Kommentar von Jacques Rupnik
Kommentar von Jacques Rupnik
Recent developments in several new member states of the EU, namely the rise of both right wing and left wing populism, have drawn new attention to East-Central Europe. How to explain the current tide of populist movements in the region? And what implications can be drawn for the future of the European Union? Political scientist and historian Jacques Rupnik gives an analysis of the situation.
In February 1989 I gave a talk at the IWM in Vienna which was entitled “After communism what?” Its main thesis was that the crumbling of communism in East-Central Europe brings with it the prospect of democratic change but that its success will depend on the new balance found between the democratic ethos of opposition to totalitarianism and the resurfacing of deeper undercurrents of the region’s political culture. Just as the term “return to Europe” was ambiguous, so the term “return of democracy” was problematic for anybody who had studied pre-communist politics of East-Central Europe. The test case, I thought, would be Poland, and I had ventured the following question: The mix of Catholicism and nationalism that prevailed in Polish society had made it particularly resistant to communism (certainly in comparison with the egalitarian, social-democratic ethos of the legacy of Masaryk’s pre-war Czechoslovakia).
However, the question was: would these ‘assets’ of the Polish political culture in a context of resistance be also the most conducive to the establishment of a liberal democracy after the collapse of dictatorship? The question implied some doubts on the subject. The developments of the following decade suggested that these had been exaggerated and that Poland was displaying a remarkable combination of “Catholic ethics and the spirit of capitalism.” If Catholics even in Eastern Europe today behave more like Protestants in Max Weber’s time and if the experience of unfreedom and resistance paradoxically provided the conditions for the re-invention of a democratic culture associated with dissent and with the Solidarity movement, then one could dismiss the parallels with the first transition to democracy of the 1920’s. Similar arguments could be made about the rest of the region from the Baltic to Hungary. With consolidated democracies and their new anchor in the European Union a new East-Central Europe (not “new Europe”!) was in the making.
Recent developments in the new member-states of the EU may lead us to reconsider or at least nuance that proposition. Right wing populists in Poland and left wing populists in Slovakia now run the government in alliance with extremist nationalist parties. In Budapest the main opposition party Fidesz calls its supporters to demonstrate in front of Parliament for the resignation of a government on the very day the Parliament had confirmed in a confidence vote the political outcome of the elections of last May. In contrast, in Prague, a minority right wing government that has not gained a confidence vote in Parliament after five months of bickering and mobilizing against the “communist threat” is carrying out a widespread purge of the upper echelons of public administration. Last but not least, the Bulgarian entry into the European Union has been heralded by turning the presidential race into a confrontation between an ex-communist (who claims to like the EU) and a protofascist (who says he hates Turks, Gypsies and Jews).
There is obviously a great diversity of situations and political contexts, but there are also certain common features and trends in the landscape after joining the EU with important implications for the state of democracy and the future of European integration. The first is obviously political instability and the low level of predictability of political actors in the region while elections have just taken place in all the Visegrad countries over the past year. Perhaps more worryingly there is an erosion of trust in democratic institutions. According to a recent Gallup International poll East-Central Europeans appear as the most skeptical concerning the state of democracy (only about one-third have trust in the democratic process). In contrast to a majority of West Europeans the East Europeans do not consider their elections free and fair. To the question “Do you think your voice matters?” some 22% give a positive reply. Democracy today has no rivals but is losing supporters. Populist movements to some extent express that ambivalence and discontent.
This points to the second feature of the current tide of populist movements. They are not anti-democratic (indeed they claim to be the “true voice of the people” and keep demanding new elections or referenda) but anti-liberal. If democracy means popular legitimacy and constitutionalism (the separation of powers) then the populists accept the former and reject the latter (i.e. the idea that constitutional norms and representative democracy have primacy over values and “legitimate” popular grievances). The “politics of values” Polish style is, of course, based on the assumption that “moral order” based on religion should prevail over the freedoms guaranteed by permissive liberalism on issues such as abortion, gays or the death penalty. Asked about his intention to repudiate Darwinism from school curricula the Polish minister of education answered, “We’ve managed without tolerance for long enough. And we shall manage without it even now.” In Slovakia the anti-liberal reaction applies also to the treatment of national minorities. Although in practice there is no significant shift (yet?), but the discourse has changed: Jan Slota, the leader of the Slovak National Party, was reported saying that he envies the Czechs for having expelled the Germans and that he would not mind sending Bugar, the leader of the Hungarian minority, to Mars “without a return ticket.” The legitimation of xenophobia is a major feature of the onslaught on political liberalism.
The common pattern in all the Visegrad countries is one of acute polarization. And this is where the imprint of communist political culture becomes most obvious: you do not face a political opponent with whom you argue or negotiate, but an enemy which you must destroy.
