1989 as a Political World Event

This book is not about the events of 1989, but about 1989 as a world event. Starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc it examines the historical significance and the world brought about by 1989.

When the Cold War ended in Europe it ushered in a world in which the international agenda is set outside Europe, in America or Asia. The book critically examines and moves beyond some of the conveniently simple paradigms proposed in the 1990s, by leading political scientists such as Fukuyama and Huntington, to show how the events of 1989 meant different things to different parties. This was an anti-utopian revolution, a symbol of the possibility of non-violent transitions to democracy, which raised the hopes of world-wide democratic changes. Contributors show how 1989 can be seen as the founding moment of a globalized world, but equal attention should be given to the dispersion of its meanings and the exhaustion of some of its main trends associated with the post-1989 era. Europe was reunited, yet it is in crisis. Some 20 years on, global markets have brought about a global financial crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated as the advent of free movement in a world without borders. Now however, we can see that new borders, walls, fences have since been built.

With an introductory essay by Václav Havel, 1989 as a Political World Event will be of interest to scholars of European Politics and International Relations.

Jacques Rupnik is Senior Research Fellow at CERI and Professor at Sciences Po, Paris and the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.

Routledge series on global order studies

Edited by

David Armstrong

University of Exeter, UK

and

Karoline Postel-Vinay

CERI, Sciences-Po, Paris, France

This new series focuses on the major global issues that have surfaced in recent years that will pose significant and complex challenges to global governance in the next few decades. The books will explore challenges to the current global order and relate to these themes:

•  The Challenge to Western Dominance

•  The Challenge to International Governance

•  Religion, Nationalism and Extremism

•  Sustainable Growth

•  Global Justice and the Poorest Countries

•  The Implications of the Global Economic Crisis for Future World Order

1  Redefining Regional Power in International Relations

Indian and South African perspectives

Miriam Prys

2  Turkey between Nationalism and Globalization

Riva Kastoryano

3  Contemporary Political Agency

Theory and practice

Edited by Bice Maiguashca and Raffaele Marchetti

4  1989 as a Political World Event

Democracy, Europe and the new international system in the age of globalization

Edited by Jacques Rupnik

1989 as a Political World Event

Democracy, Europe and the new international system in the age of globalization

Edited by Jacques Rupnik

First published 2014

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2014 Jacques Rupnik for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contributions

The right of Jacques Rupnik to be identified as the author of the editorial material and the authors of their individual chapters has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1989 as a political world event: democracy, globalisation and the international system / edited by Jacques Rupnik.

pages cm. – (Routledge series on global order studies; 4)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Nineteen eighty-nine, A.D. 2. World politics–1985–1995. 3. Post-communism–History. 4. Democratization–History. I. Rupnik, Jacques. II. Title: Nineteen eighty-nine as a political world event.

D856.A178 2013

909.82′8–dc23

2013014933

ISBN: 978-0-415-61589-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-88449-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

To the memory of Václav Havel (1936–2011)

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Notes on contributors

Preface

1  On the unpredictability of history

VÁCLAV HAVEL

PART I

The meanings and legacies of 1989

2  The world after 1989 and the exhaustion of three cycles

JACQUES RUPNIK

3  Writing 1989: a world narrative?

KAROLINE POSTEL-VINAY

4  1989: a philosophy of immediacy

ZAKI LAÏDI

PART II

Re-inventing democracy and its discontents

5  Democracy and dissatisfaction

IVAN KRASTEV

6  From the revolutions of 1989 to democracy fatigue in Eastern Europe

JACQUES RUPNIK

7  The difficult new era for international democracy support

THOMAS CAROTHERS

8  Civil society: from myth to reality

GRZEGORZ EKIERT AND ROBERTO FOA

9  ‘Tropical democracy’

RICHARD BANÉGAS

10  The Arab four seasons: when an excess of religion leads to political secularization

OLIVIER ROY

PART III

Varieties of capitalism in the age of globalization

11  Institutional change and market transitions after socialism

LESZEK BALCEROWICZ

12  The political economy of post-1989 capitalism in East-Central Europe

CLAUS OFFE

13  1989 and the advent of an authoritarian state capitalism in China

JEAN-FRANÇOIS HUCHET

PART IV

Between global governance and new power rivalries

14  American visions of the world after 1989

JOHN L. HARPER

15  Russia and the quest for lost power

MARIE MENDRAS

16  China and the end of socialism in Europe: a godsend for the Beijing Communists

JEAN-PHILIPPE BÉJA

17  The UN and the changing meaning of an international community

JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO

Index

Figures

6.1

Political freedom in the post-communist space

8.1

The NGO Sustainability Index for four groups of post-communist countries (lower numbers correspond to better conditions)

8.2

Log strikes per capita

8.3

Trust in civil society organizations

11.1

Per capita GDP in 1950 and 1990, Poland vs. Spain and Hungary vs. Austria

11.2

Per capita GDP in 1950 and 2003, North Korea vs. South Korea, Cuba vs. Chile, and China

11.3

Private sector share in GDP

11.4

Average of transition indicators (EBRD), 2009

11.5

GDP per capita 2009

11.6

Inflation 2008

11.7

FDI stock 2008)

11.8

GDP/unit of energy use

11.9

Life expectancy at birth 2007

11.10

Gini index

12.1

Average growth rates for the years 1990–2010

12.2

Social expenditure (as percentage of GDP) in 2006 and Social Democratic vs. Non-Leftist Party composition of government, 1991–2006

12.3

The economic situation in this country is better today than around 1989

12.4

Trust in society

12.5

Top statutory personal income tax rate. 2006 income, %

12.6

Adjusted top statutory corporate income tax rate. 2010 income, %

13.1

Fiscal revenues (center and provinces) as a percentage of GDP

13.2

The percentage of tax receipts going respectively to the central state and to the local administrations

Tables

6.1

Democratic transitions compared

8.1

Ideological polarization among survey respondents, 1990–1992 and 2005–2007

12.1

Size of the informal sector

12.2

Prognosis for the development of the GDP per capita in the EU-8 in relation to the average GDP per capita in the EU-15

12.3

Employment and wages

12.4

At-risk-of poverty after social transfers (2006) – 60 percent of median income threshold

Contributors

Leszek Balcerowicz is Professor of Economics at the Warsaw School of Economics, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, former President of the National Bank of Poland. He was the main architect of Poland’s economic reforms initiated in 1989. Author of numerous publications on economics, he holds a PhD in economics from the Foreign Trade faculty in the Central School of Planning and Statistics (1975) in Warsaw, now Warsaw School of Economics. He also holds an MBA from St John’s University in New York (1974). Since October 1992 he has been a Professor at the Warsaw School of Economics, and since 1993 he has been a Director of the Chair of International Comparative Studies at the Warsaw School of Economics. In 1992–2000 he was a Chairman of the Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Warsaw.

Richard Banégas holds a PhD in Political Science (1998) from Sciences Po, Paris where he now teaches. Research Fellow at the CEMAf (Centre d’études des mondes africaines), he is the Editor of the journal Politique africaine, a member of the International African Institute and a consultant for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His research focuses on the issues of democratization, citizenship and political violence in Western Africa and the Great Lakes region. His main publications include: La démocratie à pas de caméléon. Démocratisation et imaginaires politiques au Bénin (Karthala, 2006) and The Recurring Great Lakes Crisis. Identity, Violence and Power (edited with J.-P. Chrétien, Hurst, London, 2008).

Jean-Philippe Béja has graduated from Sciences Po, Paris, studied Chinese at Paris VII University and Chinese literature at Liaoning University. He holds a PhD in Asian Studies from the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes (6ème Section). He became a Research Fellow at CNRS and CERI Sciences Po in 1975. He has been the Scientific Director of the Centre d’Etudes Français sur la Chine Contemporaine (Hong Kong) from 1993 to 1997 and is currently back with the centre, based in Beijing. He has co-founded China Perspectives in 1995 and is the author, among other books, of A la recherche d’une ombre chinoise. Le mouvement pour la démocratie en Chine (1919–2004), Paris, Le Seuil, 2004, and Introduction and Translation of de Zhang Liang, Les archives de Tiananmen, Paris, Le Félin, 2004.

Thomas Carothers is the Vice President for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In this capacity, he oversees the Democracy and Rule of Law Program, Middle East Program and Carnegie Europe. He is a leading authority on democracy promotion and democratization worldwide as well as an expert on US foreign policy generally. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program which analyses the state of democracy in the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, international law, foreign aid, rule of law and civil society development. He is the author or editor of eight books on democracy promotion as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. He has been a visiting faculty member at Oxford University, Central European University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the US Department of State. Selected Publications: Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (Carnegie, 2006); Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Carnegie, 2006); Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, co-edited with Marina Ottaway (Carnegie, 2005); Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Carnegie, 2004); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, co-edited with Marina Ottaway (Carnegie, 2000); Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Carnegie, 1999); Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania (Carnegie, 1996).

Grzegorz Ekiert is Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard. His teaching and research interests focus on comparative politics, regime change and democratization, civil society and social movements, and East European politics and societies. He is the author of The State Against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe (1996), Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, with (Jan Kubik 1999) and Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, (co-edited with Stephen Hanson 2003). His papers have appeared in numerous social science journals and edited volumes. His current projects explore the patterns of civil society development in new democracies in Central Europe and East Asia, and the state of democracy in a postcommunist world. He is also Senior Faculty Associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies and Member of the Club of Madrid Advisory Committee.

Roberto Foa is Doctoral Candidate in Government at Harvard University, Research Fellow of the Russian Higher School of Economics and member of the World Values Survey network. His research focuses on comparative historical analysis and the empirical measurement of social institutions.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, former UN Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping operations from 2000 to 2009, he became the longest-serving head of peace-keeping and led the biggest expansion of peacekeeping in the history of the United Nations. Before joining the United Nations he was the Director of Policy Planning in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1989 to 1993, Ambassador to the Western European Union, and Chairman of the French Institute of Higher Defense Studies. Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Center on International Cooperation (New York University) since 2009. He is the author of the End of the Nation-State (1993).

John L. Harper is Professor of American Foreign Policy and European Studies at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of America and the Reconstruction of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of US Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is a contributing editor of Survival, and is writing a book called The Cold War.

Jean-François Huchet is Director of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Hong Kong, Editor of the review China Perspectives (and its French edition (Perspectives Chinoises) and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Rennes 2 in France. He was based in Asia for 15 years and has occupied several academic positions at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo, CEFC in Hong Kong and Peking University. He has received his PhD of economics from the University of Rennes 1. He has published numerous articles and books on the Chinese economy, especially on the reform of the state-owned enterprises. He has published recently: Huchet, Jean-François and Wang Wei (eds), Chinese Firms in the Era of Globalisation (in Chinese and English), Pékin, Zhongguo Fazhan Chubanshe, 2008, p. 293 and Huchet, Jean-François, Joël Ruet and Xavier Richet (eds), Globalisation of Firms in China, India and Russia, New Delhi, Academic Foundation, 2007.

Ivan Krastev is one of East Europe’s leading public intellectuals. Chair of Board of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and permanent Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, Krastev has been in 2004 the Executive Director of and drafter of The Balkans in Europe’s Future of the International Commission on the Balkans chaired by the former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. In 2006 he was awarded membership in the Forum of Young Global Leaders, a partner organization of the World Economic Forum. He was the Director of the Open Century Project of the Central European University, edited Nationalism after Communism (CEU Press 2004), and numerous articles in the Journal of Democracy.

Zaki Laïdi is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre d’études européennes of Sciences Po. Founder of TELOS, he participated in the White Book Commission on Foreign and European policies of France (2007–2008) and was member of the Follow-up Committee on the Law on the Autonomy of the Universities. He has served as special adviser to Pascal Lamy, European Commissioner for Trade (2000–2004). Former Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins-Bologna University (1992–1995), the University of Montreal (2001 and 2004) and the University of Geneva (2003 and 2004). A frequent commentator and columnist for the media his fields of research are Europe in the world system and the political regulation of globalization. He is the author of La norme sans la force, l’énigme de la puissance européenne (2005), EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World (2008) and Limited Achievements, Obama’s Foreign Policy (2012).

Marie Mendras is a political scientist in the field of Russian and post-Soviet studies. She is a Research Fellow with the CNRS and CERI, and a Professor at Sciences Po’s School of International Affairs in Paris. She is on the editorial board of journals Esprit (Paris) and Pro et Contra (Moscow) and is a member of the EU–Russia Centre in Brussels. At CERI, she conducts research on the Russian political system, elite behaviour and society. She runs the Observatoire de la Russie, which organizes a seminar series and online publication of papers: Cahiers Russie – Russia Papers. From 2008 to 2010, she was Professor in the Government Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been consultant for the Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Directorate for Strategic Affairs at the French Ministry of Defence. She was educated at Essex University, Sciences Po, Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, SAIS-Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University. She is the author, most recently of Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State, London, Hurst, 2012.

Claus Offe, born 1940, was (until 2005) Professor of Political Science at Humboldt University, Berlin, where he held a chair of Political Sociology and Social Policy. Since 2006 he has taught at the Hertie School of Governance where he holds a Chair of Political Sociology. Previous positions include professorships at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bremen, where he has served as Director of the Center of Social Policy Research. His fields of research include democratic theory, transition studies, EU integration, and welfare state and labour market studies. He has published numerous articles and book chapters in these fields, a selection of which was recently reprinted as Herausforderungen der Demokratie. Zur Integrations- und Leistungsfähigkeit politischer Institutionen (2003). Book publications in English include Varieties of Transition (1996), Modernity and the State: East and West (1996), Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies (1998, with J. Elster and U.K. Preuss) and Reflections on America. Tocqueville, Weber, and Adorno in the United States (2006).

Karoline Postel-Vinay holds a Master’s degree in Japanese studies from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and a PhD in international relations from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. She lived in Japan for four years as a visiting fellow with the Department of International Relations, National University of Tokyo (Todai) and a grantee of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A member of the advisory board of Ebisu and co-editor of the Europe in the World book series published by Routledge, London, she co-directs the International Studies section of the French Political Science Association and is a member of the “Re-Thinking Europe in a Non-European World” research network at Oxford University.

Olivier Roy is Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute in Florence. A Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (since 1985) and Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (since 2003). He headed the OSCE’s Mission for Tajikistan (1993–1994) and was a Consultant for the UN Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan (1988). His field works include Political Islam, Middle East, Islam in the West and comparative religions. Professor Roy received an “Agrégation de Philosophie” and a PhD in Political Sciences. He is the author of Globalized Islam (Chicago University Press 2004) and more recently of La Sainte Ignorance [The Holy Ignorance], Seuil 2008). In 2008–2009 he was a visiting Professor at Berkeley University. He is presently working on “Islamic norms in the public sphere”, conversions and apostasy and comparative religions.

Jacques Rupnik is Research Director at CERI and Professor at Sciences Po and at the College of Europe, Bruges since 1999. He holds degrees in history from the University of Paris I-Sorbonne and politics from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, a Master’s in Soviet Studies from Harvard University (1974) and a PhD in the history of international relations from the University of Paris I (1978). He was Eastern Europe Analyst for the BBC World Service from 1977 to 1982 when he joined CERI, Executive Director of the International Commission for the Balkans, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1995–1996) and drafter of its report Unfinished Peace; member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (1999–2000) and co-author of The Kosovo Report (2000); co-editor of Transeuropéennes (1992–2003). He was Advisor to the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel (1990–1992); Advisor to the European Commission 2007–2010; Member of the Scientific Board of the Prague Institute of International Relations; and since 2010 Member of the Board of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague and of the Board of the Václav Havel Library in Prague. He was Visiting Professor in the Department of Government, Harvard University (2006). He has published several books since The Other Europe (1989) and edited among others International Perspectives on the Balkans (2003), Les Banlieues de l’Europe, les politiques de voisinage de l’UE (2007).

Preface

This volume originated as a research project and an international conference held in October 2009 in Paris at Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po on how 1989 transformed Europe and the international system. Special thanks are due to my colleagues involved since the early stages, Pierre Hassner, Karoline Postel-Vinay, Ewa Kulesza and particularly Christian Lequesne, director of CERI. Václav Havel, whose name became so closely identified with the ‘velvet revolutions’ of 1989, revisited the subject in a speech on the occasion of a doctorate honoris causa awarded from Sciences Po. That speech, delivered in a lecture hall packed with students who were born in or around 1989, was his last major political essay. It provides a fitting and moving opening for this book.

Jacques Rupnik

1  On the unpredictability of history

Václav Havel

The following speech was given by Václav Havel on the acceptance of his honoris causa doctorate at Sciences Po in Paris, in 2009, at a conference that led to the chapters in this book.

Allow me to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on the events that I have witnessed or participated in over these past decades, and on one aspect of that experience in particular.

In the days when I was considered one of the “dissidents”, I was occasionally visited by Western journalists, and I often sensed from their questions enormous amazement at the fact that we dissidents – as a tiny percentage of the population – were openly striving for a fundamental change of the status quo, even though it was patently obvious that we could not achieve any fundamental change. On the contrary, it seemed a way of provoking only more persecution. Our efforts seemed in vain because they lacked the support of any levers of power or even the visible backing of some valid section of society. What do you want to achieve when you don’t have the backing of the working class, the intelligentsia, an insurgent movement, a legal political party or other major social force? Those were the sort of questions journalists asked us and we had our standard responses ready.

The origin of their amazement was a feeling that they had understood all the basic historical mechanisms and therefore knew what was going to happen or could happen, what had a chance of success and what had none, what was sensible and realistic and what was sheer madness. I would often emphasise in the course of those interviews that under totalitarian conditions it was very hard to see into the inner workings of a society that appeared on the surface to be a monolith, but that monolith – seemingly loyal to the regime but welded together chiefly by fear – could in reality be much less stable than it appeared at first glance, and no one could tell when some chance snowball would unleash an entire avalanche. Admittedly that awareness was not the main or sole driving force of our actions at that time, but that is how we perceived things.

The lesson to be learnt from that is obvious: one should not be certain of having understood all the laws of history and therefore capable of predicting infallibly what will happen.

Twenty years ago the Czechoslovak snowball in the form of the brutal suppression of a student demonstration turned into an avalanche. And the entire totalitarian system started to collapse like a house of cards. Many factors played a role in this, however, including the regime’s profound internal crisis, the events in neighbouring countries, and the favourable international situation. And yet we were surprised how quickly and relatively easily it happened. On that occasion it was not only the Western journalists who were surprised: we were equally amazed. We did not expect it to happen so soon or that it would be so simple. The dissidents turned out to be no better off than the Western journalists or political analysts. We also had misjudged things and proved incapable of seeing and understanding the processes occurring unseen not only within the power structures but also within society, and therefore unable to predict their possible outcomes. We endeavoured to act freely, speak the truth, and bear witness to the situation in our country, but we did not strive for power. It did not occur to us in the least that we who considered ourselves at most public mouthpieces would suddenly be handed the power of government lock, stock and barrel.

We accepted it with discomfiture, because there were no alternatives. And at that moment an interesting thing happened: many of those who had mutely toed the line for years as well as many of those who regarded our former endeavours to be a waste of time started to reproach us for being ill prepared for history. They wanted to know how it was that we didn’t have a new democratic constitution written long ago? Why didn’t we have an agreement on a new electoral law? How come we hadn’t drafted ages ago all sorts of legislation – including one creating the legal framework for the entire gigantic privatization process that our country had to undergo? How come we had not prepared the programmes of the various political parties that must be established in order for a pluralist political system to operate? And we continue to be pounced on for all the things we should have done, but failed to do, or that we shouldn’t have done and did.

All of a sudden there were many new “generals after the battle”, who blamed us for the same thing, over which we used to criticise sceptical outside observers, i.e. that we had failed to see latent possibilities, failed to foresee history’s hidden fluctuations, failed to think ahead sufficiently, and failed to admit that something could happen that we had previously considered most improbable.

That fact is that the dissidents were professors, painters, writers and boiler men, anything but politicians. Where were we to find an alternative political leadership out of the blue? And so we were simply flabbergasted by everything we were required to do.

And yet I think it was good that we were caught unawares by history, or rather the acceleration of the pace of history. Generally speaking I am a bit wary of those who are over-prepared.

There were further surprises waiting in store for us. Although we had no ready-made laws drafted during the dissident years, in that atmosphere of universal enthusiasm created by the painless revolution, when all and sundry were offering their disinterested help, it seemed to us that the renewal of a democratic political system and the denationalization of the economy could proceed rapidly and in an uncomplicated fashion.

That was not the case, however. It proved impossible to consider, formulate and implement all the necessary reforms in the space of hours or days. Each of them inevitably offered scope for unending debates, and it was necessary to plough one’s way through mountains of contradictory arguments, seek out with difficulty the requisite assistance, overcome innumerable obstacles, including the greatest obstacle of all: the lingering social demoralization, which was given fresh scope in thousands of ways with the return of freedom and the unprecedented redistribution of property. I recall how I became almost pathologically impatient during the first months and years of my presidency, and how I would be continually annoyed by the fact that nothing happened straight away and everything took so maddeningly long. That was perhaps the greatest surprise for me – and not only for me: that history can be influenced to a certain extent, but there is no hurrying it.

It is irksome, but it must be taken into account. Incurable haste could have far worse consequences than those resulting from that exasperating sluggishness. And back it came once more. Yet again I had to accustom myself to the fact that history is not fully predictable and so one can never be entirely prepared for it.

For various good reasons, our country, in company with other countries of the former Soviet bloc, made intensive efforts from the very outset to gain entry to Western institutions, particularly NATO and the European Union. Eventually it happened. It took a long time and their many obstacles had to be overcome. We are now, I believe, firmly anchored in an environment to which we belong and from which we were torn by force. Nevertheless, I am not sure whether the “old”, democracies of the West don’t occasionally regret this enlargement. And I am not sure, if the decision were being taken today, whether they would accept us among their number.

If that were the case, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised. But at the same time I am sure of what I have been talking about all this time: that patience pays off. It paid off in our case as dissidents; it paid off in the laborious building of a democratic state. The fact is that you won’t make a lawn grow by tugging at the grass. It can be irritating sometimes, but nonetheless it would seem that there is a time for everything. A Europe permanently divided is an awful thought. In our part of Europe it could lead to a risky upsurge in nationalism and its cohorts, which is happening almost everywhere when the terrain is unstable. This would definitely be an even greater headache for the West and the world in general, than the one it has with us already. And the infection would spread further. So patience obviously makes sense.

Impatience could lead to pride and pride to impatience. By impatience I mean the proud conviction that I alone know everything and I alone have understood history, and hence I am capable of predicting what will happen. And when the course of events or world affairs no longer fit my concept, then I have to intervene. By force, if necessary. That is the case of Communism, after all. The self-assurance of its theorists and of those who implemented it eventually led to the Gulags. After all it all started with the conviction that at last everything was clear and so it was obvious how to build a just world. Why delay matters with explanations? In the interest of humankind the better world must be created straight away by those who know how, irrespective of what human-kind thinks. Dialogue is a waste of time and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

When the Iron Curtain collapsed and the bipolar division of the world – which formerly seemed to be one of the main causes of all ills – came to an end, it was undoubtedly an event of historical importance. It ended the violation of the world and the danger of a third world war evaporated. It might have occurred to many in those first moments that history had truly been brought to an end and that some kind of splendid era out of time had been ushered in.

That too reflected an inadequate sense of the mysteriousness of history, or quite simply a lack of imagination. Time didn’t come to a halt. Granted a number of major dangers ceased to exist, but countless seemingly lesser dangers emerged from beneath the cracked bipolar shell. But in an era of globalization what is a “small danger”? In the past world wars arose in Europe, which was for so long a sort of centre of world civilization. Can we be sure that this will always be the case? Isn’t it possible, for instance, at a time when any tin-pot dictator can lay his hands on an atom bomb, that some more serious regional conflict will escalate into a global conflict? Don’t today’s terrorists have disproportionately greater scope than they ever had in the past? In this first ever atheistic civilization, which has no regard for eternity, isn’t there an alarming growth in dangers resulting simply from short-sightedness? Are we not seeing the emergence of new generations of crazed fanatics or hatred-ridden people who are given infinitely greater opportunities in our days than ever in the past? Are we not, every day, interfering in the life of our planet by hundreds of different actions that have pernicious and irreversible consequences?

It strikes me that the most important thing today – and my observations and experience of recent decades confirm me in this opinion – is to maintain a humble attitude to the world, to have reverence for what transcends us, to take into account that there are mysteries that we will never understand, and to realise that although we must assume our responsibility for the world, we cannot base this on the conviction that we know everything and therefore know how everything will turn out. We know nothing. But no one can deprive us of our hope.

Besides, a life in which there were no surprises would be extremely boring.

Part I

The meanings and legacies of 1989

2  The world after 1989 and the exhaustion of three cycles

Jacques Rupnik

The year 1989 was dubbed annus mirabilis because of the suddenness and the surprising ease of the collapse of dictatorships and the international order inherited from the Cold War. Václav Havel, who started the year in prison and ended it in the Prague Castle as president, symbolized the moment. The unpredictability of history provides the theme of his beautiful opening essay in this volume, which hints ironically at journalists and political scientists who thought they understood the “system” and the “laws of history”. This indeed remains one of the important lessons for students of international affairs: experts and social scientists failed to anticipate the possibility of a “1989” although they had no shortage of knowing arguments after to demonstrate why collapse had been inevitable …

This is not a book about the events of 1989, but about 1989 as a “world event”. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolically marked the end of the Cold War, heralding the transformation of the international system that had prevailed since the end of World War II. It clearly represents a caesura, the closure of the “short twentieth century” (1914–1989) marked by two world wars and two totalitarianisms that originated in Europe. As a peaceful transition to democracy and the “return to Europe”, 1989 had a global resonance, but the dispersion of its echoes also revealed a plurality of meanings. Though originating in Europe – the initial core of the cold-war system – it may have been the last time Europe constituted the center-stage of a world event. The center of gravity has since been shifting eastward, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Two decades after the “return to Europe”, some are heralding its eclipse.

1989 had a global impact, but meant different things to a variety of actors in different parts of the world. A Western or “Eurocentric” narrative of 1989 thus needs to be confronted with contrasting perceptions from Asia or Africa. In Asia, it marked the advent of global capitalism, but not quite the end of the Cold War, as Communist China, Vietnam and a divided Korea remind us. 1989 was democracy’s founding moment in the heart of Europe, but, while on June 4 Poland held its first free elections, on the very same day the pro-democracy movement was crushed in Tien an Men square in Beijing. What was seen at the time as setting China at odds with the democratic tide of 1989, is in retrospect perceived in Asia as the opening of China’s spectacular rise on the international scene as an economic and strategic superpower.

The collapse of the Soviet Union might have weakened the Arab regimes associated with it, but it had little impact on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Moreover, the rise of political Islam at the expense of “progressive nationalism” in the region pre-dates the end of the Cold War. 1989 was the year when freedom of expression was recovered in Eastern Europe and glasnost became the motto of the day in Moscow. It was also the year the Ayatollah Khomeini launched a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses. The real echo of the revolutions in Eastern Europe, it has been argued, came 20 years later with the Arab Spring. Writing in the midst of the events, the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf argued that “2011 will not just go down in history as the Arab equivalent of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe…. It is an exceptional, unprecedented phenomenon, and perhaps a harbinger of a democratic renewal worldwide”.[1]

It seems as if every revolution has to measure itself against its predecessors in the quest for recognition and universal significance. The shockwaves of 1989 and the end of the Cold War also helped to bring about more silent revolutions in South Africa, with the end of apartheid, and, in very different contexts, the end of the political stalemates that had prevailed for decades in countries such as Japan and Italy. The end of the Christian Democratic Party’s monopoly on government in Italy, along with the implosion of the Communist Party and the Italian party system more generally, were direct consequences of the end of the Cold War. These developments were seen at the time as advancing democratic pluralism, but they also opened the way for new political entrepreneurs like Berlusconi …

The interpretations of 1989 and the world it brought about have also changed over time. The aim of this volume is not to provide another account of the events of 1989, their underlying causes and main protagonists. Rather, beyond the heroic narratives associated with the revolutionary wave that swept through communist dictatorships and the Soviet empire, it examines the main ideas and political trends associated with 1989 that have shaped the globalized world we live in. After briefly examining the legacies of the “velvet revolutions”, this book explores both the significance of the Great Transformation they brought about, but also the crisis of expectations that followed and the exhaustion of the paradigms and models it projected on the world two decades ago.

The post-1989 world can be examined through a triple transformation: the transition to democracy as the only source of legitimate government; the globalization of market economies as the path to prosperity and modernity; and the triumph of the West in the Cold War as the prelude to the reunification of Europe and the quest for a “new international order”. Now may indeed be the appropriate moment to examine the legacies of 1989 as, more than 20 years on, we can see the limits or the exhaustion of the three interrelated post-1989 cycles that have shaped the post-1989 world: (1) from the democratic élan of 1989 to democratic fatigue or crisis of democracy and the rise of authoritarian regimes; (2) from the unrestrained triumph of a globalized market economy promoted by the West to the international financial and economic crisis that since 2008 has shaken the very foundations of Western economic preeminence; and (3) from the hopes in the 1990s of a “Europe whole and free” and a “new international order” based on global governance to the reassertion of power politics, the relative decline of Europe and the West and the emergence of new threats and new powers known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). In short, it is the post-1989 world in crisis that is now being re-designed.

Interpreting 1989

Among the many labels assigned to 1989, “democratic revolution” remains in retrospect as the most fitting. Not because the revolution itself was democratic (that may sound like a contradiction in terms), but because its aim and its actual outcome was to bring about democratic change. Revolutions, as Raymond Aron has observed, are often presented as movements of liberation, but “the revolutions of the twentieth century seem rather to promote servitude or at least authoritarianism”. Those of 1989 were different precisely because their ethos and leading protagonists – who were as diverse as Václav Havel and Lech Walesa – rejected violence and represented, albeit briefly, the meeting of dissident movements with the democratic aspirations of the people.

The “Autumn of the People” of 1989 could perhaps most adequately be compared to the “Spring of Nations” of 1848, because of the speed of its diffusion-effect across Europe and the way it combined democratic and national aspirations: “Wir sind dans Volk” (We are the people) chanted by the East German demonstrators in October 1989 became, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are one people). From democratization to German reunification, popular and national sovereignty combined to challenge the post-war European order.

But was it really a revolution? Certainly, if we consider that it resulted in systemic political and economic change. However, the negotiated transfer of power between moderate elites of the old regime and the dissident movements has also been called a “velvet revolution” or a “refolution” (Timothy Garton-Ash), a combination of reformist, non-violent means and revolutionary ends. “Rapid, mass, forceful systemic transformation of a society’s principal institutions and organizations”, Negotiated Revolutions in the words of George Lawson. In retrospect, this change in revolutionary paradigm can indeed be considered as the major, original legacy of 1989: the possibility of the triumph of non-violent civic disobedience over dictatorships protected by walls and an occupation army. For Adam Roberts, civil resistance combining pressure from below with division at the top was “one factor in ending communist party rule in many countries in 1989–91 and hence in ending the Cold War. The world today has been shaped significantly by this mode of political action”.[2] This alternative notion of a “revolution” as non-violent civil disobedience leading to the transformation of the system of political power, as seen in Berlin and Prague in 1989, is considered by some authors as the inspiration for movements as diverse as the Burmese democracy movement or the Arab Spring. Put differently, 1989 was a revolution that symbolically ended a two-century long “Age of Revolutions”, dating back to 1789 or 1917, and that rejected the idea that a better society can be brought about through violent change. In the words of Adam Michnik, a leading figure of the Polish opposition: “Those who storm the Bastille end up building their own Bastille”.

The narrative that prevailed in the 1990s of the democratic revolutions of 1989 being driven by emerging civil societies has recently been challenged by authors such as Stephen Kotkin, who argues that it was rather “uncivil society” (that is, the Communist establishments) that, confronted with economic failure, financial bankruptcy and unable to sustain competition with the capitalist West, surrendered their political power.[3] From this perspective, 1989 is thus seen as the implosion of the communist system at its very center in Moscow, rather than as a democratic revolution on its East European periphery. In truth, 1989 was a combination of both: the emancipation of the societies in Eastern Europe steadily eroded imperial control and Gorbachev’s renunciation of maintaining control by force opened the way for a negotiated transfer of power.

Beyond the symbolic end of an era, there is another reservation to the use of the word “revolution” to describe 1989. François Furet, the historian of the French Revolution, argues that a genuine revolution is the bearer of a new idea, a new social project. However, in his view, “not a single new idea has come out of Eastern Europe in 1989”. The return of freedom and sovereignty, private property and markets amounted, according to Furet, to combining restoration with the imitation of Western liberal models.[4] In a similar vein, Jürgen Habermas called 1989 Nachhollende Revolution, a “catching-up revolution”, characterized precisely by “its total lack of ideas that are either innovative or oriented towards the future”.[5] Such a reading of 1989 may indeed correspond to the main thrust of the institutional and market-oriented reforms introduced in the post-communist space during the following two decades, and is confirmed in this volume by the essay of Leszek Balcerowicz, the father of the Polish economic reforms. This reading should, however, be resisted. Those who make revolutions are not necessarily those whose ideas prevail subsequently. The fact that some of the important legacies of dissident thinking associated with 1989 did not prevail in the transformations that followed is not a sufficient reason to ignore or dismiss them altogether. Indeed, at least three important legacies have retained lasting relevance.

The first concerns an interpretation of the communist system that goes beyond the classic opposition of totalitarianism and democracy. Václav Havel, influenced by the philosopher Jan Patocka, saw the domination of a bureaucratic and impersonal totalitarian power not as a mere aberration of oriental despotism, but as an avatar of Western industrial modernity,

a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies [namely, scientism, the fanaticism of abstraction, the relentless pursuit of “growth for the sake of growth”] an extreme offshoot of its own development and an ominous product of its expansion…. They are a deeply informative reflection of its own crisis…. The biggest mistake that Western Europe could make would be a failure to understand the [post-totalitarian regimes] for what they ultimately are: a distorted mirror of all modern civilization.

For Havel, the totalitarian systems were “not merely dangerous neighbors, and even less some kind of an avant-garde of world progress. Alas, just the opposite: they are the avant-garde of a global crisis of this civilization, initially European, then Euro-American, and ultimately global”.[6] The word globalization was not yet in use in the mid-1980s, but the disturbing question posed by Havel has not vanished with the end of Communism. Indeed, if Havel’s writings are today read the world over, it is not because they provide insights into the modus operandi of a defunct dictatorship, but because they transcend the political circumstances of the time in which they were written and continue to enlighten us about the world we live in today.

The second important legacy of dissident thinking concerns the rediscovery since the 1970s of civil society as a vital ingredient in the reclaiming of democracy. Adam Michnik in Warsaw, Václav Havel in Prague and György Konrad in Budapest redefined civil society with an emphasis on self-organization and solidarity. Writing in 1981 at the time of Solidarnosc, the largest social movement in post-war Europe, Claude Lefort put it as follows: “Nowadays it is all the protests, all the revolts coming from the East that give democratic invention its meaning”.[7] The underlying expectation behind much of Western Europe’s intellectual support for the dissidents in the period leading up to 1989 was that the reinvention of democratic concepts and practices in conditions of un-freedom or, after 1989, in a transition where the very basic tenets of a democratic polity were being redefined, could be an inspiration for old, established Western democracies suffering from democratic fatigue. The fact that post-1989 “democratic invention” did not match the expectations of dissidents in the East or political theorists in the West need not imply that the impetus and ideas were absent or irrelevant.

The third idea associated with 1989 and the legacies of dissident thinking concerns the relations between peace and human rights, both in Europe and more generally in international relations. The Helsinki Agreement signed in 1975 was initially meant to confirm the post-war territorial status quo in a divided continent. In the late 1970s and 1980s it was gradually subverted by a process that became known as “Helsinki from below”. For the dissidents the Helsinki framework was an opportunity structure and they used it to challenge the way in which diplomatic relations between states defined terms such as “peace” and “détente”: peace, they argued, cannot be separated from human rights; you cannot have détente between states in Europe unless you simultaneously have détente between states and societies. The initially neglected provisions in the “third basket” of the Helsinki Agreement, concerned with human rights and the free movement of people and ideas, provided an opportunity for independent actors on both sides of the East–West divide to engage a dialogue and mobilize public opinion pressure in favor of an intrusive monitoring of human rights violations as a condition for East–West détente in Europe. That civil society dialogue about human rights across the “Iron Curtain” can be considered as the founding moment of a European public space. Mary Kaldor considers it to be the origin of the concept of a “global civil society”,[8] developed in the aftermath of the Cold War. Post-1989 developments did not vindicate such aspirations, although a variety of international civil society initiatives ranging from human rights protection to anti-globalization movements can be seen as pointers in that direction.

Indeed, the linkage of peace and human rights, and their defense beyond traditional definitions of state sovereignty, remain closely associated with the legacy of 1989. It prepared the ground for concepts of “humanitarian intervention” and a “droit d’ingérence” to stop humanitarian disasters or protect human rights. This was invoked in the 1990s to justify military interventions to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. As seen subsequently, “humanitarian internationalism” is also open to hijacking and misuse, in Iraq or elsewhere. This does not, however, detract from its initial importance, but simply points to the ambiguous nature of the legacies of 1989.

The collapse of Communism ushered in a new era, with redefined relations to time and space. It brought to a close the “age of revolutions”, but also two centuries dominated by belief in the idea of progress. The world after World War II had been dominated by East–West competition between two ideologically opposed visions of the future. The thaw in Eastern Europe and the détente of the 1960s blurred the lines on both sides of the divide, while futurology transcended ideological conflict and offered a “theory of convergence” under the different labels of “post-industrial society” or “scientific and technical revolution” (Andrei Sakharov; Radovan Richta). So long as a “radiant future” ideology prevailed in the East, you did not need futurology. However, once the “end of ideology”[9] blurred the vision and later in the 1970s the doctrine of “actually existing socialism” accompanied the restoration of order, futurology and prognostic institutes were summoned to provide a blueprint for the future.1968 was perhaps the last moment when the post-war military and ideological status quo had been challenged simultaneously from both the East and the West with alternative visions of the future still associated, albeit vaguely and incoherently, with a socialist project.[10] The 1968 “visions” clashed with geopolitical realities. In contrast, the post-1989 future seemed wide open, while the options available or the “horizon of expectations”, as Reinhardt Koselleck[11] puts it, were steadily shrinking. From societies of planning we moved to market societies or “societies of risk” (Ulrich Beck). The shift from state-centered societies to network societies has, as Jenny Andersson points out, been accompanied by new modes of governance that are allegedly more flexible and open-ended, rather than future-oriented.[12] In Prague, economists from the Institute of Forecasting, created initially to help socialist planners, promptly jumped ship in 1989 and became promoters of free-market reforms of the Chicago school. The “prognostics”, as they were known, promptly eclipsed the dissidents. The future was not to be devoted to new experiments but to catching up with the West.

The end of future-oriented blueprints coincided with a triumphalist version of 1989 as the “end of history”. Fukuyama’s use of the famous Hegelian formula for his essay might have encouraged its simplistic reading by some commentators and politicians, but it certainly helped to formulate (that is, encapsulate) the dominant Western paradigm of the 1990s: 1989 as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.[13]

The alternative paradigm to Fukuyama’s “end of history” was Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”. It was no less Western-centered (despite finding adepts around the world), but instead of triumphant optimism it provided a pessimistic reading of the world after 1989, in which the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century are projected as being replaced by a clash of civilizations. Primarily identified with their religious underpinnings, civilizations would thus have primacy over ideological or economic rivalries:

The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.[14]

Huntington identified seven main civilizational areas in the world, and singled out China and the Islamic world as the most likely main rivals or adversaries of the West. China’s Confucian Communism was identified as the emerging great power. The Islamic world was presented as both the most resilient to the adoption of Western modernity and the most prone to conflict: from the Balkans to the Caucasus, from Central Asia to India, from Indonesia to the Arab–Israeli conflict, “Islam has bloody borders”. The fact that the “clash of civilizations” thesis found many adepts on opposing sides of the conflict in Bosnia, as well as among Russian Slavophile nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists and conservative Christians in the United States, revealed the new power of the global circulation of ideas, provided they gave simple answers to complex issues.

Fukuyama’s faith in the global reach of liberal capitalist modernization reflected the Western optimism of the first post-1989 decade, just as Huntington’s cultural pessimism seemed to capture the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, including Huntington’s dubious self-fulfilling prophecy of “the West against the rest”.

From democratic revolutions to the crisis of democracy

1989 was and still remains associated with the advent of democratic triumphalism – after the “Age of Extremes” (Hobsbawm) opens the age of democratic peace. The apparent absence of a major ideological alternative to liberal democracy was interpreted as inviting the possibility of the rapid global expansion of Western-style modernity, i.e. markets and democracy (at times lumped together as “market-democracy”). Now that the main ideological rival had admitted defeat (Gorbachev’s speech at the United Nations in December 1988) and the external constraint of Soviet power had been lifted, the spread of “market-democracy” need not be seen as a historical process the success of which is dependent on a series of preconditions, but rather as a desirable and achievable political goal: where there is a will, there is a way.

In a 1984 article entitled “Will more countries become democratic?” Huntington stated bluntly: “The likelihood of democratic development in Eastern Europe is virtually nil. The Soviet presence is a decisive overriding obstacle, no matter how favorable other conditions may be in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland”.[15] The key element for democratization was the lifting of external constraint: 1989 and the end of the Cold War could thus be seen, particularly by the American administration, as the high point of a worldwide democratic revolution. Experts on democratic transitions (“transitology” became a booming industry in academia) presented 1989 rather as the culmination of a “third wave” of democratic transitions that originated with the fall of dictatorships in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece) in the 1970s, then extended to Latin America’s exit from authoritarian military regimes in the 1980s, before finally reaching the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991.

The core assumptions in what Thomas Carothers described as the “transition paradigm” that prevailed after 1989 run roughly as follows:[16] (1) Any country moving away from dictatorship is considered to be in transition to democracy. (2) Democratization unfolds in a sequence of three stages: opening, breakthrough (collapse of the old regime) and consolidation of democracy as the “only game in town”. (3) Democracy is primarily identified with simply holding elections. (4) No pre-conditions (economic, social, cultural) are considered major factors impacting on the outcome of the transition. (5) Democracy-building is unlikely to be hampered by state-building since they are considered to be two mutually reinforcing processes.

The post-1989 transition paradigm thus created a triple illusion. The first was the illusion or indeed the “tyranny of immediacy”.[17] What was actually the result of a long process (going back to Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, Gdansk 1980) and of the truly exceptional circumstances of 1989 gave way to a new, “accelerated” representation of social change and the possibility of “giving history a push”. The second illusion stemmed from the confusion between the apparent absence of a global ideological rival and the widespread acceptance of liberal democracy. From Milosevic-type nationalists in the Balkans to Chinese Communists, not to mention Islamist movements from Marrakesh to Bangladesh, a wide range of international actors were apparently not convinced of the ineluctable triumph of liberal democracy. The third illusion was associated with the presumption that transitions from dictatorships necessarily lead to democracy. More often than not they led to hybrid regimes, or what Levitsky and Way call “competitive authoritarianism”,[18] which allows elections and some basic freedoms but certainly does not create a level playing field for political actors and consequently obstructs the possibility of an alternation in power.

So what is the balance sheet for the democratic hopes of 1989, some 20 years on? There is both good and bad news. The good news is that we have in recent years witnessed the awakening of democracy from below in regions where it was least expected: from the “color revolutions” in the Ukraine and Georgia to the mass protests in Moscow after the elections of December 2011 and, last but not least, the Arab Spring of 2011. The bad news, however, is that democracy is in crisis in the countries in which it seemed solidly anchored.

Is the Arab Spring 1989 all over again? There are obvious parallels in the breathtaking speed with which dictatorships collapsed in a chain reaction of non-violent popular mobilizations from Tunisia to Egypt (then to Libya and Syria). Tunisia, with its secular-educated elites, is reminiscent of Hungary; Libya and Syria are more like Ceausescu’s Romania; and Egypt, the pivotal country for the region, is much like Poland was for Eastern Europe in 1989. Neither 1989 nor 2011 had been anticipated by analysts, which is both an invitation to modesty and a call to address some of the rapidly emerging issues of democratic transition. And this is where differences as well as lessons learned matter. Middle Europe is not the Middle East: there are historical, cultural and sociological differences, as well as different legacies of dissent and opposition to the Old Regime which are significant for the shaping of new political elites and their commitment to democratic values. No less importantly, in both cases the withdrawal of superpower backing (“It’s 1989, but now the West is Soviet Russia”) helped regime change, but also opened a period of regional instability with very different geopolitical implications. Beyond such comparisons, are there lessons learned from the different experiences of democratic transitions in Eastern Europe (the constitutional moment, nationalist secessions, the importance of an external European anchor for democratization) that can be of relevance to the transitions underway on the southern shore of the Mediterranean?

The outcome of the variety of movements known collectively as the Arab Spring remains highly uncertain. Nevertheless, they have already helped to correct at least two widespread Western post-1989 assumptions. The first assumption, which is related to the clash of civilizations thesis, saw the chances of democratization in the Arab world as negligible given the prevailing religious and cultural conditions. Whether Islamism is soluble in democracy remains an open question, but surely the Arab Spring has revealed a clash within a civilization.

The second prevailing assumption that has been challenged by the Arab Spring relates to the thesis that Western options in the region were limited to a choice between a secular military or Islamic fundamentalism. European concerns in relation to the Arab world tended to focus on two issues, namely security (the terrorist threat) and the control of immigration flows. Now, a third dimension has come to the fore: the possibility of a democratization that would not be synonymous with “Westernization” or “Europeanization”. This constitutes a major point of difference between the Arab Spring and 1989, but also an important new challenge for the European Union’s neighborhood policy. The credibility of Europe’s engagement however also depends on the state of democracy within its own borders.

Which brings us to the bad news. The current economic and financial crisis has turned into a trans-European crisis of democracy. After how long does a democracy cease to be “young”? The answer is when it suffers the same ills as old democracies. And there is no shortage of shared symptoms of democratic fatigue across what used to be called East and West Europe.

One of the frequently discussed assumptions two decades ago was that a transition to a market economy entails major risks of destabilization for societies, which could jeopardize the outcome of the post-1989 democratic transitions. That fear did not materialize and we witnessed in the following decade uneven levels of democratic consolidation. Today, it is the economic crisis and the markets that threaten to undermine consolidated democracies.

A second assumption was that European Union accession and its transformative power is the best way to make the lands of East-Central Europe safe for democracy. But what if the EU itself, under pressure from global financial markets, is now facing centrifugal disintegrative tendencies? What if the pressures of the financial markets contribute to undermine not just the economic prospects, but the social fabric and the very legitimacy of democratic institutions? The two dominant recent responses to the crisis have been the mutually reinforcing rise of technocracy (policy as a substitute for politics; Greece and Italy being the most explicit examples) and populism (politics without policy; mobilization against technocratic elites and against the EU in defense of national sovereignty, with varying degrees of xenophobia). Thus, the vertical axis “technocracy versus populism” is, as Pierre Hassner has observed, matched by a horizontal axis of politics, “cosmopolitanism versus particularism” (national, ethnic, religious).[19] Older, established democracies (such as those in Britain, France and Germany), despite all their weaknesses, have managed to contain the trend so far, as has Poland. Nevertheless, we are witnessing the erosion of the EU as a democratizing constraint on its old and new members.

Another challenge to the post-1989 “transitology” concerns the sequence of democratization, from transition to consolidation. Today we face the disturbing possibility that consolidated democracies such as Hungary can experience “democratic regression” – a reminder that democracies, by their very nature, are never definitely established. Hungary, once considered a model of democratic transition, is today (as was the case of Poland under the Kaczynski twindom) a case study of “illiberal democracy”. East-Central Europe displays again some of the features of the “lands in-between”, providing an insight into the crisis of democracy in Western Europe, but also a bridge to the authoritarian drift in the East of the continent: an axis of authoritarian regression going from Hungary’s “illiberal moment” under Viktor Orban to a more pronounced authoritarian temptation in Yanukovich’s Ukraine, through to fully-fledged authoritarianism under Lukasenko in Belarus and Putin in Russia. Some 20 years after the fall of the old regime, the new democracies in East-Central Europe became a laboratory for both patterns in the current crisis of democracy in Europe.

Global markets, varieties of capitalism and democracy

The simultaneous triumph in 1989 of democracy over dictatorships and of free markets over statist command economies has reinforced their interconnection. For a while, the term “market-democracies” became the dominant paradigm, though recent developments revealed its limits and contradictions. The post-Soviet transition to capitalism, a major accelerator of the globalization process, rested on the implicit assumption that there exists, as Joseph Stiglitz put it, a “one and true way for growth and development”,[20] a free market economy that can be replicated anywhere provided it is implemented through radical economic reform where speed is of the essence, with legal or institutional constraints being viewed as risks potentially delaying or sidetracking the project. Beyond the ideological commitment of Eastern European free marketers, there was pressure from the so-called “Washington consensus” (IMF, World Bank) to simultaneously pursue the rapid privatization, deregulation and flexibility of labor markets. Eastern Europe overwhelmingly opted for the “Anglo-American” model, as opposed to the continental European one, which was considered to be too regulated and burdened by an overblown welfare state. By the time Western academic debates about the “varieties of capitalism” (liberal versus coordinated markets) reached Eastern Europe the above-mentioned variety was already well in place and, as Leszek Balcerowicz argues in this volume, it proved rather successful.[21]

The Wall Street Crash of 2008 and the international financial and economic crisis that followed brought into the open wide-ranging critiques of the post-1989 paradigm. Since it was precisely its prime initiators, the United States and Britain, that were initially the worst affected by the crisis, with the state being forced to intervene massively to save and sometimes even nationalize banks, their initial ideological posture became difficult to sustain. The model was no longer a model; the state was back to rescue capitalism from itself, leaving the free-market mantra of the post-1989 era severely battered.

The change has exposed four main challenges to the post-1989 global markets paradigm that prevailed for two decades:

1  The first concerns the re-definition of the relationship between globalized markets, states and democracy. In the aftermath of 1989 Jean-Marie Guéhenno published an essay entitled “the end of democracy”, which interestingly was translated in English under the title “the end of the nation-state”.[22] The author meant both, arguing that post-1989 globalization closed the Age of Revolutions and brought about the demise of the nation-states that had provided the original framework for our democracies. The new ideas associated with 1989 (civil society, networks, soft power) are a witness to the diffusion of power in the democratic process. They herald the advent of post-national/post-democratic empires and call for global governance.

Two decades later we have global markets but certainly not global democratic governance. The logic of economic globalization (i.e., deep integration) forces on the national governments major policy constraints that Tom Friedman called the “Golden Straitjacket”. As a result, he argued, “your economy grows and your politics shrink”.[23] That at least was the assumption before the crisis. Now your economy shrinks and so does your politics.

The new situation leads Harvard economist Dani Rodrik to reformulate what he calls the fundamental political trilemma of the world economy as follows:

We cannot pursue democracy, national determination and economic globalization. If we want to push globalization further, we have to give up either the nation-state or democratic politics. If we want to maintain and deepen democracy, we have to choose between nation-state and international economic integration. And if we want to keep the nation-state and self-determination, we have to choose between deepening democracy and deepening globalization.[24]

And since global democratic governance remains a utopia, Rodrik concludes bluntly that “hyperglobalization is incompatible with democracy”.

Even those who may find such a conclusion an overstatement cannot avoid confronting yesterday’s assumptions with today’s realities. 1. The pressures of globalized financial markets, as we can see in Europe today, are actually shrinking the space of democratic deliberation. 2. Globalization has opened possibilities of democratic change, but also allowed the rise of authoritarian capitalism in China and Russia. We thus face hard choices between the logic of democracy and that of globalized markets-a stark reversal from the 1989 paradigm.

2  In the aftermath of 1989 political liberals (seeking to protect human rights and civil liberties) and economic liberals (seeking to extend free markets) considered – albeit from different perspectives – the state as the prime hindrance to free societies and economies. Now, after two decades of the dismantling of states and regulations, mainstream economists rediscover that the self-regulation of financial markets is a myth and that markets actually need states and well-functioning public institutions. Simon Johnson, chief economist with the IMF wrote in 2009: “A whole generation of policy-makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street” producing a “river of deregulation that is, in hindsight, astonishing.[25] In times of crisis the (indebted) state is back while regulation and ‘good governance’ have become the motto of the day”.

3  The post-1989 globalization promoted by the West left behind its main promoters. The free movement of capital goods and people across borders concerned not just former Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe, but also China, India, South East Asia and Latin America, which soon became part of a globalized economy. For about a decade a mix of Western triumphalism and complacency pushed for the dismantling of trade barriers as a win–win scenario for global prosperity only to discover some unintended consequences. Put another way: “America fell behind in the World that it invented”[26] and much the same applies to Europe. It left both of them confronted with the following challenges identified by Friedman and Mandelbaum: First, how to adapt to globalization that undermines their preeminence. Second, the information technology revolution was “flattening the global economic playing field reducing the advantages of the people in developed countries, such as the United States, while empowering those in the developing ones”.[27] Third, coping with the debt and soaring budget deficits. Fourth, How to manage a world of both rising energy consumption and rising climate threats? All the discussions about the relative decline of the West are associated with the unintended consequences of the triumph of its economic model.

4  The fourth challenge of the post-1989 world concerns what the Europeans used to call their “social model”. As Tony Judt describes that change it in his Ill Fares the Land:

Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities between rich and poor. And above all the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.[28]

The shift of production to low wage countries in Asia and the erosion of the “social-market” model in Europe went hand in hand. In short: Over the last two decades half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in Asia while the European welfare state was being steadily dismantled. Trade with low income countries turned out to have a growing impact on inequality in rich countries. The report of the advisory group chaired by Michelle Bachelet, convened by the ILO, states that while globalization “has been a source of opportunities for those able to seize them … it has left many unprotected against the new global challenges that are having deep repercussions at national and local levels”.[29] Over five billion people, 75 percent of the world population are not covered by adequate social security (ILO) and 1.4 billion people live on less than US$1.25 a day (World Bank). The global market competition under these conditions has made the European welfare state increasingly difficult to sustain. To be sure, the task force also notes that in China and India experts and policy makers are now discovering the importance of the social question that leads some of its members (Martin Hirsch) to advocate a gradual move towards “global social protection”.[30] But that seems roughly as likely as “global democratic governance”. And even if one were to accept such an optimistic scenario it would be a slow process and with little indication that it will lead to the adoption of remedies favored in Europe. European ideas about social protection may now be getting some attention in Asia but by the time they prevail the post-war European welfare state might already have been dismantled.

From “unipolar moment” to multipolar world

The third major transformation of the post-1989 paradigm concerns the international system. There were two main versions of the “new international order” heralded by President George H. Bush in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War. There was the European vision of a continent reunited that could become a major international actor using its “soft power”, an example of post-sovereign peace through cooperation and interdependence that aspired to become a model for global governance. There was the American vision in which victory in the Cold War and the demise of its main competitor opened an era of unprecedented military and economic global pre-dominance. Then French foreign minister Hubert Védrine spoke of American “hyperpower” and Charles Krauthammer dubbed it the “unipolar moment”. The US military spending was about equivalent to that of all other major powers combined and the US economy about a quarter of the world’s GDP. There simply was no state or combination of states that could supplant US hegemony. The only question was whether this was a lasting or a transitional feature of the new international system.

These were indeed very different (and to some extent competing)[31] visions but had one thing in common: “structural power”. The European Union could in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, as America could on the global scale, act as a “structural power” that is, to use Susan Strange’s definition, with the capacity to impose its logic on its environment.[32] The attributes of a “transnational empire” included not just security but also the financial system, the production of knowledge, the capacity to establish the rules of the game and shape the agenda and the preferences of other actors.

Some 20 years on neither the European nor the American version of the new international order prevailed. Instead, the decline of the West, associated with the crisis of its economic model, is shifting the center of gravity to Asia. The “unipolar moment” turned out to be just that, a moment. Instead we have seen the emergence of new powers and a multipolar international system.

Western dominated globalization lasted for little over a decade. The “European Dream” seemed to come through with the 2004 Eastern enlargement of the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc now counting half a billion inhabitants. It discovered quickly, however, that beyond speeches about the unification of the continent it was divided on the Iraq war and transatlantic relations (“old” versus “new” Europe, to use the Rumsfeldian terminology), then on the adequate response to the crisis of the euro (Northern Europe versus Southern Europe). And in times of major international crisis, such as the 2011 military intervention in Libya, it had a would-be diplomacy, known as External Action Service, but not really a “common foreign and security policy”. Amidst demographic and economic decline there is growing concern about Europe’s marginalization on the international scene. Instead of the “quiet superpower” one detects signs of “impotent agitation” (Pierre Hassner).[33]

The American version of the declinist debate is a more contested one. It was launched by Paul Kennedy’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,[34] but promptly dismissed as his “imperial overstretch” argument seemed then to apply rather to the demise of the Soviet Empire while America celebrated its finest hour. Kennedy (and other analysts) has since claimed the confirmation of his thesis arguing that the United States

is slowly losing its abnormal status in the international system and returning to being one of the most prominent players in the small club of great powers. Things are not going badly wrong … things are just coming back to normal.[35]

Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the limits of military power, the financial crisis has revealed the failure of a system but also the scale of its reliance on China to fund its debt, the erosion of American “soft power” has been only marginally affected by the ‘Obama effect’. Most importantly, American decline is only relative to the rise of new powers.

The decline of the West has only been relative to “rise of the rest”. The emerging markets of the 1990s have since become emerging powers. They have now established themselves on the international scene as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) a label that obviously covers a variety of situations: some, like China and Russia, are adepts of authoritarian capitalism while others (India, Brazil and South Africa) see themselves as the forerunners of democracy on three continents. But they also share common features and approaches to the international system. The most obvious is a formidable pace of economic growth (China averaged nearly 10 percent for a quarter of a century) with the BRICS closely followed by a second circle of emerging economies such as Turkey or Indonesia. The second shared feature is their opposition to the Western domination of international institutions such as the United Nations and the IMF. Finally, the BRICS oppose any attempts to curtail state sovereignty and any ideas of “humanitarian intervention” or “responsibility to protect” that they see as illegitimate or ill-disguised Western attempts to gain access to natural resources. Needless to say the “end of history” thesis – a distant reminder of post-1989 triumphalism of the West – has never been popular with the “rest”.

As the center of gravity of global economy shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific the international system has moved from the “unipolar moment” of the 1990s to the multipolar world at the start of the new millennium. The reassuring version (or the post-Cold War utopia reinvented as the “interpolar world”) combines a global redistribution of power or multipolarity with growing interdependence.[36] The more Realpolitik “strategic vision”, put forward by Brzezinski, points instead to a global governance of the international system shaped by the reassertion of the logic of power. Great power rivalry over spheres of influence and resources (with rising weapons proliferation, terrorism and ethnic conflict) is more likely to mean international instability and chaos rather than a new multipolar order.[37]

The other main feature of the post-1989 international system is, as Pierre Hassner has argued, fluidity and ambiguity where the classic opposition between domestic and international order no longer applies:

The separation between internal and external affairs, between states and societies, between national and international are blurred and relativized by a number of well-known factors: from the revolution of communications to the democratization of violence, from ethnicity to globalized terrorism, from civil wars to economic interdependence, from the beginnings of international criminal justice to the multiplication of lawless areas and failing states.[38]

One of the ambiguous legacies of the post-1989 international system is precisely the attempt to reconcile the sovereignty of states with the ambition to make human rights protection a major feature of the new international order. Although the post-1989 ambition to introduce the principle “humanitarian intervention” has been undermined by the Iraq war, the UN did adopt in 2005 the Responsibility to Protect, that is the idea that when governments fail to protect their citizens that responsibility falls onto the “international community”. And that, according to Christoph Bertram, exists “only when a few states are ready to act together”.

Reappraisals

1989 has brought about the Great Transformation whose basic tenets are shaken. The post-1989 paradigm has been challenged by new realities but it has also left a deep imprint on them. In two decades we have moved from the velvet revolutions of 1989 in the heart of Europe and the spread of democracy well beyond the former Soviet empire, to a Europe united in the crisis of democracy under the combined and mutually reinforcing challenges of technocracy and populism. The international spread of democracy has suffered set-backs, and American-style “democracy-promotion” remains discredited by its militaristic version in Iraq. Post-1989 democratization facilitated by the transformative power of the EU remains a prospect at best confined to the Balkans or the Ukraine. In contrast to 1989, the Arab awakening points to the possibility of a democratization process that would not be synonymous with Westernization or Europeanization.

The post-1989 expansion on a global scale of unfettered free markets has, some 20 years on, brought about the greatest international financial and economic crisis since 1929. And the crisis has merely accelerated another trend: Western-inspired globalization shifted the economic center of gravity to Asia, but without extending their Western social or environmental concerns. With the crisis the social question is back but not the conditions that helped to craft the post-war European compromise known as the “social-market economy”.

Finally, the end of the Cold War brought to the fore two at times competing and complementary visions of the international order: Europe’s post-modern/post-national model of peace through interdependence as an inspiration for “global governance”. America’s “unipolar moment” also turned out to be its “unilateral moment”. Some 20 years on both approaches have discovered their limitations in a multipolar – though not necessary multilateral world.

The post-1989 world has left us ambiguous legacies and no master narrative. Its crisis confronts us with new questions about what is living and what is dead in the ideas associated with the “velvet revolutions” that ended the Cold War. We have come to the close of three related cycles that have since shaped the world order. Yet any search for alternatives, the recasting of a public conversation, has to start with a reflection about the promises and illusions, the achievements and dead ends of 1989.

Notes

1  Amin Maalouf, Disordered World, London, Bloomsbury, 2012, p. XIX.

2  Adam Roberts, “Introduction”, in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds), Civil Resistance and Power Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 1. Roberts defines the mechanisms of change associated with civil resistance as “increasing the costs to the adversary of pursuing particular policies … or even undermining completely the adversary’s sources of legitimacy and power, whether domestic or international” (p. 3).

3  Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society, New York, Modern Library, 2009.

4  François Furet, L’énigme de la désagrégation communiste, Paris, Fondation Saint Simon, 1990, p. 4.

5  Quoted by Fred Halliday, Revolutions and World Politics, 1999, p. 53.

6  Václav Havel, “Politics and Conscience” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990, New York, Vintage, 1992, p. 260.

7  Claude Lefort, L’invention démocratique, Paris, Fayard, 1981, p. 42.

8  Mary Kaldor, “The Ideas of 1989: The Origins of the Concept of Global Civil Society”, in Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, vol. 9, 1999, pp. 475–488.

9  To use a phrase coined by Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1962.

10  Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, New York, Norton, 1996; Jacques Rupnik, “Les deux Printemps 1968”, Etudes, May 2008, pp. 585–592.

11  R. Koselleck, Le Futur Passé, Paris, EHESS, 1990, p. 314.

12  This is a theme developed by Jenny Andersson in a research project, FUTUREPOL, ERC grant.

13  Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, National Interest, 1989, pp. 3–18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.

14  Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, p. 22. This essay was developed into a book: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Remaking of World Order, New York, Penguin, 1996.

15  Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?”, Political Sciences Quarterly, vol. 99, no. 2, Summer 1984, p. 217.

16  Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–20. In this volume Thomas Carothers revisits the “democracy promotion paradigm” by contrasting the neoconservative approach of the presidency of George W. Bush with that of the Obama Administration.

17  “We constantly look forward and backward without leaving a present which we have turned into our only horizon”, François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris, Seuil, 2003, p. 217. On the construction of democratic time horizons see Andreas Schedler and Javier Santiso, “Democracy and Time: An Invitation”, International Political Sciences Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5–18.

18  Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cf. also, Larry Diamond, “The Democratic Rollback”, in Foreign Affairs, March–April 2008, pp. 36–48.

19  Pierre Hassner, “Preface”, in Politique, Anthologie du savoir, Paris, 2012, p. 16.

20  Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York, Norton, 2002, p. 20.

21  Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, OUP, 2001; Bob Hancké, Debating Varieties of Capitalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

22  Jean-Marie Guéhenno, La Fin de la Démocratie, Paris, Flamarion, 1993; The End of the Nation-State, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

23  Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York, Anchor Books, 2000, p. 106.

24  Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States and Democracy cannot Coexist, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. XVIII.

25  Simon Johnson, in Atlantic Monthly, May 2009.

26  Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be US, How America Fell Behind in the World it invented and how we can Come Back, New York, Picador, 2011.

27  Ibid., p. 18.

28  Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, New York, Penguin, 2010, p. 2.

29  Report of the advisory group chaired by Michelle Bachelet, Social protection floor for a fair and inclusive globalization, Geneva, ILO, 2011, p. XIII. The task force included the directors of the ILO and of the WHO.

30  Martin Hirsch, Secu: Objectif Monde, Paris, 2011.

31  Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream, How Europe is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, New York, Penguin Books, 2004; Mark Leonard, How Europe Will Run the XXIst Century, Harper and Collins, 2005.

32  Susan Strange, States and Markets, London, Pinter, 1988 p. 24; also Susan Strange, Authority and Markets, New York, Palgrave, 2002, pp. 141–145.

33  Pierre Hassner, “La réalité européenne actuelle se caractérise par une impuissance agitée” in La Grande Europe, no. 37, October 2011, pp. 13–19. See also Hassner’s introduction to P. Esper et al. Un monde sans Europe?, Paris, Fayard, 2011, pp. 13–33.

34  Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, New York, Random House, 1987.

35  Paul Kennedy, “Back to Normalcy”, New Republic, December 30, 2010, p. 10. The thesis about US decline is rejected by neoconservative analysts such as Robert Kagan, “Not Fade Away, against the Myth of American Decline”, New Republic, February 2, 2012, pp. 19–25; or Edward Luttwak, “The Declinists, Wrong Again”, American Interest, November/December 2008, pp. 7–13.

36  Cf. Giovanni Grevi, “The Interpolar World: A New Scenario”, Paris, EUISS, occasional paper no. 79, June 2009. “Interpolarity is interest-based (as it builds on the convergence of interests of major international actors), problem-driven (as it focuses on challenges requiring cooperative solutions) and process-oriented” (p. 5).

37  Zbigniew Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, New York, Basic Books, 2012.

38  Pierre Hassner, “The Ambiguity of Order: From the Dilemmas of Action to the Contradictions of Institutions” in Gilles Andreani and Pierre Hassner (eds) Justifying War? From Humanitarian Intervention to Counterterrorism, New York, Palgrave, 2008.

3  Writing 1989

A world narrative?

Karoline Postel-Vinay

“All the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart”[1] said Jawaharlal Nehru in August 1947 in his beautiful speech delivered on the eve of the independence of India. While celebrating the awakening of a great nation-state that at long last had reclaimed its sovereignty – the realization of “its tryst with destiny” – the Indian prime minister was also acknowledging that this event was taking place in an entirely novel environment, in a world that had become “One World”, echoing the title of a 1943 best-seller by Wendell Willkie, an advisor to president Franklin Roosevelt.[2] Nehru was a remarkable orator. But although he produced memorable narratives on the rise and shine of India, on the uniting of Asia, and on the vibrancy of Afro-Asian solidarity, he never offered anything quite comparable on the matter of the emerging One World. Neither did Willkie’s followers. What comes to mind, rather, when one thinks of the defining speeches of the late 1940s, is Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” declaration at Fulton in March 1946, which announced, not the uniting, but the partition of that One World.

One could argue of course, and implicitly one often did, that this partition did not call the very existence of the One World entity into question. The Iron Curtain that had descended across the European continent was a threat to “the safety of the world”, warned the British prime minister.[3] In other words, the conflict between Greece and Turkey that would soon oppose the Soviet Union and the United States was challenging the peace of the new interdependent One World, but not the latter in itself. Because the conflict that was taking place in the Balkans could, according to Harry Truman, “be far reaching to the West as well as to the East”,[4] because of its possible earth-scale effect, it confirmed, rather than denied, the reality of the oneness of the international scene. From that perspective the beginning of the Cold War was a world event. Was the end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, a world event too? The answer to this question is paradoxically not self-evident. The celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was significant in that regard. The gathering on November 9, 2009 in the German capital of all the main historical figures of the Cold War – the former Eastern dissidents and their Western supporters – while the American president, Barak Obama, was too busy visiting East Asia to attend the ceremony, looked almost like an allegory of remembrance of things past in international affairs.

What eventually showed through the November 2009 celebrations was that somehow Europe was no longer at the center of world politics. The commemoration of 1989 was clearly about German and European history. Whether it was also about global history is open to question. While the first US president of non-European origin was traveling around East Asia, the citizens of India, Brazil or Nigeria were not celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall either. The purpose of this chapter is to try to make sense of this paradoxical transformation of the status of a historical fact that took shape as an unquestionably world phenomenon and whose international significance was not, at the end, as undoubtedly of a global scale. What is at stake here is the possibility of creating a common narrative around some 40 years of world politics that have fundamentally shaped the global order – engendering the so-called bipolar order – but which meaning does not translate into a consensual representation. The process through which common “geopolitical narratives” are produced encompasses a larger issue of international politics where the ability to formulate and impose a specific world-view, or more precisely a specific “reading” and “writing” of world events, constitute one form of power.[5] The production of the “Cold War” as a world-scale war, in the late 1940s, was an expression of narrative power, albeit not an uncontested one. The uncertainties about its significance some 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall might point to the de-centering if not demotion-of-Europe trend that is so often talked about in world politics analysis,[6] but might as well point to the actual sustainability of global geopolitical narratives.

1 “World wars” as world narratives

Creating commonality is a major component of political activity, whether at the local, national or global level. As famously demonstrated by Benedict Anderson,[7] the makings of nations are sustained by the production of a common grammar that then forms a repertoire from which national narratives are elaborated. One could argue that producing a common grammar, and from there on a common narrative, is also part of the genesis of the “international imagined community”. The sociology of nationalism is evidently not that of “One World-ism”, but both phenomena imply the existence of a frame of reference that provides not only identity – for those who are supposed to rally the nation or the international community – but also legitimacy and influence – for those who aim at leading either of them.

