The Backsliding

The Return

In any social change, the new mixes with the old and experiments with continuity. It is the structure of the common thought that organizes people’s action that shapes the future. The urge to change is based on the rejection of the past, a will to start anew. But 1989 was a change that, while rejecting the immediate past, wanted to reach into a deeper past, more distant than the last fifty years. That wish had a profound influence over what happened next.

I think that the return to old-style nationalism, though not inevitable, was inscribed into the structure of the transitions of 1989. The initial political slogan was that of the “return to Europe,” which meant not only the joining of Western political institutions but also a return to one’s own past, extending a bridge to the pre-war period while skipping over the period of 1945–1989. This was meant to erase a sequence of humiliating experiences—war, occupation, the communist period—both from the memory of a nation and from the personal histories of families and individuals. The intense work of memory in these countries was similar to a partial amnesia. The past, however, came back with its own retrieved traumas. And that skipped-over time came knocking on the door of politics. ¹

It is not that the left disappeared in the countries of East Central Europe, though it is obvious that the collapse of the communist regimes was also due to the exhaustion of their ideology. “The fall of the Communist dictatorship in 1989 compromised the left wing intellectually and morally,” wrote Gabor Demszky, the former dissident and then mayor of post-1989 Budapest. ² What was surprising, as we remember, was the vitality of the post-communist left in the immediate post-1989 period; it is enough to recall the shock of the election of Aleksander Kwaśniewski to the presidency of Poland in 1995. This vitality, however, did not result from the continuity of ideological principles. The post-communist elites swiftly attached themselves to the neoliberal ideology and abandoned social justice language that they had previously overused and destroyed. It is, in fact, that very language that is sometimes picked up by the populist-nationalists of the entire region.

The slogans of 1989 were anti-left, anti-revolutionary: they were intended as a rejection of the idea of basing the future on some new, untried ideas. They advocated a return to what seemed to have been working; this was one of the meanings of the return to Europe. It included not only the emulation of social practices of the contemporary West and the United States, but also reconnecting with the past of the pre-war period in Poland and pre-1944 in Hungary. There were, however, serious dangers in that return. “Because of the lack of [work of memory],” Demszky wrote, “nationalist and right-wing, including Nazi and extreme right-wing ideas could again become virulent because they were [previously] supressed and conserved. They had the moral advantage of repression, and therefore, an anti-Soviet patriotic gloss. (A similar process—in part related, in part due to other causes—can be observed throughout Europe, but it was only able to become truly dangerous, and may yet become so in the future, in the countries of the former Soviet empire.)” ³

The idea of the return caused the period from 1939 till 1989 to become an empty time, a time of the “refrigeration” of old problems, a time of arrested development. There was a lament about the unfulfilled potential of individual lives and the stunted life of the nation. In his article, Demszky discusses the Fidesz-introduced changes of the Hungarian constitution, the preamble of which consigns the period of more than forty-six years of the country’s history to oblivion; the consequence of this move is that from the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944 to the election of May 1990, nothing that happened was Hungary’s responsibility. Not only communism, but also the Holocaust, becomes a responsibility of others. For these nations, the return to Europe meant not only becoming rich and free but also a retrieval of authenticity, real identity, which expressed itself in its own history, traditional customs, old ways of buying and selling, and worshipping. It was to return to old institutions, or sometimes to the pre-war roles of these institutions, especially the Catholic Church, school, and family.

The main Polish institution that took to heart the slogan of the return and made most of it was indeed the Catholic Church. It had an unprecedented asset in the person of the Polish Pope John Paul II. Already in the summer of 1990, one year after the first almost free elections, and while teachers were on vacation, religion classes were introduced to all public schools. Religion classes were available and well developed in the parishes and churches, mostly consisting of the preparation for rites. Now the preparation for rites was moved to schools, and it was the Polish taxpayer who was picking up the bill. This was just the first of many steps with which the Catholic Church gained decisive influence over all aspects of public life in Poland, including a claimed monopoly on morality. The immediate period after 1989 was the era of repayment for the Church’s suffering during communism and for its support of the opposition. Today, the Church claims a status superior to the legal and elected authorities as a guardian of tradition and of the nation’s soul. ⁴ It is at the forefront of culture wars on abortion, in vitro fertilization, same-sex union, and “gender.” One can say that its role is very reminiscent and consciously modeled on the pre-war period. It is now working on liberating some professions—especially gynecologists and teachers—from the dictates of law, that is, telling them that they should follow their consciences, which are defined by the Church. It is in fact their conscience that is supposed to elevate their work above the rules and regulations. This is a definite example of a return to the illiberal democracy of Poland of 1930s.

