Post-Dissident Politics and the “Liberal Consensus” in East-Central Europe after 1989

Post-Dissent, Post-Communist Liberalism and the Politics of Consensus: A Conceptual Frame

Former dissidents, namely iconic figures such as Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, and György Konrád, have become symbols—alongside economic reformers such as Leszek Balcerowicz and Václav Klaus—of the glory and misery of the post-Communist liberal consensus. Some authors have attempted to explain how this came about, and while their work is only a small part of the production on the subject of dissent, the topic is quickly gaining relevance.

Democratic opposition to the Communist dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s—dissidence—is one the most attractive chapters of recent history in east-central Europe. It was a powerful civic resistance and protest movement of remarkable cultural strength and social energies that found its representation in political and social ideas, arts, and literature. It is considered an integral part of the global history of human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. Distinctive historiographical research developed around central European dissidence, sometimes referred to as dissent and samizdat studies. The tale of dissidence up to 1989 is still often written in the heroic mode, as a romance leading to the crowning finale of the successful democratic revolutions. Post-dissent is quite a different story—one that is written about far less and in a different tone: more skeptical and full of disappointment, befitting the genre of tragedy or farce.

Speaking schematically, two interpretations of the role of former dissidents in the liberal democratic transition have crystallized in the literature in the last decades. The first is a story of a failure. Former dissidents might have been important symbolic figures in new democracies—such as the dissidents-turned-presidents Václav Havel, Lech Walęsa, and Arpád Göncz—but they failed to realize the new, better, truly democratic politics and society envisaged in their dissident writings and activities. Instead, they succumbed to a greedy neoliberal capitalism imported from the West and growing from below. John Keane’s biography of Havel, with the telling subtitle “a political tragedy in six acts,” is one of the early examples of this approach broadly shared among many disappointed fans and supporters of former dissidents in the region and beyond and by former dissidents themselves. ⁸ One of the most prominent dissidents in Poland and the whole region, Jacek Kuroń, an active participant in Polish democratic politics after 1989, including as Minister of Social Affairs, is a prime example of a dissident who grew more and more skeptical from the early 1990s about the role that he and other former dissidents had played in the neoliberal transformation. ⁹

Second is a story of complicity. It is a story told by critical literature emerging initially on the Left, but increasingly also coming from the Right, stressing not failure, but rather post-dissident “complicity” in the neoliberal transformation. Eloquent examples include the works of sociologists such as Iván Szelényi, Gil Eyal, and David Ost, who write about dissident anti-politics as a crucial factor in the creation of the “spirit of capitalism” of the post-1989 era in central and eastern Europe. ¹⁰ They claim that former dissidents, who formed the opinion-making intelligentsia of the post-Communist order, were one of the two constitutive parts of the “second Bildungsbürgertum”—the cultural bourgeoisie that legitimized the capitalist transformation with the double strategy of endorsing both civil society and economic rationalism.

These works measure the public activities of former dissidents in the post-Communist era against the democratic ideals of dissidence and the promises made by those who embodied those ideals. They conceptualize them as a sociological aggregate, a social stratum (the intelligentsia), which they then interpret on the basis of its social function in society and the systemic change after 1989. A recent monograph by András Bozóki, who has been working on this topic for several decades, links the two perspectives and advances the debate on the role of ex-dissidents in the democratic and capitalist transformation to a new level. On the example of Hungary, his Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals offers a systematic treatment of the role of dissident intellectuals (but also technocrats and reformists within the late Kádárist regime) in the systemic transformation at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. ¹¹ His approach combines the sociology of intellectuals and social movements, transition studies, Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of intellectuals as legislators and interpreters and the intellectual history of dissidence. ¹² Bozóki presents two key observations on the public and political role of the dissent and post-dissent.

First, he speaks about a “long decade of intellectuals” as an era of their particularly significant influence in Hungarian society, from the late 1970s until 1994. The “long decade” comprised three distinct phases. It began with the time of dissidence that created an alternative public sphere and organized human rights-based opposition. Next came the time of political professionalization starting in 1988, when the first non-Communist political movements and parties came about, such as the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Alliance of Free Democrats or the Federation of Young Democrats, all originating from the opposition. This was the time when dissidents and other intellectuals played the role of “legislators,” their activities focused on fundamental legislation and constitution making. The final phase was a time of party politics but also new political movements, such as the Democratic Charter, after the regime change. Intellectuals switched from “legislators” to “interpreters,” explaining to wider society the basic parameters of the transition. This phase lasted until the parliamentary election in 1994, after which “the era of political activity of intellectuals ended.[. . .] In the period of democratic consolidation [after 1994], the leading role was taken from the intellectuals by the experts of the routine operation of power, that is, professional politicians and bureaucrats.” ¹³

The second innovative aspect of the work is Bozóki’s key category of “rolling transition.” Drawing on statistical analysis of actors of the dissent/opposition and post-dissent, he comes to the conclusion that the regime change was not a process carried out by one coherent elite group. It was more similar to a relay-race of intellectual groups and opposition generations with a significant rotation of agents, where in every period—comprising usually just a couple of years—a different group dominated the striving for change.

These are important findings because they show that the influence of the opposition intelligentsia (or dissidence) on the democratic transition in east-central Europe was enormous. They also warn against the temptation to focus on a select group or prominent individuals and to construct a general account of the legacy of dissidence in the transition era based just on their particular story.

The present study shares Bozóki’s perspective, but its objectives are different and narrower. While Bozóki explores the role of the intelligentsia, including former dissidents, in creating the post-Communist liberal democratic transformation and the transformation of dissident and opposition groups into liberal or other political entities, he is not particularly interested in the relationship between post-dissent and liberalism, which is central to this study.

Post-dissident liberalism has always been a somewhat enigmatic concept. The literature on dissidence and post-Communist politics in central and eastern Europe presupposes it yet rarely attempts to define it. Historical actors were often hesitant to define themselves as liberals. Nonetheless, the liberalism of former dissidents has been widely presupposed in view of the post-1989 development, that is, the liberal democratic transformation and the former dissidents’ contribution to the liberal consensus of the early transition period. Yet how can we speak about post-dissident liberalism after 1989 as one of the primary political currents shaping the politics of the liberal transition when there were in fact only precious few self-conscious and self-declared liberals among the dissidents in the region prior to 1989? Although some were quite visible, such as the relatively small but vocal group of the so-called Gdańsk liberals around Donald Tusk, or a handful of Hungarian dissidents around János Kis forming the nucleus of the future Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), they are few and far between.

This is not to say that the development of dissident movements and dissident thought in 1980s east-central Europe did not somehow prefigure the future triumph of the liberal transformation. However, the liberal promise in dissent was rather vague, and liberalism of any kind did not represent a majority political position among dissidents. Barbara Falk, in her attempt to assess the overall contribution of dissident thought to contemporary political theory, recognized the powerful liberal interpretive current in the West and in the region that saw dissent as a form of reconstructed liberalism. ¹⁴ She acknowledged that dissidents’ institutional claims, such as public choice, parliamentary representation, human rights, and the rule of law, were fundamentally liberal. At the same time, she pointed out that in many other central aspects—such as a radically anti-political conception of civil society, a strong emphasis on the role of morality in politics, authenticity, active collective citizenship and the ethos of social Solidarity—dissident ideas were at odds with the liberal descriptor. She therefore found merit in Jeffrey Isaac’s notion of “liberalism plus,” where the plus meant a democratic added value of active participation and stress on self-governance that characterized dissident thought and practice, but which “the liberal interpretation of 1989 quietly expropriated.” ¹⁵

Others, such as Paul Blokker in his critique of the triumphant liberal constitutionalism after 1989, have explicitly invoked an alternative democratic republican interpretation of dissent with an emphasis on public engagement and self-government in contrast to the liberal emphasis on private property, individual interest, and representative politics. The latter prevailed in east-central Europe after 1989, but in Blokker’s reading it was despite, not because of, the dissident legacy. ¹⁶ The liberalism of dissidents was anything but self-evident, and the liberalism of ex-dissidents after 1989 was not much different. So how did it happen that one of the most significant results of the political self-organization of former dissidents after 1989 became the formation of liberal political parties?

If post-dissident liberalism has a somewhat ambiguous status in existing research, post-Communist liberalism as a whole has long been a subject of intense interest among politicians, political scientists, and historians of ideas. Liberalism in post-Communist eastern Europe was a broad and variegated ideological stream of a diverse genealogy. Everyone found a place in it: former dissidents and oppositionists, former Communist party members and socialist company managers, and various experts—economists, lawyers, and academics—from the “grey zone.”

