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The staying power of history
By Shlomo Avineri
Tags: Berlin Wall, Israel News

"How lovely was the republic - under the monarchy." This quote was attributed to disappointed Republicans during the French Revolution, which began with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and quickly degenerated into the Jacobin Terror, the Thermidorian Reaction and ultimately the imperial Napoleonic regime.

Something similar, though not as extreme, happened to the hopes associated with the wondrous year 1989: With people like Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa firing the imaginations of people the world over, and with the dramatic scenes of the Berlin Wall falling without violence - what could have been expected if not clear progress toward democracy, liberalism and perhaps even an Eastern European version of social democracy, rising from the ruins of Soviet oppression? Some even prophesied "the end of history."

But that did not come about. Indeed, what stands out today are, above all, the differences in the development of the various countries involved, even though all of them were apparently sharing the same kind of system, based on a rejection of private property, a centralized economy, exclusive single-party rule and a total monopoly on education and the media.
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There were of course differences in the ways the communist regime was implemented in the different countries: Poland, for example, was different from the Soviet republics, but the basic principles and the way they were institutionalized were more or less the same.

The plurality of forms that development in the post-communist countries has taken is indeed astonishing: While Russia has developed a neo-authoritarian regime centered on a dominant personality, its neighbor Ukraine is suffering from its inability thus far to define its national and governmental identity and is on the brink of becoming a failed state. By comparison, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and, somewhat surprisingly, Slovakia as well, have managed to go through the transition to democracy and to establish quite stable democracies based on free elections, multi-party systems, a free press and a market economy.

At the same time, the transition has often been characterized by petty politics conducted by uninspired people embroiled in trivial power struggles that do not always elevate the democratic process in the minds of their voters. In Hungary this was also accompanied by the resurgence of a nationalistic discourse with ugly racist overtones.

The reunification of Germany put an end to the possibility of separate development in what had been perhaps the most disciplined country in the Soviet bloc - the former German Democratic Republic. Romania and Bulgaria have been accepted into the European Union, but their internal regimes are still very far away, both politically and economically, from what are customarily considered European standards. Belarus is an autocratic dictatorship, and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia have developed Sultanistic dictatorships that would not have shamed the worst of what used to be called the Third World.

On a more limited scale, that of the former Yugoslavia, the end of the relatively moderate communist regime led not only to the dismantling of the country into seven separate states, but also to the development of each as very different from the others. Slovenia and to a considerable extent Croatia have developed into reasonably liberal democracies, whereas Serbia is still seeking the constitutional and ideological framework for the formation of democratic institutionalization. Macedonia has not yet won stability and the very existence of Bosnia-Herzegovina, even after the end of the bloody war that tore it to shreds, is still not entirely ensured. Though Kosovo has won its independence, Serbia has not yet come to terms with that fact, and the tensions between Serbs and Albanians have not subsided.

The question is, why?

The paradox is that although they ostensibly started out from the same point, 20 years after the fall of the communist regimes, the post-communist countries evidence far more profound differences than those that can be seen among the countries of Western Europe. Personally, I have never believed that developments in the post-communist countries would all be in a liberal and democratic direction, or would be uniform: I stated this in an article published in the Brookings Review in the spring of 1992 - but it still calls for an explanation.

At that time I argued, first, that it would be a pipe dream to hope that all the post-communist countries would be capable of arriving at a stable democratic regime within a short time. Anyone who had such hopes was ignoring the fact that even in Western Europe the way to democracy was long and drawn out over decades - if not centuries: It was not in a single day that England moved from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy, and France went through many transformations, swinging back and forth more than once from monarchy to republic to imperial rule, until it stabilized in its current format (effectively only in the wake of the Gaullist putsch in 1958, which led to the founding of the Fifth Republic). And there is no need to go on at length about the bumpy roads Germany and Italy have traveled on their respective ways to democracy.

To imagine that developments in Eastern Europe would be smoother or less complex was totally unrealistic, nourished on the one hand by the best of hopes and on the other by a simplistic sense of triumphalism over communism, and the assumption that in the absence of Soviet oppression, democracy would automatically spring up.

It emerges that there is a single factor more dominant than any other for determining the path of former communist countries, one that is stronger and more crucial than other, quantifiable aspects (such as level of economic development or some other index). This crucial factor is the existence - or nonexistence - of a civil society, which holds memories, real or imaginary, of pre-communist institutions that were able to develop into a basis for a liberal and democratic politics. Thus it happened that in countries like the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary - despite their different histories - it was possible to consolidate democracy because of the existence of representative institutions during the pre-communist period, along with a tradition of a strong civil society with voluntary institutions (a church, universities, and other organizations), upon which it was possible to base a democratic infrastructure.

However, a country like Russia, with its czarist history, was completely devoid of these traditions. Representative institutions had never existed in Russia, and the pre-communist political traditions were all authoritarian and hierarchical - and for this reason the democratic revolution in Russia in 1917 also failed. If there is an effective historical memory in Russia, it is connected to czars like Peter and Catherine (both of whom share the epithet "the Great"), who imposed forced modernization on the country and solidified it as an authoritarian state, in which the nobility, the church and academia were subordinated to an authoritarian bureaucracy and there were no islands of either political or cultural autonomy. No wonder a portrait of Peter the Great that hangs in Vladimir Putin's office in the Kremlin.

However, the failure of political consolidation in Ukraine, by contrast, is connected to the absence of a tradition of historical, intellectual and institutional foundations of nation-building: The Cossack tradition - Khmelnytzky, for example - is without a doubt central to the Ukrainian self-identity, but it is not exactly a model or base on which to establish a modern polity.

This does not mean that the future of each of these countries is entirely determined by its past and that there is no way for them to be freed of it: Croatia and Slovakia are examples of societies that have managed to overcome the dark sides of their history.

But all that takes time. There is also a need for a context that makes these developments easier as well as courageous political leadership. There are also geopolitical circumstances beyond the control of the societies themselves, as evident for example in the problematic development of Georgia is an example of such constraints, which weigh on domestic progress despite the good intentions of those who lead them.

There is yet another aspect to all this: conventional wisdom holds that democratic development and the establishment of a market economy are intertwined. This is not always the case, and not only in the case of China, which is characterized by a combination of political authoritarianism and a market economy. This also applies to a considerable extent to Putin's Russia.

The conclusions that can be drawn from this complex picture are manifold. First, there is no determinism in historical development, which can take various channels. Second, there is no single rule that applies to all societies, even when ostensibly they resemble one another. And third, anyone who ignores the history of a given society, or is unaware of it, simply cannot understand it and certainly cannot see how history is both an opportunity and a burden.

This is true not only with respect to Eastern Europe. It is a reality that is now undermining American efforts in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and casting its shadow on the Palestinian failure in nation-building. But this is another story, though the plot may be similar.
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