The discussion that is touched upon here – whether the imagined community paradigm can apply to the international arena and why and how world narratives take shape – is not a historical or a historiographical one. It could, of course, be formulated from the point of view of history and historiography, and it has been raised in a sense, by the very rich and well-established current of World History, which has already generated a vast array of debates on the definition of planetary history.[8] Although useful and enlightening for the critical understanding of what a world narrative might be, the historians’ discussion does not address an issue that is central for the analysis of international relations, i.e. that of the configuration of power and order. World narratives – that can also be called “geopolitical narratives” if one considers them from a power politics perspective – contribute to the organization of international order. They give meaning to sequences of events, and a sense of direction, on which agendas can be built. So does, or did, the narrative of the “world-scale war”, as illustrated by what is commonly known as World War II.

The historiographies of World War II, and indeed those of the Great War or World War I, and up to a point of the Cold War, tend to take for granted the very notion of “world war” and do not question the normative implications of that notion. There has been some limited discussion, from a historical standpoint, on why and how the 1939–1945 war was called “World War II” or the “Second World War”, and why in the meantime in the Soviet Union the official name for that event was the “Great Patriotic War”, and why in the People’s Republic of China it was the “War of Resistance against Japan”. As this discussion reminds us, there is a history of the labeling of those major conflicts.[9] The first “world war” was for a long time known, and is often still known as “the Great War” in the United Kingdom and, likewise, “la Grande Guerre” in France. The origin of the term “world war” is American. During the first three years of the conflict, the American press called it the “European War”. After the spring of 1917, when the United States got involved, it started to be called the “World War” by both the media and government circles in Washington. The document that was prepared for the Paris Conference negotiations and finally edited in 1924 by the historian James Shotwell, a member of Woodrow Wilson’s advisory team, was presented as a history of the “World War”.[10] The use of the term “world war”, rather than the European War or the Great War was deliberate on the part of Woodrow Wilson. It was not a matter of geographical precision, as some large parts of the planet, notably in South America and Asia, were not involved in the conflict. Neither was it for the sake of political accuracy, as an important number of nations that were either colonized or semi-colonized were not fully (sovereign) actors of the war. Wilson chose to speak of “world war” or “world crisis” both for domestic considerations and for personal convictions based on his own vision of international relations. The president needed to convince the Congress and more generally the American public opinion that the United States was not going to fight a “European war”, involving complicated and unattractive territorial rivalries, but was aiming at a much grander and significant goal, i.e. “to make the world safe for democracy”. Woodrow Wilson believed, as the League of Nations adventure illustrated, in the oneness of the international scene, and in what would be later called the One World.

By the 1930s, the notion of “world war” started to appear in British and French publications. The “world war” was becoming a global narrative that described a global disorder, the antinomy of a global order characterized as “world peace”. As early as 1939, Franklin Roosevelt referred to the events that were occurring in Europe as a “world war”. After 1945, the “second world war” became not just standard historiography, but history as international norm. Again, as for the 1914–1918 conflict, the notion of “world war” could not be justified by the need for geographical precision – large portions of the planet were not involved in the conflict – neither by a concern for political accuracy – the same colonized or semi-colonized nations were still not proper actors of the war. The term “world” to characterize the war could be explained by a Wilsonian interpretation of international affairs, in the sense that one could argue that the conflict was of universal significance. The stake of the war clearly cut across nations and territories, as it was indeed a fight of freedom against tyranny, or democracy against fascism. The resolution of the conflict did lead to the creation of universal instruments such as the notion of crime against humanity. Yet universalism is a philosophical notion that does not always translate into actual planetary terms: in other words, the “universal” is not necessarily “global” – earth-scale – especially not in international politics. The fact, again, that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China have used terms other than “World War II” is one indication of this reality. Neither the Soviet nor the Chinese authorities have actually called into question the narrative of “the global fight of freedom against tyranny”, as long they themselves have been clearly pictured, however surreal, on the side of freedom and democracy. But their preference for expressions such as the “Great Patriotic War”, in reference to Russia’s Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon’s France, or the “War of Resistance against Japan”, in reference to a Sino-Japanese conflict that really started in 1894, is a sign of a distance taken from the global narrative. It also reveals an identity-building process that is grounded in national history rather than global history.

2 The Cold War as “world war”?

The first and second “world wars” did, nevertheless, establish themselves as global narratives, and despite the existence of national counter-narratives have never been seriously challenged at the international level. The Cold War, however, has been contested almost from the start as a narrative describing a world-scale conflict. There have even been doubts expressed at some point, notably by Mary Kaldor, as to whether the Cold War was a real war at all.[11] Before asking whether that war was in fact cold or hot, whether it was a conflict or a mere tension, voices have contested the very notion that whatever was happening in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, was indeed a “world event”. In other words, what was then called into question was the actual stage – the world as stage – and not the configuration of the plot.

The expression itself, “cold war”, was an American creation. It was the title of a popular essay by the journalist Walter Lippmann,[12] and along with president Harry Truman’s war speech of March 1947, it rapidly caught the American collective imagination. Truman’s declaration described a faraway, localized conflict with global implications. It echoed Wilson and Roosevelt’s respective war speeches, by referring to the same notion of America’s duty to the world: “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world”.[13] Again the involvement of the United States in the new conflict was not about solving some local problem – this time in the Balkans – but fighting a “world war”. The novelty of that particular war narrative was that the respective sides of freedom and tyranny were given geographical designations, the West and the East. This dichotomy was rhetorically all the more efficient in that it related to a well-rooted European repertoire in which, as Larry Wolff demonstrated, the notion of “Eastern Europe”, produced by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking, is opposed to a “Western Europe” identity.[14] The East–West dichotomy also relates to an even more ancient opposition of Europe versus Asia, and which was evoked in “X”, alias George Kennan’s defining text on American policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Stalin, according to “X”, came from a “Russian–Asiatic world” characterized by “a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful co-existence of rival forces”.[15]

The containment of the Soviet Union meant that Russia was now firmly established in the East, despite De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe that would stretch to the Ural Mountains. In the meantime, nations that had so far been equated with the Orient, either the East or the Far East, such as Turkey and Japan, were defined as members of the West. These paradoxical geographical definitions were not just mere rhetorical oddities; they also illustrated the ambivalence of the position within the West of the countries in question – an ambivalence that has taken a new dimension, most obviously in the case of Turkey, in the post-Cold War order. However, for a majority of nations in the late 1940s the most pressing matter was not to define oneself as a member of the West or the East but to be able to write down one’s name on the map of the world. European empires were still controlling vast portions of the earth. The main objective of the leaders of nationalist movements in Asia and Africa was either the independence of their respective countries, or the reinforcement of the sovereignty they had just acquired – what would be called “state-building” nowadays. From that perspective the notion of taking sides, and therefore accepting some form of allegiance, was understandably rather unpalatable. As early as the fall of 1946, Nehru advised to “keep away from the power politics of groups, aligned against one another”, announcing the possibility of a third way that would later become the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[16]

The April 1955 Bandung Conference that launched the NAM was the starting point of a process through which the Cold War as a common global narrative was challenged, and which might explain the difficulty to produce a cohesive representation of the “1989” event at the international, earth-scale level today. The actual agenda of the NAM varied and was often contradictory. But the fundamental narrative of the movement did call into question what had been presented as an essential division of the international scene – the West versus the East – and proposed to replace it by another division, if not a marked opposition, between the North and the South. The purpose of this alternative narrative was very simply, at first, to give a voice to those who had been silenced for so long by calling the world’s attention to the reality of colonialism and its long-lasting effects. As the first Indonesian president, Ahmed Sukarno, pointed out at Bandung:

We are often told: “Colonialism is dead”. Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are un-free? And, I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form, which we in Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation.[17]

Sukarno was also prompt to add that the victims of colonialism, mainly the peoples of Asia and Africa, constituted “far more than half the human population of the world”, a potential strength that could be used to “demonstrate to the minority of the world which lives on the other continents” that the majority was in favor of peace, not war. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy expressed the same idea that a so far “silent majority” of the world population, whose interests did not necessarily converge with that of the minority, was at long last starting to be heard. To define this large group that belonged neither to the West nor the East, Sauvy coined the term “Third World”,[18] in reference to the “Third Estate” (Tiers-Etat) of the French society that Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès described in a famous pamphlet written on the eve of the 1789 Revolution, as such: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something”.

To “be something” in the international political order was indeed the first stage of the emergence of the Third World. To challenge the Cold War narrative and the global political agenda it sustained, by introducing another representation of the world – organized around the North–South, rather than the East–West division – implying other priorities, such as economic development rather than military security, was the second stage of this evolution. The power of the Third World’s counter-narrative reached a peak in the 1970s when, on the one hand, a mood of détente was transforming the East–West dynamics – the American president Richard Nixon visited Peking and Moscow in 1972 – and, on the other, the United Nations was announcing, in 1974, the establishment of a New International Economic Order “based on equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest, and cooperation among all states, irrespective of their economic and social systems”.[19] After that golden decade, however, Third Worldism declined rapidly in the 1980s, and along with it the efficiency of the North–South division narrative weakened.[20] In a sense, the seeming fading of the North–South gap – despite the persistence of enormous economic disparities between developed and developing countries – announced the end of the East–West confrontation. The new international order of the 1990s was to be that of a post-geographical “global governance”, where issues, whether economic development or security (soon to be enlarged to “human security”), were to be tackled regardless of their localization.

3 The end of world narratives?

The weakening of Third Worldism did not mean that the former “silent majority” was being silent again. On the contrary, the long lasting consequence of decolonization was that a considerable number of new states had appeared on the international scene and were there to say. The arena of world affairs in 1989 was far more diverse than that of 1945, and had become even more so some 20 years later, with the entrance of the so-called emerging powers such as Brazil, China or India. This new diversity is probably one major factor in the difficulty to conceive, in retrospect, the fall of the Berlin Wall as a world event. One could of course point to historical evidence as to why the end of the East–West conflict was, in some measure, of geographically limited significance. The durability of the division of the Korean peninsula, that started with the Cold War but did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, is one obvious example. But beyond those hard facts, that would necessitate a more detailed discussion, the very plurality of the twenty-first-century international scene seems to be both what most likely explains the ambiguous status of the end of the Cold War as a world event, and what is most difficult for certain Western leaders to apprehend.

In the fall of 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, president George W. Bush launched an initiative to establish the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9, as a “World Freedom Day”. The proposal never reached the voting stage at the United Nations. The narrative continuum that the American president tried to create, with the help of neo-conservative thinking, between the first two world wars, the Cold War as third world war, and what was supposed to be the fourth, “the War on Terror”, also proved unsustainable. Some hard facts can explain the failure of this vision, such as the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the improbability of an alliance between the nationalist secular leader Saddam Hussein and the radical religious network of Al-Qaida, making the invasion of Iraq as a response to the “War on Terror” questionable at best. Yet, again, beyond those facts, the relative inefficiency of George W. Bush’s worldview had more fundamentally to do with a difficulty to grasp the dynamics of an international scene that was no longer organized by a Euro-centered repertoire. To envisage that 9/11 was the beginning of a “fourth world war” – as the American president did when comparing, for example, 9/11 to the attack on Pearl Harbor – was to miss the fact that the Cold War itself had already been contested as a possible “third world war”.

International events do not become “world events” just because of their universal significance. If that were the case, one could wonder why the vastly murderous conflict of the Great Lakes region that the Africans call “our world war” would not indeed be called a “world war” by the rest of the planet. One could hardly argue that the gigantic tragedy that took place in Central Africa was not a tragedy for the whole of humanity. The reason why this conflict is internationally called a “regional”, therefore a sub-global, one, has to do with narrative power. In a much talked-about speech given in Dakar in 2007, French president Nicolas Sarkozy claimed that the “African man had not entered History enough”. Such claim was expressing a classic confusion between words and facts – what is said and what is done – and, more specifically, between taking part in international events and being able to “write” international history as a “world event”. Sarkozy was forgetting that Africa had long been part of that “silent majority” that did not really choose to be so, and that had only recently emerged as a visible and audible actor on the international scene. Ironically the French president was also overlooking Europe’s own difficulty not to enter, but to stay in History, as the localized celebration of “1989” tended to reveal.

From a universalistic perspective, the history of post-1945 Europe is of global significance. From the creation of a territory where war is impossible, to the peaceful advent of democracy in Eastern Europe, the history of Europe constitutes a possible turning point, or at least a new horizon for the advancement of world freedom and peace. Yet the actors of the European construction have seemed unable to provide a narrative that would actually tell that story. The referenda fiasco of 2005 was a clear indication of that inability. The problem might not be inherent to Europe. One can wonder indeed if the very principle of an overarching narrative, such as the two world wars were, and such was, in part, the Cold War, can still function today. Writing history on an earth-scale has become an exercise in complexity, in the sense that the affirmation of one’s own worldview can no longer be dissociated from the actual plurality of the world. This global challenge is particularly difficult for Europe, which for so long could conflate the universality of its own experience with global reality.

Notes

1  Nehru, J. “Tryst With Destiny” (Speech on the Granting of Indian Independence) August 14, 1947.

2  Willkie, W. (1943) One World, New York: Simon and Schuster.

3  Churchill, W. (Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri) March 5, 1946.

4  Truman, H. (Address before a Joint Session of Congress) March 12, 1947.

5  For a longer discussion on “geopolitical narratives” (récits géopolitiques) see Postel-Vinay, K. (2005) L’Occident et sa bonne parole, Paris: Flammarion.

6  See for example Laqueur, W. and Hassner, P. (2010) “What Happened to ‘Europe’?”, American Interest 5: 6, 5–24.

7  Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, New York: Verso.

8  Mazlish, B. and Buultjens, R. (1993) Conceptualizing Global History. Boulder: West-view Press.

9  Reynolds, D. (2003) “The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’: Historical Discourse and International Politics”, Journal of Contemporary History, 38: 1, 29–44.

10  Shotwell, J.T. (ed.) (1924) Economic and Social History of the World War, Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (150 volumes).

11  Kaldor, M. (1990) The Imaginary War, Oxford: Blackwell. See also Oakes, G. (1994) The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12  Lippman, W. (1947) The Cold War, New York: Harper & Brothers.

13  Truman, H. (Address before a Joint Session of Congress), March 12, 1947.

14  Wolff, L. (1996) Inventing Eastern Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press. See also Neumann, I. (1999) Uses of the Other. “The East” in European Identity Formation, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

15  X (Keenan, G.) (1947) “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, Foreign Affairs, 25.

16  Cf. Kumar, S. (1983) “Non-alignment: International Goals and National Interests”, Asian Survey, 23: 4, 445–462.

17  Sukarno, A. (Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference) April 18, 1955.

18  Sauvy, A. (1952) “Trois mondes, une planète”, L’Observateur, August 14.

19  United Nations (1974) “Declaration and Program of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order”, A/RES/3201, S-VI.

20  Cf. Berger, M.T. (2004) “After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism”, Third World Quarterly, 25: 1.

4  1989

A philosophy of immediacy

Zaki Laïdi

While 1989 swallowed up the USSR and Communism, it also swept away an entire way of representing social change. The old style of representation was substituted by a new one based on the idea of immediacy. Two novel hypotheses were formulated at the time. The first holds the view that transition to capitalism and democracy necessarily go hand in hand, since capitalism is impossible without democracy and democracy is impossible without capitalism. This is the era of ‘capitalist democracy’. The second hypothesis sees such a transition occurring rapidly and immediately: as soon as political elites express the desire to implement the change or they are able to receive decisive external support.

The year 1989 saw the emergence of a new, deeply voluntaristic, representation of social change. It overthrew all previous representations of such change – stressing, as they did, the importance of preconditions for the transition to capitalism or to democracy. Hence, 1989 wiped out any notion of transition, replacing it with the idea of immediate change. This new representation of social change is not very distant from what Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’. Initially, Durkheim saw these moments as taking place within a limited social framework: for example in a heated and excited assembly. But very quickly he widened the notion to historical periods and to political events that allowed individuals to seek each other out and to merge forces. He used the example of the night of 4 August 1789, in the wake of the French Revolution, during which the French Constituent Assembly abolished the feudal privileges of the landed aristocracy in a matter of hours. This sociological and historical reference is important. It helps us to grasp the existence of moments, in which history seems to run out of control and in which the break between ‘before’ and ‘after’ appears decisive. In these moments of collective effervescence, anything – or almost anything – seems possible. The sense of a common movement galvanizes all who share its point of view, or who see themselves as part of it. It is an exceptional situation in which representations and behaviors suggest that the traditional constraints and routines of collective action can be disrupted or even completely thrown off in quite unprecedented ways.

In what follows, we shall attempt to show how this radically new conception of social change developed with regard to the transition to both capitalism and democracy. Finally, by analyzing the case of Iraq we shall observe its geopolitical implications.

Capitalism in 500 days

The American economist Jeffrey Sachs is the founding theorist and architect of the doctrine of shock therapy, which advocates the implementation of immediate and simultaneous structural reforms in all fields to foster economic development. However, structural reforms, Sachs claimed, make sense only within the framework of a new, effective price system, which is the central element of the transformation. Such a price system will, according to Sachs, make possible the transition to a convertible currency, stave off the dangers of hyperinflation and select in Darwinian fashion the public enterprises capable of survival.[1]

Shock therapy has three goals: stabilization, liberalization and privatization,[2] and assumes that social change is barely constrained by time (if by ‘time’ we understand the existence of a form of social viscosity that makes any change by definition slow and difficult).[3] In this apparent indifference to the depth of time there is, however, a genuine paradox. On the one hand, there is a belief that the market economy can send signals that instantly modify the behavior of actors. On the other hand, there seems to be a fear that social inertia is liable to derail the ‘shock therapy’ reforms. Sachs was, in fact, much less worried by the prospect of the return of Communism than he was by the idea that shock therapy reforms would be bogged down, as they were in Argentina, instead of aiming for a sufficiently rapid mobilization so as to disarm the opponents of reform.[4]

The preachers of neoliberalism think that the market is able to break through the social time barrier. In many respects, this view of social change was – and remains – deeply utopian. But Jeffrey Sachs has always rejected this criticism, pointing out that his project did not aim to offer another world, but simply to replicate what had clearly worked elsewhere. In other words, it was not a matter of invention, but merely of duplication. This is a teleology that in no way aspires to make history by proposing a new cosmogony, but to remake it by duplicating ‘real capitalism’ as it exists in North America and Western Europe. In all this, there is no trace of utopianism unless one takes the view that it would be utopian to believe in the pure and simple reproduction of a model existing elsewhere.[5]

According to Sachs, there is nothing to learn from market economies that we do not already know. Shock therapy has, in fact little to say about the historical realities of the economies of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Rather, with Communism rejected, all the institutions inherited from Communism were doomed to disappear. The argument was sound but omitted that under Communism there survived societies, national histories, particular traditions and local specificities that were not all identical and not all necessarily obsolete. Ultimately, shock therapy committed the same error as Sovietism. It was sold on the idea that Communism had structured societies to such a degree that it was no longer useful to take an interest in their particularities.

Even beyond ‘free-market’ circles, there was an unquestioned consensus among economists in the early 1990s that shock therapy had to be radical.[6] Broad and massive reform was required to increase the certainty of gaining results, and to ensure independence from the hostility it might initially encounter.[7] No less significant was the highlighting – unexpected among economists – of the crucial role attributed to certain political actors in the relative success of the economic reforms.[8] This consensus on radical reform was also politically constructed to marginalize any competing philosophy. For example, shock therapy theorists massively dominated the intellectual production of one of the most important international institutions, the World Bank. It is interesting, in this regard, to examine the theoretical production of that institution and its breeding ground. In the World Bank’s Annual Development Report published in 1996, the most cited author is, by far, Jeffrey Sachs. If we add in other shock therapy proponents, such as Shleifer, Vishny, Lipton, Fischer or Gelb, we find that these authors are over-represented in the World Bank’s publications.[9] In contrast, authors critical of shock therapy, such as Murrell, Roland and Dewatripont are mentioned merely for the sake of form.[10]

This domination was reinforced by the World Bank’s complicity with certain Central and Eastern European elites that were particularly receptive to this reforming radicalism.[11] However, the idea that the latter were mere puppets of Western manipulators does not withstand a serious examination. Many economists from these countries were won over to the shock therapy idea. Many of them (Klaus, Jezek and Triska in the Czech Republic, Balcerowicz in Poland, Gaidar and Yavlinsky in Russia, and Kornai in Hungary) were extraordinarily frustrated by the difficulties they had themselves encountered in their attempts to reconcile socialism with the free market in the 1960s or 1970s. Their conversion was also facilitated by their participation in networks of economic socialization that had been bringing together economists from the West and the East from the mid-1960s onwards.[12] Hence, the dismantling of the socialist state became, in their eyes, a prerequisite condition to reforms.

Shock therapy thus appears both as a technology of economic reform and as an exceptional zeitgeist moment, a ‘window of opportunity’ to be exploited, during which it was imperative to act if the one system was to tip over into another. Change could happen here and now. Given that situation, why waste time testing that which had already been tried and proven effective elsewhere?

Instant democracy

Instant democracy did not have its Jeffrey Sachs. However, the processes that led to its conception – and subsequently, its implementation – turn out to be very similar to those that had led to the inception of economic shock therapy.

The rapidity with which outdated totalitarianism was swept away and replaced by democratic political regimes in Central and Eastern Europe was at first met with stupefaction. But the intense energy this exceptional moment unleashed had to go somewhere. It needed to externalize itself and find an outlet for its exuberance, and this could lie only in the reactivation of a democratic messianism that had previously been held in check by the vagaries of colonialism and the imperatives of the Cold War. As in the case of ‘shock therapy’, we find here the main ingredients of a political change that was conceived as both thoroughgoing and immediate. Democracy was considered desirable here and now. The requirement that countries demonstrate a prior democratic culture now seems a suspicious request, as it bears the marks of a relativism that had been consigned to the past.

Democracy now meant first and foremost free elections. Once the tyrants were swept away, democracy became, in a sense, a formal matter, which was first and foremost electoral in nature and could draw on the trustworthy reservoir of electoral knowledge accumulated by the old Western democracies, which were willing to share their experience with anyone who asked for it. As with shock therapy, the argument claimed, democracy didn’t need to be submitted to the ritual of experimentation because it was a social practice that was already sufficiently understood. On the day of his inauguration in January 1989, George Bush senior could say:

For the first time in this century, for the first time in perhaps all history, man does not have to invent a system by which to live. We don’t have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better. We don’t have to wrest justice from the kings. We only have to summon it from within ourselves.[13]

As with shock therapy, social imitation is implicitly seen as representing a kind of refreshing break with the age of utopias that has now been consigned to the past. Hence, the essential variable becomes the will of the actors. Also in the same way as shock therapy, the radical prescription of instant democracy seems to draw deeply on the reserves of common sense: the political failure of undemocratic systems eliminates any alternative to democracy; the existence of a supply of available democratic technology means the transition period to democracy can be shortened; it is presumed that the reputedly universal attraction of democracy is a problem only for the dictators and petty tyrants whose days are now numbered. The parallel with economic shock therapy is, in these respects, almost perfect.

Democracy as procedure, not as culture

This dramatic change in the representation of the conditions for the emergence of democracy leads to democracy being regarded as a procedure, not as a culture. This means that democracy comes to be defined as: ‘That institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’.[14] Democracy is, then, first and foremost the election that enables the leading elites to be selected. This procedural definition, provided initially by Schumpeter, is very close to what Przeworski elsewhere terms as the minimal definition of democracy: the right of individuals to choose their leaders freely through competitive elections.[15] Giuseppe di Palma echoes this exclusively procedural, minimalist definition, taking the view that democracy is no longer a value expressing the defense of the common good. It is thereby inevitably disconnected from any reference to social progress.[16]

In such conditions, politics becomes akin to a market wherein various offers for meeting a political demand compete with each other. The prerequisite for a democratic political culture – one of the famous preconditions for democracy – is submerged beneath the imperatives of rational calculation and the associated game of incentives. The prerequisites for democracy come to be seen, on the contrary, as products of democracy.[17] And adherence to democracy comes to be measured by the concrete advantages that it brings. It becomes a product traded in a public marketplace. The fact that Schumpeter’s definition has made a comeback after 1989 is not a mere coincidence. Schumpeter had largely copied his definition of democracy from the definition of the market. For him, politics had never been a matter of representation. It was always first and foremost a product tradable on an electoral market.[18]

The consequences of opting for procedural democracy are twofold. The first is lower costs of entry into the great brotherhood of democratic nations. Anyone can enter: it is no longer a British club, but a universal association. This simplification of the conditions for entry and for recognition as a democracy will clearly not be without consequence for the very definition of democracy and its political and ideological instrumentalization. To the Western advocates, lowering the access threshold to democracy makes it possible to bring strategic allies under the democratic banner without a too obvious threat of self-contradiction. At the same time, it makes it possible to apply the promotion of democracy as a political lever towards those who might happen to resist this new world order. For those on the receiving end, the advantages are not negligible either, since, once the criteria for democracy are primarily procedural, it is possible – if not always easy – to fabricate free elections in the way that non-democratic elections were fabricated. Naturally, free elections are, by definition, the opposite of prefabricated elections. But authoritarian regimes have, in fact, turned out to possess a great democratic inventiveness. When democracy is reduced strictly to an electoral ‘game’, there is a danger that the political contest will be open only to a small elite capable of ‘low-cost’ legitimization in the eyes of both its own citizens and the international community.[19] Market democracy has accordingly lowered the threshold of transition to democracy. It has also detached democratic progress from, among other things, any idea of social progress.

Market democracy is therefore based on a central paradox. On the one hand, it draws on a minimalist definition that limits itself to the procedural aspects of democracy. On the other hand, it conceives the introduction of democracy and the establishment of the free market as indissociable. But the paradox is merely apparent, since, as we have seen, despite the ambitiousness of its aims, shock therapy was itself procedural. The question of who would be the social beneficiaries of the privatization of the economy was not asked. Privatization was simply assumed to be a necessary prerequisite for achieving a market democracy; the assumed idea being that everyone would benefit from it in the end. Market democracy was thus built upon an ambivalence that is at the very heart of ‘the ideas of 1989’. In certain respects, it appears extraordinarily ambitious as a perspective for social change, since economic and political reforms are regarded as indissociable. In other respects, given the stress it places on the procedural dimension of change (elections and privatization) it allows substantial room for adaptation and ‘re-branding’ once it limits itself merely to a procedural form (electoral democracies).

The Iraq war as an illustration of the ideology of immediacy

The Iraq war may be said to be the best political illustration of this ideology of immediacy, even if its political justification was not initially based on the desire to export democracy to the country. There can be no doubt, however, that the thinking of the American neoconservatives was pervaded by the idea that democracy could be implanted rapidly there, as it had been in post-war Germany and Japan. The famous Bremer ‘debaathification’ decree – modeled on ‘denazification’ and ‘decommunization’ – which is said to have marked the beginning of civil war in Iraq, is, from this standpoint, symptomatic of a simplified worldview that pays scant attention to the dense texture of local situations and believes that what was done in Berlin and Tokyo in the 1940s could be done in Baghdad in the 2000s. Admittedly, the United States could legitimately take the view that the majority of Iraqis were probably in favor of the American intervention. But the desire to be rid of a tyrant in no way implied a desire to build a democracy. The idea that there was a democracy in gestation, ready to emerge once the authoritarian lid was removed, is, to say the least, simplistic. Saddam Hussain was, admittedly, a despicable tyrant, but to think that his regime merely hovered above a society with which it had no relation is of the order of a fairytale. Here, the artless anti-ethnocentrism of Wolfowitz (‘Why should the Arabs not be allowed to have democracy?’) is disarmingly naïve.

Why, then, would what succeeded in Japan not succeed in Iraq? There are an infinite number of differences between these two experiences.[20] There is, however, one that is fundamental, and is also perhaps the only universal prerequisite for democracy: the existence of a demos whose nature, future and borders are subject to a prior consensus. The writings of Linz and Stepan are categorical on this point.[21] If, in a given political society, there is no prior consensus – at least among the elites – on the demos, its borders and its identity, democracy quite simply does not make sense. It makes even less sense if, instead of stabilizing the demos, democracy weakens or destroys it.

Now, this is precisely what happened in Iraq. There was a majority that on essentially sectarian grounds wanted to see the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime, which, particularly since 1991, had become a Sunni-based regime. However, once that aim had been achieved, there was consensus on hardly anything else. This became clear when the constitutional debates on Iraqi democracy were held. Should it be an Arab democracy, or an Islamic one? It could not be Arabic since that would have meant discriminating against the Kurds who are not Arabs. Nor could it be Islamic, for even if 98 percent of the Iraqi population are Muslims, the reference to an ‘Islamic republic’ would indicate a republic of the Iranian type, dominated by the Shi’ites.

Admittedly, ethnic pluralism is not necessarily at odds with the democratic idea. Lijphart’s model of consociational democracy is precisely intended for regulating multiethnic societies.[22] Moreover, one could easily imagine denominational balances being guaranteed, on the Lebanese model, under a foreign trusteeship, which was probably the hope of the Americans. However, to get to that point a minimal consensus is essential, and the Shi’ite majority probably feels strong enough not to have to seek a compromise with the Sunnis. The Shi’ites’ intransigence is sustained by an Iranian neighbor working methodically to bring about American failure. Przeworski is right on this point: democratic pacts succeed only when the competitors are not sure of their respective strengths. When they are uncertain, each party seeks the greatest guarantees on the assumption that they may be the losers.[23] Linz and Stepan explain the successes of democratic transitions not only by a consensus of elites on the question of the demos, but also by the conviction that democracy is ‘the only game in town’.

Iraq as precarious ethno-democracy

Here again, Iraq does not entirely fit the pattern. Its internal dynamic rests on three factors that are both indissociable and contradictory: the Shi’ite domination of Iraqi political life; the existence of a great degree of Kurdish autonomy; and the improbable risk of partition on account of the multiplicity of fault lines, though these are so numerous that they offer the advantage of not necessarily coinciding on all levels. If the initial political dynamic in 2003 rested broadly on an alliance between Kurds and Shi’ites to remove the Sunnis from power, the situation seven years later is remarkably more complex. Because the Sunnis are almost definitively out of power, their support is now essential for the Shi’ite forces that hope to exercise it. There is, therefore, nothing contradictory about having Shi’ites united, on the one hand, over an unwillingness to review the 2003 settlement and, at the same time, having this essential point of agreement lead to a divide amongst themselves in the exercise of power.[24]

Nor is there anything specifically Iraqi about this reality. The problem arises in more or less the same way for the Sunnis. They know that, in all probability, they will not be able to regain power in Baghdad and that, in these conditions, they have to trade their support for the Shi’ite government against the best available offer. This is how most Sunni support for Iyad Alawi’s party in the legislative elections of January 2010 should be understood. Moreover, though the Shi’ites and the Kurds are in fundamental agreement over not revisiting the new political deal that resulted from American intervention in 2003, Shi’ites and Sunnis are united in their desire not to see an expansion of Kurdish influence – particularly into the contested zones of northern Iraq (Kirkuk).[25] Furthermore, they do not wish to see the share-out of oil revenues leave the Kurds independent of central government. The absence of a political consensus on the division of oil revenues provides confirmation of the genuine split between Arabs and Kurds. The fact that the Iraqi system is basically organized on denominational and ethnic lines which, at the same time, cannot remotely absorb the whole of the political dynamic, paradoxically represents the best guarantee of the preservation of the new political order insofar as no faction can govern alone unless it were to seize power by force.

Iraq is currently light years away from being a functioning, pacified political democracy. It is akin to a form of – extraordinarily fragile and possibly temporary – electoral ethno-democracy. For better or for worse, the Iraqis have in a way become masters of their own destiny again, even if that destiny is not the one imagined by the American neo-conservatives. Iraq has shown the US’s ability to change a political order at the same time as it has revealed the US’s difficulty in building a new political order that is in keeping with its aims and interests.

The year 1989 unquestionably provided a global structure of opportunity favorable to the extension of democracy throughout the world. There are unquestionably more democracies in the world now than there were some 20 years ago. This dynamic, however, offers neither evidence against democratic backsliding nor its misrepresentation through ‘re-branding’, it only confirms the pluralization of the contents of democracy. As is often the case, the philosophy of immediacy has gained ground, but the ground it contests is furrowed more than ever before by the particularities of each different society.

Notes

1  D. Lipton, J. Sachs, S. Fischer and J. Kornai, ‘Creating a Market Economy in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland’, Brooking Papers on Economics Activity, vol. 1, 1990, pp. 75–147.

2  Ibid.

3  J. Sachs, ‘Understanding Shock Therapy’, Occasional Paper of the Social Market Foundation 7, 1994.

4  Ibid., p. 100.

5  J. Sachs, ‘Shock Therapy in Poland: Perspectives of Five Years’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 6–7 April 1994, p. 270.

6  Peter Murrell has clearly demonstrated how a consensus was created around economists from Sachs’s Harvard University, showing both the role played by the theme of shock therapy and the contrast that existed between the deep conviction of the rightness of the therapy’s solutions and the absence of a critical distance for assessing its effectiveness or otherwise. See P. Murell, ‘The Transition According to Cambridge, Mass.’, Journal of Economic Literature 33, March 1995, pp. 164–178.

7  R. Fernandez and D. Rodrik, ‘Resistance to Reform: Status Quo Bias in the Presence of Individual-Specific Uncertainty’, Journal of Economic Literature 81, December 1991, pp. 1146–1155.

8  A.C. Harberger, ‘Secrets of Success: A Handful of Heroes’, American Economic Review 83, May 1993, pp. 343–350.

9  Jeffrey Sachs, for example, is cited 17 times, whereas the second most cited author is cited only nine times. If the citations of Sachs are added to the citations of Shleifer, Vishny, Lipton, Fischer or Gelb, who all favored shock therapy, we arrive at the total of 41 citations. Of the 130 citations in the report, 61 are attributable either to authors particularly committed to the defense of shock therapy or to the authors of the report itself. For more details, see B. Kogut and A. Spicer, Critical and Alternative Perspectives on International Assistance to Post-Communist Countries, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004, p. 43.

10  Ibid., p. 6.

11  Ibid., p. 43.

12  J. Bockman and G. Eyal, ‘Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism’, American Journal of Sociology 108, September 2002, p. 341.

13  George Bush, Inaugural Address, p. 1.

14  J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947/1978, p. 269.

15  A. Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

16  16 G. Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

17  T. Karl, ‘A Research Perspective’. Cited in C. Gallo, ‘Democracy by Default?’ Sociological Forum 7, 1992, p. 713.

18  See I. Shapiro, ‘Democratic Innovation: South Africa in Comparative Context’, World Politics 46, October 1993, pp. 121–150.

19  This danger was identified very early by P. Schmitter and T. Lyon Karl, ‘What democracy is … and is not’ in: L. Diamond and M.F. Plattner (eds), The Global Resurgence of Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 42.

20  John Dower’s fascinating book on the American occupation of Japan and the subsequent implantation of democracy in that country is greatly recommended in this connection. See J.W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: Norton Press, 1999.

21  J. Linz and A. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996, p. 19.

22  A. Lijphart, ‘Consociational Democracy’, World Politics, XXI, January 1969, pp. 207–225.

23  J. Linz and A. Stepan, op. cit.

24  K. Katzman, ‘Iraq Politics, Elections and Benchmarks’, CRS Report for Congress, 28 April 2010. Online, available at: www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS21968.pdf.

25  A.H. Cordesman, Iraq and the United States: Creating a Strategic Partnership, Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010, p. 54.

Part II

Re-inventing democracy and its discontents

5  Democracy and dissatisfaction[*]

Ivan Krastev

“As a rule history is “Protestant” not “Catholic” – its primary feature being institutional, cultural and ideological diversity. But episodically history has its “Catholic moments” when universal ideological word becomes an institutional flesh” and when there is a powerful feeling that history is heading to a certain destination.[1] The post-Cold war period was such a “Catholic moment”. At least for while Western liberal democracies looked as the final stop in human history. Contrary to the experience of the past at the end of the last century neither God/tradition, nor revolution/ideology could grant governments “the moral title to rule”. The will of the people as expressed in free and fair elections has become the only source of legitimate government that modern societies are ready to accept. The global spread of elections – frequently free and sometimes fair – and the universal acceptance of the language of human rights have become the distinctive feature of politics in the beginning of the new century. While the earlier generation of democratic theorists was preoccupied with the question “what makes democracy work and last” the new post-1989 democratic theory has become overwhelmed by democracy’s universal appeal, the emergence and survival of democratic regimes in unlikely places and in diverse cultural and economic environments.

The revolutionary crowds on the streets of Prague and East Berlin – peaceful, triumphant, and insisting on their right to live in a “normal society” – provided the ultimate validation for the superiority of liberal democracy as a form of government. The fears and contradictions that had been afflicting Europe’s democratic experience over the last two centuries seemed finally to have reached a resolution. Democracy did not need any more justifications. Europe has entered the age of democratic triumphalism.

Democracy – meant to be the self-government of equals – is now universally valued, it is institutionalized in more than three-fifths of the world’s states and it is demanded and struggled for by a large movements in the remaining two-fifths. By 2005 for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population was living in a democracy. Centuries-old arguments critical of the desirability or feasibility of democratic regimes virtually disappeared. Democracy may not have run out of enemies, but it ran out of critics. Anti-democratic arguments and sentiments went into hiding. And here comes the problem …

The paradoxical outcome of the triumph of democracy is that two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall there is a growing dissatisfaction with the really existing democratic regimes and there is a growing sense of trouble in the house of freedom. The triumph of democracy has turned to be also its crisis. There is a feeling that we have reached what Gerschenkron called a “nodal point”, a point where in a relatively short period of time we will witness, experience and perhaps even participate in the aesthetic, ideological, strategic and finally institutional redefinition of the meaning of democracy.

There is the feeling that, inspired by the spread of democratic regimes following the demise of communism, political theorists have failed to grasp the profound transformation within the democratic regimes and the historic consequences related to this transformation. In the years immediately following 1989, little attention was paid to the impact of that year’s epochal events on the way that democracy was beginning to be perceived by its own citizens and the arguments with which it was promoted. The discourse of democratic triumphalism has eroded the intellectual foundations of modern democratic regimes. No longer was democracy only the least undesirable form of government – the best of a bad bunch, if you will; rather, it was coming to seem like the best form of government, period. People were starting to look to democratic regimes not merely to save them from something worse but to deliver peace, prosperity, and honest and effective governance all in one big and luxury package. The historical break point of 1989 has led many to believe that democracy is synonymous to peace and economic growth. The defining feature of the age of democratic triumphalism was the attempt to present democracy as a single cure for all societal problems and to justify democracy not comparing its advantages and disadvantages with the ones of its competitors but in terms of its capacity to satisfy the material needs of the modern consumer. Democracy was presented as the only right answer to a number of unrelated questions. What is the best way to bring economic growth – the answer is to become a democracy. What is the best way to protect one’s country – the answer is to become a democracy and to be surrounded by democracies: “freedom anywhere will make the world safer everywhere”. What is the best way to fight corruption – the answer is to be a democracy. What is the best way to respond to demographic or migration challenges – the answer is to be more democratic and inclusive. Rhetoric has won a victory over reality. What the missionaries of democracy have failed to recognize is that it is one thing to argue that problems like corruption or the integration of minorities can be better solved in a democratic environment, and it is totally different thing to insist that the very introduction of free and fair elections and the adoption of a liberal constitution can solve all these problems.

Within a decade the justification of democracy’s superiority in terms of economic growth, security or good governance has started to backfire. The combination of the global economic crisis and the rise of authoritarian capitalism has challenged long-held assumptions. The claim that democracy is best at delivering economic growth has been shaken by the success of China. For the last 30 years, non-democratic China has been the world’s fastest growing economy. It is on its way to overtake the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation and it has already replaced Germany as world’s leading exporter. But it is not only China: the research community is well aware of the fact that some of the best, and worst, performing emerging economies are autocracies. So, while the most developed democracies tend to be rich and prosperous, democracy is not synonymous with prosperity or economic growth.

The democratic experience in Africa has demonstrated that the spread of elections was also not necessarily benign when it comes to the reduction of violence. The Oxford economist Paul Collier in his fascinating book Wars, Guns and Votes[2] has demonstrated that while in the middle income countries elections systematically reduce the risk of political violence, in low income countries elections made the society more dangerous. In the same fashion of “think again”, enlightened revisionist Israeli military historian Azar Gat[3] went even further in challenging the current orthodoxy about the military superiority of the liberal democratic camp. In his analysis, democracies’ victory in the last two world wars should be explained not by the intrinsic superiority of the democratic political system, but by the fact that the United States happened to be in the democratic camp. It is America’s superiority, and not democracy’s superiority, that explains the outcome of the power struggles of the twentieth century. While Azar Gat was challenging the notion that democracies are invincible, American political scientists Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder[4] challenged the strategy that puts democracy promotion at the center of the West’s security policy. Collecting historical evidence from the last 200 years Mansfield and Snyder have challenged the democratic peace theory. While the authors agree that democracies tend not to fight each other, in their analysis societies that are undergoing a period of transition to democracy become more war-prone not less and they do fight democratic states. So, be sure you know what you pray for when you pray that one day China and Russia will start or re-start their democratic transitions.

Robert Kagan’s[5] hypothesis that a nations’ form of government, not its civilization or a geographical location, may be the best predictor of its geopolitical alignment also came under fire. It is enough to open today’s newspapers in order to notice that when it comes to foreign policy neither democratic Turkey, democratic India nor democratic Brazil are inclined as a matter of principal to side with the fellow democracies from the United States or the European Union. Anti-colonial sentiments and old-fashioned state interests and ambitions, not a nation’s form of government, can be better predictors for a country’s geopolitical alignment. So, what happened to democracy in the last decade is what marketing specialists will easily recognize as the crisis of “overselling”. The latest two waves of democratization created expectations and institutionalized a discourse on democracy that is at the very heart of the current crisis of the actually existing democratic regimes.

The great recession

When the world was hit by the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression many political theorists expected that the crisis would result either in the failure of the new regimes of authoritarian capitalism, like Russia or China, or that it would end up in the repetition of the 1930s and destroy the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. The crisis in a perverse way neither led to the collapse of the new authoritarians nor to the demise of the new democracies. In a strange way, the crisis validated Huntington’s observation, made 40 years ago, that “the most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government”.[6]

The blurring border between democracy and authoritarianism in the context of a growing mistrust of both political and business elites and a deepening crisis of governability of modern societies on the global scale, and not the rise of capitalist authoritarianism, is the defining feature of our time.

The authoritarian capitalist regimes of today, best represented by China and Russia, are not rooted in the power structures of the traditional societies and are not primarily dependent on mass repression. While living in non-democratic states both Russians and Chinese are freer and wealthier than in any other moment in their history. It is the Russian and Chinese middle classes that represent the key social constituency supporting the regime. Unlike Soviet or Chinese communism the new regimes of authoritarian capitalism do not present themselves as an alternative to democracy, but as a variation of democracy. The new authoritarianism strives on fears or disappointments related to previous attempts for democratization, Russia being the classical example.

The concept of “sovereign democracy” synthesized in the Kremlin’s ideological laboratory can be the key to understanding this new reality. It succeeds in confronting the Kremlin’s two ideological enemies of choice: the liberal democracy of the West and the populist democracy admired by the rest. It pretends to reconcile Russia’s urgent need of Western-type modernization and Russia’s will to defend its independence from the West. Putin’s consolidation of state power took the form of the nationalization of the elite and the elimination or marginalization of what Vladislav Surkov calls “offshore aristocracy” – Berezovsky, Gusinsky and Co. The Kremlin de facto nationalized the energy sector, put the media under its total control, de facto criminalized the Western-funded NGOs; Kremlin-sponsored party-building, the criminal persecution of Kremlin opponents (the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky) and the creation of structures able to secure active support for the regime in the time of crisis (such as the Nashi [Ours] movement) were the other elements of Putin’s regime building strategy. The offshore oligarchs were replaced by state serving oligarchs. But at the heart of the concept of sovereign democracy is that Putin never challenged the legitimacy or the merits of the democratic system. He preferred to imitate democratic institutions instead of challenging them.

The global survey “The Voice of the People”, conducted annually by Gallup International in the last four years, suggests an intriguing paradox: while democracy is universally accepted as the best form of government, the citizens of the democratic societies in many cases, and in particular in the case of Central and Eastern Europe, are not only more critical of the merits of the democratic system than those living in non-democratic societies, but also tend to believe that their voice matters less in the way their countries are governed. Havel’s classics on the late totalitarian society was famously entitled The Power of the Powerless, its post-communist sequel could easily be published under the title The Frustration of the Empowered.

1989 and all that

Today, some 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a growing ambiguity about the historical significance of 1989 and about the state of democracy in Europe (particularly Central Europe). Trust in democratic institutions (including elections) is steadily declining. The political class is viewed as corrupt and self-interested. Disenchantment with democracy appears to be growing. According to a 2008 Eurobarometer survey, only 21 percent of Lithuanians, 24 percent of Bulgarians, 24 percent of Romanians, 30 percent of Hungarians, and 38 percent of Poles believe that they have benefited from the fall of the Berlin Wall.[7]

There are many today who believe that it was not the people but the old elites who broke free and collected the jackpot of 1989. The end of communism, this account goes, set in motion a process that has liberated ex-communist elites from fear (of purges), from guilt (for being rich), from ideology, from the chains of community, from national loyalties, and even from the necessity to govern. The offshore elites and not the democratic publics turned to be the biggest beneficiaries from “the end of history”. The democratic revolutions of 1989 puzzled many with their anti-egalitarianism and anti-utopianism. Alexis de Tocqueville would be surprised to learn that in contrast to the previous waves of democratization the last wave widened the income inequalities in the new democracies.

It is not only people on the street, but also democratic theorists, who have second thoughts about the real historical meaning of 1989. The leading democratic minds reflecting on the legacy of the three decades of the spread of democracy since Portugal’s democratic revolution of 1974 are coming to sobering conclusions. In an article published in the Journal of Democracy, Philippe Schmitter[8] asserts that democratization has proven far easier to accomplish in the contemporary historical context than it was previously thought, but at the same time the last wave of democratizations was less consequential than the previous waves. In Schmitter’s analysis it was easier exactly because it was less consequential. The old elites benefited from the current political changes much more than their predecessors.

It is exactly the fact that old elites have turned to be the biggest winners of the game that provoked a wave of revisionist interpretations of recent history. In his new book Uncivil Society, US historian Stephen Kotkin[9] powerfully argues that, the Polish case aside, the communist collapse across Central and Eastern Europe is best understood as the implosion of an ineffective and demoralized communist establishment (the “uncivil society” of his title) than by a revolt of civil society. The people on the streets of Prague and Sofia were not so much revolutionary citizens as dissatisfied consumers. In Kotkin’s final analysis, neither political freedom nor the market economy were the fulfilled goal of a successful revolution, rather the unintended consequences of the bank run on communism.

In short, in the way democracy has become the victim of its sellers’ excesses, the revolutions of 1989 are on the way to fall victim of its trivialization. There is a need to ask questions so old that we have forgotten the right answers, like: what makes democracy the least unacceptable form of government and what is the role of the revolutions in 1989 in re-making Europe’s democratic tradition?

My argument is that the revolutions of 1989, without being the end of history, were a turning point in Europe’s experience with democracy. They did succeed in reconciling liberalism and democracy – but at a cost. The ideology of normality that was their driving force (the attempt to present democracy as a natural state of society and to free it from its historical contradictions) contributed to its current crisis by weakening the democratic immune system.

Farewell to Weimar

It is now difficult to imagine how radical was the rupture between the way Europeans thought about democracy before the fall of the Berlin Wall and how they thought about it afterward. It is difficult to accept that everything we take for granted today was not only in jeopardy, but seriously questioned even by its defenders, just yesterday. The revolutions of 1989 as a collective European experience have remade Europe’s political culture.

Modern European history has been strongly shaped by a deeply rooted ambivalence toward democracy as a political regime. In 1934, the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar bravely predicted that “within twenty years, if there is not some retrograde movement in political evolution, there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe”.[10] The revolutionary upheavals of the long nineteenth century (a century whose quietude is overrated in many conventional accounts) and the collapse of democracies during the interwar period made many Europeans skeptical regarding the merits of mass political participation. After 1918, there were hardly any European countries blessed with governments that lasted longer than 12 months. The short, unhappy life of Germany’s Weimar Republic and its tragic death – “part murder, part wasting sickness, part suicide”, in Peter Gay’s famous phrase[11] – left a lasting imprint on European attitudes toward democracy. The association between Weimar democracy and the fascist violence that grew within it and ultimately rose to power on Weimar’s carcass remained strong in the minds of many. The postwar Western democratic theory is nothing more than competing interpretations on the fall of the Weimar republic.

One cannot understand the political experience of twentieth century Europe without grasping the fear of the revolutionary masses that underlay so much of that experience. “We tend to see revolution as in theory a movement to bring liberation”, wrote Raymond Aron in the 1970s. “But the revolutions of the twentieth century seem rather to promote servitude, or at least authoritarianism”.[12] A century earlier Jacob Burckhardt was even clearer “I know too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny, which will mean the end of history”. In short, on the Continent, liberalism and democracy were not married but divorced for almost two centuries. Liberals were convinced that talk of liberal democracy was oxymoronic. They often found themselves waging a two-front struggle as they fought against both the proponents of authoritarian stability and the advocates of radical (populist) democracy. The very different meanings of the word “populism” in the US and European political traditions (mostly neutral in the former, overwhelmingly negative in the latter) reveal two contrasting patterns of relations between democracy and liberalism. French liberalism in particular – born as it was as part of a response to the excesses of the French Revolution – saw itself not as a part of, but rather as an alternative to mass democracy. For someone like François Guizot, an essential part of being a liberal was refusing to be a democrat.

Even as “democracy” was Western Europe’s battle cry in its confrontation with Soviet communism, mistrust of democracy was part of the Cold War European consensus. Democracies were regarded as weak and unstable. They were ineffective at combating destructive enemies. They were too idealistic and too slow to act when it came to making tough decisions about the use of violence. Democratic decision making was shortsighted, divisive and prone to demagoguery and manipulation. It was Winston Churchill himself who wittily observed that “the best argument against democracy is a five minute talk with the average voter”. Meritocracy, not democracy, was the ideal of Europe’s educated classes. Meritocracy and liberal rationalism – not democracy – lay at the very foundations of the project of European integration. Meritocrats and not democrats were at the foundation of the European Union.

It was in 1983 – just six years before the wall was torn down – that Jean-François Revel articulated the fears of the Cold War generation when he wrote that “democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes”.[13] What made him so pessimistic was his conviction that democracy receives too little credit for its achievements, and at the same time must pay an infinitely higher price for its failures and mistakes than its adversaries do for theirs. In short, on the very eve of the “velvet revolutions”, democratic regimes continued to be perceived as weak, as inadvertently self-destructive, if not outright suicidal. It took the revolutions of 1989 to erase the Weimar experience and to change profoundly Europeans’ attitudes toward democracy. The night of November 9 that year, when joyous crowds of Germans decisively breached the Berlin Wall, served at last to suppress memories of the November evening exactly 51 years earlier when the Nazis’ anti-Semitic Kristallnacht atrocities put the world on notice that the “wall” between civilization and barbarism was falling in the heart of Europe. In the mind of many a European, the revolutions of 1989 succeeded at last in reconciling the experience of revolution with the ideal of liberal democracy. Seeing the nonviolent nature of the change and the firmness of the fledgling democracies’ resolve to adopt new constitutions through orderly means, liberals found themselves at long last won over to democracy’s cause. The revolutions of 1989 made manifest to West Europeans the attractiveness of their own much deprecated political model.

The revolutions of 1989 and the experience of postcommunist transition also helped to put an end to a long running intra-European debate over the relationship between political democracy and market capitalism. It was for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the European Right was haunted by the fear that mass democracy would end up destroying property rights and personal freedom while the Marxist Left was passionately arguing that bourgeois democracy was only a façade for the dominance of the property classes.

Today, historians find themselves tempted to tell the story of Central and Eastern Europe’s postcommunist transitions as a tale of the irresistible attraction between democracy and capitalism. But some 20 years ago, the goals of market building and democracy building were often seen as contradictory. Most of the East European dissidents (being men of letters) shared the anti-capitalist sentiments so common on the European Left. And while political theorists in the late 1980s agreed that free markets and freely competitive politics tended to strengthen each other in the long run, the fear was that political and economic reforms, when pursued simultaneously, would work at cross-purposes. How can you give people the power to make free choices and at the same time expect them freely to mandate the pain of slashed budgets, reduced subsidies, and fired workers? German sociologist Claus Offe spoke for many when he wrote in the early days of transition that “the market economy is set in motion only in pre-democratic conditions”.[14]

Normality and its discontents

Happily enough, sometimes what does not work in theory works in practice. Central and Eastern Europe did manage to make a simultaneous transition to both markets and democracy. It took a magical mix of ideas, emotions, circumstances, external pressure and leadership to make that success possible. In their efforts to transform their societies, the region’s reformers found the communist legacy to be a natural if unwilling ally. People were patient in the face of reform’s cost because they were impatient to break away from communism. The early 1990s were surreal years that saw trade unionists calling for job cuts and ex-communists professing their eagerness to advance economic privatization.

There was anger against capitalism, but there was neither a party nor even a viable political vocabulary to give force or voice to the inchoate anti-capitalist feelings of those who saw themselves as net losers from the transition. Any criticism of the market was equated with nostalgia for communism. Anticommunist and ex-communist elites both backed the changes – the former on principle, the latter out of self-interest. The popular longing to “return to Europe” helped postcommunist societies to reconcile the redistributive instincts of democracy with the market’s penchant for producing inequality. Disciplined in the straitjacket of European integration, Central and Eastern Europe embraced political and economic opening at one and the same time. Democracy, liberalism and capitalism were reconciled not only in Eastern Europe but also in the western part of the continent. In the attempt to imitate Western liberal democracies, East Europeans invented them.

In short, the ideology of normality that was the driving force of the revolutions of 1989 deserves the credit both for the successes of the transition and for the hollowness of post-transition politics. The desire to be normal encouraged Central and East European political leaders to look for pragmatic solutions, and to imitate Western institutions and practices. The ideology of normality was particularly useful in advancing the decade long process of EU accession, during which many a postcommunist polity busied itself with passing laws over which it had scarcely paused to deliberate. This same ideology of normality, however, is at least partly responsible for the intellectual paralysis that grips Central and East European politics today, as well as for the larger failures of the new democracies to reinvent themselves. The politics of “normalization” replaced deliberation with imitation, inspired respect for banality, and allowed policy makers to pull off the rhetorical sleight of hand involved in using “democracy” and “good governance” as synonyms. Central Europe made a virtue of being uninventive. In the postcommunist era, the very word “experiment” took on negative connotations. The paradox is that when it comes to political experiments Chinese postcommunist authoritarianism is in many ways more inventive and experiment friendly than postcommunist democracies.

By declaring democracy the normal state of society and restricting democratization to an imitation of the institutions and practices of developed democracies, Central Europe’s ideology of normality failed to give rein to the creative tensions that do so much to supply democracy with its flexibility and endurance. The tensions between democratic majoritarianism and liberal constitutionalism, for example, are not transitional “growing pains”, but lie at the very heart of democratic politics. These tensions cannot be wished away or simply resolved; instead, societies must learn to live with them and turn them to good use. Democracy is a federation whose constituent republics constantly squabble over and renegotiate their shared borders. Democracy is a self-correcting regime that is sustained by its own contradictions. It is instructive that even while the current ideologues of normality tend to interpret the rise of populism in Central Europe as a leap into the abyss of political pathology, the expressed level of citizens’ trust in democratic institutions in countries with populist governments (Bulgaria and Slovakia, for instance) has dramatically increased.[15]

In seeking to explain how and why societies seem constantly to oscillate between periods of intense preoccupation with public affairs and times when private concerns hold the upper hand, Albert O. Hirschman demonstrated that acts of participation in public affairs, which are undertaken because they are expected to yield satisfaction, also yield dissatisfaction.[16] Hirschman’s insight that the rise of the consumer society and the broadening of individual choices will be accompanied by the boom of dissatisfaction, in my view, should be at the heart of the new debate on the advantages of democracy over its authoritarian competitors.

Democracy’s advantage over authoritarianism lies not in some inherent democratic ability to offer citizens instant gratification of their needs and desires, but rather in democracy’s superior institutional and intellectual readiness to cope with the dissatisfaction produced by its citizens’ choices. In this respect the democratic triumphalism of the last two decades is a real and present danger for our understanding of the challenges that democracy faces today. Whereas before 1989 democracies tended to take people’s dissatisfaction for granted, the normality obsessed democracies of post-1989 Europe tend to view such dissatisfaction as baffling and unintelligible. Democracy is not an alternative to bad governance, it is an alternative to revolution.

In fact, it is democratic societies’ capacity to overcome their own failings and learn from experience that gives these societies their deepest and most durable appeal. And this is especially important in the moment when most Europeans fear that their future will not be as prosperous and peaceful as their past.

By defining democracy as the natural state of society while limiting the sanctioned policy choices available to the public, the post-1989 consensus paradoxically undercut this very basic advantage of democratic regimes. Democracies are not and cannot be “satisfaction machines”. They do not produce good governance the way a baker turns out doughnuts. (Good governance is a welcome but far from inevitable product of democratic governance.) What democracies do offer dissatisfied citizens is the satisfaction of having the right to do something about their dissatisfaction. So, democracy is the political regime that fits best for the current age of dissatisfaction.

Notes

*  This chapter is extended and enriched version of an earlier article published in the Journal of Democracy.

1  Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.

2  Paul Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.

3  Azar Gat, “The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007).

4  Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War”, Foreign Affairs, May/June 1995.

5  Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, New York: Vintage Books, 2009.

6  Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968.

7  Eurobarometer 70, Field Work, October–November 2008, “Data”, p. 58, December 2008. Online, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb70/eb70_en.htm.

8  Philippe C. Schmitter, “Twenty-Five Years, Fifteen Findings”, Journal of Democracy, 21, 1, January 2010, pp. 17–28.

9  Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, New York: Random House, 2009.

10  Quoted in John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, London, Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2009.

11  Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, New York: Harper and Row, 1968, p. xiii.

12  Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, New York: Basic Books, 2003, p. 163.

13  Jean-François Revel, How Democracies Perish, New York: Doubleday, 1983, p. 3.

14  Claus Offe, Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, p. 67.

15  Grigorij Mesežnikov, Olga Gyárfášová and Daniel Smilov, eds, Populist Politics and Liberal Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Bratislava, Institute for Public Policy, 2008.

16  Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

6  From the revolutions of 1989 to democracy fatigue in Eastern Europe

Jacques Rupnik

The democratic revolutions in East-Central Europe were perceived at the time as an event with its symbolic turning point (the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989) and its conclusion with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. In actual fact it was not an event but a process with antecedents going back to 1956, and it was by no means concluded with the collapse of the Soviet empire. In many ways it remains unfinished business some 20 years on. It was made possible under the combined pressures of East European peripheries and the retreat of the imperial centre. Non-violent change, as it turned out, became possible in 1989 because the victim was a consenting one. Thus Václav Havel, the hero of the ‘velvet revolution’ in Prague, could succeed because Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow too had renounced violent means to keep East European Communism in power and became a “hero of retreat” (as Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it). This unique historical moment in which both sides rejected violence and opted for a negotiated exit from dictatorship remains 1989’s major achievement and, for some, an inspiring example. Eastern Europe in 1989 showed it was possible. China’s repression at Tiananmen Square in Beijing at the very same time was a reminder that this was by no means the only option.

However, two decades later, this may also be one of the reasons for the reluctance to use the very word “revolution” and a preference for more neutral terms such as “regime change” or simply the “events” of 1989. With a more prosaic vocabulary also comes a certain devaluation of the revolution itself. Even in Prague one noticed a distance towards the brand “velvet revolution”, which had since acquired global resonance. Former dissident and deputy chairman of the senate Petr Pithart prefers the term “takeover”,[1] the actor and former Charter 77 signatory Pavel Landovský suggested the “abolishment of serfdom”, and media speak modestly of the “events of November 1989” or simply “November”. Interestingly, nobody in Prague claims the “copyright” on the term “velvet revolution” or can identify its author. Václav Havel, its most prominent symbol, attributes it to a Western journalist. So the term, like much else of what followed, apparently came from the West.

In Poland or Hungary one could attribute the slight embarrassment that the term “revolution” relates to the experience of a peaceful, negotiated transition to democracy. The rejection of revolutionary logic is indeed presented by the protagonists as the true legacy of 1989.[2] The “Spanish model” of the 1970s rather than 1789 was the reference for the protagonists of the Polish or Hungarian roundtables that ensured an unexpectedly smooth exit from totalitarianism. But the consensus ends there as suggested by three competing celebrations on 4 June 2009 of the first (almost) free elections in 1989: in Gdańsk (President Kaczyński), in Warsaw (parliament) and in Cracow (Prime Minister Tusk). Although Hungarian officials reminded everybody of their contribution, quoting chancellor Kohl who praised them for having “pulled the first brick out of the Berlin Wall”, there was no display of public fervour in the celebration of the opening of the Austro-Hungarian border; there was a noted absence of the then main opposition leader Viktor Orbán. In a context marked by the severe impact of the economic crisis an opinion poll published in Népszabadság even suggests that close to a half of young Hungarians consider life under what used to be known as “goulash communism” better than today.[3]

In Berlin it was, of course, the “fall of the wall” that was celebrated. Distant echoes of the crowds gathered in October and November 1989 in Dresden and Leipzig have since been overshadowed by recent revelations attributing the opening of the wall to the combined efforts of Gorbachev’s destabilization of the Honecker regime[4] and to those who, after the Hungarians opened the border with Austria in August 1989, voted with their feet to leave East Germany for West Germany (“leaving their country in order to join their fatherland” as the late François Furet put it).

Whatever the adequate word for the founding moment of democratic regimes, there is, with varying degrees of intensity from country to country, a discussion on the “crisis of expectations” or even the “revolution betrayed” and the disenchantment with democracy some 20 years on. There is no homesickness for the communist dictatorship, no political forces are actually seeking to turn the clocks back, but there is the reckoning that democracy can no longer derive its legitimacy simply from the overwhelming rejection in 1989 of the old regime.

Another reason for the ambivalence towards the use of the term “revolutions of 1989” stems from the reservations made by several leading European thinkers such as the historian François Furet or the philosopher Jürgen Habermas on the grounds that 1989, unlike 1789 or 1917, did not usher in a new social project. Between the restoration of the pre-communist past and the imitation of the West, their argument goes, 1989 did not bring to the fore any new ideas. If anything, it became associated with the globalized extension of the Western model of market economy and liberal democracy, which some mistook for the advent of the “end of history”.

Why then, given these caveats, does the term “democratic revolution” seem to us still as the most appropriate? Whether negotiated by elites from above or brought about under social pressure and collective action from below, the outcome in the end was very similar: the dismantling of the old monopolistic system of power and the organization of free elections opening the possibilities of democratic transition. If by revolution we mean a radical transformation of the political and social order then 1989 surely was one. It coincided with a collapse of the Soviet empire and as such was part of a recasting of the European order of similar importance as that of 1918 or 1945, though we lack a convenient label for it matching the Europe of Versailles or that of Yalta. In 1984 Samuel Huntington published an article entitled “Will More Countries Become Democratic?”[5] It devoted a mere paragraph to Eastern Europe considering that, mainly due to the Soviet constraint, such chances were negligible and not worth elaborating any further. Clearly, it was the simultaneous transformation of the international order (end of the Cold War) and the internal economic decay and the mounting pressure of society that helped to bring about the democratic change.

And it is precisely because 1989 was a democratic revolution that it is relevant to ask what happened to its legacies and examine the state of democracy some 20 years on. In so doing it is worth recalling the exaggerated expectations of some and the exaggerated pessimism of others. For the former the collapse of communism and the reinvention of democracy in the Eastern half of Europe implied a delegitimation of all authoritarian regimes heralding a new wave of democratic expansion. Liberal democracy may have opponents but no longer rivals. For the latter it seemed unlikely that the countries coming out of communism could simultaneously sustain the social costs of the introduction of a market economy and the formation of a democratic polity. Varieties of Latin American scenarios combining economic turmoil and authoritarian setbacks were seen as a serious possibility: Eastern Europe moving South rather than West?[6]

Hence also the discussion among experts as to whether 1989 was the culmination of what Huntington termed the “third wave” of democratization, starting in the 1970s in Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and Latin America, or whether one should distinguish the transitions from post-communist regimes as a “fourth wave of democratization” as Michael McFaul suggested. It was tempting for ‘transitologists’ to emphasize the global and therefore comparative perspective, while those with greater knowledge of communist regimes were more prone to stress the distinct features of the post-communist transitions, with the relevance of “path dependency” accounting for the different outcomes of the exit from dictatorship and the chances of democratic consolidation.

Beyond exaggerated expectations and pessimistic scenarios, the “great transformation” of the past two decades reveals a new political geography of the continent shaped by three different trajectories of post-communist change – not all of them democratic – implying different types of relations with one main external anchor, the European Union. Central Europe has been the success story of the “third wave” of democratization.[7] It has established democracy as the “only game in town” and an election in Prague or in Warsaw is about the possibility of changing the government, not the regime change. “The return to Europe”, the slogan of the fall of 1989, meant reconnecting politically, economically, and culturally with the other half of Europe and soon became identified with the prospect of joining the European Union.

The Balkans witnessed a different trajectory from that of Central Europe with democratization side-tracked by war and the still unfinished tasks of nation-state building. Thus the fall of the Berlin Wall did not just mean open borders and open societies. In the Balkans, it revealed the “darker side” of 1989 with the return of violent conflicts and wars and, as Igor Stiks, a Croatian writer from Sarajevo, put it, a sense that “the Berlin Wall crumbled down upon their heads”.[8] The end of the Cold War brought with it a strategic devaluation of Yugoslavia, which initially meant lesser involvement by major international players busy with other duties such as facing the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany or trying to help Gorbachev prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union. It provided by the same token greater room of manoeuvre for local political entrepreneurs surfing on a wave of radical nationalism as a means to conquer or preserve power. Tito had skilfully used Yugoslavia’s status as one of the founders of the ‘non-aligned movement’ in his balancing act between East and West. But what was non-alignment to mean once the East–West conflict had disappeared? The rivalry between the two superpowers had receded with the anticipation of economic “peace dividends” for Europeans but simultaneously the outbreak of wars of Yugoslav dissolution pointed to the emergence of a new type of low intensity conflict associated with the rise of radical ethno-nationalism. The short twentieth century had started with the outbreak of the First World War in Sarajevo in 1914. It ended with the return of war to Sarajevo in 1992, heralding another facet of the post-1989 international agenda concerned with ethnic conflict in failed or collapsing states, “humanitarian interventions” and protectorates accompanying ethnic partition and attempts to build new states with the inevitable risk of ad hoc solutions in the Balkans becoming legal or political precedents in other parts of the world. The international military intervention in Kosovo in the spring of 1999 clearly helped to make the case for a similar international intervention in East Timor. In both cases this led to the independence of the two secessionist territories from Serbia and Indonesia respectively, but, not surprisingly, it also gave Russia the opportunity to present it as a precedent for a de facto annexation of Georgia’s separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Figure 6.1  Political freedom in the post-communist space (source: Freedom House Score, 2010 (1 indicates best score, 7 indicates worst score).

While Central Europeans were discovering the attractive if also disruptive effects of an open society, in the Western Balkans people were recreating ethnically defined closed societies. The new post-1989 narrative suggested that borders and territory were becoming of secondary importance in the age of globalization. The Balkan wars were reasserting the primacy of borders, territory and belonging as part of a delayed state-building process that took precedence over (or was seen as a pre-condition for) democratic change. And moving from ethnocracy to democracy, even with post-conflict state building under European supervision, need not be synonymous with a stable and functioning political system since, in ethnically divided states, democracy tends to be seen by each community as a means to pursue its own “national goals”.

The collapse of the old regime need not lead to democracy. This is clearly confirmed by the third pattern of post-1989 change on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, where, despite significant recent progress, hybrid or semi-authoritarian regimes have prevailed. In the post-Soviet space, Andrew Wilson observes, “the core institutions of democratic political society – political parties, elections, political leadership, inter-party alliances, legislatures – by which society constitutes itself politically to select and monitor democratic government have yet to emerge”.[9] For more than a decade Russia under Gorbachev and Yeltsin embarked on a democratization process with references to a Western model. It was followed by a decade of regression under Putin claiming the existence of varieties of models of democracy. In the aftermath of the “velvet revolutions” on its periphery Russia developed a concept of “sovereign democracy” in explicit opposition to Western models adopted in Georgia or Ukraine.

