The International Circulation of Attacks and the Reputational Consequences of Local Context: George Soros’s Difficult Reputation in Russia,Post-Soviet Lithuania and the United States

Introduction

George Soros is one of the most controversial public figures in the modern world. A currency speculator who made billions in secret financial transactions, Soros has also been a prominent proponent of a democratic ‘open society’. A Hungarian Jew by birth and upbringing, the young Soros avoided death and imprisonment at the hands of both Nazi and communist dictatorships. Soros later moved to England and then the United States, where he made his fortune as a currency speculator in New York City. He became famous in the 1990s as the ‘man who broke the Bank of England’ and as a prominent philanthropist, popular writer and political fund-raiser for the liberal-left. Widely known but hardly uncontroversial, Soros has what sociologist Gary Alan Fine has referred to as a ‘difficult reputation’ (Fine, 2001). The contradictions abound.

Soros makes for an interesting case study in the international circulation of political attacks. Soros’s reputation evolved differently in varied regions of the world, as his unique career as a currency speculator, philanthropist and political actor changed over time. Soros began his philanthropy in New York City decades ago and he has since spent a significant part of his rather substantial fortune in promoting democracy around the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was extremely unpopular among communist elites in the Soviet bloc, while having an ambiguous reputation in the West as an anti-communist capitalist with unorthodox liberal politics. More recently, he has re-focused his energy on politics in the United States itself, where he became one of the most visible and harsh critics of the Bush administration and its ‘war on terror’ and, more recently, supporter of Obama and various left-liberal causes. Over the past couple of years, Soros has emerged as a favorite target for conservative conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.

The reception of Soros raises significant questions about the utility of hyper-globalization theories (Albrow, 1996; Beck, 2006; Hirst and Thompson, 1996; Ohmae, 1990). Changes in technology and media have certainly transformed the social context in which ideas travel and reputations are constituted. In previous decades it may have been possible to do an analysis of how an individual’s reputation differs in one country compared to another, dealing with national reputations as discrete entities that are constituted largely by domestic political forces (Beck, 2006; Scholte, 2005 [2000]). In the case of Soros’s reputation and influence in Eastern Europe and the United States, however, the ‘international circulation of ideas’ is key (Bourdieu, 1999).

Drawing on insights from what has been called the third wave ‘transformative’ perspectives in globalization studies (Held et al., 1999; Martell, 2007; Scholte, 2005 [2000]), we will emphasize how ideas are circulating internationally with new rapidity and influence. Attacks on Soros from a range of political perspectives were circulated internationally but, in the end, continue to be interpreted locally based on domestic politics and cultural frames. The case of Soros thus reinforces skepticism towards extreme globalization perspectives (Hay and Marsh, 2000).

The purpose of this article will be to explore how Soros’s reputation in the United States, Russia and Lithuania in the early years of the 21st century was shaped by a newly international circulation of reputational attacks. We examine the US case because Soros was based there, and his reputation was once relatively positive but became ‘polluted’ in the early years of the 21st century by right-wing attacks that have since helped define the international debate about him. Russia provides a more pure ‘negative’ case where Soros was attacked continuously by elites from communism to Putin, although he does have a certain appeal in popular culture. The Lithuanian case provides a relatively unique example of a former part of the Soviet Union that is now in the European Union. In Lithuania, Soros was extremely well-regarded and had many influential supporters precisely because he was American and anti-communist; anti-American and anti-Russian themes would be contested through the symbol of Soros. ¹

In addition to discussing major differences between Soros’s reputation in the American and Soviet-Russian contexts, we will also emphasize the campaign against Soros in the Lithuanian newspaper Respublika in 2005 and a series of American-based attacks posted on the internet in 2005 and then pulled together in the book The Shadow Party (Horowitz and Poe, 2006). In both the United States and Lithuania, Soros was framed as a ‘notorious supporter’ – a controversial figure associated with a political orientation, movement or party who is used by their political opponents to try to discredit the larger cause (Fine, 2006). Attacks on Soros circulated back and forth across borders with increasing speed. In the cases of the United States, Russia and Lithuania, local political traditions and realities trumped internationally circulating ideas.

