History’s debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present

Nationalism

How does this ‘discovery’ of a mass that needs to be acknowledged and more thoroughly considered affect our understanding of 1989 and its aftermaths? Referring to the massive demonstrations in East Germany and Czechoslovakia during the fall of 1989, political scientist Valerie Bunce has argued that these protests were ‘strongly influenced by the merger among nation, sovereignty, and regime change’.^[27] The appeal of Solidarity in Poland, for example, ‘reflected not just the unwillingness of both the Polish and the Soviet leaders to crack down on rebellious Poles and to impose hardline stalinization, but also the capacity of nationalism to forge Polish unity’.^[28] The subtext of these two statements is the exhaustion, in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, of the four trajectories of identification and the possibility that systemic transformation in 1989 could revitalize resources for national and individual selves. And yet the forms of socialization under communism could not just disappear into thin air. Indeed, ‘mental maps endure — inherited understandings of the essence of political justice, of how the world functions, of who is trying to exploit whom and how, do not disappear as rapidly as metaphors such as “collapse” seem to imply’.^[29] A democratic 1989 was possible even without democrats, so it seems. However, the consolidation of what had been achieved presupposed a difficult equilibrium, because the political, economic, civic, and cultural starting points for any mode of postsocialism had already been determined by pre-1989 identity-building processes.^[30] Moreover, if looking to history to (partially) explain postsocialism, one should adopt more of a longue durée perspective and turn one’s eyes towards both pre- and post-1945 pasts.^[31]

In Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia the succession of disenchantments with social utopia in (depending on the country) 1956, 1968, 1970, and 19801981 — Solidarity can be seen as the last attempt to hold a party to its promise of a workers’ state — generated pragmatization, deideologization, and the pluralization of societies. Moreover, attempts at national-(post)stalinist syntheses in Central Europe ran into difficulties: in Poland such efforts collapsed with Gomulka’s fall from power; in Kádár’s Hungary and Husák’s Czechoslovakia the regimes were not afraid to flex their nationalist muscles, but the events of 1956 and 1968 in these respective countries made legitimization via the nation secondary to legitimization via the economy. Despite a strong ethnic turn in the GDR, the narratives of Heimat and antifascism were more important and formative for the polity.

One author judiciously summarized these dialectics of identity: ‘communist regimes did not burn their national flags but emblazoned them with communist symbols’.^[32] Most importantly, though, the building of socialism brought about homogenization. Put another way, ‘“communist nationalism” and “nationalism after communism” were very different from the nationalisms that existed before communist rule’.^[33] I would stress here that the communist experience, far from being an interlude or a parenthesis, created the societies of Eastern Europe as we knew them in 1989. Thus their pre-1945 histories could hardly be recuperated in ignorance of the ways that they had filtered through the state socialism period.

A brief review of this issue in Southeastern Europe can be very telling. In Romania, the nation as a master symbol did not appear primarily as a result of a reenchantment with the past. It was presupposed by the assertion of the socialist nation-state’s sovereignty. The utopia that was put into practice took on a national mantle. Regression into tradition was a welcome by-product and necessary corollary to the redefinition both of the civilizational agent (from the proletariat to the entire Romanian people) and of the identity of the polity undergoing socialist transformation (the socialist nation-state).^[34]

In Bulgaria, the 1971 constitution made no reference to minorities, and in 1974 its Communist Party introduced the term ‘unified Bulgarian socialist nation’. Three years later it declared that Bulgaria consisted almost entirely ‘of one ethnic type and is heading towards complete homogeneity’.^[35] By the 1980s, TodorŽivkov attempted to ‘bulgarize’ the country’s Muslim population in an effort to ethnically engineer the society to correspond to the ideological postulates that had been put in place. Similarly, the state-building project in communist Albania was an exercise in national integration. In 1984, Enver Hoxha declared that ‘our people’s state power and the monolithic unity of our people’ were the two main achievements of Albania’s Communist Party and of its socialist revolution.^[36] Only the League of Yugoslav Communists sought to construct a supranational identity based on the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of the nation’s peoples and on the founding narrative of partisan resistance during World War II. This was true until 1974, when the new constitution fundamentally transformed the republics into nationalizing entities within the framework of a multiethnic confederation. This development paved the way for a Serbian counter-reaction to affirm its hegemony as federal ethnic core and to Croatian and Slovene ‘national revolutions’.^[37]