The existing categorization of post-Communist liberalism distinguishes among various kinds of liberalism, such as economic (with an emphasis on market transformation), civic (with an emphasis on civil society and civic participation), political (with an emphasis on representative politics and rule of law), and cultural (with an emphasis on open society, tolerance, and cultural plurality). These different understandings and principles of liberalism clearly often went against one other, but still all contributed to the formation of the “liberal consensus.” ¹⁷ The conventional model speaks of two liberalisms: economic liberalism or neoliberalism, on one hand, and civil society or social liberalism, on the other. ¹⁸ For convenience, we will stick to this simplifying, binary, ideal-typical model, keeping in mind George Box’s aphorism that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Given the socio-economic development after 1989, neoliberalism is considered the more influential of the two liberalisms, for it was the primary trigger of the large-scale economic transformation in the region, radically changing economies and societies. It emphasized a free-market economy and philosophical individualism, property rights, and the strict separation of the private and the public. It was not primarily concerned with building a civil society, but rather with restructuring the economic sphere, a free market, and private ownership, from which a “politics of freedom” could grow. Despite its innate mistrust of an omnipotent state, neoliberalism presupposed a strong state, even more so in times of democratic transformation, for the power of the state was meant to be the key mover of liberal reforms after Communism.

Neoliberalism had some intellectual and socio-cultural roots in east-central Europe during the last decades of state socialism. This was less true among the democratic opposition, even though some neoliberals, such as the Gdańsk group around Donald Tusk, had dissident pasts. ¹⁹ Neoliberalism was more present among various semi-independent circles critical of both the Communist regime and the anti-Communist opposition, such as the Cracow neoliberals and the neoconservative circles around Mirosław Dzielski. ²⁰ However, the most fertile environment to produce leading neoliberal reformers such as Leszek Balcerowicz, Václav Klaus, and Lajos Bokros was expert and epistemic communities at official academic, administrative, and advisory institutions. Since the early 1980s, these milieux and “grey-zone” expert circles, while not yet neoliberally zealous, had increasingly emphasized the importance of the economic sphere and the need of its thorough reform and primacy over politics. ²¹

Much more post-dissident, in genealogy and outlook, was the second, less clearly ideologically defined stream of liberalism, usually referred to as ethical, social, or civil society liberalism. To emphasize the post-dissident connection, I call it “human rights liberalism” for both its emphasis on human rights and its genealogical connection to human rights-related dissident activism before 1989. It was much broader and vaguer than, for instance, the Rawlsian-style Western political liberalism of that period, elaborating a project of a society based on legal equality and political justice. More than Rawlsian political liberalism, post-dissident human rights liberalism resembles the broad current of thought and politics sometimes referred to as “Cold War liberalism.” ²²

The post-dissident liberal camp—in contrast to neoliberals—defined itself as liberal only reluctantly, sometimes to the point of being resentful about the label. Its representatives among former dissidents were not only the icons of dissident cultural liberalism such as Václav Havel, György Konrád, and Adam Michnik, but also conservatives such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Petr Pithart, and Gaspár Miklós Tamás, or on the other hand radical democrats and leftists such as Jacek Kuroń, Miklós Haraszti, Petr Uhl, and Miroslav Kusý. Many of these “liberals” understood their liberalism—if they ever accepted the designation—as a commitment to basic institutional structures such as the rule of law, which they then combined with a plethora of conservative, socialist, or radical democratic sensibilities. They often had wildly divergent political visions and understandings of democracy. Yet, in terms of historical consciousness and vague constitutional imagination, they had much in common due to their shared past.

If there is considerable and justified reluctance in the literature to interpret generically dissident thought as liberal, it stands to reason that we should be similarly wary of quickly assigning the liberal descriptor to post-dissident politics. Yet it is an undeniable fact that the democratization movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s, often led and supported by former dissidents, transformed themselves during the early transition—somewhat unwittingly but relatively quickly—into liberal political parties, contributing substantially to the emergence of the liberal consensus.

It is this hesitant transformation of post-dissident democrats into liberals that is at the heart of the present analysis. The concept of the politics of consensus will guide us in this respect. But what do we actually mean by this term? To put it into perspective, I draw on Nadia Urbinati’s model of democracy in her criticism of recent ‘“disfigurations” of democracy in current political theory. ²³ Urbinati conceptualizes representative democracy as a diarchy—that is, she claims that political “will” and political “opinion” are two distinct forms of power in democracy that should remain distinct in our theoretical understanding. In functioning liberal democracies, they are represented by procedural practices of decision-making and voting, on one hand, and by the public forum of opinions, on the other.

The diarchic perspective on democracy is directly relevant for dissidence and post-dissent research in that it focuses on the right to free speech and freedom of opinion as an essential component of citizens’ political rights, not only as the right of the individual. The diarchic theory of democracy is an inspiration for the re-reading of dissident theory and democratic practices in the late state socialist period. Dissident activities symbolized best by samizdat and tamizdat publications—aiming to develop a plurality of opinions and democratic discussions to contest the information monopoly of the regime—amounted to democracy as public forum, or democracy as opinion-making par excellence. ²⁴ At a time when democratic will-formation was hardly possible, dissidents made other democratic practices such as free speech and critical democratic discussion available.

Yet political will-formation, in a germinal stage, was also present in dissident practice. It constituted the dissident politics of consensus—a constant endeavour for unity among the oppositional communities in the struggle against the repressive Communist state. This effort for fundamental strategic unity among the various opposition groups was based on a consensus regarding the pre-political character of human rights defence and the ensuing visions of democratization. Beyond such unity, however, the plurality of dissident “civil society” was to be preserved. It was a negotiated consensus that valued social, political, and cultural pluralism (in contrast to Communist homogenization efforts), and it was based on mostly informal rules, procedures, and institutions. The politics of consensus required constant strategic planning and tactical balancing by dissident leaders and remained a precarious consensus due to the opposition’s extraordinary internal diversity and the authoritarian regime’s ability to draw parts of the opposition or semi-opposition into collaboration and infiltrate its unyielding core. It was not political will-formation in the true sense of the phrase. ²⁵ The dissident effort to achieve unity in opposition to the dictatorship was an effort to build a consensus around political means (human rights, constitutionalism, or pluralism) not around political ends (form of democracy, welfare regime, or foreign policy).

The literature on dissent sometimes recognizes this aspect of dissident activity, but usually at the margins of other prominent themes of dissident theory and practice, such as civil society, anti-political politics, or democratic self-organization. Barbara Falk, for example, in her classic work on dissent in east-central Europe, notices the dissident politics of consensus in all three countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. She specifically considers Charter 77 to be the most successful in consensus-building, but registers similar efforts in the Hungarian case, for example in connection with the famous Bibó Memory Book, which she understands as an expression of consensus-making efforts across opposition milieux inside and outside regime structures. ²⁶ Symptomatically, András Bozóki, whose work goes beyond 1989 and thus follows the phenomenon of post-dissident politics, takes a somewhat more detailed look at the dissident politics of consensus. He examines it in the context of the central samizdat journal of the democratic opposition, Beszélő, and its discussions in the first half of the 1980s seeking to establish an overarching opposition program. He also takes note of the general efforts to establish a broad (institutional) democratizing consensus during the 1989 negotiated revolution and of the politics of consensus emerging from the anti-Communist opposition. In his view, the “high prestige of consensual solutions affected the period of post-communist democracy,” creating a formally very stable political environment in Hungary, whose flaw, however, was a weak capacity for democratic self-correction. ²⁷

Transitological literature has produced a relatively comprehensive discussion of the so-called elite settlement and elite consensus as a prerequisite for the development of a stable liberal democracy. For instance, John Higley and his collaborators have systematically mapped the elite political consensus in post-Communist democracies. They used social scientific tools to explore the possibilities and limits of elite consensus, with Hungary and Poland serving as near-ideal types of elite consensus, as established in the negotiations and roundtables of 1989. Significantly, this research also turned to the mirror question of elite polarization (as the opposite of consensus) in the second half of the twenty-first century’s first decade, at a time of apparent decline of the liberal consensus in the region. ²⁸

It is furthermore necessary to distinguish the dissident politics of consensus from the concept of consensus politics in a functional democratic society. Whereas the former was defined primarily by an asymmetrical relationship to the centre of power, the latter denotes a dominant set of ideas or a policy paradigm creating a constraining framework of politics, such as the post-war “social democratic consensus” or the post-Keynesian “neoliberal consensus” in Western democracies. ²⁹ A somewhat different understanding is promoted in German-speaking political science. It deal with Grundkonsens, defining a liberal democratic minimum based fair compliance with the constitution and the principles governing it as well as the fundamental values of freedom, justice, and solidarity. ³⁰

This study builds on these strands of reflection on the dissident and post-dissident politics of consensus, as well as consensus politics in liberal democracy, but looks at it from a specific angle. Unlike the elite consensus literature, which seeks to define and measure the degree of consensus, my perspective homes in on consensus-making, that is, the politics of consensus, not elite consensus per se. I do not focus on consensus-making in post-Communist democracies as a whole or, as Bozóki does, on the role of the intelligentsia in this process. Instead, I analyze post-dissident consensus-making efforts and their contribution to the liberal Zeitgeist. The focus of this work is the legacy of dissidence in terms of ideas that were bound to and expressed through concrete social practices. How did these ideas and practices, the dissident politics of consensus, and the rudimentary form of dissident democratic will-formation translate into new democratic conditions after 1989 and into the “liberal consensus” in particular?