Bourdieu’s analysis of the international circulation of ideas will be modified and built on, with the case study of a philanthropist and public intellectual known beyond closed networks of intellectual and academic elites (Bourdieu, 1999). New flows of ideas are facilitated by new communications technology, while being read through the lens of local political and economic realities. Debate about whether Soros was a ‘helper’ or an ‘interferer’ in Lithuania became invariably linked to complicated issues raised by American culture’s broader reception in the region. In the United States, Soros’s reputation was linked to events and attacks originating in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The ideas we examine about Soros’s activities were not global but emerged in specific national contexts and circulated internationally.

The outline of our analysis is as follows. We will begin with the story of Soros’s career as a public intellectual and philanthropist, paying attention to the various actors that emerged to promote and attack his reputation, given his unique set of ideas and sociological positioning as a ‘progressive’ capitalist public intellectual activist with international reach. We will then examine Soros’s reputation in the United States, Eastern Europe and Lithuania, with a focus on attacks against him in the US and Lithuania circulating around 2005–6. Attacks on Soros drew more heavily on internationally circulating ideas and incidents than in the past, as ‘globalists’ and ‘third wave’ social science perspectives would highlight (Martell, 2007; Scholte, 2005 [2000]). But local context was more important than any dynamics created by the internet or ‘global’ flows of culture (Bourdieu, 1999). A return to a ‘sceptical’ perspective within globalization debates is called for when dealing with how ideas travel internationally and how reputations are constructed locally (Hay and Marsh, 2000).

Soros’s Reputational Entrepreneurs and Partisan Warriors

The dynamic of reputational entrepreneurship and partisan warriorship (Fine, 2001), reflected by unusual cases such as that of George Soros, requires sociological analysis of the dynamics created by his crossing of national and professional borders. Unlike in the case of the American presidents whom Gary Alan Fine and Barry Schwartz have studied (Fine, 2001; Schwartz, 1987), Soros has not been linked to a particular political party with staff, resources and institutionalized historical memory, since he was not a politician contesting for power. As a currency speculator and philanthropist, Soros has had a global vision for both making money and social change, but he has intervened as an individual actor with his money and ideas.

Soros is, from one perspective, a failed academic who studied philosophy at the London School of Economics (LSE) under Karl Popper, the famous theorist of the scientific method. Popper had been Soros’s tutor at the LSE, and they met again after Soros had finished his formal education and left the academic world in order to make his fortune. Soros put aside his academic interests for years but returned to write numerous books of social criticism and political and economic commentary in the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century (Bryant, 2002).

The fact that Soros was not an academic meant that he did not have graduate students and junior faculty motivated to promote his reputation. Soros, a currency speculator with unorthodox political views, could hardly be viewed as a consensus figure whose reputation could be easily institutionalized. He did, however, have structural and material advantages when one thinks about the reputational entrepreneurs who are likely to emerge (Fine, 2001) to promote his reputation. Putting his money where his ideas are, Soros is one of the most visible and generous philanthropists of the later part of the 20th century and the early 21st century; this has created a number of reputational entrepreneurs such as the extensive staff and former staff of his various Open Society and related philanthropic foundations (Neier, 2003; Sudetic, 2011). Networks of Eastern and Central European intellectuals, scholars and students who benefited from his money and moral and intellectual support during his struggle to open up Soviet totalitarianism, also represented a strong reputational base for Soros (Bryant, 2000).

Soros was intellectually engaged, energetic, famous (after 1992, at least, he became known as the ‘man who broke the Bank of England’) and increasingly able to reach mass audiences through books and the media. While many philanthropists, business people and activists allow public relations staff, journalists and media professionals to ‘frame’ their reputations (Fine, 2001), Soros honed narratives of his own reputation in op-eds, books and essays to such an extent that he was often criticized as being self-promoting (Foster, 2004).

Another important part of the creation of Soros’s reputation involves the biographies that emerged as he gained fame (Kaufman, 2002; Slater, 1996; Soifer, 2005). American journalist Kaufman’s book Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire (2002) provides a wealth of information, albeit from a reputational entrepreneur sympathetic to Soros’s Open Society approach. Slater’s Soros: The Unauthorized Biography (1996) is less comprehensive but has more critical distance – Soros and his circle refused to cooperate. The Russian language Soifer study on Soros’s foundations provides useful material from the post-Soviet context but is relatively uncritical, being written by an institutional insider (Soifer, 2005).