It may seem naïve or merely a sign of disappointment among liberal elites to ask, as Lilia Shevtsova did, “why Russia has not become the West and why the West is difficult for Russia”.[10] Anybody familiar with the political history of Russia and the state of its society after the collapse of communism would have great doubts about Russia “becoming the West”, though that does not imply either any kind of predetermination for what Pierre Hassner called a “transition to autocracy”.[11]

In contrast to developments in Russia, the “colour revolutions” on its southern periphery seemed, at least initially, to give a second chance to those who had failed or aborted their initial transition to democracy in the 1990s. From Georgia’s “Rose revolution” in November 2003 to Ukraine’s “Orange revolution” of December 2004 – not to mention the more problematic “Tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan – popular mobilization sparked by contested elections results and organized by NGOs with Western support were presented by some of its protagonists as a remake or continuation of those in East-Central Europe in 1989. With, however, one major difference pointed out by Václav Havel: the latter were revolutions against communism; the so-called “colour revolutions” were revolutions against “post-communism” which, in Havel’s words, stands for a combination of “authoritarian power and mafia capitalism”.[12]

Some five years later, the balance-sheet of democratic change remains a modest one: In Georgia, Saakashvili’s regime is probably less corrupt but more centralized than its predecessor, while the war with Russia in August 2008 exposed the limitations of relying on nationalism and Western support in its bid for the recovery of territorial integrity. Ukraine’s Orange coalition had disintegrated shortly after its initial success in December 2004, and the elections of January 2010 brought back Viktor Yanukovych, the defeated candidate in 2004, who promptly mended fences with Moscow by signing to an extension of Russia’s lease on its naval base at Sebastopol and a to a new deal concerning Russia’s energy supply. As for Kyrgyzstan and its “Tulip revolution”, it never delivered democracy and has since given way in the spring of 2010 to a coup brought about by a wave of violence and ethnic cleansing. So “competitive authoritarianism” and “hybrid regimes” seem to prevail on Russia’s periphery, pointing to the geopolitical limitations on the democratization process in the post-Soviet space.[13]

The three different patterns of post-communist change outlined above show that the “democratic revolutions” of 1989 did not necessarily lead to a consolidated democracy. This was the case only in Central Europe (from the Baltic republics to Slovenia on the Adriatic, to paraphrase Churchill’s famous 1946 speech about the “Iron Curtain” descending upon Europe); the post-Milosevic Balkans with legacies of war and “unfinished states” only more recently embarked on a delayed democratic transition; Russia and the lands on its ex-Soviet periphery are moving between “competitive authoritarianism”[14] (as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called it) and recent, though yet inconclusive, attempts at democratization. The latter two cases share certain similarities but also three important differences: Communism in former Yugoslavia lasted two generations and was of a less repressive kind than that established in the Soviet Union for three-quarters of a century. The remaining contested territorial issues involve a Serbia now cut down to size rather than a resurgent Russia. Finally, the countries of the Western Balkans all have a clear commitment from the European Union concerning their future membership while the post-Soviet periphery is part of its neighbourhood policy. The year 1989 is a turning point in a process (rather than a moment) still not completed some 20 years on.

Premature fatigue of democracy

The professed goals of the revolutions of 1989 were, in a nutshell, to establish basic freedoms and democratic government, a market economy leading to prosperity, a “return to Europe” that, translated into a political agenda, meant joining the European Union as a community of free nations ensuring peace on the continent. These main objectives were, at least in Central Europe, on the whole successfully completed. The democratic system has not been overtly challenged, a marked contrast with the interwar period of 1918–1938. A conversion to a market economy, led, after an initial slump, to a decade of rapid growth, modernization and improved living standards for the majority of the population. The accession in the European Union was completed in 2004 (2007 for Romania and Bulgaria): for the first time in their modern history the Eastern “suburbs of Europe”,[15] as Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki called the lands between Germany and Russia, became integrated into the mainstream of democratic and prosperous Europe.

Why then, despite the achievements of the “great transformation”[16] of the last two decades, did one notice in 2009 a certain reluctance to celebrate it, revealing no nostalgia for the old regime but a widely shared ambivalence towards the state of democracy in East-Central Europe some 20 years on? Asked in 2009 in a Eurobarometer survey whether “things in their country were going in the right direction” only about a quarter of East Europeans who had recently joined the EU answered positively, with the lowest figures in Hungary (7 per cent), Latvia (9 per cent) or Lithuania (13 per cent).[17] There are, of course, circumstances such as the impact of the economic crisis that can partially account for such pessimism, even among the more successful transition countries. Our main argument is that, despite a variety of situations, there is a shared common denominator, which can be summed up as the exhaustion of a threefold post-1989 transformation cycle concerning democracy, market economy and Europe. Each will be briefly examined here.

In the immediate aftermath of 1989 there were expectations that the process of building democracy after totalitarianism would be an experiment of significance for all democracies. A process in which all the basic tenets of a democratic polity (constitutions and parliaments, civil society and citizenship) were being recreated attracted considerable international attention. It was perceived as an experiment and an inspiration. The legitimacy of third world dictatorship was undermined and the tired democracies in the West felt (for a while at least) rejuvenated by proxy through the reinvention of democracy in the East.

What prevailed instead was a drive for a speedy and faithful imitation of the Western models. In this, 1989 differed sharply from 1968 and the dominant idea (illusion or utopia?) of the Prague Spring – the quest for an alternative model both to that prevailing in the communist East and that in the capitalist West. Later, despite the crushing of the hopes of “68ers”, the emergence a decade later of dissent and the rediscovery of Central Europe squeezed between East and West revived the myth of the “third way”. All this was abandoned after 1989 with the aim of a speedy reconnection with the West.

The Central European imitation was on the whole successful, particularly as far as the constitutional and institutional framework was concerned. The only problem was that it was imitating a model that was already showing signs of fatigue, even of crisis.[18] And, not surprisingly, the East Europeans faithfully reproduced them: a steady decline of voter participation, the huge gap between citizens and political elites, low trust in parliamentary and state institutions and the rise of populist and nationalist challenges to liberal democracy.

To be sure, there are free and fair elections, but participation has been steadily declining, except when high levels of polarization have helped to mobilize the voters (as in Slovakia 1998 or Poland 2007). The elections to the European parliament in May 2009 provide a broader point of comparison. Participation has declined everywhere, but in the new member states it was on average half of that in the rest of the European Union.[19] Trust in governments remains low (around 20 per cent) ranging from 10 per cent in Latvia, 17 per cent in Bulgaria to around one-third in Slovenia and Slovakia.[20] Perhaps even more damning is the similarly low confidence in the very symbol of the new democracies, freely elected parliaments. The rule of law was a prime condition for joining the EU, but under one-third of the citizens trust it (only 14 per cent in Bulgaria, 24 per cent in Lithuania, 25 per cent in Romania, etc.). Only one-third of citizens consider that they have greater influence on the government than before 1989, and half see no change.[21]

To sum up, the countries of East-Central Europe have established functioning democratic institutions, but on close examination they often look like empty shells. There is no alternative to democracy, but there is little trust in its institutions and the political elites that presided over two decades of post-communist transition seem utterly exhausted. After 1989, as Václav Havel put it, “we fought for a different political system from the one we ended up with”. The disappointments of post-revolutionary life “could to a degree have been predicted, but it turned out to be much worse than anyone expected”.[22]

How to account for such premature democratic fatigue? Several explanations can be suggested. The first could be called the forgotten legacy of 1989 associated with the dissident movements and their emphasis on the ethical foundation of politics and on civil society as the crucial underpinning of political society. Why then was the prospect of “democratic invention”, to use Claude Lefort’s phrase,[23] so promptly pushed aside and the former dissidents eclipsed from the political scene after 1989?

The first explanation one hears in Eastern Europe has to do with the conversion of the old communist apparatus accepting the loss of political power in 1989 in exchange for achieving large economic power in the transition to a market economy. Their problematic contribution to the democratic malaise today stems less from their obvious reluctance to confront the communist past, than from another legacy: their capture of the state. In the old days it was party control over the state through the nomenklatura system. After 1989, it became state capture and nomenklatura insider-trading during the privatization of state assets. As A. Grzymala-Buse has argued, where party competition is limited so is state-capacity, leaving ample opportunities for the spread of political corruption.[24] The ex-communists in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia or elsewhere have been widely associated with the spread of such practices. It has often been argued (by Robert Putnam among others) that social capital, the networks built on trust, were an important ingredient in fostering civic engagement and a democratic culture. In former communist countries social capital has mostly worked the other way: networks inherited from the past were corrupt, based on getting around the law and institutional rules and thus undermine trust in democracy and the rule of law. This was the post-communists’ major contribution to the current disenchantment with democracy.

The second reason had to do with the liberal consensus that prevailed in Central Europe in the postcommunist transition. True, governments changed at every election, but they mostly followed similar policies aimed at consolidating new institutions, developing a market economy and pursuing as the main goal the accession to the European Union and NATO. The elite consensus delivered liberal policies, but at the expense of politics. The EU accession process generated major institutional and legislative changes that, given its scope and pace, contributed to that trend by de facto constraining party competition and undermining the normal legislative process.

After some 15 years the policy consensus eventually produced a populist backlash[25] in several countries: in Poland populists and nationalists on the Right under the Kaczyński twins (the Law and Justice coalition between 2005 and 2007 with Lepper’s Self-Defense movement and the League of Polish Families); in Slovakia under Robert Fico’s Smer (Direction) brought together between 2006 and 2010, populists on the Left allied with radical nationalists. Populists are not antidemocratic, but anti-liberal. They confront the transition elites with demands for more power for the voters and for inspired leadership, and challenge politically “neutral” institutions such as the central bank or the constitutional court. Does the rise of populism present risks for the new democracies, or is it mainly a sign of the post-transition return of politics? In either case it marked what Ivan Krastev called “the strange death of the liberal consensus”.[26]

In reflecting upon the post-1989 experience of East-Central Europe one notes interesting parallels with the crisis of democracies in the West. And in doing so one is led to move on from “transitology” and revisit some of the recent debates in democratic theory trying to come to terms with more general explanations for what has been called the crisis of democracy. For Marcel Gauchet, it is not just the liberal consensus, but the inherent logic of liberal democracy with its emphasis on the rule of law and individual’s rights and aspirations as opposed to the citizens’ collective quest of the common good that empty politics of its substance.[27] The term democratic government has been replaced by democratic governance that heralds the advent of “politics without power”.[28] This is where political liberalism and economic liberalism converge in the post-1989 context of the expanding powers of globalized markets and the shrinking realm of political deliberation. Hence the “generalized feeling of dispossession” that came to haunt the Western democracies at the very moment of their triumph. As a consequence we see the growing gap between the elites and the peoples, the erosion of trust in the democratic party system and the emergence of various forms of defiance of which the populist backlash is only the most obvious expression. This is what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”, which represents both a challenge to liberal democracy and the possibility to search for new alternative ways for a revival of the democratic process with new civil society actors.[29]

To be sure, the subject of “disenchantment” with democracy is an old one and one way of understanding it and at once relativizing its current acuteness is to return to its classic formulation by Benjamin Constant in his essay comparing the “freedom of the Ancients to that of the moderns”:[30] the Greek and Roman republican ideal of political participation and the modern notion of democracy based on the primacy of the enjoyment of individual freedoms at the expense of political participation. The year 1989 was a vital if rather brief “participatory moment” in the foundation of democracies after communism. What has followed and prevails today is the quest for the individual enjoyment of new freedoms at the expense of politics.

Perhaps the appropriate way to approach the problem the East European democracies now share with their Western counterparts may thus be through the prism of the distinction made by Isaiah Berlin between two concepts of liberty.[31] Negative freedom is the capacity of men to act unobstructed by others or by the intrusion of the state. Positive freedom refers to the capacity to influence the framework that determines the scope of individual and collective action. After 1989 East-Central Europe witnessed great achievements in terms of what Berlin calls “negative freedom” (freedom from the state). Never before in their history have the citizens of what used to be called “the other Europe” enjoyed so many individual freedoms. However, that achievement has not been matched by the development of “positive freedom”, the capacity of citizens to intervene in the public sphere and influence policy making. The latter may be a disappointment to those who identified with the hopes of democracy revitalized beyond the participatory moment of 1989. Yet it may also be seen as a sign of banalization of the new democracies – to know that they suffer from the same ills as some of the oldest ones on the continent.

The free market model in crisis

There were good reasons why the countries of East-Central Europe went for the free market model in their transition from state socialism. It seemed to provide the clearest break with the clear failure of the command economy in the whole Soviet bloc. “No experiments” or the “third way leads to the third world” were the motto of the day and the local free marketers (Leszek Balcerowicz in Poland or Václav Klaus in the Czech Republic) endorsed promptly Jeffrey Sach’s “shock therapy” approach, which rests on the assumption that there is only one true model of a free market economy, which can be replicated anywhere provided it is implemented through an economic revolution where speed is of the essence while legal or institutional constraints are seen as risks to side-track the project.

On the whole, the strategy has worked well since the mid-1990s, as the countries of East-Central Europe grew not only much faster than those of the Balkans or of the former Soviet Union, but also on average twice as fast as West Europeans. Beyond the ideological commitment to free markets there was the pressure of the so-called “Washington consensus” (IMF, World Bank, etc.) to pursue simultaneously rapid privatization, deregulation and flexibility of the labour markets. The state was seen as the enemy of freedom, a legacy of the old regime to be dismantled through the joint efforts of political liberals, often ex-dissidents, seeking to enhance human rights and individual freedoms and by economic liberals, seeking to enhance the scope of the free market.

Hence the confusion and bafflement of those elites identified with the above-mentioned post-1989 consensus when the world economic financial and crisis broke out in 2007–2008. When you come out of communism you can hardly imagine that capitalism could be in crisis; that’s what communist propaganda used to say. They built capitalism without capital, which came mostly from outside, and discovered that you cannot insulate yourself from the crisis or have “capitalism in one country”. The East European free marketers had opted for the Anglo-American model as opposed to the continental European one, considered as too regulated and burdened with an overblown welfare state. But since it was precisely the United States and Britain that were worst affected by the crisis and where the state was forced to intervene most massively to save and sometimes even nationalize banks, the ideological posture became difficult to sustain.[32] The state was back to rescue capitalism from itself and the liberal ideology of the post-1989 era severely battered.

All the countries in the region were not, of course, affected the same way and called for different responses. Poland and the Czech Republic weathered it rather well in contrast to Hungary or Latvia. But the East European political and economic elites had to confront the reality that the model they had imitated was in crisis and that the liberal cycle that prevailed in the transition had come to a close. Now that the boom years in Central Europe are over and the free market ideologues are forced to keep a lower profile, a new space opens for a long delayed debate about “what kind of capitalism” is best suited for today.

Such a debate has been impossible until now both because of the post-1989 ideological context in the region and because when you are growing at such pace there is little incentive for a critical examination. After 1989, the Left was seen as illegitimate in East-Central Europe. The language of “civil society” was abandoned or even derided as some bizarre remnant of the dissident era (“NGO-ismus” and “humanrightismus”, according to Czech President Klaus). The word “social” smacked of “socialism” which implied a legacy of communism. As Mrs Thatcher famously put it, “there is no such a thing as society, only individuals, their families and the state”. So if there is no “society” to speak of and the “social question” is merely an ideological legacy of the past, what then should the proper response be in times of crisis?

To add to the confusion, the political identities or brands in Central Europe have often been at odds with the policies followed: while the cultural left was economically right (pro-market) or liberal in both the European and American meanings of the word, the cultural right (national conservatives such as Kaczynski’s PiS in Poland or Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary) was economically left (statist). With the global economic crisis the “varieties of capitalism” debate could well become a salient issue for future political realignments in East and Central Europe.

Europe’s transformative power and its limits

A decisive factor contributing to the democratic consolidation in Central Europe has been the accession process to the European Union with an effective use of conditionality. The evaluation of the fulfilment of the Copenhagen criteria adopted in 1993 has sometimes been debatable or considered as excessively intrusive, but nobody questions that the one non-negotiable condition for joining the EU was, and remains, democracy and respect for human rights. As an institution based on shared values and legal norms, the EU puts great emphasis on the capacity of new member states to implement the EU legislation known as the “acquis communautaire”. This process of asymmetrical integration has been criticized for undermining genuine party competition and the parliamentary process, and there is something to the argument that the EU’s Eastern expansion of its single market and shared legal norms contributed to the emptying politics of its substance. To be sure, “Europeanization”, like democracy-building and the establishment of the market, was largely based on adaptation and imitation. But, on the whole, it has also provided a major leverage to the development of institutions and practices of the rule of law. Even illiberal political elites in Slovakia, Romania or Bulgaria in the 1990s eventually found that the cost of being left out of the enlargement process was internally (politically) and externally (economically and diplomatically) too high.[33]

Table 6.1  Democratic transitions compared

Country

Freedom House Score (2010) (1 indicates best score, 7 indicates worst score)

NGO Sustainability Index (2009) (1 indicates best score, 7 indicates worst score)

Transparency International CPI (2010) (from 10, highly clean, to 0, highly corrupt)

Human Development Index (2010) (Scores between 0 and 1, with 1 being most developed)

Slovenia

1.93

3.8

6.4

0.828

Estonia

1.96

2

6.5

0.812

Latvia

2.18

2.7

4.3

0.769

Hungary

2.39

2.8

4.7

0.805

Slovakia

2.68

2.7

4.3

0.818

Czech Republic

2.21

2.7

4.6

0.841

Lithuania

2.25

2.8

5

0.783

Poland

2.32

2.2

5.3

0.795

Bulgaria

3.04

3.2

3.6

0.743

Romania

3.46

3.5

3.7

0.767

Serbia

3.71

4.3

3.5

0.735

Croatia

3.71

3.1

4.1

0.767

Albania

3.93

3.9

3.3

0.719

Macedonia

3.79

3.6

4.1

0.701

Montenegro

3.79

4.1

3.7

0.769

Bosnia

4.25

3.7

3.2

0.710

Ukraine

4.39

3.5

2.4

0.710

Georgia

4.93

4.2

3.8

0.698

Moldova

5.14

4.3

2.9

0.623

Armenia

5.39

4

2.6

0.695

Kosovo

5.07

3.9

2.8

Kyrgyzstan

6.21

4.1

2

0.598

Russia

6.14

4.4

2.1

0.719

Tajikistan

6.14

4.8

2.1

0.580

Azerbaijan

6.39

4.7

2.4

0.713

Kazakhstan

6.43

4

2.9

0.714

Belarus

6.50

5.9

2.5

0.732

Uzbekistan

6.93

5.7

1.6

0.617

Turkmenistan

6.93

5.7

1.6

0.669

After the “big bang” of Eastern enlargement, which brought in ten new East European members in 2004 and 2007and has given way to the EU’s difficulty to reform its governance and redefine its project, there is a widespread reckoning that further enlargements will not be on the agenda in the near future (except for Croatia in 2013) and that, in any case, it cannot be the only type of relationship the EU is able to develop with its peripheries. The countries of the Western Balkans have, since the Thessaloniki EU summit in 2003, a clear commitment to a future move from Europeanized protectorates to actual membership. For others (the Black Sea region from the Ukraine to the Caucasus) EU’s neighbourhood policies or “Eastern partnership” are on offer at least in a medium-term perspective.[34] The question posed is therefore the following: can the EU “transformative power” be effective in helping the democratization of former Soviet republics without membership being a plausible goal? Some commentators in the new member-states wrote about “membership without belonging”. Well, what if a membership prospect itself was to wither away the further East you move? The EU’s relations with Turkey will probably be a test case on this issue. For the foreseeable future, the next 15 years or so, it seems clear that, except for the Balkans, the pattern successfully implemented in post 1989 East-Central Europe is unlikely to be repeated. The European expansion cycle is now also reaching its limits.

Some 20 years after 1989 we have come to a close of three closely related cycles that have shaped the possibilities of democratic development in Europe: from democratic transition and consolidation to acute symptoms of democratic fatigue with exhausted political elites and disillusioned citizens; from a successful economic transformation to the crisis of the free market model; from a successful democratization through ‘Europeanization’ to the discovery of the geopolitical limits of EU’s transformative power. Eastern Europe successfully imitated a model now in crisis. And, like the rest of the world, it is now confronted with the search for a new democratic paradigm.

Notes

1  P. Pithart, Devětaosmdesátý, Prague: Academia, 2009, pp. 17–23, and p. 55.

2  A. Michnik speaking at the conference “1989–2009: Some Questions” organized by the Batory Foundation in Warsaw on 27 June 2009.

3  In: Hospodářské noviny, (Prague), 29 June 2009.

4  This is now well documented thanks to the opening of the archives. M. Meyer, Histoire secrete de la chute du Mur, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009.

5  S.P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?”, Political Science Quarterly 99, Summer 1984, pp. 193–218.

6  A. Przeworski, ‘The ‘East’ becomes the ‘South’? The Autumn of the People and the Future of Eastern Europe’, PS: Political Science and Politics 24, March 1991. Claus Offe, Jon Elster and John Gray among others were expressing similar doubts about the possibility to pursue simultaneously democratic and market transformations.

7  S.P. Huntington, The Third Wave, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Unlike “transitologists” and not without good reasons Michael McFaul distinguishes the post-communist transitions from the cases of Southern Europe and Latin America going back to the 1970s. M. McFaul, “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship”, World Politics 54, January 2002, pp. 212–244.

8  I. Stiks, “The Berlin Wall Crumbled Down upon Our Heads!: 1989 and Violence in the former Socialist Multinational Federations”, Global Society 24, January 2010, pp. 91–110.

9  A. Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 48.

10  L. Shevtsova, The Lonely Power: Why Russia has not become the West and Why the West is Difficult for Russia, Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center and ROSSPEN Publishing House, 2010.

11  P. Hassner, “Russia’s Transition to Autocracy”, Journal of Democracy 19, April 2008, pp. 5–15.

12  V. Havel, Interview with J. Rupnik, Le Monde, 25 February 2005.

13  S. Levitsky and L.A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: The Origins and Evolution of Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. For early elaborations on this theme by the two authors: “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism”, Journal of Democracy 13, April 2002, pp. 51–65; “The Dynamics of Autocratic Coercion after the Cold War”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, September 2006, pp. 387–410.

14  Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2010.

15  J. Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999.

16  J. Kornai, “The Great Transformation of Central Europe: Success and Disappointments”, Presidential Address, delivered at the fourteenth World Congress of the International Economic Association, Marrakech, Morocco, 29 August 2005.

17  European Commission, Eurobarometer 71, Public Opinion in the European Union, September 2009.

18  This was the theme of a study by M. Crozier, S.P. Huntington and J. Watanuki (The Crisis of Democracy, New York: New York University Press, 1975) for the Trilateral Commission. The subject was revisited by S.J. Pharr, R.D. Putnam and R.J. Dalton “Trouble in the Advanced Democracies? A Quarter-Century of Declining Confidence”, Journal of Democracy 11, April 2000, pp. 5–25.

19  Slovakia 19.6 per cent, Lithuania 20.9 per cent, Slovenia 28.3 per cent, Poland 24.5 per cent, Romania 27.6 per cent, Czech Republic 28.2 per cent, etc.

20  These and the following figures are based on Standard Eurobarometer 71.

21  In the Czech Republic a majority of the population thinks that present day politicians are more able and competent than their communist predecessors though three-quarters do not consider them as more honest, and 83 per cent of Czechs polled do not think that today’s politicians take into account peoples’ opinion. STEM poll, MF Dnes, 12 February 2007.

22  P.S. Green and A. Dudikova, “Havel Laments as ‘Consumer Palaces’ Occupy Nation”, Bloomberg 18 June 2009 and CTK 18 June 2009.

23  C. Lefort, L’invention démocratique, Paris: Fayard, 1981.

24  A. Grzymala-Busse, Rebuilding Leviathan, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

25  J. Rupnik, “From Democracy Fatigue to Populist Backlash”, Journal of Democracy 18, October 2007, pp. 17–25.

26  I. Krastev, “The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus”, Journal of Democracy 18, October 2007, pp. 56–63.

27  The argument is developed in M. Gauchet, La Démocratie contre elle-même, Paris: Gallimard, 2002.

28  M. Gauchet, La démocratie d’une crise à l’autre, Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2007.

29  P. Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie, la politique à l’âge de la défiance, Paris: Seuil, 2006.

30  B. Constant, “De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes”, in: B. Constant, Ecrits politiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1997, pp. 589–619.

31  I. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in: I. Berlin: Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 166–217.

32  Speaking at a session of the European parliament in Strasbourg in the spring of 2009 the Czech prime minister Mirek Topolánek, then presiding over the EU, warned against the policies of government intervention in the economy and called US economic policies of the Obama administration “the road to hell”. “EU President call US Stimulus the ‘Way to Hell’”, New York Times, 26 March 2009. The Czech finance minister said in October 2008: “We had resisted hard socialism from the East, now we have to resist soft socialism from the West”. J. Rupnik, “Die Krise und das Ende des Wirtschaftsliberalismus in Mitteleuropa”, Transit (Wien) 37, 2009.

33  A.-M. Le Gloannec and J. Rupnik, “Democratization by Extension”, in: Z. Laïdi (ed.), EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, London: Routledge, 2008; also M. Vachudova, Europe Undivided, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

34  J. Rupnik, (ed.), Les Banlieues de l’Europe, les politiques de voisinage de l’UE, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2007.

7  The difficult new era for international democracy support

Thomas Carothers

Democracy support, as an element both of US foreign policy and of the foreign policies of many established democracies, suffered greatly during the last decade as a result of a damaging association with policies led by US president George Bush that were extremely widely, and often very deeply, disliked. The close identification of the enterprise of democracy promotion with the US-led war in Iraq and with President Bush’s more general regime change impulses caused many people around the world to view democracy promotion not as an at least somewhat idealistic effort to advance commendable principles but instead as a hypocritical cover for aggressive assertions of US geo-strategic power. What President Bush held out as the muscular core of his global “Freedom Agenda” – military-based efforts to construct democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan – seemed to many people by definition a contradiction of democratic principles in that they involved the imposition on a citizenry of an outside power’s political will. Moreover, US abuses of the rule of law and human rights at Guantanamo, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere undermined America’s standing as a global symbol of democracy and human rights, further weakening the broader democracy promotion enterprise.

In response to this political coloring of democracy promotion, a number of governments in different parts of the world, including in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere, stepped up efforts to resist and limit externally sponsored democracy support activities in their territory, such as international election observation, political party support and civil society funding. This growing backlash against democracy support was further fueled by the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and the perception (often exaggerated) on the part of many observers that the United States had played a key role in these events through its democracy assistance programs. The backlash affected not only US democracy support efforts, but also those of European governments and international organizations. Some non-US actors engaged in democracy support, such as some European governments and international organizations, felt uncomfortable being associated with the United States on this issue and emphasized alternative concepts to democracy promotion like human rights, rule of law and governance support. Within the United States itself, public support for democracy promotion as a foreign-policy goal sank during the later Bush years.

Given the close connection between the travails of democracy promotion and the presidency of George Bush, many people in the broader community of democracy support organizations hoped and even assumed that with the departure of George Bush from office these difficulties would subside relatively quickly. The election of Barack Obama encouraged these hopes. Now the United States had in place a president whose remarkable global popularity coming into office was the almost exact inverse of the global unpopularity of his predecessor. Although Obama felt compelled to continue the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan for security purposes, he had clearly disassociated himself from the idea of military intervention for the sake of democracy promotion and from the regime change line generally. And once in office Obama set himself immediately to the task of trying to improve America’s compliance with the rule of law and human rights in its counterterrorism activities.

Yet as President Obama and his foreign-policy team proceed to elaborate their efforts to develop a more effective, respected US foreign policy, it is becoming clear that the challenges for democracy promotion remain extremely deep, whether it is in Afghanistan, Russia, Nigeria, or anywhere else. Although Bush policies did cause many problems for democracy promotion, they were just one part of a broader set of political developments in the first decade of this new century that have rendered the task of supporting democracy around the world more complex and difficult than in the much more optimistic years of the late 1980s and the 1990s. The fact that the Bush policies attracted so much negative attention often obscured the broader set of changes taking place. In that this post-Bush political landscape is different, a clearer view is possible.

A framework of optimism

To throw into sharp relief the defining features of the current challenging environment for democracy promotion, it is useful to briefly outline the basic profile of the foundational period of contemporary international democracy support. These were the years coinciding with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a post-Cold War era. In these years, what had been a rather modest circle of organizations and people engaged in democracy support – such as the German political foundations and their US counterparts – mushroomed into a sizable domain. From the mid-1980s through the end of the 1990s dozens of new actors, ranging from new European political foundations and US NGOs to specialized offices within multilateral intergovernmental organizations, entered the democracy support realm. The types of such activities widened, going from an initial focus on political party development and elections work to a wide-ranging menu of programs that reach all sorts of political actors, institutions, and processes. The geographical reach of such work widened in matching fashion. Democracy support programs and policies unfolded in every part of the developing and post-communist worlds, including Latin America, Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia. Although international democracy support remained just one of many elements of international relations, by the end of the 1990s it was no longer a small, marginal area, but rather an active, growing domain of considerable significance in the foreign policy of many Western countries and the political life of many countries throughout the developing and post-communist worlds.

This burgeoning domain of international democracy support rested on a set of four guiding assumptions, assumptions that reflected the political conditions and perspectives of that period:

The first assumption was that democracy is expanding steadily, at times rapidly, in the world and that this expansion constitutes a basic, even natural direction of international political life. The tremendous expansion of democracy that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s opened doors all over the world for democracy support efforts. Although democracy promotion specialists often like to view democracy support as a sort of vanguard that is leading democratization, in fact the opposite is often true – democratic openings tend to prompt international actors to react with offers of support and to encourage the multiplication of democracy aid programs. The basic aspects of the overall tenor of democracy support in those years – the sense of optimism about the possibility of basic political transformations, the feelings of self-confidence and historical mission, and the belief in the possibility of almost limitless reach – all derive from the larger pattern of rapid democratization that marked those years.

A second assumption was that international democracy support rests on a widespread consensus that democracy is the most desirable political system and has no substantial ideological rivals. The task of democracy support was thus conceived during these years not as requiring persuasion about democracy’s value but rather simply as helping countries figure out how to achieve it. Of course it was assumed that authoritarian regimes would continue to resist external democracy support, but within the democracy support community the view prevailed that such regimes constituted a shrinking set of political actors on the wrong side of history who were hobbled by defensiveness and decreasing legitimacy. This belief in the universality of democracy extended both to the idea that democracy is the best political system everywhere both for fulfilling the aspiration of human dignity as well as for delivering the best socioeconomic results.

A third guiding idea of that period was that the process of democratization, wherever it occurs, is relatively straightforward and comprehensible. The “Third Wave” of democracy that crested in those years appeared to be defined by a relatively consistent pattern of democratization, despite the extremely wide geographic extension of the democratic wave. This pattern was defined by a series of stages: the weakening and then collapse of an authoritarian system due to the accumulated failures of performance and legitimacy; an initial democratic transition consisting of a sudden opening of political space and debate, the formation of new political parties, foundational elections, the writing of a new constitution, the taking of power by an elected government; and then a process of steady democratic consolidation in which the main political institutions are gradually reformed in accordance with the democratic norms and independent civil society develops in parallel, with all political sides becoming habituated to democratic processes and accepting of democratic norms. In short, the process of democratization appeared to follow a well-defined continuum away from closed, repressive regimes to open democratic ones.

Following on that idea about democratization was the fourth assumption: not only does the democracy support community understand the processes of democratization taking place in the world, but it also understands how to help advance and solidify them. In simple terms, the method for supporting democratization was to attempt to facilitate every element of the assumed transitional process described above – helping political parties learn how to operate; providing technical assistance for the holding of elections; supporting reforms for basic political institutions, like legislatures and judiciaries; providing aid to nascent civil society organizations, and so forth. Underlying all of these constituent elements of democracy support was the basic idea that the key to democracy support was to identify pro-democratic actors and then supply them with the knowledge and material resources they needed to act on their political beliefs.

Undermined by events

Taken together, these four assumptions constituted a powerful framework of both understanding and action by the community of actors engaged in international democracy support. It was a framework adopted as much consciously as unconsciously, growing as it did out of the dominant political events defining the period in question. Implicit though it often was, it was nevertheless very widespread and influential. During this past decade, however, all four of the core assumptions of this outlook have been undermined or least thrown into question by events. Understanding these underlying changes is critical to grasping the state of the field of democracy support today.

First, democracy is no longer spreading in the world. For the first time in many decades, the number of democracies in the world at the end of this decade was no greater than the number at the start of it. Various attempted democratic transitions have fallen badly short or fallen apart altogether. Russia is perhaps the most important such case, but it is by no means the only one. Whereas in the early 1990s the whole former Soviet domain appeared to be a zone of democratic advance, by the end of this past decade it was largely an authoritarian region, with the exception of some shaky pluralistic systems on the western edge. Incipient signs of political reform and opening in China in the 1990s have gained little momentum, with repression and political monopoly still defining political life there. A promising democratic transition in Africa’s most populous state, Nigeria, has badly stalled. Many new democracies are hovering in a state of precarious partial achievement, their citizens unhappy with the inability of fledgling democratic systems to produce a better daily life. The troubled state of democracy’s global fortunes appears to have intensified in the last several years, with Freedom House reporting in each of the last four years that democratic backsliding has eclipsed democratic gains.

The causes of this halt of democracy’s spread are multiple and complex.

In a general sense, the Third Wave appears to have reached its own natural limit. Those autocratic systems that survived it are ones with considerable ability for political survival, based either on good economic performance (such as China and Vietnam) or harshly effective structures of repression (such as North Korea and Burma). Moreover, the rapid expansion of democracy around the world in the 1980s and 1990s entailed political openings in many countries that had few of the underlying conditions that tend to make democracy successful, such as competent states, sociopolitical cohesiveness and experience with peaceful pluralism. As a result, after initial movement away from failed authoritarian systems, many such societies encountered numerous political troubles (such as elections that provoked violence between contending groups or institutional reform undermined by persistent corruption) and experienced only very incomplete processes of democratic change.

Unexpected, essentially contingent factors have also worked against democracy’s further global spread. The sharp rise in the price of oil and gas in the middle years of the past decade was a boon for a significant number of non-democratic energy-rich governments, whether in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, or elsewhere. In addition, the spike in energy prices made most established democracies less willing to push these energy-rich non-democracies (such as Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran and Angola) toward democratic reforms, out of concern about jeopardizing their own energy supplies.

The second assumption–confidence about democracy’s unique value and special international status – has also weakened. The continuing economic success of some authoritarian countries, above all China, has provoked doubts in many quarters about whether democracy is necessarily the best or only path to long-term economic success. Russia’s authoritarian stabilization under Vladimir Putin appears to have convinced many Russians that democracy is not necessarily their best choice. A greater self-confidence on the part of various non-democratic governments, not just in China and Russia, but also in Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere, has given rise to new claims about possible alternatives to Western democracy. For many people in the poorest countries of the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the idea that there is only one legitimate political path no longer seems at all a given. Political observers in different parts of the world now look back on the “end of history” thinking of the early 1990s as an ideological relic of the initial post-Cold War enthusiasm.

Third, certainty about how democratization occurs has also diminished considerably. With a significant number of countries that were once labeled as “democratizing countries” having entered into a gray zone of political hybridity – in which democratic features interweave with persistent non-democratic characteristics – the basic “transition paradigm” of the Third Wave no longer coheres. The idea of political change as a natural series of steps along a well-defined democratic continuum has melted away in the light of contrary realities. Instead, countries all around the world in which authoritarian regimes collapsed are following many different political paths – moving sideways, in circles and backward – as often as they move forward in democratic terms. Regular elections have not proven to be a certain formula for democratic advance, with many countries that hold regular elections being stuck in semi-authoritarianism. Scholars of comparative politics have in the past years struggled to define new conceptual models to describe this tremendous heterogeneity of political development.

With this loss of certainty about how democratization occurs has also come a weakening of the fourth guiding assumption – diminished certainty about how outside actors can effectively support democracy. In many countries stuck in the political gray zone, the standard menu of externally-sponsored democracy support activities appears to have little positive effect despite years of repetition. It has become apparent in many places that the obstacles to democratization are much more complex and stubborn than the international democracy support community originally thought. The basic method in democracy support of dividing political actors into two clear groups – pro-democratic ones on the one hand and non-democratic ones on the other – in order to support the former against the latter no longer makes much sense when political life is a study in grays rather than black and white. Providing political actors in struggling democracies with knowledge about how democratic processes work in other countries has only very limited effect on underlying democratic obstacles that are rooted in basic societal traditions and structures. Despite significant assistance for political party development in many countries for example, political parties remain the single least respected political institution in many of these places. Some countries, such as Russia, have absorbed large amounts of externally sponsored democracy support, with little visible effect.

Principles for the next phase

In short, the damage that George Bush’s foreign policy inflicted on democracy promotion was serious but it came on top of a much deeper set of changes that have led the world from the democratic optimism of the 1990s in a new era of much less certainty and optimism both about democracy’s global fortunes and the appropriate place of democracy support in international politics. These changes included the halting of the spread of democracy, new debates over possible alternatives to democracy, less certainty about how democratization occurs and about how it can be facilitated. Not just the Obama administration but all governmental and nongovernmental actors interested in supporting democracy outside their borders must confront this changed international reality as they decide how to move forward on democracy support in the decade ahead. Although deciding what the new era of international democracy support should look like will take at least several years to determine, several initial principles for action in this sobering, even daunting new context might include the following:

Accept modest results: Democracy supporters became accustomed in the 1980s and 1990s to something like instant gratification – positive political change appeared to be happening fast, and even modest efforts, like supporting a transitional election after authoritarian collapse, seemed to contribute to transformative changes. They now have to settle for less in terms of impact, and convince those who fund their work or who back it at the top policy levels that modest results are now the best that can be expected. Accepting less is hard to do at any time but especially now in the aid world because it coincides with sharply growing demand on aid organizations to prove impact – skeptical publics and politicians are insisting much more than before that foreign aid demonstrate results. The fact that this push to show impact comes just at the time when the spread of democracy has halted and the results of democracy support are especially hard to demonstrate is an unfortunate fact that the democracy support community has to take into account.

Move beyond transferring knowledge: Although transferring knowledge from established democracies to new ones has a useful role in democracy support, relying heavily on that method is no longer viable. The many stuck or broken democratic transitions are not in bad shape primarily because of lack of knowledge on the part of the main political actors. Democracy support programs and policies must instead concentrate more on identifying the deeper obstacles to democratic change and mobilizing more focused ways of helping facilitate locally-based efforts to overcome those obstacles. This may mean being “more political”, something that some aid actors shy away from, but without a more focused and at time assertive approach, the gray zone of attempted democratic transitions will remain gray.

Cross-fertilize the economic and the political: Given that many new democracies are struggling for legitimacy with their citizens because of their inability to deliver better socio-economic performance, democracy support activities must do more to find ways to blend a focus on democratic reforms with a focus on socio-economic progress. The traditional stance of many democracy support programs and policies to assume that better politics will naturally lead over time to better economics must be replaced with a conscious effort to find the connections between democratic and economic change. Thus for example helping to improve the functioning of a weak legislature can be expanded from narrow political goals – such as a more rule-bound legislature – to broader socio-economic ones as well, such as a legislature capable of analyzing and improving legislation that will underlie dynamic economic reforms. A similar process of widening from the political to include the economic should take place in many parts of the standard menu of democracy aid.

Return (intelligently) to democratic persuasion: Given the new debates over the relative value of democracy versus its authoritarian rivals in the developing and postcommunist worlds, the international democracy support community can no longer proceed on the assumption that the basic case for democracy does not need to be made. Instead, democracy supporters must return to the task of finding ways to participate effectively in debates over the value of democracy, to help advance democracy’s cause as one ideology in a mix of competing ones. They must do so in thoughtful ways, avoiding any of the tendencies toward propaganda that were characteristic of old Cold War ideological debates, but nevertheless in a spirit of positive debate and persuasion.

8  Civil society

From myth to reality

Grzegorz Ekiert and Roberto Foa

1989 was initially considered as the triumph of civil society movements over monolithic communist regimes. Yet during the last two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that civil society is weak and structurally deficient in post-communist countries. Early studies of ‘social capital’ in the region found lower levels of social trust, community engagement, and confidence in social and political institutions across Central and Eastern Europe.[1] Studies by Howard and Bernhard and Karakoç,[2] among others, have shown low levels of voluntary associational membership, a paucity of public participation, and an anemic civil society even in comparison to post-authoritarian new democracies. Scholars have also criticized the failure of new democratic states to develop and strengthen civic initiatives and participation in governance.[3] The picture that arises from the literature is one of ‘democracies without citizens’, in that political elites have succeeded in protecting basic civic rights and implementing democratic procedures, rule of law, and multiparty competition, but failed to enhance social cohesion and voluntary activity at the grassroots level and increase popular support for the institutions of representative democracy. Warning of the dangers to democratic consolidation, some authors have pointed to the growing dissatisfaction and popularity of populist and radical right parties that exhibit questionable support for democratic institutions.[4] These concerns about weakness of civil society, its sources and consequences are echoed in many debates taking place in Central and Eastern Europe.[5]

Is the consensus view, that all post-communist countries share weak and structurally deficient civil societies, in fact correct? Taking the conventional wisdom at its face value appears to generate a number of paradoxes. First, if 1989 was the triumph of active and mobilized civil societies why did they become so weak after democracy was established? After all, the inauguration of democracy with its guarantees of political rights and freedoms ought to have facilitated a flourishing of civic activity, rather than civic atrophy. If civil society was uniformly weak across the post-communist space, how can we relate this to significantly diverging outcomes of political, social and economic transformations in the region? Why did some regimes in Central Asia lapse rapidly back into authoritarian rule, while others in Eastern Europe saw gradual deterioration in respect for civic rights and liberties, and yet others in East-Central Europe held steady to the path of democratic consolidation?

I The weakness of post-communist civil society argument

In the wake of the democratic revolutions of 1989, it was commonly asserted that communism had wiped out any traces of a genuine civil society, and that the legacy of totalitarian rule was highly detrimental to the reconstitution of pluralist associational life. As Wedel remarked, ‘under communism the nations of Eastern Europe never had a “civil society” … the lack of civil society was part of the very essence of the all-pervasive communist state’.[6] Ralf Dahrendorf famously argued that while building liberal political and economic institutions in Eastern Europe could be relatively swift, re-building strong and effective civil society would present a much greater challenge, only to be accomplished over the course of several generations.[7] Since the claim that a vibrant civil society supports the consolidation as well as the quality of democracy is a long-established, although still debated, tenet of the social sciences,[8] its absence in post-communist countries was treated as a great obstacle to building working democratic systems. The paucity of associational life and civic engagement registered by the cross-national public opinion surveys over the last two decades would seem to confirm the persistent deficit of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe and place in doubt the future health of democracy in the region.

While the transition to democracy after 1989 might have been expected to lead to a civic renaissance, many observers noted instead a ‘civic demobilization’. According to many scholars, the negative legacy of communism was compounded by the manner in which the post-1989 democratic transformations occurred: the elite-driven strategies of democratic reform and economic liberalization implied the need for demobilization of the publics and further marginalized incipient civil societies.[9] Reflecting on this phenomenon, Bernhard points to four factors responsible for the enfeeblement of a previously mobilized civil society: demobilization resulting from the manner in which pacted transitions privilege elite negotiations and cooperation at the expense of popular forces, collective action and grassroots organizations; the ‘decapitation’ of the civic movement’s organizational leadership through its migration to the new state bureaucracies, political parties and democratic institutions; the legacy of totalitarian rule undermining social trust and volunteerism; and the demobilizing social consequences of the economic recession and structural adjustment.[10] Thus, the strong civil societies that challenged communist government in the region subsequently became weak and demobilized as a result of factors inherent in the nature of the dual economic and political transformation occurring across the post-communist sphere. Some scholars argued that even the EU accession process and membership, with its putative support for civil society initiatives, in fact did very little to boost civil society capacity and development.[11] While the question of the absence of civil society under communism depends to a large degree on the definition one adopts, the failure of citizens to respond to new opportunities after the democratic transition and the restoration of political and civil rights remains a puzzle.

However, if civil society is systematically weak across the post-communist space, how can we relate this to significantly diverging outcomes of political, social and economic transformations in the region? Two decades of transition have produced a striking diversity of outcomes ranging from consolidated liberal democracies to various types of authoritarianism, and from a social market economy, to predatory state capitalism. A glance at various measures and indices gauging the progress of political and economic reforms shows that a number of post-communist countries (in particular those that joined the European Union in 2004 and in 2007) have made considerable progress even despite the recent global crisis. The quality of their democratic institutions is similar to that enjoyed by the citizens of established Western democracies. They also have working market economies and extensive welfare systems. In contrast, political and economic reforms in several Balkan countries as well as countries that emerged from the dissolution of the former Soviet Union (except for the Baltic republics) are less advanced. Moreover, the recent data show a growing split between these two parts of the former Soviet bloc, as well as further deepening of sub-regional divisions. On the one hand, there exists a striking convergence between the new member states of the EU and the official candidate countries. They are richer and have lower levels of income inequality and poverty and more developed welfare systems. Moreover, their economies are growing faster, while liberal democratic standards are safeguarded by consolidated democratic systems. On the other hand, the majority of former Soviet republics (including Russia) have emerged poorer and less egalitarian while concurrently being plagued by more severe economic difficulties, massive corruption, and increasingly authoritarian political regimes.[12] It seems clear that a theory of post-communist civil society needs to account for the diversity of transformation paths found in different countries and to show their specific causes and mechanisms.

In summary, in the literature on post-communist political developments there is an obvious tension between (often normatively inspired) claims about the weakness of civil society, and available empirical evidence that suggests significant diversity in the nature, development and robustness of civil societies across the region. It seems that given social and organizational legacies of communism, the survival of some pre-communist traditions, and a high level of popular mobilization during the transition, post-1989 civil society should be relatively dense and active. In addition, if one factors in significant external assistance for civil society building projects, considerable state support and subsidies, as well as a relatively advanced level of socio-economic development, one would expect post-communist civil society to be relatively strong, especially in comparison to many post-authoritarian democracies. We shall argue that the vision of an anemic and passive civil society common to all countries in the region depicted in the Western scholarly literature is not accurate. Post-communist civil society as a specific singular phenomenon does not really exist. Differences in civil society condition and strength within the region are as vast as differences across regions, despite the shared communist legacy.

II Civil societies in Eastern and Central Europe under the old and the new regime

In order to reassesses the current debates, we need first to reconstruct the origin and structure of civil society in post-communist Europe. Under the old regime, East European countries had a distinct (politicized, bureaucratized, centralized, and comprehensive) pattern of associational life and interest ‘representation’. The presence of this type of social organization was a defining element of totalitarianism and one of the most fundamental institutional differences between it and other political regimes, both democratic and authoritarian. There were, however, important differences among countries in the structure, historical continuity and function of associations that reflected contrasting historical traditions, distinct strategies of the communist takeover and diverging political developments during the communist period. The legacies of communist rule in the sphere of associational life are quite dissimilar for various post-communist countries and tend to influence their post-1989 civil society transformations. In the next section we are going to focus on three distinct periods that shaped the currently existing civil societies: communist, transition, and post-communist.

1 The incomplete civil society of the communist period

The traditional associational sphere of the region, consisting of a wide range of social, professional and corporate associations, churches, charities and local organizations, was largely destroyed during the imposition and consolidation of communist regimes; Hankiss described this as a ‘carpet bombing of civil society’.[13] The communist onslaught followed the destruction to the social and institutional fabric of East European societies resulting from World War II. During the consecutive occupations, pre-war civil societies were deliberately repressed in countries invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Social, professional and political organizations were banned, their leaders eliminated, and their resources confiscated. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, population transfers and border changes destroyed almost completely the social underpinning of associational life. Although many of the social and political organizations and charities that disappeared were reconstituted after the war, they were again disbanded, banned or forcefully merged into newly established mass organizations controlled by the communist party-states, or reconstituted under communist control.[14]

After communist takeover, a dense and comprehensive organizational network of politicized, monopolistic and centralized mass organizations was constructed, designed to incorporate all social, generational and professional strata and categories. This massive institutional network of party controlled organizations filled the space between the party-state bureaucracy and the private lives of individuals. It constituted a spoiler representational sphere and provided a mechanism of indoctrination and political mobilization for the new regime, especially during the Stalinist period. Trade unions and other mass organizations were famously described as ‘transmission belts’ carrying forth the directives of the communist party to all segments of society.[15]

At the same time, these new, politically controlled organizations were not purely coercive instruments of social control and mobilization. They provided various public goods to their members and their families, organized leisure activities, and often served as an integral part of the welfare provision system.[16] These organizations also had some limited capacity to represent group interests and extract concessions, benefits and resources for their members from the party-state bureaucracies and central planners. Moreover, the associational landscape of communist societies was not exclusively populated by centralized mass organizations. Some pre-communist civil society traditions and even old organizations (mostly in the realm of leisure, education or culture) survived under communist rule, especially on the local level.[17] They served as hidden carriers of local traditions and provided the space for some activities sheltered from direct political interference. Finally, various associational sectors in specific countries were organized differently. Some sectors were less centralized and hierarchical: Poland, for example, had four functionally segmented youth organizations. Membership in many of these mass organizations was usually automatic or routine (as part of employment or education) rather than compulsory and often collective not individual (all employees of an enterprise or all children at a school were members of specific organizations). In organizations where the membership was a matter of individual decisions, becoming a member carried some tangible social or material benefits and was not widely resented, as it is often implied in the weakness of post-communist civil society argument.

During the communist era these mass organizations underwent important transformations. Following de-Stalinization in the 1950s and especially since the mid-1970s, this official institutional sphere experienced a gradual process of pragmatization, de-ideologization, and even pluralization. This happened to a different degree in various countries, with Poland and Hungary leading the way. Membership in many organizations was increasingly voluntary and based on the provision of various special benefits and collective goods. This gradual transformation of the nature and role of mass organizations had important consequences for state–society relations and produced striking differences across the Soviet bloc, with a growing split between ‘reformist’ and ‘orthodox’ communist regimes. The process of diversification was accelerated in the 1980s and aided by the systemic crisis of communism and by the emerging challenge from the embryonic independent and oppositional movements and organizations.

Alongside the transformation of state controlled organizations, independent or oppositional civil society networks emerged in many East European countries since the mid-1970s. Reflecting the decline of political repressions, growing intellectual and cultural dissent, the de-privatization of religion and increasing opening to the West, autonomous social initiatives, human rights organizations, cultural, environmental and religious movements were gaining ground in communist societies.[18] The appearance of opposition groups in Eastern Europe, and especially the emergence of the Solidarity movement in Poland, gave the impetus to rethinking the nature and role of East European dissent. These independent social and political initiatives were often described by Western observers as the formation of rudimentary forms of autonomous civil society.[19] The implosion of the communist ideology, the emerging discourse of human rights, samizdat, and networks of independent communication provided foundations for this phenomenon. By the 1980s, European communist countries had what can be described as incomplete civil societies with a large number of associations and a dense structure of organizations at various levels and in all functional domains, but without autonomy, a legally defined public space, and enforceable rights and liberties.[20] The self-organization of East European societies against their communist regimes provided a stimulus for the resurrection of the concept of civil society and the debate on the relationship between civil society and democracy in social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s.

The independent sector of civil society comprised of a wide range of groups, including semi-autonomous churches and religious organizations, human rights organizations and illegal political opposition, independent artistic and cultural movements, single-issue apolitical movements (environmental, ethnic, consumer), and self-help groups, showed a much higher degree of diversity across the region. Central European countries (mostly notably Poland, but also Czechoslovakia and Hungary) had more robust independent sectors than other countries. These countries had a higher number of independent organizations,[21] larger and more diverse oppositional movements, more public support for independent activities, more coordination and contacts among independent groups and a higher number of contentious events challenging communist authorities.[22]

In summary, three points must be emphasized. First, totalitarian regimes (in contrast to traditional authoritarian regimes) had a very distinctive impact upon civil society and upon associational life, and a highly unique pattern of institutionalizing and controlling the public sphere. Accordingly, we should observe in these countries a distinct social and cultural legacy shaping the transformations of civil societies during the post-communist period. Given the legacy of the dense state controlled associational structures and autonomous self-mobilization efforts, we should expect more robust civil societies in post-communist than in post-authoritarian new democracies. Second, since there were significant differences across the region in the composition, institutionalization and practices of these incomplete civil societies and their relations to the party-states, we should expect that these differences should carry over and have consequences for the post-communist period as well. Therefore, we should expect contrasting dynamics during the period of regime change with different patterns of civil society involvement and development. Finally, one would expect that given the extent of the organizational density of the old regimes, the extent of external assistance for civil society building, and the competition between old and new social organizations, the process of civil society re-formulation should be qualitatively different in post-communist and post-authoritarian cases. As a result, post-communist civil societies should be more robust and organizationally denser than post-authoritarian civil societies, especially in cases of successful democratization among societies that are at a similar level of socio-economic development.

2 ‘Re-combinant’ civil society of the transition period

The collapse of communist regimes opened a space for the reconstitution of civil society and unleashed the process of civil society mobilization common to all cases of democratization.[23] This process resulted in two parallel developments. First, there was the re-invention of non-existent, independent sectors of civil society. It was manifested in the massive social mobilization and rapid emergence of a wide spectrum of new organizations and movements (mostly NGOs, foundations, charities, religious and ethnic minority organizations but also employer and business associations).

These newcomers were by and large the organizations absent in the associational landscape inherited from the communist regime (such as NGOs, charities or foundations) as well as organizations competing directly with the inherited organizations (such as independent trade unions or new professional associations). Many of these organizations failed to secure resources and attract members and disappeared as quickly as they emerged, especially in the sectors of civil society where they faced competition from the former communist era organizations (labor unions, professional associations). The newly emerged independent sector had a different level of organizational growth and success and different composition across the region.[24] While no reliable comparative data on the formation of new, post-1989 associations exist, there are some data sets constructed for several post-communist countries. They show interesting differences in the speed and intensity of civil society growth.

Depending on specific circumstances (conflicts and wars, quality of democracy, external support, existing traditions and extent of economic crisis), the emerging new sectors of civil societies exhibited various institutional configurations, different balances between inherited and new organizations, contrasting styles of collective action, and normative orientations. Moreover, different collective actors played a dominant role in shaping civil society actions and political influence. Finally, new states employed different strategies to encourage some activities and discourage others through a variety of legal regulations and financial means, including registration procedures, tax exemptions, subsidies, etc.[25] State actors entered in differently structured relations with civil society actors on local and national levels as well.

Second, the majority of former communist-controlled organizations experienced a complex and, by and large, successful process of reform and adaptation to new democratic conditions. While losing a significant portion of their members and resources, they frequently split into smaller organizations, changed their names, leaders and agendas.

This process of adaptation of communist-era organizations as well as the organizational and normative re-invention of new sectors of civil society was not uniform across the region. First of all, there were different levels of civic mobilization and political conflict during the transfer of power stage of democratization. In some countries the formation of new civil society was a highly contentious process while in others it moved in a more orderly and subdued fashion.[26] The intensity of the initial political conflict shaped the organizational landscape of new civil societies. The ratio of inherited and newly formed organizations also differed across the region. Old communist-era organizations have remained more powerful in countries where former communists managed to stay in power. In countries with successful political opposition there were two distinct patterns of adaptation that resulted in either a more pluralist (Poland as an ideal type) or a more corporatist (Slovenia, Hungary) structuring of civil society, with other countries falling between these two poles. These patterns shaped the rate of civil society organizational growth, the relation between civil society and the state, the level of competition among the organizations, and the level of contention in state–civil society and business–civil society relations.

Thus, post-communist civil society emerged through a complex re-combination process involving internal transformations of the communist-era associations, the emergence of new sectors of civil society, and interactions between old and new organizations as well as between them and the new democratic states. Stark introduced the concept of re-combination, analyzing the process of economic and institutional transformations in the region[27] but it fits equally well other institutional domains. This peculiar nature of civil society reformulation created a range of civil society types that were highly diversified, variously networked and unequal in distribution of resources and influence.

3 Civil society in new East European democracies – diverging trajectories

The initial democratic transformations in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in the emergence of re-combined civil societies across the region. These new civil societies registered significant growth and instantly underwent diverse processes of transformation. The emerging trajectories of civil society development were shaped by a number of factors. The most important were the quality of democracy in individual countries, the resources and strength of independent civic initiatives, the role of the state in financing and supporting emerging civil society sectors, the quality of institutional infrastructure, and the involvement of external actors.

a The quality of public space

The most important split in the condition and development potential of civil societies has been between countries that experienced gradual consolidation of democratic institutions and practices, and countries that experienced retrenchment of liberties and freedoms and restoration of authoritarian systems. Obviously, the regime type defines the respect for political liberties and rights, and shapes freedom of organization and expression, the capacity to acquire and exchange information, interest articulation, identity formation and modes of representation – all critical for the health of civil society. New authoritarian regimes in former communist countries impose multiple constraints on civil society activities even if they do not resort to open political repression. Students of emerging civil society in Russia,[28] for example, have argued that the initial weakness of the Russian state contributed significantly to the organizational weakness of civil society. Subsequently, the turn to authoritarian rule resulted in a gradual increase of political and bureaucratic constraints on civil society activities, its cooperation with transnational actors and freedom of communication.[29]

The quality of public space, in terms of respect for rights of assembly and expression, is therefore the most important long-run parameter shaping civil society organization, strength and capacity to act. In this dimension there is a striking variation of conditions across the post-communist space as well as significant changes over time. The political regimes that replaced the communist system have evolved into the entire spectrum of regime types, ranging from fully consolidated liberal democracies in East-Central Europe to ‘oriental tyrannies’ of Central Asia with a range of hybrid regimes in-between. It should not surprise anyone that such diverse political developments shape the nature of civil society in various post-communist countries and define its autonomy and capacity to pursue its goals. In countries that reverted to authoritarian rule, there are again incomplete civil societies without legally protected public space. The associational life is dominated by state sponsored and controlled associations, and independent civil society actors face many restrictions, constraints, threats and repressions, often akin to those they had faced in incomplete civil societies of late communism.

The comparison among regions of the former communist world shows that in countries of East-Central Europe the quality of public space, as measured by the Freedom House index of civil rights and political liberties and the index of press freedom, is similar today to that in established Western democracies. Countries of South Eastern Europe have made considerable progress in improving the quality of public space as well, while other sub-regions either did not make any progress (Central Asia) or registered significant decline after initial improvement (the remaining part of the Soviet Union except for the Baltic Republics) during the last decade or so. Thus, in this dimension so important for civil society development the differences between various post-communist countries are enormous.

Although regime type is crucial for creating constraints and opportunities for public actors, the state policies vis-à-vis civil society generate another order of diversity. While post-communist civil societies inherited relatively dense organizational structures and resources, they have been beyond any doubt late developing civil societies. A famous distinction made by Gerschenkron between early and late economic development can easily be applied to civil society transformations in the region.[30] Since these have been late developing civil societies, then following Gerschenkron’s logic we should expect that their transformations were characterized by the significant role of the state as well as by the importance of foreign funding and assistance. The states in the region have been instrumental in creating political and economic conditions for the development of civil society organizations and in providing an institutional infrastructure that imposed constraints and opened opportunities for civil society actors. The legal and institutional changes regarding registration procedures, financing and taxation mechanisms, restrictions of activities, subsidies, etc., have pushed civil society development into diverging trajectories across the region.[31]

While there are diverse ways of structuring state–civil society relations in democratic countries,[32] there has been convergence of preferences across Europe towards a model outlined in the White Paper on European Governance adopted in 2001. Giving voice to the concerns of citizens and delivering services that meet people’s needs are seen as fundamental to the civil society role.[33] Post-communist countries were not uniformly influenced by the dominant European model of state–civil society relations – that is, a corporatist model characterized by professionalized civil society, constituting a significant employment sector and involved in formal structures of social partnership, largely financed by the state and focused on service provision. Candidate and subsequent member countries of the EU, however, moved their domestic legislation in this direction. Civil society organizations in these countries increasingly sought resources from the European Social Fund and participated in projects funded by structural funds. Thus, for several post-communist countries, the EU enlargement process and the EU membership provided a critical turn in the pattern of civil society transformations. The accession of ten post-communist countries to the European Union in 2004 and 2007 has strengthened civil society actors in these new member states in three distinct ways: the integration process provided opportunities to civil society organizations to enter EU-supported transnational networks, to tap the significant new resources through the access to EU structural and community funds, and to increase their political role on the local and national level through EU-mandated procedures that stipulate the partner role of civil society organizations in many policy arenas.[34]

Another dimension of diversity in post-communist civil societies stems from the nature of sectoral re-balancing and diversification in the civil society organizational structure. Traditional sectors of civil society inherited from the old regime composed of powerful trade unions and professional organizations weakened in response to structural changes in the economy, transformations of the labor markets and disarticulation of networks linking these organizations to state bureaucracies and policy makers. At the same time, the professional NGO sector experienced dramatic growth, expanding the number of civil society organizations, redefining intra-organizational networks and building trans-national links.

While the growth of professional organizations and multiplication of their functions drives civil society transformations, its sectoral composition is also shaped by the strength of grass-roots activities, the networks of alliances, political affiliations and dependencies. Churches, political parties, local authorities, the state and trans-national actors influence the composition of specific civil societies and their normative orientations to a different degree in different countries. Strong grass-roots movements bring new issues to the public arena, generate new organizations, and influence public policy. Strong links to churches and parties generate greater politicization of civil society actors. In general, reviewing the experiences of post-communist countries one could discern pluralist and corporatist patterns of civil society organization. Pluralist civil societies, such as the Polish one, tend to have more organizational growth and destruction, fragmented sectors with higher number of organizations, more competition among organizations, and less stable relations with political parties, local and national state administration. Civil societies dominated by large organizations tend to be more stable, less diverse and accommodating in their relations with the state.

When the number of different factors outlined above is taken into consideration, the most striking differences among post-communist civil societies are along sub-regional boundaries. The USAID’s NGO Sustainability Index, measuring systematically various dimensions of the civil society environment, show a persistent gap between various groups of post-communist countries and relatively little convergence.

b The organizational structure

In many existing analyses, the organizational strength of civil society has been judged by the rate of membership in voluntary associations, as declared in public opinion surveys. Given the growing ambiguity of the concept of membership, it may be more accurate to focus on the changing organizational structure of civil society, if we are to assess its transformation over time. Registration data of new civil society organizations provide a good insight into organizational density and growth in various countries. The rates of growth in the number of organizations were the highest in the first few years of transition. Poland, for example, achieved initially some 400 percent growth in the number of registered NGOs. While the growth leveled around 1994, it remained at around 100 percent every year with an average of some 4,000 new NGOs and 500 foundations registered every year. The fact that fewer than 13 percent of all NGOs in 2006 were established before 1989 reinforces the point about strong organizational growth of civil society, at least in some post-communist countries.

Figure 8.1  The NGO Sustainability Index for four groups of post-communist countries (lower numbers correspond to better conditions).

It is also important to emphasize that the development of civil society organizations in Poland has been distributed across the entire range of localities and not restricted to major urban centers, as only 24.1 percent of registered NGOs are located in big cities (defined as those with over half a million inhabitants), while 19.7 percent are located in villages, 34.7 percent in small towns (up to 99,000 inhabitants) and 21.5 percent in larger towns (100,000–499,000 inhabitants).[35] While there is a considerable controversy regarding how many of these registered organizations still exist and how active they are,[36] the rate of NGO creation when combined with other measures provides a testimony to the considerable vitality of civil society. There is no systematic data on organizational growth for the entire region, but data from other countries show a similar dynamic of growth.[37]

While public opinion surveys register low rates of reported associational membership, other available data paint a brighter picture of civil society strength.

By this measure, East-Central Europe is not much different from mature Western European democracies. These post-communist countries seem to have a higher density of international NGOs than South European democracies, which have had a much longer record of democratic rule and EU membership. Moreover, there is also a striking level of difference among the sub-regions of the former Soviet bloc on this measure. There are a number of other data sources that can be included in the assessment of the organizational strength of civil societies. For example, while the levels of membership in trade unions in new member states declined significantly over the last two decades, it is not much different from the European average.[38]

In short, during the last two decades there has been consistent growth in the number and variety of civil society organizations in many post-communist countries, and important shifts in the sectoral composition of their civil societies. Polish data exhibit these trends, although Poland may not be a perfect example of general civil society transformations, given the legacy of the Solidarity movement, political opposition under the old regime, and relatively high levels of contention in early years of democratization. Other countries in the region that have been able to consolidate their new democratic systems also registered significant improvements in the condition and organizational strength of their civil societies. In the authoritarian part of the former Soviet bloc the organizational transformation of civil society is less advanced, and the older communist-era organizations dominate the associational landscape.

c Civil society behavior and preferences of actors

Differences in the quality of public space, and in the organizational strength and composition of post-communist civil societies, are further magnified by differences in the behavior of civil society organizations and the normative orientations of civil society actors. In their study of contention during initial years of political and economic transformations Ekiert and Kubik noted striking differences among four Central European countries in the number of protests sponsored by civil society organizations.[39]

They argued that from the perspective of civil society actors’ behavior there are two types of civil society emerging in the region: contentious and accommodating. However, the longer term data are necessary to assess how stable these early patterns of civil society activities have been. Other data suggest that participation in contentious civic behavior, such as demonstration or strikes (shown below) has fallen since the 1989–1992 period in all post-communist countries, though this may largely reflect the unusually heightened level of contention induced by the transition process. Moreover, a falling incidence of strike activity is consistent with a trend across the world towards lower rates of industrial action. Interestingly, civic ‘demobilization’ has been sharpest in the post-Soviet countries and East-Central Europe, but relatively limited in southeastern Europe. Thus, the least and the most democratic post-communist countries registered the steepest drops in contention.

Figure 8.2  Log strikes per capita.

Notes

Source of strikes and lockouts data is the International Labour Organisation. Demonstration participation data is from the World Values Surveys, waves 2–5 (1990–2005).

It is also important to note that in non-and semi-democratic countries of the former Soviet bloc there are recurring waves of civil society mobilization. So-called ‘colored revolutions’ mark the periods of heightened political crisis usually centered on contested elections. These are cases of rapid mobilization and emergence of civic movements that are followed by demobilization, organizational atrophy and passivity of civil society actors.[40] Not surprisingly, in the least democratic post-communist countries there is a much lower level of sustainability of civil society organizations even following the periods of significant public mobilization.

While contentious actions are an important part of civil society behavior, they are not the only public behavior of civil society actors. Volunteering for various social causes is a part and parcel of routine civil society activity. There are many data that show much lower levels of volunteering in post-communist countries.[41] However, more focused opinion polls usually show higher levels of volunteering than general surveys such as the World Values Survey or the European Social Survey. For example, systematic surveys in Poland registered a relatively high, although fluctuating, level of volunteering and charitable giving.[42] The numbers reported for Poland and for some other post-communist countries[43] are not strikingly lower than the numbers for West European countries. The data from the most democratic post-communist countries do not show significantly lower levels of volunteering and charitable giving than West European averages. By this measure, some post-communist civil societies can be considered very active and strong.

The values of civil society actors matter greatly in determining their behavior and the nature of the political outcomes of civil society activities. In terms of the political orientation of civil society actors, one can distinguish between liberal and ‘illiberal’ civil societies. Berman provides a notable example in the case of Weimar Germany, where a dense middle-class organizational life ultimately supported conservative and Nazi opposition to the democratic regime, due to the weak underlying commitment to democracy of the German Mittelstand to open, pluralist institutions.[44] In addition, values and preferences may determine whether civil society develops along normative or clientelistic lines, that is, whether civil society organizations exist to defend citizen rights, work for public good and advance the rule of law and democratic process, or simply as a means of extracting material rents for their leaders and members from the state and local administration.

Apart from studying the programs and behavior of specific organizations, it is difficult to assess normative orientations of civil society actors. But, as an indicator of the liberal commitment of civil society actors, we can examine the degree to which citizens possess a normative commitment to democracy. Public opinion surveys often solicit the view whether democracy is a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ way to run the country. These trends based on the World Values Survey data are shown for the four clusters of post-communist societies in Figure 8.3. The normative commitment to democracy is evidently weak among the post-Soviet states, while it stands almost as high in South Eastern Europe as is the case in Southern and Western Europe. Central Europe, meanwhile, fits somewhere in-between the two. In terms of change over time, affective support for democracy has consolidated in the post-Soviet countries (from a very low starting point), and experienced a sharp decline only in Central Asia.

Post-communist civil societies also fare well with regard to the extent to which they are normative rather than clientelist in function. As one indicator which may detect the extent to which civic movements serve to advance the interest of citizens, rather than their own private interests, we can take the degree of trust that survey respondents express as having in the civil society organizations of their country. In East-Central Europe and post-Soviet Europe, public trust in the civic sector is comparable to that found in Southern and Western Europe; only in the Balkans and Central Asia, does this confidence lag behind, possibly reflecting the greater degree of clientelism and cooptation in these cases. Also charted is the trend over time in trust in civil society organizations since 1990. These trends clearly suggest that the transition from single party rule to pluralism has seen a consolidation of public trust in the civic sector, for public trust in NGOs has grown across all post-communist societies since 1990.

Figure 8.3  Trust in civil society organizations.

Notes

Source of attitudinal items is the World Values Surveys, waves 2–5 (1990–2005).

A further indicator of civic consolidation is the left–right placement of respondents. Since Bell (1960) it has been argued that ideological differences narrow as countries develop economically,[45] and that this has occurred in Western democracies in particular.[46] However, in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, the concern has often been expressed that far from converging on the median, ideological divisions have widened, with the growing popularity in particular of populist and radical right parties.[47] It can be seen, according to World Values Survey (1990–1992 and 2005–2005), that while levels of ideological polarization in Western Europe have remained low and stable, in this sample of Eastern European countries radicalization has somewhat increased. However, it is also notable that the overall level remains low, both as an overall proportion of the population, and also by broader international comparison. While 6.6 percent of Eastern Europeans in this country sample positioned themselves as radical right (‘10’ on a ten-point left to right scale), the equivalent figures are 13 percent in India, 19 percent in Indonesia, and 25 percent in Colombia. The thesis regarding the ‘radicalization’ of eastern European politics must therefore be kept in perspective.