It is not as if nationalism had been locked away in a freezer when the events of 1989 began to unfold. On the contrary: nationalism was a formative instrument for each country in the region. Its intensity during the immediate aftermaths of the upheavals depended on the specificities of each former regime. During the regime-changing events it took a backseat for the most part, but almost immediately afterwards nationalist mobilizations reared their heads: there were Romanian-Hungarian and Turkish-Bulgarian clashes in 1990; Czechoslovakia collapsed in 1992 (albeit peacefully); anti-immigrant violence flared up in East Germany; and, of course, Yugoslavia descended into a maelstrom of interethnic bloodshed and destruction that outlasted the country itself and persisted through 2000 (2001, once one takes into account Macedonia). As the walls crumbled in Eastern Europe, they seemed always to fall on someone’s head.^[38]

Everyday Identities

I would like to return briefly to the issue of social identity under state socialism in a conception that extends beyond the labels of civil and uncivil society, while keeping in mind the civilization feature of the historical experience itself. Borrowing François Furet’s memorable dictum about the French Revolution, Marci Shore correctly emphasized that ‘the communist period […] had not been a homogenous bloc of time’.^[39] During those years, lives were not only lost but also lived. Careers were not only unmade but also made. If we extend the temporal limits and include the various experiences of fascism and right-wing authoritarianism in the 1930s and early 1940s, people in 1989 had had enough time to be victimized twice and/or to become perpetrators or collaborators in distinct eras. The troubled pasts of the post-1989 period can be worked through only by telling the many truths of those whose lives have been affected by them.

Under communism, belonging, socialization, and recognition were the result of ‘playing the identity game’.^[40] Individuals could thus appropriate and use the rules of social identification enforced by the party-state to prove their creative and faithful contributions to the upholding of the socialist order. The area of individual autonomy in determining one’s identity within (post)stalinist society consisted of what Mark Edele has called the ‘internalization of Soviet [or local communist, B.I.] discourse as a method of thinking’.^[41] Transnational images and discourses that were supposed to create internationalist solidarities or bolster support for various decolonization struggles are interesting examples of the ambiguities inherent in official scripts. Indeed, ‘heroic images of “progressive struggles” of the decolonizing world became an integral part of domestic mass culture’ in Eastern Europe, even as they could also ‘be used to construct a new political language through which alternative visions could be articulated — ones which critiqued existing state socialism’.^[42]

Citing the example of the GDR, the German historian Alf Lüdtke famously argued that state socialist society was durchherrscht — that is, it was thoroughly pervaded by practices of political authority. According to him, ‘in a paradoxical inversion of Marx’s utopian prophecy, it was rather society itself that had withered away during socialism, and not the state’.^[43] The ‘archival revolution’ in former communist countries revealed that the communist regimes were extremely fluid, undergoing a permanent process of adaptation to both their own societies and to the outside world (either the ‘world Leninist system’ or the ‘West’). However, when stagnation, sclerosis, and crisis hit, learnt trajectories of identity were lost or subverted. The didactic value of identification narratives within various communist regimes, surprisingly, took on a centrifugal quality. They could feed criticism against betrayed ideals — of socialism, the nation, or, more generally, of locally embedded visions of modernity. In this sense, in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania 1968 was pregnant with 1989 in more ways than one, to paraphrase Charles Maier.^[44]