Soros certainly has his supporters, but there were and remain powerful institutional forces that give rise to partisan warriors who benefited from attacking Soros. Soros’s defence of Western democratic capitalism and his vocal arguments against authoritarianism created many partisan warriors in the Soviet and post-Soviet sphere who tried to discredit him. Soros’s economic activities also captured the attention of liberal and left economists, social critics and activists, creating the possibility of reputational attacks from the left. ² Finally, his social liberalism around issues of the death penalty, gun control, drugs and secularism, combined with his opposition to George W. Bush and the Iraq War, created legions of Soros bashers in the heartland of Republican America. ³

Soros in the US: The Renegade Democrat

Soros’s reputational history in the US stretches back over the past 40 years of his financial and philanthropic activities, but there was a more recent shift related to American domestic politics after 2000. Soros always retained an interest in American domestic politics and social policy despite the fact that the major focus of his philanthropy had tended to be international. He was a critic of America’s ‘war on drugs’, a crusader against urban poverty, and someone critical of the ‘denial of death’ in Western societies. Beginning in the early years of the 21st century, however, Soros began to accelerate his funding of projects in the US on domestic issues. The election of Bush in 2000 and the call for a ‘war on terror’ since the events of 9/11 served as a catalyst for Soros’s full-scale American philanthropic involvement. Soros developed a reputation as a ‘renegade Democrat’, as just the kind of wealthy, culturally elite and socially liberal Democrat that populist and conservative Christian Republicans loved to hate. The massive spending that he engaged in to defeat Bush in the 2004 presidential race (over $24 million) solidified his new, difficult reputation.

The books and essays which Soros wrote just before and in the aftermath of 9/11 moved away from a focus on opening up the former Soviet Union and increasingly revolved around issues such as ‘reforming global capitalism’, ‘globalization’, defeating George W. Bush in 2004 and ‘the consequences of the war on terror’. ⁴ Soros had been a ‘non-partisan’ Democrat who, while having links to the Clinton White House, supported a variety of causes and moderate Republicans. The battle between John Kerry and George W. Bush, however, marked a drastic change in Soros’s approach (Kaufman, 2002).

Lukewarm over Kerry but passionately opposed to Bush, Soros began strategizing directly with partisan Democrats. He also gave enormous amounts of money to 527s, a new form of political activity that became common after the campaign reform of the early years of the 21st century. 527s were a new form of ‘soft money’ organizations that cannot give money directly to candidates but fund issue-based advocacy. Soros’s reputation soon became dominated, at least in the United States, by his association with Hillary Clinton (he had once visited Haiti with her) and Barack Obama, whom he supported in the 2008 primaries.

There is a soft version of Soros’s reputation as a ‘renegade Democrat’. For centrist Democrats, moderate Republicans and the journalistic establishment in the United States, Soros was not a team player from the perspective of the political establishment. Too independent to be controlled and too visible to be ignored, Soros was a valued contributor to the cause with deep pockets but also a potentially notorious supporter (Fine, 2006). Soros’s vast wealth and cosmopolitan commitments were an electoral and reputational liability.

A more sinister version of this reputation emerged in David Horowitz and Richard Poe’s The Shadow Party (2006). A harsh conspiratorial and paranoid rant, Horowitz and Poe make the case that Soros is at the centre of a plot to promote the drug culture of the 1960s, a soft-on-crime approach, gun control, the rationing of health care linked to euthanasia for the elderly, an anti-American defeatism in face of Islamist-backed terrorism, the domination of American politics by wealthy liberal elites, mass immigration and the loss of national sovereignty. Additionally, Bill O’Reilly of Fox called Soros a ‘sleazoid’ and someone who is ‘as far left as you can get without moving to Havana’ (quoted in Rosin, 2004). Even more outrageously, Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House at the time, suggested that Soros funded his philanthropy from drug money (Krugman, 2006), a theme that was later picked up in Lithuania. More recently, Glenn Beck took attacks on Soros to a new level. Beck’s Fox News TV show during 2009 and 2010 featured segments making Soros, as well as social scientists the late Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, part of an alleged Obama-led socialist conspiracy to ruin the American economy.