Table 8.1  Ideological polarization among survey respondents, 1990–1992 and 2005–2007

Year

Extreme Left

Center

Extreme Right

France

1990

5.1

93.2

1.8

2005

9.1

88.1

2.8

Italy

1990

8.5

88.8

2.8

2005

4.9

91.9

3.2

Netherlands

1990

2.5

95.0

2.5

2005

2.7

95.2

2.1

Sweden

1990

1.2

94.8

4.1

2005

2.7

94.1

3.2

Great Britain

1990

3.1

93.5

3.4

2005

3.8

93.8

2.5

West Germany

1990

0.9

97.5

1.7

2005

3.1

95.6

1.3

Western Europe Average

1990

3.5

93.8

2.7

2005

4.4

93.1

2.5

Poland

1990

3.6

88.6

7.9

2005

4.5

85.7

9.9

Romania

1990

1.7

95.6

2.8

2005

6.0

85.4

8.6

Slovenia

1990

2.5

94.9

2.6

2005

6.8

86.8

6.4

East Germany

1990

2.2

96.2

1.6

2005

6.5

92.2

1.4

Eastern Europe Average

1990

2.5

93.8

3.7

2005

5.9

87.5

6.6

Sources: World Values Surveys, waves 2 (1990–1992) and 5 (2005–2007).

Finally, a further indicator of civic engagement is the degree of public interest in politics, as this contributes to the development of programmatic politics, as well as the monitoring and accountability functions of civil society organizations. Such interest is high across the post-communist space, notably in Central Europe and the Baltic states, where a higher proportion of the public claim to be interested in politics than in Western Europe. However, even post-Soviet European, Central Asian, and Southeast European societies express a greater degree of public interest in politics than in the post-authoritarian societies of Southern Europe.

III Conclusions: civil societies in post-communist Europe

Since 1989 civil societies in formerly communist countries have experienced contrasting developments that after two decades have produced a wide range of outcomes. The standard argument about the weakness of post-communist civil society is not based on uniform empirical evidence. If we conceive of civil society as a multidimensional phenomenon, then we need to be more careful in making cross-national comparisons. The outcomes of political transformations generated the most profound differences in the nature of contemporary civil societies across Central and Eastern Europe. On the one hand, the return of authoritarianism in parts of the former Soviet bloc stifled emerging civic pluralism, slowed down civil society transformation and preserved organizational structures inherited from the communist regime. On the other hand, consolidation of democracy and membership in the European Union have produced diversified, dense and active civil societies that are not much different from their West European counterparts. Our analysis also shows that civil society transformations cannot be linked exclusively to post-1989 political developments. Legacies of communist rule in the sphere of associational life and deeper historical traditions seem to be very important in accounting for differences among countries that emerged from decades of communist rule.

The civil society literature suggests a range of mechanisms linking aspects of social and civic life to democratic transition and consolidation, and thus various aspects of civil society that we ought to measure. Pluralist theories of democracy, for example, following in the tradition of Robert Dahl (1961), stress the representative role of civil society groups and organizations in setting the agenda of democratic politics, thereby ensuring outcomes that reflect a sufficiently wide spectrum of public opinion.[48] This view suggests the density of civic organizations, and in particular membership of organizations such as labor unions, business groups, or groups that represent salient social issues, competition among organizations and normative pluralism as an indicators of the health of civic life. On the other hand, a tradition in political culture dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville, more recently expounded by Robert Putnam, sees civic organizations as mechanisms of democratic socialization – ‘schools of democracy’ – where citizens are socialized into the norms of democratic life such as debate, negotiation, and compromise. From such a perspective, it makes sense to adopt a more inclusive definition of civil society and to track membership in more apolitical local voluntary groups, and participation in communal activities. Alternatively, a third tradition in behavioral political science sees the role of civil society organizations as a means of holding politicians to account through acts of direct contestation, for example, organizing mass demonstrations when politicians renege on campaign promises, are exposed in corruption scandals, or violate constitutional norms. If this is how civil society affects political outcomes, then we ought to measure the propensity of citizens to engage in ‘contentious’ activities, such as protest, going on strike, or mobilizing through petitions and boycotts, rather than more passive acts of civic association, which may not have the same effect upon institutional accountability. Finally, there is the view associated with Jürgen Habermas, that a constitutive part of vibrant civil society is a ‘public sphere’, a forum in which diverse public opinions can engage one another, and an overlapping consensus emerge regarding the best policy options. Such a mechanism leads us to focus on legal guarantees ensuring equal access to the public domain as well as on civic participation in the media, both as readers and as contributors to the public debate, for example by writing letters to newspapers, running Internet blogs, or attending local town meetings, as well as the legal guaranties that allow public communication to flourish.

If we pursue a multidimensional strategy for analyzing the constitution of civil society and civic behavior – that is, by measuring organization and behavior of civil society actors along a range of different dimensions and using a range of different sources rather than by a single concept or instrument – the picture of post-communist civil society becomes more complex and more interesting. First of all, there are striking sub-regional divisions on a variety of measures, including the quality of public space, density of organization and behavior of civil society actors. Second, it becomes evident as to the extent to which prior studies of civil society have tended to be narrowly focused on just one dimension of civic life – typically membership in a voluntary organization – and on a limited set of data sources, typically, public opinion surveys. Third, we are forced to abandon any simplistic generalizations regarding the ‘weakness of post-communist’ civil society or its ‘demobilization’ following democratic transition, as many individual indicators tell a contrary story.

Though the collapse of communism may seem a relatively recent event, it is the same distance behind us as was the collapse of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy when Almond and Verba published The Civic Culture in 1963. Today, as then, we are faced with the same paradox: how to explain the relative durability of democratic consolidation in the face of apparently weak participation in civic associations? We suggest that, just as Almond and Verba distinguished different dimensions of civic orientation, scholars should take into account different dimensions of civil society. Post-1989 civil societies are not as feeble as is often assumed, many possess vigorous public spheres and active associational life with civil society actors influencing policy outcomes on local and national levels. Moreover, we find little evidence of degeneration over time, as the decline of older organizational forms is balanced by the arrival of new organizations and expanding ties to international civil society. This is by no means the uniform condition of post-communist civil societies. In many countries where initial democratic gains were lost the transformation of the associational sphere has been blocked or even reversed. Emerging civil society actors have been constrained, marginalized and repressed by new authoritarian rulers.

Notes

1  R. Rose, ‘What Does Social Capital Add to Individual Welfare? An Empirical Analysis in Russia’, SCI Working Paper no. 15. Washington, DC: World Bank, 1999; R. Rose, W. Mishler and C. Haerpfer, ‘Getting Real: Social Capital in Post-Communist Societies’, Conference on the Erosion of Confidence in Advanced Democracies. Brussels, 7–9 November 1996.

2  M. Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; B. Michael and E. Karakoc, ‘Civil Society and Legacies of Dictatorship’, World Politics 59, July 2007, pp. 539–567.

3  B. Lomax, ‘The Strange Death of Civil Society in Post-Communist Hungary’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 13, 1997, pp. 41–63; J. Ely, ‘Libertarian Ecology and Civil Society’, Society and Nature 2, Fall 1994, p. 3.

4  S. Ramet. The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989, University Park: Penn State Press, 1999; M. Minkenberg, ‘The Radical Right in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Observations and Interpretations’, East European Politics and Societies 16, (2), 2002, pp. 335–362; P. Kopecky and C. Mudde Uncivil Society: Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, London: Routledge, 2003; J. Rupnik, ‘From Democratic Fatigue to Populist Backlash’, Journal of Democracy 18, October 2007, pp. 17–25.

5  A. Jawlowska and J. Kubik ‘Dyskusja redakcyjma “Societas Communitas”. Rozmowa o aktualnym stanie i perspektywach rozwoju aktywnosci zbiorowej w Polsce’, Societas/Communitas 2 (4), 2007 and Societas/Communitas 1 (5), 2008; Civil Society Forum Bratislava 2009, online, available at: http://csf.ceetrust.org.

6  J. Wedel, ‘US Aid to Central and Eastern Europe, 1990–1994: An Analysis of Aid Model and Responses, East-Central European Economies in Transition: Study papers submitted to Joint Economic Committee’, Congress of the United States, Washington, US Printing Office, 1994, p. 323.

7  R. Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: A Letter Intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw, New York: Random House, 1990.

8  See for example A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Library of America, 2004; G. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture, Boston: Little Brown and Co, 1963; P. Paxton, ‘Social Capital and Democracy: An Interdependent Relationship’, American Sociological Review 67, 2002, pp. 254–277; E. Shils, ‘The Virtue of Civil Society’, Government and Opposition 26, 1991, pp. 3–20; L. Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1999, pp. 218–260; N.L. Rosenblum and R.C. Post., in: N. Rosenblum and R. Post, eds, Civil Society and Government, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 1–25; M. Alagappa, ed., Civil Society and Political Change in Asia: Expanding and Contracting Democratic Space, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004; S. Berman, ‘Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic’, World Politics 49, April 1997, pp. 401–429; P.C. Schmitter, ‘Civil Society East and West’, in: L. Diamond, M.F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu and Hung-mao Tien, eds, Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp. 239–262; N. Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

9  B. Lomax, ‘The Strange Death of Civil Society in Post-Communist Hungary’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 13 (1), 1997, pp. 41–63; J. Ely, ‘Libertarian Ecology and Civil Society’; J. Staniszkis, Post-communism: Emerging Enigma, Warsaw: IPS 1999; M. Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe.

10  M. Bernhard, ‘Civil Society after the First Transition’, Communist and Postcommunist Studies 29 (3), 1996, pp. 309–330.

11  A. Giza-Poleszczuk, ‘Third Sector, Public Institutions and Home-made Civil Society’, paper presented at the conference Poland after 20 Years of Freedom, Warsaw University, Institute of Sociology, 22–24 May 2009.

12  G. Ekiert, J. Kubik and M.A. Vachudova, ‘Democracy in Postcommunist World: An Unending Quest’, East European Politics and Societies 21 (1), 2007, pp. 1–24.

13  E. Hankiss, ‘Demobilization, Self-Mobilization and Quasi-Mobilization in Hungary, 1948–1987’, East European Politics and Societies 3 (1), 1989, pp. 105–151.

14  E. Les, Dzialalnosc dobroczynna w Europie in Ameryce. Tradycje i wspolczesnosc, Centrum Informacji dla Organizacji Pozarządowych BORDO: Warszawa, 2004.

15  P. Selznik, The Organizational Weapons: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics, New York: McGrew-Hill, 1952.

16  T. Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

17  J. Kurczewska, ‘Tradycje w przestrzeni lokalnego spoleczestwa obywatelskiego’, in: Piotr Gliski, Barbara Lewenstein and Andrzej Siciski, eds, Samoorganizacja Spo?eczenstwa Polskiego, IFIS PAN, pp. 302–332; A. Gasior-Niemiec and P. Glinski, ‘Polish Tradition of Self-organization, Social Capital and the Challenge of Europeanisation’, Review of Soc. Polit. 14 (1), pp. 255–256.

18  R.L. Tokes, ed., Opposition in Eastern Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; V. Havel, The Power of the Powerless. Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, Armonk: Sharpe, 1985; G.H. Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988; T. Judt, ‘The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-Central Europe’, East European Politics and Societies 2 (2), 1988, pp. 185–240; G. Ekiert, ‘Democratization Processes in East Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration’, British Journal of Political Science 21 (3), 1991, pp. 285–313; M. Buchowski, ‘The Shifting Meaning of Civil and Civic Society in Poland’, in: C. Hann and E. Dunn, eds, Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 77–96; E. Sielawa-Kolbowska, ‘Niezaleze inicjatywy spoleczne w Polsce konca lat osiemdziesiatych’, in: P. Glinski and B. Lewenstein, eds, Somoorganizacja spoleczenstwa polskiego: Trzeci Sector, Warsaw: Warszawa IFiS PAN, 2002, pp. 80–92.

19  A. Arato, ‘Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980–81’, Telos 47, pp. 23–47; J. Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State, London: Verso, 1988.

20  E. Grzegorz and J. Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999; J. Kubik, ‘Between the State and Networks of “Cousins”: The Role of Society and Noncivil Associations in the Democratization of Poland’, in: N. Bermeo and P. Nord, eds, Civil Society before Democracy, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 181–207.

21  J. Pehe, ‘Annotated Survey of Independent Movements in Eastern Europe’, Radio Free Europe, Background Report/100, Munich, 13 June 1989.

22  L. Bruszt, N. Campos, J. Fidrmuc, and G. Ronald, ‘Does Civil Society Development under Communism (1985–1991) Help Explain Political and Economic Performance during Transition?’, manuscript, April 2007.

23  G. O’Donnell, P.C. Schmitter and L. Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

24  OECD, ‘The Emergence of Business Associations and Chambers in the Economies in Transition: Examples from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic’, Paris, 1994; H. Anheier and W. Seibel, ‘The Nonprofit Sector and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Analysis of East Germany, Poland and Hungary’, in: W. Powell and E. Clemens, eds, Private Action and the Public Good, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 177–192; E. Kuti, ‘Different East European Countries at Different Crossroads’ 10 (1), 1999, pp. 51–60; Z. Mansfeldova, ‘Civil Society in Transition: Civic Engagement and Nonprofit Organizations in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989’, in: A. Zimmer and E. Priller, eds, Future of Civil Society. Making Central European Nonprofit-Organizations Work, Wisbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004, pp. 99–121; S. Nalecz and J. Bartkowski, ‘Is there Organizational Base for Civil Society in Central Eastern Europe?’, in: S. Eliaeson, ed., Building Democracy and Civil Society East of the Elba, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 163–195.

25  K.W. Simone, ‘Tax Laws and Tax Preferences’, in: A. Zimmer and E. Priller, eds, Future of Civil Society. Making Central European Nonprofit-Organizations Work, Wisbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 147–168.

26  G. Ekiert and J. Kubik, ‘Contentious Politics in New Democracies’, World Politics 50 (4), 1998, pp. 547–581.

27  D. Stark, ‘Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism’, American Journal of Sociology 101 (4), 1996, pp. 993–1027.

28  M.S. Fish, ‘Russia’s Fourth Transition’, Journal of Democracy 5 (3), 1994, pp. 31–42; M. McFaul, ed., Special issue of Demokratizatsiya 10 (2), 2002.

29  A. Neier and L. Benardo, ‘Russia: The Prosecution of Civil Society’, New York Review of Books, 27 April 2006.

30  H. Anheier and W. Seibel, ‘The Nonprofit Sector and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Analysis of East Germany, Poland and Hungary’.

31  A. Zimmer and E. Priller, eds, Future of Civil Society. Making Central European Nonprofit-Organizations Work, Wisbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004; K. Hadzi-Miceva, ‘Prawne i instytucjonalne mechanizmy wspólpracy organizacji pozarzadowych i administracji pañstwowej w Chorwacji, w Estonii i na Wêgrzech’, in: M. Rymsza, ed., Organizacje pozarzadowe, dialog obywatelski, polityka panstwa, Warsaw: ISP, 2007, pp. 21–62; M. Rymsza, ‘State Policy towards the Civic Sector in Poland in Years 1989–2007’, Trzeci Sector, Special edition 2008, pp. 53–62.

32  S.P. Osborne, ed., The Third Sector in Europe, London, Routledge, 2008.

33  D. Gawin, ‘European Civil Society – the Citizens’ or Eurocrats’ Project?’, in: D. Gawin and P. Glinski, eds, Civil Society in the Making, Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 2006, pp. 77–88.

34  R. Kozlicka, ‘Unia Europejska wobec organizacji pozarzadowych: konsekwencje dla trzeciego sectora w Polsce, in: P. Glinski, B. Lewenstein, and A. Sicinski, eds, Samoorganizacja Spoleczenstwa Polskiego: III sector i wspolnoty lokalne w jednoczacej sie Europie, Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2004. pp. 41–56.

35  A. Gasior-Niemiec and P. Glinski, ‘Polish Tradition of Self-organization, Social Capital and the Challenge of Europeanisation’, p. 246.

36  M. Gumowska, J. Herbst and P. Radecki Podstawowe fakty o organizacjach pozarzadowych. Raport z Badan 2008, Stowarzyszenie Klon/Jawor, 2009, pp. 11–12.

37  T. Randma-Liiv, D. Liiv and U. Lepp, ‘Institutionalizing Relations between Government and the Third Sector’, in: S.P. Osborn, ed., The Third Sector in Europe, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 258; Z. Mansfeldova et al., ‘Civil Society in Transition: Civic Engagement and Nonprofit Organizations in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989’.

38  J. Visser, ‘Union Membership Statistics in 24 Countries”, Monthly Labor Review 129 (1), 2006.

39  G. Ekiert and J. Kubik, ‘Contentious Politics in New Democracies’.

40  V.J. Bunce and S.L. Wolchik, ‘International Diffusion and Postcommunist Electoral Revolutions’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 39 (3), 2006, pp. 283–304; P. D’Anieri, ‘Explaining the Success and Failure of Post-Communist Revolutions’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, September 2006, pp. 331–350; H. Hale, ‘Democracy or Autocracy on the March? The Colored Revolutions as Normal Dynamics of Patronal Presidentialism’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, September 2006, pp. 305–329; T. Kuzio, ‘Civil Society, Youth and Societal Mobilization in Democratic Revolutions’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, September 2006, pp. 365–386.

41  S. Nalecz and J. Bartkowski, ‘Is there Organizational Base for Civil Society in Central Eastern Europe?’

42  CBOS, Raport: Dzialalnosc spoleczna Polakow, Warszawa (styczen), 2010; CBOS, Raport: Dobroczynnosc w Polsce, Warszawa (luty), 2010; CBOS, Raport: Aktywnosc Polakow w organizacjach obywatelskich 19989–2010, Warszawa (luty), 2010.

43  K. Gaskin and J.D. Smith, A New Civic Europe? Third edition. London: The Volunteer Centre, 1997.

44  S. Berman, ‘Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic’.

45  D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960.

46  R. Dalton, ‘Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization’, Japanese Journal of Political Science 7 (1), 2006, pp. 1–22.

47  S. Ramet. The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989; M. Minkenberg, ‘The Radical Right in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Observations and Interpretations’; P. Kopecky and C. Mudde Uncivil Society: Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Eastern Europe; J. Rupnik, ‘From Democratic Fatigue to Populist Backlash’, Journal of Democracy 18, October 2007, pp. 17–25.

48  R. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

9  ‘Tropical democracy’

Richard Banégas

In February 2010, a few months after the global festivities commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Benin discreetly celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the National Conference of Dynamic Forces that led the country on to the path of a peaceful transition toward pluralism. In 2010, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the French-speaking countries of Africa, Benin, the old ‘Latin Quarter’ of French West Africa, seems to represent one of the exceptions that proves the rule that West Africa is an area disinclined to democratic change and undermined by political crises. For most observers of the African continent, the matter has long been settled. The transplantation of ‘democratic modernity’ has generally been a failure, expressed, at best, by a reproduction of the ‘bad governance’ of the corrupt postcolonial states and, at worst, in an increase in tensions, disintegrating the social fabric and leading to violence, if not to real war. Côte d’Ivoire is said to be the classic case of a crisis of citizenship generated by opening the Pandora’s Box of pluralism.[1] The majority of funders, weary of seeing the democratic conditions on which they insist hijacked by regimes creating an illusory democratic ‘front’, seem to have found refuge in a minimal appeal to ‘good governance’ and ‘participatory strategies’ to combat poverty.

In the strategic context of the 2000s, with its new ‘scramble for Africa’, in which Western and Asian countries are engaged in new power rivalries over the continent’s energy resources, the democratic imperative has yielded to other considerations relating to the containment of ‘global threats’ (immigration, terrorism) or post-conflict reconstruction. We are seeing the re-emergence, even in certain official statements, of hackneyed culturalist judgements that seem to consign Africa to a ‘darkness’ resistant to democratic modernity.[2] It may be useful, then, in this brief contribution, to reflect back on some of the discussed ideas on the ‘acclimatization’ of the institutions of representative democracy in Africa. Beyond the famous question of the ‘overall balance sheet’ of democratization processes (which, as we shall see, is probably much less negative than it seems), the main argument is the hypothesis of a ‘paradoxical domestication’ of the institutions and values of an ‘imported’ democratic modernity.

Democratization in chiaroscuro or the ‘disenchantments of freedom’

Since the early 1990s most of the countries of the sub-region have engaged in processes of ‘democratic transition’, producing results that have been, to say the least, mixed. Some countries, such as Benin, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Nigeria and Niger, have seen peaceful handovers of power through the ballot box and have set out on the path of ‘democratic consolidation’,[3] in return for some ‘growing’ pains, thus proving the solidity of their institutions and the trust of those concerned in the free operation of electoral procedures.

Others, in contrast, have remained resistant to change despite an apparent liberalization of their politics. This is the case of, inter alia, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Togo (to speak only of West Africa), where those in power have, in various ways, conceded illusory reforms and a sham democracy in order to preserve their position, or even to strengthen it. Whether they had to organize a national conference, like General Eyadéma, or merely submit to the ritual of the ballot box (even if it meant openly flouting the electoral results, as Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe), a number of autocrats reviled by opposition movements have succeeded in reclaiming control of the process of political liberalization, or even reversing the process itself, by taking their countries towards an insidious authoritarian restoration.

Lastly, a third group of countries has come through the last ten years stuck in situations of violence and war, thereby forfeiting all prospects of democratization in the short or medium term. Côte d’Ivoire, which has been in crisis since the 1999 coup d’état and the outbreak of rebellion in 2002; Sierra Leone and Liberia, which are attempting to get back on their feet after successful electoral processes; and Guinea-Bissau and Gambia, which have both, since the mid-1990s, been shaken by uprisings and coups d’état, are all among the countries attesting (there are others) to the uneven trajectory of democratization.

Eighteen years after the first national conferences, the transition balance sheet does not seem at all healthy. The corruption of multipartyism and reforms, the serial putsches and authoritarian restorations, the criminalization of the state and the ever more frequent recourse to war to gain power seem to have dashed once and for all the democratic hopes of the early 1990s. With a few rare exceptions, the transition processes have failed or have not brought about the changes expected of them: the renewal of elites has scarcely been seen and political practices have undergone little positive development. In many cases, the old dictators have managed to remain in power or to return through the ballot box or by the force of arms, and when new teams have taken command, they have often reintroduced the predatory behaviour and factional strife of the previous regimes, giving the impression that ‘democratization’ merely means ‘authoritarian decompression’ or ‘cosmetic’ changes masking a continuity of pork-barrel politics.[4]

Many quantitative and comparative analyses of democratization in Africa confirm this impression. But they also reveal a more mixed landscape that attests to genuine advances of pluralism south of the Sahara. If we take, as a first approximation, the number of democratic handovers of power as a criterion for the routinization of pluralist procedures, it is clear that the majority of sub-Saharan African countries (27 out of 48) do not meet it. Looking more closely, however, we can see that between 1999 and 2007 the number of such handovers greatly increased (from 13 to 21), which seems to disconfirm the impression of an ebbing of the pluralist wave from the mid-1990s onwards.[5] Even more significantly, this trend concerns very populous and/or politically influential countries, such as Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and even Kenya, despite the electoral violence of December 2009/January 2010 – though this does not mean we should close our eyes to the outcomes of these ballots, which consisted mostly in a strategy of conservative modernization, enabling the political status quo to be reproduced.

If we adopt the (mean and median) longevity of leaders in power as an indicator of pluralism in the political process, then we find a slow, but constant reduction in the number of years spent by a leader as the head of state and, as a corollary, a quicker rotation of leadership personnel at all levels of the political and administrative hierarchy.[6] Once again, we have to note that this acceleration of the ‘political tontine’ is not necessarily a mark of increasing democratization; it may also express an intensification of factional strife within the old regimes and/or strategies of adaptation to external and internal pressures. If, lastly, we attempt to measure the advance of ‘civil liberties’ and classify regimes in terms of these criteria, we can say that they have generally advanced and take the view, with Larry Diamond, that the number of regimes that can be described as ‘democratic’ is constantly rising. According to Diamond’s typology, the number of ‘liberal democracies’ almost doubled in the 2000s (though the total remains nevertheless very low, the rise being from five to nine between 2001 and 2007). And fewer than half of the regimes (23 out of 48) can still be said to be autocracies (liberalized or unreformed, to keep to his classification).[7] This optimism regarding figures should not, however, delude us; in most of the African societies that have experimented with change, the general sense that prevails is one of a ‘disenchantment with freedom’.[8]

Given this state of affairs, in the face of this desencanto and these mixed results, the question, though brutal, deserves to be put: what has Africa gained from its ‘democratic transitions’? Have the democratization processes produced a radical break in the historical trajectory of the states of the sub-region or are they merely an avatar of the post-colonial passive revolution? The practices of ‘political transhumance’ of politicians and electors, the pretences of pluralism and multi-partyism, the spread of electoral and political corruption, the collusion around ‘structural adjustment’ reforms, and the sociological composition of the national and local elites suggest that, even where processes of democratic consolidation have ‘succeeded’, they have been effected through the reciprocal assimilation of the old and new elites, lending credence to the hypothesis of a reproduction of the postcolonial passive revolution in democratic attire.

The processes of democratization have not made major inroads into the dynamics of the political construction of the African states that were forged through a long history of extraversion (i.e. not only of the exploitation of external ‘rents of dependency’, but also of longstanding insertion into what is today called globalization).[9] On the contrary, thanks in particular to the conditions imposed by international agencies in terms of ‘good governance’, the signing-up of regimes to a process of democratization seems like a new strategy of extraversion, which suggests that ‘market democracy’ – its discourse, practices and symbolic repertoires – is merely a supplementary ‘rent’ in an old relationship based on the exploitation of external resources.

The changing of political cultures: the assertion of the principle of democratic legitimacy

This impression of continuity could well be an optical illusion. The empirical studies conducted in Benin, Senegal, Ghana, Mali and elsewhere[10] show, in fact, that this ‘change within continuity’ does not amount to a ‘para-democratic retread of “transformism”’,[11] as J.-F. Bayart has argued. Beneath the apparent stability of the hegemonic structures, the configuration of African public spaces has, in fact, been deeply disrupted by the dual movement of political and economic liberalization and, correlatively with these changes in public space, decisive shifts have occurred in political imaginaries – shifts that show themselves in relations between governors and governed and attest, in our view, to a significant evolution of the foundations of governmentality.

To grasp the depth of these transformations beneath the apparent stability of elites, we have to change perspective, to view these processes from the standpoint of political imaginaries, and to focus on the development of popular representations of legitimate power underlying the liberalization of public spaces. When we do this, it is possible to see, beneath the still waters of the passive democratic revolution, decisive mutations in what John Lonsdale calls the ‘internal architecture of civic virtue’.[12] The liberalization of public speech, the establishment of new institutions and, most importantly, popular ownership of the institution of competitive voting have effectively contributed to an appreciable transformation of the conceptions of legitimacy of many West African citizens, both in urban and rural environments.

Studies on the politicization of the popular strata in the Third French Republic (1870–1940) have shown that the introduction of universal suffrage shaped the electorate in a profound way, leading to a progressive ‘intimization’ of opinion and an increasing degree of electoral ‘disciplining’. Even though the situations in Mali, Guinea, Togo, Benin and Nigeria are very different in nature, for the last ten years or so West African citizens have experienced an engagement in the electoral process that they now take seriously, though they do so to very varying degrees. Studies carried out on this subject show, in fact, that the domestication of electoral institutions in Benin, Senegal and Mali has led to appreciable readjustments of political behaviour[13] that has manifested itself, in particular, through: the gradual establishment of an ‘economy of patience’ (Albert O. Hirschman) in line with the temporal rhythms of electoral democracy (in accordance with the rules and procedures of the Rechtsstaat), in a gradual espousal of non-violent habits of conduct, and in the development of new attitudes that express themselves in an increasing conformity with the rules of electoral civility.

Admittedly, the development of this ‘civic culture’ is not tangible everywhere and, where it is observed, it is a work in progress that is neither linear nor unambiguous. On the contrary, in many cases, these new representations of legitimate power fit – in a complex and sometimes paradoxical way – with a moral economy structured by values and languages that have, on the face of it, few elective affinities with democracy: particularly ‘pork-barrel politics’ and electoral clientelism.[14] And yet, though they are eminently ambivalent, the shifts occurring in ‘political imaginaries’ are not negligible, insofar as they contribute essentially to foregrounding the notion of accountability, which carries within it the seeds of an appreciable change in the relations between governors and governed.

The democratic passive revolution

We have to gauge the extent of these changes associated with the recasting of the local and national public spaces since it constitutes, in our view, a central parameter of the development of African states. As has been said, it seems at first sight that the transition processes have barely changed the situation in the power relations between the various competing social groups. In a majority of countries, social revolution has not taken place and there has been little renewal of national elites. At times new elites have emerged without, however, managing to dethrone the former ruling classes, which have managed to adapt to the new rules and preserve their dominant positions. In Benin, for example, the local elite that had emerged under the revolutionary regime managed, more or less, to retain (or take back) a large part of power, at the cost of alliances with its former enemies or with actors emerging in the new pluralist public space.

Yet the ‘Democratic Renewal’ in Africa seems to have nevertheless heralded a radical change in balance of force: social groups persecuted under the revolution for their religious convictions or economic activities (the ‘corrupt traders’ or ‘feudal elements’, for example) acquired a new public visibility; the peasants, grasping the opportunity of devaluation and, particularly, of the privatization of the agricultural credit funds, took their revenge on the local civil servants and the ‘educated’, who were on top in the old structures and had, allegedly, ‘robbed the peasants of their money’. The (literacy-related) eligibility criteria for voting in the first local ballots also promoted the rise of young educated people – school drop-outs or unemployed high-school graduates who went back to their villages – who acquired significant positions of power at the expense of those who were formerly dominant. Within the production cooperatives and the village councils, the évolués (literally, the ‘evolved’ or ‘advanced’ members of the community) thus regained a majority and the educated young were able to turn the first pluralist elections to their advantage. They had to compromise, however, with the administrative and peasant elites, who were the products of the revolutionary regime and were able in many cases to retain their positions, and with the ‘neo-traditional’ authorities, who spared no effort to reposition themselves in a new public space.

Democratization has not, then, overturned the structure of the ‘hegemonic bloc’, but it has been accompanied by a reconfiguration of the process of the reciprocal assimilation of elites and a subtle redefinition of the lines of overlap between these sedimented strata. In Benin, Mali, Ghana and elsewhere, new actors have made their voices heard (particularly, young people who are now ‘standing up as men’), while others have regained an influence that had eroded under the ‘revolutionary’ regimes (among others, the ‘evolved’ and the customary authorities). ‘Itineraries of accumulation’ and of political ascension have become diversified, with decentralization and the rise of new agencies of local power. Opportunities for ‘straddling’ and for enrichment have greatly increased with political and economic liberalization, bringing with them a renegotiation of social alliances and greater complexity in the political field. In other words, we find that in most of the countries, the formation of a pluralist public space has given rise to a complex situation comprising an accumulation of instances of power and of more or less stable compromises between old and new elites.

Where the impact of democratization is concerned, a key question arises as to whether there is a greater emergence of new elites in cases where change came through the ballot box or in cases where it came by force of arms. It seems, at first sight, that there is a statistically greater renewal of elites in those countries where governments have been overthrown by force of arms. In Burkina Faso, for example, the Sankarist revolution of the 1980s gave rise to a thoroughgoing renewal of the elite, with young radical soldiers and civilians supplanting – in part, at least – the social categories that came out of the independence movement. The same goes for Gambia, Liberia or Sierra Leone. Conversely, in the countries where power changed hands peacefully through the ballot box, changes in the elites seem less tangible. In Cape Verde the democratic handover brought a younger generation to power, but did not, strictly speaking, produce a new elite, as those currently in positions of responsibility herald mostly from the ranks of the PAICV (the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde), the former single party. Similarly, in Benin, as has been said, democratization does not seem to have generated new elites, as is attested by the longevity of the ‘chameleon’ Matthieu Kérékou as the head of state. The politicians of Benin, skilled in the arts of ‘political transhumance’, have managed, like their colleagues in the sub-region, to adapt to the pluralist context and to skilfully convert their political resources. This impression of stability on the part of the elites is, however, deceptive, since the processes of democratization have also produced upheavals in the sociological composition of the elite, and sometimes even social revolutions. Less spectacularly – and certainly less peacefully – ‘democratization’ processes also caused hegemonies to be overturned elsewhere, as in the Central African Republic, where the ‘people of the savannah’, led by Ange Félix Patassé, dethroned the ‘river people’ who traditionally held power, and in Niger, where the democratic election of President Mahamane Ousmane overturned Zarma hegemony and brought Hausa elites to power.

We should note, in addition, that the democratic transitions have had non-negligible effects on the structure of the local elites. While in many countries power relations at local or village level have been reconfigured by the emergence of influential new actors (unemployed young people with educational qualifications returning to their villages, groups of growers, etc.), and the sometimes spectacular reactivation of customary authorities (Benin, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, etc.), this return of the traditional elites to centre stage varies, however, from one country to another and depends on historical trajectories. Conversely, many coups d’état did not appreciably modify the structure of the elite, as in Chad or Nigeria, where successive putsches merely reinforced the power of the northern groups. It seems established, then, that the renewal of national elites is not directly a function of the mode of political change. As a general trend, however, such a renewal seems to be more significant in those countries where power was conquered by force of arms and not following a democratization process.

The studies carried out on the question of democratization show that the reforms undertaken throughout Africa have produced a new distribution of power among the various actors. There has, however, been no substitution of one instance of power for another, but rather a ‘stacking up’ of different regulatory authorities, with new institutions ‘straddling’ old ones. In other words, the political transitions take place, particularly in the local arenas, by way of sedimentation between strata of power accumulated at various times, leading to ‘multi-headed’ village public spaces.[15] These are complex, multi-layered structures, pregnant with conflict, but also favourable to what anthropologists call ‘institution shopping’ and to infinite arrangements in the management of disagreements. A structural political fluidity ensues, which reveals itself in a permanent negotiation over prerogatives. This trend, which is very clearly seen in the area of power over land,[16] is another basic characteristic to be taken into account in the analysis of the processes of political and economic liberalization.

The paradoxes of the transplantation of pluralism

We can see, then, that ‘democratization’ in Africa is the product of paradoxical effects. Far from following the well-signposted paths of ‘good governance’ imposed or recommended by the international funders, the transplantation of pluralism happily takes unofficial ‘off-the-beaten-path’ routes that may at first seem far removed from the ‘ideal type’ of representative democracy, but nonetheless produce democratization. Let us take, for example, the case of ‘political cultures’ mentioned above. Against the classical argument that posits the existence of ‘civic virtues’ as a precondition for democratization, and sees the rates of illiteracy in Africa as an insuperable hindrance to pluralism, many studies have shown, to the contrary, that the routinization of the procedures of representative democracy produced its own values and led to tangible changes in the representations of legitimate power. More than this, it has also been possible to prove that these ‘civic virtues’ could also develop in the framework of an imaginary conception of political relations, which, on the face of it, had nothing democratic about it. This is the case, for example, with the idioms of ‘tradition’, ‘kinship’ or ‘the powers of the invisible’, which, in some cases, may serve as a register for the enunciation of political modernity.[17] We may cite many other modalities of the paradoxical invention of democratic modernity. Thus, in many countries, the liberalization of public spaces and the extension of political participation have at times led to a narrowing of the field of representation, to the detriment of the most marginal groups, and to an increased confiscation of public discourse by the literate elites.

In Africa, as in other regions of the world, we see that democratization often goes hand in hand with a reassertion of inequalities and relations of authority in a context of ‘re-traditionalization’ of the social and political order. In the countries of the Sahel, Guinea and Mauritania, for example, we thus find that political liberalization has paradoxically seen a worsening of the situation of downtrodden groups at the same time as offering them the means to make their voices heard.[18] Paradoxically once again, case studies seem to suggest that, in the phases of democratization, liberalization expresses itself in a contradictory movement of the expansion of the political arena and the ‘privatization’ of public space, with meetings and discussions shifting symbolically from the premises of the local administrations to the personal residences of ‘notables’. Since the same phenomenon is observable in several countries, we may wonder whether there is not, at the local level, a close correlation between degrees of democratic openness and the privatization of the political space. The hypothesis gains even more credence from the abandonment of public meetings (which were more or less obligatory in the days of the single parties) and the fact that the collective mobilization of citizens occurs both on a reduced scale (that of the cooperative, the credit group, the NGO of women palm oil producers, etc.) as well as around more specific and often ‘private’ issues. Against the Hirsch-manian image of an inverse relation between ‘private happiness’ and ‘public action’,[19] should we not posit that learning to speak as a citizen, and the ‘formation’ of a civic space, both occur chiefly through individuals ‘falling back’ on their private interests and affirming their primary allegiance to the ‘domestic’ sphere or the small group, in a context of the assertion of autochthony? This trend, which converges with a similar trend in the industrialized countries, seems important to us for the future of the continent. It probably indicates that the societies of sub-Saharan Africa are engaged, like other societies, in processes of individualization that fit in with the historical dynamics of modernity and globalization[20] – the paradox, or ruse of History being that it is in the name of liberalism that ‘structural adjustment’ and its twenty-first-century surrogates are giving birth to Africa’s social classes and new elites.[21]

However this may be, this brief contribution had no other intention than to propose another angle of reflection on the complex processes of the acclimatization of pluralist institutions in contexts – those of post-colonial African societies – that are too often perceived as ill-adapted to representative democracy. Too often, in fact, the debate on democratization processes in sub-Saharan Africa is locked into a sterile alternative between the assumptions of developmentalism and culturalist aporias. The former contends that Africa, at worst, is not yet ready for democracy and, at best, that it can aspire to democracy on condition that it emerges from its ‘darkness’ by adopting, for example, the panoply of ‘good governance’ measures. The latter, meanwhile, stresses at times the existence of a deliberative ‘tradition’ favourable to the emergence of a ‘Palaver Democracy’ and, at others, the depressing absence of elective affinities between the continent’s cultural patterns and the universalist values of market democracy. To gauge what is really going on today with the liberalization of African public spaces, we have definitively to move beyond this double aporia and recognize, once and for all, that contemporary African societies are also experiencing a process – chequered but real – of assertion of the citizen-individual.

Notes

1  Special issues ‘Côte d’Ivoire, la tentation ethnonationaliste’, Politique africaine 78, June 2000; ‘La Côte d’Ivoire en guerre: dynamiques du dedans et du dehors’, Politique africaine 89, March 2003.

2  J.-P. Chrétien (ed.), L’Afrique de Sarkozy: Un déni d’histoire, Paris: Karthala, 2008.

3  This question of ‘democratic consolidation’ has been debated on many occasions. It would take too long to list all the relevant references here. See J.J. Linz and A. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-communist Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. See also the critical perspective provided by N. Ghuilhot and P.C. Schmitter, ‘De la transition à la consolidation: Une lecture rétrospective des democratization studies’, Revue Française de Science Politique 50, August–October 2000, pp. 615–632.

4  See J.-F. Bayart, L’Etat en Afrique: La politique du ventre, Paris: Fayard, 2006 [1989].

5  The 2000s also saw a radical fall in the number of countries in which pluralist elections had not been tried (only three remained in 2007: Eritrea, Somalia and Swaziland).

6  Ibid., p. 31.

7  L.J. Diamond, ‘Thinking about Hybrid Regimes’, Journal of Democracy 13, April 2002. Here again we use the information updated by J.-F. Desgroseillers, op. cit.

8  To quote, in a different context, the title of a book by G. Hermet, Les Désenchantements de la liberté: La sortie des dictatures dans les années 1990, Paris: Fayard, 1993.

9  See J.-F. Bayart, ‘L’Afrique dans le monde: “L’Afrique dans le monde: une histoire d’extraversion”’, Critique internationale 5, Autumn 1999, pp. 97–120.

10  See, for example, R. Banégas, La démocratie à pas de caméléon. Démocratisation et imaginaires politiques au Bénin, Paris: Karthala, 2003.

11  J.-F. Bayart, ‘L’Historicité de l’État importé’ in J.-F. Bayart, ed., La Greffe de l’État, Paris: Karthala, 1996, p. 29.

12  J. Lonsdale, ‘The Moral Economy of Mau-Mau: Wealth, Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought’, in B. Berman, J. Lonsdale (eds), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, London: James Currey, 1992, p. 330.

13  See M. Gazibo, Les paradoxes de la démocratisation en Afrique, Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2005; P. Quantin (ed.), Voter en Afrique, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004.

14  See R. Banégas, ‘Marchandisation du vote, citoyenneté et consolidation démocratique au Bénin’, Politique Africaine 69, March 1998, pp. 75–88.

15  See, in particular, T. Bierschenk and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan (eds), Les pouvoirs au village, Paris: Karthala, 1997.

16  See, in particular, S. Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa, Chicago: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993; and the works of J.-P. Chauveau on Côte d’Ivoire.

17  See P. Geschiere, Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique: La viande des autres, Paris: Karthala, 1995. Also R. Banégas, La démocratie à pas de caméléon.

18  See R. Botte (ed.), ‘L’Ombre portée de l’esclavage’, Journal des Africanistes 70, 1–2, 2000.

19  See A. Hirschman, Shifting Involvement: Private Interest, Public Action, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.

20  See F. Leimdorfer and A. Marie (eds), L’Afrique des citadins, Paris: Karthala, 2003.

21  See A. Marie, ‘Comment, au nom du libéralisme, l’ajustement structurel accouche l’Afrique de ses classes sociales (le paradigme ivoirien)’, in M. Haubert and P.-P. Rey (eds), Les sociétés civiles face aux marchés, Paris: Karthala, 2000, pp. 263–298.

10  The Arab four seasons

When an excess of religion leads to political secularization

Olivier Roy

1989 and the fall of the Soviet empire did not trigger a democratic movement in the Arab world, for a variety of reasons. First, times were not ripe: political mobilization in the Arab streets used to occur around either pan-Arab or pan-Islamic issues, both embodied by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The fall of the USSR was consequently perceived through its geo-strategic dimension, not in its own political dimension. The disappearance of the only super-power that steadily supported Arab nationalism against the perceived American–Israeli alliance was seen as a blow for the Arab cause. The second reason is that the different opposition movements in most of the Arab countries were not stressing democratization, but were sticking to an ideologically loaded agenda, either pan-Arab or pan-Islamic. In fact there were few actors promoting democratization as such: even the liberal elites were reluctant to endorse a democratization process that could bring Islamists into power.

The Arab Left was already in crisis: leaders and movements it supported in the wake of the decolonization process and the struggles for national liberation had turned into dictators and authoritarian regimes (the different Baath parties in Syria and Iraq, Nasserism in Egypt, the FLN in Algeria). The Left was still attached to pan-Arab nationalism that pushed it to ignore both domestic social issues and the rise of Islamism as the dominant form of opposition. The rise of the Islamist parties happened in close connection with a complex process of re-Islamization of the Arab societies that was both genuine and encouraged by the authoritarian regimes to undermine the influence of the secular nationalist Left.

The religious revival movement also was not promoting democratization. Even apolitical religious schools of thought, like the “Tablighis” (a movement born in colonial India in 1927) and the “Salafis” (a fundamentalist version of Islam close to Saudi Wahhabism) dubbed democracy a Western concept that should not be imported. The Salafis explicitly rejected the creation of political parties, because that would bring division (fitna) among the Muslim community. They discouraged political mobilization against the ruling regimes, in favour of the promotion of purely religious norms and values among individuals and civil society. The stress was on the concept of community, identity and unity, not on diversity, individualization or freedom of speech. Basic elements of democracy (the right to change religion, debating law in parliament, acknowledging the concept of sovereignty of the “people”) were even declared as contrary to the tenets of “true Islam” not only by Salafists but also by many mainstream conservative ulamas or religious scholars. Pluralism was identified with division and weakness. There was a striking parallel between the leftist secular concept of a “people” on the model of the “Volk”, homogeneous, unanimous and whose unity is reflected in the person of a “great leader”, and the Islamist conception of a “faith community”, also homogeneous and united in the practice of its religion and by the implementation of a sacred law, the sharia, which is not to be discussed. The parallel between Arab nationalism and Islamist ideology was expressed by the use by Arab nationalists of religious terms, like “ummah” to designate the whole Arab nation. The Islamist parties (Muslim Brothers, FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), Hamas) were also rejecting any real democracy by promoting a single vanguard party, under a charismatic leader, to implement the “Law of God”, not supposed to be debated in parliament.

But even the liberal pro-Western elites of the Arab societies had misgivings against a process of democratization that could bring the Islamists into power. The small liberal secular elites that existed, confronted with the rise of radical Islam, ended-up supporting, more or less reluctantly, authoritarian regimes seen as the bulwark against radical Islam. The best illustration was Algeria: after a brief “Arab Spring” in 1988, the opposition to the regime was rapidly identified with the FIS, whose agenda was to set-up an Islamic state. When FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991, the regime cancelled the elections and launched a campaign of arrests and repression. Ten years of a bloody low-level civil war ensued. And most of the Algerian liberals, without necessarily supporting the regime, approved the suspension of a democratic process that would have brought radical Islamists to power. The “éradicateurs” as they were called, denied the right of the Islamists to participate in any kind of democratic process, and refused to acknowledge that the army could have made use of the civil war to perpetuate its own power. The chronological parallel is striking here: the very years that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw on the contrary a strengthening of the authoritarian regimes in the Arab World, in the name of the struggle against the “Islamic threat”. Western governments and liberal Arab milieus approved the suspension of a fledging democratic opening in the Arab world, although Western governments supported the democratic process occurring in former communist countries.

This means that the postponement of democratization in the Arab countries was not just a consequence of the lack of indigenous mass democratic movements, but also a consequence of the post-soviet geo-strategic perception by international and local political actors who considered that Islamism had replaced communism as the global threat for Western democracies: think tanks and institutions that were set up to contain communism suddenly found a new job in denouncing the “Islamic Threat”, and considered dictatorship a lesser evil compared to Islamism, in the same way that they supported anti-communist authoritarian regimes in Latin America and South east Asia.

The idea that something could be worse than democracy did not make sense in East Europe and the former Soviet Union (although in retrospect one can wonder whether Chechnya and Turkmenistan, or even Belarus, were not in a better shape at the time of Brezhnev). But it was a key factor in refusing support to any kind of popular movements in the Middle East that could unsettle the existing regimes. In a sense the doctrine of the clash of civilizations that was exposed by Samuel Huntington after the collapse of communism, as a sort of a recasting of a bipolar perception of geo-strategy with new actors, did fulfil its role and played largely as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This explains while, until the G.W. Bush administration after 2001, no global project was launched by the international community, comparable to the Helsinki process, to promote democracy in the Middle East and put pressure on the authoritarian regimes. Democratization of the Middle East was not perceived by Western government as an opportunity, but as a threat. And the fact that few opposition actors in the Arab countries explicitly promoted democracy comforted the West in its prejudices.

Nevertheless the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had a long-term impact on domestic political scenes in the Arab world. Paradoxically, its consequence was to encourage Yasser Arafat to enter into the so-called “Oslo process”, because he realized that the regional balance of power was upset by the fall of the Soviet Union. The subsequent negotiations in Madrid and Oslo contributed to transform the Israeli–Arab conflict into a more limited regional Israeli–Palestinian conflict, depriving the other Arab countries (and hence Arab militants) of their claim to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people. Second, the fall of the Soviet Union weakened dictatorships supported by Moscow (Syria, Iraq): they lost their status of great regional powers (the Gulf War of 1991 for Iraq, while the lost Russian support pushed the Syrian regime to ally closely with Iran, isolating it among the Sunni Arab countries). In short, the fall of the USSR dealt a blow to pan-Arabism as a geo-strategic option. Meanwhile the Islamist movements could no longer present themselves as an alternative between East and West, communism and capitalism, and lost much of their “revolutionary” flavour, a fact that pushed them closer to the Salafis, on a more social and conservative agenda, while endorsing economic liberalism. More or less reluctantly, the Islamists also took notice that they could not find external support and that they would have to engage the West. In this case dual track diplomacy was mostly promoted by private Western actors like the San Egidio community in Roma, who brought the FIS to the negotiating table: the Algerian government and the European governments refused to participate, but the Islamists slowly turned down their anti-Western rhetoric and began a slow shift to the centre. Meanwhile, the excesses of authoritarian regimes in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt alienated a new more liberal generation.

The wave of democratization subsequently did touch the Arab world, because of a succession of mutations (a new more educated and better informed generation, an individualization of political and religious behaviours, a diversification of the religious field, an unintended consequence of the wave of “re-Islamization”). The West did not play a significant role, sticking almost to the end to discredited dictators, but was not in a capacity to intervene.

There are nevertheless some common points between 1989 and the Arab Spring. The system crumbled from inside under the pressure of peaceful demonstrators; there was no coup, no armed insurrection, just people telling a regime that they were fed up, that it was time to go. Second, the upheavals touched different countries belonging to the same political space and culture, and sharing some sense of a common political destiny: communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Arab countries with dictators who were the distant heirs of secular Arab nationalism. Third, the mirror effect played a major role: watching or listening to what was happening in a neighbouring country belonging to the same political space, people just decided to “do the same”. Finally, interestingly enough, although the countries concerned were involved in a close net of strategic alliances and tensions, external players (Soviet Union, United States) were helpless and watched the situation unravelling without any capacity or any will to change the course of the events. It is difficult to speak of an impact of the 1989 events on the Arab Spring: many Arab demonstrators were hardly born then. But clearly 1989 represented a pattern of a peaceful, grassroots and popular upheavals against an apparently strong and relentless regime. 1989 had just shown that “You can do it”.

The Arab Spring had initially nothing specifically “Arab” or “Muslim”. The demonstrators were calling for “dignity”, elections, democracy, good governance and human rights. They insisted on individual citizenship, and not on a holistic entity, like the “people”, the Muslim ummah or the Arab nation, contrary to what the past revolutionary movements had all done during the previous 60 years. The demonstrators did not refer to the specific conflicts of the Middle East, they did not burn US or Israeli flags, they did not chant in favour of the main opposition parties (the Islamists), there were no references to the establishment of an Islamic state or the implementation of Islamic law (sharia), and no charismatic leaders emerged from the crowd, despite the frantic quest by the Western media to find and bestow prizes on astonishingly young, modern and low-profile spokespersons. In a word the Arab Spring belied the “Arab predicament”, which supposes that the centrality of the Israeli–Arab conflict is working in favour of a growing Islamization of the Arab societies, of a quest for a charismatic leader and on the identification with a supra-national cause.

But the demonstrators did not seize power, they did not even try; they just wanted to establish a new political scene. Predictably, the Egyptian and Tunisian elections brought the electoral triumph of Islamist parties. With deep roots in society, enjoying a legitimacy conferred by decades of political opposition, and defending conservative and religious values shared by a majority of the population, the Muslim Brotherhood and Nahda Party were able to attract votes well beyond an ideological hard core because they looked like a credible party of government. More surprising was the strong showing of the Salafist al-Nour Party in Egypt. Even allowing for the rise of Salafism in Egypt, the sudden transformation of an apolitical and informal school of thought into a successful political movement shows precisely that no Islamist party can claim a monopoly of the expression of Islam into the political sphere. In any case, the actors who entered into the electoral stage and benefitted from the Arab Spring were either old ones – the Islamists – or strange newcomers – the Salafists. And these actors are not known for their attachment to democracy, although they gave up the motto of the “Islamic revolution”, while still putting religion at the centre of their political agenda. Islamists, as well as Salafists, deplore secularization in the Arab world, the influence of Western values and the excesses of individualism. Everywhere, they seek to assert the centrality of religion to national identity and they are conservative in all areas except the economy. And in Egypt, like any party swept to power in an electoral landslide, they are tempted to think that they can dispense with the grubby business of forming alliances and distributing government posts equitably. In any case, why would the Islamists, with no democratic culture to speak of, behave like good democrats who believe in pluralism? No doubt many activists are asking themselves the same question.

Consequently, following the elections, the enthusiasm of the Western media faded away and the headlines were more on deploring an “Arab winter” than on celebrating a democratic spring. The ghosts of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban were casting their shadows on the streets of Cairo and Tunis. And the only obstacle to an Islamization of the society seemed for many to be the Egyptian army, whose aversion to democracy is well known too. Is the dilemma “secular” dictatorship versus “Islamic” totalitarianism the destiny of the Arab Middle East?

The present chapter suggests that it is definitely not the case. Something irreversible did happen, and, whatever the ups and downs that will follow, what we are witnessing is the beginning of a long process of rooting democratization in Arab societies. Democratization here is a process, not a programme of government implemented by hard-dyed democrats. Comparisons with other countries (such as Latin America) are difficult to make, because the Middle East is the only place where the dominant opposition is made of strongly centralized and ideological parties with a religious agenda. A possible comparison could be with the communist parties of Spain and Portugal in the late 1970s for instance, who benefitted also from a democratization process they did not trigger, but the latter never achieved an absolute control of the elected parliament, as did the Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia. Whatever their own agenda, the communist parties were forced to negotiate. Our point is to show that, whatever their own agenda and ideology, the Islamist parties are likely be pushed to adjust to the democratization process, more (Nahda) or less (Muslim Brothers) willingly. It is the constraints of the social, religious, political and geo-strategic fields that will push them to either reform or be side-lined. It is not an issue of a more or less hidden agenda, or of the possibility (or impossibility) to conciliate Islam and democracy. I will argue that, to grasp what is happening in the Middle East, we must set aside a number of deep-rooted prejudices. The first of these is the assumption that democracy presupposes secularization: the democratization movement came precisely after 30 years of what has been called the “return of the sacred”, an obvious process of re-Islamization of everyday life, coupled with the rise of the Islamist parties. The second is the idea that a democrat is, by definition, also a liberal. But there was not such a thing as the development of a “liberal Islam” preceding the spread of democratic ideas in the Middle East: the few reformist religious thinkers, lauded here and there in the West, never had a popular appeal inside the Arab societies. Conversely many staunch secularists, in Tunisia for instance, are not democrats: they want to repress the Islamists, following the model of “liberal” Algerian secularist intellectuals, called the “éradicateurs” (eradicators), during the civil war of the 1990s. Moreover, fundamentalist religious actors, such as Islamists in Tunisia, might become the improbable and reluctant actors of a secularization of the political space, which anyway should not be confused with a secularization of the society.

The History of the West does not contradict these theses. Religious tolerance was not the product of Enlightenment and liberalism, but of reluctant truces following savage wars of religions (from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648). Politics played a bigger role than philosophy or theology. The greatest Western religious reformer, Martin Luther, was not a model of democracy, tolerance and liberalism, not to speak of his anti-Semitism. The link between Protestantism and democratization is not a theological issue, but a complex political and societal process. The American Founding Fathers were not secularists; for them, the separation of church and state was a way of protecting religion from government, not the reverse. The French Third Republic was established in 1871 by a predominantly conservative, Catholic, monarchist parliament that had just crushed the Paris Commune. Christian democracy developed in Europe not because the Church wanted to promote secular values, but because it was the only way that it could maintain political influence. Finally, let’s not forget that populist movements in Europe today align themselves with Christian democracy in calling for the continent’s Christian identity to be inscribed in the EU constitution, but few would called this “identity politics” an omen of a re-Christianization of Europe. The fact that “Islamic” identity is a recurrent motto in the afterwards of the Arab Spring, does not mean at all that mosques will be more crowded. Religious identity and faith are two different (and maybe opposed) concepts in politics. Identity might be a way to bury faith into secular politics.

The Islamists as well as the Salafists are entering into a political space formatted by a set of constraints that not only limit their supposed “hidden agenda” of establishing an Islamic state but push them to adopt a more open and democratic way of governance, because it is their only possibility to remain on the stage as central political actors. We will list here the different constraints that are “formatting” the Islamists, and even the Salafists, into reluctant actors of the process of democratization.

Societal changes

A new global generation: as Philippe Fargues has shown some time ago,[1] there has been a profound demographic change in the Arab world, not to speak of the Muslim world in general: the fertility rate has fallen dramatically (in Tunisia it came under the French rate after 2000), women have entered universities and the job-market, young people marry later, there is more equality in the couple (in terms of age and education), they have less children and tend to be better educated than their parents, nuclear-families are replacing extended households. Cell phones, satellite TV, Internet have allowed these new generations to know, connect and debate on a “peer” basis and not through a top-down authoritarian system of knowledge transmission. The young generation is a “peer” generation, and does not feel strongly bound to a patriarchal society which has been unable to cope with the challenges of contemporary Middle Eastern societies.

A change in political culture: being more individualist, the members of this new generation are less attracted by holistic ideologies, whether Islamist or nationalist. There is a sharp decline of the patriarchal model embodied by charismatic leaders. The failure of the political Islam that I pointed to some 20 years ago seems obvious:[2] it does not mean that Islamist parties are no longer present on the political field – on the contrary – but that their utopian conception of an “Islamic state” has lost credibility. The Islamist ideology is challenged either by a call for democracy, which rejects the claim of any party or ideology to have the monopoly of power, or by the “neo-fundamentalists” or Salafis, who claimed that only a strict personal return to the true tenets of religious practices could help to establish an “Islamic society”. Even among the Muslim Brothers, young members reject the blind obedience towards the leadership. The new generation calls for debate, freedom, democracy and good governance. The appeal of democracy is not a consequence of the exportation of the concept of Western democracy, as fancied by the supporters of the US military intervention in Iraq. It is the political consequence of a process of social and cultural changes in the Arab societies, which of course is part of the globalization process. It is precisely because the Arab Spring is a succession of indigenous upheavals, centred on the nation and delinked with Western encroachments (which, when it happened, came after and not before the movement – as in Libya), that democracy is seen as both acceptable and desirable. Consequently the ritual anti-imperialist mottos and chants have disappeared from the demonstrations (including the usual condemnation of Zionism as the source of all the problems of the Arab world). This explains why Al Qaeda is out of the picture: the uprooted global jihadist is no longer a model for young activists and failed to take roots when he came to enlist local militants for the global cause (Al Qaeda has been expelled from Iraq by the local fighters), with the exception of the geographic fringes of the Arab world (Sahel, Somalia, Yemen). Al Qaeda was part and parcel of the old anti-imperialist Middle East political culture.

Of course the social changes are disparate and they do not necessarily produce a “democratic mind”. The impact is greater in the big cities and among educated youth with access to the Internet. Many other social categories may feel excluded from the changes: rural habitants as in Egypt, jobless urbanites in Southern Tunisia, conservative milieus, upset by what they see as sexual promiscuity among the demonstrators, shopkeepers and merchants, who are afraid of the economic consequences of the disturbances, etc. In other words, the Arab Spring may have hidden the fact that the Arab societies remain rather conservative. But even conservative milieus are also part of the process of individualization. A recent remarkable field-study shows how conservative religious villages in Egypt could precisely, during elections, ignore the Muslim Brothers because they consider them as too monolithic and centralized,[3] and prefer to vote for the Salafists, seen as politically more liberal – a fact confirmed by the endorsement by the Al Nur Salafist party, even if temporary, of the candidacy for president of the liberal ex Muslim Brother Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (April 2012).

Evolution of the religious field

A change of religiosity: I tried to show in Globalized Islam that neo-fundamentalism (a global trend of recasting religion as a code and a set of clear-cut norms, disconnected from tradition and culture – Salafism being the most obvious form of neo-fundamentalism), far from being a backlash of traditional Muslim societies, is an adaptation to modernity and globalization. Of course, this adaptation should not be understood in terms of theology theological reforms need not be a prerequisite for religious modernization) but in terms of religiosity (the way the believer experiences his/her faith). The wave of re-Islamization hides a very important fact: it has contributed to the diversification and the individualization of the religious field. Religion (theological corpus) did not change, but religiosity did, and this religiosity, liberal or not, is compatible with democratization, because it delinks personal faith from collective identity, traditions and external authority. The usual religious authorities (ulama and Islamist leaders) have largely lost their legitimacy in favour of self-appointed, and often self-taught, religious entrepreneurs. Young “born-again” Muslims found their own way by surfing the Internet or joining local groups of peers: they were very critical towards the cultural Islam of their parents, and tried to construct their own brand of Islam. Religion became more and more a matter of personal choice ranging from Salafism to any sort of syncretism, not to speak of conversions to other religions (see for instance the growth of a Protestant evangelical church among former Muslims in Morocco and Algeria).[4] This individualization and diversification had the unexpected consequence of disconnecting religion from daily politics, of bringing it back to the private and of excluding it from the sphere of government management. As I tried to show in Holy Ignorance, fundamentalism, by disconnecting religion from culture and by defining a faith community through believing and not just belonging, is in fact contributing to the secularization of society (hence the bitter belief of any fundamentalist, from born-again Christian evangelicals to Salafist Muslims, that true believers are a minority even if the surrounding society is nominally sharing the same religion).

As a consequence an apparent rejection of secularization and democracy may nevertheless express “democracy-compatible” patterns: individualization, refusal of blind obedience, separation of faith and collective identity, and a certain distance from daily politics. In such a context, any endeavour to bring the society back, by a set of laws and regulations, to a traditional model of norms and values, will fail, as surely as the Tea Party agenda, even in case of access to power, will not bring the US society back to the Bible Belt’s way of life of the 1950s. After all, you can’t change a society by decree. In Saudi Arabia the growing tensions between the official enforcement of the sharia and the rapidly increase of middle and upper class emancipated women is leading to unbearable tensions. In Iran, all the indicators suggest that society has become more modern and secular under the mullahs; although a post 1979 law allows girls as young as nine to be married, statistics show that the average age at which Iranian women get married has continued to rise – today it stands at more than 25. In short, even when sharia is theoretically implemented, we are not seeing a return to a traditional society.

Diversification of the religious field: as we saw, the Islamists don’t enjoy a religious monopoly in the public sphere. There are other movements, such as the Sufis and the Salafists. This diversification is precisely the consequence of 30 years of “re-Islamization”: the centrality of religion in everyday life, coupled with the individualization of religiosity, has given birth to a variety of religious movements, encouraged by the regimes, which tried and succeeded in promoting other religious movements in order to counter the Muslim Brothers, contributing in a sense to democratize the religious field. An unexpected result of the Arab Spring is that al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, one of Egypt’s most important religious institutions, has found a new legitimacy: the imam of al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, although a conformist appointee of ex-President Mubarak, has suddenly become, in 2011, an advocate of human rights, liberty and, above all, the separation of religious institutions from the state (statement of June 2011). In Tunisia, the Nahda movement came to power only to discover that in reality they don’t control (and even don’t know) the hundreds of young imams in charge of mosques abandoned by discredited official clerics. The Egyptian Muslim Brothers, convinced that their 60 years of steady religious and social activism would give them enough legitimacy to “represent” Islam, were upset to see Salafist newcomers successfully challenging their primacy. And to make things more complicated, the Tunisian Salafists challenge the Islamists on their right (they opposed democracy and want immediate implementation of sharia), while most of the Egyptian Salafists challenge the Muslim Brotherhood on their left, by allying with more liberal dissidents from the Brotherhood. This implies also that, in contrast to the Khomeinist leadership in revolutionary Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nahda Party are unable to “say what Islam says”, or, at least, to convince the people that they have such a monopoly on religion. The religious arena, too, has become pluralistic and open to democratic pressure, even if, for the faithful, there are some elements that remain non-negotiable.

Opening of a religious debate: That said, there is no agreement among religious political actors over what is and is not negotiable beyond the centrality of Islam. Should there be a body that determines the Islamic-ness of laws? If so, who ought to be nominated to it and by whom? Should the hudud or corporal punishment be applied in cases where religious laws have been violated? Is conversion to Christianity possible for a Muslim? It is on the question of the definition of religious liberty that we can expect the most vigorous debates. Would the Muslim Brotherhood be prepared to present itself as the protector of the rights of the minority Coptic Christians in Egypt to practise their religion thus making religious freedom an individual human right (abandoning the concept of apostasy in the process), rather than the collective right of a minority? The debate has already started. Abdel Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, a Muslim Brotherhood dissident and candidate for the presidency, curiously supported by many Salafists, declared in May last year: “Nobody should interfere if a Christian decides to convert to Islam or a Muslim decides to leave Islam and become a Christian”.[5]

Whenever the implementation of Islamic religious norms comes up for discussion, there is an internal debate in the institutions concerned. The result is that one cannot simply oppose the “religious” bloc with the “secular” one. Democratization has affected the community of believers, too. The Salafists will certainly try to raise the stakes over sharia law and to make the Muslim Brotherhood face up to the contradictions of its position. But they have also leapt into the political realm, forming parties while they previously challenged the very idea of political parties in the name of Islam. In their case, this is the compliment that vice pays to virtue: they know that without a parliamentary presence they would lose their influence.

All the same, the Salafists are anything but a party of government; they have no programme beyond the introduction of sharia, and the most realistic among them (including some in al-Nour) are perfectly aware of this. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists are fated to be rivals, and so one cannot rule out the possibility of them entering into unexpected alliances with other political forces.

Political changes

The failure of political Islam: Islamists have changed, or at least understood that the world has changed. Either in success (Iran, Gaza) or failure (Algeria, Syria and Egypt before the Arab Spring), the Islamists have been unable to bring about a successful model of Islamic state. They own their present success to the success of the “others”: democratic secularists or nationalists. They won in Gaza on a nationalist agenda, not Islamic, and the same is true for the Lebanese Hezbollah, who built its success on its ability to represent the Shi’a community and on opposing Israel. In opposition, in jail and in exile, they came into contact with other opponents, more secularist or defenders of human rights: when they go into exile, it is more often London than Mecca. They understood the need to make alliances and to take into account other views. They tried to engage the West (but were too often rebuked). The calls for Jihad and for violent confrontation are the trademarks of countries or groups that are not friendly to them, and even consider them as traitors: Iran or Al Qaeda. Implementation of sharia is the official policy of regimes and movements they cannot identify with: Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. Their social agenda has slowly faded away (except for charities) with the gentrification of their constituencies (more and more bourgeois and entrepreneurs). The aging of their leadership put them at odds with the new generation of believers. There is a cultural gap between the Islamists and the younger generation, which is not about Islam, but about what it means to be a believer.

All these changes gave way to what I called post-Islamism (the expression has been used first by Assef Bayat):[6] it does not mean that the Islamists disappeared, but that their utopia did not stand in front of social, political and even geo-strategic realities: they have no blueprint for an “Islamic economy”, and although they run many charities in deprived neighbourhoods, they tended to become socially conservative, opposing strikes and approving the rescinding of the agrarian reform in Egypt. The wave of religious revival that has swept the Muslim world did not swell their ranks, but contributed on the contrary to the diversification of the religious field, transforming the Islamists into religious actors among others.

Have the Islamists become “democrats”? They have clearly been favouring elections for some time because support for armed struggle was either playing into the hands of jihadists or of repressive governments seeking support from the West as the best bulwark against a “radical Islamist threat”. Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Nahda, explicitly rejected the concept of an “Islamic state”, and took the Turkish AKP as a model of a post-Islamism religious-minded and conservative party.

But still most Islamists are uneasy about sharing power with non-Islamic parties and turning their “brotherhood” kind of organizations into a modern political party. They sometimes give up formal support for sharia (as in Tunisia and Morocco) but are unable to define a concrete ruling programme that would go beyond banning alcohol and promoting the veil, or some other petty forms of shariatization. After the Arab Spring, which started outside their ranks, they have to make choices. The first choice would be the “Turkish model” (the AK Party): it consists in turning the “brotherhood” into a true modern political party, trying to rally a larger constitution than the hard core of the devout Muslims, recasting religious norms into more vague conservative values (family, property, work ethic, honesty), adopting a neo-liberal approach in economy and endorsing constitution, parliament and regular elections. Another choice would be to ally with “counter revolution” forces, as in Egypt for instance, for fear of a real democracy that they are not sure to control, but in this case they will lose their remaining legitimacy, and might be instrumentalized by the army. They may side with the Salafists, by calling for an Islamization centred on certain isolated issues (veil, family law), much as Christian conservatives in the West are focusing on abortion and gay marriage, while ignoring the other social and economic issues. But in fact, their real practices are more under the influence of the course of the events than of an ideological debate.

Constraints brought by the new political scene: The Islamists are certainly neither secularists nor liberals, but they can be democrats. It is not the convictions of political actors that shape their policies but the constraints to which they are subject. The Islamists are entering an entirely new political space: this was not a revolution in which a dictatorship was replaced by a regime that resembled its predecessor. There have been elections and there is a parliament. Political parties have been formed and, whatever the disappointments and fears of the secular left, it will be difficult simply to close down this new space, because what brought it into being in the first place – a savvy, connected young generation, a spirit of protest – is still there. But experience has shown that in the Middle East, when people are offered to participate into free elections, they go to the voting booths (Tunisia, Egypt, Iran), even in case of threat (Afghanistan and Iraq for instance). Islamist movements throughout the region are constrained to operate in a democratic arena that they didn’t create and which has legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

The Islamists have also to listen to their electors who do not follow them blindly. The “Islamic” electorate in Egypt or Tunisia today is not revolutionary; it is conservative. It wants order. It wants leaders who will kick-start the economy and affirm conventional religious values, but it is not ready for the great adventure of a caliphate or an Islamic republic. And the Muslim Brotherhood knows this. It needs to attract voters because it doesn’t have the means to seize power by force, which in any case it does not wish to do. And even if it did, it does not have the technical wherewithal to do so, as it doesn’t control the police or the armed forces and has no paramilitary militia. Furthermore, the protest movements in Egypt and Tunisia were shaped not by an ideology as all-encompassing as the regimes that they toppled (which was the case in Iran in 1979), but by the ideals of democracy, pluralism and good governance. In Iran in 1979, elections by contrast were held in the name of the Islamic Republic. The message was clear: this was an ideological revolution (even if there was disagreement about its complexion between the red of the Marxist–Leninists and the green of the Islamists). There is nothing of the kind in either Egypt or Tunisia. There is no revolutionary or ideological dynamic. It is significant, in this regard, that nowhere has the cult of the charismatic strong man reappeared. Instead, there are political parties and a new culture of debate that has influenced even the Islamists.