Two fundamental topics emerge from such an interpretative framework: resistance and negotiation. One author remarked that ‘the negotiating man was the new paradigm of Soviet subjectivity emerging from the revisionist years’.^[45] The same can be said of Eastern European state socialisms. In this reading, resistance is not simply understood as anticommunist opposition. It is, rather, viewed as a prism that refracts and distils what might otherwise be opaque dimensions of the social, cultural, and political history of each of the bloc’s societies.^[46]

In an insightful review of the historiography of the revolutions of 1989, Barbara Falk has insisted that ‘there is no clear-cut line between resistance and dissent — it is more of a continuum or full spectrum’.^[47] To further clarify how the intermediary, grey, majoritarian social categories reacted in the space created between the actions of illiberal elites and those of dissidents, we need to better understand how society was fused with the party-state. To put the matt er differently, the post-1989 world was pregnant with a complex array of reactions against the ‘ancien régime’:

‘At one pole of resistance lie activities such as absenteeism, alcoholism or drug abuse, and the preference for personal travel and sporting activities rather than trade-union- or workplace- sponsored events. Closer to the middle would be private or family discussions on alternative historiography, listening to a banned radio broadcast, writing an essay “for the drawer”, publicly telling jokes, or reading samizdat. Closer to the middle on the other side, toward the pole of dissent, would be activities taken in support or in the “grey zone” — agreeing with a petition, participating in a pilgrimage perhaps, or discussing with friends a particular broadcast or spreading news obtained there. Finally, at the “dissent” end of the continuum is the production and distribution of samizdat, public protest, active involvement in independent groups outside the control of the party-state — all of which risked regime persecution and/or imprisonment. One could also further differentiate between individual moral resistance or organized opposition — particularly by the late 1980s or in states such as Poland where the opposition was extremely well organized, expansive, and multidimensional.’^[48]

These spaces of individual ambivalence in communist societies, combined with the presence of dissidents and the increasing identitarian disarray, generated the potential for spontaneous civic mobilization when elites began deserting their regimes and displayed their unwillingness to repress dissent. This dynamic made possible the massive public protests in Prague, Bucharest, and Leipzig in 1989. These demonstrations, after all, emulated earlier contestations with party-states in 1953, 1956, 1970, and 1980-1981, but they emerged within radically different domestic and international contexts. Anne Applebaum has stressed, in a review of Stephen Kotkin’s Uncivil Society, that the potential for alternative forms of mobilization

‘helped form the crowds and then helped the crowds create change (impelling Václav Havel to the presidency of the Czech Republic, for example). Maybe more importantly, they affected the midlevel bureaucrats, the people who had been following orders all along but, with the threat of a Soviet invasion withdrawn, no longer wanted to do so. People like the policeman who spontaneously opened the barrier at the Berlin Wall, just to take one famous example, were moved to switch sides by, yes, the civil society that had been growing around them.’^[49]

But the features of communist rule also provided a breeding ground for political populism. Cas Mudde has underlined that

‘”real existing socialism” created nihilist and atomized societies in which egalitarianism became mixed with deep social envy. This, combined with the stained reputation of the institutions of the state and the party […] created a deeply felt dichotomy between “the moral non-Communist people” versus “the corrupt Communist elite” — incidentally, very similar, if not identical, to the dichotomy between (moral) “civil society” versus the (corrupt) state.’^[50]

Such appetites, mixed with the perseverance of myths of national unity and homogeneity omnipresent before 1989, configured a far from benign potential lurking within Eastern Europe’s much vaunted civil societies. The elation, expectations, spontaneity, and nonviolence of the year of wonders hid not only uncivil societies, but also sociocultural idiosyncrasies that would rapidly and repeatedly fuel democratic disenchantment and backsliding. Over the course of twenty-five years, civic and political actors have been constrained and empowered in equal measure by pre- and post-1945 pasts. Far from being a regional feature, Ekiert and Ziblatt have convincingly shown that

‘the context specificity of European experience of democratization has played a major role in all transformations within the region, from southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s to Eastern Europe in the 1990s’.^[51]

What Tradition?