Soros’s reputation in the US remains in flux. It is unlikely that Democrats will want to be closely associated with Soros, even if his financial and ideological support strengthens them. Soros suffers from reluctance among reputational entrepreneurs in the US to come to his defence – socialist or left-wing intellectuals may agree with much of his philanthropy but tend to be appalled by how he makes his money. Many ideological supporters of corporate-oriented capitalism are uneasy with his statements about the need for government regulation. It is not yet clear how successful efforts will be to scapegoat Soros using the ‘paranoid style’ of politics Richard Hofstadter argued has deep roots in American culture. This view of Soros as a ‘renegade Democrat’, however, has replaced the earlier image of the fighter for freedom under Communism. ⁵

Soros’s Currency Behind and After the Curtain: The Communist and Russian Context

Soros was largely unknown within 20th-century communism until the chaos and dramatic transformations in the decade leading to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. From the middle of the 1980s onwards, Soros had contact with Soviet-era elites and gained recognition among dissidents in Hungary and the Soviet Union. Soros became famous in Central and Eastern Europe, at least among the educated elites, before he became widely known in the United States and Britain. His reputation in the region, however, was more about the political conflict over what these societies would look like in the post-communist era than about Soros himself.

Soros’s reputational entry-point in this part of the world initially was less linked to the source of his wealth than tied to his efforts to bring markets and open debate to Soviet-dominated communism. Soros’s fame in Central and Eastern Europe has mostly crystallized alongside debates about Western assistance, in which the ‘Soros factor’ played an important role. A positive attitude towards US philanthropy and liberal market reforms corresponded to the general processes of the Americanization of the region which contrasted with failures of state socialism. A new organizational culture of Soros’s NGOs (most notably the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations network, established since 1985 in Central and Eastern Europe) was a key institutional factor on which Soros’s reputational entrepreneurs relied.

As Kaufman puts it, ‘Soros became as well-known in Russia as any foreigner. Virtually every professor, editor, scientist, and school administrator at least knew someone who had received help from the foundation’ (Kaufman, 2002: 224). Numerous Russians (including Gorbachev himself) had nominated Soros for the Nobel Peace Prize. After the collapse of communism, Soros’s fame was such that a star and microbe had been named after him in the former Soviet Union. As Kaufman writes, ‘Russians even turned his name into a verb, “Sorosovat”, which has come to mean seeking grants from any quarter, in the same way “Xeroxing” is now universally used to mean copying with any kind of machine’ (Kaufman, 2002: 224). There was even a popular song written in Russia based on Soros, something unimaginable in the United States. ⁶

This renown did not mean that Soros had a less difficult reputation in Central and Eastern Europe than in the West. Far from being a consensual figure, Soros was even more controversial. Reputational entrepreneurs and partisan warriors defended or attacked him depending on their own interests; the stories they attempted to narrate about Soros were based on their own political visions and the specific institutional locations that gave them platforms from which to speak. In a polarized context in which Soros himself did not have deeps roots or links with reputational entrepreneurs to offer counter-spin (unlike in the United States), image mattered more than reality.

Partisan warriors were highly visible in attempting to discredit Soros in communist regimes. Hard-line former communists and local nationalists strengthened the case against unwanted reforms by using Soros as a symbol of capitalism, America and, even more ominously, world Jewry. In Budapest, right-wing nationalists attacked Soros (and the university he helped found, the Central European University; Bryant, 2000) with blatant anti-Semitism, something Soros responded to in an op-ed in The New York Times (Kaufman, 2002: 259). Similar anti-Semitic themes were used in attacks on Soros in other countries and were never far from the surface in Russia itself. Soros had already been called a CIA agent by Chinese hardliners in the mid-1980s, after he had supported the work of exile Liang Heng and his magazine The Chinese Intellectual (Kaufman, 2002: 218). Serbian dictator Milosevic tried to evict Soros’s foundation from his country by closing its offices in Belgrade (Gordy, 1999), legal claims were brought against staff in Croatia, and Belarus’s dictator Lukashenko threatened criminal investigations against staff involved in Open Society activities, forcing the closing of the institute. ⁷ Soros was a metaphor for the unjustness of capitalism, elite manipulation and shady American intervention in local politics.