Another aspect of the anti-liberal drive concerns economics. After fifteen years of unabashed free-market policies the populists in Warsaw, Bratislava or Budapest want to bring back the state. In reality, they herald the return of the social question. The losers of the transition cannot really get excited about the merits of the flat tax or the self-serving rhetoric about the “new tigers from the Tatras” (a favorite slogan of the former Slovak government). Since for fifteen years even the socialist parties pushed liberal economic policies, it is not surprising that the social question returns on the right (Kaczyinski or Orban) with nationalist, protectionist overtones. The populists have destroyed the myth of liberal “new Europe” (challenging the decline and stalemate of the “old” one).
The third related feature of the East European populist tide is its onslaught on the elite consensus that has prevailed since 1990. Governments come and go, but they have, on the whole, followed very similar market-oriented policies at home and NATO/EU-oriented foreign policy. The populist challenge to the modernizing political and technocratic elites that have prevailed in the 1990’s comes in two guises: as an anti-corruption drive, on the one hand, and as “de-communization” on the other. In Poland we find an interesting combination of the two with the denunciation of the “original sin” of the 1989 compromise between moderate dissident elites and moderate communist elites which had allowed a non-violent exit from communism. This moral and political fault has allegedly allowed the ex-communists to convert their political power into economic power and sled into the widespread corruption which has accompanied the privatization process. Hence the need for a two-pronged attack: anti-corruption and de-communization which is a leitmotiv of Kaczynski twins, Orban, and, to some extent of the right-wing (ODS) party now in office in Prague.
The fourth feature of the recent populist tide in East-Central Europe is a reluctance or outright opposition to European integration. The pro-European coalitions have been exhausted and disintegrated in the immediate aftermath of joining of the EU. Significantly, the Polish, Czech and Hungarian prime ministers resigned within days or weeks after fulfilling the “historic” task of “returning to Europe.” The populist nationalists present themselves as the only defenders of national identity and national sovereignty against “external threats”, as Kaczynski put it. He also never misses a chance to stress that Poland is in the EU only to defend its legitimate interests. The EU is the perfect target since as a liberal, elitist, supranational project it represents a combination of most of the above mentioned grievances. So the assumption that joining the EU is stabilizing the political system of the new democracies seems to work most effectively in the pre-accession phase. After joining the EU the “now we can show them who we really are” posture seems to prevail. In some cases one senses a curious satisfaction in joining Europe in order to oppose those who for half a century built it without us, speaking of Europe (or on behalf of Europe) without taking us into account. Tired of being the European pupils, the populist nationalists seem to have been longing to reveal at last the kind of Europe the have in mind (a “Europe of sovereign nation-states”, a “Christian Europe” opposed to the materialist, decadent, permissive, supra-national one).
This raises a number of questions concerning the impact of the populist backlash on the EU itself. The first and most obvious implication is that this will do little to help promote further enlargements of the EU which are not particularly popular these days, particularly among its founding member states. You cannot day-in day-out describe the EU as a menace (as Kaczynski or Klaus do) and at the same time demand that the benefits of membership be extended further East to a long list of candidates starting with the Ukraine. You cannot, as the Romanian president has done, state that your number one priority is the “strategic axes” Washington-London-Bucharest and claim (even before having joined the EU) that Moldova and the Black Sea countries must become members.
The second implication is not a threat of unravelling but the steady erosion of the political bond within the EU. What the East European populists do not fully appreciate is that the great benefits that their countries derive (and will derive according to the new budget for 2007-2013) from membership depend on the existence of a political bond. If populists obsessed with the sole defense of “national interests” prevail, they may well weaken the will to develop common policies and foster a re-nationalization which precisely would not be in the “national interest” of the new member states.
There are at least two main reasons why the situation may be “desperate, but not serious,” i.e. why the EU could learn to live with the populists. One is that that there are cycles of populism. They come to power on an anti-corruption drive “to clean the house,” but once you become the house you may yourself become identified with the practices you have denounced. The fall back position then tends to be clientelism and state capture by the ruling parties (as we see in Poland) rather the pursuit of radicalization.
The Euro-consensus of the last decade has often been accused of emptying the political competition in the candidate countries of its substance and thus contributing to the populist backlash using Europe as a scapegoat. But the EU can also work as a constraint on the populists. This, at least, is the experience with populism inside the EU prior to its enlargement to the East. Austria was the main test case since 2000: ostracism showed its limits, absorption proved more effective. After all, populist nationalists joined (and have since left) government coalitions in Italy, Holland or Denmark. The lesson for the newcomers could be that populism can erode or dissolve thanks to the EU constraint. In other words nationalist populism is a trans-European phenomenon, but, unlike in the 1930s it does not see itself as an alternative to democracy and operates within the context of the European Union. The premature crisis of democratic representation in the new member-states is defused by its banalization and the constraints of its European framework. Populism is the ultimate test of EU’s much debated “absorption capacity.”