Post-communist Political Development

1. Post-communist Political Development Lecture on June 1, 2009

2. Aftermath of 1989 Since the Revolutions of 1989 we have considered the fate of those who made the revolution in Poland (Dunn’s workers in the Alima factory), the fate of those most negatively effected by the transition to liberal capitalism (the Roma of Eastern Europe). We have also seen how the end of communist rule created the space for debates over national identity to emerge as in the case of Poland’s contested re-construction of history in the wake of Jan Gross’ work. With Havel’s memoir we gain insight into the fate of dissidents who provided the ethical basis for opposition to communism and the leadership for a non-violent transition to democracy and liberal capitalism. How did they fare as the prominent among them (Havel, Walesa, Goncz) became the Presidents of newly independent states? What were the regrets and adjustment difficulties they faced as they transitioned from the realm of dissent to the realm of institutionalized politics?

3. Regrets, I’ve had a few… “I miss being in touch with the former dissidents, that is, the chartists, all the more so because I get along better with them than I do with most of the new politicians. I also miss the circle of my literary colleagues with whom I went through the difficult years of the 1970s and 1980s; we did many things together in an attempt to preserve at least some kind of continuity of free literary expression in that underground gloom. I keep saying I’m going to make it up to them in some way, but I never manage to get around to it.” (Havel, p. 260)

4. Havel: Additional Sources • Václav Havel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia • http://old.hrad.cz/favicon.ico (Havel’s famous New Years speech, 1990) • http://www.ce-review.org/favicon.ico (review of Bozoki, ed., Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe , 1999)

5. Adjustment difficulties Havel’s memoir contains a number of reoccurring tensions and conflicts that might signal the presence of adjustment difficulties faced more generally by dissidents turned presidents and by new incumbents facing the old, entrenched bureaucracies: • Epic conflicts with Prime Minister Klaus – while conflicts elsewhere perhaps less intense, both Walesa (v. PM Olszewski) and Goncz (v. PM Antall) had re-occurring battles with PMs. • Simmering tensions with administrative staff • On-going tensions between personal liberty, intellectual personhood and the demands of the office

6. Placing this personal narrative into a broader context Situating these tensions into the broader context of post-communist political development, we can further identify some central difficulties underlying the transition from resistance to governance; difficulties prevalent across a number of cases: • Difficulty of routinizing charismatic leadership – leading resistance as opposed to succeeding in ordinary politics may well require different skills. As Adam Michnik remarked with reference to Walesa: “Robin Hood is not suited for #10 Downing Street” • Difficulty of moving from the unity produced by shared opposition to communism to the disunity, conflict, and divisiveness of ordinary multi-party politics • Difficulty accommodating the personal rivalries and grudges held by peripheral opposition figures becoming more prominent politically after 1989 – Klaus, Orban (in Hungary), the Kaczynski brothers (in Poland) were all bit players during the years of opposition to communism who have been more than willing to settle old scores against their former colleagues once they achieved greater power. • Difficulty adjusting political philosophies that took shape during the resistance years to the realities of liberal capitalism. How suitable is the “ethical charisma of 1989” (as Jowitt labels these philosophies) to the mundane world of electoral politics and technocratic governance?

7. A broader context conditioned by the Leninist legacies? According to Jowitt, these difficulties represent more than just transitional adjustments, they represent the negative legacies of Leninist rule. From this perspective, the legacy of opposition to communism has produced political elites incapable of routine democratic governance; additionally the rapid collapse of communism has left disaggregated and disoriented elites in power with little sense of established norms and practices of interaction; no traditions of a ‘loyal opposition’, no capacity for organized discipline essential for providing structured, coherent governing cabinets or coalitions. Politics is essentially personalized, not programmatic or bureaucratized. Parties are driven more by individual leaders than by adherence to long established ideological tenets like social democracy or conservative doctrine.

8. Elites and Publics Furthermore, these deficiencies at the elite level are negatively complimented by detrimental Leninist legacies at the social level where political culture has arguably been deformed under communist rule. Among the negative legacy traits identified by Jowitt: the privileging of private over public virtues as people valorize personal relationships not public engagement such as running for office or getting involved politically; the prevalence of a “ghetto political culture” characterized by distance from and hostility toward those in power; the prevalence of rumor and cynical jokes as “covert political discourse”; the spread of a narrow self-serving individualism fostering corruption and a disengagement from the public good; the absence of a “culture of impersonal measured action” required for the collective, sustained pursuit of shared public or political goals. Additionally, a culture of tolerance towards one’s political opponents which underlies democratic political development also appears unsustainable in light of the abuses of ‘nomenklatura privatization’ whereby former Party members were able to utilize their waning political power to acquire economic power.

9. Pre-conditions for Democracy? Implicit in Jowitt’s analysis of the negative legacies of Leninism is an assessment of the conditions required for democratic political development; conditions not present in eastern Europe due especially to the extent to which Leninism reinforced the traditional patterns of authority associated with peasant societies. Pre-conditions: a political culture characterized by a shared public identity of citizenship, tolerance and the valorization of public virtues; an established, disciplined political elite and sustainable economic development that minimizes socio-economic inequalities. In the absence of these pre-conditions, Jowitt predicted Latin American style outcomes in post-communist eastern Europe – the rise of the military and pervasive populism a la Peron. While these dire predictions have not been substantiated, other aspects of Jowitt’s analysis do appear to have been borne out as divisive political elites, apathetic publics, weak civil societies continue to set the region apart from West European polities.