The aim of this study is not to sketch the contours or analyze the dilemmas of the post-Communist democratic Grundkonsens in east-central Europe. Rather, this text portrays and analyzes the efforts of post-dissident liberals to translate the dissident politics of consensus into the constitutional politics of the liberal democratic Grundkonsens—which, as it happened, yielded an influential attempt at building liberal political hegemony.

A Short Story of Nonpartisan Politics: The Demise of the Consensus in Czechoslovakia

The annus mirabilis that was 1989—the year of negotiated and non-violent revolutions in central and eastern Europe—is rightly considered a triumph of the democratic opposition, its struggle for human rights, and the basic strategy of mobilizing civil society against an oppressive state. However, the triumphalist media image of democracy’s victory over totalitarianism had many different shades on the ground. The broad democratization consensus in both model countries of the “Roundtable Revolution,” Poland and Hungary, was shaking at its foundations as early as 1989. It soon became clear that the fall of Communist power had exhausted the last shared vestiges of this consensus. It was different in countries like Czechoslovakia, where the conservative forces of the Communist Party were in power until the very end, holding at bay reformist efforts within the party as well as democratizing efforts in society. The democratic revolution here was thus more dramatic, taking place largely in the streets rather than at the negotiating table. One of the results was that the dissident politics of consensus embodied in Civic Forum (Občanské/Občianske fórum, OF) and Public against Violence (Verejnosť proti násiliu, VPN) had a relatively longer afterlife.

OF, initially a Czechoslovak association that ultimately became restricted to the Czech lands, is a particularly well-suited case for studying the metamorphosis of the dissident politics of consensus following the democratic revolution. It was stamped by the tradition of so-called “anti-political politics” and the legacy of Charter 77. In November 1989, the Charter’s dissident outsiders were catapulted to the forefront of the democratization movement. The dynamic and often chaotic formation of OF was largely predetermined by its dissident origins, particularly engrained practices of self-organization. It was conceived as a broad, nonpartisan community of engaged citizens from various walks of life, the main role of which was to guarantee the non-violent transfer of power and create conditions for the first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1946.

Václav Havel played a key role in OF’s initial days as the generally recognized leader of the democratic revolution. Not only at the time of his OF leadership but also later, following his elevation to the presidential office in Prague Castle, he would defend the concept of OF as a deliberately vague, politically undetermined movement, the crucial role of which was to establish the basis of a (liberal) democratic order rather than to represent specific forms of politics. Subsequent OF leaders adopted and maintained this mission of nonpartisan politics (nestranická politika): first, the lawyer, former dissident, and soon-to-be Czech prime minister Petr Pithart; and second, the journalist and former dissident Jan Urban, who led OF during the June 1990 elections. ³¹

The sister organization in Slovakia, VPN, had a similar approach even though, technically speaking, it did not develop from dissidence. Anti-regime opposition was relatively weak in Slovakia, which is why the so-called “grey zone”—that is, people who neither identified with the regime nor belonged to the narrow circle of Slovak dissent—was more important for the formation of VPN. It was from these self-professed “islands of positive deviance,” such as the environmentalist movement, groups of innovative and pro-democracy-oriented social scientists, self-organized Catholic religious activists, and artistic circles, that most of the founding figures of VPN were recruited. In general, the formation of VPN was primarily the initiative of a group of liberal intellectuals from Bratislava. Here, as with the post-dissident OF, the term liberal reflects a widely shared “liberal” attitude to life and politics, which was related to professional orientation and a way of life, not to a conscious or explicit accentuation of liberal ideology. ³²

In the case of VPN, nonpartisan politics had an even more anti-political character than in that of OF. There was significantly less willingness among VPN leaders to get directly involved in existing political and administrative structures. From the beginning, the VPN leadership decided to assume a role primarily of oversight rather than power in the transition to democracy. Thus, it sought less than OF to dominate state institutions and staff them with its own people.

This approach proved problematic quite early, in the first months of 1990, when the informal position of VPN based on its revolutionary ethos began to crumble. The movement declared its primary goal to be the preparation and implementation of free elections. Much less clear was whether it had the ambition to win the election and potentially form a government. The movement thus offered its rank-and-file activists only a vague vision of the future. Symptomatic of this haziness were the ideas of Fedor Gál, one of the VPN leaders, who, after the elections, characterized VPN as “a political club—a modern political organization free of a hierarchy of rituals, symbols of affiliation [. . .]. The basic method of activity in this club is dialogue.” ³³ As it turned out, a club without a solid unifying identity and ideological vision was hardly appropriate for the nascent competitive party politics.

In the first half of 1990, both OF and the VPN got into several fundamental external and internal conflicts that they were unable to resolve. Their identity was based on a politics of consensus presented as nonpartisan politics and aimed at a broad societal effort to establish the basis of democracy with support from the non-Communist majority of the population. Simultaneously, specific reform policy questions emerged in many areas that needed clear-cut political decisions. A useful example is the question concerning the nature and intensity of economic reforms, which soon became an object of contention in Czechia between experts of the Czech national and federal cabinets—represented, on one hand, by the Czech deputy prime minister František Vlasák and, on the other, by the federal minister of finance, Václav Klaus. ³⁴

Few disputed the idea of economic reform as a way out of the inherited, centralized state system. However, the goals of the economic reform, its ways, means, pace and individual steps of implementation were all highly political questions. Yet OF and most of its representatives holding various state-administrative positions tended to present economic reform as a technical, apolitical problem requiring an optimum solution. There was a specific logic and time awareness behind this approach, characteristic of early transition politics. The idea was that fundamental systemic changes need to be implemented first and swiftly to exploit the unique “window of opportunity” before the revolutionary enthusiasm evaporated. Only thereafter would “fine-tuning” come into play, along with “normal” political competition between different visions and solutions. However, who was to decide what qualified as systemic change, how long it would take, and what instead amounted to specific political or ideological visions to be subjected to democratic contestation?

Another example of an eminently socio-political issue undermining the post-dissident politics of consensus was historical memory and the politics of history, which would soon become one of the most prominent areas of political conflict in post-Communist democracies all over the region. The OF and VPN leaderships inevitably felt bound by the historic compromises at their roundtables. They could hardly push for the sharp, anti-Communist course called for by many. Such a conciliatory approach soon became the object of criticism from other political movements and memory organizations, such as the Club of Committed Nonpartisan Members or the Confederation of Political Prisoners, the genealogy of which clearly inclined them to a sharper anti-Communist course. ³⁵ Even more importantly for the future of the two movements, the Prague and Bratislava leaderships’ temperate anti-Communism soon became unacceptable for many district organizations, for whom relations with local Communist Party officials and large company managers had become the central problem of their everyday political activities. Even in Slovakia, where anti-Communist sentiments were considerably weaker, regional leaders began to express fears of a return to the “old structures” in response to cases of VPN members being fired from their jobs after VPN dismantled revolutionary organizations at local workplaces and company directors stopped respecting the movement’s authority. ³⁶

There was a difference between OF and VPN in this respect, too. The latter, in response to a drop in public support, soon started to court popular reform-oriented former or current Communist politicians such as Alexander Dubček or Marián Čalfa. Their Communist pasts notwithstanding, VPN offered them prominent places on the parliamentary election ticket. As a result, during the general election in June 1990, the political representation of the movement was significantly different from what it had been in November 1989 in terms of its public visage. The VPN elite was de facto divided into two parts: “liberal” intellectuals and “post-Communist” professional politicians. Many of the latter assumed public office after the elections, in large parts thanks to their prior executive experience. At the same time, the founding, “liberal” elite dominated most of the top bodies of VPN and had little interest in holding positions of public office.

