Democracy in the New Europe: The Politics of Post‐Communism

Citation

Rankin, A. (2000), "Democracy in the New Europe: The Politics of Post‐Communism", European Business Review, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 355-360. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2000.12.6.355.3

A number of years ago, when I was working at Survival International, I wrote an article for The Independent about the people of West Papua, the half of New Guinea known to its Indonesian colonists as “Irian Jaya”. The article was occasioned by the kidnapping of some neo‐missionary “development workers” by tribesmen. It looked at the conflict of values between the rough‐and‐ready, ecologically balanced Papuan society and the Indonesian mania for economic growth, with subsequent disastrous consequences, both ecological and political. As a result of this article, I was visited in my office by a Czech lady who brought with her the life membership fee for Survival in cash. She told me that she had been involved with the dissident green movement under communism. During that time, she had more success in putting across ideas such as steady‐state economics and decentralisation of power than after 1989. Today’s Czechs, she believed, were less receptive to these ideas freely expressed than they had been to them circulated underground. So mesmerised were they by materialism, and all the superficial “choices” it presents, that they regarded criticism of consumer society as akin to a curious perversion.

Such testimonies tell one more about politics and culture than a thousand electoral statistics. As a political scientist by training, I am aware of the great flaw in this discipline, especially these days when its humanistic components are yielding to glorified opinion polls, along with ideologies such as feminism and “post‐modernism”, which display the same contempt for the individual as the regimes against which East Europeans rebelled. It is no coincidence that such abstractions as European political union, the UK’s Human Rights Act, neo‐liberal economics and the “anti‐discrimination” industry are all given credence by political science. Despite (or because of) expanded education, the gap between ideas and human reality has widened.

Democracy in the New Europe is a scholarly, well‐researched book, to which much time has clearly been devoted, and whose editors are thorough, conscientious and diligent. It seems churlish to criticise, therefore, and yet I must. For Smith, Teague and colleagues often behave like intellectual cheerleaders. Deconstruction is fashionable, I am told, and in this spirit the book can be reduced to a few simple slogans: “Democracy – hooray!”; “Markets – hooray!”; “Communism – boo!”; and “State intervention – boo!”. I look back with nostalgia to the more subtle graffiti artists of Prague, Budapest and East Berlin: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite”.

I have often wondered what would have happened if the fall of the Berlin Wall had taken place ten years earlier, when market fundamentalism was confined to émigré academics and South American generals, and when the EU still consisted of independent nation‐states. Then, perhaps, the transition to democratic pluralism might have been less traumatic. It is fortunate that the collapse of Communism, and state‐socialist models generally, coincided with the rise of a dogma equally scornful of community, tradition and genuine freedom. The revolution of “market forces” has more in common with Communism than its iconoclastic approach to culture. It is, as the more astute of the Seattle demonstrators recognized last year, an attack on the middle class. It revives and universalises the insecurity of working class life before the welfare state, without any of the compensatory communal bonds. East and West, the new proletariat encompasses professional people as well as workers in the traditional sense. Neo‐liberalism, more than Communism, succeeds in tearing down all points of cultural reference, reducing societies to populations of eternally “flexible” transients. It should come as no surprise that rhetorical attacks on the Church in Poland and other Eastern bloc countries should be more strident, if anything, than under the old order. For any institution which champions values other than the material, or upholds the sanctity of human life, threatens the value‐free “liberal” world view.

There are, as the authors acknowledge, several “new Europes”. Eastern Germany is a special case, because of its semi‐detached relationship with the West (which arguably predates partition). Conditions in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia differ markedly from those of Albania, Moldova and Romania, let alone Russia herself. It is the same in Latin America: the problems of implanting democracy are quite different in Argentina and Colombia. The countries of Central “new” Europe have strong middle classes whose political sophistication can match anything in the West and probably surpass it. Further East, the transition has been from semi‐feudalism, through communist dictatorship to free‐market gangsterism. In Central Europe, there is the possibility of reviving democratic instincts long suppressed. Further East, the challenge for democrats is to create a civic culture in societies where the human spirit is strong but political loyalties weak. Abstract charters of “rights”, imposed from above or outside, can never work. Democracy has to be built up gradually, from the grassroots and in ways applicable to national and regional conditions. The rapid, unplanned economic transition has not yet aided this process: it is but one more revolution, when evolution is what is so desperately needed.

In Central “new” Europe, the politically conscious middle class are beginning to see the flip side of capitalism, its threat to their personal and collective security. I do not share the authors’ apparent surprise that such voters are turning to “reformed” Communist parties, or that former Communist bosses are reinventing themselves as social democrats. The same thing, after all, is happening in Western Europe. Romano Prodi, who calls the European Commission “my government” and wants a pan‐European army, is a former Bologna party boss. In “new” and “old” Europe alike, reformed Communists see political union as a progressive panacea, a super‐state that, unlike the discarded Marxist ideal, can never “wither away”. The sole exception seems to be the Party of Democratic Socialism in Eastern Germany, which has working class supporters who retain strong regional roots.

Democracy in the New Europe is a good reference book, but more emphasis on political culture would have made it a rounded study. Like most works of political science today, it avoids the larger questions. And the largest of these is that raised by the Czech lady in my office: should the environment, human values and the quality of life be sacrificed to economic growth?