What initially appeared to be a straightforward path for post-1989 societies to follow — ‘all that was needed, it seemed, was to get rid of the false histories put forward by the communist regimes and restore the true pluralist histories of the various peoples of the region’^[52] — got bogged down in aggressive fantasies of salvation. These are the result of (at least) two factors. First, there are the historiographical and symbolic continuities with state socialism. Second, there are feverish post-1989 drives for a politics of history which supposedly substantiates redefinitions of national identity and citizenship, as well as the territorial, social, and cultural boundaries of post-1989 states.^[53] These essentially compensatory discourses can be called ‘legitimation from the past’.

The events of 1989 became a threshold that allowed a jump backward in time to join a supposedly pristine tradition. One aspect of this phenomenon was the search for so-called Golden Ages that would prove the European pedigree of the newly ‘liberated’ societies. Perhaps the most frequently appearing feature here was the glorification of the period between the two world wars. This era was described as a time of true development (as compared with the deficiencies of socialist modernity), the source of democratic potential in each of the postcommunist countries. Its importance lies also in its being the time when many of the region’s societies had achieved long-sought status as nation-states: unified Romania and Poland; Slovakia and Croatia during the war; even enlarged Hungary and Bulgaria after the 1940 Vienna arbitrages. However, such a view often overlooks the finer details of the historical realities in these countries. The region’s democracies were somewhat functional while they lasted, but had significant blind spots in terms of citizen empowerment. A nation-state’s consolidation often meant the repression of its minorities. These polities frequently backslid into autocratic and even fascist regimes by the end of the 1930s. In most of them, antisemitism was rampant, and later their governments often collaborated with Nazi Germany in the perpetration of the Holocaust.

One of the defining topics for many of the post-1989 debates was a discussion about the interwar period’s flourishing cultural and intellectual life. Unsurprisingly, these debates became relevant in the assessment of the influence of radical, extremist ideologies in the region. The trap here has been that there was indeed extensive synchronization with European-wide phenomena of the first half of the past century. But such development took place concurrently with the ideological storms that ravaged the continent. That is, what appeared to be a vibrant intellectual scene was also a milieu that had internalized the self-destructive appetites of the times. One historian noted that

‘as the cultural flourishing of the interwar period was followed by the communist takeover, the anti-modernist patterns of thought became retrospectively framed as constitutive elements of the “European” cultural canon of these countries and this led in turn to the rather uncritical revival of many of these discourses after 1989.’^[54]

What makes the feverish appeal to tradition even more questionable is my earlier point about the autochtonization of state socialisms. For example, historian Victor Neumann remarked in 2013 that within Romanian historiography, many continue to endorse

‘a romantic view of Romanian history, an approach which is opposed to critical analysis, methodological renewal, and conceptual progress, and which is not willing to tear itself away from past structures of thought and promote, instead, Western norms’.^[55]

Though the idea of embracing ‘Western norms’ might appear as self-orientalization, the coinage stands in for the principle of critical historicization. In Romania, because of only partial (public and scholarly) examination of the national-Stalinist experience, the charismatic nationalism that made the latter possible is still firmly entrenched in identity narratives and in collectivist political visions. Local communism was a textbook case of conjoined autochtonization, both from the top and from below. Intellectuals functioned as experts serving the national agenda as well as dignitaries of the regime’s cultural diplomacy. Subsequently, the various traditions and trends from the pre-1945 period that had been appropriated within the system experienced a process of hybridization with Marxist-Leninist eschatology and cultural-historical determinism.