To re-instate a form of authoritarian government, the Islamists would need to have control of the police and of the army, or to create their own para-military forces, which don’t exist. In Tunisia and in Egypt, the army is there and was not identified with the former regime (as was the Iranian army in 1979). Moreover the Islamists in power cannot rely on the oil rent to placate the poor layers of the society and to pay for loyal militias. There is by the way a clear negative connection between “Arab Spring” and oil rent. Governments lacking financial means have to find a popular support through the voting booths or return to the opposition. One could expect huge swings in elections for the next decade, as well as in Europe for instance. Although Islamists tend to adopt a populist profile (blaming Westernized elites, putting forward the motto of “national identity”), they may find more populist-minded demagogues than them, if not “holier than them”.

A last constraint: the geo-strategic environment

There is one further set of constraints on both the Islamists and the Salafists, and these are geo-strategic. Neither was elected on a programme of jihad or support for the Palestinians. The Arab Spring and Arab winter did not turn around international questions, Unlike the Nasserite and Ba’athist revolutions, Anwar al-Sadat’s counter-revolution of 1974 when he opened up Egypt’s economy and swapped the Soviet for the American embrace. But, even before the events, they have never been able to articulate a coherent supra-national programme of mobilizing the “ummah”, letting the latter in the bloody hands of Al Qaeda. The different branches of the Muslim Brothers (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Syria) as well as the Islamists from the Maghreb, had always a national agenda and were organized in the framework of their own nation-state; they were never able to devise a regional common strategy, despite their ideological proximity. The present unravelling of political events shows also how differently they may react: the Jordanian and Tunisian Islamists are far more open in their alliances and in their perception of democracy than the Egyptians. Moreover there are no supranational dynamics that could push the Islamists to change their domestic agenda.

Certainly the Israeli–Palestinian conflict remains important on an emotional level, but no one is ready to endanger stability and economic development in the name of supporting the Palestinian cause. The Islamists don’t like Israel, and in this respect they are in step with Arab public opinion, but they are not willing to go to war. They have accepted the existing geo-strategic constraints. The government of Tunisia’s invitation to the Hamas leader Ismail Haniye in January 2012 is in line with that extended to the Palestine Liberation Organisation after the Israelis took Beirut in 1982, and is evidence of continuity rather than rupture. The care that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken to open a dialogue with Western diplomats is another sign that it is accepting strategic realities. The Brotherhood is willing to renegotiate the relationship between Egypt and Israel, but not through confrontation. Economic constraints, like the lack of oil rent and the need to keep tourism working, also push the new governments to appear as moderates. There are projects to turn tourism “hallal”, with gender segregated beaches or alcohol free resorts, but it does not seem to be a real alternative: why should wealthy Saudis leave Marbella and Beirut for a hallal turned Sharm el Sheikh resort, just miles away from their own puritan five stars hotels?

In fact there is no alternative in terms of regional alliances, especially not of an opening towards Iran. The Saudis and the Qataris have played a significant offstage role here, the former in pushing the Salafists to run for election, the latter in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood wherever it stood.

The major conflict that is taking shape is not a clash between an Islamists-led Muslim world and the West. Rather, it is the one that pits the conservative Sunni Arab world (whatever secular, Islamist, Wahhabi or Salafist) against the “Shia crescent” united around Iran, – all that notwithstanding Saudi Arabia’s discreet “unholy alliance” with Israel in the background. The crisis in Syria obliges the regional actors to make choices, even if they would have preferred not to be confronted with the necessity to choose. Hezbollah is siding with Tehran and the Syrian regime, while Hamas, although allied with Syria and Hezbollah, has reluctantly left Damascus for Cairo, coming back to the fold of its old family: the Sunni Muslim Brothers. Turkey, after having been evicted from the European dream, is carving a new regional role for itself, taking the lead of a Sunni alliance. The AKP leaders are well acquainted with the Arab Islamist leaders, and a new axis is taking shape, bringing together similar conservative Sunni parties. The Turkish connexion is also a factor of moderation for the Islamist parties. Of course this Sunni axis antagonizes local minorities (Alevis in Turkey, Alawis in Syria), and accentuates the divide with the Shias in the Gulf (no support for the Bahraini demonstrators), in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon and in Iraq (a blatant exception to the Arab Spring, thanks to the US intervention of 2003); but this isolation of Iran is also a factor of stabilization and moderation. Any possible military Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities will certainly trigger demonstrations in Cairo, Tunis and Casablanca, but will probably not mobilize the Arab street against their new elected governments, which will keep a lower profile than expected. In fact, the last regional power able to play into the domestic politics of the different countries is probably Saudi Arabia, who cannot stand the concept of an Arab Spring and grows more and more estranged with the Islamist parties. Saudi Arabia did play, directly or indirectly, the Salafists against the Brothers. But Saudis will not be able to find staunch and long lasting allies either among the hard-line Tunisian Salafists or the mild-mannered Egyptian Salafists.

Hence, for the first time since the early 1950s, the geo-strategic landscape does not dictate domestic agenda and instead leads to a radicalization of domestic politics, a good omen for the process of democratization.

And Islam?

Whatever the political ups and down, the diversity of the national cases, the foreseeable fragmentation of both “democrats” and “Islamists” into various trends and parties, the main issue will be to redefine the role of and the reference to Islam in politics. The de facto autonomization of the religious field from political and ideological control does not mean, once again, that secularism is necessarily gaining ground in terms of culture and society, but certainly a new form of political secularism is emerging, where in fact religion does not dictate what politics should be, but is reduced to politics.

What is at stake is the reformulation of the reference to religion in the public sphere. There is a large agreement on inscribing, in the constitution, the “Muslim” identity of the society and of the state, there is also a large agreement on the fact that sharia is not an autonomous and complete system of law that could be implemented from above and replace the “secular” law, but is becoming more and more a loose reference, except for personal law (which means that the issue of women’s rights will be at the core of the debate, followed by the issue of what religious freedom means). As we saw, the modern forms of religiosity tend to stress individual faith and choices, against conformity to any sort of institutionalized Islam. The old motto “in Islam no separation between religion (din) and worldly issues (dunya)” changed a long time ago from an academic statement to mere wishful thinking, but it has definitely been undermined by the Arab Spring. What we see is, more than secularization, a deconstruction of Islam, torn between some sort of a cultural identity (there could be in this sense “atheist Muslims”), a faith that could be shared only by born again believers (Salafists) in the confines of self-centred faith communities, or a “horizon of meaning” where references to sharia are more virtual than real. The recasting of religious norms into values helps also to promote an inter-faith coalition of religious conservatives that could unite around some specific causes: opposition to same sex marriage for instance. It is interesting to see, how, in Western Europe for instance, while secular populists tend to stress more and more the Christian identity of Europe, many Muslim conservatives try to forge an alliance of believers to defend shared values. By doing so, many of them tend to adopt a Protestant evangelical agenda, fighting abortion and Darwinism, both issues that have never been relevant in the traditional Islamic debates.[7] In this sense the modern neo-fundamentalists are trying to recast Islam in a Western compatible kind of religious conservatism, a fact that is obvious in Turkey: when the prime minister, Erdogan, tried to promote an anti-adultery law in 2004, adultery was defined not in terms of sharia, but by reference to the modern Western family (a monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with equal rights and duties, making thus the custom of polygamy, not infrequent among traditional AK local cadres, a crime). In this sense Islam is part of the recasting of a religious global market disconnected from local cultures.[8]

Instead of secularization of the society, we may better speak of the “autonomization” of politics from religion, and of religion from politics, due to the diversification of the religious field and the inability to construct religion as a political ideology. When religion is everywhere, it is nowhere. That was the underlying meaning of the statement made by the Speaker of the Egyptian parliament, the Muslim Brother Saad al-Katatni, who rebuked a Salafist deputy, Mamdouh Ismail, for performing the adhaan, or the Muslim call to prayer, in the course of a session:[9] “we are all Muslims, if you want to pray there is mosque in the parliament, but the parliament is not a mosque”. Thus the paradox of re-Islamization is that it leads to some sort of a political secularization and opens the debate on what Islam means. One of the effects could be the re-opening of the theological debate, which in this case would be a consequence and not a condition of the democratization of Muslim societies.

Notes

1  Fargues, Philippe, Générations arabes. L’Alchimie du nombre, Fayard, Paris, 2000.

2  Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, Harvard University Press 1994.

3  Yasmine Moataz Ahmed, “Who do Egypt’s villagers vote for? And why?”, Egypt Independent, Monday April 30, 2012.

4  Nadia Marzouki, “Conversion as Statelessness: A Study of Contemporary Algerian Conversions to Evangelical Christianity”, Middle East Law and Governance 4, 2012: 69–105.

5  Noha el Hennawi, “Islamist Presidential Candidate Declares Conversion Permissible”, Egypt Independent, May 16, 2011.

6  Assef Bayat, The Coming of a post Islamist Society, Critique: Critical Middle East Studies, n°9, Fall 1996.

7  For instance an “Atlas of Creation”, written by Harun Yahya, was widely distributed in the West around 2007: it presents all the arguments and some iconography of the American anti-Darwinist literature.

8  Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance, Columbia University Press, 2008.

9  February 2012, see Council on Foreign Relations website, online, available at: http://blogs.cfr.org/husain/2012/02/07/egypts-piety-contest/.

Part III

Varieties of capitalism in the age of globalization

11  Institutional change and market transitions after socialism

Leszek Balcerowicz

After a brief period of simultaneous political and economic liberalization a great divide has emerged in the former Soviet bloc since 1989. Some countries have consolidated democracy while other states have returned to various non-democratic regimes. Countries that have moved to democracy have also moved to capitalism, while non-democratic regimes have co-existed with various economic systems. These patterns in the post-socialist world confirm the earlier observations that democracy can be lastingly combined only with capitalism, while capitalism (of different kinds) can co-exist both with democracy and a variety of authoritarian regimes.

The nature and costs of socialism

One way of structuring a country’s institutional system is to distinguish in it three interrelated components: the legal framework, the organizational system, and the mechanisms of mass and regular human interactions.[1]

Legal framework determines, inter alia, what types of (inter)actions are recognized as crimes, and which are not (i.e., scope of formal freedoms). The legal framework thus also determines what types of organizations can legally exist, e.g., whether private enterprises are allowed (capitalism) or banned (socialism). On the other hand, some parts of a country’s organizational system, especially the state enforcement apparatus and criminal justice system, support a given legal framework. Generally speaking, the larger the share of legally prohibited actions is, the more extensive these enforcement organizations are, and the less the legal framework remains on paper. Institutional systems differ both in the content of the legal framework (the share of prohibited types of actions) and in the level of its enforcement. For example, the nominally repressive systems, with the same set of prohibitions, may differ in the actual level of repression depending on the personalities of the top rulers and the related operation of the repression apparatus. Or systems with the same nominal structure of private property rights differ in the level of their protection against predation from private individuals and members of the state apparatus (extortion, corruption). Large differences of this type, strongly distinguish returns to private investment and, thus, the rate of economic growth.[2]

Finally, both the legal framework and the organizational system shape the mechanisms of mass and regular human interactions. Systems that strongly limit individual economic freedom create a coordination vacuum that must be filled by the command-rationing mechanism (central planning). The legal framework, which allows individuals and organizations sufficient economic freedom, gives rise to market-type mechanisms of coordination, but they can operate in different ways depending on the extent of organizational concentration, which, in turn, depends on the freedom of entry, determined by the legal framework. (The freedom of entry in itself also influences the behavior of market participants).

There were significant differences among the institutional systems that existed at the turn of the decade in the countries of the crumbling Soviet empire.[3] In Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union the political repression was reduced and the socialist rulers de facto legalized private ownership, shortly before losing power. One can say that – consciously or inadvertently – they entered the Chinese institutional trajectory: capitalism yes, democracy no.[4] But it was too late for them, and the breakthrough that occurred in 1989–1992 in these countries also included political liberalization and market reforms. However, a bit later the institutional trajectories of the countries of the former Soviet bloc have diverged. In other countries of the region, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania, socialism survived in a more rigid, “classical” form.[5] In what follows I will disregard the differences between early reformers and other socialist countries, as the institutional similarities at the turn of the decade seem to be far more important than the differences.[6] However, there is an interesting issue of the impact of the differences in the inherited institutional systems upon the subsequent institutional trajectories.

A description of the socialist institutional system addresses three main components of a country’s institutional order: legal framework, organizational system, and mechanisms of mass and regular human interactions:

1  The fundamental defining characteristic of the socialist legal framework was the extensive suppression of classical “negative” individual rights to life, liberty and property, to religious freedom, freedom of speech and the like. As Jan Elster and Claus Offe emphasize:

they are negative not because they do not require positive state action … but because they protect … the status negativus of an individual, i.e. his or her status as an independent person who makes claim on the society not to be disturbed.[7]

Attempts to exercise theses rights, e.g., setting up an independent association, organizing a demonstration, or developing a private productive activity, were legally recognized as crimes against socialism; this is why the term “socialist” crimes is appropriate.[8] As the essence of socialism was a dominance of a party-state over individuals, i.e., the suppression of classical “negative” rights, the introduction and persecution of “socialist” crimes was a functional necessity.[9] Otherwise socialism would not survive (unless one believes in a “socialist man”, i.e., a person who voluntarily – without the threat of official punishments – obeys prohibitions). In the deepest sense, socialism, therefore, was based on extensive prohibitions and the related repressions.[10]

2  The extensive suppression of classical individual rights and the related catalogue of “socialist” crimes required – as a functional necessity – an extensive system of enforcement organizations: party apparatus, security apparatus, censorship, etc.[11] Besides, the suppression of markets necessitated the central planning as the coordination mechanisms, which, in turn demanded another functional necessity, a special system of economic organizations, whereby enterprises were compulsorily grouped into monopolistic associations, and sets of such associations were again grouped into larger units, subordinated to the respective ministries. The central planning, resulting from the suppression of individual economic freedom, produced, therefore, an extreme monopolization of economy.[12]

All these special organizations of socialism, in a sort of “creative destruction” had to be dismantled, if the institutional system were to move in the direction of rule of law, democracy and capitalism.

3  The suppression of economic freedom eliminated legal markets and created a need for central planning with all of its inefficiencies, like the hostility to welfare-enhancing innovations and massive shortages.[13] Besides, the suppression of civil rights ruled out the development of the civil society, including various self-help organizations, which were quite prominent in Western capitalism (until they were largely crowded-out by the expansion of the welfare state).

In addition to these three characteristics of a socialist institutional system let me mention a fourth one: a peculiar welfare state. It was peculiar because of its structure. First, many welfare services were delivered via state companies (which were dominating the economy) to their employees. In this they were similar to some large Western corporations – “the corporate welfare states” – e.g., General Motors, with a large role of trade unions. Second, foodstuffs, rents and electricity prices were heavily subsidized – at the cost of heavy taxes on consumer durables and massive shortages. The price structure was, therefore, heavily distorted and called for a painful adjustment. Third, a part of the socialist welfare state was the reverse side of the inefficiency of socialist economy: overused inputs including labor. In other words, unemployment existed in a hidden form (unemployment on the job) and not in an open one. As a result, an unemployment benefits system typical of Western market economies was not needed and did not exist. And given the over-employment, the transition to a market economy had to include a painful reallocation of labor, including the transformation of some parts of the hidden unemployment into open unemployment or into non-employment (disability pensions, early retirement). Finally, socialist states were spending a relatively large part of their budgets on education and health – compared to non-socialist countries with a similar per capita income.[14] As a result, the human capital produced by these systems, especially in the form of general education, exceeded the possibilities of its efficient use by the wasteful and anti-innovative socialist economy and the repressive public administration. Therefore, this capital was gradually dissipated during the professional life of graduates. However, at the start of the transition, the “surplus” educational capital was one of the few assets left by socialism. It called for radical reforms, capable of creating better opportunities for its absorption. Otherwise this asset would disappear via the internal dissipation and migration.

In general, while suppressing classical individual rights, socialism had recognized welfare (social) rights. However, it should be remembered that the socialist welfare state was based on increasingly crumbling economic foundations. Besides, the socialist state (and state enterprises) owed its prominent role in providing social services partly to the fact that it had the monopoly for such services, as it suppressed private economic activity and the related individual coping strategies as well as independent self-help organizations.

Socialism as defined by the suppression of classical individual rights and the corresponding extreme concentration of the politico-economic power at the top of the party-state imposed two kinds of heavy costs upon societies subjected to it: economic and non-economic.

The economic costs are the opportunity costs: the difference between the standard of living achievable under socialism and that which would have been obtained – under the same initial conditions – had the affected societies had a reasonably efficient capitalist system. Socialism invariably performs badly on the long run in terms of growth; in this sense there is no such thing as good socialism. Capitalism, as defined by the dominance of private enterprises, can take various forms, depending on the degree of fiscal and monetary stability, and the flexibility of markets, external openness and the related extent of market competition, the level of protection of property rights and that of the enforcement of contracts, etc.[15] These varieties differ in their economic stability and the long-run economic growth. Therefore, while socialism is always bad with respect to the growth of the standard of living, varieties of capitalism differ. It is not difficult to find the kinds of capitalisms that produce only slow economic growth. They are those that meet some or all of the following features: extreme macroeconomic instability, excessive regulation of private activity, protectionism and monopolization, and poor protection of property rights. Such deficient capitalisms existed until recently in many Latin American countries and in India. The point is, however, that there are more efficient forms of capitalism capable of producing economic growth far superior to that under any form of socialism, as shown by Figure 11.1.

In 1950, Poland had a level of per capita income similar to that of Spain, while in 1990 the former’s income equaled only 42 percent of the Spanish one. In the same period, Hungary sharply diverged relative to Austria.

Figure 11.2 shows the extreme divergence of North Korea compared to South Korea and the substantial divergence of Cuba relative to Chile. It also illustrates how Maoist China was backsliding compared to the standard of living in Western Europe, and how – since late 1990 – it has been catching up while transforming its economic system into a capitalist one.[16]

Figure 11.1  Per capita GDP (in 1990 international dollars) in 1950 and 1990, Poland vs. Spain and Hungary vs. Austria (source: Maddison Database).

Figure 11.2  Per capita GDP (in 1990 international dollars) in 1950 and 2003, North Korea vs. South Korea, Cuba vs. Chile, and China (source: Maddison Database).

By suppressing classical liberties and exposing people to constant official propaganda, socialism also burdened individuals with systemic non-economic costs of a psychological nature. Besides, an extreme concentration of political power created risks of criminal decisions by top rulers, resulting in humanitarian catastrophes, as shown by the policies of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.

Institutional trajectories after socialism

A country’s institutional system can be broken down into the political and the economic component. The former includes institutions directly related to the inter-personal exchange and the exercise of power in the state, e.g., electoral laws, the party system and the structure of the government. The latter includes institutions that shape the decision-making and the implementation of decisions with respect to production, employment, savings, investment and consumption,[17] e.g., types of property rights, extent of economic regulations, etc. The degree of separation between these two systems differs across institutional regimes: it is much stronger under Western type democratic capitalism than under socialism with its fusion of political and economic power.

This section will take a bird’s eye view on what has changed in the political and economic systems of the countries that once belonged to the Soviet bloc. Sharp differentiation has emerged among the political regimes of the former socialist countries. According to Polity IV, Central-Eastern European states belong to fully institutionalized democracies, together – perhaps surprisingly – with Mongolia. Democracies albeit in the less mature form, also prevail in Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia[18] and Armenia. At the other end, there are fully-fledged authority regimes in Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. They have a level of political freedom similar to China and Vietnam. Russia is located in the intermediate zone of incoherent or mixed authority regime. It is neither a democracy nor a pure dictatorship.

Therefore a great divide has emerged after a brief initial period of political pluralism in the countries of the former Soviet bloc: Central-Eastern countries and few other states have established democracy, while Belarus, Central Asian countries, and Russia have returned to non-democratic political regimes.

What about the transformation of economic systems? Here, again, the patterns are clear: countries that moved towards democracy also moved towards capitalism, while countries with non-democratic political regimes have different economic systems: capitalist or closer to socialism

As socialism is defined by the monopoly of the state sector and capitalism by the dominant role of the private sector, the share of the private sector on GDP is an indispensable and important measure of the nature of the economic systems that emerged after socialism. However, a comment is necessary. As noted in above, institutional systems differ not only in the content of their legal frameworks but also in the level of protection (enforcement) of the respective laws, and this is certainly true of private property rights. Therefore, similar shares of private sector on GDP in countries with different political regimes may mask different realities: In non-democratic systems that are devoid of institutional limits on political power – and such have been the non-democratic regimes that emerged after socialism – the protection of private property rights seems much more unevenly distributed across various types of owners (and their firms) than in democratic regimes with clear limits on political power. In the former, those connected to political rulers – via business, political or family ties – enjoy much higher levels of protection of their possessions than the overwhelming majority of other owners. In this respect, the post-socialist regimes that combine non-democracy and private ownership may resemble the institutional systems that prevailed until recently in Latin America or in Indonesia under Suharto. One may call the private property rights whereby a high level of protection requires ties to political power a politicized private ownership.[19] Such ownership is a basis of the court system, which is subservient to political rulers, as clearly shown by the Khodorkovski case in Russia.[20] In democratic regimes with limits on political power, the distribution of protection of private property rights is less uneven, because political ties are not so important for the security of property rights. This difference in the distribution of protection of private ownership is likely to be reflected in a more difficult situation of small-and medium-size enterprises (which are too small to be politically connected) in non-democratic regimes with politicized private ownership than in democratic systems with a more arm’s-length relationship between governments and firms. In other words, different political regimes in the post-socialist world have tended to be combined with different kinds of capitalism: democratic systems with more entrepreneurial capitalism (more free entry, more competition), and non-democratic regimes with more oligarchic regimes (less free entry, a larger share of large and politically connected firms).

Figure 11.3  Private sector share in GDP (source: EBRD).

The differences in the nature of the economic system after socialism are also shown by the EBRD.

To sum up, clear politico-economic patterns have emerged after socialism: democracy is combined with capitalism while non-democratic regimes co-exist either with (quasi)capitalism with politicized private property rights or with statist systems close to socialism. These systemic combinations should not be surprising – they confirm previous experience and research on what the stable and unstable combinations of political and economic systems are: Socialism cannot be lastingly combined with democracy; therefore democracy requires capitalism for its survival. The argumentation has been presented elsewhere as to why the combination of socialism and democracy is unstable: it either turns into the combination of socialism and non-democracy or becomes the combination of democracy and capitalism.[21] It is, therefore, not an accident that there has been no single case of a lasting co-existence of democracy and socialism. Democratic socialism is an oxymoron[22] (as long as socialism is defined by the monopoly of state ownership). Therefore it should not be surprising that the countries of the former Soviet bloc that maintain quasi-socialism (Belarus and Central Asian states) are all non-democratic.

Figure 11.4  Average of transition indicators (EBRD), 2009 (source: EBRD; Czech Republic is not considered a transition country anymore).

While democracy requires capitalism, capitalism does not require democracy, in the sense that it can lastingly co-exist with both non-democracy and democracy. South Korea and Taiwan until their recent democratization, and China since late 1970, illustrate the first combination.[23] Russia and Kazakhstan – after a brief period of simultaneous democratization and market reforms – appear to have switched to the Chinese trajectory: Capitalism yes, democracy no. The Western countries illustrate the other combination. They are imitated by the Central and East European states (and some other states), although the democratization in the latter case was much more rapid than the lengthy transition to mass democracy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the West.

Outcomes after socialism

Outcomes are changes in important components of societies’ living standards. They can be divided into economic and non-economic.

The growth of GDP, an especially important kind of economic outcome is strongly related to consumers’ welfare.

Figure 11.5 shows that huge variation occurred in this variable after the collapse of socialism.

Poland’s GDP was 80 percent higher in 2009 than in 1989, while Ukraine’s was 24 percent lower. Bear in mind that these are official data; if the informal sector were added, the differences would be smaller, albeit certainly still very large. One should also remember that factors such as wasteful investment, excessive stocks, large military expenditures and value-diminishing activities, inflated the levels of GDP under socialism.[24] The correction for these inflated figures was recorded as a decline in GDP after socialism and often mistakenly interpreted as an equal decline in welfare. However, these factors do not fundamentally change the relative picture: a huge variation of GDP after 1989.

Figure 11.5  GDP per capita 2009 (source: The Conference Board Total Economy Database, January 2010, online, available at: www.conference-board.org/economics/database.cfm).

The economies of the region, except for former Czechoslovakia and Hungary, suffered hyperinflations at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. They all have made considerable progress in decreasing inflation (Figure 11.7), albeit to different levels. Generally speaking, better long-run growth performance went hand in hand with lower inflation. This confirms a well-known fact that successful disinflation is conducive to such growth. Besides, high inflation directly reduces consumers’ welfare via increasing an unpleasant uncertainty and it hits especially poorer people as they have fewer possibilities to protect their cash balances and savings than the richer ones.

Massive differences are also apparent in per capita inflows of foreign direct investment (Figure 11.7). FDI usually follows economic success and strengthens economic growth, especially through technology transfer.

A great difference in outcomes occurred not only with respect to economic but also to non-economic dimensions of the standard of living. Countries that performed better on the first scale, tended to perform better on the second as well.

Figure 11.6  Inflation 2008 (source: World Bank, WDI Online).

Figure 11.7  FDI stock 2008 (source: UNCTAD).

Figure 11.8  GDP/unit of energy use 2006 (source: World Bank, WDI Online, IMF WEO).

Take the environment: being highly wasteful, the socialist economy was also very damaging to the environment – in absolute terms and at the low levels of per capita income. One of the main reasons for this was a low level of the ratio of GDP to energy consumption. One can see that CEE economies have achieved much higher energy efficiency of their economies than most countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Post-socialist countries also differ in their health developments. With respect to life expectancy at birth (Figure 11.9), the CEE economies have registered substantial increases. However, life expectancy in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz Republic has declined.

Many observers deplore increases in income inequality after socialism, even though it is difficult to establish the optimal extent of this kind of inequality.[25] Besides, income inequality under socialism was combined with the suppression of classical individual liberties; and some privileges enjoyed by the ruling elites were hidden. Finally, there were huge inequalities in political power, which were partly translated into inequalities in the standard of living. Against this background the interesting question is not whether the measured income inequalities increased after socialism – this had to be expected – but what the differences in the achieved levels across the post-socialist world are.

As one can see, the highest levels of income inequality have been recorded by Russia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – countries with rather poor market reform and growth performance. Better reform and growth performance, such as in Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, have displayed lower levels in the Gini coefficient. It is thus a fallacy to blame market reforms in the post-socialist countries for increased income inequalities.

Figure 11.9  Life expectancy at birth 2007 (source: UNDP Human Development Report 2009).

Figure 11.10  Gini index (source: UNDP Human Development Report 2009).

To sum up, the collapse of socialism has been followed by hugely different economic and non-economic outcomes. This striking fact obviously calls for an explanation.

Explaining outcomes after socialism

Let me start with the economic outcomes and focus on the wide variation in growth, which is the kind of the economic outcome that has attracted most attention. The variation in growth performance can be caused by differences in the following factors:

1  initial conditions;

2  the extent of market reforms and in the resulting scope of change in the nature of the economic system;

3  external shocks during the transition process;

4  domestic shocks.

From the point of view of future economic growth it does not matter how bad or good the initial conditions in a static sense are, but whether they contain structures (distortions, inefficiencies), the elimination of which releases accelerated growth. Such structures can be called transitional growth mechanisms.[26] From this point of view, China in the late 1970s was in a much better situation than the countries of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s. Being very poor, China was dominated by technologically simple, collectivized agriculture, which was technically easy to privatize. And, in fact, even the limited privatization in the form of the long-term lease of land to farmers has released powerful forces of growth. This was not available in the former Soviet bloc, where agriculture played a much smaller role in the GDP generation and was much more technologically complex.[27] It is, therefore, a (popular) fallacy to ascribe the superior growth performance in China only to its economic strategy.[28]

However, there were also important differences across post-Soviet economies. The smaller countries, heavily dependent on exports to Russia, were to suffer huge external shocks due to the collapse of the Soviet trading system. The CEE economies, except for the Baltics, were less exposed to this shock. Russia was in a relatively favorable situation as its size meant that it was not very dependent on exports to other socialist economies. And as a large exporter of oil and gas, it obtained gains in terms of trade thanks to the transition to payments in hard currency on the part of its former satellites.

Over time, the differences in most initial conditions[29] declined in importance, and other determinants of growth came to the fore. A large body of empirical research shows that growth after socialism has been positively linked to the extent of accumulated market reforms: among others, economic reform, liberalization, privatization, tax reforms,[30] i.e., to the dynamics of the transition from socialism to capitalism. There is not to be found one single empirical investigation showing that under the comparable conditions smaller market reforms have led to a superior growth performance than greater reforms.

Against this background the huge literature on “shock therapy” versus “gradualism” with respect to the economic strategy after socialism has to be mentioned. Much of this literature is of no analytical value as the very terms “shock therapy” and “gradualism” are so imprecise that they fail to express the true intellectual and practical problems that the policy-makers after socialism faced, i.e., the timing of the start and the speed of implementation of the respective reforms or, in other words, what the optimal packages of reforms were, given the initial conditions in post-socialist countries.[31] Besides, the very term “shock” is emotionally loaded and was interpreted by more naïve observers as denoting that something bad was happening to people after the collapse of socialism. To prefer “gradualism” to “shock therapy” on these grounds is akin to assuming that slow medical treatment is better than fast medical treatment, regardless of the disease that the patient suffers from.

More sophisticated critics of “shock therapy” assumed that radical economic reforms would cause riots and thus undermine the democratization process. They completely disregarded the conditions of “extraordinary politics” that originated after the fall of socialism in most countries. Given the external liberation and the economic crisis, as well as the fact that the political forces of the ancient regime were in disarray while the new forces were still united, special psycho-social and institutional conditions appeared after the collapse of socialism, making radical measures more acceptable to the wider public than during the “normal” times.

The period of “extraordinary politics” is unavoidably short and this is why one uses this gift of history when one reforms the country on a broad front and at rapid speed. However, not only psychosocial factors called for radical reforms. The logic of the socialist system is such that it could not have been successfully reformed slowly or in small pieces.[32] A “gradualist” strategy of reforms was not only bound to waste the period of extraordinary politics, in addition, it risked falling below the threshold of the necessary reforms, thus delaying the improvement of the economy. And this could have undermined – via the ensuing frustration of the society – the democratization process.

Finally, partial reforms, especially an incomplete economic liberalization, gave the arbitrary control of entry into market to political rulers and public bureaucracy, thus creating a system replete with “rent-seeking”.[33] Such a regime is not only less efficient and dynamic than an entrepreneurial capitalism resulting from radical and comprehensive reforms, but it is also resistant to further change.

To sum up, even before the start of the transition there were powerful arguments in favor of radical and comprehensive market reforms after socialism, and the subsequent experience and research have, in my view, validated these arguments.

Market reforms release what can be called the systemic forces of growth (profit motive, competition, and innovations), forces that operate during long periods or all the time, though with varying intensity.[34] The long-run growth is also affected by external and domestic shocks that produce the breakdowns in growth. Therefore, the differences in the incidence or seriousness of such shocks also influence the long-term developments and the level of income. And such differences occurred in the post-socialist countries, especially during the recent global financial crisis that started in 2008. In general, smaller economies (e.g., the Baltics, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary) and countries dependent on the production and exports of commodities (Russia, Ukraine) suffered a deeper trade shock than a relatively large and diversified economy like Poland. Booms were turn into busts and into the resulting recessions. The global economic crisis precipitated and deepened these recessions. The domestic imbalances were much more extensive in Hungary (fiscal) and in the Baltics, Ukraine and Russia (credit booms) than in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Large differences in trade shocks and in the size of domestic macroeconomic imbalances largely explain a large variation of the GDP dynamic during the recent crisis. In the third quarter of 2010, it ranged from −19 in Latvia, −16 in Estonia, −14 in Lithuania, and −7 in Hungary to +1 percent in Poland (Eurostat).

To sum up, radical and sustained market reforms as well as disciplined macroeconomic policies are important and indispensable factors for rapid economic growth in the post-socialist countries (and elsewhere). The reverse combination: slow or hesitant reforms and persistently expansionary macroeconomic policies can only produce divergence vis-à-vis the richer economies. Some post-socialist countries, e.g., the Baltics or Hungary, have introduced many market reforms, but were hit by external or domestic shocks. One should not blame these reforms for the effects of such shocks, which resulted partly from objective factors and partly from public policy failures.

Let us finally turn to the differences in the non-economic outcomes. This issue has been investigated much less than the variation of growth in the post-socialist world. It can be shown, however, that some crucial factors conducive to economic growth have been also conducive to non-economic outcomes. For example, market reforms increased economic efficiency, including in the use of energy and raw materials, and have contributed to a reduction in environmental pollution. They have also led the reduction in the relative size of the most polluting sectors (mining, heavy industry). The separation of enterprises from state via their privatization and the introduction of rule of law helped the enforcement of ecological regulations. Different health development can also be largely linked to economic reforms. For example, economic liberalization has made the more healthy foodstuffs relatively cheaper and more available.[35]

Conclusion: the financial crisis as a crisis of thought?

The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe has been followed by huge variations of economic and non-economic outcomes. Countries of the former Soviet bloc have sharply diverged with respect to GDP growth, inflation, inflows of FDI, as well as regarding the economy’s impact on environment, wealth and income inequality. With regard to the most important type of economic outcome, economic growth, there is a substantial empirical literature that shows that it is positively related to the extent of accumulated market reforms. At the same time there is no empirical investigation that would show that a lower scope of market reforms after socialism has led, under comparable conditions, to faster economic growth. Against this background it is difficult to find much analytical value in the massive literature that discussed the merits of “shock therapy” versus “gradualism”. It can also be shown that the growth performance of the post-socialist economies has also depended on the incidence and seriousness of the external and domestic shocks, the latter resulting from the failures of macroeconomic policies. Finally, market reforms have contributed to the ecological and health improvements in the post-socialist countries via increased energy efficiency of the economy, and greater availability and lower relative prices of more healthy foodstuffs.

Some 20 years after 1989 the question has been asked: Should the recent international financial and economic crisis lead us to reconsider the assumptions on which the post-1989 economic reforms were conceived and implemented in East-Central Europe? Some have jumped to such conclusions and here is why they should be resisted. Starting with the terms we use to discuss the current crisis.

The term “economic crisis” is usually associated with markets and capitalism. However, the biggest crises and economic downfalls occur in systems where political power (i.e., the state) is either unlimited or only feebly limited, and where – as was the case in pre-1989 Eastern Europe – the private sector and the free market had been entirely or in a large part eliminated.

Socialist systems are an extreme case in point. There are no institutional limitations to political power; separation of powers does not exist; in addition, because of the monopolistic nature of state property, political and economic powers are intermingled. Every time such extended political power falls into the hands of murderous, careless or incompetent individuals, their decisions lead to profound economic breakdowns, with often tragic consequences. In the most drastic cases, they have resulted in humanitarian and economic disasters, such as the Stalinist collectivization of agriculture in the USSR of the 1930s, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Other examples of such “political and economical adventurism”, from the forced cultivation of corn by Khrushchev in the USSR and of sugar cane by Castro in Cuba, to Gierek’s and Ceausescu’s pushing Poland and Romania into the trap of foreign debt, may be less severe but nonetheless, wasteful and painful from an economic point of view.

Quasi-socialist systems characterized by a large state sector and an under-sized public sector, although recently abandoned by many Latin American countries, still persist in Iran and other oil-producing countries; Chavez’s Venezuela is about to fall into this category. In these cases as well, the vast realm of political-economic power frequently translates into economic policies leading to deep economic predicaments.

A number of countries considered as capitalist, such as Indonesia under Suharto, maintain what can be described as “crony capitalism”, characterized by a dominating private sector controlled by a privileged minority and, consequently, with a discriminated majority. The former, through family relations or other types of relationships, is connected to the ruling political elite and benefits from better administrative or legal protection, state concessions, etc. By the very existence of such connections, the privileged minority has access to convenient financing conditions by capital markets, which operate under the supposition that the state will in any case guarantee the credits (i.e., a lesser risk premium). This leads to excessive private debt and, ultimately, to a crisis.

In all the above-mentioned systems, albeit on a different scale, unlimited or only partially limited political power not only generates the risks of serious economic downfalls, but also eliminates or weakens fundamental systemic forces of development, including free market competition and – most importantly-economic innovation.

Even in Western-type capitalist economies (represented by OECD countries) serious crises and economic breakdowns do not occur because of the free market, but for political reasons. Here, I have in mind two particular categories: fiscal crises and crises within “socialist enclaves”.

Fiscal crises are generally provoked by a long-lasting expansion of budgetary spending leading to an increase of public debt, which – often suddenly – rises above a certain security limit. Hungary and Greece are examples of this quite sizeable group of countries. A rapid increase of public debt is also a side effect of a financial crisis (see below) and of anti-crisis policies aimed at lowering the consequences of a recession.

But a fiscal crisis is not the only risk generated by a growing budgetary spending/GDP ratio. In addition, particularly in the case of a significant increase in social expenditures, a systematic “development brake” can be observed. Social expenditures frequently limit labor supply and (together with budget deficits) restrain the size of national savings, which in turn reduces investment and generates a stronger demand for international capital. The latter, in particular when taking the form of credits and occurring in relatively heavy doses, can become a supplementary reason for economic instability. In addition, increasing budgetary spending usually leads to higher taxes and contributes to the slowing down of economic growth.

Crises within “socialist enclaves” concern economic sectors either formally (through state ownership) or informally linked to political power. Their most recent examples – out of a long list – are the German regional banks (Landesbanken) and the Spanish cajas (both cases are similar because of their ownership structure dominated by regional governments) on the one hand. Of course, privately owned banks are not immune to crises. But not everyone is aware of the basic fact that, more often than not, crises occur when banks are either excessively dependent upon political power or fall victims to inadequate public interventions. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, most crises within “socialist enclaves” are not due to the flaws of capitalism but rather to the acts (and the failure to act) of the governments.

Capitalist financial crises are probably the most misinterpreted and the most misunderstood of all. They begin in the financial sector and – through a chain of processes – spread over the rest of the economy of a given country or, when happening in globally important economies such as that of the United States, over the whole world. In modern history, such a global financial and economic crisis has occurred only twice, in the 1930s and in 2008–2009.

Even though the pre- World War II turmoil was far more intense and more worrisome than the most recent one, both crises have generated a series of misleading interpretations:

•  A crisis of capitalism. However, this statement does not distinguish between crisis “within capitalism” and “crisis of capitalism” (i.e., of private property and of the market). In addition, it presupposes – without convincing evidence – that the deep causes of the crisis are due to the private sector.

•  A crisis of “neoliberalism” – a term used with a pejorative slant, like the word “bourgeois” during socialist times, but can hardly be a substitute to explanations.

•  A crisis resulting from greed. But then again, does it refer to a moral weakness of specific people, or a flaw in their behavior? In any case, this neither explains the origin of these weaknesses and flaws nor does it elucidate why serious and global crises in capitalist economies remain rare. Altogether, this approach seems closer to preaching than to a genuine analysis.

“A crisis generated in the financial sector with causes to be sought in the failings of global finance”: This hypothesis is as pertinent as saying that the cold originates in the nose because a running nose is a symptom of the cold. What triggers a financial crisis? In what way does a financial crisis lead to a recession? Why does the duration of an economic slow-down vary from one country to another? Why can they continue over several years, as was the case in the United States and in France in the 1930s or in Japan between the 1980s and the 1990s?

In most cases, a credit “boom”, i.e., a significant rapid increase in borrowing by households and businesses ends up beyond a security limit, precedes a financial crisis and, eventually, leads to a recession. Studies suggest that the most destructive credit “booms” are those accompanied by a significant growth of asset prices, in particular real estate. Research in the economic history of the last 200 years tends to show that the deep-rooted causes of financial crises reside in the excessive interventionism of public authorities, which in several ways subsidize risk-taking by the private sector and/or distort the discipline of the market. People react to stimuli; when these are flawed, they in turn lead to flawed behaviors – as is clearly demonstrated under socialist regimes.

A serious analysis of the current crisis should be based on a comparative approach and looking at contemporary events against the background and in the light of previous historic examples. It must focus on the essential question: What can we learn from the previous cases of public bailing out of large financial companies, which led to their excessive development being known as “too big to fail”? In this way governments became hostages of their own misguided policies.

A series of mistaken interventionist measures contributed to the blunders made by the leadership of some major financial companies, such as the so-called “search for yield”. This does not mean, of course, that they are not to blame. However, from both an analytical and a practical point of view, blaming is not enough – it is also necessary to define what the incidence of these mistakes depends on. This, in turn, leads us back to the question of public intervention. Recession mechanisms put in motion by a crushing credit “boom” cannot be stopped. An anti-crisis policy can only, at the very most, soothe their effects, while at the same time generating additional costs and jeopardizing economic growth over a longer period. This is particularly true in the case of expansive fiscal policies stepping beyond the action of the so-called automatic stabilizers. The question of the costs and the threats generated by a lax monetary policy remains open.

Extensive research is being devoted to another fundamental problem: why, in some cases, can the economic slowdown following the burst of the credit “boom” extend over several years? Some recent works strongly suggest that the main sources of this phenomenon are to be found in various combinations of mistaken public interventions. Contrary to anti-capitalist orthodoxy, a free market creates neither excessively strong “booms” nor long-lasting economic slowdowns. In both cases, a close analysis reveals the role of the (often invisible) hand of political power.

In no way has the crisis of the years 2008–2009 (or, for that matter, the earlier ones) put into question any important empirical findings related to the determinants of economic growth. It could, however, result in a prolonged weakening of such growth because of political reasons, if decision-makers or/and a significant part of the public opinion give in to false interpretations and assumptions about the nature and the reasons of the crisis. This is why it is so crucially important to publicly oppose these deceptive and superficial explanations.

It is therefore essential to clarify the following:

•  Private property, when separated from politics, is definitely better for economic development than public or “political–private” ownership. This applies as well, and with full strength, to banks. The recent crisis has taught us nothing new. On the contrary, it has confirmed previous warnings (for example by the World Bank) about the effects of the formal or informal influence of politics on the banking system. Therefore, a responsible stress-testing of financial institutions should include risks linked to their vulnerability to political influence, including direct or indirect state ownership.

•  Long term, the supremacy of state or “political-private” ownership can only lead to stagnation and expose a country to the risk of serious economic hardship. To secure economic growth, it is therefore of utmost importance to make a clear distinction between state property on the one hand, and private property immune to any kind of political influence, on the other hand. Opposing national to foreign ownership does not make much sense. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever that the crisis of 2008–2009 has changed anything in this respect.

•  Free market competition remains the best means to guarantee innovation as well as economic efficiency and development.

•  Free from excessive regulation, and therefore elastic, markets, in particular the labor market, are essential for two important reasons: first, they allow for a swifter adaptation of the economy to new challenges; second, they reduce the recessionist effects of internal or external disturbances.

•  High levels of budgetary spending and, consequently, high taxes are a systemic constraint to economic growth. In the early stages of their economic development, wealthy Western countries had to deal with a far lighter fiscal and social burden than countries such as Poland today. Similarly, all contemporary “economic tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Chili, even Ireland between 1990 and 2007) followed a much looser tax policy than Poland.

Restraining and controlling the interventionist powers of the state remains necessary in order to secure economic freedom, market competition and stimulate growth. The contribution of the state can be useful and valuable when exerted in its own domain of action: first and foremost, legislating (hopefully, not too much …) and enforcing the law. Such a reading of the lessons of the recent crisis vindicates rather than challenges the assumptions and legacies of post-1989 economic reforms in East-Central Europe.

Notes

1  L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995, pp. 4–5.

2  L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Systems and Economic Growth”, in: A. Åslund and M. Dabrowski (eds), Challenges of Globalization: Imbalances and Growth, Washington: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2008, pp. 153–199.

3  A. Åslund, How the Capitalism was built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

4  L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Change After Socialism and the Rule of Law”, Hague Journal on the Rule of Law 1, September 2009.

5  I leave aside in this chapter the former Yugoslavia.

6  For example, Poland introduced a constitutional court, the administrative courts and the institution of the ombudsman before the political breakthrough in 1989. However, these innovations were truly “activated” only after the breakthrough in 1989.

7  J. Elster and C. Offe, Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 81.

8  L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Change after Socialism and the Rule of Law”.

9  By functional necessities I mean the necessary links between various institutional arrangements. One can compare them to the gravitation forces. The opposite of functional necessities are structural incompatibilities, between certain institutional structures, e.g., between socialism and democracy.

10  The nominal socialist legal framework contained also some liberty rights that were, however, a decoration while lower-order prohibitions were really binding. These “decorative” parts of a legal framework were characteristic of socialism; sometimes they fooled the naïve Western observers. Besides the repression included not only the criminal law but also the use of rewards and sanctions contained in the vast state distribution of goods such as apartments, consumer durables, or access to higher education.

11  The “normal” repression apparatus and the justice systems, i.e., police, prosecutors and courts, that were to deal with conventional crimes could be also used (and were used) to prosecute “socialist” crimes.

12  L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation. While no prominent economist has praised private monopolies, some prominent economists, e.g., J. Schumpeter, were convinced of the possible good economic performance of a centrally planned economy despite its extreme monopolization. They either believed that public monopolies would perform better than private ones or that central planning would somehow compensate for the inefficiencies of monopolization. Needless to say, both assumptions were hopelessly wrong. J. Schumpeter, Socialism, Capitalism, Democracy, New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

13  J. Kornai, Economics of Shortage, Amsterdam: North Holland, 1980. L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Change after Socialism and the Rule of Law”.

14  However, the socialist economy hampered the growth of per capita income relative to that of a reasonably efficient capitalist one. Therefore if both started from the same level of income per capita, the latter would after a while spend more – in absolute terms – on education and health than the former.

15  L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Systems and Economic Growth”.

16  T.W. Wing “The Experimentalist Convergence Debate on Interpreting China’s Economic Growth: A Cross Country Perspective”, in: L. Balcerowicz and S. Fisher, eds, Living standards and the Wealth of Nations: Successes and Failures in Real Convergence, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 73–114.

17  A. Windbeck, The Political Economy of the New Left, New York: Harper and Row, 1997.

18  For a skeptical note on Georgia’s democracy under Saakashvili see: C.H. Fairbanks, “Georgia’s Soviet Legacy”, Journal of Democracy 21, 1, 2010, pp. 144–151.

19  Another type of politicized ownership is the state one. In this case the ultimate decision-making power with respect to companies legally belongs to the political rulers and the public administration.

20  Courts in both types of political regimes also differ in their efficiency and in the extent of corruption. L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Change after Socialism and the Rule of Law”.

21  L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation.

22

In most of the contemporary literature in sociology and political science that deals with the determinants of democracy or of other valued things, “the state” is front and center. It is wise or bumbling, but in any case the decisive-coordinator of economic agents, director of societal forces, shaper of social action, agent of accumulation, and all-round master of ceremonies…. The notion that the best thing that the state can do for democracy is to ensure private economic actors, freedom of action and otherwise get out of the way is widely regarded as the possession of a narrow fringe consisting of Milton Friedman, Jack Kamp, and Francis Fukuyama.

(M.S. Fish, “Economic Policy Doctrine and Political Regime”, in: N.F. Campos and F.J. Frdimuc, (eds), Political Economy of Transition and Development: Institutions, Politics and Policies, Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, 2003, p. 198)

23  There is an expectation that the long-lasting development of capitalism would create more and more people independent in their professional life from the state and more and more interested in participating in the government of the country (“the middle class”). While it is difficult to tell how long this process will take and its outcome is not certain, it is true that the development of capitalism is the best hope for democracy in China and other non-democratic regimes (as well as for the continued improvements in the standard of living). The relapse into etatism would weaken both the chances for democracy and for further economic growth.

24  L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation. A. Åslund and M. Dabrowski (eds), Challenges of Globalization. Imbalances and Growth, Washington: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2008.

25  In this respect the income inequality (or more generally, inequality of situation) sharply differs from the inequality of opportunities: most people agree in the modern world most people in the modern world agree with the ideal of equal opportunity. There is no such ideal with respect to the inequality of income.

26  L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Systems and Economic Growth”.

27  L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation. R. Scott and J.F.M. Swinnen, “Success and Failure of Reform. Insights from the Transition in Agriculture”, Journal of Economic Literature 42, June 2004, pp. 404–456.

28  In addition, China could have achieved higher growth than the socialist countries in Europe because it was initially much poorer.

29  The inherited conditions that persist and can have a lasting importance include large differences in location (small landlocked economies versus countries with an easy access to developed countries) and the role of natural resources. Economies dominated by natural riches may experience difficulties because of various economic and political mechanisms.

30  See, for example: T. Beck and L. Laeven, “Institution Building and Growth in Transition Economies”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 3657, July, 2005; S. Polanec, “Convergence at Last? Evidence from Transition Countries”, LICOS Discussion Papers 14404, 2004, LICOS – Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, K.U. Leuven; E. Falcetti, T. Lysenko and P. Sanfey, “Reforms and Growth in Transition: Re-examining the Evidence”, Journal of Comparative Economics 34, December 2006, pp. 421–445; A. Åslund and M. Dabrowski (eds), Challenges of Globalization.

31  L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation.

32  I have analyzed elsewhere at greater length the political, economic and psychological arguments for radical reforms after socialism. L. Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation.

33  F. Coricelli, “Economic and Political Reforms in Transition Countries: A Tale of Success and Failure”, Club of Madrid Expert Paper, 2005. J.S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transition”, World Politics 50, January 2008 pp. 203–234.

34  L. Balcerowicz, “Institutional Systems and Economic Growth”.

35  L. Balcerowicz, “Economic Forces and Health”, Dialogue and Universalism 8, 1998.

12  The political economy of post-1989 capitalism in East-Central Europe

Claus Offe

The demise of state socialism, made definitive by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, has given rise to an entirely novel type of political economy, characterized by the sudden political creation of a private economy. Let us call it post-socialist capitalism. In this chapter, I discuss four questions concerning this new animal. First, what was the context of the birth of post-socialist capitalism that shaped its main features? Second, how has it performed in economic terms over the 20 years of its operation? Third, how do people living under post-socialist capitalism evaluate its dynamics and results? Finally, what are the major trends and associated frictions in the institutional development and political dynamics of post-socialist capitalism?

1 The emergence of post-socialist capitalism and its distinctive features

Prior to 1989, the economic system of state socialist industrial societies was governed and administered in virtually every detail (production, investment, prices, wages, location, marketing, finance, etc.) by a state apparatus that was itself under the control of the monopolistic party. This tight coupling of the economy to the polity implied that when the party lost its monopolistic power the economy largely collapsed and found itself in a veritable “state of nature” – an initially virtually unruly condition that in the early nineties was described by contemporary observers as “grab-and-run-capitalism”. The emerging post-communist political elites largely agreed on two points. First, what was urgently needed was the introduction of a market-based economic order that was to be erected along the three trajectories of the privatization of property, the liberalization of prices, and fiscal stabilization. Second, this rebuilding of the economy must take place rapidly (originally widely conceived of as a “short sharp shock”, or an act of jumpstarting the economy) so as to preclude the interference of the disintegrating forces of the old regime as well as the emerging political forces of the new one. In other words, capitalism as a fait accompli must be in place before democratic politics sets in and might start to interfere with it. In reality, however, building a viable form of capitalism turned out to be a very time consuming project to complete, with the external force of the EU and the conditions it imposed upon prospective members being an important driving force. Capitalism had to be built from scratch, and in a particularly “naked” way – meaning that the builders had to work without the institutional shell in which production and distribution are “embedded” in the capitalist democracies of the OECD world. Instead, the initial years of post-socialist capitalism were spent in the absence of codes of civil law and labor law, a clearly defined banking system, institutions for the generation of managerial and vocational skills, regulatory law and supervisory institutions, etc. Perhaps most importantly, capitalism had to be built without a capitalist class of entrepreneurs and business interest associations being present as the driving force of transformation. (All this was of course different in the very special case of the GDR where institutions already in use in West Germany were instantaneously transplanted from West to East in the process of unification. Yet in both cases, the strategic initiative of designing the new economic system was not left to the nascent capitalist agents within the economy, but seized by the top civil servants, experts, converted managers and functionaries, foreign advisors, spokespeople of ad hoc committees, etc.)

Many of the designers and founding fathers of post-socialist capitalism viewed the economic system to be created as one that was to be governed by unfettered profit-seeking in largely unregulated markets. They thus made a virtue out of the necessity that resulted from the virtual absence of a coherent regulatory regime serving as an institutional shell of the economy. In doing so, it sometimes seems that the founding fathers, inspired as they were by the slogans of Reaganite and Thatcherite rhetoric, adopted the epistemic legacy of Marxism–Leninism text books, which depicted capitalism as ruthless and unruly profit-making; while they had reversed the evaluative perspective by 180 degrees, the shrill tone of doctrinaire orthodoxy continued to make itself heard. There is also another continuity across the rupture of 1989: Vast and functionally essential unofficial deals, favors, privileges, and networks of cooperation and personal influence were facts of economic life under state socialism. The economy of post-socialist capitalism, too, relies until the present day and to a much greater extent than in Western Europe on an “informal sector” (see Table 12.1), where production remains untaxed and unregulated, labor is unprotected, and political corruption remains a major challenge in at least some of the post-socialist capitalist polities and societies.

Yet it must also be said that in the course of the 20 years since post-socialist capitalism emerged, a largely “normal” institutional framework of continental democratic welfare capitalism began to evolve (if with large differences from country to country and generally with a greater degree of fragility), complete with trade unions, business associations, reformed health and pension systems, and reasonably stable patterns of territorial, functional, and sub-territorial representation and, above all, the essentials of the rule of law and constitutional democracy. In part, domestic political forces that have emerged in the region must clearly be credited with these accomplishments. But to a large extent they are also due to the consistent strategic efforts of external actors – most significantly the EU and its “conditionality” approach to the development of post-socialist capitalist polities and political economies. Note, however, that the leverage of conditionality is considerably weakened after the admission to EU membership. Other external actors who have shaped the developmental path of the polities and political economies of post-socialist capitalist countries (and not just the ten that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, respectively) include NATO, CoE, the World Bank, IMF, OSCE, ILO, as well as banks, media and NGO’s.

Table 12.1  Size of the informal sector

Country

Shadow economy (in percentage of official GDP)

1999–2000

2001–2002

2002–2003

Czech Republic

19.1

19.6

20.1

Estonia

38.4

39.2

40.1

Hungary

25.1

25.7

26.2

Latvia

39.9

40.7

41.3

Lithuania

30.3

31.4

32.6

Poland

27.6

28.2

28.9

Slovakia

18.9

19.3

20.2

Slovenia

27.1

28.3

29.4

Average

28.3

29.0

29.9

Germany

16.0

16.3

16.8

Source: Schneider, (2004: 26, 30); own compilation and calculations.

However, with so much of their institutional, as well as economic development being due to strategic initiatives of actors external to the post-socialist EU-10, these economies are – and are bound to remain – strongly dependent economies. They depend on EU transfers for their infrastructure development, on West European labor markets for the “export” of workers and the remittances they generate, on markets for consumer goods and, most importantly, on Western foreign direct investment (FDI) that is attracted by both significantly lower costs of labor and equally lower (and often flat) rates of direct taxation. Moreover, this economic dependency upon the EU-15 core economies is clearly an asymmetrical one, meaning that EU-10 economies (which largely remain, with the exception of Slovenia, Slovakia and, most recently, Estonia, outside of the Euro zone) are highly vulnerable, in terms of GDP and monetary stability, to repercussions of downturns in Western core economies. In contrast, the latter can well shield themselves against the economic malaise that that has affected not just the latecomers Bulgaria and Romania, but also cases such as Latvia and Hungary, which have become dependent upon IMF loans.

2 The economic performance of post-socialist capitalist countries

The problem of asymmetrical dependency within the EU-27 should not distract attention from the remarkable economic performance that occurred in the region after the sharp decline of GDP per capita that resulted from the transformation crisis had been overcome. In most countries this happened by the mid-1990s, although Bulgaria reached its 1990 GDP as late as 2008, while Poland had reached that goal as early as 1993 (see Figure 12.1).

Comparing the post-socialist capitalist “catch up” economies of EU-8 with the “mature” economies of (most of) EU-15, we see persistent gaps between the two groups of countries. Annual per capita growth averaged 4.0 percent in the EU-8 region (i.e., the post-socialist capitalist economies of the enlargement round of 2004) during the period 1995–2010, compared to a mere 1.8 percent in EU-15. The annual growth of labor productivity reached 4.2 percent (compared to 0.9 percent) and the consumption per capita grew by 4.3 percent, more than twice the 1.9 percent of the EU-15. On the other hand, and given the vast disparities of economic performance in the two regions before 1989, it seems safe to predict that we are presently more likely to be two generations than one away from the full equalization of economic performance of the two regions. Even if we, somewhat heroically, project annual growth rates of 2.5 percent in EU-8 and 1.5 percent in EU-15, the average GDP per capita will remain at about two-thirds of that achieved in EU-15 as far ahead as 2030 (see Table 12.2). These estimates of regional averages tend of course to distract from quite substantial intra-regional differences within the EU-10 group. Here, the clear champions are Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which suggests that factors of economic geography have a strong causal impact.

Figure 12.1  Average growth rates for the years 1990–2010.

We also need to take account of the fact that the post-socialist transformation economies were affected much more severely by the financial market crisis of 2008 than were most of the old EU member states.

As far as social expenditures and the fiscal capacity of welfare states are concerned, findings are quite in line with the familiar general rule: The higher the GDP per capita of a country, the higher the percentage of GDP that is being spent on “social affairs”, i.e., on health, disability, old age, family benefits, housing and social assistance. The total budgets comprising these welfare state budgets are about one-fifth of GDP in EU-8 and close to one-third in EU-15. This is – and is most likely to remain – so in spite of the fact that the “need” for welfare state transfers has clearly and massively grown in the societies of post-socialist capitalism. For one thing, the employment ratio has strongly decreased in all of them, and in some dramatically so; we can speak of high levels of labor force under-utilization (be it due to unemployment or to the large and growing informal sector) as a characteristic of post-socialist capitalism. For another, real wages for those in (formal) employment have dropped in the majority of countries (see Table 12.3), leaving relatively (and often absolutely) impoverished workers with a dependency upon welfare state transfers (or, failing that, dependency upon family resources). Like in EU-15 (though on a much lower absolute level), those most likely to be at risk of poverty are young workers, pensioners, single households, and single parents (Table 12.4).

Table 12.2  Prognosis for the development of the GDP per capita in the EU-8 in relation to the average GDP per capita in the EU-15

Country[*]

2003

2010

2020

2030

Average EU-8

0.51

0.55

0.60

0.66

Estonia

0.45

0.48

0.53

0.58

Latvia

0.42

0.45

0.49

0.54

Lithuania

0.42

0.45

0.50

0.55

Poland

0.42

0.45

0.50

0.55

Slovakia

0.47

0.50

0.55

0.61

Slovenia

0.71

0.76

0.83

0.92

Czech Republic

0.63

0.67

0.74

0.82

Hungary

0.56

0.60

0.66

0.73

Average EU-8

0.51

0.58

0.71

0.86

Estonia

0.45

0.51

0.62

0.76

Latvia

0.42

0.48

0.58

0.70

Lithuania

0.42

0.48

0.59

0.71

Poland

0.42

0.49

0.59

0.72

Slovakia

0.47

0.54

0.65

0.79

Slovenia

0.71

0.81

0.98

1.19

Czech Republic

0.63

0.72

0.88

1.07

Hungary

0.56

0.64

0.78

0.94

Source: Hönekopp et al., (2004: 5); own compilations, own calculations.

Note

* Assumed annual GDP growth of 2.5 percent in the EU-8 and 1.5 percent in the EU-15.

As for welfare state performance, there is another fairly widely generalizable rule: Welfare state expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) are the higher the stronger the role of social democratic parties in government. Ironically, while virtually all former Communist parties of the region have changed their name to something having to do with “social democracy”, “the Left”, or “democratic socialism”, the effect suggested by the above generalization seems to be much weaker in the post-socialist capitalism region than anywhere else in the world of capitalist democracies. For the data in Figure 12.2 suggest that even to the extent we have a left-of-center party in government in the post-socialist capitalism world, it does not boost social spending to the extent it does everywhere else – a deviation from the rule that turns out to apply to all of the EU-10 except Slovenia (which is exceptional in many other aspects as well, beginning with the fact that this country is the only one in EU-10 that never belonged to the Warsaw Pact and CMEA). One explanation of this failure of (nominally) social democratic forces to promote social spending may have to do with the mental and political legacies of state socialism and its lasting success in discrediting and eradicating left-egalitarian approaches and ambitions. Also it must be observed that the traditional social democratic emphasis on security redistribution and state-organized services (as well as on economic growth as their necessary fiscal prerequisite) does not have a counterpart in the region where virtually all “social democrats” have adopted neoliberal economic doctrines.

Table 12.3  Employment and wages

Table 12.4  At-risk-of poverty after social treasfers (2006) – 60 percent of median income threshold

Sources: Eurostat (2008). Structural indicators, online, available at: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/; Cerami (2008: 1089).

Figure 12.2  Social expenditure (as percentage of GDP) in 2006 and Social Democratic vs. Non-Leftist Party composition of government, 1991–2006 (source: Schmidt 2009)..

3 How (dis)satisfied are people with the results of the economic and political transformations that have taken place in their countries?

At least outside of the circles committed to neoliberal orthodoxy, there can be little controversy, I submit, over the following proposition: In order for a transformation to count as a successful accomplishment, it must be validated as such by the people affected by it. (This is, arguably, a lesson that was consistently ignored by the rulers of state socialism, as they routinely ignored and often severely repressed the voices of those who failed to appreciate actual developments under the regime as desirable and “progressive” ones.)

In order to answer the above question, I shall rely on the extensive survey that has been conducted by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and published under the title “Life in Transition” in 2007. This survey covers the entire region of post-socialist capitalism (subdivided into Central Europe and the Baltics (CEB), the Commonwealth of Independent States plus Mongolia (CIS+M), and South Eastern Europe including the Western Balkans (SEE). It also provides a detailed profile for each individual country. This broad scope of the survey across a vast variety of countries makes similarities among them all the more significant. The overall findings lead the authors to conclusions of a rather dramatic kind, such as “People across the region on average see themselves as worse off than before the transition” (p. 7) and “only 30 per cent believe that their household lives better today than in 1989” (p. 9).

The distribution of opinions across the social structure shows two consistent patterns everywhere. First, the younger respondents are, the more favorable is their assessment of the situation. This finding can be read as a lifecycle effect (the younger cohorts have not yet experienced the frustrations of the older ones) or as an inter-generational trend (those whose adult life began after the end of state socialism have adopted a more favorable attitude to post-socialist capitalism realities). Second and unsurprisingly, the better-off respondents are, the more favorable their assessment of the overall (not just their own) economic situation. Yet note that it is only in a minority of cases/countries that more than half of even the youngest and the best-off “agree or strongly agree” to favorable statements concerning the economic and political conditions in their country. (Figure 12.3) Of the three macro-regions compared, relative optimism is greatest in Central Europe and the Baltics (where general satisfaction with life reaches a record value of 62 percent, if only among those belonging to the highest income bracket) and lowest in South Eastern Europe. Relative majorities of respondents (more than a third) agree across regions that the highest priority for additional government spending is the area of health services.

Equally dramatic are views on the political system. In all three regions, between 60 and 70 percent of the respondents “disagree or strongly disagree” with the statement: “There is less corruption now than around 1989”. High levels of distrust are also indicated not only by people’s opinions about political institutions, but also by people’s “trust in society” as expressed in their opinion on whether people could be trusted before 1989 versus can people be trusted today; more than half of the respondents favor the first alternative, while a third or less are willing to trust others “today” (Figure 12.4). Given the choice of which public institutions they trust the most, a majority of respondents of all categories and across all regions respond (when asked in 2006) rather amazingly in favor of “the banks and the financial system” as the most trusted institutions. Findings like these allow the overall conclusion that, in the eyes of populations undergoing and affected by the transformations towards post-socialist capitalism, this transformation has so far been less than a consistently satisfactory success story; this remains true even if we interpret the more favorable attitudes of the younger cohorts as a reflection of their hopes in the medium term future.

4 Current trends, developments, and outcomes

After the logic of conditionality as it prevailed throughout the process of Eastern enlargement from 1993 to 2007 has largely declined and after, by implication, external political actors came to play a lesser role in Central and Eastern European affairs and developments, there are clearly two classes of member states within the EU-27. Ignoring here the one-and-a-half small Mediterranean islands (Malta and Greek Cyprus), a clear divide remains between the old and the new member states, the EU-15 and the EU-10. This divide is due to much more than the lasting differences in economic performance and the fact that most of the EU-15 belong to the Euro zone while most of the EU do not. On top of these economic realities, or so I wish to suggest here, a deep divide is due to the very different motives and strategic concerns both sides had for their respective efforts to accomplish “Eastern enlargement” (the Western perspective) or “accession” as it was perceived by the prospective new member states.

Figure 12.3  The economic situation in this country is better today than around 1989 (source: EBRD 2007, p. 20).

Figure 12.4  Trust in society (source: EBRD 2007, p. 26).

Starting with the old member states, the original motivations for striving for Eastern enlargement were of a primarily political nature, as the priority of the EU (as well as of NATO) around the mid-1990s consisted in helping to consolidate democracy and the rule of law in the Central and Eastern European region through conditionality, and thereby to “normalize” and stabilize the political development of the post-Communist European constitutional democracies through soft forms of outside control. The guiding assumption was that after the end of the Cold War, the historically contested regions of Central East Europe, together with those of the Baltics and South East Europe, must be assisted in transforming themselves into stable and prosperous regimes. For such regimes are unlikely to inflict upon their Western neighbors highly undesired externalities such as waves of refugee and labor migration, threats to international security or an alliance with/dependency on the Russian Federation. The prospect of Eastern enlargement and eventual accession was seen by the West as a means to incentivize the formation of liberal democratic regimes in those regions and to provide guarantees for their stability. Relative to these political concerns, the economic interest in rebuilding the post-socialist economies, tapping their labor resources, and thereby achieving growth in the West was clearly a subordinate consideration in promoting the EU Eastern enlargement which was rightly seen, from the beginning, as involving massive transfers of resources from West to East. In contrast, most of new member states, having just escaped from a tight and authoritarian form of supranational control, were rather reluctant and skeptical about “joining Europe” as a political project. Yet such skepticism was for the most part – and for the time being – trumped by the prospects of a post-socialist economic recovery that were based upon the expectation of free access (of goods and workers) to Western markets, the inflow of FDI into the region, and the claims to modernization subsidies that would come from the EU once a full membership status was achieved. If anything, doubts about the political desirability of “ever more closely integrating” in the EU at the expense of “national sovereignty rights” are being voiced ever more loudly by both elite elements of the new member states and growing rightist nationalist movements and parties.

Yet once the enlargement process was completed after 2004 and 2007, respectively, both sides experienced a wave of second thoughts. These consisted in the realization of failures and necessary sacrifices concerning the respective subordinate objectives. As for the old member states, their intended political gain of having stable and democratic Eastern neighbors was partly offset by the growing economic challenges originating from the region of the new member states. These challenges came in the form of the inflow of goods and labor and the outflow of investment and funds allocated out of EU budgets. These Western economic concerns were exacerbated when the idea of low flat rate taxes and the implied intra-EU tax competition began to spread among CEE governments. Similarly, and in a strictly reciprocal fashion, elites as well as non-elites of the new member states began to perceive and to develop concerns about the political costs of EU membership – costs that were framed in terms of losses of national autonomy and the need to comply with EU-wide rules and policies.

Thus both sides begin to perceive reasons to pose to themselves the question: Was the price we had to pay for the achievement of our respective primary objectives really worth paying?

Finally, and if we read a variety of indicators rightly that emerge in the newly integrated political economy of Europe, a third phase of regret and frustration may well become dominant as the dynamics of EU-27, as well as the global economic crisis, unfold. To put it bluntly: Both sides begin to see that what they actually received for paying that price is less than they had anticipated and hoped for. From an EU-15 point of view, this second disappointment relates to the fact that neither regime stability nor the liberal democratic consensus (nor, for that matter, a modern and reasonably corruption-free state structure, to say nothing about their willingness to join distinctively “European” projects of foreign and international security policies) has taken firm roots in the region. This disillusion is all the deeper as it comes with the realization that, after formal enlargement, the leverage of conditionality has largely been rendered inoperative.

Time will show whether and to what extent the second and third stage of this rather gloomy model will materialize. At any rate, and in order to defend and enhance their competitive advantage, most of the post-socialist new member states have introduced tax systems that sharply differ from those in EU-15 in both the level and (non-progressive, or “flat rate”) structure of direct taxes. As a consequence, top statutory personal income tax rates vary between 16 percent in Romania and 59 percent in Denmark (Figure 12.5), while the marginal corporate income tax ranges from 10 percent in Bulgaria to 38.7 percent in Germany, with all the post-socialist capitalist countries clustering below the EU-27 average (Figure 12.6). Such practices of virtual fiscal self-starvation of CEE governments deprive them of the resources needed to fund social security programs and combat widespread poverty. At the same time, and in order to maintain competitiveness in Western markets, wages in the new member states are far below of those in the old member states, a condition that precludes any prospect for a recovery that would be led not by exports, but by domestic demand.