10. On the other hand… While some aspects of Havel’s memoir appear to bear out the “burden of history” argumentation represented by Jowitt, other aspects demonstrate the capacity to “escape from history” through a process of creative innovation; through processes of adopting and adapting Western institutions to suit individual/local needs; through processes of accommodating change while resisting the labeling of obsolescence. In an odd way, Havel is like the workers of the Alima factory– constantly striving to demonstrate his continued worth and relevance under changed circumstances.

11. Transitioning to Democracy without Historically determined pre-conditions: The “Tabula Rosa” approach Since Jowitt’s essay was published in 1992 a considerable amount of scholarship has followed in his footsteps, tracing historically rooted factors influencing contemporary post-communist political development. While diverging from Jowitt in terms of which legacies are privileged in the analysis (communist or precommunist, for example) and in seeing such legacies as both positive and negative, this literature shares a structural theoretical orientation – linking structural factors like culture, level of socioeconomic development, demography to current political outcomes. This literature also shares a common opposition to an alternative approach to the study of transitional polities, one that maintains the importance of agency (a voluntaristic theoretical orientation) in bringing about desired outcomes. From this perspective, democracy does not need committed democrats – at the outset of transition all that is required is a critical mass of elites willing to reform their political system even if for self-interested reasons. Once liberal capitalist institutions are established, the proper behaviors will follow from the incentives these institutions generate and, over time, even the appropriate attitudes will be forthcoming as a result of socialization processes.

12. Additional Sources For more on the debate between these two approaches, see: B. Crawford and A. Lijphart, eds., Liberalization and Leninist Legacies: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Transition , 1997 on-line publication: • http://repositories.cdlib.org/favicon.ico For recent contributions to the legacies framework, see: Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change,” in The Journal of Politics, 69, no. 4, 2007 and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Postcommuist Democracy: Legacies and Outcomes,” Review Essay in Comparative Politics , 35, no. 2, 2003.

13. Point of Convergence Interestingly, even as these approaches differ in their assumptions -- the burden of history versus the tabula rosa (or clean slate) of post- communist ‘new beginnings’ -- they both converge on the significance of the West as a crucial external actor either “adopting” eastern Europe and saving it from an historically predetermined fate of problematic post-communist political development as in Jowitt’s analysis or as an incentivizing and constraining force reinforcing elite –driven reforms, as in much of the literature on the EU accession process.

14. Post-Communist or Post-Revolutionary? Havel’s memoir thus offers an opportunity to adjudicate between these competing approaches to the study of post-communist political development: which side finds greater support or substantiation in his account? Alternatively, perhaps we can also find support for an interpretation of contemporary political development that places more analytical weight on the process of building institutions and reconstructing national identities in the wake of revolutionary upheaval. For example, two outcomes of the 1989 revolutions have had consequential effects on contemporary politics across the region: the dual executive system which regularly pits prime ministers against activist presidents and the polarizing presence of the ex-communist successor parties. Because the revolutions of 1989 negotiated orderly transitions that had interesting institutional by-products such as an uncertain division of powers between presidents and prime ministers, while leaving the communists alive and able to re-enter the politic sphere, they have had lasting constitutive effects. Since it is not entirely clear that the unfolding of these revolutions was solely or even largely pre-determined by deeper historical legacies such as Jowitt’s Leninist legacies, I would argue that 1989 represents a conjuncture of both structural and contingent factors comprising a new and arguably more influential ‘legacy.’

15. Additional Sources • On the (unexpectedly!) useful role of communist successor parties in promoting vigorous political competition, see Anna Grzymala-Busse, Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies, Cambridge University Press, 2007. • http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v048/48.3baylis.pdf (Thomas Baylis, “Presidents versus Prime Ministers: Shaping Executive Authority in Eastern Europe,” in World Politics, 48 (April 1996) • http://dss.ucsd.edu/~mshugart/semi-presidentialism.pdf (M. Shugart, “Semi-Presidential Systems: Dual Executives and Mixed Authority Patterns,” Draft Paper, 2005 • O. Protsyk, “The Politics of Intra-executive conflict in semi-presidential regimes in Eastern Europe,” in East European Politics and Societies , vol. 19, no. 2, 2005 Note: even though the Czech Republic is not a semi-presidential regime, and the presidency is largely a ceremonial office (like Germany and Hungary), this has not prevented tensions and conflicts from emerging.

16. Re-constructing National Identity Havel’s account can, therefore, be read as a post-revolutionary memoir of institutional conflict and contested political authority typical for the region, but also as a rendering of certain aspects unique to the Czech Republic. For example, while both Poland and Hungary* have experienced vigorous debates on national identity pitting conservative nationalists (some with anti-Semitic leanings) against liberal secular cosmopolitans, similar debates on national identity and purpose appear to be lacking in the CR (see, Havel p. 159). On the other hand, there may be more subtle markers of Czech national identity construction discernable in the text. Markers such as Havel’s relative silence on the Roma and the persistent violation of their rights in the CR. * On the aggressive nationalist re-construction of an idealized Hungarian past (as exemplified by the reburial and re-evaluation of Admiral Horthy-- Hungary’s authoritarian leader before and during WWII), see Rothschild, p. 223.