The approach of nonpartisan politics—another term, in the contemporary context, for the politics of consensus—came under increasing criticism among the democratic movements. Structural problems in internal communication only exacerbated the issue. The charismatic legitimacy of OF soon began to crumble as Havel and many former dissidents close to him left for the Office of the President or for state and parliamentary positions. The non-existent vertical relations and unclear communication rules, particularly between the Prague Coordination Centre and the regional and district organizations, produced power disarray inside the movement, resulting in a considerable democratic deficit. The Prague centre took on a significant share of the responsibility, but its decision-making was initially uncontrolled by the OF Congress or any other representative platform. Therefore, it quickly came into conflict with the regions and districts. “The OF representatives never stopped speaking about democratisation, while the power logic forced them to maintain the previous revolutionary practice that had inhibited [internal] democratisation. It represented one of the paradoxes of that time, which was probably without a solution.” ³⁷ The Coordination Centre felt that revolutionary changes needed swift decisiveness, not extensive democratic deliberation. However, the pervasive belief that democratic procedures were too slow, if not a hindrance to needed policy decisions, testified to an epistemic or unpolitical twist in this early political practice, favouring political efficiency over democratic procedures. ³⁸ The emphasis on the “generally beneficial” character of the Prague Coordination Centre’s politics concealed the de facto hegemony of a narrow circle of Prague intellectuals—former dissidents—who thereby aroused aversion and bitterness among many active participants of the political process. ³⁹

While OF did win the June 1990 elections in the Czech lands, its victory almost immediately brought it into an identity crisis. It became the most important political entity in the country but lacked any clear political or programmatic vision to fulfil. In the elections, “the concept of civic politics triumphed while losing momentum at the same time. Transformation politics could no longer be the politics of consensus and compromise.” ⁴⁰ The idea of OF representing a broad, ideologically undefined political mainstream based on citizens’ active participation according to their interests and needs contradicted the dynamic of the transformation process, which required solid political responses and ideological anchoring.

The reappointed federal minister of finance, Václav Klaus, understood best the logic of the development. In the summer of 1990, he began to tour regional and district OF offices, endeavouring to secure political support for his vision of radical economic transformation based on privatization and the fast introduction of free market economy. He skilfully made use of the inflamed anti-Communism in the districts, which stemmed from the power and economic struggles between local OFs and “Communist mafias.” Klaus was hailed by OF activists who were unhappy about the Prague centre’s hegemonic practices and who called for a clear political agenda. He offered them a vision of transforming OF into a centre-right-wing party with a program of radical economic transformation. He was decisively elected as chairman of OF in October 1990, and in February 1991 he established the Civic Democratic Party (Občanská demokratická strana, ODS) using considerable parts of the OF organizational structure as well as its activist human potential. ⁴¹

The relatively friendly takeover of the post-dissident democratization movement by “grey-zone” neoliberal economists and technocrats surrounding Klaus created a powerful centre-right political party, the prevalent political force in Czech politics between 1992 and 1998. ODS started with a clear neoliberal economic program, to which it soon added increasingly explicit conservative sensibilities. Consciously connecting to the teachings of Mont Pèlerin neoliberal thinkers as well as to the Thatcherite political model, Klaus’s ODS became the only political party in the post-Communist region able to form government coalitions as a senior partner, whose self-professed core ideology was neoliberalism. ⁴²

Czech post-dissident liberals started to evolve in response to this neoliberal-conservative powerhouse of Czech politics. Like ODS, the post-dissident liberal Civic Movement (Občanské hnutí, OH) was a successor to OF. Unlike ODS, however, future OH members did not play an active part in this process; they disagreed with the OF split, considering it premature. Therefore, OH presented itself as the principal “heir” of OF and, by extension, the pre-1989 dissident movement. It defined itself as “a liberal, civic, and social political movement,” which, unlike ODS, rejected the right–left division of the political spectrum. The post-dissident liberals wanted to incarnate a liberal political centre and create the conditions for a broad consensus across the political spectrum. In February 1991, the movement adopted its first program, explicitly referring to OF and its November 1989 declaration “What We Want.” OH declared its lasting adherence to the OF manifesto, which had allegedly not been fulfilled, such that the democratic revolution was not yet completed. In the eyes of OH strategists, the politics of broad democratization consensus were not yet over. Their policy did not bear the desired fruit, for despite great expectations, OH lost the June 1992 election to ODS in a landslide. ⁴³

The split in VPN had a timeframe similar to that of OF. Yet the cleavage here was quite different, more reminiscent of the fundamental cultural–political schism in the Hungarian and Polish cases. The emerging gap between liberal VPN intellectuals and post-Communist politicians in the first months of 1990 eventually turned into a conflict between the VPN “liberal” leadership and the government led after the June elections by Vladimír Mečiar, who swiftly built up a solid political position for himself. The growing disputes between the two centres of power evolved along the national axis, with tensions growing between Slovak and Czech politics as a whole. The “nationally oriented current” represented by Ján Budaj and Milan Kňažko stood against the “pro-federal current” represented by Gál, Martin Bútora, and Peter Zajac. The national wing took Prime Minister Mečiar (himself still very restrained as far as nationalist rhetoric was concerned) as its hero for his supposedly brave representation of sovereign Slovak politics. It criticized the “federalists” for their dependence on Prague. On the other side, the VPN leadership around Gál saw in the “national wing” problematic symptoms of integral Slovak nationalism and accused it of cultivating national populism. ⁴⁴

In the increasingly personalized conflict between VPN chairman Gál and PM Mečiar, the latter was, in the longer run, on the winning side. He was in fact the most popular Slovak politician at the time. By contrast, the already low popularity of Gál and his fellow anti-Mečiarist intellectuals in the VPN leadership declined even further. Like Klaus in the Czech case, Mečiar, dissatisfied with the VPN leadership, was the driving force behind the movement’s disintegration. At the VPN farewell congress at the end of April 1991, Mečiar announced the new Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko, HZDS), which became the political hegemon of Slovak politics for much of the 1990s. ⁴⁵

Slovak “post-dissidents” were passive politically but active discursively during the disintegration process. They tried to portray themselves as the guarantors of freedom, pluralism, and democracy, while Mečiar’s party was supposed to represent the remnants of totalitarianism, nationalism, leftism, and excessive protectionism. ⁴⁶ Hastily building the political identity of the residual VPN on a programme of radical economic transformation and support for the existence of federation, they could hardly compete with HZDS. However, the Slovak liberal anti-populism that emerged in this period found its field of action in the following period, for it was from this post-dissident liberal milieu that the core of the so-called democratic opposition to Mečiar’s nationally populist ruling coalition, with growing authoritarian tendencies was recruited in 1992–1998.

From the very beginning, OF and VPN, both broad democratization movements, set the restoration of parliamentary democracy as one of their main goals. There was little explicit liberal ideology in their programs and political activities. At the moment of disintegration, groups claiming both the legacy of dissidence and the tasks of OF or VPN began to profess liberalism as a centrist political ideology and, in the Slovak case, as the antithesis of nationalist populism. ⁴⁷ Nevertheless, the core of their identity continued to be the fundamental tasks of building a liberal democracy, rather than explicitly liberal politics.

Many former dissidents and oppositionists probably did not intend to pursue a political career after 1989. Many among them were artists, humanities and social science scholars, intellectuals, priests, and human rights activists. They did not see their future in political parties and parliaments. They wanted to facilitate what Ralf Dahrendorf, in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (a deliberate allusion to Burke), called “constitutional politics.” He distinguished between “constitutional” and “normal” politics, where the former was concerned with the framework of social and political order and its institutional forms. Normal politics, in contrast, was about the activities within that framework following particular interests and preferences. ⁴⁸

It was constitutional politics—or “nonpartisan politics,” as they would call it—for which many dissidents were willing to stay in politics for a while. Yet many of them realized that it might take longer to “fulfill” constitutional politics and that the boundary between “constitutional” and “normal” politics gets blurred with time. Willy-nilly, they started to build their own political structures, mostly as a reaction to those challenging the concept of civil society-based nonpartisan politics.

Liberal political identity, relating to the fundamental goals of liberal democratic transformation rather than a specific vision of a liberal political and economic order, was a result of their attempt to reformulate the democratic ethos of dissidence and respond to the challenges of the early transition era. However, these post-dissident liberal parties did not represent the contemporary telos. Whether transitional (in the case of Klaus’s ODS) or national-emancipatory (in the case of Mečiar’s HZDS) the telos was represented by their opponents, with whom the post-dissident liberals shared the common matrix of democratic revolutionary movements.

Post-Dissident Liberalism as Anti-Populism: Hungary

Hungary is an anomaly in the region in that no “civic forum” type of united opposition to the Communist regime appeared in the country at the end of the 1980s. The opposition to the one-party system was culturally, ideologically, and personally divided and thus, competition and polarization characterized the post-1989 multi-party system from the very beginning. By the March 1990 elections, the major parties already possessed political profiles, party programs, and relatively sizeable memberships. Three political camps were formed by the early 1990s: the liberal, the national-conservative/Christian, and the socialist (post-Communist). The liberals were represented above all by two parties both deriving their identity from the former opposition, namely the Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége, SZDSZ) and the Federation of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, Fidesz). ⁴⁹

The SZDSZ originated in 1988 as the political organization of the so-called “democratic opposition,” the human rights-oriented core of the anti-Communist opposition. Thus, the notion of human rights—as well as an emphasis on civil and political rights and institutions enabling democratization and democratic political life—stood at the heart of their political thinking, leaving a crucial stamp upon the conceptual universe of the SZDSZ. This was a clear contrast to the other party with prominent post-dissident members, the national-conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Fórum, MDF), for which the “nation” was central. For the “democratic opposition” turned post-dissident liberals, the main aim was not the nation’s independence but rather the “liberation” of civil society from state grip. The primacy of universal human rights over communal bonds and the stress on the rule of law and constitutionalism stood high in their political agenda—as did the creation of a functioning market economy. Yet, after the regime change, this goal was shared by most political actors, including the post-Communists, and it could thus not assume a primary identificatory function for the liberals.