These bleak economic conditions were one of two determinants of the striking instability of governments and other aspects of institutional politics in the region. The frequency of governments prematurely giving up and the length of time needed to form new ones, together with the “factitious, noisy, and prone to scandal” (Barysch 2005) nature of party competition in the region where the distinction between “enemy” and “opponent” often seems blurred, have become signature features of the shrill and confrontational style of post-Communist politics. The other characteristic of the political situation is the rise of non-institutional political forces – be it in the form of rightist populist new parties often focusing on issues of ethno-national (sometimes also religious) identity, or be it in the form of outright riots and political violence (e.g., against Roma minority in Hungary). Both share the features of being anti-liberal, anti-European, and demanding state-sponsored social protection.

Figure 12.5  Top statutory personal income tax rate. 2006 income, in % (source: European Commission, 2010, p. 8).

Figure 12.6  Adjusted top statutory corporate income tax rate. 2010 income, in % (source: European Commission 2010, p. 11).

Demands for social protection have a rational foundation in the actual distributional situation of those large parts of the population of post-Communist political economies who are clearly “transformation losers” and suffer from poverty and material precariousness. Another familiar rule-of-thumb applies here, as drastically illustrated by the cases of Romania, Bulgaria and Poland: The lower the per capita income, the more unequal is the actual income distribution (European Quality of Life Survey 2007). Another motivation behind populist politics of anti-establishment protest is, in addition to poverty and precariousness, the widely shared perception that the power holders of the official political system are self-serving, untrustworthy, corrupt, clientelistic and unable or unwilling to protect people from the repercussions of the economic crisis. For instance, the average score for “trust in government” declined by 12 percent in a period of a mere two years (from September 2007 to September 2009) to the value of 4.08 (on a scale of 10). It reached its lowest level (2.25) in Latvia, the country among the new member states that in the same period had to cut its public sector real wages, in an effort towards balancing the budget, by a record 30 to 35 percent. If unresolved distributional issues of income and social security on the one hand, and the distrust in political institutions and elites, on the other, form the motivational core of populist protest mobilization, additional ingredients and amplifiers consist in ethno-nationalist (anti-minority, in particular anti-Roma), religious (anti-liberal), and anti-European/anti-Western confrontational references, which in some cases (Poland and Czech Republic being the most prominent ones) are complemented by calls for ever more extensive “de-communization”.

The potential for this kind of populist mobilization, or so I wish to suggest, has largely grown immune to pressures for “normalization” exerted by the old member states – if only because quite a number of them (the Netherlands, France, Italy, Austria, Denmark) have shown symptoms of analogous types of populist mobilization. Rather than the old member states performing a corrective function through the practice of shaming and ostracism (as it was at least attempted in the Austrian case in 2000), it seems likely that a fertile soil is provided for further surges in populist anti-liberal and anti-European politics, under the conditions of the pan-European economic crisis, as it affects the post-Communist new member states more severely than the old ones. For in contrast to most of the EU-15, the EU-10 do not have the option to spend themselves out of the crisis. Instead, they must reduce public spending – be it because they have called in the IMF already (Latvia, Hungary) or in order to avoid a situation in which they would have to do so (Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania). Having adopted a growth model that is based on exports to Western markets premised upon cheap labor and low corporate taxes, Central and Eastern European economies are being hard hit by the decline in external demand.

Moreover, the space for expansive monetary policies is sharply limited for those outside the Euro-zone (i.e., all EU-10 except Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia) by the consideration that mortgages and consumer loans, which have been obtained by Latvians, Hungarians and Poles on a massive scale from foreign banks in Euro and Swiss francs, will become more expensive to service as a consequence of currency devaluation. Also, and in spite of the wage and tax incentives provided, a decline of foreign direct investment is taking place that is due to both cyclical and structural reasons (the latter having to do with the option investors enjoy to invest in places to the East of the region where labor costs are even lower). Nor is reliance on international bond markets an easy way out, due to the rising demand of old member states in capital markets and the crowding-out effect resulting from that demand. Finally, governments of old member states, given their own precarious fiscal condition, have evidently other priorities than assisting the new member states through additional transfers provided in the name of European solidarity, which to the extent it can be activated, seems to be focused, since 2010, on the precarious cases (GIPS: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) among Euro-zone members.

In conclusion, it seems fair to state that neither the “Western” objective of Eastern enlargement (namely that of establishing stable democratic regimes and defense allies in the region) nor the “Eastern” objective of EU accession (namely that of catching up with Western prosperity) is likely to be developed further under the present conditions of the European political economy. Instead, a new divide within Europe is emerging. The location of this divide coincides largely with the divide that was to be abolished by the new beginning of 1989 and its promise of the CEE countries’ “return to Europe”. At any rate, celebrations of that new beginning should be qualified by a realistic assessment of the apparent impasse into which it has led us so far.

References

Barysch, Katarina. 2005. “East versus West? The European Economic and Social Model after Enlargement” Essay, Centre for European Reform, London. Online, available at: www.cer.org.uk/pdf/essay_social_model_barysch_oct05.pdf, accessed January 2005.

Cerami, Alfio. 2008. “New Social Risks in Central and Eastern Europe”, Czech Sociological Review 44 (6): 1089–1110.

EBRD. 2007. Life in Transition: A Survey of People’s Experiences and Attitudes. Online, available at: www.ebrd.com.

European Commission. 2010. Taxation Trends in the European Union – Main Results. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Eurostat Statistical Books.

European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. 2009. Second European Quality of Life Survey 2007. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

Hoen, Herman W. 2011. “Crisis in Eastern Europe: The Downside of a Market Economy Revealed” European Review 19 (1): 31–41.

Höhnekopp, Elmar, Kristine Langenbücher and Ulrich Walwei. 2004. EU-Osterweiterung – Aufholprozeß mit Chancen und Risiken, IAB Kurzbericht, Ausgabe Nr. 12/12.10.2004, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt-und Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Nürnberg. Online, available at: http://doku.iab.de/kurzber/2004/kb1204.pdf.

Kornai János. 2010. “Liberté, ègaltié, Fraternité. Reflections on the Changes following the Collapse of Communism” European Review 18 (3): 379–398.

Schmidt, Manfred G. 2009. Political Parties and the Welfare State in Western Democracies and Post-Communist Countries. Conference Paper prepared for the ECPR Joint Sessions, Lisbon.

Schneider, F. 2004. “The Size of the Shadow Economies of 145 Countries all over the World: First Results over the Period 1999 to 2003”, IZA Discussion Paper no. 1431, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, Bonn. Online, available at: www.iza.org.

Schneider, Friedrich. 2009. “The Shadow Economy in Europe: Using Payment Systems to Combat the Shadow Economy”. Commissioned by AT Kearney.

Schimmelfennig, Frank and Ulrich Sedelmaier. 2004. “Governance by Conditionality: EU Rule Transfer to the Candidate Countries of Central and Eastern Europe” Journal of European Public Policy 11 (4): 661–679.

13  1989 and the advent of an authoritarian state capitalism in China

Jean-François Huchet

When, in December 2008, the Chinese government celebrated with great pomp the thirtieth anniversary of the launch of its economic reforms, it did not refer at all to the period from 4 June 1989 to the fourteenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 1992. The Chinese media and, more importantly, economic analyses produced in Chinese academic circles presented the economic reforms as a ‘long quiet river’. The reality is, however, very far removed from this non-conflictual, teleological, linear presentation. The political crisis produced by the student movement of spring 1989 and the collapse of the USSR had a profound impact on the direction of the economic reforms and the structuring of Chinese capitalism. Admittedly, a number of adjustment measures to the reforms put in place after 4 June 1989 would certainly have had to be adopted, even if the reformers had won out. And yet, other choices could have been preferred by the Chinese leaders. Those advocated, for example, by the former general secretary of the CCP; Zhao Zi-yang[1] in the autumn of 1987 at the thirteenth congress of the CCP hinted at a different line of development from that taken from summer 1989 onwards.[2] This is also the line argued by the MIT-based Chinese economist Huang Yasheng in a recent book analyzing the discontinuities between the 1980s and 1990s in terms of the political orientations of economic reforms.[3] In other words, the analysis of the impact of this period on the decisions taken by the leaders with regard to economic reform seems crucial for understanding the current face of Chinese capitalism.

We think the impact has made itself felt mainly in four fields, which we analyses in this chapter, that have constituted a large part of the program for the reform of the economic system, confirmed at the time of the fourteenth congress of the CCP in autumn 1992.

The first impact is felt in the leaders’ choice between maintaining state planning and developing the market. After some hesitations and some attempts by the conservatives to favor planning at the expense of the market, the market rapidly won out so far as the content of the reforms was concerned. The second impact came in the recentralizing of economic decision-making power in Beijing and the construction of a stronger, more structured central state in the economic field. The third impact concerns the restructuring of the public sector and the development of state intervention in the economy. Contrary to what happened in the former socialist countries of the USSR or Eastern Europe, the state has not greatly withdrawn from the economy. It has, admittedly, changed its mode of action, but it has remained the dominant economic actor via its control of the capital of the country’s large enterprises and a proactive industrial policy. Finally, the last – but not the least – impact relates to the management of labor (understood here as a factor of production). The destruction of the ‘iron rice bowl’,[4] the repression of workers’ demands, the pursuit of segregation between workers in the rural and urban milieus and the strengthening of the official trade unions constitute the main elements of a vast policy of authoritarian control over the world of work, desired by the Chinese leaders to promote the interests of capital (savings, investment, productivity) over those of labor (incomes, consumption).

These policies were all announced at the time of the fourteenth congress of the CCP in October 1992. Even though their implementation would be stretched out over the 1990s, their gestation period ran from summer 1989 to autumn 1992 in reaction to three important developments: the nature and impact of the economic reforms of the 1980s; the reforming ideas at the political and economic levels promoted (jointly or separately) by Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang,[5] and the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Choosing the market over the plan

On the political level, the decisions of the Chinese leaders were still reversible until 1991. Planning still played a central role in the urban economy. The whole organization of the state was still modelled on the Soviet Union with so-called ‘industrial’ ministries, a still omnipotent state planning commission, a mono-bank type of financial system and an organization of urban employment and social protection centered on the state enterprise model. It is, of course, impossible to rewrite history, but it would have been conceivable up to 1991 for the Chinese leaders to take their lead from the Hungarian example before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The leaders could have acted to keep the market in a minor role in the mode of regulation of commercial transactions, investments and production. And it was this question of the irreversibility of market processes that remained at the center of debates between reformist and conservative leaders throughout the 1980s.

The conservatives, highly critical of the role granted to the market since the mid-1980s, would attempt to roll back that development by according greater importance to the plan after 4 June 1989. Among the measures featured in the ‘Thirty-Nine Points’ adopted in November 1989, state enterprises saw their dominant role reaffirmed at the expense of the township and village enterprises of the rural zones, which were accused of engaging in unfair competition with state firms. The powerful state planning commission recovered all its prerogatives in terms of control of investment and the steering of the economy.

The primacy of the plan would, however, be short-lived. The definitive transition to a market economy returned very quickly to the center of political debate within the CCP. Apart from the question of the reversibility of the evolution of the way the economy functioned in the 1980s, it was actually the political impact of such a decision on the survival of the CCP that would be at the fore in the debates between leaders. The fall of Communism in the former USSR and in Eastern Europe would lead to conflicts and to the decision to cleave to the market as the privileged mode of transaction between economic agents. Deng Xiaoping established that it was impossible for China to follow a Brezhnevite strategy with regard to the Chinese economy. This was based on three arguments.

The first was demographic. If one adds in those demobilized from the army, the labor market had between 15 million and 18 million new entrants in the early 1990s, depending on the particular year chosen. Moreover, Deng was aware that the situation was going to continue to be unfavorable throughout the 1990s, as far as new entrants into the labor market were concerned. Worried about the potential consequences of a rise in unemployment for the regime’s political stability, Deng Xiaoping threw all his political weight into the battle and tipped the decision in favor of the market.[6] In his view, a planned, centralized system, even if it included a small proportion of market activity on its fringes, was incapable of coping with the coming demographic tidal wave.

The second argument relates to the intrinsic difficulty planned systems have in generating increases in what economists call the overall productivity of factors of production – particularly the productivity that is brought about by technological progress and improvement of the management of work organization. In particular, so long as enterprises at the heart of the industrial system remain in the grip of centralized planning, there is little chance that productivity increases will continue to maintain growth at a high rate. Now, the Chinese leaders were aware that the rural reforms that had taken place from the mid-1980s onwards were running out of steam. These reforms did not allow the state to mobilize a growing flow of financial resources from the rural areas to finance a high rate of capital accumulation in industry and maintain a high growth rate in the economy. The contribution of foreign capital was also insufficient at the time to guarantee a high rate of accumulation in Chinese industry. Faced with this essential incompatibility between productivity gains and planning, transition to a market economy was inescapable for a regime that needed to maintain a high growth rate in the economy.

The third argument is linked to the political advantages of a wider spread of mass consumption. The Chinese leaders would arrive at a political conclusion – still disputed during the second half of the 1980s – that it was necessary to provide the greater part of their population with access to mass consumption (even though, only a relatively small part of the population could in fact have such access at the time). Like the former East Germany, China was surrounded by countries and territories – such as Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea – that had very high rates of economic growth. It thus became increasingly urgent and politically inevitable for the Chinese population to be granted access to mass consumption. The desire to leave ‘poor socialism’ (pinkun shihuizhuyi) behind, which already formed part of Deng’s thinking in the 1980s, would win out once and for all across the whole of the CCP. In his view, if it could not provide more material wealth for the masses, socialism was in danger of falling into discredit. This finding was reinforced by the CCP’s need to find new forms of legitimacy among its urban population, who had been stung by the violent repression of the student movement in spring 1989. Nevertheless, the production of mass consumer goods and planning have never been comfortable bedfellows. Given this incompatibility, the market made for greater flexibility and offered more opportunities for the emergence of an industrial fabric capable of delivering the production of mass consumer goods.

Once the political decision was taken, the planning mechanisms would be quickly dismantled, proving that the market was already deeply rooted in the practices of enterprises. In 1995, the deregulation of prices, supplies and distribution was completed, leading to the pure and simple disappearance of the plan. Today, a little over 90 percent of retail prices in industry and over 80 percent of agricultural prices are set by the market.

This development has had an important psychological effect on economic agents. The death of planning marked the impossibility of going back on China’s economic options. While the 1980s were characterized by uncertainty with regard to the direction taken by economic reforms, the definitive transition to a market economy in the early 1990s spelled the end of socialism in economic affairs. During the 1980s the economic agents lived through the reforms with a feeling (well-founded if we observe what happened just after 4 June 1989) that they could end at any moment. This context of uncertainty encouraged the economic actors to pursue short-term – often commercial – profit, particularly by exploiting the differences between planned prices for inputs and (higher) market prices for outputs. The definitive transition to a market economy at the beginning of the 1990s reassured the economic actors about the irreversibility of the economic reforms and expanded their time-horizons where investment was concerned.

The centralization of economic power

The conservatives would, after 4 June 1989, point to administrative decentralization as the main reason for the worrying development of the state’s fiscal situation. State fiscal revenues as a proportion of GDP in fact began to fall rapidly from the early 1980s onwards and stood at merely 10.7 percent of GDP in 1993 (as against 31 percent in 1978; see Figure 13.1); in parallel with this, the proportion of tax receipts going to the central government represented only 22 percent of the total in 1994, as against 38 percent in 1984 and only 3.68 percent of GDP in 1992, as against 9.28 percent in 1984 (see Figure 13.2).

Decentralization also contributed to fragmenting the industrial fabric, producing enormous wastage of financial resources nationally. Every province and township attempted to stimulate investment within its area as much as possible. Many investments turned out to be unprofitable and enterprises encountered financial difficulties in repaying their bank loans. The problem of bad bank debts became really dangerous for the country’s economic equilibrium in the mid-1990s. However, as early as the beginning of the 1990s this had been clearly identified, and noted as sufficiently worrying by the CCP’s leaders that it could not be ignored.

More generally, decentralization had transformed economic relations into a massive round of bargaining, in which almost everything was negotiable:[7] the level of taxes paid by the provinces to Beijing; the investment authorizations granted by the various administrative bodies to enterprises; the repayment of bank credit by public enterprises; not forgetting the investments of the People’s Liberation Army in civilian activities that were, to say the least, far removed from their areas of competence. The disintegration of the hierarchy found in Soviet-style centralized planning systems had become a subject of major worry for the conservatives. It was, in their view, the main reason for the growth of corruption and the collapse of socialist morality among many of the CCP’s cadres. At the time, the CCP’s magazine the Red Flag stressed the destructive influence of the market and decentralization on the morality of the CCP’s cadres: ‘they think of ideals as distant, of politics as useless. By contrast, cash is something very real’.[8]

In other words, from the mid-1980s onwards, where the conservatives were concerned, the decentralization process (and the process of market expansion, the two being indissociable in their minds) had gone too far. The collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe would reinforce this analysis.

As with the transition to the market economy, the centralization of economic power was to occur in two phases. In a first phase, the most conservative elements of the CCP, who had taken over the reins of power after 4 June 1989, were to rely on planning and the return to greater Socialist orthodoxy to achieve the centralization of economic decision-making. Nevertheless, the victory of Deng over the conservatives and the abandonment of planning at the point when the working document for the CCP’s fourteenth congress was being prepared in 1992 would push the leaders into a compromise and into exploring other avenues. Centralization plans were thus directed towards three areas: taxation, the banking system and the control of the capital of large-scale enterprises.

Figure 13.1  Fiscal revenues (center and provinces) as a percentage of GDP (source: Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian (China Statistical Yearbook) 2009, Beijing, 2009, p. 263).

Note

Recettes fiscales = Tax receipts/GDP (in %).

The fiscal reform that would emerge at the beginning of 1994 drew, in part, on a project formulated in 1984, based on the principle of the ‘system of the sharing of fiscal revenues’ (between the center and the provinces). In the months preceding the reform of 1 January 1994, the central state announced that it wished, after a number of years, to have available to it 60 percent of the tax income, whereas on the eve of reform it was the provinces that held almost 70 percent of tax receipts (excluding extra-budgetary funds). Moreover, in order to control the expenditure of the local administrations, the central government decided to budgetize (partly to its advantage) or eliminate the so-called extra-budgetary revenues raised in a totally anarchic way by the local administrations – revenues that did not appear in their budgets.

The outcomes of the tax reform of 1994 partly attained their objectives for the central government. So far as the increase in fiscal revenues was concerned, and their rebalancing to the advantage of the central government, the outcomes of the reform were positive. The annual average rise in tax revenues between 1994 and 2008 was 20.8 percent,[9] an increase superior to the rate of growth of the economy – which was not the case, as we saw, in the 1980s. In 2008, as is indicated by Figure 13.1, fiscal receipts had risen again to almost 20 percent of GDP. Moreover, the central state’s share has, since the beginning of the reform, stabilized at around 53–54 percent of total receipts, thus showing a rapid rebalancing in favor of Beijing (see Figure 13.2).

The governance of local public finances nevertheless still remains largely problematic, with a poorly managed use of land and of the commercialization of public goods. If the influence of local government and state enterprises on the decision-making of the banks at the local level is also taken into account, the central government still sees much of the expenditure of the local administrations slipping from its control. It is forced, in a cat-and-mouse game, to resort to all kinds of administrative means that complete the edifice of devolution/centralization it has put in place with its fiscal reform to regulate that expenditure. A new major reform of local finances – finding the right balance between devolution and centralization that provides local administrations with the resources to finance their policies, while controlling the use of extrabudgetary revenues – will very certainly be necessary in the near future.

In parallel with the centralization of the tax system, the Chinese leaders have also introduced a series of reforms aimed at recovering control of the funding circuits of enterprise investment, and particularly of the banking system which, at the time, constituted the main way that firms were externally financed.

Figure 13.2  The percentage of tax receipts going respectively to the central state and to the local administrations (source: Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian (China Statistical Yearbook) 2009, Beijing, 2009, p. 263).

Without going into detail on all the reforms of the banking system introduced since 1992, many of these targeted both the links between local bureaucracies and the banks, on the one hand, and those between state enterprises and the banks, on the other. As with fiscal reform, the outcome of all these measures has been quite mixed. The big state banks, which were in a situation that many experts described as ‘virtual bankruptcy’ at the end of the 1990s, have stabilized their positions with assistance from the state. The pressure exerted by the central authorities on the state banks to improve their balance sheets has also led to a decrease in the level of credit granted to insolvent enterprises or for poorly prepared investment projects. The situation has improved generally, then, by comparison with the early 1990s.

Nevertheless, the umbilical cord between the state enterprises and the banks has not been totally cut. Even today, public companies still remain the main beneficiaries of bank credit. Moreover, as far as relations between local administrations and the banks are concerned, the local directors of the big public commercial banks have not become totally independent of the pressures and influence of local leaders. This is particularly the case during periods when monetary policy has been relaxed. Generally, the highest possible level of growth without inflation and an unemployment rate that ensures the social and political stability of the country are the two main political and economic objectives at Beijing. In this context, local political and economic systems also remain fundamentally oriented towards the highest possible GDP growth. From this standpoint, the 2008 plan to restimulate the economy revealed the limits of the centralization of the banks’ decision-making circuits and of their independence vis-à-vis the political authorities.

The CCP’S control of major enterprises

One of the most significant impacts of the domestic political crisis of 1989 and the collapse of Communism will have been the maintenance of CCP control of the major national enterprises. This question was already beginning to divide the CCP in the late 1980s. At the time of the thirteenth congress in 1987, Zhao Ziyang had proposed the CCP’s withdrawal from the management of enterprises. Many conservatives opposed to this idea had seen it as the beginning of a vast privatization program in China. It is difficult to know whether Zhao would really have pushed economic reform in this direction if he had remained in power. The post-socialist experiences of the countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe indicate that, at least at the intellectual level (the reality having been different in several countries), privatization programs were indissociable from the transition to democracy, which included, among other things, the redistribution of the state’s assets to the people. The fact remains that much had been written about the reform of ownership since the mid-1980s. Part of the reformist camp had clearly identified the maintenance of public ownership as the chief obstacle to economic reform. Moreover, Zhao’s proposals on the separation of the CCP from the management of enterprises had been roundly criticized by Chen Yun. For the conservatives, the question of public ownership was indissociable from the dictatorship of the CCP and, hence, the regime’s survival. In retrospect, analysis has shown this to be as one of the major elements separating the reformist wing from the conservative wing of the CCP.[10] On the one side was a neo-authoritarian political and economic project supported by Zhao, evolving towards privatization and a complete separation of the CCP from the leadership of enterprises; on the other was a neo-conservative project guaranteeing the continuation of exclusive CCP control of the country’s large-scale enterprises. It was in this second direction that the reform would run from 1992 onwards.

Nevertheless, the obstacle of conceiving public property without state planning had to be overcome. State ownership had, in fact, never been envisaged in a communist regime without the planning that was, in a sense, an attribute of it. A group of conservatives less old than the octogenarian old guard were to offer the beginnings of an intellectual and practical solution, which Deng would espouse quite comfortably in the run up to the fourteenth congress of the CCP in the fall of 1992. This solution was proposed in an epoch-making article, distributed initially within a small circle of CCP leaders in September 1991, then much more widely in the main central government press from fall 1992 onwards.[11] In this article, the authors – Chen Yuan (the son of Chen Yun and currently president of the China Investment Bank), He Xin (a non-conformist, conservative intellectual) and Deng Yingtao (son of Deng Liqun, one of the leaders of the conservative wing of the CCP) – denounced romantic capitalist ideas, the policy of radical reform pursued by Zhao Ziyang, and articulated the need for the CCP to take back control of the economy and enterprises in order to escape the fate of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The most original section of the text suggested the possibility of developing a strong, market-based economy, but one in which the CCP (the authors stressed the role of the party, not the state, to underline their opposition to the reformers) would retain total power over the country’s most important enterprises by controlling their capital.

It was through this ideological breach that the reforms would pour. The CCP would remain rooted, through public ownership, in the largest enterprises, which were to be the flagships of the national economy. The sectors that were to be strategic would not be defined, so as to leave the CCP greater discretion in maintaining its control. The slogan chosen by the party where privatization was concerned – keep the big (companies), let go the small’ – would indicate that the CCP was ultimately more concerned with size than with particular sectors in its decision to maintain state control. Among the 150 ‘Kombinat’ firms controlled by the central state today, there are companies in the energy, telecommunications and aeronautics sectors, which belong to the traditional domain of the state, but also firms operating in the sectors of automobile production, tourism, commerce, architecture and photography. Public companies were to operate in a market economy in which, in certain sectors, barriers to entry were thrown up by the state to create either a state monopoly or organized competition between a number of state enterprises. The governance of enterprises could be reformed in such a way that they could adapt to the market and international competition. The financial management of the assets of these large-scale enterprises would be carried out by the central government through an entity under the aegis of the Council of State Affairs, the SASAC (State-owned Asset Supervision Administration). The CCP would, of course, maintain a cell within all these great state enterprises, as well as in the collective or private firms, including ‘enterprises with foreign capital’. As for the small and medium-sized state enterprises, the management of their assets would be entrusted entirely to the township governments, which, for their part, would create a local commission for the management of state assets and decide whether to privatize them or not.

In the end, we have before us today a state which, by way of state ownership, remains the dominant actor in the national economy, but which has also profoundly transformed its relation to the enterprises it controls. The leaders can be said to have succeeded in their attempt to avoid Soviet-type sclerosis with a public sector dominating the economy.

The primacy granted to capital (enterprises) over labor (households) in the distribution of added value

By comparison with the three fields we have dealt with so far, it is more difficult to trace the link between the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and what has happened with regard to the labor question. The debates among the leaders of the CCP during the period 1989–1992 did not directly relate to this. Nevertheless, their decisions on the reform of the state sector, the abolition of the plan, and the control of public enterprises by the CCP – motivated largely by the internal political crisis of 1989 and the collapse of Communism in the former USSR – were to be accompanied by an authoritarian management of labor. As a result of all these reforms, the Chinese leaders were to pursue a policy that was very much in favor of capital (and hence of enterprises and investment) to the detriment of labor (and hence of households and consumption) in the distribution of added value. Some features of the authoritarian management of labor, such as the absence of trade union freedom, already existed before 1989 and would simply be perpetuated. But they would be applied in a context that was different from the 1980s, in that it involved the dismantling of the socialist framework of production in urban areas and a massive flow of migrants to work in the (mainly foreign-financed) export companies located in the coastal zones.

In addition to the structural demographic factors, political decisions on the orientation of the reforms undertaken at the time of the fourteenth congress of the CCP in October 1992 were also to reinforce the savings capacity of enterprises at the expense of household savings and, hence, of consumption. The ‘iron rice bowl’ system, from which employees of state companies benefited, would undergo sweeping changes after 1992. Open-ended employment contracts for new recruits were abolished and, in the space of a decade, social benefits (including housing) would be disconnected from enterprises. The restructuring of the state industrial sector would also entail massive, brutal cutting of the workforce. Out of a total of 140 million employees, between 30 and 40 million would lose their jobs, depending on the various different estimates. At the same time, the state was to permit competition between urban and rural workers for unskilled urban jobs in industry and services, accentuating the disequilibria between the supply and demand of labor in urban zones to the advantage of the enterprises. The CCP would also decide to maintain strict administrative control over flows of labor from the countryside to the towns through the system of the residence permit (hukou, ), which prohibits persons born in rural areas from coming to settle in the towns. By deciding to perpetuate a division between the economic and social rights of the residents of urban zones and those of rural areas, the CCP knowingly put the young migrants coming to work in the towns in a precarious, unfavorable situation vis-à-vis their employers. In keeping with this, the CCP also closed its eyes to the serious infringements of economic and social rights experienced by the migrants, increasing the savings made by enterprises on labor costs.

The CCP also strengthened the control of the official trade union (the ACFTU or ‘All China Federation of Trade Unions’) within enterprises, while continuing severely to repress any attempt at collective organization outside the official trade union on the part of employees. Where there was strife, the trade union branches most often gave in to management directives.[12] As a result of repression, workers were also made aware of the clear limits set on the expression of discontent.[13]

All in all, the CCP’s political decisions on labor management considerably reinforced the economic and demographic factors limiting the advance of real wages where the non-agricultural jobs of rural workers were concerned. Enterprises were able to keep to wage increases that were much lower than productivity gains, particularly for blue-collar workers. Though there are divergences in the various studies that have attempted to measure it, all are agreed on the fact that productivity gains have risen much more rapidly than wages.[14] Conversely, the savings deriving from enterprises (which corresponds to those enterprises’ profits) have increased rapidly since the end of the 1990s, rising from 15 percent to 26 percent of GDP in 2008.[15]

The authoritarian control of labor was then inseparable from the economic objectives set by the Chinese leaders in response to the collapse of Soviet Communism, seeking to avoid the same fate.

Conclusion

The domestic political crisis of 1989 and the collapse of Communism in the former USSR can be seen, then, to have had a very significant impact on the course of the economic reforms in China. One could even assert that these two events were to prompt the Chinese leaders to bring about a systemic change in the operation of the economy. As far as the Chinese economy is concerned, there is, then, a pre- and a post-1992 era.

Though we have to stress the primacy of politics and, most particularly, the survival of the CCP among the reasons that explain the economic decisions of the Chinese leaders, these four broad orientations of the economic reform of 1992 nonetheless progressively acquired a coherence at the economic level from the late 1990s onwards. They gave rise to a capitalism of an authoritarian, statist type that might be seen as a particular category of ‘cohesive’ capitalist state within the typology drawn up by Atul Kohli,[16] on account of the crucial role the state plays in the industrialization of China. Tony Saich, in his analysis of the CCP’s fourteenth congress in 1992, spoke of a proposition to establish ‘authoritarian rule with an essentially market economy operating under centralized political control’.[17] This proposition, which was merely a potentiality at the time, seems to have materialized in the early years of the twenty-first century.

It very clearly bears the mark of one man, Deng Xiaoping. Though he had to incorporate demands from the most conservative elements in the CCP, the broad economic orientations decided upon in the fall of 1992 are very largely the product of his political thinking on the causes of the collapse of Communism and the problems in the orientation of domestic economic reforms in the 1980s. However, this still does not make it easy to analyze Deng’s heritage where economic reform in China is concerned. Some observers, most of them economists, saw in the decisions of 1992 the mark of his insight into how economic and political life functions: his lack of a planned vision of change for the Chinese economic system is said to have enabled him to gauge a process of economic, social and political transformation of an evolutionary kind, to react to the unanticipated effects of the reforms and of the collapse of Communism and to avoid the economic traumas of the shock therapies applied in the European socialist countries. Others, most of them non-specialists in economics, often dissidents and Deng’s political opponents, have interpreted his many turnabouts in economic thinking, his past before his rise to supreme power, and his lack of a planned vision for the economy, as the ultimate demonstration of the subordination of economic policy to the survival and consolidation of the CCP.

Although the arrival in power of the Hu Jingtao–Wen Jiabao pairing in 2003 caused some noteworthy tweaking of the reforms, particularly in the rural areas, as well as in social welfare and the environment, the current economic operation of China is still based mainly on the major political decisions of 1992, which we have described in this chapter. They can be said to have been remarkably effective, providing for economic development unprecedented in the history of modern and contemporary China. Nonetheless, it seems that the ‘wind of change’ of 1992 could be beginning to blow itself out. The current debate on the reorientation of China’s mode of growth has many ramifications, which, for the most part, imply a profound rethinking of the political and economic framework decided in 1992. This is the case with the centralization of economic decision-making. There is a need today for a massive reform of local finances and the role of the public banks, as is indicated by the uncontrolled commercialization of real estate by local governments. Without such reform, a severe debt crisis could develop. This is also the case with the operation of the state sector and its role in the economy. If the CCP does not decide to launch a new raft of ambitious reforms, there is a non-negligible risk of sclerosis, both where the governance of public firms is concerned and, more generally, in respect of certain economic sectors dominated by a number of state firms. The same goes for the authoritarian management of labor. This question is at the heart of the debate on a rise in wages and, hence, on consumption as a proportion of GDP, with a rise in wages potentially allowing for a rebalancing of Chinese growth in favor of the domestic market.

The reforms required are very certainly going to push the Chinese leaders into going against the broad political principles that underlie the reforming thrust of 1992: into extending privatization in the public sector, for example; discussing the possible foundations of a fiscal federalism; accepting a distribution of added value that is more favorable to employees or abolishing the residence permits that prevent rural dwellers from settling in towns. It is still difficult to know how far the Communist leaders will go in the coming years and what part of the political heritage of 1992 they will attempt to preserve. These questions will be interesting to analyze, particularly from the standpoint of the history of Chinese economic reforms.

The situation of the Chinese Communists in 1992 was different from what it is today. Though it had been difficult to do so, the CCP had achieved unity in order to respond to the very strong constraints that arose out of the political crisis of 1989, the collapse of Communism and the economic underdevelopment of the country. The power of the CCP then seemed much more threatened in the medium term than it is today, which explains Deng’s decisions to throw off dogmatism in economic matters. Now that the Chinese leadership has no strong external or internal threats and is in a much more comfortable position domestically and internationally, it will be interesting to see whether, in the coming years, its survival instinct leads it once again to throw away the heritage of Deng and confine itself to prudent pragmatic reforms.

Notes

1  Before assuming the post of general secretary of the CCP, he was prime minister from 1981 to 1987, in charge of the country’s economic policy.

2  Z. Zhao, P. Bao, R. Chiang, A. Ignatius and R. MacFarquhar, Prisoner of the State: the Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

3  Y. Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

4  An expression referring to industrial waged work in the urban milieu, enjoying the benefits of the socialist system in terms of housing and social protection.

5  General secretary of the CCP between 1980 and 1987.

6  S. Zhao, ‘Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour: Elite Politics in post-Tiananmen China’, Asia Survey 33, August 1993, pp. 739–756.

7  S.L. Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933.

8  L.R. Sullivan, ‘Assault on the Reforms: Conservative Criticism of Political and Economic Liberalization in China, 1985–1986’, China Quarterly 114, June 1988, pp. 198–222.

9  Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian (China Statistical Yearbook) 2009, Beijing, 2009, p. 261.

10  R. Baum, ‘China after Deng: Ten Scenarios in Search of Reality’, China Quarterly 145, March 1996, pp. 153–175.

11  C. Yuan, H. Xin and D. Yingtao, ‘China’s Realistic Countermeasures and Strategic Choices after the Drastic Changes in the Soviet Union’. After internal circulation, this article would be published in Zhongguo Qingnianbao and then in Zhongguo Zhichun, December 1992.

12  M. Zhao and T. Nichols, ‘Management Control of Labor in State-Owned Enterprises: Cases from the Textile Industry’, China Journal, 36, July 1996, pp. 1–24.

13  C.K. Lee, ‘From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism: Changing Labor Regimes in Chinese Factories’, China Quarterly 157, March 1999, pp. 44–71.

14  L. Kuijs and T. Wang, Pattern of Growth: Moving to Sustainability and Reducing Inequality, Beijing: World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3767, November 2005.

15  J. Anderson, ‘The Myth of Chinese Saving’, Far Eastern Economic Review 172, November 2009, pp. 24–30.

16  A. Kohli, State-directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

17  T. Saich, ‘The Fourteenth Party Congress: a Programme for Authoritarian Rule’, China Quarterly 132, December 1992, pp. 1136–1160.

Part IV

Between global governance and new power rivalries

14  American visions of the world after 1989

John L. Harper

For the historian trying to simplify a vast subject, it is convenient to divide American diplomatic culture[1] since the eighteenth century into four main “tendencies of thought” (tendances de pensée), each connected with a certain vision of the role of the United States in the world. Two of these tendencies have had a strong influence on post-1945 history. Two others have been of more marginal importance but have exerted an influence in certain moments. First, I will briefly identify and describe the tendencies of thought. Second, I will look at what happened to them, and how they influenced US policy after the end of the Cold War. Finally, I will say a few words about the current US administration and its view of the world.

The first central tendency is liberal internationalism (or Wilsonianism, since it is associated with the views of President Woodrow Wilson), which holds that liberal democracy and free market capitalism are necessary conditions of peace. Global governance has to be based on the cooperation of liberal democracies, of the sort both Immanuel Kant and Wilson foresaw. At least in theory, it is an egalitarian vision: all states enjoy equal rights, no matter if large or small. It is a vision of the world influenced by Protestant theology and basically teleological in nature. History is moving toward an end state in time when peace and prosperity will prevail on earth. And it is a messianic vision: the United States is the chosen nation, or the agent, in carrying out this design. A second main tendency is what can be called conservative internationalism, the American version of the Machiavellian or Hobbesian view of the world. This view, associated for example with Alexander Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt, holds that there will be no millennium or “end of history”, but rather a world of perpetual power rivalries. Nor is it an egalitarian vision: the strong will always command the fortunes of the weak. As a great power, the United States has no choice but to engage itself when necessary to try to preserve a balance of power, and to keep order. International peace does not depend on whether the internal regimes of the powers are democratic or autocratic. Nor can global governance be built on the hegemony of a single power – that is an illusion. Rather, it must be built on a concert in which the great powers take responsibility for their respective areas, and cooperate to deal with major threats to peace.

The first of the more marginal tendencies is liberal reformism, associated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The vision here is of a perfected American society that can serve as an example to the world (“a city on a hill”). But the welfare of the American people is the first priority and, as Thomas Jefferson warned, war (or the large-scale preparation for war) is an evil to be avoided. War wastes resources that could be employed to improve American society, and leads to a powerful executive (an “imperial presidency”) that will threaten liberty in the United States. The other more marginal tendency is conservative nationalism (or isolationism) associated with the right-wing of the Republican Party. The conservative nationalists prefer to keep America’s hands free and to act unilaterally, rather than in concert with others. In 1919–1920, they opposed Wilson’s version of the League of Nations because it would have imposed limits on American freedom of action. They are determined to do whatever is necessary to preserve American independence and sovereignty even if this implies limited sovereignty for the other members of the international system. The vision is of a powerful and autonomous “Fortress America” able to dictate its terms to the world.

During most of the Cold War, American foreign policy was based on a kind of synthesis of liberal and conservative internationalism, sometimes leaning in one direction, sometimes in the other. It was the kind of synthesis of Kant and Metternich that one first sees in Franklin Roosevelt’s policy during World War II.[2] The other two tendencies made their influence felt in certain moments: liberal reformism in the 1960s; conservative nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, with the growth of the “new right” including the “religious right”. The so-called neo (or new) conservatives were originally Wilsonian Democrats who reacted against what they considered the excesses of liberal reformism in the 1960s and the alleged amorality and defeatism of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s conservative internationalism (including withdrawal from Vietnam and détente with the Soviet Union) in the 1970s. Starting in the mid-1970s, they formed a political and cultural connection with conservative nationalist Republicans in which each influenced the other. The neoconservatives fertilized the nationalists with their Wilsonian messianism, and the nationalists fertilized the neoconservatives with their preferences for unilateralism and military force. The neoconservatives supported the right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, although Reagan later disappointed them by moving back in the direction of arms control and détente.

US foreign policy after 1989

The most striking feature of US foreign policy after the Cold War is the continuity with the past. The American approach to the world continued for the time-being to be based on a synthesis of liberal and conservative internationalism, at times leaning (depending on whether a Republican or Democratic administration was in power) in one direction, at times in the other. One reason for continuity is simply that the supply of “ideological raw material” available to US leaders did not suddenly change from one day to the next. A second reason is that the striking events of the 1980s – the so-called third wave of democracy in Latin America and East Asia[3] and the crisis of the Soviet empire and of the USSR itself – appeared strongly to validate the Wilsonian idea of a single directional history for all humanity, with the United States as the guide or avant-garde.

Two years before the collapse of the Berlin wall Secretary of State George Shultz had argued:

The elites of both the East and the West recognize that advanced economic power derives from a certain level of education, an openness to the outside world, a rational distribution of decision making power, an emphasis on individual initiative, the decentralization of political authority, a greater freedom of information and association…. (Thus) Everywhere in the world we see a powerful impulse towards democratic values and institutions.[4]

If advanced economic and military power could be generated only in the conditions described by Shultz, the “end of history” was indeed in sight because liberal democracy and capitalism were poised to win a definitive victory over competing systems. Naturally, some (for example, Muslim fanatics who dreamed of reviving the Caliphate, or nostalgics like Fidel Castro who dreamed of preserving socialism) would resist the West but they were destined for the “dustbin of history”, just as the Fascists and Communists had been doomed to fail. The same historical moment witnessed a revival of the Kantian and Wilsonian notion of a “democratic peace”. History demonstrated, according to the argument, that liberal democracies did not go to war with each other. The end of the Cold War therefore offered the opportunity for the West to lay the foundations of a universal peace.

Some were skeptical of this triumphalism. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations argued that new fault lines were emerging along religious-cultural lines. Western values, far from triumphing, would decline because of the backlashes they were sure to provoke in other parts of the world. “The image of an emerging, universally Western world”, he wrote in 1996, “is misguided, arrogant, false, and dangerous”.[5] But for many others, the West’s victory in the Cold War seemed to create the opportunity for the United States to expand liberal democracy and capitalism around the world. Even if Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man was inspired not by Wilson but Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, the notion of the approaching terminus of history seemed plausible in light of recent events. This was true for both Democrats and neoconservatives who favored an activist foreign policy in the 1990s.

A third reason for the post-1989 continuity in US foreign policy was the continued request for American engagement, including the demand for admission to NATO by Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact. NATO expansion to the east was driven by many factors, including US domestic politics and the sense of a moral obligation to the victims of “le système de Yalta”. But the most important reason was probably the conviction shared in Washington, London, Bonn, and Central and Eastern European capitals (although not necessarily in Paris) that the United States could and must remain the leading European power to guarantee stability and serve as an insurance policy against the possible resurgence of Russia, as well as a more powerful Germany. In any case, on the eve of the Maastricht treaty, the George H.W. Bush administration persuaded its European allies to sign the NATO “Rome declaration” according to which the Atlantic alliance (rather than the nascent European Union) would remain the “essential forum for discussion and locus of decision regarding the security and defense commitments of the allies”[6] under the 1949 Atlantic treaty. At the same time, it discouraged the idea of an EU bloc or “caucus” that would speak with a single voice within the alliance. NATO would continue to be the instrument of US influence in Europe, and constitute, in effect, a ceiling beyond which the EU’s new common foreign and security policy could not go. The US liberation of Kuwait in the first Gulf War of 1991, the inability of the European Union countries to resolve the Balkans crisis, and the relatively successful NATO interventions in Bosnia (1995–1996) and Kosovo (1999), encouraged Washington and its European friends to believe that the United States remained the “indispensable nation”[7] despite the end of the Cold War.

The Bush administration’s broader vision was essentially conservative internationalist. The “new world order” proposed by Washington during the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis was a revival of Roosevelt’s idea of a concert of the great powers including Russia, and using the UN Security Council as its instrument. History suggested that such a concert depended on three conditions: (1) the participation of all of the great powers, (2) a basic ideological consensus among them, and (3) renunciation of war and territorial expansion as means of competition with other states. With the end of the Cold War, arguably, such conditions (especially the first and second) had been met. The neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer was correct in saying that the Bush vision was essentially conservative, that is, designed to prevent violent challenges to the status quo and content to live with authoritarian political regimes in the Middle East. Krauthammer also argued that the group of states that had defeated Saddam Hussein had been a pseudo-coalition. In reality, the Americans had acted alone, and such unilateral action to police the world was to be the model for future action by the United States.[8]

The Clinton administration was at first more sympathetic than its predecessor to the idea of greater European autonomy in the realm of foreign policy. But its doubts grew during the Balkans crisis, and it proved to be as determined as Bush’s to preserve NATO as the main instrument of US influence in Europe. In 1994, Clinton began the process of enlarging NATO, culminating in the admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999. In the late 1990s, the State Department bluntly warned against EU security and defense policies that might duplicate NATO structures, discriminate against non-EU NATO members like Turkey, or “decouple” Europe from America. Clinton’s broader vision was strongly liberal internationalist, incorporating classic Wilsonian themes like strengthening the United Nations, the “enlargement” of democracy and free markets under US leadership, and the democratic peace.[9] Above all, the Clinton administration emphasized the economic dimension of Wilsonianism. Economic globalization became a kind of obsession (Clinton called himself the “globalization president”) and panacea that was supposed to alleviate poverty in the developing world, domesticate China and Russia by co-opting them into the World Trade Organization, and contribute to domestic economic growth by opening new markets for US exports and investment.

Unfortunately, the UN was unequipped to play the role Washington had suddenly appointed it to play. It did not help that the United States was committed to reducing its contribution to the UN’s operating costs from 30 percent to 25 percent of the total. After an incident in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 in which 18 US soldiers died, the administration itself (and not only conservative Republican senators like Jesse Helms) blamed the UN for what had been a US-planned and commanded operation, contributing to a political backlash, and declining popularity in the United States for the organization. The promotion of globalization benefitted US exporters (between 1992 and 1999, 20 percent of GDP growth was accounted for by exports) and especially US banks and financial service companies that invested aggressively in “emerging markets” around the world. Unfortunately the United States and the EU countries applied globalization selectively in the 1990s, restricting emigration and agricultural exports from the south.

With the end of the 1945–1989 East–West struggle, one also saw the reemergence of the two more marginal “tendencies of thought” in US politics. Clinton was first elected because of a strong popular demand to deal with domestic economic problems in the midst of a serious recession, brutal “down-sizing” by US corporations (especially in the defense sector), and years of low investment in US physical infrastructure. During the early 1990s, even internationalists like Huntington believed that “to remain abroad, America must come home … not to indulge itself or isolate itself but to renew itself”. William Hyland, the editor of Foreign Affairs, declared that “What is desperately needed is a psychological turn inward” in the United States.

Clinton was initially a liberal reformer and “temporary isolationist” (a model for Obama 16 years later), responding to the wide-spread view that Bush had paid too much attention to foreign policy, that national security after the Cold War increasingly meant economic security, and that federal budget deficits had reached a level where they threatened the ability of the United States to act as a great power. (The stock of US federal debt had nearly quadrupled between 1980 and 1992, thanks to tax cuts and high defense spending, and the annual financing costs had become a major item in the federal budget.) By raising taxes and downsizing the US armed forces (defense spending as a percentage of GDP fell from 6.5 percent in 1986 to about 3.5 percent in the late 1990s) Clinton was successful in reversing this trend. The federal budget was in surplus in 1999–2001. But he failed in his attempt to reform the US health care system, an experience that the Obama administration studied carefully and was determined not to repeat.

More surprisingly, one also sees the renewed influence of conservative nationalism after 1989 – now in alliance with neoconservatism. This is because the end of the USSR, the crushing defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991, and the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” (supposedly giving the United States a decisive advantage in conventional weaponry) appeared to some to offer the possibility of long-term US military predominance and minimal dependence on allies – what Charles Krauthammer called a “unipolar moment”. There are traces of this vision in the 1992 defense planning guidance document produced by the neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Lewis Libby working for a conservative nationalist secretary of defense, Richard Cheney. This Pentagon study argued that “world order is sustained in the final analysis by the United States”. The continuing presence of the United States in the Far East, Middle East, and Europe was necessary to “convince potential rivals that they don’t need to seek a bigger role or to pursue a more aggressive posture in order to protect their legitimate interests”. The United States “should be in a position to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated”. After a public controversy, the document was rewritten (dropping mention of potential competitors). But it continued to argue, in effect, that the United States would build up its military capabilities to the point where rivals would find it useless to compete.[10] There are also traces of the unipolar-unilateralist vision in the project for a National Missile Defense advanced by the George W. Bush administration in 2001. Such a system (strongly supported by Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other conservatives), if perfected, would protect the homeland and allow the United States to intervene around the world without fear of retaliation by missile attack.

In general, the 1990s appeared to refute those (Paul Kennedy and others) who had argued in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the United States, like previous great powers, was facing “imperial over-stretch” and entering a phase of irreversible decline. The decline thesis had failed to predict the collapse of the USSR or the crisis of the Japanese economic model (Japan had appeared to be a potent rival in the 1980s). It had missed the significance of the revolution in military affairs, put on display, for example in Kosovo in 1999. A commentator compared the Kosovo war to a bolt of lightning illuminating the world’s geopolitical landscape, and revealing American ascendancy for at least the next 40 years. Her point was that, unlike the United States, the EU lacked both precision weaponry and the capacity to make coherent foreign policy decisions.[11] The weakest part of the decline thesis was probably that it underestimated the capacity of the United States to deal with its structural economic problems. The federal government reversed its precarious financial position in the 1990s. Rapid productivity growth and technological innovation (the “dot-com boom”) belied the earlier pessimism. In 2000, the US economy was one where 4 percent of the world’s population produced 22 percent of its wealth.

Declinists and other skeptics replied that, even before September 11, 2001, the federal government’s financial position was once again heading rapidly in the wrong direction. (In May 2001, the Bush administration cut taxes by $1.3 trillion over a ten-year period.) Moreover, well before the arrival of George W. Bush and his rude rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, Huntington and others had pointed to signs that the world was growing impatient with America as the sole superpower, and was determined (if not to counter-balance it) to compete.[12] Although American observers were dismissive of Europe because of its Balkans performance and slower economic growth, the 1990s had been the most impressive decade for European integration since the 1950s. The decline of the United States thesis was probably best seen as a self-denying prophecy: the fact that decline was predicted, and that policymakers took the possibility seriously, led to steps that prevented the prophecy from coming true (at least for the time-being). Another conclusion one could draw from the 1990s was that no recent decade had produced more slick formulas purporting to explain reality: the “decline” thesis; “the end of history”, “the unipolar moment”, “the democratic peace”, “the clash of civilizations”, “the new economic paradigm” (for a supposedly recession-proof economy). These were soon followed by “World War IV” (to describe the war on terrorism), “Venus and Mars” (the transatlantic relationship), and “the end of the end of history”.[13] The post-1989 period was perhaps best described as “the age of the cliché”.

September 11, 2001 and Iraq

The shocking attacks of 9/11 served, in effect, to reinforce the chauvinism and militarism of the conservative nationalists and the messianism of the neoconservatives, and created the political and psychological conditions in which they could try to realize a two-part vision. By the same token, prudent conservative internationalists like Colin Powell were weakened, and a number of liberal internationalist intellectuals and commentators were converted to the crusade to democratize the Middle East. The conservative nationalist element of the vision was evident in president George W. Bush’s speech at West Point on June 1, 2002: “America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge”, that is, permanent superiority. Other nations would be free to compete with the United States in the realm of economics, but it would be useless and dangerous to try to match US military power. Moreover, the United States intended to use its power preventively, unilaterally, and at times of its own choosing. In its National Security Strategy (September 2002), the administration set out a doctrine amounting to absolute sovereignty for the United States and limited sovereignty for the rest.

The messianic Wilsonian element of the vision was spelled out in the same document. There “is a single, sustainable model of national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise”, and it is the mission of the United States to export the model around the world. According to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Bush believed that the United States “could sit on its unparalleled power and dispense it in small doses, or it could make big strategic power plays that would fundamentally alter the balance of power. Bush planted himself in the visionary camp”.[14] A basic assumption behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that the world must see in no uncertain terms how the United States dealt with those who defied it. (The defeat of the Taliban in December 2001 had sent a signal, but a stronger message was needed.) A second important assumption behind the war was that the democratization of the greater Middle East was the only way, in the final analysis, to defeat Islamic terrorism, and that the region, like Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, was on the verge of a historic transformation. By using military power to knock away the scaffolding of the old political and ideological order, the United States would liberate suppressed forces of liberalism and democracy supposedly waiting there to be released.

The Bush administration’s approach raised a basic question: was a US foreign policy that tried to preserve permanent military superiority and that was based on the assumption of a “single sustainable model of national success”, itself sustainable? Or was it based on illusions? The 2007–2008 “surge” of US troops in the Baghdad area, together with the recruitment of Sunni tribes to combat Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, allowed Washington to avoid a catastrophic outcome in Iraq. Some kind of (Lebanese-style?) democracy may eventually emerge in Iraq, but the country’s future is at best uncertain. And given the high cost in American blood and treasure (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost, new recruits for Al Qaeda, and serious tensions with the Europeans), few Americans believed that the Bush approach had been a success, or could serve as a model for interventions elsewhere. By the same token, US nation-building ambitions in Afghanistan appeared unachievable by 2007–2008. In 2008, a majority of Americans (as well as much of the rest of the world) were ready to support Barack Obama for president in part because of the bankruptcy of the Bush vision elaborated after September 11, 2001. Some 20 years after the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire had suggested to American liberal internationalists and neoconservatives that “the end of history” was approaching, messianism was out of fashion in the United States.

Obama’s vision?

Obama’s election generated enormous expectations for change. But there were several reasons to expect continuity with the past. First, Obama inherited what could be called “the infrastructure of empire”: on-going wars (in Iraq, Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda elsewhere), alliances, agreements and commitments. The United States maintained a vast network of bases in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East, huge defense and intelligence bureaucracies in Washington, not to mention the armed services themselves (supported by their allies in Congress), all of whom were convinced of their indispensability and determined to protect their positions. Non-American as well as American commentators insisted that, despite its problems, the United States continued to be the world’s “default power”, the country that “does what others cannot or will not do”.[15] Second (and reinforcing this point), Obama, as a Democratic president, became the custodian of the liberal internationalist ideology according to which America has a historical mission to spread democracy and free markets. Third, the Obama administration automatically became the guarantor of the international economic position of the United States. Finally, like every president, Obama was subject to a degree to a kind of “iron law” American democracy: the opposition party will try to make you pay for any sign of weakness in the area of national security. The US two-party democratic competition has often produced a tendency to act, if not aggressively, at least on the basis of worst case scenarios. Presidents and the parties they lead are afraid to look weak.

By the same token there were several factors suggesting change in US foreign policy and in the international position of the United States. First the unilateralist, overly-militarized approach of the previous administration had been discredited and Washington had no choice but to seek consensus and to pursue a more cautious, multilateralist foreign policy.[16] A second factor was the economic crisis and the enormous federal budget deficits (amounting to $1.2 trillion per year in 2009–2012) that were being created to deal with it. Fewer resources implied greater caution and greater willingness to accommodate other states, in other words, picking one’s fights far more carefully and relying more on diplomacy (read: compromise) and less on force.[17] Certainly it was imperative to avoid a collision with China, the country that was underwriting a huge component of the US debt. Finally, the world facing Obama included several states (China, Russia, Iran) pursuing de facto policies of containment of the United States. With the exception of Iran, they were not hostile, but all were trying to achieve greater power in their regions at the expense of the United States.

Did Obama enter the White House with a definite vision of the world? During his first year in office, his basic message at times appeared to be: “Le message, c’est moi”. In other words, the fact that a black man, a reflective man, an eloquent man, had become president of the United States signified that America had rejected Bush’s arrogant, unilateral policies, and the rest of the world could identify with it in a positive way again. A second impression left by Obama’s first year was that despite the expectations of the world, and despite the fact that he was one of the most cosmopolitan presidents since Jefferson, his first objective (this was also true of Clinton, Johnson, Roosevelt and Wilson himself) was to be a domestic reformer. In any case, he had little choice but to concentrate on the economic crisis and the reform of the health care system. Until the end of 2009, he allowed others to manage his foreign policy and tried to postpone controversial decisions, for example, on Afghanistan. The decision in December 2009 to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan – but also to begin to remove them in July 2011 – seemed designed to shield the administration against conservative criticism rather than to win the war. Obama redefined the objectives inherited from the previous administration,[18] and appeared to be determined not to allow Afghanistan to become the kind of trap that Vietnam had become for Johnson in 1964–1968. (Of course, whether he would decide to withdraw from Afghanistan regardless of the conditions on the ground there was impossible to say.)

In any case, once his basic domestic agenda (health care and financial reform) is completed (or defeated) Obama will devote more attention to foreign policy and clarify his vision of the world. Circumstances will probably oblige him to do this in any case. When that happens (and although historians are bad prophets), we will no doubt see a new mix of liberal and conservative internationalism, with a strong pull exerted by liberal reformism. The Obama administration will see economic globalization as inevitable and, on balance, positive for the United States and the rest of the world, but it will not make a fetish of the phenomenon in the way that Clinton did. It will see multilateral action as more legitimate and usually more effective than unilateral action, but it will not pursue the idea of a formal league of democracies favored by some Wilsonians (as well as conservatives like John McCain). Rather, in the realpolitik tradition of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, it will probably promote an informal concert of powers, including Russia and China, recognizing that it is necessary to co-operate with those states on questions such as Iran and nuclear non-proliferation, regardless of their internal regimes. Especially in light of the August 2008 Russian–Georgian war, Washington is unlikely to push the program of NATO enlargement to Georgia or the Ukraine.

Finally, as far as Europe is concerned, although Obama has said that he has Irish blood (a typical claim of US presidents), he does not have an emotional attachment to Ireland or any other part of Europe. At least in theory, he will probably support the standard post-1989 notion that America must remain the leading power in Europe, but he will probably be more open than his predecessors to the idea of a strong, autonomous EU, and we are unlikely to see disputes like those of the 1990s (let alone the tensions of 2002–2003). Events, in any case, will probably force his administration to pay most of its attention to the Middle East and the Far East. It was fortunate for Europe that Richard Holbrooke’s attention was needed today in Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than in Bosnia. With Obama, Europe will not have the alibi of a US administration opposed to or strongly ambivalent toward greater European activism and autonomy. So let Europe (if it wants to) take advantage of Washington’s more tolerant attitude and lack of attention. Vive l’indifférence américaine!

Notes

1  “Diplomatic culture” can be defined as the stock of ideas out of which foreign policies are formed.

2  Under pressure from the Democratic Party and the State Department, Roosevelt accepted the idea of a United Nations organization to which all states would belong, and in which they would theoretically have equal rights. But the Security Council created a kind of concert of the great powers and preserved something of his original plan for a hierarchy with the so-called “Four Policemen” (the United States, United Kingdom, USSR and China) at the top.

3  Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the late 20th Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

4  G. Shultz, speech, December 1987.

5  Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

6  See NATO’s ‘Rome Declaration’, November 1991, meant to condition the Maastricht treaty.

7  The term used by secretary of state Madeleine Albright.

8  C. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment”, Foreign Affairs 70, 1990–1991. pp. 23–33.

9  The notion of “enlargement” was associated especially with Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake.

10  See P.E. Tyler, “Pentagon’s New World Order: US to Reign Supreme”, International Herald Tribune, March 9, 1992. The original version of the document contained no mention of the United Nations, despite the fact that the United States had acted in the recent Gulf crisis under Security Council resolutions.

11  C. Bell, “American Ascendancy”, National Interest, Fall 1999, pp. 55–63.

12  S.P. Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower”, Foreign Affairs 78, March–April 1999, pp. 35–49.

13  For the latter see R. Kagan, “The End of the End of History”, New Republic, April 23, 2008.

14  Quoted in B. Woodward, Plan of Attack, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

15  J. Joffe, “America, the Default Power”, Foreign Affairs 88, September–October 2009, p. 34.

16  This reversal of trends was already evident, of course, during Bush’s second term.

17  One commentator suggested that Obama was trying to follow Walter Lippmann’s famous 1943 advice that foreign policy required “bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power”. F. Zakaria, “The Post-Imperial Presidency”, Newsweek, December 14, 2009.

18  Obama’s speech announcing his policy on Afghanistan spoke of defeating Al Qaeda, but simply of reversing the Taliban’s momentum (rather than defeating it outright). There was no mention of building a democracy; rather, of strengthening the capacity of the local security forces and government “so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future”. New York Times, December 2, 2009.

15  Russia and the quest for lost power

Marie Mendras

Some 20 years after the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s foreign policy, like its domestic policy, today remains profoundly marked by the fall of 1991. The men currently directing the country have a negative vision of their national history. They continue to view the extraordinary upheaval of Gorbachev’s reforms and the shattering of the empire as a considerable loss. 1991 was a “geopolitical catastrophe”, Vladimir Putin insists. This brutal break with the past has left profound traces both in the mindset and behavior of the political elite.

The retreat into a sphere of territorial proximity while vaunting ambitions to be a world power heightens the ambivalence and fragility of Russian policies. This ambivalence is reflected in domestic politics and its emblematic form was the Putin–Medvedev “tandem”. From the summer of 2008 to the beginning of 2012, Dmitry Medvedev effectively fulfilled his function as a diplomat-president, without really being either the strategist or the decision-maker. Vladimir Putin chose to bring this role-playing to an end and have himself elected president in March 2012. In controversial circumstances, Vladimir Putin has obtained a new mandate of six years, thus formally taking back all prerogatives as head of state and Commander in Chief.

Named prime minister by Boris Yeltsin in August 1999, then elected president in March 2000 as the war in Chechnya and acts of terrorism raged in the background, Putin is nearing his fourteenth year in power. During the electoral campaign early in 2012, he used virulent slogans against the United States and the West complaining of their “internal spies” and “agents of influence” charged with the task of discrediting his regime and weakening Russia. To reinforce his political position, currently contested by a more and more active civil society, he counts on national pride and the appeal of protectionism “against external threats”. It is vital for him to unite society and the Russian elite behind a foreign policy that affirms national sovereignty and “international power” at the expense of a partnership with Western countries and Asian powers and at the risk of impeding Russia’s modernization.

Faithful to traditional Soviet doctrine, the Russian president and former head of the FSB (intelligence services) has staked a claim for Russia as an international power with a historical trajectory – the legitimate inheritance of the past – and in confrontation with the United States – the balance between two super-powers, between the East and the West. He relies on the classical means of foreign policy: the growth of the national economy, a boosting of military and strategic positions, the consolidation of a sphere of influence, and a key role at the UN. He knows that the future motor for Russian policies will be energy exportation and commerce but thinks that the structure of power politics is still based on nuclear deterrents and the sphere of influence. He benefits from a major trump card in the export of highly priced hydrocarbons, but faces serious challenges in globalization, the power of China, and the weak competitiveness of the Russian economy.

This chapter will propose a reading of the Russian elite’s vision of the world and of its place in the world some 20 years after 1991. It emphasizes the question of national identity and the consolidation of Putin’s regime, as well as the complex relationship with Europe and the West, a relationship in which neighboring countries (such as the Ukraine, Georgia and Moldavia) are currently trapped in-between the European Union and Russia. For Moscow, this “in-between space” is a focal point that tends to mask the crucial issues of the immediate and distant future: the transformation of Asia and globalization. China is quickly developing its relations with several ex-Soviet countries and increasing its investments in Russia.

The impossible “return”

The verbs “returning”, “rebuilding”, “recovering” and “regaining” are found over and over again in Russian speeches and articles: Russia’s return to its status as a major power, its comeback on the continent, recovering its status as a strong, modern state. The return is predicated on what was before, “re-” relies on “ex-”. Russia is an ex- Soviet country surrounded by ex- Soviet republics and the “ex-people’s democracies” of Central Europe.

With the collapse of the USSR, Russia lost its state and its power, derzhava. Because Russian thinking remains resolutely faithful to realist theories of international relations, this notion of derzhava is basically synonymous with the state. Starting with the victory over Nazi Germany, power has been thought of and experienced as something intangible and existential. The term derzhava, which comes from the verb derzhat’, to hold, expresses the idea of control over territory, resources, and borders. For Moscow, the loss of its status as a superpower translates into a weakening of the state and a rise in the influence of other states. This is how the theme of a “return” to world power translates a desire to recover a past status. It is important to note that the Russian elite attribute greater importance to this status than they do to an effective power strategy that would require much political will and new resources placed in the service of gaining domination. The USSR’s position before 1989–1991 is magnified and current efforts seek to “regain” lost positions. Nostalgia for the past carries more weight than either present reality or ambition for the future.

For several years now, the ways official history has been rewritten display the sensibilities of Putin’s elite and of the society they are governing. The great patriotic war is the final monument of the Soviet epic. Other major heroic episodes (1917, the industrialization of the 1930s, the atom, Gagarin and the conquest of space) have lost either their importance or their meaning. The memory of the victory against Nazi Germany is carefully preserved since it provides a source of pride and identity as well as the foundation for Soviet power after 1945. The utopia of worldwide revolution was already buried by the end of the 1920s and the goal of strategic power had become the motivation for the Soviet regime.

If Russians were today to accept the fact that the struggle to be a superpower and win victory over the Other (the capitalist camp) no longer made any sense, how could they justify the decades of sacrifice that started with the civil war after 1918 and continued through the 30 years of Stalinist dictatorship? It is essentially to maintain the legitimacy of these sacrifices (hence, to reaffirm the “inevitability” of acts of repression) by past generations that Stalin remains a terrifying heroic figure in Putin’s historiography. Stalin is the bloody dictator – that much is not contested – who constructed a superpower out of a humiliated empire and thus trumped both America and old Europe. He built, conquered and dominated whereas Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin merely destroyed. Most history textbooks published over these last several years contain an apology for these periods of “power” that contrast with the condemnable regimes that left Russia weaker.[1]

When Russia opened and aligned itself more closely with Europe and the West during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and then Boris Yeltsin’s reforms, it lost its aura as an already declining power. This decline was already underway in the 1970s but was largely concealed by Moscow and minimized by Western capitals. For Russians, the opening and reforms of the years between 1986 and 1993 were responsible for the terrible ensuing crisis.[2] While Westerners rejoiced at the Soviet people’s “liberation” and the victory of democracy, the vast majority of Russians underwent a trauma for which they were unprepared.

It is important to emphasize how Russian experience and our Western vision of Gorbachev’s mandate and the end of communism do not match. We in the West observed the period of the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War and of the enchantment of politics thanks to the “liberalization” of populations closed off in the Soviet empire with great enthusiasm. This major misunderstanding between Russians and ourselves over the most fundamental episode of their recent history will long leave its mark on our relations with them. The political and memorial line that divides Europe and Russia has shifted but it remains an East–West divide.

Russian society has on the whole had a hard time in the 1990s and because of this compounds hostility toward change and internationalization with profound conservatism. Vladimir Putin took advantage of this mindset and built his political system on three pillars: a social order without political democracy, economic growth without reform, and the image of a Russia that is stronger in regional and world politics.[3]

“Russia’s peculiarity is that it is not so much an emerging market but a recently failed superpower”,[4] as the Finnish economist Pekka Sutela puts it. The contradictions of Putin’s regime are concentrated in the trouble it has reading recent history with an appropriate distance and abandoning positions that have lost their advantages. “Bygones are bygones” is the golden rule of economists. What is lost is lost: one should not continue to invest in a bottomless well nor keep holding on to positions that belong to the past. Politicians often have a tendency to defend what has been acquired and to fill in the gaps; they hesitate to take the risk of a radically new approach. They “maintain” more than they construct.

This reflex, which is even more pronounced in Russian leaders, explains the pursuit of a protectionist, almost negative conception of relations with the outside world, even with close neighbors, thus revealing the lack of confidence in a national project. “Passions exist at the level of nations, but they often tend to be defensive and negative”,[5] Pierre Hassner has observed. Russia’s foreign policy harbors emotions, regrets and the will to take revenge for the country’s dark years.

Putin’s ruling group remains faithful to a traditional conception according to which the balance of power and the reference to the past provide the measure for Russia’s strength. This elite also remains tied to an inaccurate, unproductive vision of national identity and of the position of their country in its regional environment. The elite’s own uncertainties and frustrations hold it back in the process of adjusting to new, multiple and changing realities on the European and Asian continents.

For Moscow, is it reasonable to seek to return to a position of power that was determined by the Cold War even though the world has changed profoundly and major players like China are changing much faster than Russia is? Space and time zones are no longer advantages for a vast country that often speaks of modernization but has trouble developing at the same pace as its neighbors.[6]

Was the tsarist empire ever a dominant power? It defeated Napoleon’s army, entered into the concert of nations at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, grew and formed alliances over the nineteenth century, but also suffered major losses – the Crimean War in 1856, defeat by Japan in 1905 – and decomposed during World War I. From 1918 to 1941, Soviet Russia lived more or less in isolation, cut off from Europe and Asia. The June 1941 German invasion plunged the Stalinist dictatorship into world affairs. The satellization of Central Europe and the years of the Cold War and the “balance of terror” (nuclear deterrence) from Khrushchev to Brezhnev constitute the most “international” period of Russian history. Are not these three decades of being a “superpower” the exception rather than the rule? No Russian expert would dare ask such an iconoclastic question. Even political scientists and experts critical of Putin’s authoritarianism accept the postulate of Russia as being naturally and necessarily a major power.[7] Anachronistically, Russian discourse is principally organized around notions of “the defense of national sovereignty” and of “the sphere of privileged interests”, as if the most stabilizing perspective were to be found in the idea of an unvarying great Russia.

This consensus, or politically correct position, on foreign affairs remains strong, but has been questioned by a few experts and journalists after the flawed Duma elections of December 2011 and Putin’s controversial victory in March 2012.

Consensus over foreign policy, for how long?

Dimitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, quite rightly emphasizes the fact that the first challenge is to maintain control over Siberia and the Far East, and to reestablish security in the republics of the North Caucasus. The problem is thus first of all a problem of internal cohesion, of “integration into the center”, according to Trenin’s formulation, and of the judicious use of national economic and territorial resources.[8]

For Fedor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, the August 2008 conflict in Georgia came to confirm that Russian foreign policy no longer needed to focus on the West and that it was time for NATO to stop crossing the “red line” of Russia’s “sphere of privileged interests” in the neighboring ex-Soviet republics in Europe. In his editorials, Lukyanov often makes reference to the “closed parentheses” of the 1990s and the return to a balance of power.[9] Even Vladimir Baranovsky, director of IMEMO in Moscow, who has expressed criticism of the Putin regime, does not question Russia’s need and right to return to its status as a major power.[10] As if this status were something owed to Russia, something that had already been accomplished.

Official and semi-official experts are reined in in their analyses and have very limited forward capacity. They do not indicate how and why Russia would rebuild a major military and economic space capable of standing up to the West on the one hand and to China and Asia on the other. They are contested by independent Russian researchers who emphasize, to the contrary, their country’s need to adapt to the new realities of the world and to avoid sacrificing the indispensable process of modernization to a vain quest for past power. A few talented security experts and scholars left Russia to live and work abroad. Yuri Fedorov worries about the renewal of militarization policies in Russia and about a new confrontation over security with the European continent.[11] Arkady Moshes and Pavel Baev offer challenging interpretations but they both live and work in Europe.