In post-Communist Russia, Soros gained reputational support when Yeltsin came to power after 1991. The new Russian president was a supporter of the ‘shock therapy’ and privatization that Soros believed would bring prosperity to the region. At the same time, however, starting from the middle of the 1980s, the KGB was actively trying to link Soros with the CIA in order to discredit him. They would try to, as Kaufman puts it, tie ‘this “spying” American to various independent Russian intellectuals and various reformist elements within elite communist politics’ (Kaufman, 2002: 12). Even Gorbachev, as Kaufman puts it, ‘avoided direct contact with Soros’ to make sure that ‘charges against Soros could not be used against Gorbachev himself’. ⁸

In their extensive study on anti-Americanism in Russia, Shiraev and Zubok (2000) provide examples showing that attacks against Soros largely corresponded to anti-Americanism in the public space. ⁹ From the mid-1990s, a sharply rising disillusionment with the general ‘Western model’ and US involvement in the region superseded previous pro-Western and pro-American attitudes. Popular optimism turned into distress, which was intensified by populists, especially considering that a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Russia never materialized. The scapegoating of Soros flowed from the dynamics of Russian attempts to restore pride in their country by rejecting ‘foreign’ models. ¹⁰

Soros’s reputation worsened in Russia after he lost heavily in Russian markets in 1997, something that led to him publicly criticizing Yeltsin. Soros gained new notoriety by calling for the devaluation of the Russian currency in 1998, creating political and economic shockwaves in the region and raising questions about conflicts of interests in Soros’s dual activities as investor and political activist/philanthropist. In 2003 the offices of the Open Society Foundation in Moscow had been raided by camouflaged men with stun guns in the wake of Soros’s public defense of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil tycoon and critic of President Putin’s authoritarian rule (Murphy, 2003). Soros was more successful in facilitating the emergence of democracy in post-Soviet Lithuania, as discussed below.

The Lithuanian Case: Soros and the Defense of Democracy

Soros’s involvement in Lithuania began in October 1990 when the Open Society Fund Lithuania (OSFL) launched its activities to help implement policies that the weak local institutions could not. Since the small and newly independent state had little resources, Soros’s philanthropic involvement was widely perceived as ‘helping’ rather than ‘interfering’ and Soros himself soon became widely respected among urban intelligentsia. In a nation used to dealing with Americans as scores of Lithuanian expatriates returned to help, ¹¹ Lithuania was not a place opposed to Soros’s vision of an ‘Open Society’. And his arguments for a democratic society were not caught up in the imported polarized binaries of ‘left’ versus ‘right’, something that did not fit the regional context until very recently (Trilupaityte, 2008b).

Lithuania had good reasons to renew its long-standing ties with the West because of Lithuania’s pre-Second World War history and the national consensus to move away from the Russian sphere. Since the US (particularly under Ronald Reagan) had refused to recognize the Soviet incorporation of the Baltic ‘captive nations’ and was seen as a counterweight to Soviet power, anti-Americanism has not been a theme in the political culture of Lithuania in the 1990s (in contrast to Russia). Unlike in Russia, Belarus or the Balkan region countries, Soros’s NGOs influenced the emergence of a new institutional culture through various programs (book publishing, education grants, etc.). These NGOs worked in close collaboration with state-funded institutions, especially in the fields of art and culture. ¹² Such a positive intersection of state, private and non-governmental sectors during the 1990s has also helped create a positive reputation for Soros himself.

There had been debate about Soros within Lithuania from the beginning of his involvement, of course, yet here we concentrate on the particular controversy that erupted in Lithuanian media and political circles in 2005. This incident occurred after OSFL had already closed down its major programs after 2000 and after Soros reduced his financial support for the region, particularly after Lithuania and other Baltic countries entered the European Union in 2004. In a campaign of attacks against Soros published for a period of over three weeks in Respublika, a Lithuanian populist daily paper, it was suggested that the ‘fishy’ Soros-created NGOs were undermining local sovereignty, adolescent health, and promoting drug use. ¹³ In the words of the English news magazine translation, Soros was accused of being a ‘malevolent outside meddler in Lithuania’s affairs’ (The Economist, 2005). The Respublika coverage gained even more notoriety when prominent members of the Lithuania Liberal Democrat and Labour parties (both widely considered as populist in Lithuanian politics, at the time) lent support to the attacks on Soros, suggesting a campaign to discredit Soros along with local politicians and intellectuals linked to him through NGOs and funding. The Labour Party and its allies even asked the national security services to formally investigate the Soros foundations’ ‘financial schemes and networks’ on the grounds that they ‘pose a threat to national security’ since they are ‘targeted not at consolidating but dividing society’. ¹⁴ These conspiracy theories gave rise to a counter-campaign to defend Soros’s reputation, undertaken by some of Lithuania’s major intellectuals. Respublika has a populist tabloid-oriented style, and had discredited itself among intellectuals a couple of years before with a series of attacks on Jews and gays, leading to a protest petition. But the level of attacks on Soros and the perception that this was part of a larger campaign to discredit influential politicians and intellectuals linked to the pro-European Community perspective convinced Soros’s Lithuanian supporters that another counter-campaign was necessary.