Seen from a socio-political point of view, it was symptomatic that the intelligentsia that founded the SZDSZ had roots in the humanities and social sciences, such as philosophy, sociology, history, and economics. These left-wing intellectuals had usually broken with Marxism during the 1970s and shifted to a left-liberal or social democratic perspective, although many professed—just as many dissidents elsewhere—an explicit anti-ideological stance. A significant number of them came from families of Communist functionaries from Budapest and were of Jewish origin.

This distinguished them from Fidesz, the other post-dissident liberal political party, formed as a youth political organization in the spring of 1988. The founders of Fidesz partly grew up on the samizdat literature published by the “democratic opposition,” accepting ever more readily civic and liberal political values and rejecting the state socialist system. Nevertheless, the leaders of Fidesz were different from those of the SZDSZ not just in generational terms but also in terms of their origins and family background. Many came from provincial, middle-class families and were often “first-generation” members of the intelligentsia. In cultural matters and economic outlook, Fidesz, as a youth party, was more libertarian than the SZDSZ during the early 1990s. But it also had a more authoritarian conception of government, believing in a strong executive branch and an effective state. ⁵⁰

As a political party, the SZDSZ was the most successful post-dissident liberal formation in the whole of central and eastern Europe. It existed as a party for more than two decades, and, especially in the 1990s, its political influence and role as an opinion-maker were essential. The origins of this influence were linked to the party’s program of “coherent regime change” and its radical anti-Communist agenda during the regime change, which significantly broadened the base of the SZDSZ. In contrast to the other post-dissident party, the MDF, which was ready to compromise with the reform wing of the Communist party led by Imre Pozsgay at the roundtable talks in the summer of 1989, the SZDSZ was adamant in its pressure for radical regime change. ⁵¹

After the 1990 elections, the SZDSZ became the largest opposition party to the centre-right government led by the MDF, and it engaged in highly contentious politics. Its demarcation against the ruling nationally conservative right brought a gradual change in the politics of the post-dissident liberals in 1991–1992. Opening itself towards the Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt, the Communist party’s successor), previously their chief opponent, they later formed a socialist–liberal coalition lasting from 1994 to 1998 and continuing after 2002.

The key to the early success of the post-dissident liberals was that they integrated groups with different motivations. Upon its foundation, the SZDSZ was home to both radical anti-Communists and representatives of the left-wing human rights tradition. It was a party both of civic values and rights defence and of uncompromising regime change. The common denominator of this broad and colourful political camp was respect for the moral, intellectual, and political heritage of the human rights-based democratic opposition and the critical intelligentsia that formed the party’s intellectual backbone. Not only did the coalition agreement with the socialists in 1994 alienate much of the electorate, who primarily identified with the SZDSZ’s anti-Communist, anti-establishment orientation, but the party’s manifest opposition to the right also significantly reduced its potential voter base.

However, even afterwards, the party remained sufficiently heterogeneous to include representatives of two liberal traditions that were different in essential respects. The post-1989 SZDSZ, although not free of internal ideological conflicts, successfully integrated social liberal and neoliberal ideas. On one hand, there were the social liberals, whose leading representative and theoretician was the widely acknowledged, if informal, leader of the democratic opposition prior to 1989, János Kis. He elaborated a political-philosophical position of social liberalism, based on the liberal Dworkinian interpretation of human rights, in the 1980s. ⁵² In the transition era, this position favoured the concept of an emancipatory state, seeking to compensate for the deficits of Western democracy and capitalism through state activism in economic and social policy. Furthermore, it demanded, inter alia, women’s equality, domestic violence prevention, a minimum wage for university-educated employees, legal control of hate speech, and broad protection of minorities.

On the other hand, the party also included market-oriented neoliberals, prominently represented by another former dissident, the economist Tamás Bauer. They sought to reduce the socio-economic role of the activist state and were strongly pro-privatization, gradually advocating the marketization of public services. In social policy, the neoliberals were decidedly for needs-based solutions and in favour of reducing the welfare state.

The two approaches, their political philosophies, and even more their policy orientations constantly intermingled in the party’s politics and at times openly competed. Their representatives never formed rival party factions, but the cleavage created clear tensions by the mid-1990s between the “traditional” SZDSZ elite, represented by the likes of Bálint Magyar and Iván Pető, and the so-called internal opposition around Bauer. ⁵³

The post-dissident liberalism of the SZDSZ and its intellectuals, such as Kis, György Konrád, István Eörsi, and Miklós Szabó, represented a clear case of the “liberalism of fear,” defined at the time by Judith Shklar as a form of liberalism that aimed to create the political conditions to prevent cruelty and focused on constitutional checks on potential power abuse. ⁵⁴ The central preoccupation of this kind of liberalism, if we take as an example Kis’ carefully elaborated position, was constitutional order, state neutrality guaranteeing societal, cultural, and political pluralism, and a reliable institutional framework for exercising civil and political rights. In Kis’ rendering, post-dissident liberalism had a vital social dimension, which was theoretically substantiated by the central position of the concept of equality (well beyond the equality before the law) in his political philosophy. Therefore, as Ferenc Laczó has pointed out, Kis raised concerns about the social cost of the transformation and what he saw as a rapidly widening gap between societal elites and the majority of the population. As a liberal, he was clearly for the existence of a free market economy, but he hoped that the growing power of market forces would be counterbalanced by strengthening trade unions. During the debate within the SZDSZ about the character and extent of market liberalization, Kis promoted the concept of the party as a “social-liberal force.” ⁵⁵

The topos of threats in liberal discourse was omnipresent—first, to the volatile unity of the democratic forces against Communist rulers in 1988–1989 and later to the young democratic order. In his political journalism in the early 1990s, Kis highlighted the various threats as an incentive for consensus-building. Threat-awareness was to be a motivation for moderation, national reconciliation, and democratic consolidation. However, the image of impending danger was a double-edged sword that soon started to draw a sharp line between the “friends” and “enemies” of democracy.

Moreover, other leading representatives of the SDZSZ, such as Konrád, were going on the assumption that current Western societies were already in the stage of post-nationalism. This idea proved to be one of the great illusions of the 1990s in democratizing eastern Europe and the West alike, detrimental to the stability of the liberal democratic consensus. The idea of an upcoming post-national era, combined with an aesthetic aversion and moral disapproval of nationalist politics, asserted itself loudly in these years, leading liberals to believe that they had to resist awakened national demons with all their might. The Hungarian case is exemplary in this respect. In contrast to Czechoslovakia, there was no effort in Hungary to forge a nationwide post-dissident politics of consensus due to the early differentiation of the opposition.

There were two ways in which the dissident politics of consensus—twisted and, as a result, dissolved—translated into early democratic discourse among liberals. We can call the first the “politics of universalist rationality” and the second liberal anti-populism. Both served as building blocks of the emerging political identity of liberals. Both, however, also helped raise ideological barriers separating liberals from other political camps, particularly the national-conservative right.

The Free Democrats presented themselves as a party that drew on its dissident past to follow a morally grounded political stance, and it pursued robust, critical internal debates to seek optimal political solutions. It cast itself as a political subject committed to articulating the truth and as a hotbed of opinions—the veritable “politics of opinion” having been its members’ primary modus operandi in opposition during the late Kádárist period. In this way, the SZDSZ was unintentionally seizing for itself the position of universalist rationality and transforming the dissident politics of consensus—embodied best in the 1987 opposition program, the New Social Contract—into a political party formula. In other words, from the very beginning, the Free Democrats were edging towards the epistemic disfiguration of democracy that Urbinati characterizes as a tendency to place questions of truth and enlightenment above democratic procedures and deliberation mechanisms. ⁵⁶

From the Free Democrats’ point of view, however, what was at stake was not narrow party politics but the basic constitutional design, aimed at continuing the transition towards a market economy and constitutional democracy until the basic structures were secure and all legitimate political subjects shared a basic consensus (Grundkonsens). This involved compliance with the constitution and its governing principles, as well as with the fundamental values of freedom, justice, and solidarity. Justice, meant to balance power differences in political disputes, was of particular importance, especially after the Communist dictatorship. A certain minimal understanding of the historical lessons of the “totalitarian” order was also to have been a part of the basic consensus.

The Hungarian post-dissident liberals were well aware of their ambiguous position between “constitutional politics,” in Dahrendorf’s sense, and liberal identity.