Among Russian experts who address international affairs differently and more critically are political scientists and sociologists who, like Lilia Shevtsova, Boris Dubin, and Mihail Dmitriev, turn their attention to Russia’s internal policies, the shortcomings of economic and social development and the failure to devise productive strategies towards Ukraine, the Caucasus and other former Soviet countries. Lilia Shevtsova denounces the use of anti-Western themes and Moscow’s strategy for domination in the common neighboring countries of Georgia and the Ukraine. She underlines the heavy consequences of the Yeltsin regime’s powerlessness both over internal changes and foreign policy, consequences still very much felt today.[12]

In effect, during the Yeltsin years, Russia did not forge a foreign policy. It was too busy with internal reconstruction in a context of economic and social collapse.[13] It followed through with cooperation with Europe, the United States and NATO. It depended on the good will of former rivals in order to save its economy, its army and its territorial integrity. The Russian state ended up failing in the disaster of the first war in Chechnya (December 1994–August 1996) and the financial crash of August 1998. The humiliation was unprecedented.

NATO’s spring 1999 air strikes on Serbia to defend Kosovo shocked Russians and awakened their foreign policy. They also freed leaders from any reservations about launching a second murderous military campaign in Chechnya in September 1999 with terrorist attacks in Moscow as a motivating factor. Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States furnished Vladimir Putin with a pretext for assimilating Chechen fighters’ recourse to terrorism with the international terrorism driven by Ben Laden. And to win back Washington’s acknowledgment of Russia’s strategic importance.

In the first half of the 2000s, Putin’s team reconstructed a foreign policy based in the energy resources whose price started skyrocketing in 2001 and a renewed strategic partnership with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Without the considerable resources of oil, natural gas and other raw materials, and without the common “war” against terrorism, the question of Russia’s “return” to power would never have been posed. The nuclear arsenal would not have been enough to ensure Moscow’s position of power on the international scene.

The second half of the 2000s are different from the first Putin period. In effect, the year 2004 confronts the Russian president with major challenges in Russia and its “near abroad”, the term Russians use to name their former republics whose sovereignty they are contesting. The second Chechen War heightened insecurity and violence throughout the North Caucasus. The revolutions of color in Georgia and Ukraine took Vladimir Putin by surprise in 2003 and 2004. He feared democratic contagion in Russia and was prepared to do anything to weaken the new regimes, increase Russia’s economic presence, and fuel the territorial conflicts in Georgia.

Vladimir Putin’s strategy essentially aimed to stop NATO’s expansion and to keep the intermediary countries beyond Western influence. This led to the war in Georgia in August 2008 when Russia defied a taboo: it sent its army to fight on the territory of an independent member state of the UN. Russian militias still occupy parts of Georgia and the political powers have recognized the independence of the provinces of Abkhazia and of South Ossetia.[14] The toughening of Russian policy at the gates of NATO and the EU, in parallel with the Putin regime’s hardening against civil society and the opposition along with the increased corruption at the heights of power, have had the effect of slowing down the rapprochement with Washington, the famous “reset” launched by Barack Obama in 2009 and marked most notably by the signature of the new START 2 accord in April 2010.

The useful enemy

Vladimir Putin has convinced Russians that without renewed power over other states, their country is in danger. Since 2000, the paradigm of internal and external enemies, of a fatherland in danger has returned to the center of doctrine and has insinuated itself into the Russian mindset. The August 2008 war in Georgia was only made possible and acceptable for the Russian population thanks to the insecurity implanted in their minds. Already in 1993–1994, the Russian elite began doubting the good intentions of their neighbors and partners and adhered to an entirely mistrustful matrix of explanation: the West wanted to keep their country in a weak position as a way of constructing a unipolar international system dominated by America. Surprisingly, the rise of China, India, and Brazil, which called the unipolar model into question, has not provided a significant corrective to this deformed reading of the intentions of Western countries and their organizations (NATO, the European Union).

In his February 2007 speech in Munich, Vladimir Putin frontally attacked “unipolar” American policy and plans for expanding NATO, condemning a cold war attitude and a threat to Russia’s security. “The United States has overstepped its national borders…. Nobody can feel secure”.[15]

One of the messages Putin conveys is that Russia will defend its interests first and foremost in a world where other states also think only of defending their own interests. Behind a discourse of cooperation, Western leaders have a secret agenda. For Putin, the European Union remains a mysterious construction that cannot be governed democratically and equitably and is in reality controlled by the major states and big industrial and financial groups. Is it even possible for him to conceive of a leader who would privilege long term efforts whose strategic benefits he will not personally reap? And to imagine that a parliament or a court might actually have the authority to oppose the leader’s decisions in the state-based initiatives of foreign policy? When British judges refused to extra-dite the former Chechen minister Akhmed Zakayev at the beginning of the 2000s, Vladimir Putin led prime minister Tony Blair to understand that he deemed him responsible for the refusal since the affair was, from the Russian perspective, highly political. When asked about the “controlled” elections in Russia, he answered that George W. Bush was unfairly elected. When asked about Chechnya, he immediately assimilated it to al-Qaeda.[16] The attitude of Russian leaders is only comprehensible if one takes their partly erroneous perception of our democratic governments into account.

The anti-Western tone has decreased with the 2008 world crisis and thanks to Medvedev’s presidency. Yet even the more affable words pronounced by Dmitry Medvedev over the course of his four years of presidency are always accompanied by one or two phrases on America’s military ambitions or European dishonesty.[17]

The electoral campaign that took place between late 2011 and the beginning of 2012 gave renewed currency to anti-American insults and accusations of NATO countries’ spying and subversion that contribute to the destabilization of Russia and its ex-Soviet neighbors. Documentary films specially produced at the last minute and broadcast on television before Putin’s reelection were caricatures of the propaganda films shown in wartime: liberal Russian intellectuals are working for the United States, NGOs with a concern for the rights of man and public liberties are the submarines of “anti-Russian forces”, the regime’s opponents are inviting chaos and throwing the Russian nation out to be devoured by the jackals. Once the election had past, the terms and images were less aggressive, but the atmosphere remains tense, as if the country were still on red alert.

The idea that NATO countries have a vested interest in keeping Russia from “returning” to its position of power is deeply inscribed into people’s minds. This reveals an attachment to the classical notion of power according to which the strength and status of an “equal rival” counts more than partnership and the sharing of strategic means and ends. Any rapprochement with Western positions is viewed as a new “concession” to American power and a new form of Russian subjection. The reticence to share reveals a fear of elucidating the mysteries of the Russian political and economic system and of making it more vulnerable.

In most multilateral negotiations, Russian officials are careful to compartmentalize subjects under discussion and to avoid making the link between military security and commercial transparency. Preparations for the December 2010 OSCE summit in Astana are a case in point.[18] The Russian refusal to respect the energy charter it had signed provides another example of the primacy of “national sovereignty” over multilateral commitments.

Yet Russian peace is threatened first of all from within the system of power; the main danger for the state’s stability and peace for civilians comes without a doubt from the brutal and ineffective policies being carried out in Chechnya. Terrorism and extreme violence have found fertile terrain in the two wars waged by the Russian army in Chechnya[19] and in the poverty striking the peoples of the Caucasus. Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan have shown that the priority of the secret services and other siloviki (army, interior ministry troops) is to ensure the protection of the interests of the organizations and clans that form the regime’s structure and play a disproportionate role in the decisions arbitrated by Vladimir Putin.[20] National security is first of all the security of the regime and the state and not the security of individuals. Without a doubt, the fact that Dmitry Medvedev is returning his Kremlin seat to his mentor in 2012 serves as an indication of a less conciliatory foreign policy carried out in large part by people close to Putin, secret services members or men in control of the major financial holdings and raw materials monopolies such as Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov.

The theme of the internal enemy has tragically regained its choice position in official discourse: the Chechen enemy, the Islamic terrorist, the people of the Caucasus “prone to violence”, the “extremists”. For the most part, the August 2008 conflict with Georgia is a result of the Chechen drama and of the atmosphere of a “nation in danger” that is carefully maintained by the Russian regime. The president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is the “external enemy” to be destroyed, as President Medvedev did not hesitate to proclaim for the war’s third anniversary.[21] This is why the idea that Medvedev did not approve the 2008 intervention and sought to differentiate himself from Putin’s hard line does not hold. To the contrary, Medvedev used this episode to give himself the image of a strong patriot as he tried, in vain, to run for a second presidential mandate in 2012.

The sociologist Lev Gudkov has quite rightly observed that Russia is a “nationalist country without a national idea”.[22] The ordinary Russian, Gudkov explains, exists against. He identifies with the national community by default: “I am neither Georgian, nor Jewish, nor European”. He is nostalgic for lost Soviet power because it gave him a strong identity and the assurance of belonging to a strong and respected state.

Today, the Russian citizen has not been able to recuperate that sense of belonging because the Russian Federation is an increasingly disparate, poorly governed and corrupt political, economic and social space where regions communicate very little amongst themselves and where the social classes barely mix. In other words, the Russian state is a weak and dysfunctional state in terms of its internal functioning and in its relations with the former Soviet republics.[23]

Vladimir Putin has encouraged this fragmentation of space and the dissolution of the social bond through systematic policies that seek to weaken public institutions and thus reinforce the domination of the networks and major financial groups he controls. The more personal and clientelist interests prevail, the weaker does the state become.[24] Putin has paradoxically weakened what is the basis of classical strategies of power: the strong national state, homogeneous, united, and sovereign. And he did not construct a system of alliances or a dynamic economic community.

By cultivating these images of the enemy and this profound mistrust of multilateral negotiations, preferring bilateral agreements that rely on relations among leaders, Russian leaders deprive themselves of reliable allies and partners. Certain former republics have signed military agreements with Moscow, but the Tashkent agreement[25] does not provide the basis for a common defense policy. The project for a customs union that will unite Russia, Belorussia, Kazakhstan and soon Kyrghistan is still relatively modest. Formed in a rush in the troubles of December 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States, is a weakly structured group grounded largely in bilateral agreements between Moscow and each of the concerned capitals.

The in-between countries

More than anything else, Vladimir Putin fears the political disturbances of his “near abroad” and the democratic contagion they could provoke in Russia itself. Toward the end of his first presidential term, he found himself directly confronted with the color revolutions in the ex-Soviet territories. The fall 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia overthrew Shevardnadze and brought Mikhail Saakachvilii to power. The fall 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine forced the clan of Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovich to respect the citizens’ vote and cede the presidency to Viktor Yushchenko who had been democratically elected. Vladimir Putin got scared. He was humiliated by the victory of the Ukrainian opposition against “his camp”, that of president Kuchma. He feared the wave of contestation against a Slavic “little brother” just as corrupt as Russia but less authoritarian. He denied the reality of the democratic revolt, affirming that it was merely American manipulation. He then did everything to weaken the new Ukrainian government.

In Putin’s conception of power, the affirmation of an international strategy is not a simple “derivative” of a stalled internal situation. Control over neighboring political and economic regimes is absolutely crucial to the regime’s survival. And this control over a “privileged sphere of interest”, to cite the recurring term, is made possible by Western politicians’ elusive stance on that very sphere. The prudence of Europeans can be explained both by a concern for maintaining a partnership with Russia for reasons of strategy and energy resources and by the hardly promising evolution of domestic policies in the Ukraine, Belorussia and Azerbaijan, to emphasize the most problematic political regimes.

In Europe, we designate countries sandwiched in-between ourselves and Russia with the terms “common neighborhood” and “Eastern partnership”. In Russia, people speak of the “former Union” or the “near abroad”. The nuance makes for a major difference. Russian leaders seek to show that national sovereignty is fragile and that it largely depends on good relations with Moscow. Nourished by propaganda on the mistaken ways of Georgia, the Ukraine and even Estonia, a member state of the EU, the Russian population tends to consider that these countries still enjoy a particular relationship with Russia, which keeps them from being entirely independent countries. Opinion polls are revealing. When asked if Belorussia is a foreign country, almost two-thirds of people surveyed answered in the negative.[26]

The countries of the Caucasus provide the switch-point for Russian policies in ex-Soviet space. Russian tanks stationed in Ossetia are less than 50 km from Tbilisi. Putin has not reached all his goals in choosing war with Georgia in 2008. None of the ex-Soviet countries has recognized the independence of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia.

The three countries of the Caucasus – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – find themselves in a very unstable position. Like the other intermediary states, they belong neither to the Russian sphere nor to the EU or NATO. The relations between the three states remain tense, particularly between Armenia and Azerbaijan, who have not been able to make progress toward a political solution of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave populated by Armenians in Azerbaijan. For Georgia, relations with Moscow are terrible, relations with Azerbaijan are conflicted, while with Armenia they are tense. In Tomas de Wahl’s opinion, “in 2020, these countries will have even weaker ties to Russia”[27] because there are very few Russians left in the three countries.

The violation of Georgia’s national sovereignty by the Russian army, then by the Russian parliament that recognized the independence of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, is the sign of a major breach, as if Moscow were tempted by a brutal return to policies from the time of the Bolshevik conquest more than a century ago.

As is the case with the Ukraine, Belorussia and Moldavia, the Kremlin’s position has been clear since the 2008 war: the line any one of these intermediary countries cannot cross is the one that would bring them to adhere to an organization of which Russia is not a member (the EU and NATO in particular). Russia wants in a way to freeze the countries of the Eastern partnership in a position of weak sovereignty, refusing them any possibility of belonging to an alliance. The “gas wars” that have poisoned Moscow’s relations with Kiev since 2005 are one way to prove that Europe has nothing to gain by getting along with the intermediary countries without working through Moscow. The former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko’s condemnation by the Yanouvich regime “for having signed an unfavorable agreement with Russia” shows to what extent energy commerce is a key issue for all parties concerned.

The fear of democratic contagion

Moscow has strategically retreated into its region, not because there’s nothing better to do but because it is making an anachronistic choice: the consolidation of its positions through the maintenance of buffer zones and the erection of barriers between these buffer countries and the European world, even though the Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova should be bridges between Russia and Europe. The elite in power in Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan and Armenia accept this state of things even if they frequently claw at this “tacit contract” with Moscow through appeals to Europe, Turkey and the international community. The virtuous process of democratization/Europeanization has momentarily paused. For Europe, it is important to avoid the reversal of the tendency that would lead to a hardening of the political regimes in Kiev, Minsk, and Moscow and a new split between the East and the West.

Russian leaders have become worried and helpless when faced with the waves of revolution in the Middle East. Speechless, they watched the fall of the three old dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. They know that Syria and other countries will likely see similar fates, but they are unable to adapt their policies. Russia’s position on Libya at the UN Security Council remains an exception. On March 17, 2011, Moscow abstained from vetoing resolution 1973, which approved air strikes against the Gadhafi regime (Beijing followed suit). On the other hand, at the beginning of October, 2011, Russia and China opposed the resolution that planned for sanctions against Syria. On February 4, 2012, these two permanent members of the Security Council blocked a resolution condemning Al-Assad’s regime. They were opposed to any resolution that would designate the regime in place as the main culprit of the violence and deaths. Russian diplomacy continues to play on the confusion with a “jihadist threat” and to present the “right to intervene” as unacceptable. Its priority is not to put an end to conflict and protect civilians. One might remember that in recent years, Moscow blocked votes on sanctions against Burma and Sudan.[28]

The Arab League’s mission and Kofi Annan’s mediation at the beginning of 2012 did not dissuade Bashar Al-Assad from pursuing his armed repression. These attempts allowed Moscow to repeat that “only a negotiated political solution” is possible, which implicitly means a negotiation where the balance of power would favor Syria’s “legitimate authorities”. Russia cannot and does not want to be a mediator in the conflict’s resolution. It does not want to take the risk of saving the Assad clan nor does it want to invest in a multilateral effort to encourage Assad’s fall. In the conflict in Syria, inseparable from the Iranian situation and the Israeli question, Russia sees a favorable political terrain for its strategic positions in their confrontation with an indecisive America weakened by the Afghan quagmire and the Iranian threat.

The Russian position on Libya was thus an exception that can be explained by several errors of judgment on the part of Russian leaders: Libya did not seem crucial to them, even if Russia was negotiating major contracts there. They thought that the Americans would keep out of the conflict and that the American airstrikes would not work. Under Dmitry Medvedev’s influence, they banked on the advantages of displaying a good stakeholder’s attitude at the Security Council. Yet the essential factor that confounded Russian leaders’ judgment is the fear of popular revolt and of similar changes in Russia.

The incredible nervousness of Russian and Chinese leaders when faced with the Arab revolutions, their preventative measures and their denunciation of what they called subversion or crusades, show just how much they exaggerate their stability and confidence; that the specter of democracy continues to haunt them.[29]

Pierre Hassner is right to emphasize that in the open and very competitive world of the twenty-first century, autocracies withdrawn into the interests of several clans fear above all that their societies will become more open. Vladimir Putin’s reelection, in very controversial circumstances and after months of political protests, has once again shown that the regime in place has not accepted honest democratic struggle and has refused even the possibility of a change in power.

A protectionist strategy for an authoritarian regime

The personality and mindset of the men driving foreign policy, along with their personal and corporatist interests, are the determining factors in that policy’s evolution. To the extent that a small number of people are making the decisions, their behavior and the relations that tie them to one another do indeed carry more weight in national strategy than major doctrines or ambitious plans. As long as it is the same people from within the same organizations and groups that have the Russian state in their clutch, foreign policy will not see any significant inflection.

Starting in May 2012, Vladimir Putin will no longer benefit abroad from his loyal Medvedev who now serves as prime minister and will be less involved in foreign diplomacy. He is once again president of Russia and is alone in assuring his roles as principal diplomat, main strategist, and head of armies. The doubling of functions that started in summer 2008 had its advantages but also its disadvantages. In the perspective of a dissociation between the near abroad and the world, and its accompanying double standard, the Putin–Medvedev tandem took on a particular significance. Vladimir Putin, acting to guarantee national interest and Russia’s “power status”, took hold over the former empire and accepted the task of commandeering national defense, including both military force and the energy domination. Dmitry Medvedev, diplomat-president, a charismatic and “modern” figure, drove international institutional policy and persuaded partners that Russia was acting in accordance with the customs of international cohabitation, but that it was evolving at its own pace and in its own way by ensuring the protection of the buffer countries to the south and west.

This division of roles was Medvedev’s trump card in his attempt to stay in the tandem with Putin after the December 2011 and March 2012 elections. He was able to obtain the promise of directing the government, but missed out on keeping international policy. For our European governments, the Kremlin’s double face was convenient. They preferred to display the friendly relationship with Dmitry Medvedev, less authoritarian and more charismatic than Vladimir Putin.

This interlude is now over and we must face the reality of decision-making in Moscow: it is non-transparent and depends on the interests and idiosyncrasies of a few men and a few powerful groups.

Twenty years after the end of the USSR, Russia’s international strategy remains hesitant and occasionally contradictory. The Russian elite, in the widest sense of the term, feel this uncertainty and doubt in their leaders’ ability to face the economic, technological and military challenges of the 2020s and 2030s.[30] The more they doubt, the more they publically adhere to the “return to great power” and the less they believe in it. Behind the façade of a souverainiste consensus, Russian leaders and businessmen are engaged in industrial and technological joint ventures, looking for investors, taking part in innovative foreign projects, attempting to develop more lucrative commercial relations. They are seeking innovation and sustenance elsewhere.

Hydrocarbon exportation and arms sales will no longer suffice to ensure economic strength, as businessmen and military leaders know only too well.[31] There is thus a hiatus between the conventional discourse that brags of a Russia that providence has made great and powerful – to paraphrase the nineteenth-century historian Nicolas Karamzin[32] – and the reality of the pragmatic politics driven by the political and economic leaders of the beginning of the twenty-first century.

After having placed a damper on the process, Russia will end up being a part of the World Trade Organization. On December 15, 2011, a general agreement was struck and, after several negotiated adjustments, the accession took place in 2012.

Russian strategy, with is lack of innovation, will continue to associate a short-term “damage-control” strategy that aims to minimize dangers with a middle-term strategy that seeks to stabilize acquired positions. Long-term perspectives looking 15 or 20 years into the future are largely absent, except in the ritual exercises in planning that are largely ignored by the players concerned. In the short term, the major concern is to avoid the erosion of the economic, military and diplomatic basis of Russian strength through the astute combination of “positive” propositions with fierce opposition to conflict resolution, most notably in Syria. In the middle term, Russian leaders seek to stabilize a favorable geopolitical situation in their regional environment thanks to cooperation with the United States, NATO and the countries of the EU. Western partners tolerate Russia’s role in its historical sphere, saying they want to include Russia in the architecture of European security. They thereby hope to make Russian leaders more “reasonable” in the supply of energy, the handling of financial resources, and transnational criminality.

East–West relations are thus in a way back in fashion: each side of the chess-board needs the other side. For Russia, the tacit understanding is all the more crucial given that it has seen the traditional basis for its strength disappear bit by bit: territory, population, industrial and technological performance, military superiority, nuclear arms and the subjection of neighboring states. National territory, vast, poorly developed and unequally populated, has become a factor of vulnerability. And finally, borders are creating new challenges that Russia can no longer address with the methods of the Soviet era. Russia’s space of sovereignty is circumscribed and more limited than it was during the era of the socialist empire, when it stretched to East Berlin, Mongolia and Cuba. The exceptionality of the current situation is the confusion Moscow maintains concerning the nature of its borders with Georgia, the Ukraine, Belorussia and Moldavia, states that weather intense military, political and economic pressure from Russia. In the middle or long term, this scaffolding will come apart, just as the USSR and the Soviet camp did in 1989–1991.

The countries of Central Asia are becoming increasingly important for Russia’s strategic position as autonomous players, yet they remain trapped in the tacit understanding between Moscow and Washington. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which unites the states of Central and Eastern Asia, ensures Russia with a role as a bridge between Western and Chinese interests.

The major ambiguity in Russia’s strategic thinking concerns China, and beyond China, Asia – young, productive, competitive, in full financial development, with investments in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. A Russian academic has clearly stated the challenge:

The need for Russia to ensure a lasting presence in the Asia-Pacific region – a key region for the twenty-first century world – is unavoidable. Russia’s central problem today consists in not becoming a mere satellite. In other words, the clear weakness of our current positions in the Asian-Pacific region should be compensated by an active policy of optimal diversification of our economic and political capacities.[33]

In ten to 15 years, Russia’s regional and international position will have changed. It will probably dominate less and negotiate more and will certainly be better integrated – in terms of security and economic integration – into a great continental European group that will also open to the “intermediary” countries of the Ukraine and the countries of the Caucasus. Will Russia as a state be a “major power” in 2025 or 2030? The question will not mean much because for this former superpower, as will be the case for Europe, the main point will be to exist in safety, to prosper, to count in the major international issues, to propose solutions for common challenges. Whether or not these opportunities will be taken will depend above all else on the political will in Moscow.

Notes

1  Analysis of the ideology implicit in history textbooks and documentary films has been carried out by historians associated with Memorial, and especially by Arseni Roginski. Interviews with the author in Moscow and Paris in 2009, 2010 and 2012.

2  See the public opinion studies undertaken by the Levada Center for the Study of Public Opinion, online, available at: www.levada.ru.

3  See Marie Mendras, Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State, London and New York, Hurst and Columbia University Press, 2012.

4  Pekka Sutela, “How Strong is Russia’s Economic Foundation?”, Center for European Reform, Policy Brief, October 2009, p. 1. Online, available at: www.cer.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/attachments/pdf/2011/pb_sutela_russia_29oct09–732.pdf.

5  Pierre Hassner, Preface in, Philippe Esper (ed.) Un monde sans Europe?, Fayard, 2011, p. 30.

6  Pierre Buhler, La puissance au XXIè siècle: Les nouvelles définitions du monde, CNRS Editions, 2011, pp. 177–186.

7  The project for “Russia. Scenario 2020” carried out under the aegis of the Carnegie Center in Moscow reflects this state of mind. Several studies are devoted to Russian foreign policy. Even Thomas Graham, a Russian-speaking American diplomat, grounds its reasoning on the fact that “Russia was a major power for three hundred years” and that “it has largely regained its status as a major power”. He is pleased that Russia remains “the dominant power in ex-Soviet space” and has become “a fundamental pillar in the new architecture of European security alongside NATO and the European Union”. These studies are being published in the Russian-language journal Pro et Contra, Moscow. See also the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website, online, available at: www.carnegie.ru.

8  Dmitri Trenin, Post-Imperium, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Washington, DC, 2011.

9  Quarterly journal published in Russian and English, Russia in Global Affairs, Moscow.

10  Vladimir Baranovsky’s presentation at an EU–Russia Centre conference, Brussels, June 20, 2011.

11  Yuri Fedorov, “The Russia Factor in International Security: An Assessment of Moscow’s Ambitions and Capacity”, paper presented at the Observatoire de la Russie, CERI/Sciences Po, July 6, 2011.

12  Lilia Shevtsova, Lonely Power, Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Washington DC, 2010, “Politics Inside, Policy Outside: How Russian Elites Preserve the Status Quo and Look Modern”, study presented at the seminar of Observatoire de la Russie, CERI/Sciences Po, September 28, 2011.

13  M. Mendras, “La Russie en mal de politique étrangère”, Pouvoirs, 88, 1999, pp. 107–120.

14  Ronald Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West, 2010; Roy Allison, “The War in Georgia”, International Affairs, September 2008.

15  Speech by Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, at the forty-third conference on security in Munich, February 10, 2007, online, available at: www.securityconference.de/archive.

16  Meetings of the Valdai Club in Russia, September 2004 and 2005. Author’s notes.

17  See for example his May 16, 2011 television interview and his August 4, 2011 interview with the daily Izvestiia, online, available at: www.kremlin.ru.

18  Think tank conference after the Astana summit, OSCE, Vienna, December 13, 2010.

19  On the second war in Chechnya, see Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, University of Chicago, 2003.

20  Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, Public Affairs, 2010.

21  Interview with Dmitry Medvedev, Izvestiia, August 4, 2011.

22  Lev Gudkov, Negativnaïa identitchnost’ [Negative identity], Moscow, 2007.

23  See the Levada Center’s studies published in the monitoring obchtchestvennogo mneiia, online, available at: www.levada.ru as well as the studies done by the team working with the demographer Anatoli Vishnevsky, online, available at: www.demo-scope.ru.

24  I have developed this analysis in Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State, op. cit.

25  The Commonwealth of Independent States was formed in December 1991 around Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia and Kasakhstan who were later joined by Armenia, Azebaidjan and the republics of Central Asia. The Tashkent Collective Security Treaty Organization brings Russia together with Armenia and the states of Central Asia with the exception of Turkmenistan.

26  Levada Center poll, 2007, online, available at: www.levada.ru.

27  Thomas de Wahl, contribution to the project “Russia, Scenarios for 2020”, Carnegie Center, Moscow, online, available at: www.carnegie.ru.

28  Roy Allison, presentation at the Observatoire de la Russie, CERI-Sciences Po, July 6, 2011.

29  Pierre Hassner, art. cit, p. 22.

30  See the studies by the Levada Center and the Strategic Analytical Center directed by Mikhail Dmitriev in Moscow.

31  The natural gas industry is under the control of the giant Gazprom whose methods of management remain opaque and which is seeking out major investors to develop the new natural gas fields and new energy sources. See the analyses by Mikhail Korchemkin, Jonathan Steele, and Thane Gustafson.

32  M. Mendras, op. cit., chapter 1, p. XX.

33  Dmitry Yefremenko, “Forced or Desired Modernity? Russia’s Chances in a Post-American World”, Russia in Global Affairs, October 2010, p. 38.

16  China and the end of socialism in Europe

A godsend for the Beijing Communists

Jean-Philippe Béja

Su Dongpo was a famous poet and calligrapher who lived during the Song Dynasty (eleventh century). But his name is also almost homophonic with Su Dongbo, meaning ‘the Soviet and Eastern European Wave’, by which the Chinese educated public refers to the events of 1989–1991 in Eastern Europe (dong) and the Soviet Union (Su). Does this mean that, for Chinese intellectuals, these events represent a beautifully written page in the history of mankind?[1]

They undoubtedly left an impression on the Chinese people, but to most of them, 1989 is associated not with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but rather with the movement for democracy on Tiananmen. For Europeans should remember that the first half of that year was marked by the largest mass movement in the history of the People’s Republic of China, a movement that lasted 50 days and shook the Communist Party, when thousands of students camping on Tiananmen Square – the symbolic center of power – were joined every day by hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents supporting them in calls for democracy and freedom. This was the time when Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to officially restore Soviet–Chinese party-to-party and state-to-state relations, could not be greeted on the square – a terrible loss of face for the Chinese leaders – despite (or because of?) the fact that the students acclaimed his policy of glasnost. Just after the CPSU general secretary’s visit, premier Li Peng proclaimed martial law; but it took the People’s Liberation Army two weeks to enter the city and crush the movement with tanks.[2]

The June 4 massacre put an end to the attempts at political reform that had been launched in the latter part of the 1980s, when Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang proclaimed his intention to separate the party from the state and establish a ‘dialogue’ with society.[3] All the organizations of the emerging civil society and public space that had been founded during the previous decade were banned, and their promoters and activists persecuted by the police. Many fled China and the massacre sparked serious protests from Western governments, which imposed sanctions on the People’s Republic even as their relations with the Soviet bloc were warming. The massacre had another unexpected consequence according to some sources: it reassured Mikhail Gorbachev that using the armed forces to repress popular demonstrations was counter-productive. The reactions provoked by the June 4 massacre were said to have counted in his decision to oppose Erich Honecker’s decision to imitate his Beijing counterparts. Although there is no way to confirm it, this theory was widespread among Chinese dissidents and exiled activists in the fall of 1989.[4] It acted as a consolation as it seemed to show that the martyrs of June 4 hadn’t sacrificed their lives for nothing.

A glimmer of hope in the darkness

The intellectual activists who were to play an important part in Beijing’s 1989 spring had shown great interest in the developments in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. In 1987 Zhao Ziyang himself had expressed his intention to enforce ‘toumingdu’ (transparency, the Chinese translation of glasnost). In 1988 one of the most liberal Chinese publications, the World Economic Herald, published a series of articles on political reform in the USSR and on Solidarność and the evolution of relations between party and society in Poland. Intellectuals who had been raised in the 1950s had been influenced by the Polish and Hungarian events of 1956, and they remained interested in the development of these countries in the 1980s. So, when the Berlin Wall fell, although the official press covered the event minimally, most of those who had taken part in the vast social movement of the first half of 1989 became very excited. The changes in East Germany, which then extended to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania, appeared as a vindication of the movement that had just been repressed in China and were viewed with extreme sympathy. The execution of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu in December aroused hope among activists who were consoled by the fact that the murderers didn’t go unpunished. Of course, these views could not be published in China’s official press, which had since June 4 been subjected to renewed control by the Department of Propaganda. Instead, it was through conversations with activists in China or in exile, that one could understand how widespread they were. To the pro-democracy activists, these events were the living evidence that the party was not invincible. If demonstrations had succeeded in bringing about the fall of all Eastern European communist parties, there was hope that their Chinese counterpart could meet with the same fate – a comforting thought in the period of what they termed the ‘white terror’ (baise kongbu).

Interest in the events in Europe was not, however, confined to the leaders of the student movement. Reformist party members and leading cadres, especially the followers of former general secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who had been purged or sidelined after June 4, were also very interested in such developments. These cadres, who had worked hard to implement the reform of the political system before 1989, were particularly impressed by Gorbachev’s decision to organize free and fair elections and to allow broad freedoms of the press – two demands they had been pushing for years. They also supported his decision to recognize citizens’ rights to set up autonomous organizations, as it was consistent with what they had tried to achieve in the 1980s. The fall of the East German and Czechoslovak parties showed that leaders who refused to adjust to the emergence of a strong civil society were doomed. Therefore, the radical reformers who had been purged after June 4 often discussed the action of the leaders of civil society in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.[5] When the Central and Eastern European Communist Parties collapsed, dissidents hoped that Chinese leaders would understand that the return to socialist orthodoxy they had imposed after June 4 could only lead to the end of the People’s Republic. Because they were not convinced that direct opposition to the party could be effective in China, where the emerging civil society had been dealt a terrible blow after the massacre, they believed that they should support the ‘healthy’ forces in the apparatus in their ‘struggle’ with the conservatives. In 1992, intellectuals and cadres belonging to these circles published a book entitled The Current of History, in which they stated that the only way for the party to avoid the destiny of its European counterparts consisted in striving to establish a market economy and pushing for the democratization of the regime, as this represented ‘the current of history’.[6] In a way, the fall of the wall consolidated these radical reformers’ faith in their pre-June 4 strategy.

The influence it had on some younger non-party democratic activists of the 1989 movement was quite different. After the massacre, which resulted in large numbers of oppositionists going to jail or into exile, it became impossible to organize demonstrations or any kind of social movement. Confronted with the impossibility of mobilizing the discontented, these activists chose to refuse to compromise with the party and to ‘live in truth’, thus adopting a behavior quite similar to that of the Central European dissidents. It is hard to tell if they did so under the direct influence of their European counterparts or whether it was rather the result of the similarity between the Czechoslovak situation after the 1968 Soviet intervention and the post-June 4 situation in the Middle Kingdom, or both. But there is definitely a ‘Havelian’ touch in the behavior of some 1990s dissident intellectuals, the most representative of whom is Liu Xiaobo:[7]

To stick to the bottom line, which consists in behaving sincerely like a man in daily life, doesn’t require so much courage, nobility, conscience or wisdom; such an attitude does not necessarily suppose that one pays the high personal price of jail, of hunger strike … it only requires that one refrain from lying in public speeches; and that, when confronted with the state’s carrot-and-stick tactics, one doesn’t lie in order to survive.[8]

This attitude is very similar to Havel’s conception of ‘living in truth’ and it is a fact that Liu Xiaobo has been an admirer of Václav Havel for many years. The Czech thinker’s ideas so impressed dissident circles in China that in the early twenty-first century a university professor translated his works, had them printed as a book at his own expense and distributed the book through personal networks, so that around 2005 Havel’s ideas were widely discussed among politically conscious Chinese intellectuals and reached a wide audience comprising students interested in politics.

Therefore, despite the efforts made by the Chinese Communist Party to control information about the fall of the Berlin Wall, former activists of – and participants in – the 1989 pro-democracy movement did their best to follow the developments and discuss their significance when they met informally. As the party had re-established complete control over the public sphere, the results of these reflections were not published in China, but many activists wrote articles on these events in Hong Kong journals[9] and in the democrats’ press in exile.[10] When travel restrictions for Chinese citizens were eased in the mid-1990s, information about what had happened in late 1989 in Europe became more immediately available and the events were more widely discussed in activist circles. In 1993 a former student leader from Xi’an, Ma Shaohua, published a book entitled Eastern Europe: 1989–1993, in which he explained that Communism had collapsed in Eastern Europe because the people could stand neither the poverty produced by the command economy nor the one-party dictatorship. His conclusion was that, in order to avoid chaos, the only solution for China was to adopt a democratic political system similar to the Western one and a market economy.[11] The book was banned, but it was able to reach a wide audience and to this day some critiques of the regime still refer to the events described in the book to show the fragility of the regime.

The fall of the Wall and the strategy of ‘peaceful evolution’ attributed to the West

To the Communist Party leadership, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism in Eastern Europe were further evidence that they had been right to refuse to host a dialogue with the striking students and to send in the People’s Liberation Army to put an end to the demonstrations that had rocked China for 50 days. These events showed that Gorbachev’s strategy of glasnost, which most leaders considered to be a Soviet version of the ‘reform of the political system’ that Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang had wanted to enforce in the 1980s, could result only in the end of socialism. The recognition of independent organizations and the organization of free elections amounted to the end of the leadership of the Communist Party, which Chinese leaders considered the cornerstone of the regime and had enshrined in the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’[12] defined by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Gorbachev’s ‘errors’ were seen as strikingly similar to the ones for which Hu Yaobang had been criticized in early 1987, when he was accused of giving in to ‘bourgeois liberalization’, an accusation that was later leveled against his successor Zhao Ziyang.[13] Deng and his comrades were convinced that this weakness had encouraged ‘hostile forces’ to launch the large-scale demonstrations of the spring of 1989. They agreed that ‘quelling’ the demonstrations was a question of life and death for the regime, and the fall of the Berlin Wall proved that they were right.

The Chinese leaders believed, however, that Gorbachev’s mistakes were not the only factor that had caused the end of European Communist regimes. They thought that it was also the result of a new strategy in the conditions of ‘détente’ on the part of the Western countries – the United States foremost among them – which used the defense of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ to weaken the Socialist countries. This strategy had been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Drawing on the lessons of the 1989–1991 events, Chinese central television explained in 2006:

The US government even linked ‘human rights diplomacy’ to ideological and political infiltration, openly using human rights issues to pressure Socialist countries. After the Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975, Western countries used their stipulations to provide support to ‘political dissidents’ in the Soviet Union. The support included material and financial aid, and also ‘honor’ or ‘moral support’.

To Deng Xiaoping and his comrades, the support lent by the international media to the Chinese pro-democracy movement in the spring of 1989 was part of this strategy, which they called ‘peaceful evolution’ (from socialism to capitalism):[14] ‘For years, the US and Western countries have been using the “human rights” issue to attack and slander socialist systems, raising a fuss that “the Communist world tramples on citizens’ rights”’.[15] After June 4, it was argued, they were using the same strategy to try and topple the Chinese Communist Party by enacting sanctions against the People’s Republic to protest the ‘violations of human rights’ which were being committed there. To party leaders, these sanctions showed that the United States and other Western countries had decided to apply to China the strategy that had been successful in Europe.

But the Chinese leaders were not in unanimous agreement regarding the lessons to be drawn from the Su Dongbo. Although they agreed on the diagnosis, they differed on the remedies. The conservatives, who gained the upper hand in the wake of the June 4 massacre, thought that the solution consisted in

resolutely maintain[ing] the leadership of the party and not develop[ing] a multiparty system; resolutely maintain[ing] the dictatorship of the proletariat and never develop[ing] bourgeois democratic freedoms; resolutely maintain[ing] the system of public ownership and not develop[ing] privatization; resolutely uphold[ing] Marxism and not allow[ing] ideological pluralism.[16]

Basically, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian and their comrades believed that, in order to save the party, the regime should reduce the scope of the market, restrict the development of township and village enterprises considered elements of capitalist restoration in the countryside, limit foreign investment regarded as a Trojan horse for capitalism – in sum, roll back the economic reforms, as well as prevent the emergence of an autonomous civil society.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a document popularly referred to as the ‘princelings’ manifesto’[17] (since its promoters were the sons of Communist leaders) demanded that the party assume its position as an interest group, exert control over state enterprises, and use nationalism and ‘Chinese tradition’ as the new legitimizing ideology. This manifesto was never publicly published, but it influenced the thinking of a number of conservative leaders.

Deng’s analysis was different. Although he agreed with the political lessons drawn by his comrades on the need to prevent the emergence of autonomous organizations, he emphasized the need to reinforce ‘ideological education’, a task which, he insisted, had been overlooked during the 1980s as general secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang[18] had lent an ear to the sirens of ‘bourgeois liberalization’. Also, although he considered that the party’s primary task was maintaining ‘stability and unity’, he remained convinced that these steps were not sufficient and he continued to strongly believe that the solution didn’t consist in restoring the basic tenets of orthodox Socialism. For years, he had battled the partisans of the primacy of central planning, often clashing with orthodox leader Chen Yun. Deng insisted that, in order to re-establish the legitimacy that had been seriously affected by the June 4 massacre, the government had to improve the living conditions of the people:

Although we have to strengthen ideological and political work, we cannot depend on those measures alone. The crucial factor is economic growth, which will be reflected in a gradual rise in living standards. Only when people have felt the tangible benefits that come with stability and with the current systems and policies will there be true stability.[19]

Paradoxically, the end of communism in Europe and the USSR helped strengthen his hand, and allowed him to impose his economic policy on his conservative partners. He explained that one of the reasons for the fall of the Berlin Wall had been the increasing differences in the living standards between Eastern and Western Europe. The European Communist leaders had neglected economic development and the Chinese should not repeat their mistake: ‘If China wants to withstand the pressure of hegemonism and power politics and to uphold the socialist system, it is crucial for us to achieve rapid economic growth and to carry out our development strategy’.[20] The centrally planned economy had failed in Central Europe, and it could certainly not help restore the Chinese party’s legitimacy. During the Southern Tour that he carried out immediately after the fall of the USSR in January 1992, Deng directly criticized his conservative comrades:

Right tendencies [meaning ‘bourgeois liberalization’] can destroy socialism, but so can ‘Left’ ones…. Regarding reform and the open policy as means of introducing capitalism and seeing the danger of peaceful evolution towards capitalism as coming chiefly from the economic sphere are ‘Left’ tendencies.[21]

And in direct criticism of Chen Yun’s emphasis on central planning, he added: ‘A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism, too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism, too’.[22] Deng reaffirmed his determination to pursue the policy of secularization that he had started to carry out in 1978, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that he was right. By sticking to orthodox economic policies, the European parties had been unable to raise the people’s living standards, which resulted in the loss of their legitimacy. Deng concluded that it was useless to endlessly debate the socialist or capitalist nature of economic reforms and policies. ‘Development is the most important task’ (fazhan shi ying daoli).

This meant that China would not hesitate to violate the basic tenets of socialism. Private enterprises, which had been permitted on a small-scale, were allowed to grow as long as they participated in the development of the economy. The opening-up policy was re-asserted and, despite sanctions by Western governments, transnational companies were offered very attractive conditions in terms of tax breaks.

The party decided that the new phase of development would emphasize high technology, which meant that it needed to mobilize the intellectual elites. However, a majority of their members had been involved in the 1989 pro-democracy movement, and the two years of repression which had followed the June 4 massacre made them reluctant to support a party that had revived the anti-intellectual discourse of Mao’s years. Deng Xiaoping held out an olive branch to them, and welcomed their contribution to the country’s development. He offered material advantages to lure them back into the party fold.

Despite their symbolic rehabilitation during the 1990s (the former ‘stinking ninth’ of the Cultural Revolution were reintegrated into the ‘working class’), the social and economic status of the intellectual elites remained very low. After his Southern tour, Deng offered them the opportunity for enrichment by creating their own enterprises and to improve their standards of living by raising their salaries, as in the case of university professors. Scholars were allowed to join the international scientific community by taking part in international conferences, going abroad for study and research, and those who had emigrated in the wake of the 1989 repression were lured back by promises of excellent material conditions. Of course, all these perks could be enjoyed if, and only if, they refrained from criticizing the party.

Deng’s proposals were enthusiastically approved by most of the intelligentsia. Many of those who had taken part in the 1989 pro-democracy movement and had applauded the fall of the Berlin Wall were appalled by the situation in which Russia found itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To these patriots, who shared with the leadership the century-old dream of making China a strong and prosperous country (fuguo qiangbing), the independence proclaimed by Russia’s ‘national minorities’ and the transformation of a one-time superpower into a third world country – whose leaders were seeking help from the International Monetary Fund – was a nightmare they wanted to avoid at all costs. Many accepted the party line that this situation was the result of the policy of glasnost adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev. A number of those who had fought for democracy reflected back on their action and began to believe that the student movement could have led China to exactly where the Soviet Union was now. They started to wonder whether the party had not been right to repress the movement, especially since it had embarked on the road to marketization and development. Using a proto-Marxist logic, many democrats concluded that the 1989 movement had failed because the organizations of the budding civil society were exceedingly reliant on the state and lacked economic autonomy. According to them, Deng’s new policy of allowing the market to develop, would actually create the economic infrastructure required for an autonomous civil society, a necessary condition of democratization. Therefore, the intellectuals explained that, by creating enterprises and accepting the new social contract, they were actually continuing their fight for democracy, and helping make China a strong and prosperous country.

In the aftermath of Deng’s Southern tour, a large number of intellectuals plunged into the sea of commerce (xia hai), creating enterprises in the high tech, export–import and real estate sectors. Many made fortunes and became the staunchest supporters of the party’s new policy. In the mid-1990s, professors’ salaries and working conditions in universities were dramatically improved. Whereas in 1992 any expression of dissent met with repression, pressure gradually relaxed and people were allowed to criticize the government in private. The mainstream intelligentsia started to abandon its demands for democracy and the new generations of students became less interested in politics. Most of them are now eager to join the party in order to improve their future prospects.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union helped Deng Xiaoping to sideline the orthodox socialists who had helped him gain the upper hand against the pro-democracy movement. The Communist Party was transformed from a party claiming to represent the working class and the peasantry into a party representing the elites. The formula was coined by general secretary Jiang Zemin when, in 2001, he expressed his theory of the ‘three representatives’: the party represents first the most advanced productive forces, which is not – in contrast to Marxist theory, which dominated Eastern European parties – the working class, but rather private entrepreneurs (who were officially admitted into the party on the eightieth anniversary of its foundation), managers of state-owned enterprises, and engineers, etc.; second, ‘the most advanced culture’, i.e. the intellectuals, as long as they refrain from criticizing the regime; and last, the population as a whole. This consensus, which was achieved after Deng’s Southern tour, was largely a consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall. By using the negative example that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented, Deng succeeded in mobilizing the ‘patriotism’ of the elites, and forced his more conservative rivals to accept his strategy of party-led capitalist development and a party-controlled political and social sphere. He and his successors have also been able to prevent the emergence of autonomous organizations that could pose a threat to the regime.

Conclusion

Some 20 years on, China has achieved impressive results. The new model of development, termed by some the ‘Beijing consensus’, seems to have proved the 1989 democrats’ forecasts wrong: the People’s Republic of China has not followed in the footsteps of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It has been able to overcome the sanctions imposed by Western countries in 1989, and is now in a position to impose its values on international relations: Western governments have been increasingly reluctant to raise the question of human rights when dealing with Beijing, and they have acknowledged the return of China as a great power on the international scene, as was demonstrated by the presence of most heads of state and government at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

China’s Westphalian approach to international relations – its reluctance to ‘interfere’ in the internal affairs of other countries – has attracted the support of many states, especially in what was once the Third World. Despite being ruled by a communist party, the PRC has been admitted to the WTO and has since played an important role in the world economy. This was further demonstrated when Beijing was courted by developed countries in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The joke circulating on the Chinese Internet – ‘Only China can save capitalism’[23] – was not so far from reality. The PRC has emerged much stronger from the crisis[24] and has even lectured the United States on how to manage a capitalist economy.[25] In a way, the Communist Party has been able to achieve the dream of making China ‘a strong and prosperous nation’.

In the last two decades, China has achieved an impressive growth rate, becoming the second largest economy in the world. This has been achieved through a system that mixes a very strong control of the political and social fields with a market economy largely dominated by big state-owned corporations and state-led joint ventures.[26]

As demonstrated in this chapter, the Chinese Communists have since June 4, 1989 done everything they could to reinforce the dictatorship of the party: the ideas of separation between party and state proposed in 1987 have been abandoned, and since 1989, the number one of the party has also been president of the republic and head of the Central Military Commission, which supervises the army. This reinforcement of the dictatorship has allowed the party to concentrate its forces on economic development. However, that development has also resulted in unprecedented social polarization, further intensified by banning social groups from creating their own organizations.

During the last two decades, the slogan of the party has been: ‘stability overrules everything’. Its policies have favored an elite and an emerging middle class who have been content to put up with the absence of institutionalized freedoms as long as their standards of living were improving. However, the formula that has been so successful is beginning to display signs of erosion. In the last five or six years, social contradictions have multiplied. Those who have lagged behind – peasants who have been victims of land grabs without sufficient compensation, workers whose salaries have diminished in relative terms, victims of the degradation of the environment caused by free-for-all development, workers of peasant origin who are deprived of the rights reserved to urban citizens – have become more outspoken.

Thanks to the development of the Internet, a new generation of ‘citizen journalists’ and politicized members of the middle classes have started to question the development model that deprives a large part of the population of its basic rights. Strikes, riots and protests by peasants have multiplied, fuelled by the rampant corruption of cadres, especially at the local level. In Xinjiang and Tibet, ethnic riots have shown that relations between the ‘nationalities’ remain tense and might threaten stability. Dissidents’ voices once again made themselves heard in December 2008, when 10,000 people from all ranks of society signed Charter 08,[27] a document inspired by the Czechoslovak Charter 77, which demanded the transformation of the regime into a liberal democracy. The harsh sentence meted out to one of the organizers, Liu Xiaobo,[28] shows that the regime is not ready to ease its grip on the political field. In 2010, measures were taken to rein in the NGOs that have been created in the last five years.

The increasing emergence of factors of instability has yet to become a life-and-death threat to the party’s power. However, it might indicate that the social contract established after the end of the USSR in 1992 is beginning to be eroded and that the mixture of post-totalitarian regime and all-out capitalism might have to be amended in the near future. The approach of the election of the new general secretary in 2012 and the new premier in 2013 will be an important test of the regime’s degree of institutionalization. Will a smooth succession process permit the relaxation of controls and a certain degree of tolerance of civil society, leading to a reduction in social conflict? Or will contradictions related to the succession process lead to the adoption of a tougher stance that could make social conflict more acute and threaten the Chinese development model?

Notes

1  Mao referred to China as ‘a blank page on which it is possible to write the most beautiful poems’.

2  For a detailed account of the movement, see J.-P. Béja, M.Bonnin, A.Peyraube, Le tremblement de terre de Pékin, Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

3  Jea Ziyang, Report to the XIIIth Communist Party Congress. Online, available at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2003–01/20/content_697061.htm.

4  Interviews with the leaders of the Federation for a Democratic China, October–November 1989. See also Y. Chixia, ‘June 4th Triggered the Su dong bo’, June 3, 2006. Online, available at: www.youpai.org/read.php?id=708.

5  Interviews with elderly members of the Hu Yaobang faction (Hu Yaobang xitong) Beijing, 1991–1993.

6  Lishi de chaoliu, Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin Daxue Chubanshe, 1992.

7  L. Xiaobo discovered Havel’s works during his imprisonment in a camp between 1996 and 1999.

8  L. Xiaobo, ‘Wo xinzhong yongyuande gaogui jiyi’ (An Eternally Precious Record in my Heart), Zhengming 296, June 2002), p. 37.

9  See, for example, L. Xiaobo’s articles in Kaifangi, Zhengming, etc.

10  See Minzhu Zhongguo.

11  D. Ou: 1989–1993, Xi’an: Shaanxi Jiaoyu Chubanshe 1993, reviewed in Mingbao, November 29, 1993. Cited in J.-P. Béja, ‘Frémissements dans le monde de la dissidence’, Perspectives chinoises 20, November–December 1993.

12  Defined in March 1979 by Deng Xiaoping, the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’ are Socialism, Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Party leadership. See D. Xiaoping, ‘Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles’, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 2. Online, available at: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/contents2.html.

13  Z. Ziyang, Prisoner of the State, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

14  To understand how much importance Chinese Party leaders attribute to the international media, see Z. Liang, The Tiananmen Papers, New York: Public Affairs, 2001, and L. Peng, Li Peng Tiananmen riji.

15  See the eighth episode of the TV series, Preparing for Times of Danger in Times of Safety: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Response to the Western World’s Strategy of Westernization and Dissolution. Online, available at: https://chinascope.org/main/content/view/2467/92/ (translation of the script) June 2006.

16  Speech by G. Di, Renmin Ribao, August 30, 1991. Cited in D. Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 59.

17

The emphasis put on national culture and the call to patriotism have a definite power of persuasion. And insofar as the Chinese nation’s rich and refined traditional culture is concerned, it can, in our situation, help the masses adhere to morally and spiritually positive values,

in ‘Sulian jubian zhihou Zhongguo de xianshi yingdui yu zhanlüe xuanze [The Situation and the Strategic Choice that Confronts China after the Soviet Coup]’, Qianshao, January 1992, pp. 50–55. Cited in J. Thoraval, ‘Néo-autoritarisme et néo-conservatisme’, Perspectives chinoises 2, April 1992, p. 18. One can see that the recent adoption by the party of the concept of ‘harmonious society’ corresponds to this emphasis on ‘traditional culture’ as a way to reinforce party legitimacy.

18  On Deng’s view of Hu Yaobang, see Z. Ziyang, Prisoner of the State.; and of Zhao Ziyang, see Li Peng ‘Liu.Si’riji (The Tiananmen Diary of Li Peng, Hong Kong: New Century Press, 2010.

19  Lessons drawn by Deng Xiaoping from the collapse of the wall. From ‘The International Situation and Economic Problems’, March 3, 1990, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3. Online, available at: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/vol.3/text/d1130.html.

20  ‘The International Situation and Economic Problems’, March 3, 1990, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3. Online, available at: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/vol.3/text/d1130.html.

21  ‘Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai’, January 18–February 21, 1992, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping. Online, available at: http://web.peopledaily.com.cn/english/dengxp/vol.3/text/d1200.html.

22  Ibid.

23  A parody of Mao Zedong’s slogan always repeated by party leaders ‘Only socialism can save China’.

24  J.-P. Béja, ‘La crise financière en Chine: une divine surprise?’, Esprit, November 2009, pp. 97–100.

25  C. Huang, ‘Mainland Extends its Global Influence and Offers a Real Challenge to US Dominance’, South China Morning Post, August 8, 2009.

26  On the economy, see above, J.-F. Huchet, The Impact of ‘1989’ on the Advent of an Authoritarian State Capitalism in China.

27  ‘China’s Charter 08’, Online, available at: www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/chinas-charter-08/.

28  On December 27, 2009, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment for ‘incitement to subversion’.

17  The UN and the changing meaning of an international community

Jean-Marie Guéhenno

The international system established in 1945 is in crisis not only because the balance of power has changed and Europe has lost its centrality, but also because the nature of the problems it is confronted with has changed.

The Bush administration, because it was allowing the rest of the world – and particularly the Europeans – to reduce the question of their global positioning to the question of their relations with the United States, delayed this debate. The arrival of the Obama administration, combined with the changing balance of power hastened by the economic crisis, complicates matters further: it was easier to hide behind the opposition to Bush than to define a partnership with Obama. The Europeans do not want to be a counterweight to America, but they do not know whether they are simply an extension of it, and their inability to conceptualize their relations with Russia is revealing in this regard.

It is very difficult for Europeans to understand a world in which Europe is no longer the hub of international relations. Shanghai Cooperation Council, Latin America/Africa, China/Africa – the rest of the world is not like Europe and by the time the Europeans have come to an agreement among themselves, they don’t have much energy left for the rest of the world. And how much do they really want to engage with it? It seems more agreeable to negotiate with similar people.

The European theme of ‘effective multilateralism’ banks on the world being able to find stability within accepted rules and on creating common values. But the world is not just mobilized by processes and there is, at times, a suspicion that the European insistence on process conceals an incapacity to open up fundamental debates with the rest of the world, even though the exhaustion of the 1945 compromise demands a more ambitious concept of the international community.

Almost the entire burden of a fundamental engagement with ‘the rest’ is today borne by the United States: in relation to China, Russia and Iran, it is the United States who define the terms of the discussion. The majority of Europeans are satisfied with such a situation and doubtless prefer today to be part of a ‘big Switzerland’. Before we condemn such an attitude, let us acknowledge that it is not so bad: better a big Switzerland than a little Prussia, and better a little Prussia than a big one. And Europe finds a justification for its quietism in the essential contribution to world peace that its successive enlargements have so far represented.

American engagement remains the best insurance today against a return to power politics. China, distrustful of grand ideas, appreciates a pragmatism that leaves lots of options open. Will this meeting of two pragmatisms, only one of which has a universalist dimension, be enough to ensure cooperative management of questions that are too enormous to be dealt with by a single state, however, powerful it may be? A dyarchy is always unstable and the gamble on the multilateral engagement of American democracy represented by such an option is a dangerous one: the ‘free rider’ position irritated the Americans during the Cold War, but the United States had no other option than to bear the burden of leading the Western world. It has other options today than multilateralism, particularly as a relative European absence reduces discussion to a bipolar dimension that narrows the diplomatic room for maneuver.

A more visible Europe could restore flexibility to the international debate and an ECFR survey indicates that, in more than 50 countries, this is felt to be desirable: what a resounding vote of confidence! Europeans can become a bridge between an American world, based on a project and a contract, and the majority of nations, whose past is, in some cases, a source of inspiration, in others a millstone around their necks. And, more than China or the United States, they have a real interest in rescuing the idea of an order based on an idea of international community: they are powerful enough to influence the globe, but not so powerful that they can manage without a rule-governed world. And vis-à-vis the rest of the nations, they have two characteristics that give them a place apart: that of having invented the modern form of the nation-state; that of managing the transcendence of that form today. In an unequal world, in which the principle of sovereignty remains the great equalizer, European history is both a ‘turn-off’, when it is a reminder of a colonial and imperial past, and an asset, because a humble Europe, remembering its tragic history, should be able to establish the necessary proximity with the world’s fragile communities. It also implies a Europe capable to redefine both the transatlantic relationship and its place within the system of the United Nations.

The UN and the quest for global governance

Could 1989 have been a second beginning for the United Nations, after the aborted start of 1945, when the onset of the Cold War scuttled the great ambitions of the UN charter? Would the end of the division that had paralyzed the Security Council lead to the foundation of an International Community? 1989 was undoubtedly a moment of great hope. This was the time when a president of the United States could speak of a New International Order without triggering immediate opposition. This was also the time when the concept of humanitarian intervention was developed.

Where are we some 20 years later? The history of the last two decades tells two contradictory stories.

On the one hand, the extraordinary acceleration of the 1989–2009 period expresses the new possibilities of cooperation that the end of the Cold War opened up. It was reflected in the almost feverish activity of the council, which met constantly and whose work program was constantly expanding as new crises came on to its agenda, without it being possible to delete old ones from it. And many of these crises were not minor. In mid-2009 the council was still debating the Arab–Israeli conflict, but also Iran and the danger of nuclear proliferation, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia, Lebanon and Sudan, etc. The ‘blue helmets’, the most concrete manifestation of the executive power of the Security Council, are today almost 100,000 in number and, if we add in the police officers and civilian personnel of the UN missions, almost 120,000 people are deployed today under the direct authority of the council. And the figure exceeds 200,000 if we include the operations ‘authorized’ by the council – that is to say, the operations for which it takes political responsibility, but whose execution falls within the remit of organizations other than the UN (NATO, the European Union, the African Union).

To the management of these inter-or intra-state crises new subjects have been added. On the one hand, particularly under pressure from the United States, the definition of security has tended to broaden. The question of AIDS and its implications for security, for example, has come within the competence of the Security Council, not without this prompting negative reactions on the part of the developing countries. On the other hand, the development of the concept of international justice has led the Security Council to exercise new responsibilities, either creating an ad hoc tribunal by resolution – which it did for Lebanon – or a treaty giving it a specific role. This was the case with the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, which authorizes the council to extend the jurisdiction of the court to non-signatory states – as the council has done in the case of Darfur, as well as to suspend prosecutions for a period of one year, which the African Union and the Arab League are asking it to do in the same case. Lastly, the council, keen to diversify the instruments at its disposal and recognizing the difficulty of putting new modes of action in place by the treaty route, has extended the practice of sanctions, including personal sanctions, creating ad hoc procedures through its own resolutions, at times to punish, at others to limit the impact of the punishments it inflicts. The ‘Oil for Food’ program, which aimed to limit the impact on the Iraqi population of the sanctions aimed at punishing Saddam Hussein’s regime, remains the best-known and most unfortunate of these initiatives.

Such a range of activities and such a level of operational engagement would have been unthinkable during the Cold War.

There is however another story, which is not a story of expansion and success, but of paralysis and failures. The paralysis of UN reform, and the great tragedies of the 1990s. The Security Council, which is being asked to take on new responsibilities, has seen only one enlargement since 1945. This was in 1965, and the latest 2005 attempt to make its membership more representative of the twenty-first-century world, has failed. As for its procedures, they remain those of the ‘Provisional (sic) Rules of Procedure’ adopted in 1946. The discussions that have taken place on changes to the use of the right of veto by the five permanent members have not led to any sort of agreement.

There is, therefore, a peculiar contrast between the upheavals the council is undergoing in its activities and its underlying institutional arrangements. Does the council’s activism genuinely reflect a greater international consensus? The creation of the International Criminal Court and the 2005 Summit at which leaders of state seemed to take on board the new concept of the ‘responsibility to protect’, by solemnly affirming that they were:

prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,

have been interpreted as two signs that the world was genuinely entering a new phase and that the idea of international community was assuming a reality it had never had before. But this same first decade of the twenty-first century is also the decade that saw the Security Council deeply divided when it had to confront the prospect of a preventive war in Iraq. It was also the decade of the Darfur tragedy, which has remained unresolved for more than five years, even though it was described by Colin Powell as a ‘genocide’! What conclusions are we to draw, then, from these contradictory signals for the future and from international governance? After several failed attempts to reform international organizations, G2, G20, coalitions of the willing or coalitions of the relevant are more discussed than institutional reform. Ambitions have been scaled back, and the world is definitely not in a ‘1945 moment’. Does that mean that the two decades since the end of the cold war are two decades of missed opportunities?

The United Nations Charter negotiated in 1945 was a compromise reflecting the exceptional circumstances of the time. It reaffirms the Westphalian principle of an order based on the sovereignty and hence equality of states, but it introduces an extraordinary inequality by entrusting particular responsibilities for the preservation of that order to five states, the permanent members of the Security Council. The authors of the charter were influenced by the experience of World War II and by the sequence of circumstances that had made it possible. Collective security, as it had been organized within the framework of the League of Nations, had shown itself incapable of providing a solid base for the international legal order. Faced with a determined actor who did not accept the established order, the League of Nations had demonstrated its impotence: to make security everyone’s business, was to make it no one’s. It was necessary, then, to entrust the responsibility for policing the international order to a more limited group of nations and extend into peacetime the particular responsibilities the ‘united nations’ had had to assume against the Axis powers during the war. The Security Council and its core of permanent members were born out of this understanding. If a new Hitler were to appear, Chapter VII of the charter afforded the Security Council the possibility of acting without the consent of the country concerned. In agreeing to entrust such a heavy responsibility to a handful of states, the community of nations, which was admittedly limited in 1945 to a few dozen countries, took a bold, and even revolutionary, decision. It was difficult for nations that had stayed out of the war to oppose a new international order promoted by countries that had paid a price in blood. This makes it all the more noteworthy that, even in these exceptional circumstances, negotiations were difficult. One of the essential elements of the agreement was the reaffirmation of the principle of sovereignty. Article 2-7 of the charter in fact states that:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

The nations that assembled in San Francisco in 1945 accepted that inter-state relations should be governed by principles of law; they did not accept that ‘matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state’ should be subject to external authority.

The compromise achieved in 1945 was not implemented as its authors had envisaged, because the threats to peace that appeared in the following years in no sense matched the threats that had led to World War II. The fundamental fact was the appearance of the Cold War, which smashed the war-time unity and created a situation in which the first threat to peace was a confrontation between permanent members of the council. When the Cold War was at last over, it was conflicts of a new type – more often intra-state than inter-state – that the Security Council had to deal with. Ultimately, in the 65 years of its existence, the Security Council has voted to undertake only one military operation that corresponds – at least in its spirit – to what was envisaged by the authors of the charter. The military operation against Saddam Hussein after his aggression against Kuwait, which was authorized by the council and led by the United States, can be described as an international policing operation in keeping with the spirit of 1945. It is, moreover, interesting to note that the coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait would have broken up if it had gone further than the 1945 compromise and tried to take on the regime itself.

Could the end of the Cold War make it possible to return to the 1945 compromise, or even go further? That was certainly the hope in 1989, but the last 20 years have revealed the unrealism of such a hope. Instead, the post-Cold War world has undermined the foundations of the 1945 compromise, at the very moment when some were at last hoping to be able to give it an operational reality. First, the separation between matters that are essentially within ‘the domestic jurisdiction of any state’ and those relating to external security has turned out to be increasingly difficult to preserve. On the strategic level, a state can become a threat as much by its weakness as by its strength, and the internal affairs of a state may, therefore, have consequences for international security. At the same time, the inequality between states introduced in 1945 is becoming more visible at the very point when it is becoming less legitimate: an effective response to the new conditions of international security demands, in fact, that the Security Council make more and more decisions that challenge the sovereignty of states, but its composition reflects a world dating back to before decolonization and is leading a growing number of states to contest its authority. Lastly, a genuine consensus of the international community over what it expects from the Security Council seems increasingly difficult to attain. For some, the distinction between an inter-state order governed by universally recognized principles and an intra-state order that supposedly is not, is less and less acceptable. For others, this univocal solidarity may become a veil for a neo-colonialism of the powerful, against which the affirmation of sovereignty remains the best defense.

Expectations of the Security Council are, therefore, contradictory, and the way the UN implements augmented operational responsibilities reflects the contradictions and ambivalences of a divided international community.

At the strategic level, Al Qaeda’s attacks on US territory have revealed the strategic vulnerability of a strong state – the most powerful on Earth – to one of the weakest states on the planet. The collapse of a state is not only a threat to the well-being of its inhabitants; it can become a strategic concern for the whole world once a well-organized terrorist group finds a safe haven there. And this discovery immediately posed new questions for the Security Council that called into doubt the 1945 compromise.

The most immediate question was the one relating to the conditions in which force was to be used. In a letter to the Security Council in October 2001, when military operations were beginning in Afghanistan, the government of the United States stated that it was acting within a framework of self-defense, as recognized in article 51 of the charter. It thus seemed to be acting within the political and legal framework laid down in 1945. It was striking back against the state that had served as a rearward base for the 11 September terrorists, thus asserting the principle of the political responsibility of every state for the control of the territory under its sovereignty. However, the letter added that the United States reserved the right to conduct ‘further actions with respect to other organizations and States’. This remark brought about a qualitative change in the possibilities for using force. It formalized the vision of a ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) that has no territorial or temporal limits. The transnational threat of terrorism destroyed the international order that the authors of the charter had attempted to consolidate in 1945. The clear fact of aggression by one state against another, which justified the bypassing of the judgment of the Security Council, was no longer required, and a state could resort to force against an organization settled on the territory of another state without a direct, immediate link being established between an act of aggression and a potential riposte. The notion of self-defense was, in this way, redefined, and the scope for unilateral decision-making on the part of states radically expanded, at the expense of the Security Council. There had been the beginnings of the implementation of this vision under the Clinton administration, when cruise missile attacks were launched in summer 1998, but it was theorized and extended by the Bush administration. The debates surrounding the launching of the Iraq war represented an additional step in the reduction of the Security Council’s authority, not just with the well-known differences between the United States and the opponents of war (particularly France), but also with the less visible differences between the USA and Great Britain. Between opponents and advocates of war, the bone of contention, in the particular circumstances of the history of relations with Iraq, was the authority of the Security Council in respect of its past resolutions. Did it, as the opponents of war claimed, have to adopt a new resolution to authorize the use of force or did past resolutions (678 and 1441) represent a sufficient basis for action? Great Britain, forced to make a virtue of necessity, had to accept that past resolutions were sufficient. But it did not go as far as to subscribe to the American position that judgment on how a resolution was to be implemented could be left to the individual assessment of states and did not fall under the authority of the Security Council. Thus, not only was the field of application of legitimate self-defense widened (and the possibility of the preventive use of force envisaged), but in the situations within the authority of the Security Council, its powers were restricted by a broad interpretation of, on the one hand, the authority conferred by its past resolutions and, on the other, of the scope for assessment by individual states of their implementation. To the ambiguity of the new threats the United States did not wish to add the uncertainty of an international institution whose ultimate decision was difficult to predict. But the balance constructed in 1945 between the role of the Security Council and that of the nations was thereby disrupted. Each nation’s right to resort to force in cases of self-defense had been preserved in 1945, but the acts of aggression justifying such a resort were supposed to be both clear and exceptional. Things were quite different in a world in which wars had neither beginning nor end and the transition from peace to war was no longer the clear matter of an army crossing a frontier. Moreover, the very immensity of the disaster that would be wrought by the effective use of weapons of mass destruction by a non-state actor modified the terms of the choice between preventive action and counterattack. Did a state have to run the risk of ignoring the danger of a future existential threat and relying on a collective process with an uncertain outcome or, stepping outside the 1945 compromise, was it to take its fate in its own hands, even at the risk of defying the international community? Was it necessary to pass from preemption to prevention?

The absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda discredited a Bush administration that thought it could confront the new threats by giving the US government sole responsibility for determining both the threats and the appropriate responses to them. However, the failure of unilateralism has not put an end to the difficulties ensuing from the evolution of the nature of the threats to international security. The order built in 1945 remains a Westphalian order built on the sovereignty of states. How are we to respond to the situations in which a state finds itself unable to exercise the responsibilities that ensue from sovereignty? Who will fill this gap that the charter had not foreseen? Strong states that can export security? International organizations acting in the name of global collective interests? The question is ultimately the same whether we are debating the threats emanating from non-state actors that states do not know how to deal with, transnational questions, or the responsibility to protect those people whose states cannot protect them. These problems, which Kofi Annan called ‘problems without passports’, and which run from pandemics to terrorism or drugs, were clearly identified in the report the UN secretary general submitted to the heads of state and government in September 2005, entitled “In Larger Freedom”. They are expressions of the emergence of a world in which geography counts for less and, as a result, security does not end at frontiers and frontiers do not put an end to insecurity. It was sufficient, in the past, to have a balance of forces with one’s neighbors to ensure one’s security. The weakness of a state is a greater threat today. The United States discovered this on 11 September 2001 with Afghanistan. Israel discovered it in July 2006 with the Lebanon war. The entire world discovered it when the SARS pandemic, emerging in a number of Asian countries with precarious health systems, threatened the planet.