In an open letter signed by over 70 prominent scholars, writers and artists, as well as in a press conference, the OSFL and Soros were defended. The intellectuals were convinced that this intervention was an important part of the larger defense of democracy against both populist extremism and Russian meddling. ¹⁵ Generally, public intellectuals who were defenders of Soros claimed that the scandal sought to destabilize the pro-Western development of Lithuania and to compromise the country’s image as a stable Western-oriented democracy.

The larger issues had become even clearer when Soros’s critics within the Liberal Democrats, building on the Respublika attacks, seemed to suggest that the impeachment of the former Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas (a leader of the Liberal Democrats Party) in 2003 was somehow linked to foreign interference and ‘spies’ of global capitalism. ¹⁶ This represented a common allegation that Soros’s organizations were somehow part of a conspiracy against the ‘natural’ development of Lithuanian democracy. ¹⁷ Soros’s wealth, allegedly pro-drug policies and his difficult international reputation within the foreign financial press which Respublika relied on for information, made him a notorious supporter and target.

This 2005 incident in Lithuania did not lead to dramatic events, unlike elsewhere in the region where Soros had been forced to suspend his operations. No-one closely associated with Soros was prosecuted in Lithuania, and the defense of his activities by intellectuals succeeded in limiting the reputational damage done by the Respublika campaign. Still, moderate anti-Soros rhetoric emerged simultaneously among anti-globalists who claimed that there were tensions between the ostensibly positive OSFL goals and the practices it pursued. ¹⁸

Apart from the almost metaphorical argumentation about ‘secretly rising Russian influence in Lithuania’, which was so powerful when used by political actors for rhetorical manipulation, the rising political realism was also favorable for more moderate critics of globalization and neoliberalism. This simultaneously reflected a more critical retrospective attitude towards the local role of the OSF. For example, Vytautas Radžvilas, a formerly liberal yet not anti-democratic or populist public intellectual, was highly critical of the negative sides promoted by pro-market-oriented neoliberal NGOs. Radžvilas opined that the Open Society Fund-Lithuania, in fact, was a social engineering project orchestrated from above. This institutional experiment, according to him, legalized through foreign institutions and philanthropy, gave birth not to civil society, as it was initially intended, but helped revive a modified version of the nomenklatura tradition under new historical circumstances (Radžvilas, 2008). ¹⁹ Such opinion contradicts the widespread pro-liberal consensus that Soros’s philanthropy in Lithuania has been notably successful. ²⁰

These retrospective evaluations illustrate that the reputation of the Soros foundation, and ultimately Soros’s personal reputation in Lithuania, could develop independently of his actions. While the attacks on Soros drew on internationally circulating images about Soros’s allegedly nefarious activities, rising globalization, opposition to neo-liberalism and US policies, the debates about the proper role of civil society organizations were also central to the controversy. In Lithuania, unlike in the US, the hard-line attacks on Soros and his foundation were not ultimately about Soros at all, but were largely attempts to damage local political and intellectual figures by linking them to a notorious supporter. Democracy has taken root in Lithuania inside the European Union, but a range of broader sociological questions are worth serious consideration.

Borrowing Attacks: Ex-Communists, Lithuanian Populists and American Republicans Come Together?

