is as simple as it is difficult to enact: by regaining the authenticity of human existence. Following Patočka, Havel considered that living in truth was premised on the care of the soul, which in its turn gave the latter a clear sense of order, self-consistency, and inner beauty.⁹¹

The transition from state socialism took place against the background of a universal disparagement of conventional political dichotomies, including a widespread crisis of self-confidence on the part of Western liberalism. In my view, the main ideological successor to Leninism and the principal rival to liberalism was ethnocentric nationalism. One could argue that, taking into account most of the twentieth-century tradition of conceptualizing power in Eastern Europe, the ideal of instituting a society on the basis of procedural norms and against a neutral backdrop of minimal rights and duties had little chance to materialize. On the contrary, a “thick” notion of citizenship based on ideals that require allegiance to the community because of a presupposed “pre-political commonness of its members” seemed more likely to take shape.⁹² In the struggle between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, the former had a considerable head start. After two decades of post-Communism, in what concerns the dominant visions of membership and identity in Eastern Europe, the results are mixed.

No political myth in the twentieth century has proved more resilient, protean, and enduring than nationalism. A comprehensive and potentially aggressive constellation of symbols, emotions, and ideas, nationalism also offers a redemptive language of liberation for long-subjugated or humiliated groups. It would therefore be simply misleading to reduce nationalism to one ready-made interpretation. Conductor Leonard Bernstein used to say that whatever statement one makes about Gustav Mahler's music, the opposite is equally true. This is also the case with nationalism. It is often described as archaic, antimodern, traditionalist, in short reactionary. Other interpretations see it as a driving force of modernizing liberation, an ideology of collective emancipation, and a source of human dignity and pride. Overall, it can be said that nationalism “offers a kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions, but given a new activist social and political form through political action, mobilization, and institutions.”⁹³ Whatever one thinks of it, its ubiquitous presence at the end of the last century and the beginning of the new one is beyond any doubt. The problem, therefore, is to find ways to reconcile it with the democratic agenda. Once the nation becomes the master symbol of identitarian narratives, structures of power and regimes of knowledge are determined by who defines and how are defined the communalities perceived to represent the bedrock of that particular community of people. In other words, how can one tame that violent propensity which a Georgian political philosopher aptly called “the illiberal flesh of ethnicity”?⁹⁴

The return of ethnocentric politics, especially during the 1990s, the agonizing search for roots, and the obsession with identity were major trends of the turn of the twenty-first century in Eastern Europe. They often collided with the inclusive, civic values advocated by former dissidents such Havel or Michnik. The post-Communist first wave of primordial passions and the appeals of the new exclusionary discourses remind us that neither the premises nor the outcomes of modernity have been universally accepted. As tragically demonstrated in the former Yugoslavia, the revival of this specific form of politics can prove noxious to civic-liberal development in the post-communist societies. In most of East and Central Europe ethno-nationalism has fundamentally altered the left-right ideological spectrum.

Usually, it was intellectuals who manufactured discourses that justified nationalist identifications and projections, then the mobilized masses gave these discourses the validation of practical realities. This is, to employ for a moment Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, a process of the naturalization of a nation-centered habitus, meaning a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representation.” This way, nationalism, understood as both structures of power and a regime of knowledge, is transformed into self-reproducing and self-referential reality. Nationalism becomes the “the obvious way of doing and thinking about things.”⁹⁵ The community ordered in such fashion will not only be “known and imagined; it will also be deeply felt and acted out.”⁹⁶ While in the 1960s nationalism appeared at least in the West as an extinct myth, the end of Communism and the new era of international ethnic conflict that followed the Cold War have made nationalism the main competitor to liberalism and civil society. Its most important strength comes precisely from its ability to compensate for the loss of certainties and to offer immediate explanations for failure, confusion, and discomfiture. Nationalism caters to painful collective anxieties, alleviates angst, and reduces the individual to the lowest common denominator: the simple fact of ethnic belonging. At its core lies a revivalist myth (or, to use Roger Griffin's term, a palingenetic one). As many scholars have shown, such a myth is “an archetype of human mythopoeia which can express itself in both secular and religious forms without being ‘derived’ from any particular source or tradition.” Its most important function is to provide the groups employing it in cultural and political practice with new sources of meaning and social function. The main danger inherent to its activation is that it can bring forth an “organically conceived nation to be cleansed of decadence and comprehensively renewed.”⁹⁷