János Kis believed that the representatives of liberalism might have remained weak in Eastern Europe as a whole but it was still the most important political movement in the narrower East Central European region and was “the main force of progress” after the fall of communist regimes. In his conception, liberalism was meant to be both a constituent part of the new political system and [. . .] its basic vein. ⁵⁷

However, promotion of the basic consensus soon became a part of the party political struggle between post-dissident liberals and the governing Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), which that also understood itself as firmly embedded in the democratic consensus.

Two main political orientations defined the character of the MDF. The first and decisive one among the people in the government was the liberal-conservative, pragmatic stream led by Prime Minister József Antall, which was strongly influenced by Hungarian constitutional and legal traditions. It emphasized Christian and traditional values and the concept of the nation as an essential part of any effort to establish political continuity with pre-Communist traditions and forge a solid democratic body politic. Nevertheless, leaning on the Western European Christian democratic “model,” such political invocations of the nation were not to endanger, in any way, the borders of constitutional democracy. ⁵⁸

However, alongside the pragmatic-conservative orientation, the right-wing, national-populist stream exercised considerable influence within the party—ironically, primarily via the so-called népi writers, who represented the nationally oriented opposition in the Kádár period. They employed anti-Communist as well as anti-liberal rhetoric and were in favour of radical measures to cleanse public life of former Communists. More importantly, they were adamant opponents of the “cosmopolitan,” “liberal-Bolshevik,” and “Jewish” SZDSZ. Pointing to the Jewish origin of many SZDSZ leaders, the radical national-populist István Csurka claimed that the mentality of liberals was “alien” to “Hungarians.” ⁵⁹

Such radicals did not have much direct influence on specific policies. However, they were a visible and vocal group within the MDF and poisoned political discourse with their smear campaigns, often bordering on hate-mongering and ethnic resentment. Their open opposition within the party to the pragmatic–conservative governmental centre led eventually, in 1993, to their departure and their establishment of the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (Magyar Igazság és Élet Pártja, MIÉP). In the meantime, however, the ideological divisions and personal antagonisms between the left-liberal SZDSZ and the liberal-conservative MDF were so deep that there was no hope of overcoming them. Prime Minister Antall’s untimely death in December 1993 only further cemented this development.

The radicalism of the liberals turned against the ruling MDF largely in response to the radicalism of its ultra-nationalist wing. It culminated with the founding of the Democratic Charter movement in 1991 and its strategy of an “anti-fascist” coalition, which largely disregarded differences within the government coalition and identified it as a whole with the national radicals led by Csurka. In this way, the whole MDF-led government and its parties were branded as extremist, reactionary, far right, or simply fascistic. ⁶⁰ It would be simplistic to interpret this turn of the SZDSZ as a mere counter-reaction. The liberals themselves had a significant stake in the rapidly growing estrangement between them and the governing side.

In the heat of political quarrelling in the late 1990s, János Kis, at that point the party’s chairman and its leading intellectual, came up with the concept of the “liberal minimum” with which all players on the political spectrum would have to agree if they wanted to consider themselves legitimate parts of modern liberal democracy. He admitted that both parties, the MDF and the SZDSZ, were supporters of the multi-party system and parliamentarism. However, he pointed out that this alone was not a guarantee of modern Western democracy, which also required many other things, such as media freedom, the secured position of the opposition, and enforceable minority rights. While this was what the SZDSZ stood for, Kis had serious doubts about whether the MDF interpreted democracy in a similar way.

Free Democrats want a true, liberal democracy with a parliamentary opposition with appropriate privileges, media isolated from party politics, and rights to protect political, ideological, cultural, ethnic, and lifestyle minorities. We do not simply want a multi-party system, but also a neutral state that respects the worldview, political, and other pluralism of its citizens; we want tolerance and a transition economy controlled by the parliament. ⁶¹

In the eyes of Kis and SZDSZ’s leading intellectuals, the MDF did not stand behind many of these points, which put in doubt its liberal democratic credentials. “So I think we can say in good conscience to voters who yearn for liberal democracy to vote for the SZDSZ.” ⁶²

The reshaping of the dissident historical experience at the time of building the foundations of liberal democracy in Hungary after 1989 thus had quite a different trajectory and temporal structure from in Czechoslovakia and Poland. As a result, the supposed politics of consensus was confined to the “liberal camp” only, which proved a rather exclusivist consensus. Therefore, unlike in the other countries, we cannot speak of a liberal-conservative compromise within the “liberal consensus” of the 1990s in the Hungarian case. The liberal consensus policy of the SZDSZ was raised in Hungary from the very beginning as a progressivist bulwark against the threat—real or imagined—of a radical nationalist-traditionalist orientation. What in the other countries took on the character of consensus politics for the sake of democratic transformation took the form of a hegemonic claim by post-dissident liberals in Hungary to define and control the borders and character of a basic democratic consensus (Grundkonsens).

The confrontation between the liberal consensus—or, rather, liberal-socialist hegemony—and the potential national-populist consensus or later national-conservative hegemony became the central axis of Hungarian democratic politics from the summer of 1990 onwards, and it has remained so ever since. It has been decisive for the orientation and definition of all the major players in Hungarian politics, including the post-Communist Socialists and Fidesz. The latter took advantage of the vacancy on the national-conservative side in 1994 and self-consciously transformed itself from a junior partner in the liberal camp into a would-be national-conservative hegemon—later becoming the primary tool of Viktor Orbán’s ongoing attempt at illiberal regime building. ⁶³

Post-Dissident Liberalism as Political Style: Poland

Transitological studies rightly view Poland as a model country of post-Communist, neoliberal transformation. Poland owes this image primarily to the “shock therapy” that quickly transformed a dysfunctional, debt-ridden, centrally planned and controlled economy into an economy of functional market capitalism engaged in global economic exchange. The success of the radical liberal transformation was offset by a noticeable decline in the living standards of a substantial part of society, which became the matrix for a firm “discontent of transition” that, like the liberal elites, had its origins in the anti-Communist opposition, Solidarity. More than anywhere else, the legacy of dissent or democratic opposition played a crucial role in Poland on both sides of the political barricades that emerged in the early years after the fall of the dictatorship—divisions that characterize Polish politics to this day.

As in the Czechoslovak case, Polish post-dissident liberalism was born out of the unwilling—on the part of its leading strategists—disintegration of the democratization movement. However, unlike its Czech counterpart, it did not set itself against local neoliberals but steadily cooperated with them. From the very beginning, its primary opponent was the supposed or real threat of national populism and authoritarianism, which renders the Polish case similar to the Hungarian and Slovak ones.

In Poland, there were several centres of liberal thought in the 1980s, that is, informal intellectual groups cultivating liberal ideology as the best recipe for overcoming the late Communist dictatorship and for post-Communist reform. The most well-known were the conservative liberals in Cracow around Mirosław Dzielski; the group of Warsaw economists, most notably Leszek Balcerowicz; and the young liberals in Gdańsk. ⁶⁴ At the end of the 1980s, Polish neoliberalism was by far the most conceptually and ideologically developed in the region. As such, it played an essential role in the liberal transformation of the 1990s. However, it never created a self-standing and powerful political subject like Václav Klaus’s ODS in Czechia.

Polish neoliberals exerted their significant intellectual and ideological influence, particularly in economic policies, not as a self-standing political force but always in coalitions with the post-dissident national-conservatives and the post-dissident liberals. Their pragmatism allowed them to forge political alliances across the post-Solidarity political camp, which distinguished them from the human rights liberals originally associated, in one way or another, with the KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników, Workers’ Defence Committee) group. Unlike the neoliberals, KOR members were closely tied to the most powerful social protest movement in the Eastern Bloc. However, they also contributed significantly to the sharp division of the Solidarity community after 1989.

None of the post-dissident liberal-conservative parties—the Civic Movement–Democratic Action (Ruch Obywatelski–Akcja Demokratyczna, ROAD), the ensuing Democratic Union (Unia Demokratyczna, UD), and eventually the Freedom Union (Unia Wolności, UW), which emerged from the UD—was established as a result of a conscious intention to found a liberal political party. Instead, they originated to defend existing transformation and democratization policies. Their self-definition, delineating themselves vis-à-vis other political entities emerging from the Solidarity camp, was based on tactical and strategic disputes rather than different ideological foundations, let alone diverging political goals. The questions of political style, personal animosities, and aesthetic values and “culturedness” played a more prominent role in this process than matters of political program.