The incident in Lithuania in 2005, combined with Horowitz and Poe’s The Shadow Party (2006), raises important questions regarding the international circulation of attacks. Soros’s reputational history in Central and Eastern Europe over the past 20 years is significantly different from the Anglo-American context. Nonetheless, the reception of Soros in the Anglo-American and Eastern Europe worlds cannot be treated as separate and discrete ‘cases’ that can be compared and contrasted from within the paradigm of what Scholte has called ‘methodological territorialism’ (Scholte, 2005 [2000]). We agree with ‘third wave’ globalization theorists that new processes and dynamics have created previously unimaginable dialogue regarding reputations outside local contexts as well as newly circulating attacks (Martell, 2007). This newly international process of reputation formation magnifies the tensions and contradictions inherent in the various local receptions of Soros. We now see a series of ‘borrowings’ of reputational images such that nationalist and pro-Russian Lithuanians drew upon critiques of Soros’s liberal attitudes on drugs, gays and abortion that were first articulated in the US in the 1980s. In addition, right-wing Republicans popularized attacks on Soros in the US that were created by pro-Soviet hardliners and anti-Western populists in the 1990s.

Making the case that Soros was a supporter of the legalization of drugs was an effective strategy to undermine his reputation in relatively culturally conservative countries. Attacking Soros’s support for gay rights and abortion is more politically complicated, since his liberal attitudes would gain Soros some supporters among the young (this is the case in Lithuania). But it is noteworthy that the allegation of Soros’s anti-drug war policies was not even mentioned in the Lithuanian public statements by Soros defenders who discretely evaded the issue and deliberately used broader ‘civil society’ arguments. For Soros opponents it was effective to attack Soros’s views on drug policy, torn out of the context of the American environment where prisons are overflowing with inmates disproportionately of African-American descent.

Since Lithuanian liberal intellectuals are generally proud to be free of Soviet domination and are relatively pro-American in their political beliefs, the ‘pro-drug’ critique made far more political sense for Respublika than attacking Soros for being American, as was done in Russia. When combined with the repeating of the news of his conviction for insider trading in France (Norris, 2005), this put his Lithuanian-based reputational entrepreneurs on the defensive. If it were not for the fact that Respublika has a history of anti-gay and anti-Semitic polemics that were widely disregarded in the political mainstream, it might have been more successful in damaging Soros’s reputation among the broader Lithuanian public.

It is ironic that American Republicans who were trying to discredit Soros after the 2004 electoral campaign used images that originated among pro-communist forces opposed to attempts to create ‘open societies’. Horowitz and Poe argue that Soros is being anti-democratic and anti-American by using his vast wealth to create a ‘regime change’ in the US by taking over the Democratic Party and defeating Republicans. Suggesting that Soros is interested in a ‘coup-like’ regime change in the US, Horowitz and Poe implied that ‘Soros’ Open Society foundations have facilitated coups and rebellions in many countries, always ostensibly in the interests of “democratization”’ (2006: 21), citing the case of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze as an example from November 2003. They also emphasized the allegedly nefarious role Soros played in the color revolutions in Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005), a peculiar critique coming from American Republicans who had called for intervention and regime change in the communist world (although not following through!) for decades.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Soros had been relatively immune to excessive criticisms for his support for liberal drug and social policies; American Republicans were hesitant to attack a wealthy pro-market businessman who opposed Soviet communism. By 2004, with the Soviet Union gone and Soros attacking Republicans and supporting Democrats in partisan ways (he had publically argued that defeating Bush in 2004 was a matter of ‘life or death’), it was open season on Soros among the proponents of far-right-wing Republicanism. With the internet spreading conspiracy theories with a speed that was previously unheard of (see Kay, 2011), Horowitz and Poe simply ignored the ideological content of the previously central Cold War struggle, and made the case that Soros was a danger to mainstream America because he was a conspiratorial radical who had already overturned post-Soviet governments. More recent attacks on Soros by Fox TV’s Glenn Beck are simply an amplified and more hysterical version of the original Horowitz narrative.