One could say that the slogan of the return to Europe was based on untrue assumptions—what is Europe, how can a nation “return” anywhere—and was therefore flawed to begin with. Of course, the slogan could not be interpreted literarily; nevertheless it had the real drawback of the uncritical idealization of the past. Instead of facing both the good and the ugly of the pre-war period, this time, especially for then newly independent Poland, was imagined as a time of authenticity. The communists attacked everything in that period, and their criticisms were rejected en bloc. The past was covered by selective amnesia. The same process happened in Hungary, though it had a different coloring because of Trianon. Gabor Demszky commented on that selective use of history when he wrote: “The real danger that I see is that amnesia is no longer confined to the sphere of extremist parties, but is increasingly contaminating mainstream political parties, like Fidesz. ‘Coming to terms with the past’ is not in the interest of the ‘Magyar’ ruling party which prefers to keep Pandora’s box open when it rewrites history.” ⁵

Europe

The nostalgic post-1989 return to tradition was accompanied by an opposite movement: a strong process of economic democratization. Previously restricted higher education opportunities opened to about 50 percent of the youth, various professions became more accessible, travel easier, language less formal, and high culture lower. The old class structure of the 1950s to 1980s became open again. While reclaiming the past, society was running on a track to the future. There was a tension due to the contrast between these two directions: the future and the past. It was a period of mixed reality.

The optimism of this moment was based on the belief that economic well-being was an integral part of European democracy. The idea of transition was exhilarating, but its reality was hard. One could ask if the rapid post-1989 privatization and job insecurity did not, in public memory, mirror the prewar vocabulary of social relations with its ideas of foreign exploitation. The cost of social transformation was high and notoriously painful, with an increase in poverty and social inequalities, in unemployment, especially among the old and the very young. Job-seeking abroad became a lamented solution. Here was the place for the growth of populism. Yet, the neoliberal ideology promised overall improvement. That promise was shaken by the crisis of 2007–2008.

The language of neo-liberalism elevated economic solutions to the status of political necessity. Political horizons were limited by economic vocabulary. Once that joining of two terms—Europe = economic wellbeing—was shaken, it became logical to turn towards the nation. Political elites did not offer any other ideological concepts; only the nation would protect a beleaguered individual. The intellectual confusion of public “economism” was easily defeated by the solid tradition of national thought. An especially important element here was the pervasive sense of being a continuous victim of privatization, or of persecution. The human rights philosophy brought in by the European Union was meant to empower the individual and therefore to counteract the sense of victimhood. That ideology is linked to individual rights and protections, while the idea of sacrifice places the group, the nation, above the individual. The language of individual rights is supplanted by the work of the worshippers of the new religion—national history. Many political conflicts are expressed in continuous, intense, and quarrelsome rewritings of special historical moments, with historians, journalists, witnesses fighting over the “forgotten” facts or events. Here the right wing has its largest successes. The victory in defeat is the leitmotif of state celebrations in Poland and Hungary, growing especially conspicuous in the last couple of years. Patriotism is defined more and more as a readiness to sacrifice, rather than as an active (European) citizenship.

This is not how citizenship and Europe were understood at the beginning of the transition. The new citizen of liberated Eastern Europe was to be a self-directed, free individual, able to organize his/her life and make economic and other choices. That kind of citizenship would lead to well-being, just as freedom, which was conceived of basically as economic freedom, was leading to growth and prosperity. This joining of prosperity and the future was broken by the crisis of 2007–2008; with that break, European solidarity broke down as well. It turned out that some countries were willing to bail out the others at the price of austerity and public shaming. As Gabor Demszky wrote, for the generation of dissidents, Europe meant “a morally superior system that transcends illiberal national values.” ⁶ But for many others, especially those in the shamed countries, it meant the opposite: the freedom to reconstruct the nation-state.

The European Union was created as a moral project to prevent future wars. It presented itself, however, as an economic project, based on obvious economic calculus. The calculus behind this presentation was to avoid political and historical controversies. Perhaps the limitations of national sovereignty due to membership in the European Union had to necessarily revive the old vocabulary of nationalism. Or perhaps it was the wars in former Yugoslavia that showed the weakness of the European community and shook the commitment to the federalization process of its member states. Or else, it was the already mentioned economic crisis that decoupled the Union from economic success. Without moral justification, and with a weak fear of war, why be in a European Union that does not promise prosperity? What we have now is the return to nation-state ideologies in all the members of the European Union. ⁷ It is the return to a Europe of nationalisms. The Russo-Ukrainian war constitutes the next step on the way to disarray and anxiety, and has not seemed to revive EU solidarity. One thing is clear, if there is a return, it is a return to the traditional Polish-Russian enmity.