The fact that Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a moderately conservative politician with liberal-democratic credentials, headed the first non-Communist “Solidarity government” was crucial for the future shape of Polish post-dissident liberalism. Mazowiecki and his government soon became favourites of the initially distrustful former dissident and Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik, who became the new government’s principal public supporter. Unlike Hungary and similar to Czechia, relatively good conditions were created in Poland right from the start for the cooperation of moderate conservatives from the former opposition with the secular post-dissident left, which became a central pillar of the nascent liberal consensus and liberal-conservative compromise of the early transition period. It was nevertheless a defensive coalition from the very start. The decisive moment came in the form of a somewhat erratic improvisation by Lech Wałęsa, which later entered Polish history books as a “war at the top”— a term used to describe actions that Wałęsa undertook in May 1990, calling for the abandonment of what he considered artificial and detrimental political calm. He announced a “permanent political war,” necessitated by what he saw as Mazowiecki’s government’s patronizing disguise of natural political differences in the country. Wałęsa’s intervention was a direct challenge to the politics of consensus in the name of unleashing political potentialities. During a meeting of the central (national) Solidarity Citizens’ Committee on May 13, where Wałęsa’s unexpected initiative dominated the deliberations, he defended himself with the memorable statement:

If there is peace at the top, then there is war at the bottom. That is why I encourage you to fight. The current system—supporting the government, being told that it cannot get any better, that there is nothing to fight for, at most you can support it—is not good for the government and not safe for the society. ⁶⁵

The “war at the top” led to deep divisions in the Polish political scene, which in many cases continue today. That is why Polish political journalism and historiography see this moment as the mother of political cleavage in contemporary Poland. It was a defeat of the leading post-dissident strategists’ conception that sought to preserve the unity of Solidarity, at least for the first few years of democratic reconstruction, similar to efforts of OF and VPN in Czechoslovakia. It was a decisive blow to the post-dissident politics of consensus in the name of agonistic politics breeding real political discussion and real political conflict. For that purpose, a new political formation, the Centre Agreement (Porozumienie Centrum, PC), was formed as a coalition of various political subjects on the right of the Solidarity spectrum to help pluralize Polish politics and support Wałęsa in the upcoming presidential campaign. The centre of the new coalition, composed of several small parties and movements, was the editorial board of Tygodnik Solidarność (Solidarity Weekly), headed by Jarosław Kaczyński.

In reaction, ROAD was formed with two former leaders of underground Solidarity, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk and Zbigniew Bujak, at its head. At first, the ROAD leadership was unsure whether it wanted a germ of a political party with a specific program or still a broad democratic movement. The leaders consciously avoided the word “party” in their pronouncements. It was unclear what political direction such a broad political and cultural movement should take. The primary motivation was simply to oppose the PC. ⁶⁶

The Solidarity elites were characterized by what the sociologist Mirosława Grabowska has called “nonpartisan strategy” (apartyjna strategia), which was understandable until 1989, but detrimental for the nascent parliamentary democracy. In hindsight, she criticized the post-dissident elites (to which she belonged) for not even striving to create the stable legal foundations and means necessary for the formation and efficient functioning of new parties, which would have created a level playing field for effective rivalry in democratic politics. ⁶⁷ The creation of the post-Solidarity parties was the result of internal tensions, personal conflicts and the unrestrained disintegration of the Solidarity camp rather than preconceived intentions to build pluralist political democracy. It was a defeat of the future liberals’ existing political conception, not its fulfilment.

Such a negative identity-building process, that is, defining oneself against a dynamic political opponent, made programmatic politics difficult. The basic parameters of the new movement were defined rather by political style. It was supposed to be characterized by reason, moderation, pragmatism, and realism, rejecting the chauvinism and demagoguery allegedly typical of their political opponents, especially the PC.

As Katarzyna Chimiak has pointed out, one of the founding myths of the group had its origins at the last meeting of the national Citizens’ Committee, which was attended by representatives of both Wałęsa’s camp and his opponents. Wałęsa’s aggressive style, especially his disrespectful behaviour towards Jerzy Turowicz, a doyen of Polish Catholic journalism, whom he urged to “come clean” about his dislike of Wałęsa and elitist understanding democracy, came as a shock to many present. One of ROAD’s main, self-declared motives was to reject the “brutalization of politics.” ⁶⁸ However, the possibility that the alleged brutalization of politics may have largely been the result of the highly patronizing approach of the post-Solidarity intelligentsia in the ROAD has not been the subject of wider reflection.

This is not the place to detail the many other secessions and re-integrations in the post-Solidarity camp in these years, as the primary interest at hand is the gradual intake of liberal political programming on the side of the post-dissident liberals and the evolution of the post-dissident politics of consensus. The UD was, as a matter of fact, a coalition contract between very different ideological groupings and political projects, a compromise forged in the interest of struggle against what they considered the greater evil. ⁶⁹ If in the era of anti-Communist opposition the basis of political consensus was the agenda of human rights, now it was the broad program of building liberal democracy and market capitalism. However, these were goals upon which most of the political subjects appearing on the Polish political scene at that time could agree.

The liberal economic program in Mazowiecki’s government was primarily the agenda of Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz, who, unlike the Gdańsk liberals, did not have an oppositional past, although he was one of the economic advisors to Solidarity in 1980–1981. As a Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and Chairman of the Economic Committee of the Council of Ministers, he was member of the government until December 1991. In this capacity, Balcerowicz became the architect and symbol of neoliberal economic changes in Poland after Communism. They proved very unpopular at home, where they became a focus for local dissatisfaction with the economic hardships of the transition era. After the abdication of Mazowiecki as prime minister, Balcerowicz and four other ministers nonetheless retained their positions and stayed in the government formed by one of the Gdańsk liberals, Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, and his Liberal Democratic Congress (Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny, KLD). Pleased with taking over Balcerowicz’s plan, which fit into the neoliberal political philosophy of his party, Bielecki crafted a coalition government standing, in comparison to its predecessor, more on the centre-right. It was based on the parties that supported Wałęsa’s presidential run, including the Liberal Democratic Congress, the Centre Agreement, the Democratic Party, and the Christian National Union. Its economic program was a continuation of what Balcerowicz had started earlier, which led to the first strikes organized by Solidarity in protest against its own government. ⁷⁰

The pragmatic neoliberals of the KLD were able to form coalition partnerships with both rival parties of the post-Solidarity camp to pursue their primary target: the promotion of radical economic transformation. This also shows the degree to which both parties shared the idea of liberal economic transformation and the goal of creating a market-based, capitalist economy. This started to change, however, after a row of Solidarity protests. Balcerowicz and the neoliberals now appeared to Wałęsa like an electoral liability. He manoeuvred them out of government at the end of 1991. Since then, they have not only found themselves in opposition but have been anathema for most worker activists from Solidarity.

The trade union Solidarity, led by Marian Krzaklewski, was getting into a pincer. Growing dissatisfaction with economic reform among workers forced it to defend their interests, but Solidarity’s leadership was unwilling to articulate them in class terms and to challenge the transformative move towards market capitalism. As David Ost has shown, instead of a class-based social critique of neoliberal transformation, the lustration narrative of the need for a reckoning with Communism gradually became the political vehicle for managing social discontent. ⁷¹ Jan Olszewski’s relatively short government, lasting just several months in the first half of 1992, played a crucial role in this respect. His centre-right minority coalition was not opposed to the market economy and did not question the liberal economic doctrine in principle. It questioned the genuineness of the transformation in terms of the pervasive corruption and fraud allegedly resulting from the continuing influence of the country’s nomenklatura brotherhoods. The prescription for “genuine” liberal reform, which would supposedly not threaten workers’ interests, was thus consistent de-Communization. This became Olszewski’s main theme but also—in the form of the so-called “night of the files” (noc teczek) on June 4–5, 1992—the reason for the coalition’s downfall.

While part of Olszewski’s minority government, Jarosław Kaczyński repeatedly probed the possibility of the UD’s and the KLD’s participation in the government, that is, the formation of a centre-right majority coalition. This was something that both groups seriously considered, which shows quite clearly that there was no unbridgeable ideological gap between the two main post-Solidarity camps. The real sore spot was not the economic transformation but the nature of political transformation and the ways and means of settling accounts with the old regime.

Hence the liberal identity of the post-dissident liberals was not based on economic issues, which was the domain of the neoliberals anyway and which most of the post-Solidarity parties basically accepted as the default position. Instead, what became the backbone of post-dissident liberal political activity was the interpretation of constitutionalism and rule of law principles and how de-Communization should proceed in a democratic Rechtsstaat. ⁷² These were also areas in which post-dissident liberals felt confident, since the politics of rights and questions of legality were, after all, central to their activities in dissent. In the coalition cabinet of Hanna Suchocka, between July 1992 and October 1993, which was dominated by the liberals and liberal-conservatives from the Democratic Union and the Congress, the rule of law and constitutional politics was perhaps not the dominant issue (the country was mired in social protest at the time) but surely the staple issue as corroborated by the introduction of the “small constitution” in October 1992. ⁷³

Post-dissident liberalism in Poland was born as a reaction and refusal of the agonistic politics introduced by Walęsa and the PC politicians, such as the Kaczyński brothers. It was an attempt to redefine the dissident politics of consensus. It had a logic similar to that of dissident times but radically different outcomes due to the very different political conditions of the nascent democracy. The similarity was in the fact that consensus politics aimed to delay or even prevent excessive politicization and thus political division in the interests of defending not a specific political program but the general values of democracy and freedom.