Soros’s Jewish background played very different roles in the anti-Soros rhetoric coming out of Lithuania, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe and the United States, again suggesting the continuing relevance of national and historical differences and local context. In Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, Soros’s Jewish background was often played up in ways meant to damage his reputation, drawing on traditional anti-Semitic themes to present Soros as a wealthy and rootless capitalist who was powerful, conspiratorial and linked to America, Israel and various culturally liberal causes such as women’s rights and gays. ²¹ If throughout large parts of the world Soros was vulnerable to being attacked for being ‘too Jewish’, he tended to be attacked for not being Jewish enough in the US. This was particularly true around questions regarding both his youth during Nazi-occupied Hungary ²² and his contemporary relationship to Israel. ²³

The war in Iraq and the continuing conflict in the Middle East in particular raised the stakes for how Soros’s past is viewed, now often seen through the lens of contemporary foreign policy polemics. Serbian expatriate far-right conservative Trifkovic, in particular, had argued that Soros was the ‘only eminent “holocaust survivor” who has been accused of collaboration with the Nazis’ (Trifkovic, 2004). Horowitz and Poe called Soros a ‘Nazi collaborator’ and claimed that ‘Soros never hesitates to advocate policies whose execution would surely result in Israel’s destruction’ (Horowitz and Poe, 2006: 82–3). Recent slurs reported in the media that Soros was a Nazi are remarkable only in the moral depravity that would lead someone to slander a boy who barely survived the Holocaust. ²⁴

Soros’s own evolving views and choice of political activities contributed to this dramatic change in reputational battles in America. For example, Soros articulated a sharp criticism of Israel’s West Bank settlements, military strategy in Lebanon, and the US/Israeli position on (not) dealing with Hamas in a widely discussed 2007 New York Review of Books essay. ²⁵ As Soros became more vocal in his critical views regarding Israeli policy, the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s strategy in the Middle East, the level of hostility to him grew. Increasingly, political actors opposed to his politics brought up his past in an attempt to discredit him. These issues played out differently outside the United States. In Lithuania, for example, Soros’s relationship with Israel tended not to be an issue for either his critics or defenders. ²⁶

Soros’s current reputation in Lithuania is relatively neutral, and the media mentions him only rarely. Having turned back into the ‘foreign’ billionaire again who has little to do with Lithuanian politics, Soros is mentioned no more often than any other major global financier. Soros’s comments on the Middle East, oil prices, intervening in the Libyan revolution or the possible crash of the Euro zone are sometimes covered, but he no longer plays a symbolic role there. With no intellectuals with something to gain by promoting or attacking his reputation, the previously internationally circulating ideas regarding his American or post-Soviet activities have become irrelevant and his reputation normalized.

Conclusion

Using the case of George Soros in the US, Russia and Lithuania, we have demonstrated how politically motivated representations of Soros are transferred and borrowed across the Atlantic and used by local actors. Local context matters enormously for the reception of ideas, even more so outside of the restricted networks of academics and intellectuals central to field analysis (Bourdieu, 1999). The saliency of Soros’s personal reputation travelled beyond academic networks and into mass politics in the US and Russia, where Soros was a famous personality. In Lithuania he was not a major public figure at all, and his role was largely understood through the lens of his reputational entrepreneurs. Partly as a result of this, in Lithuania both the partisan warriors who attacked Soros and his reputational entrepreneurs who defended his efforts, emerged later in the process after his foundation had largely withdrawn from the country. In the US, Soros was attacked for his local political activities as they became more explicitly liberal. The election of Obama made Soros more rather than less relevant to right-wing conspiracy theorists in the US, given his support of America’s first African-American president.

Soros is an excellent example of what Gary Alan Fine has called a ‘notorious supporter’ (Fine, 2006). American Republicans hated him immensely but were also using Soros as an easy target – a wealthy limousine liberal. In Lithuania, local populists cared far less about Soros as an individual, since he was largely uninvolved in the country in the period after it entered the European Union. Nonetheless, these populists tried to use Soros’s support for drug legalization and his wealth and globally-oriented but Western-rooted political vision to paint him as a notorious supporter who could be tied to the local politicians and intellectuals they were trying to discredit.

As Bourdieu argued in (Bourdieu, 1999), intellectual exchanges regarding translations and circulating ideas always depend on local political context and interests. ²⁷ Contrary to globalization theorists who exaggerate global dynamics (Albrow, 1996; Beck, 2006; Ohmae, 1990), we have drawn on ‘third wave’ perspectives (Martell, 2007) that emphasize newly international (Hay and Marsh, 2000; Scholte, 2005 [2000]) but not necessarily, from our perspective, global dynamics. The case of George Soros may well represent an unusual outlier, but the issue of difficult reputations remains an important topic for further scholarly research that emphasizes the importance of internationally circulating attacks and the continuing significance of local context.