Symbolic Retribution

The second direction assumed by the grappling with the past after 1989 came by way of policies such as lustration or the granting of access to the former regime’s secret police files. The post-1989 period is rife with vicious polemics on who, how, and why to purge, determinations based on involvement with the power structures of the now-defunct socialist states. Many times, however, those involved in these public skirmishes or the scholars themselves forget that participation in the socialist modernization project was all-pervasive. It went much deeper than most who take part in these debates have been (and are) prepared to accept. Commenting on the uproar caused in Poland by the country’s 2007 lustration law, historian Marci Shore rightly remarked that, taking into account the specific clauses and formulations of the legislation, one could very well conclude that ‘it was safer now — as it had been then [before 1989] — to have been one of Havel’s greengrocers’.^[56] In similar fashion, political scientist Lavinia Stan emphasized that compromise was the defining feature of life during communism. People turned

‘a blind eye to injustice on relatives, neighbors, and friends, downgrading their life expectations, living parallel solitudes that often drew little support from within and outside immediate family, and even silently rejoicing when their enemies and rivals got in trouble with authorities’.^[57]

But the ambiguities of state socialist societies and the rather successful legitimization of some party leaderships at various points during the regimes’ existences have created contradictory attitudes among the postcommunist populations. One can point to two poles in the discourse about the socialist past: condemnation, so that ‘one side judges before making sufficient effort to assess’, and acquittal, where ‘the other aims to assess in order not to judge’.^[58] But the realities of communism as a lived system placed most of the population in a representational limbo: when individuals talk about this past as a phenomenon from the outside, they often agree to castigate it; but when they describe their own lives, and thus speak about an internalized history, the account is often positive if not glowing (reflecting self-realization). This creates a situation described by one historian as ‘confused (inconsistent) and opportunistic’. It reflects, among post-1989 members of civil societies, a ‘dual need (to defend and to give up)’ in relation to the dictatorial past.^[59]

Eastern Europe’s troubles with the past have produced results that fall into two categories. First, there is a clash of nostalgias. There is, on the one hand, ostalgia:

‘The living memory of a tranquil and predictable way of life contrasts sharply with the sometimes wild capitalist conditions that neo-liberal free-market transformation has created since 1989 and, simultaneously, with the dark vision of the totalitarian hell of the Stalinist kind dominant in the public discourse.’^[60]

And on the other hand there is a stubborn push for a state-sponsored, politically instrumentalized politics of history, which contends that ‘the national heritage should be thoroughly reconstructed on the basis of a “true and correct understanding of history” stripped of communist lies’.^[61] Ironically, both nostalgias face the same danger: concentrating only on positive, self-legitimizing histories and displaying utter ignorance or stubborn avoidance of individual or collective complicities, complexes, and fantasies with regard to the past. Here, to paraphrase Irena Grudzinska-Gross, the very active work of memory becomes strikingly similar to partial amnesia.^[62]

Second, these societies still struggle with competing martyrologies. The phenomenon is most obvious on two interrelated levels: the relationship between the Holocaust and the Gulag, as well as the assessment of the offi cial description for the mass murder and repression (i.e. the crimes) committed by the communist regimes. The unifying concept here is that of genocide. In both legal and historical narratives, ‘genocide’ has largely been used across the former socialist bloc and Soviet realm to enhance the traumatic pedigree of various stories of national suffering. It is tempting to employ the term because it refers to the most heinous category of atrocity in the hierarchy of political crimes. It is a very useful tool to wield in the politics of international recognition. But its use relies on two grievous fallacies: on the one hand, it externalizes guilt — responsibility lies outside of the body of the nation; on the other, ‘it is a very efficient mechanism to brush aside demands to confront injustices and crimes committ ed by members of the “suffering nation”’.^[63]

The practice is quite widespread across the former communist domain. Azerbaijan, Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia and its successor states (especially during the 1990s, when Croats, Serbs, and Albanians were engaged in a symbolic arms race over historical genocides that would seemingly justify ethnic cleansing or discrimination) have put forth this narrative extensively. It inevitably creates a picture in which the legacy and remembering of the Holocaust — which had been pushed to the outskirts of national discourses throughout the socialist period — comes into conflict with the national traumas experienced during state socialism. The inflation of genocide-talk left the impression that one corpus of memory could not coexist with the other. The outcome was that along the way, in Timothy Snyder’s words, ‘history is removed, numbers go upward and memories go inward, to all our peril’. The competitive martyrology released ‘millions of ghosts released into local culture’ but did not create more meaning. Rather, it consolidated resentment.^[64]