It should have been the Dahrendorfian “constitutional politics” warranting liberal-democratic political transformation and the market transformation of the economy. It should have been politics of the common good in the interests of liberal democratic transformation, in contrast to what was presented as the political adventurism of Wałęsa’s camp, which could supposedly result only in chaos and confusion. However, the reactive role lent Polish post-dissident liberalism distinctly high-strung features that radicalized the rapidly deepening divisions within the Solidarity camp and did little to create a broad, democratic political consensus. It was, in fact, a new, paradoxical edition of the dissident politics of consensus of “us” against “them,” where “they” were no longer Communists but former comrades in arms from Solidarity. They also had a “Solidarity” genealogy and professed essentially similar goals: a market economy, pluralist democracy, a pro-Western and pro-European foreign policy orientation. There were very few differences in this respect. But the people of the opposing camp were nonetheless perceived by post-dissident liberals as reckless adventurers and intolerant nationalists. ⁷⁴ It is almost irrelevant which side of the conflict had a greater stake in the acrimonious, often highly personal rift; the result, in any case, was a rapidly deepening moat in the former democratic movement. At the same time, the Democratic Union gradually acquired its distinctly liberal political program, in which the strategy of internal compromise disabled a clear-cut ideological orientation, which was thus very different from what we saw in the case of the SZDSZ in Hungary.

It is symptomatic that the post-Solidarity liberal intelligentsia was represented to the outer world largely by Christian politicians such as Mazowiecki and Suchocka. Similarly to the Czech and Slovak cases, it symbolizes the liberal-conservative compromise underlining the early transformation politics in these countries and the nascent liberal consensus. In his long political and intellectual career, Mazowiecki was all but a typical Polish liberal, and yet it was he, together with Balcerowicz, who gave a face to the post-Communist liberal transition.

Throughout most of his long career in Communist Poland, Mazowiecki pursued a “Catholic socialist” path. Along with his colleagues from the Catholic lay movement Znak, he was committed to combining Catholic social teachings with state socialist realities, searching for a viable “third way” between liberal capitalism and Communism in political economy and governance. However, in the words of Piotr Kosicki, with the collapse of state socialism,

this life-long advocate of a Catholic third way turned away from Catholic socialism and Christian Democracy alike. In the end, convinced that the third way had failed as a viable option of governance, the man who represented Poland’s greatest hope for Catholic politics instead became a reluctant liberal. ⁷⁵

Conclusion

This article has aimed to look at the so-called liberal consensus from a new perspective, based not on its sensed disintegration at the beginning of the new century but on its emergence right after 1989. If the early 1990s was a time of the emergence of a liberal consensus out of the democratic one, it was a relatively rapid process but by no means a straightforward one. Seen from the perspective of the historical actors of the time, which in our case were former dissidents, the liberal consensus, if they considered such a thing to be an existing phenomenon, was always uncertain and fragile. As we have seen, it was rather the vision of a hoped-for future towards which these actors aspired to work.

In terms of party life and the outcome of partisan political struggle, the story of post-dissident liberal parties in central and eastern Europe seemingly has a predominantly melancholic note of disappointed ambitions and expectations. None of the political parties discussed here became a mass party capable of securing political leadership. Nevertheless, judged by the intentions and motivations of their leading figures and rank-and-file members, they were a success. These small liberal parties, with their enormous intellectual and cultural potential and moral capital, which they had derived mainly from their dissident genealogy, fundamentally influenced developments in their countries during the crucial early 1990s. They were among the chief constructors of the democratic order, the rule of law and its institutions and the market economy. They were instrumental in shaping the public discourse in those years and beyond.

In many ways, they were what they wanted to be in the first place: they played the role of midwives of the newly emerging liberal democracy. They acted as guarantors of the “constitutional politics” that Dahrendorf had prescribed to them in 1990. Many of their members are rightly regarded today as founding figures of liberal democracies in the region. Many later played essential roles in politics, culture, the economy, or science.

However, their achievements need to be qualified in two important ways. First, these successes were, to some extent, not a consequence of the political strategy and gamesmanship of post-dissident liberal political parties but were achieved despite the party political failures of these formations. Second, the success of liberal transformation and the assertion of liberal hegemony after 1989 resulted in a massive counter-reaction in the form of national populism and national conservatism, which blew the liberal consensus to pieces in two countries, Hungary and Poland.

In all cases under investigation, there was an effort to transform the dissident politics of consensus in the democratic era and mould it into a broad basic democratic consensus formula (Grundkonsens) in the interest of “constitutional politics.” In all cases, this consensus politics was carried by a specific post-dissident ethos derived from dissident anti-politics. This consensus politics did not intend to be and was not anti-political in the same sense that the dissident human rights activism had been prior to 1989. Nevertheless, often it had a strong flavour of anti-partyism, that is, the dislike or outright distrust of political parties as the main element of political democracy. Such “nonpartisan politics” rejected the nascent right–left division of the political spectrum for quite some time and were motivated by dissident-like, movement-based ideas about politics and democratic engagement. This form of politics did not stand the “trial by fire” of the political struggle in the early transition period. From Urbinati’s perspective of democracy as a diarchy, former dissidents, traditionally champions of opinion-making, failed, in the longer run, in the other, more consequential form of political power in democracy, namely political will-formation. Moreover, along the way, they often leaned towards an epistemic or Platonic position that aims to construct, instead of will and opinion, democracy as a diarchy of will and ratio (or known truth), thus dislodging the cacophony of opinions from democratic politics.

Many former dissidents, disillusioned by the unexpected roughness of democratic political life, soon left politics. Most of them probably never wanted to stay in politics. Others started to form political parties, the most prominent of which aspired to represent the “liberal political centre.” They intended to be inclusive, coalition-like initiatives ranging from the radical democratic left to conservative Christians but with a clear liberal democratic orientation and hegemonic aspirations. The function of the liberal centre and advocacy of “decent politics,” as opposed to alleged political brutalization and populism, characterized all the post-dissident liberal political subjects. Yet the results, palpable especially in the Hungarian and Polish cases, were exclusivist discourses usurping the role of arbiter in judging what does and does not belong to the basic democratic Grundkonsens.

Except for Hungary, the gradual strengthening of liberal political identities in our case countries was the rather unwelcome consequence of spontaneous developments in the early democratic years more than a conscious effort to cultivate a distinctive liberal program. Yet, from a longer term perspective, the founding of post-dissident liberal parties was a culmination of a long process of liberal political conversion of highly diverse groups of people with radically different political opinions that formed within the democratic opposition in the late 1970s. At that time, many dissidents accepted with palpable reluctance the overlaps between their civic rights activism and liberal politics. Often, the same people got involved with similar reluctance in the first half of the 1990s in reshaping the remnants of the democratic movement into centre-liberal parties.

Seen from a bird’s eye view, post-dissident politics in all the countries in our scope—Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—had many common features as well as an overall “logic” of development. However, they had very different outcomes due to diverse cultural preconditions, political configurations, and pre-transition development. The political relationship between the two main strands of post-Communist liberalism in east-central Europe defining our simplified model is proof. In 1993, Jerzy Szacki observed that until there is a liberal democratic regime and until the primary matter is to gain fundamental freedom, the difference between the two liberalisms, the economic and the social-civic one, is not relevant, for “they might even seem very similar, especially since the pars destruens of all liberalism is basically the same.” ⁷⁶ This was the case in the period of the state socialist dictatorship. “However, when conditions change or at least the hope of an imminent change appears, this dispute can and even must erupt.” ⁷⁷

As we have seen in this article, the reverse was true in most of the region. Only in Czechia did a major political cleavage emerge in the 1990s between the two liberalisms, enhanced by the long-standing rivalry between their two symbolic figures, Václav Klaus and Václav Havel. In all other instances, the two potentially antagonistic branches of liberalism cooperated and even founded political parties jointly, although there always remained a considerable difference of opinion between them.

The post-dissident politics of consensus was in all these cases affected by strong opposition to those forces that were seen by post-dissident liberals as hostile to the building of liberal democracy. Hungary is the most illustrative example of how “populism” and nationalism swiftly and completely replaced “Communism” as the perceived primary threat to liberal democracy. Or as put by Adam Michnik, who always excelled at short and seductive formulations: “Nationalism is the last word of communism. A final attempt to find a social basis for dictatorship.” ⁷⁸ Liberal anti-populism, more than anything else, imprinted the political identity of the post-dissident liberals in Hungary, but also in Poland and Slovakia. On the other hand, in Czechia, this element of liberal identity was comparatively weak. This also explains the relative longevity of mainstream Czech anti-Communism, since Communism remained the main bogeyman of liberal democracy in Czech political discourse long after the turn of the century. These political and cultural foundations of post-dissident liberalism and of the construction of liberal hegemony during the transition years thus had quite similar basic contours across the three, then four countries but with varying political results, especially after their 2004 entry into the European Union.