The appearance of these threats of a new type blurs the distinction between the questions that can be left to the sovereign assessment of states, within the framework of self-defense, and those that are matters for the Security Council, and there is no consensus on where the new boundary runs between the two. On the contrary, the five countries chosen in 1945 to manage the world’s difficult moments and to take decisions in situations that go beyond the framework of traditional self-defense, are seeing their authority increasingly contested.

The most tangible sign of this loss of legitimacy is the way the council’s decisions are more and more frequently contested, at no great cost to those contesting them. The referral of the Darfur situation to the International Criminal Court by a Security Council resolution was openly contested by the Sudanese government, despite the mandatory character of the resolution that was passed. Subsequently, many African and Arab states, even though they are members of the United Nations and in some cases signatories to the statute creating the ICC, have met officially with President Bashir, thereby supporting the position taken up by Sudan, despite Bashir being the accused party in the council’s referral decision. The adoption on 31 August 2006 of resolution 1706 providing for the deployment of 17,000 UN peacekeeping troops is another illustration of the council’s loss of authority. The resolution, passed under pressure from the United States and Great Britain, in application of Chapter VII of the charter – and hence not requiring the agreement of the country concerned – was intended as an authoritative act of the council: it ‘invited’ the consent of Sudan, but did not make implementation dependent upon that consent, as China had requested. The purely formal character of this blast of authority very quickly showed itself: to deploy a military force on a country’s territory without its consent is to invade that country and hence make war on it, which, naturally, had not been seriously considered by anyone. Sudan did not give its consent, the resolution was not implemented and, one year later, the council gave in to the conditions laid down by Sudan, adopting a new resolution and forgetting its previous one. However one assesses the wisdom of the council’s decisions, what is remarkable is how little concern the international community shows when they are flouted. The council makes more and more decisions, but the costs of defying them are decreasing, and no one, including the council itself, seems excessively concerned about this.

The council is not as well respected today as it was. Not only, as we have noted, is the volume of its operational activities reaching dimensions unprecedented in UN history, but the scope of its activities is constantly expanding. The nature of the problems that have to be sorted out in order to stabilize a country emerging from conflict has led to the development of activities that neither the authors of the charter, nor later the initiators of peacekeeping had envisaged for a moment. These include the disarmament and demobilization of combatants and their reintegration into civilian life, the reform of the police and the judiciary, political and electoral processes, etc. In Kosovo and Timor, the UN for a time exercised governmental authority. In Bosnia, Liberia and Haiti, the missions mandated by the council were asked to select which members of the police – and even of the judiciary – were to be retained. In Afghanistan, the UN crucially steered the political process leading to the drafting of a constitution and then to elections. The ‘multi-dimensional’ peacekeeping missions authorized by the council to accomplish these tasks in countries weakened by war, are thus called upon to take up responsibilities that not only require new technical skills, but, most importantly, involve difficult political and ethical decisions that test the limits of the international consensus, and fundamentally call into question once again the initial compromise of 1945. The decisions taken by the Security Council contribute to shaping the communities concerned and hence, almost inevitably, have implications in fields that fell traditionally under the sovereignty of states.

Moreover, the need to respond to new situations, such as the development of terrorism, combined with the growing difficulty – which reflects the absence of a common vision – to conclude international agreements, leads at times to making the Security Council a sort of international legislator of last resort: for example, Resolution 1267 endows the council with formidable, quasi-judicial powers that enable it to place individuals suspected of terrorist activities on a special list. The creation of the committee against terrorism after the events of 11 September has further extended the Security Council’s role, and Resolution 1535 has tightened the council’s control – at the expense of the authority of the secretary general – over the committee thereby created. The adoption in 2002, under pressure from the United States, of Resolution 1422 aimed to modify the provisions of the Statute of Rome on the International Criminal Court by introducing, on the basis of Article 16 of that statute, permanent immunity for the nationals of non-signatory states (such as the United States) participating in peacekeeping operations. Since article 16 permitted the suspension of ICC prosecutions by a resolution of the council for a period limited only to 12 months, the council asserted its intention to renew the exemption regularly. It did this in 2003, but was unable to do it in 2004 after the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal. In so doing, it was abusing a provision that had been inserted into the treaty specifically to deal with a peace process that could be endangered by pursuing international legal proceedings: the council was, in fact, attempting to rewrite the treaty. This extension of the role of the Security Council occurred under pressure from its permanent members and, in the first instance, the United States, which did not hesitate, in the case of Resolution 1422 to threaten to use its veto to block other activities within the council’s ambit, such as peacekeeping missions, if its demand was not met. Such actions on the part of the permanent members test the limits of the council’s legitimacy: the fact that they are motivated by narrowly national – or, indeed, ideological – interests is compared and contrasted with the reasons and circumstances that justified the agreement struck in 1945. Such a comparison does not redound to the advantage of the council when the majority of the planet cannot agree either on its internal architecture, its composition, or its role.

Acceptance of the structural inequality within the council established by the charter in 1945 depended on recognition of the particular role of the victorious powers in restoring peace. The right of veto granted to the permanent members, which reflected the realistic admission of their power, was implicitly counterbalanced by the political requirement that they exercise that right responsibly with the sole aim of protecting fundamental interests. In the more recent debates on the ‘responsibility to protect’, the principle that the exercise of sovereignty also implies responsibility has been reaffirmed. However, the action of the permanent members does not always reflect this, whether we are speaking of the use of the veto or their commitment to implementing the Council’s decisions. Where the use of the veto is concerned, it has become exceptional for France and Great Britain to employ it, realizing, as they do, how unhelpful it would be to draw too much attention to the discrepancy between their legal and their actual power. The fact remains that the status they acquire from possessing veto rights continues to give them a much greater influence in the drafting of Security Council resolutions than the non-permanent members. The United States has not been so reticent when it comes to blocking purely rhetorical resolutions on Israel, nor China and Russia where protecting the principle of sovereignty in the Zimbabwean case is concerned. So far as implementation of the council’s decisions goes, the development of its operational activities has not been accompanied by increased commitment from the permanent members. Far from it indeed. With the exception of the peacekeeping force deployed in South Lebanon, which was reinforced after the 2006 war by European troops, including troops from France, the bulk of peacekeeping forces are now provided by developing countries that are not permanent members of the Security Council. Neither the United States, China nor Russia provide any fighting units and the only British fighting unit is deployed in Cyprus in a peacekeeping mission involving no real risk. The Security Council is authorizing the deployment of increasingly ambitious and dangerous missions, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Darfur, but is asking others to take on the risks entailed in its decisions. When they deploy forces in difficult theatres, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, the permanent members do so within a framework that avoids placing their forces under direct UN command. In these conditions, the increasingly contested right of veto is an additional divisive element and a hindrance to the reform of the Security Council. On the one hand, realism dictates that its abolition is out of the question; on the other, the use made of it suggests it should not be extended to new permanent members, the danger being that it might completely deadlock the council’s activities. However, some candidates for a permanent member’s seat reject in advance any distinction between old and new members, which could not be said to be justified by any general principle.

The world objects to the inequality within the council. It also rejects its composition, on which there is a copious literature. Many see this as the chief reason for its loss of legitimacy. Non-Europeans stress the over-representation of Europe, which, with two permanent and three non-permanent members (not even including Russia), makes up one-third of the council! Where the permanent members are concerned, some writers note the absence of two of the world’s three greatest economic powers, Japan and Germany – which are also two of the three biggest contributors to the UN budget. Others remark on the absence of India, the non-representation of entire continents, such as Latin America and, most importantly, Africa, which is nonetheless the main destination of the peacekeeping missions ordered by the council. They see this situation as confirming the archaic nature of an institution that has not managed to come to terms with the reality of decolonization and is still stuck in the world of 1945.

This failure of the council’s composition to evolve is undoubtedly a significant cause of its reduced legitimacy. However, the debate too often bypasses a discussion of the nature of the legitimacy of an international institution. Is this achieved through representation, and what does representation mean at the international level? Are we in a democratic logic or a logic of power? Even accepting the reality of a world in which peoples are represented by their governments – and this whatever the nature of their internal institutional arrangements – is it self-evidently the case that the big countries speak for the small ones and that the small ones will feel themselves bound by the decisions of a council in which the big countries in their continent have spoken on their behalf? In the building of Europe, Germany and France have rarely won the support of their partners when they sought to impose their views on them. Judging by the maneuvering of countries that fear they may be left out of an expansion of the council, the distrust observed between Europeans also exists on other continents…. In truth, a reform of the composition of the council would certainly not put an end to the debate on its representativeness and hence also its legitimacy. We shall not analyze in detail here the various formulas that have been envisaged for changing the composition of the council. In most people’s opinion, the one that seems most likely to prevail in the coming years, provided an agreement can be reached between China and the United States, involves renewable, semi-permanent members with no right of veto.

However, legitimacy does not derive only from representation. It depends also on effectiveness, itself linked to power. An expanded council could be more effective if powerful states currently excluded from it were to haggle less over their financial, military and political support because they had become party to the decisions that it takes. However, there is no certainty this would be the case: most of the candidates for enlargement seem as much preoccupied by their status as by the effectiveness of the council, and if they were to follow the example of the current permanent members, the outcome might well be a council that is even more divided and hence, ultimately, even less effective. For the council to be able to be a sort of executive committee of the world parliament, the world would have to form a community.

To expand the council to the most powerful and populous countries in the world will not, then, be enough, since institutional adjustments do not by themselves produce an ‘international community’. A world is measured by its dreams. Has the world in 2009 a dream that unites it? Is there, between the countries that might form the permanent core of a reformed Security Council a common vision, an affectio societatis that makes it possible to provide pertinent answers to the new questions that have arisen since 1989? What does the world expect of international governance today?

The question is often discussed in purely institutional terms, but it actually raises deeper ethical issues. Is there such a thing as an international community? Does that overused and misused expression ‘international community’ have a real meaning? The report “In Larger Freedom”, which was prepared for the 2005 summit at the request of the secretary general, attempted, by outlining a possible new international consensus, to provide a – both ethical and strategic – response to these questions. Five years later, in an age when distinctions between wartime and peacetime and between internal and external threats are blurred, the debate that report opened up is still not concluded. There is, in reality, no agreement either on the nature of the responses to be given to these problems or on the institutional framework on which they should be based. The evolution of the international consensus has not kept pace with the evolution of the threats.

The first signs of this discrepancy appeared precisely after the end of the first Iraq war. No UN response was made to the operation launched by Saddam Hussein against the rebellion in southern Iraq. Some months later, by contrast, the council adopted Resolution 688 in reaction to a similar operation launched in the north of the country against the Kurds. It is true that in this latter case the inflow of refugees to Turkey could be considered not just as a ‘humanitarian’ tragedy, but also as a threat to international security, which the council was at pains to mention in the resolution, thereby reducing the scope of the political advance that the advocates of what was not yet called ‘the responsibility to protect’ wanted to see in the text adopted by the council. When, in the following year (1992), the council, faced with the anarchy in Somalia, adopted Resolution 794, it did not trouble itself to refer to the threat to international security, but noted the ‘unique’ character of the situation in that country, in order not to make it a precedent. In reality it was also at the ethical level that the end of the Cold War called into question the imperfect compromise negotiated in 1945.

Tension between the peoples – those peoples in whose name the charter was drawn up, if we are to believe its Preamble, ‘We, the Peoples of the United Nations’ – and the states that speak in their name within an organization of states, is not new. By affirming their faith, in the Preamble to the charter, ‘in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’, the authors of the charter had, from the beginning, made the proactive assumption that, despite the immense differences in wealth and political conceptions separating the nations, they had a common core of values and the implementation of the charter’s procedures would be guided by a shared vision of the UN’s fundamental objectives. But they accepted that states remained the pillars of the international order, and the charter relied on their behaving as benevolent guardians of the well-being of their peoples.

The repression of the Kurds in Iraq and the anarchy in Somalia had been the first tests. A consequence of the disastrous intervention in Somalia, which ended with the hurried departure of the international forces, was the failure to react to the genocide in Rwanda. The most powerful members of the Security Council, particularly the United States, had discovered the risks of ‘humanitarian’ solidarity and were not ready to pay the price. As the genocide was beginning, a brief deployment of Western troops enabled European and American nationals to be evacuated from Rwanda, while the UN mission, with no Western contingent among its numbers, stayed behind, powerless to prevent the massacre of the Rwandans.

The immensity of the genocide and the shame at having done nothing to prevent it did, however, produce a shock, comparable on the moral plane to the shock produced at the strategic level some years later by the 11 September attacks. The UN, its member states, and its peoples were forced to question the meaning of the very general commitment they had made in 1945: could the respect for the institutional procedures to which they had committed themselves long survive a total absence of respect for the principles inspiring them? The states gave very different answers to this question, partly reflecting differences in power.

The Western states, whose political traditions have their roots in Enlightenment liberalism and which did not feel threatened in their sovereignty by a more activist position, seemed to opt in favor of increased interventionism: the military operation launched in 1999 to put a halt to Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo was an illustration of this attitude, even if it was done at the cost of exceptionally violating the authority of the Security Council. Americans and Europeans were expressing their conviction that the council’s authority would suffer more from respect for the rules leading to inaction than if breaking the rules made it possible to save human lives.

For many states, however, this exercise of Western power – in a situation that was admittedly tragic but comparable to other situations in which no intervention had been launched – demonstrated the political selectiveness of the council’s most powerful members, rather than their attachment to universal values. This suspicion was fuelled by the fact that, in most humanitarian tragedies of recent years, the practice observed in the Rwandan genocide continued, and troops from developing countries were most often in the front line, whilst the developed countries refused to commit forces. There is actually a sad irony in the fact that those defending an ambitious vision of the international community within diplomatic circles – whether it be ‘the responsibility to protect’ at the 2005 summit or international justice – are also the most reluctant to intervene with their troops. And the states most engaged in peacekeeping operations are often the ones that have most resisted this broad conception of the Security Council’s role. It is most often by proxy that the rich countries manifest a more acute sense of the solidarity that they now say they feel with the less rich.

This discrepancy between the consciousness of a universal solidarity and the conditions of its implementation raises ethical and political questions that have not yet been answered. What sense should we give to the hackneyed expression, the international community? In the world of globalization, our dreams and thoughts now have very concrete, very immediate consequences for distant communities, and the imaginary community in which we dream and think is continually expanding. And there is no symmetry in the relationship. Our dreams influence the lives of people we shall never meet, and do so both for good and ill, but our lives are not greatly influenced by theirs.

More and more each day, the long tragedy of the Sudan shows up the political and moral challenge of this asymmetry. We wanted justice in Darfur and the Security Council, noting that Sudan was not party to the Rome Convention creating the International Criminal Court, referred the case of Darfur to the court. As a political organ confronted with the pressure of the opinions of its Western members and having no answer as to what should be done, the council won time by adopting Resolution 1593 in 2005, and was able to hope that the threat of justice would be a means of exerting pressure on the actors, including the Sudanese government. In so doing, it was failing to take account of the fact that the implementation of judicial decisions cannot be calibrated as sanctions can, except by entering into negotiations in which justice is the loser but peace is not the winner. And it did not take into account the potential impact on the populations concerned, leaving responsibility for protecting them to others – namely, to troops from the developing countries. Perhaps the decision of the criminal court will lead to a new political deal and to peace in Sudan. Perhaps a majority of Darfur’s populations are delighted by the indictment of President Bashir. Some of their representatives, who have undoubted support among the population of Darfur, have welcomed the decision of the Indictments Chamber of the ICC and have announced an intensification of their military operations against the Sudan government. The fact remains that the choice of peace or war, the choice of risking one’s life, has until recently been a personal or national choice. The American or British soldier who fought Hitler had not taken the decision to risk his life, but was obeying a decision of his nation, of the political community to which he belonged. The French Resistance fighter was risking his life in a similar fashion. It is the same with those Darfur rebels who choose to fight. The ethical clarity of their decisions, the consequences of which they are ready to accept, is indisputable. The issue is less clear, however, with the demonstrators marching in Washington or Paris to call for justice to be done in Darfur. Will the justice they call for in the name of the international community, but are not able to impose, have positive or negative consequences for those they wish to help? No one really knows, but the gamble has been taken and the lives caught up in it are not the lives of those taking that gamble. A solidarity is being affirmed here, though those declaring it are not prepared to take on board all the consequences of their act and those with whom solidarity is being affirmed are not able to express either acceptance or rejection, but will simply have to undergo its effects.

With new post-national or transnational threats and new divisions over the extent of solidarity that can be expressed, it is increasingly clear that the 1945 compromise does not provide all the answers. There are too many situations in which sovereign states reveal themselves incapable of exercising their sovereignty, producing new rents in the international fabric; there are too many situations, also, in which there are no volunteers to repair those rents and, on occasion, no acceptance of the volunteers by the victims. The regulation of relations between sovereign states is no longer sufficient in itself to establish the foundations of a stable order, but there is no agreement as yet on the new solutions that should be applied. Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has been hesitantly feeling its way, and periods of interventionism alternative with periods of withdrawal. UN peacekeeping is a good barometer in these matters. The first half of the 1990s was marked by enormous expansion, followed, shortly afterwards, by a rapid contraction over the ensuing years. After renewed expansion in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and its theorization in the ‘responsibility to protect’, are we on the eve of a new contraction? The advocates of greater interventionism have less and less the will and resources to intervene. They are running up against increasingly resolute adversaries: the difficulties of Iraq and Afghanistan and also in the Democratic Republic of Congo have in fact cast doubt on the capacity of military force to bring peace and stability; the debates on Darfur have revealed the difficulty of expressing solidarity; and the economic crisis, while rendering the weakest states vulnerable, has increased the reluctance of the richest to engage in external operations. All this might lead to disenchantment and withdrawal. At the same time, the debate is not couched in the same terms as it was in 1995, when the first contraction occurred. After the 11 September attacks, the strategic consequences of a ‘state power vacuum’ are better understood, particularly by those countries most attached to sovereignty, such as China. To maintain an order based on the sovereignty of states, it can sometimes become necessary to intervene! Moreover, after the debate on the ‘responsibility to protect’, the impossibility of hiding behind the wall of sovereignty is beginning to be recognized. Lastly, and most importantly, the redistribution of power has modified the context of the debate: on the one hand, the Western countries are no longer able to impose their views – if they were ever under the illusion that they could. But on the other, all the countries that saw the principle of sovereignty as the equalizing factor protecting them from domination by the powerful are observing the increasing dispersion of power and are reassured by it – all the more so as they are noticing the limits to the willingness to intervene of the states that are, at least rhetorically, the most ‘interventionist’.

How, in this context, will international governance develop in the field of security? The range of possibilities is wider than it was in 1995 and the answer to the question will depend on the will of states and also, increasingly, on events.

What will the strategy of states be? Will they strive to retain a central role for a potentially reshaped Security Council as the keystone of the international security order, or will the council be progressively marginalized?

One important difference from the world of 1945 is the development of regional organizations and structures like NATO and the European Union. This development is sometimes interpreted as the first sign of a kind of global federalism, in which the principle of subsidiarity, a principle that gained prominence in the construction of Europe, can be seen as asserting itself. Chapter VIII of the charter, which makes provision for the regional organizations to play an important role, could at last be said to be becoming a political reality. The regional organizations would thus become the first line of defense of an international order in which the Security Council would be, first and foremost, a legitimating body providing an ultimate recourse, ensuring that harmony and coherence are maintained among the great regional structures currently in process of consolidation.

During discussions in 2005 on the reform of the UN, the British member of the commission tasked with producing the report “In Larger Freedom” – Great Britain’s former permanent representative at the United Nations – argued, for example, that the Security Council should be principally, but not solely, a legitimating body that would in most cases entrust the execution of its decisions to other structures. NATO, the European Union, the African Union or similar bodies would exercise operational responsibilities. This vision is based on the realization that the UN is too diverse and heterogeneous to oversee complex operations. Hence NATO took responsibility for security in Kosovo and Afghanistan. And the European Union, having unrivalled influence in Europe through its power of attraction, became the lead actor in Bosnia and Kosovo. This vision also serves the interests of the most powerful states, particularly the Western nations: at times they orient decisions towards organizations that they control, such as NATO, or organizations over which they can have more influence than they can over the UN, such as the African Union; at others they can use the engagement of a regional organization to press for UN engagement. This is, in fact, what happened in the case of Somalia. Confronted with a reticent Security Council, the American diplomats of the Bush administration encouraged African states like Ethiopia and Uganda to commit to a difficult operation, so that they could subsequently put pressure on the UN to aid an African mission in difficulty. In Chad the central role played by France in the European force helped it to be accepted by Chad; the prospect of being relieved by UN troops helped France to convince the European Union to become engaged; and the European deployment overcame the Security Council’s hesitations when it had to ask the UN to take over. These examples illustrate the fact that the proliferation of organizations in a world still characterized by immense power imbalances can – far from correcting those imbalances – also serve them, as it simultaneously camouflages them. International organizations are often a mask for states, and competition between organizations, if it is employed skillfully, does not increase the effectiveness of organizations, but increases the margin of maneuver for states, especially as organizations are as much characterized by power inequalities as are states. The African Union does not have the resources of NATO or the European Union, and remains dependent on Africa’s most powerful states and external support, as soon as it engages in large-scale operations. Moreover, the most populated region of the world, Asia, is not structured by a regional organization today and security questions on that continent remain dominated by sub-regional strategic rivalries.

Inequalities of power and the emergence of regional institutions do not have the seeds of a new world order within them. Will the crisis that befell the world in 2008 impose what the will of states seems incapable of achieving? First Boutros Ghali and then Kofi Annan attempted to launch a reform of the UN, when the world was in a much less uncertain situation than it is today. Those efforts failed, largely because the leading powers saw no urgency for them. The United States was still in a triumphalist phase after the ‘victorious’ end to the Cold War, the Europeans understood that any reform would inevitably reduce their relative influence, and China, focused on its own development and still remembering the war with Japan, was not prepared to commit itself to a multilateral system from which, so far as it could see, it had nothing to gain. Present difficulties might lead to greater modesty and more compromises. The economic crisis has already pointed up the lack of fitness for purpose of the institutions of global economic governance and is creating a strong incentive to reform them. The progressive development of an international architecture that would combine the flexibility of informal groupings with the legitimacy of formal structures tasked with implementing the policy orientations they would have approved does not seem out of reach.

Can a comparable course of development be envisaged in the field of peace and security? The world has not yet gauged the political consequences of the economic crisis, consequences that will in turn have an economic impact. The G20 represents 85 percent of the global economy, and the coming years will show up the interaction between economics and politics: it will not be possible to achieve lasting agreement on economic strategies without giving them political foundations. In military terms, for example, the relationship between the United States and China remains one of potential rivalry, but the mutual dependency that characterizes their economic and financial relations is radically different from the relationship that existed between the United States and the USSR during the Cold War. Given this state of affairs, it is not illogical from the Chinese point of view to try to impose budgetary constraints on the United States – not only, as many observers have noted, to preserve the value of the dollar, but also to have an indirect influence on American military expenditure. In other words, it will not be possible to sustain the close financial cooperation required for dealing with the economic crisis unless it is based on an equally cooperative political vision. Similarly, it would be self-contradictory to delight, as some have done, in the difficulties that the fall in commodities prices have caused for Russia, while expecting a cooperative attitude from the Kremlin on various security questions, such as nuclear proliferation, in which the Russia’s stance continues to be of crucial importance. This situation of interdependence in no way guarantees that a cooperative solution will be found for the current difficulties: before World War I, the future belligerents were also in a situation of great interdependence and the global economy was in some respects more integrated than it is today. But the current state of global interdependence guarantees there will be no resolution to the economic crisis without political cooperation, nor any resolution to the various political crises without economic recovery. In this sense, the events that may produce rapprochements or, conversely, new divisions will be the deciding factor.

The harmonious vision of an institutional construction in which the regional organizations are the pillars of a world order watched over by the Security Council does not correspond, then, to present world realities. The institutions remain incapable of regulating power relations if there is no common vision among the powers of the community they intend to form. In 1945 that vision no doubt existed for a short time, though it was strictly limited to interstate relations and involved a number of misunderstandings. Nonetheless, it enabled the UN charter to be adopted. The emergence of new actors today complicates the search for such a solution. The appearance of new threats and the development of a global crisis that renders them more urgent mean that a common response is more than ever required. The institutional framework, as it currently exists, will not allow us to develop that response. It may assist in its implementation if the most powerful states choose to pursue a common response together. Much, in this connection, will depend on the way the United States and China react to the difficulties assailing them. What will China want? The positions it takes up will be crucial, both because of its physical size and also because of the alternative model it represents. As for the United States and Europe, they are making the painful discovery, some 20 years later, that 1989 was more the defeat of communism than the victory of an idea. Europe has lost not only its strategic centrality but also its intellectual dominance. Although the model of pooled sovereignty that it has developed is admired, it is not the global reference in a world in which hard power seems to be gaining ground. Even within Europe, Europeans are becoming more aware of their differences, and the hard power of the United States has more relevance in a world where the concept of an international community remains elusive. If it occurs, the shifting of the boundary between ‘matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state’ and matters which might fall within the jurisdiction of renewed international institutions will not be produced by a democratic upsurge from the world’s peoples, but rather by the compromise the most powerful are prepared to accept between their concern to maintain an order based on the sovereignty of states and the recognition of the limits of effectiveness of that sovereignty. Does this mean that Europeans have lost the battle of ideas for good, and that 1989 was more a mirage than the beginning of a new era? That would be going too far. There is the beginning of an international society, which does not identify with the ideals of 1989, but which accepts a much broader discussion than anything that existed before. In that discussion, Europeans can have a voice, but it will be only one voice among many. Europeans have to learn to be humble without being bashful. They are not there yet …

Index

Page numbers in italics denote tables, those in bold denote figures.

9/11 see September 11 (2001) terrorist attacks

Abkhazia 60, 201, 205

Aboul-Fotouh, Abdel Moneim 118, 120

Abu Ghraib scandal 232

accountability 105

acquis communautaire 67

actually existing socialism, doctrine of 12

adultery 125

Afghanistan 21, 122, 194, 237; democracy support 72; and NATO 238; and UN Security Council 225, 228, 231, 233; and US 72, 192, 193, 228, 230

Africa 7, 31–2, 47, 73, 76, 209, 223, 230; authoritarian restoration 102; corruption 10, 102; democratic legitimacy, principle of 104–5; electoral institutions 104–5; elites 105–7; pluralist institutions 107–9; political cultures, changing of 104–5, 107–8; political parties 102, 103; and UN Security Council 233; wars 102; see also individual countries

African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV) 106

African Union 225, 238, 239

Age of Revolutions 10, 12, 17

agriculture 142

AIDS 225

AK Party 121, 124

al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo 119

al-Nour Party 114, 118, 120

Al-Qaeda 31, 117, 120, 123, 192, 201, 202, 228, 229

Alawi, Iyad 40

Alawis 124

Albania 59, 68, 130; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Alevis 124

Algeria 112, 113, 120; éradicateurs 112, 116; Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) 111; Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) 112, 113; Protestant evangelical church 118

All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) 178

Almond, G. 96, 97

Anderson, Jenny 12

Angola 76

Annan, Kofi 206, 230, 239

Arab countries 111–26, 230; authoritarianism 112; democratization 111–16; political culture, change in 117; religion 111–12, 113–14, 115, 116, 117, 118–20, 124–5; secularization 115–16, 118–19, 124, 125; societal changes 116–18; see also individual countries

Arab–Israeli conflict 1, 8, 113, 114, 225; see also Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Arab League 206, 225

Arab nationalism 111, 112, 114

Arab Spring 8, 9, 15, 22, 114–15, 117–18, 122, 123, 124

Arafat, Yasser 113

Argentina 35

armed forces 122; China 220; US 189

Armenia 59, 68, 205, 206, 211n25; democracy 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Aron, Raymond 9, 50

Asia 7, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 101, 196, 197, 199, 200, 209, 230, 239; see also Central Asia; and individual countries

Assad, Bashar al- 206, 207

assembly, rights of 87

associational life see civil society

Atlantic treaty (1949) 188

Austria 132, 166

authoritarian capitalism 46, 129; China 18, 21, 48, 169–81; Russia 18, 21, 48

authoritarian regression 16

authoritarianism 8, 48, 50, 53, 60, 74, 76, 81; African states 102; Arab countries 112; and civil society 86, 87, 91, 95; competitive 14, 61, 62; Russia 16

Azerbaijan 59, 68, 134, 205, 206; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Ba’ath parties 39, 111, 123

Bachelet, Michelle 19

Baev, Pavel 200

Balcerowicz, Leszek 10, 17, 36, 66, 129–51

Balkans 58, 60, 62, 81, 188

Baltic states 143, 144; see also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania

Bandung Conference (1955) 29–30

Banégas, Richard 101–10

banks/banking system 66, 146, 148, 153, 154, 160; China 174, 175, 176, 180

Baranovsky, Vladimir 200

Barysch, Katarina 165

Bashir, Omar al- 230, 236

Bayart, J.-F. 104

Bayat, Assef 121

Beck, Ulrich 12

Beijing consensus 219–20

Béja, Jean-Philippe 212–22

Belarus 59, 68, 113, 134, 136, 204, 205–6, 209, 211n25; authoritarianism 16; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector shre in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Bell, D. 94

Belorussia see Belarus

Benin 101, 102, 104, 106, 107

Berlin, Isaiah 65

Berlin Wall: fall of 7, 51, 56, 57; twentieth anniversary 25–6

Berlusconi, Silvio 8

Berman, S. 92

Bernhard, M. 80

Bertram, Christoph 22

bipolar order 26

Blair, Tony 202

borders 60; Russia 209

Borogan, Irina 203

Bosnia 12, 13, 59, 68, 188, 231, 238

Boutros Ghali, Boutros 239

Brazil 9, 21, 31, 47, 202

Bremer, Paul 39

Brezhnev, Leonid 199

BRICS 9, 21

Britain 16, 232; and financial/economic crisis 17, 66; ideological polarization 94; and Iraq war 229

Brzezinski, Zbigniew 21

budget deficits 19, 146; US 193

budgetary spending 145–6, 148

Bulgaria 49, 59, 63, 67, 68, 130, 154, 166; corporate income tax 164; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; and European Union (EU) 62; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137, 155; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; populism 53; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Burckhardt, Jacob 50–1

Burkina Faso 102, 106, 107

Burma 9, 76, 206

Bush, George H.W. 20, 37, 188

Bush, George W. 31, 72, 73, 77, 190, 191, 202, 223

Cambodia 145

Cameroon 102

Cape Verde 106

capitalism 51, 130, 132, 134, 150n23, 187; crisis of 66, 146; crony 145; and democracy 34, 129, 136, 137; global 7; grab-and-run 152; post-socialist 152–9; state 81, 169–81; transition to 34, 35–6; varieties of 17, 67; see also authoritarian capitalism

Carothers, Thomas 14, 72–8

Castro, Fidel 145, 187

Catholicism 45, 116

Ceausescu, Nicolae 145, 213

Central African Republic 106

Central Asia 79, 87, 93, 94, 95, 134, 136, 209; see also individual countries

central planning 130, 131, 149n12; China 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 217

Chad 107, 238–9

charities 82, 85, 121

Charter 08 221

Chavez, Hugo 145

Chechnya 113, 196, 201, 202, 203

Chen Yuan 176

Chen Yun 176, 216, 217

Cheney, Richard 190

Chile 148; GDP per capita 132, 133

China 7, 9, 13, 19, 31, 53, 75, 76, 134, 137, 194, 202, 209, 212–22, 223, 232, 237, 239; agriculture 142; armed forces 220; authoritarian state capitalism 18, 21, 48, 169–81; banking system 174, 175, 176, 180; Central Military Commission 220; central planning 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 217; centralization of economic power 169, 172–6; Charter 08 221; civil society 212, 214, 219, 221; Confucian Communism 13; corruption 173, 221; Cultural Revolution 145; and democracy support 72; dissidents 214, 215, 221; economic growth 21, 46–7, 76, 142, 171, 217, 220; as economic/strategic superpower 7; GDP per capita 132, 133; Great Leap Forward 145; and human rights 216, 220; intellectuals 212, 214–15, 218, 219; labour management 170, 171, 177–9, 180; local government finance 174, 175, 180; market economy 169, 170–2, 217, 218, 219; mass consumption 171–2; opening-up policy 75, 217, 219; People’s Liberation Army 212; prices 172; ‘princelings’ manifesto 216; private enterprises 218; pro-democracy movement 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218–19; productivity 171, 179; residence permits 178, 180; state enterprises 174, 175, 176–7; State-owned Asset Supervision Administration (SASAC) 177; tax revenues 172, 173, 174; Tiananmen square protests 7, 56, 212–13; trade unions 170, 178; unemployment 171; and US 193, 239–40; wages 179, 180; and World Trade Organization (WTO) 189, 220; and World War II 28

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 169, 172, 173, 174, 176–7, 179, 180–1, 212, 213, 215, 216, 219

Christian Democrats 8, 116

Christians/Christianity 120, 125; see also Catholicism; Protestantism

churches 84, 88

Churchill, Winston 51, 62; Iron Curtain speech 25

citizenship 63, 114

civil law 153

civil rights/liberties 87, 103

civil society 10, 11, 17, 63, 64, 67, 74, 75, 79–100, 131, 214; accommodating 92; behaviour and preferences of actors 91–5; China 212, 214, 219, 221; clientistic 92, 94; communist period 80, 82–5;

contentious 91–2, 96; corporatist 86, 88, 89; demobilization of 80, 92, 96; and democratic transition 80–1, 85–6; funding of 72, 87, 88; global 12; grass-roots movements 88–9; late developing 87–8; liberal and illiberal 92; normative 92–4; organizational structure 89–91; pluralist 86, 89; and quality of public space 86–9; re-combinant 85–6; Russia 201; and state 87–8; and trust 93, 94

clash of civilizations thesis 13, 15, 113, 187, 191

clientelism 92, 94, 166; electoral 105

climate threats 19

Clinton, Bill 188–9, 193, 229

closed societies 60

Cold War 186, 199, 227; beginning of 25, 224; end of 7, 8, 9, 25, 60, 187, 188, 227; as world war 26, 28–30

collective effervescence 34

collectivization, Soviet Union 145

Collier, Paul 47

Colombia 95

colonialism 30

colour revolutions 61, 72, 92, 201, 204–5

common foreign and security policy 188

Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 138, 139, 140, 141, 160, 204, 211n25

communism 3, 10–11, 35; civil society under 80, 82–5; collapse of 10, 49, 58, 60, 173, 178, 179, 180, 198, 215; Confucian 13; Yugoslav 62

communist parties 213; Italy 8; Portugal 115; Spain 115; see also Chinese Communist Party

competition, market 148

competitive authoritarianism 14, 61, 62

Confucian Communism 13

Congo, Democratic Republic of 225, 233, 237

Congress of Vienna (1815) 199

conservative internationalism 185, 186, 188, 193

conservative nationalism (isolationism) 186, 189–90, 191

consociational democracy 40

Constant, Benjamin 65

constitutional democracy 153

constitutionalism, liberal 53

constitutions 63, 74

consumer society 53

consumption: China 171–2; per capita 156

convergence, theory of 12

Copenhagen criteria 67

Coptic Christians 120

corporate taxes 164, 165, 167

corporatist civil society 86, 88, 89

corruption 46, 49, 76, 81, 129, 153, 160, 166; African states 102, 103; China 173, 221; Russia 201

cosmopolitanism 16

Council of Europe (CoE) 154

counter-democracy 65

coups d’état, African states 102

credit “booms” 147

Crimean War 199

criminal justice systems 129

Croatia 59, 68, 69

crony capitalism 145

Cuba 145; GDP per capita 132, 133

Cyprus 232

Czech Republic 59, 66–7, 68, 70n21, 143, 166; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137, 156; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; and NATO 187, 188; poverty risk 158; wages 157

Czechoslovakia 1–2, 130, 213, 214; civil society 84; Prague Spring 1968 63

Dahl, Robert 95

Dahrenforf, Ralf 80

Darfur 225, 226, 230–1, 233, 236, 237

De Gaulle, Charles 29

debt 19, 145–6; US 193

decolonization 31

democracy 11, 18, 22, 215; and capitalism 34, 129, 136, 137; consociational 40; constitutional 153; crisis of 8, 15–16, 22, 46, 65; and dissatisfication 45–55; and economic growth 46, 76; halt in

spread of 75–7; illiberal 16; instant 36–7; liberal 13–14, 45, 48, 51, 57, 58, 63, 65, 81, 87, 103, 164, 185, 187; market 14, 17, 38–9, 104, 109; normative commitment to 93; populist 48; prerequisites for 38, 39; as procedure 37–9; promotion of 22, 47, 72–3, 113; and public opinion 93; representative 107–8, 109; social 159; and socialism 136; sovereign 48, 61; support 72–8

democratic consolidation 102, 129, 163

democratic fatigue 8, 11, 16, 62–6, 69

democratic legitimacy 104–5

democratic majoritarianism 52

democratic modernity 101, 108

democratic norms 74, 75

Democratic Party, US 185

democratic peace theory 47, 187, 191

democratic regression 16

democratic revolution 9, 57–8, 61–2

democratic socialization 96

democratic transition 8, 14, 15, 16, 34, 47, 74; and civil society 80–1, 85–6; Iraq 39–41, 72

democratization 9, 14, 15, 16, 22, 74–5, 137, 143; Africa 101–10; Arab countries 111–16; fourth wave of 58; third wave of 14, 58, 74, 76, 186

demos 39, 40

Deng Liqun 176

Deng Xiaoping 171, 172, 174, 176, 179, 180, 181, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219

Deng Yingtao 176

Denmark 164, 166

deregulation 17, 66

détente 11, 30, 186, 215

Dewatripont, Mathias 36

Diamond, Larry 103

dissidents/dissident thinking 1, 2, 64, 83, 84; China 214, 215, 221; legacies of 10–12

Dmitriev, Mihail 200

droit d’ingérence 12

Dubin, Boris 200

Durkheim, Emile 34

East-Central Europe: civil society 79–100; democracy fatigue 62–6; and EU see European Union; and free market model 66–7; institutional trajectories after socialism 134–7; outcomes after socialism 137–44; post-socialist political economy 152–68; see also individual countries

East Germany (GDR) 130, 153, 213, 214

East Timor 60, 231

East–West dichotomy 29

economic crisis see financial/economic crisis

economic freedom, suppression of 130, 131

economic growth 46–7, 81, 129, 141–4, 148; China 21, 46–7, 76, 142, 171, 217, 220; and democracy 46, 76

economic integration 18

economic liberalization 104, 107

economic outcomes 137–44, 154–9

economic systems, transformation of 134–6

education 131–2

Egypt 15, 113, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 206; Nasserism 111, 123; Salafism 114–15, 119, 124

Ekiert, Grzegorz 79–100

elections 39, 47, 49, 74, 75, 76–7; African states 102; Arab countries 114; European Parliament 63; free and fair 37, 38, 45, 46, 57, 63; observation of 72

electoral clientelism 105

electoral institutions, African states 104–5

elites: African states 105–7; ex-communist 49

Elster, Jan 130

emerging economies/powers 21, 31, 47, 189

employment ratio 157

end of history thesis 13, 21, 57, 76, 185, 187, 191, 192

energy consumption 19, 139, 140, 144

energy efficiency 144

energy prices 76, 201

energy resources 76, 201; see also gas; oil

environmental organizations 83, 84

environmental pollution 144

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 56

éradicateurs, Algeria 112, 116

Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 125

Estonia 59, 68, 154, 167, 205; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP 137, 143, 156 (private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Ethiopia 238

ethnic cleansing 12

ethno-nationalism 60, 166

euro crisis 20

Eurobarometer 49, 62

Eurocentrism 7

Europe 223–4, 240, 241; see also East-Central Europe; European Union (EU); and individual countries

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 135, 160, 161, 162

European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) survey 224

European integration 51

European Parliament 63

European Quality of Life Survey 166

European Social Fund 88

European Social Survey 92

European Union (EU) 3, 22, 51, 58, 81, 190, 225, 238; accession to 16, 53, 62, 64, 67, 80, 88, 95, 162, 163, 167; common foreign and security policy 188; conditionality 152–3, 153–4, 163, 164; disintegrative tendencies 16; enlargement 20, 69, 88, 161–2, 163–4, 167; External Action Service 20; political costs of membership 163–4; and Russia 201, 202, 209; as a structural power 20

Europeanization 15, 67, 69

exports: East-Central Europe 166–7; Russia 142, 143; Ukraine 143; US 189

extraordinary politics 142–3

Eyadéma, Gnassingbe 102

Fargues, Philippe 116

Fedorov, Yuri 200

Fico, Robert 64

Fidesz 67

financial markets: globalized 18; self-regulation 18

financial/economic crisis 144–5, 146–7; (2008–) 8–9, 16, 17, 22, 46, 47–9, 62, 66, 143, 144, 146, 148, 156, 166, 193, 239, 240

fiscal crises 145–6

fiscal stabilization 152

Fischer, Stanley 36

Foa, Roberto 79–100

foreign direct investment (FDI) 138, 144, 154, 163, 167

foreign policy: Russia 196–7, 199, 200–10; US 186–94

Founding Fathers 116

France 14, 16, 147, 232, 233, 239; ideological polarization 94; and Iraq war 229; populism 166; Third Estate 30; Third Republic 104, 116

free market economy see market economy

free movement of goods/people/capital 11, 18, 163

freedom 52, 65–6; positive and negative 65

Freedom House 59, 68, 75, 87

French Revolution 34, 51

Friedman, Tom 17–18, 19

Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Algeria 111

Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) 112, 113

Fukuyama, Francis 13, 187

Furet, François 10, 57

futurology 12

Gaidar, Yegor 36

Gallup International 48

Gambia 102, 106

Garton-Ash, Timothy 9

gas 76, 142, 201, 206, 211n31

Gat, Azar 47

Gauchet, Marcel 65

Gay, Peter 50

Gaza 120

GDP 143, 144; per capita 132, 133, 137–8, 154–5, 156; private sector share in 134, 135

Gelb, Alan 36

Georgia 15, 59, 60, 61, 68, 194, 197, 200, 205, 209, 225; democracy 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; Rose revolution 61, 72, 201, 204; and Russia war 61, 194, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205; transition indicators 136

Germany 16, 39, 233; corporate income tax 164; ideological polarization 94; informal sector 154; regional banks 146; reunification of 9, 60, 153; Weimar Republic 50, 92; see also East Germany

Gerschenkron, Alexander 46, 87

Ghana 102, 103, 104, 106, 107

Ghannouchi, Rachid 121

Gierek, Edward 145

Gini coefficient 141

glasnost 8, 212, 213, 215, 218

global capitalism 7

global civil society 12

global governance 20, 22, 30, 224–41

global markets paradigm 17–19

globalization 8, 11, 17–19, 20, 22, 104, 108, 117, 118, 189, 194

good governance 46, 53, 54, 101, 104, 107, 109, 114

Gorbachev, Mikhail 10, 14, 56, 57, 60, 61, 196, 198, 212, 213, 215, 218

governance: global 20, 22, 30, 224–41; good 46, 53, 54, 101, 104, 107, 109, 114; support 72

government, trust in 63, 166

gradualism 142, 143, 144

Graham, Thomas 210n7

Greece 14, 16, 25, 58, 145, 167

Greek republicanism 65

Grzymala-Buse, A. 64

Guantanamo Bay 72

Gudkov, Lev 204

Guéhenno, Jean-Marie 17, 223–41

Guinea 102, 104, 108

Guinea-Bissau 102

Guizot, François 51

Gulf War (1991) 113, 188

Habermas, Jürgen 10, 57, 96

Haiti 231

Hamas 112, 123, 124

Hamilton, Alexander 185

Haniye, Ismail 123

Hankiss, E. 82

Harper, John L. 185–95

Hassner, Pierre 16, 20, 21–2, 61, 199, 207

Havel, Václav 1–4, 7, 9, 10–11, 49, 56, 61, 63, 214

He Xin 176

health 131, 140, 144, 153, 193

Hegel, G.W.F. 187

hegemony, United States 20

Helms, Jesse 189

Helsinki Agreement (1975) 11, 216

Hezbollah 120, 124

Hirsch, Martin 19

Hirschman, Albert O. 53, 104, 108

history: end of 13, 21, 57, 76, 185, 187, 191, 192; unpredictability of 1–4

Hobsbawm, Eric 13

Holbrooke, Richard 194

Honecker, Erich 57, 213

Howard, M. 79

Hu Jingtao 180

Hu Yaobang 170, 213, 215, 217

Huang Yasheng 169

Huchet, Jean-François 169

human capital 132

Human Development Index 59, 68

human rights 11–12, 22, 45, 66, 67, 72, 73, 84, 114, 215; China 216, 220

human rights organizations 83

human security 30

humanitarian intervention 12, 21, 22, 60, 224

Hungary 15, 49, 56–7, 59, 62, 67, 68, 83, 130, 143, 144, 167, 213; civil society 83, 84, 86; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP 137, 143, 156 (private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; IMF loans 154, 166; income inequality 141; income per capita 132; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; and NATO 187, 188; poverty risk 158; public debt 145; Roma minority 166; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Huntington, Samuel 13, 14, 48, 58, 113, 187, 189, 191

hybrid regimes 60, 61, 76, 87

Hyland, William 189

hyperinflation 138

ideology 94–5; end of 12

illiberal democracy 16

imagined community paradigm 26

immediacy, philosophy of 34–42

immigration 15, 101

“In Larger Freedom” report 234

income distribution 166

income inequalities 49, 81, 140–1, 144, 150n25

income per capita 132, 149n14, 166

income tax 164, 165

India 9, 18, 19, 21, 25, 31, 47, 95, 132, 202, 233

individualism 115

individualization 108, 113, 118, 119

Indonesia 21, 60, 95, 135, 145

inequality 19; income 49, 81, 140–1, 144, 150n25

inflation 138, 144

informal sector 153, 154, 157

information technology 19

Institute of Forecasting, Prague 12

institutional systems 129; after socialism 134–7; socialist 130–2

international community 223–41

International Criminal Court 190–1, 225, 226, 230, 231, 236

international justice 225, 236

International Labour Organisation (ILO) 19, 154

International Monetary Fund (IMF) 17, 21, 66, 154, 166

intervention 60, 73, 227, 237, 238; humanitarian 12, 21, 22, 60, 224

Iran 40, 72, 76, 113, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 145, 193, 194, 207, 223, 225

Iraq 12, 21, 31, 113, 117, 122, 124, 225, 233, 237; Ba’ath party 39, 111; democracy 39–41, 72; Kurds 39, 40–1, 234, 235; oil revenues 40–1; Shi’ites 40; Sunnis 39, 40

Iraq war 20, 22, 72, 191, 226, 229, 234; and ideology of immediacy 39–40

Ireland 148, 167

Islam 13, 15, 112

Islamic fundamentalism 15; see also neofundamentalism

Islamic identity 116

Islamic law see sharia law

Islamists/Islamism 8, 111–12, 113, 114–15, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120–2, 123, 124–5

Ismail, Mahmoud 125

isolationism (conservative nationalism) 186, 189–90, 191

Israel 120, 123, 124, 207, 230, 232; see also Arab–Israeli conflict; Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Israeli–Palestinian conflict 111, 113, 123

Italy 8, 16;

ideological polarization 94

Ivanov, Sergei 203

Japan 8, 29, 39, 147, 190, 199, 233

Jedlicki, Jerzy 62

Jefferson, Thomas 186

Jiang Zemin 219

Jihad 120

Johnson, Lyndon B. 193

Johnson, Simon 18

Jordan 123

Journal of Democracy 49

Judt, Tony 19

justice, international 225, 236

Kaczýnski, Jaroslaw 64

Kaczýnski, Lech 57, 64, 67

Kagan, Robert 47

Kaldor, Mary 12, 28

Kant, Immanuel 185, 186, 187

Karakoç, E. 79

Karamzin, Nicolas 208

Katatni, Saad al- 125

Kazakhstan 59, 68, 76, 134, 137, 204, 211n25; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Kennan, George 29

Kennedy, Paul 20–1, 190

Kenya 103

Kérékou, Matthieu 106

Khalilzad, Zalmay 190

Khmer Rouge 145

Khodorkovsky, Mikhail 48, 135

Khomeini, Ayatollah 8

Khrushchev, Nikita 145, 199

kinship 108

Kissinger, Henry 186

Klaus, Václav 36, 66

knowledge transfer 78

Kohl, Helmut 57

Kohli, Atul 179

Kojève, Alexandre 187

Konrad, György 11

Korean peninsula 7, 31; see also North Korea; South Korea

Kornai, J. 36

Koselleck, Reinhardt 12

Kosovo 12, 59, 60, 68, 188, 190, 201, 231, 235, 238

Kotkin, Stephen 10, 49–50

Krastev, Ivan 45–55, 65

Krauthammer, Charles 20, 188, 190

Kubik, J. 91

Kuchma, Leonid 204

Kurds 39, 40–1, 234, 235

Kuwait 124, 188, 227

Kyoto protocol 190

Kyrgyzstan 59, 68, 72, 204; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136; Tulip revolution 61

labour management, China 170, 171, 177–9, 180

labour markets 148, 154; flexibility 17, 66

labour productivity 155–6

Laïdi, Zaki 34–42

Landovský, Pavel 56

Latin America 14, 18, 58, 73, 132, 135, 145, 186, 209, 223, 233; see also individual countries

Latvia 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 166, 167; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP 137, 143, 156; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; IMF loans 154, 166; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Law and Justice coalition, Poland 64

League of Nations 27, 186, 226

League of Polish Families 64

Lebanon 40, 120, 124, 225, 232

Lefort, Claude 11, 64

legal frameworks 129, 130; socialist 130–1

Lepper, Andrzej 64

Levitsky, Steven 14, 62

Li Peng 212

Li Xiannian 216

Libby, Lewis 190

liberal consensus 64, 65

liberal constitutionalism 53

liberal democracy 13–14, 45, 48, 51, 57, 58, 63, 65, 81, 87, 103, 164, 185, 187

liberal internationalism (Wilsonianism) 185, 186, 188–9, 191, 192, 193

liberal rationalism 51

liberal reformism 185–6, 194

liberalism 50, 51, 52, 108, 116

liberalization 35, 108, 109, 142; economic 104, 107; political 102, 104, 107, 108–9, 130; prices 152, 172

Liberia 102, 106, 231

Libya 15, 20, 117, 206, 207

life expectancy 140

Life in Transition Survey (2007) 160, 161, 162

Lijphart, A. 40

Linz, J. 39, 40

Lippmann, Walter 28, 195n17

Lipton, David 36

Lithuania 49, 59, 62, 63, 68, 166; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP 137, 143, 156 (private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Liu Xiaobo 214, 221

living standards 132–4, 137–44

local government finance, China 174, 175, 180

Lonsdale, John 104

Lukasenko, Aleander 16

Lukyanov, Fedor 200

Luther, Martin 116

Ma Shaohua 215

Maalouf, Amin 8

Maastricht treaty 188

McCain, John 194

Macedonia 59, 68

McFaul, Michael 58

Malaysia 148

Mali 102, 104, 106

Mandelbaum, Michael 19

Mansfield, Edward 47

Mao Zedong 134, 145

market competition 148

market democracy 14, 17, 38–9, 104, 109

market economy 16, 17, 22, 57, 58, 64, 66–7, 69, 145, 147; China 169, 170–2, 217, 218, 219

market reforms 141, 142, 143–4

marriage 125

Mauritania 108

Medvedev, Dmitry 196, 202, 203, 207–8

Mendras, Marie 196–211

meritocracy 51

Metternich, Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel 186

Michnik, Adam 10, 11

Milosevic, Slobodan 235

mirror effect 114

modernity 108, 118; democratic 101, 108

modernization subsidies 163

Moldavia see Moldova

Moldova 59, 68, 197, 205–6, 209; democracy 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

monetary policies 167

Mongolia 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; private sector share in GDP 135; transition indicators 136

monogamy 125

monopolization of economy 131

Montenegro 59, 68

Morocco 118

Moshes, Arkady 200

Mugabe, Robert 102

multilateralism 224; effective 223; Russia 203, 204; US 193, 194

multipolar international system 20, 21, 22

Murrell, Peter 36, 41n6

Muslim Brothers 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124

Muslims 40, 111, 114, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 187; see also Salafis; Shi’ites/Shias; Sunnis

Nagorno-Karabakh 205

Nahda Party 114, 115, 119

Nashi [Ours] movement 48

Nasserism 111, 123

nation-states 18, 224; demise of 17

national identity, Russia 197, 199

National Missile Defense project, US 190

national sovereignty 9, 16

nationalism 3, 26, 63, 164; Arab 111, 112, 114; ethno- 60, 166; Poland 64

NATO 3, 64, 154, 163, 201, 202, 225, 238; enlargement 187, 188, 194, 202; Rome declaration 188; and Russia 200, 201, 203, 209

negative rights 130

Nehru, Jawaharlal 25, 29

neo-fundamentalism 117, 118, 125; see also Salafis/Salafism

neoconservatives 39, 186, 187, 189–90, 191, 192

neoliberalism 35, 121, 146, 159

Netherlands 166; ideological polarization 94

network societies 12

networks 17

New International Economic Order 30

new international order 8, 9, 20, 30, 224

NGOs 85, 88, 90, 154; sustainability index 59, 68, 89

Niger 102, 106–7

Nigeria 75, 102, 103, 104, 107

Nixon, Richard 30, 186

nomenklatura system 64

Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 29–30, 60

non-governmental organizations see NGOs

normality, ideology of 50, 52–4

North Korea 76; GDP per capita 132, 133

North–South division 30

nuclear proliferation 194, 225, 240

Obama, Barack 21, 25–6, 73, 192–4, 195n18, 201, 223

Offe, Claus 52, 130, 152–68

oil 142, 201; Iraqi 40–1; prices 76; rent 122

Oil for Food program 225

One World-ism 25, 26, 27

Orange revolution, Ukraine 61, 201, 204–5

Orbán, Viktor 16, 57, 67

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) 203

organizational systems 129, 130

Oslo process 113

Ousmane, Mahamane 107

outcomes, after socialism 137–44

Pakistan 194

Palestine Liberation Organisation 123

Palestinians 111, 113, 123

pan-Arabism 111, 113

parliaments 63

particularism 16

Patassé, Ange Félix 106

path dependency 58

Patocka, Jan 10

peace 11, 12, 46, 185; see also democratic peace theory

Peace of Augsburg (1555) 116

peacekeeping operations 231–2, 236, 237

PiS 67

Pithart, Petr 56

pluralist civil society 86, 89

pluralist institutions, African states 107–9

Pol Pot 134

Poland 7, 15, 16, 49, 56–7, 59, 63, 66–7, 68, 130, 143, 166, 167; civil society 83, 84, 86, 90; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign debt 145; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP 137, 143, 155, 156; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; ideological polarization 94; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; nationalism 64; and NATO 187, 188; per capita income 132; populism 64; poverty risk 158; Solidarity movement 11, 83, 90, 213; transition indicators 136; wages 157

police forces 122

political cultures: African states 104–5, 107–8; Arab countries 117

political liberalization 102, 104, 107, 108–9, 130

political liberties 86, 87

political participation 63, 65, 108

political parties 72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 88, 89; African states 102, 103; Islamist 111, 112, 114–15, 117, 119, 120, 121; see also names of individual parties

political–private ownership 148

political systems 134, 136

politics: extraordinary 142–3; pork-barrel 105; public interest in 95

pollution 144

polygamy 125

popular sovereignty 9

populism 16, 22, 51, 53, 63, 64–5, 79, 94, 116, 166

populist democracy 48

pork-barrel politics 102, 105

Portugal 58, 115, 167

post-industrial society 12

post-Islamism 121

Postel-Vinay, Karoline 25–33

poverty 19, 81, 157, 164, 166, 189

Powell, Colin 191, 226

power: redistribution of 237–8; soft 17, 20, 21; structural 20

power politics 9, 27, 197, 224

Prague Spring (1968) 63

press freedom 87

prices: China 172; liberalization of 152, 172

private sector 19, 134, 145; China 218; share in GDP 134, 135

privatization 17, 19, 35, 38, 39, 64, 66, 108, 142, 144, 152, 176, 180

productivity: China 171, 179; labour 155–6

professional associations 85, 88

profit-seeking 153, 172

progress 12

property rights 52, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136

Protestantism 45, 116, 118, 125, 185

Przeworski, A. 37

public: interest in politics 95; views of democracy 93; views of economic/political transformation 159–61, 162

public sphere 96, 97

Putin, Vladimir 16, 48, 61, 196, 197, 198–9, 201–2, 203, 204–5, 207–8

Putnam, Robert 64, 96

Qatar 123

quasi-socialist systems 145

radiant future ideology 12

radical right 79, 94

radicalization 95

rationalism, liberal 51

Reagan, Ronald 186

Red Flag 173

refolution 9

regime change 73

religion 13, 83, 84, 166; Arab countries 111–12, 113–14, 115, 116, 117, 118–20, 124–5; wars of 116; see also Catholicism; Christians/Christianity; Islam; Protestantism

religious tolerance 116

rent-seeking 143

representative democracy 107–8, 109

Republican Party, US 186

republicanism, Greek/Roman 65

residence permits, China 178, 180

Responsibility to Protect 21, 22, 226, 232, 236, 237

Revel, Jean-François 51

Revolution in Military Affairs 190

revolution(s) 9–10, 56–8; age of 10, 12, 17; catching-up 10; colour 61, 72, 92, 201, 204–5; democratic 9, 57–8, 61–2; negotiated 9; scientific and technical 12; velvet 8, 9, 56

Rice, Condoleeza 191

Richta, Radovan 12

rights 65; negative 130; suppression of 130, 131, 132; see also human rights

risk societies 12

Roberts, Adam 9

Rodrik, Dani 18

Roland, Gerard 36

Roma 166

Roman republicanism 65

Romania 15, 49, 59, 63, 67, 68, 130, 154, 166, 213; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; and European Union (EU) 62; foreign debt 145; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; ideological polarization 94; income inequality 141; income tax 164; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Rome Statute 231

Roosevelt, Franklin 27, 28, 186, 188, 193, 194

Roosevelt, Theodore 185, 194

Rosanvallon, Pierre 65

Rose Revolution, Georgia 61, 72, 201, 204

Roy, Olivier 111–26

rule of law 63, 64, 65, 67, 72, 73, 79, 144, 153, 163

Rumsfeld, Donald 190

Rupnik, Jacques 7–24, 56–71

Rushdie, Salman 8

Russia 9, 16, 21, 48, 59, 60, 62, 68, 75, 134, 188, 193, 194, 196–211, 223, 232, 240; authoritarian capitalism 18, 21, 48; border issues 209; civil society 87, 201; corruption 201; democracy support 72, 77; democratic contagion, fear of 206–7; democratization 61, 137; and energy supplies 76, 201, 211n31; energy use 139; and European Union (EU) 201, 202, 209; exports 142, 143; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; foreign policy 196–7, 199, 200–10; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); and Georgia war 61, 194, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205; growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; and multilateral negotiations 203, 204; national identity 197, 199; and NATO 200, 201, 202, 203, 209; “return” to world power 197–9, 200, 201, 203; transition indicators 136; and US 209; and World Trade Organization 189, 208; see also Soviet Union

Rwandan genocide 235

Saakashvili, Mikheil 61, 203, 204

Sachs, Jeffrey 35, 36, 66

Sadat, Anwar al- 123

Saddam Hussein 31, 39, 188, 190, 225, 227, 229 234

Saich, Tony 179

Sakharov, Andrei 12

Salafis/Salafism 111–12, 113, 114–15, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125

samizdat 84

San Egidio community 113

sanctions 225

Sarkozy, Nicolas 31–2

SARS pandemic 230

Saudi Arabia 115, 119, 120–1, 123, 124

Sauvy, Alfred 30

Schmitter, Philippe 49

Schumpeter, J.A. 37, 38

scientific and technical revolution 12

Sechin, Ogor 203

secularization, Arab countries 115–16, 118–19, 124, 125

security 15, 30, 46, 164, 225; see also common foreign and security policy; human security; United Nations (UN) Security Council

self-defense 228–9, 230

Self-Defense movement, Poland 64

self-determination 18

Senegal 102, 103, 104

September 11 (2001) terrorist attacks 31, 191, 201, 228, 230, 235

Serbia 59, 60, 62, 68, 201

Shanghai Cooperation Organization 209, 223

sharia law 112, 114, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125

Shevardnadze, Eduard 204

Shevtsova, Lilia 61, 200

Shi’ites/Shias 40, 120, 123, 124

Shleifer, Andrei 36

shock therapy 35–6, 38, 66, 142, 144, 180

shocks, domestic and external 141, 142, 143, 144

Shultz, George 187

Sierra Leone 102, 106

Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph 30

Slovakia 53, 59, 63, 64, 67, 68, 143, 154, 167; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137, 156; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; populism 64; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

Slovenia 59, 63, 68, 86, 154, 159, 167; employment ratio 157; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137, 156; private sector share in 135); ideological polarization 94; income inequality 141; inflation 138; informal sector 154; life expectancy at birth 140; poverty risk 158; transition indicators 136; wages 157

small-and medium-size enterprises 135, 177

Smer (Direction) 64

Snyder, Jack 47

social capital 64, 79

social change: Arab countries 116–18; and philosophy of immediacy 34–42

social democracy 159

social expenditures 146, 156–7, 159

social market economy 22, 81

social security 19, 164, 166

social trust 79, 80, 160, 163

socialism: nature and costs of 129–34; outcomes after 137–44

socialist crimes 130–1

socialist enclaves, crises within 146

socialization, democratic 96

soft power 17, 20, 21

Soldatov, Andrei 203

solidarity 11, 236, 237

Solidarity movement, Poland 11, 83, 90, 213

Somalia 117, 189, 225, 234–5, 238

South Africa 8, 9, 21

South Korea 137, 148; GDP per capita 132, 133

South Ossetia 60, 201, 205

sovereign democracy 48, 61

sovereignty: national 9, 16; popular 9; state 21, 22, 226, 227, 228, 230, 237, 238, 241

Soviet Union 14, 25, 29, 60, 114, 130, 186, 199, 213; collapse of 8, 113, 169, 186–7, 190, 198;collectivization 145; and World War II 28

Spain 14, 58, 115, 167; cajas 146; per capita income 132

Spanish model 57

Spring of Nations (1848) 9

stabilization 35

Stalin, Joseph 29, 134, 145, 198, 199

standard of living 132–4, 137–44

Stark, D. 86

START 2 accord (2010) 201

state-building 29, 60

state capitalism 81; China 169–81

state capture 64

state and civil society 87–8

state enterprises, China 174, 175, 176–7

state sovereignty 21, 22, 226, 227, 228, 230, 237, 238, 241

Stepan, A. 39, 40

Stiglitz, Joseph 17

Stiks, Igor 60

Strange, Susan 20

strike action 91, 92

structural adjustment 103, 108

structural power 20

subsidiarity, principle of 238

Sudan 206, 225, 230–1, 236, 237

suffrage, universal 104

Sufis 119

Suharto, Thojib 145

Sukarno, Ahmed 30

Sunnis 39, 40, 113, 124

Surkov, Vladislav 48

Sutela, Pekka 198

Sweden 94

Syria 15, 111, 113, 120, 123–4, 206–7, 209

Tablighis 111

Taiwan 137, 148

Tajikistan 59, 68, 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Taliban 115, 121, 191, 195n18

Tashkent Collective Security Treaty Organization 204, 211n25

tax revenues, China 172, 173, 174

taxes 142, 148, 154, 164, 165, 167; US 189

Tayeb, Ahmed el- 119

Tea Party, US 119

technocracy 16, 22

territory 60

terrorism 15, 101, 191, 192, 201, 203, 228, 231

Thatcher, Margaret 67

Third Worldism 30, 31

Tiananmen square protests 7, 56, 212–13

Timoshenko, Yulia 206

Tito 60

Tocqueville, Alexis de 49, 96

Togo 102, 104

totalitarianism 1, 2, 7, 10–11, 36, 80, 82, 84

tourism 123

trade shocks 143

trade unions 82–3, 85, 88, 90, 153; China 170, 178

tradition 108

transition paradigm 14, 76

transitional growth mechanisms 142

Transparency International 59, 68

Trenin, Dimitry 200

Truman, Harry 25, 28–9

trust: in civil society organizations 93, 94; in government 63, 166; social 79, 80, 160, 163

Tulip revolution, Kyrgyzstan 61

Tunisia 15, 113, 117, 122, 206; Islamists 114, 115, 116, 123; Salafists 119, 124

Turkey 21, 25, 29, 47, 124, 125, 206; AK Party 121, 124; and European Union (EU) 69, 124

Turkmenistan 59, 68, 113, 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

Tusk, Donald 57

Uganda 238

Ukraine 15, 16, 59, 61, 68, 72, 143, 197, 200, 205–6, 209, 211n25; democracy 134; exports 143; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139;

GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); growth rates 155; income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; and NATO 194; Orange revolution 61, 201, 204–5; transition indicators 136

unemployment 131, 157; China 171

unipolar moment 20, 22, 190, 191

United Nations (UN) 21, 22, 30, 188, 189, 194n2, 223–41, 238; Charter 224, 226, 227, 230, 235; “In Larger Freedom” report 234; peacekeeping operations 231–2, 236, 237

United Nations (UN) Security Council 188, 194n2, 224, 225–41; composition of 233–4; effectiveness 234; enlargement 225; as legislator of last resort 231–2; legitimacy 233; permanent members 226–7, 232, 233; procedures 225–6; representativeness 233; veto rights 226, 232, 233

United States (US) 18–19, 25, 47, 114, 147, 215, 223, 224, 232, 239, 240; and Afghanistan 72, 73, 192, 193, 195n18, 228, 230; armed forces 189; and China 193, 239–40; and Cold War 28–9; conservative internationalism 185, 186, 188, 193; conservative nationalism (isolationism) 186, 189–90, 191; decline thesis 21, 190–1; democracy promotion/support efforts 72–3; Democratic Party 185; exports 189; and financial/economic crisis 17, 66; foreign policy 186–94; health care system 193; hegemony 20; and human rights 72, 73; and Iraq 39, 40, 41, 72, 73, 117, 191, 229; liberal internationalism (Wilsonianism) 185, 186, 188–9, 191, 192, 193; liberal reformism 185–6, 194; military power 191, 192; multilateralism 193, 194; National Missile Defense project 190; National Security Strategy 191; neoconservatives 39, 186, 187, 189–90, 189–90, 191, 192; Republican Party 186; and rule of law 72, 73; and Russia 209; soft power 21; taxes 189; Tea Party agenda 119; and World Wars 27

USSR see Soviet Union

Uzbekistan 59, 68, 134; energy use 139; foreign direct investment (FDI) 139; GDP (per capita 137; private sector share in 135); income inequality 141; inflation 138; life expectancy at birth 140; transition indicators 136

varieties of capitalism 17, 67

velvet revolution 8, 9, 56

Venezuela 72, 76, 145

Verba, S. 96, 97

Vietnam 7, 76, 134, 186, 193

Vishny, Robert W. 36

Voice of the People survey 48–9

volunteerism 79, 80, 92

wages 157, 164–5; China 179, 180

Wahhabism 111, 123

Wahl, Tomas de 205

Walesa, Lec 9

war: African states 102; see also world war(s); and individual conflicts

War on Terror 31, 191, 201, 228

Washington consensus 17, 66

Way, Lucan 14, 62

wealth inequality 19

weapons of mass destruction 229; see also nuclear proliferation

Wedel, J. 80

Weimar Republic 50, 92

welfare state 19, 156–7, 159; socialist 131–2

welfare systems 81

Wen Jiabao 180

Westernization 15

Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 116

White Paper on European Governance 88

Willkie, Wendell 25

Wilson, Andrew 60–1

Wilson, Woodrow 27, 28, 185, 186, 187, 193

Wilsonianism see liberal internationalism Wolff, Larry 29

Wolfowitz, Paul 39, 190

women/women’s rights 117, 119, 124

World Bank 17, 19, 36, 66, 148, 154 World Economic Herald 213

World Freedom Day proposal 31

world narratives 25–33; end of 31–2; world wars as 26–8, 32

World Trade Organization (WTO) 189, 208, 220

World Values Survey 92, 94–5

world war(s): Cold War as 28–30; as world narratives 26–8, 32

Yanukovich, Viktor 16, 61, 204

Yavlinsky, Grigory 36

Yeltsin, Boris 61, 196, 198, 200

Yemen 117

Yugoslavia 60, 62

Yushchenko, Viktor 204

Zakayev, Akhmed 202

Zhao Ziyang 169, 170, 176, 177, 212, 213, 215, 217

Zimbabwe 102, 232

Zionism 117

Table of Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Notes on contributors

Preface

1 On the unpredictability of history

PART I The meanings and legacies of 1989

2 The world after 1989 and the exhaustion of three cycles

3 Writing 1989: a world narrative?

4 1989: a philosophy of immediacy

PART II Re-inventing democracy and its discontents

5 Democracy and dissatisfaction

6 From the revolutions of 1989 to democracy fatigue in Eastern Europe

7 The difficult new era for international democracy support

8 Civil society: from myth to reality

9 ‘Tropical democracy’

10 The Arab four seasons: when an excess of religion leads to political secularization

PART III Varieties of capitalism in the age of globalization

11 Institutional change and market transitions after socialism

12 The political economy of post-1989 capitalism in East-Central Europe

13 1989 and the advent of an authoritarian state capitalism in China

PART IV Between global governance and new power rivalries

14 American visions of the world after 1989

15 Russia and the quest for lost power

16 China and the end of socialism in Europe: a godsend for the Beijing Communists

17 The UN and the changing meaning of an international community

Index