One resilient theme in public discourse across the region is the view that the communist traumas of Eastern Europe are putatively not accepted in the memory house of contemporary (Western) Europe. An interesting extension of this narrative is the attitude of the region’s countries towards the current wave of refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere. Croatian intellectual Slavenka Drakulić has powerfully contended that one of the explanations for the region’s response is that ‘the victims of Communism now have serious competitors: war refugees arriving from the Middle East and Africa’.^[65] In this reading, the ‘new victims, mostly Muslims arriving in frighteningly high numbers’ do not trigger significant acknowledgments of responsibility among Eastern Europeans. How could they feel this way: ‘when they finally have their own states, they are expected to renounce their victimhood and national homogeneity in order to show solidarity?’^[66] Of course, postsocialist societies are not alone in their opposition to admitting refugees to their countries. Western Europeans are often reluctant as well (of course, some differentiation is necessary here, as various elites in European countries have different attitudes on the issue, while the general situation is in flux given the ongoing crisis). Stemming from different reasons, the parochialisms of East and West find ways to synchronize. I do find statements such as those of the esteemed historian André Liebich to be rather self-congratulatory and slightly disconnected from the complexity of the reactions to the refugee crisis across the EU:

‘Absent for fifty years, the ex-communist countries were excluded too long from the process of European construction to embrace its principles. They have thus come to resent rather than to share its secular and pacifist ethos which prides itself on its modernity or post-modernity and on its unrestricted tolerance.’^[67]

What do these troubles with the past point to in relation to 1989? One author correctly remarked that twenty-five years removed from 1989, first-order geographical and political divisions appear to have been largely overcome. But

‘breaking walls, opening borders, and holding elections proved to be substantially easier than constructing identities congruent with the euphoric and unifying spirit of the first post-communist days’.^[68]

The various myths of return help notions of ‘revolution betrayed’ or of alleged ‘Golden Ages’ retain their staying power. They reflect the ambiguities and specificities of individual communist regimes and societies, rather than various favourable or unpropitious combinations of civil and uncivil societies within the postcommunist nations. They indicate the persistence of restorative nationalisms, whose danger lies in its fuelling of ethnopopulisms.

An extreme example, though far from isolated, is the political program of Jobbik, the extreme-right party in Hungary that in 2014 secured just over 20% of the vote in the Hungarian parliamentary elections. In 2009, Jobbik’s English-language website stated that ‘in order to survive globalization people have to know their true history, otherwise [they will] lose their histories as the global elite has been conducting a clandestine war on national cultures’.^[69]

Writing about Romania and Hungary, historian Balázs Trencsényi observes that

‘national essentialism functions as the collective ‘subconscious’ of these political cultures, a potential grey zone of unspoken but intended connotations and a set of references that can be activated in conflicting situations’.^[70]

And much of these parochialisms in East European cultures is inextricably connected with communism’s legacies. Once the challenges of the contemporary European crisis and democratic fatigue combine with historical resentments rooted in troubles with the past, then extremism and populism are likely to come to the fore.

Simultaneously, though, one can say that such an outcome is hardly predetermined. An interesting phenomenon of the past three or four years is the emergence of a revolutionary politics without an ideology or a specifi c project — the explosions of moral indignation directed against the fallacies of postsocialism. Beyond the constraints of past parochialisms, citizens in Sofia, Bucharest, and Budapest have all taken to the streets ‘not with the hope of putting a better government in power but merely to establish the borders that no government should cross’.^[71] As noted, the exact social and political outcomes of this new form of civic mobilization remain to be seen.