The 89-ers Respond to the Collapse of Their Dreams
Ivan Krastev, Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder on the anti-liberal turn
By Pavel Barša*
The era of liberal Western hegemony ushered in by the East European revolutions of 1989 has come to an end. Many participant observers of those revolutions have asked why a liberal millennium that was supposed to last forever came to an end after twenty-five years, giving way to neo-nationalist and authoritarian leaders around the world. Three recent books represent the first round of debate on the subject: Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018), Ivan Krastev and Setphen Holmes’s The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (2019), and Anne Applebaum’s book The Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (2020). All of these authors place East Central Europe near the center of their analysis, looking to the rise and rightward trend of Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland, and asking why it was that values that seemed ascendant in the liberal democratic West were so quickly displaced by the national conservatism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. What was it that drove East Central Europe — and then the rest of the West — off track?
I
Together, Applebaum and Snyder represent the center-right and center-left wings of a post-1989 anti-totalitarian consensus in which the greatest threat to democracy is not a particular ideology but totalitarianism itself. Applebaum is a committed observer of East Central European transition who married the right-wing anti-communist Polish journalist and politician Radoslaw Sikorski and moved to Poland. Snyder, a historian and engaged commentator on Central and Eastern European politics, has updated the perspective of the great liberal Cold Warriors, thinkers such as Tony Judt and Timothy Garton Ash, for the post-Cold War period. Snyder comes from the American left and has generally opposed neoconservatives like Applebaum on issues like the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But, as far as the relationship of the West to East Central Europe is concerned, there has been no significant disagreement between the two. Both Applebaum and Snyder believe in the Manichean opposition between liberal democracy and fascist or communist dictatorships, and this opposition defines both their historical writings and their understanding of contemporary politics.
The core of their anti-totalitarian thesis can be expressed as follows: while the political crimes of Western democracies cannot be compared to the crimes committed by the Nazis or the communists, the crimes of those two movements not only can but must be compared to each other and put on the same moral plane if we want to understand their nature. As the subtitle and inner architecture of Snyder’s masterpiece Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) make clear, there is a moral symmetry between the crimes committed by Hitler’s and Stalin’s empire. Applebaum invokes a similar moral her books Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1955 (2012), and Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).
Snyder’s Bloodlands testifies to the usefulness of such a framework for the history of East Central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but also to its limits. No matter how fruitful it may be, heuristically speaking, to describe the societies of that region as caught up in a titanic struggle between two totalitarian empires, there is a cost to such an approach. The atrocities and massacres which happened during those two decades tend to be attributed exclusively to those two regimes and their respective leaders. Participation by locals is framed as a collaboration with foreign rulers, while its endogenous ideological motivations are sidelined. Despite Snyder’s honest account of local assistance in the massacres perpetrated by the two invaders, his general framework pits more or less “good” nations — which would be harmless if left to themselves on their own territories — against two “evil” empires that literally transformed the region into “bloodlands.”
Snyder alleviates this Manicheism in The Road to Unfreedom by claiming that the restored sovereignty of semi-peripheral nations in East Central Europe post-1989 brought about instability and nationalistic violence, and therefore only their integration into a supranational structure such as the EU can ensure justice and freedom. This shift, however, pushes him even more towards an exogenous explanation of the rise of authoritarianism in East Central Europe. According to Snyder, it is not the ideological elements underpinning the conservative pre-war Hungarian and Polish regimes, but rather Russian agents such as Antoni Macierevicz, that have enabled the success of Orbán and Kaczyński. Thus it is once again the Kremlin destabilizing the region in the 2010s, just as in the 1930s and 1940s — as if the PiS and Fidesz were not reusing and updating the same Polish and Hungarian national conservative tropes that predated the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
Where Snyder locates Russian agents as his external cause, Applebaum finds an aberrant psychology held over from the period of foreign domination: it was an “authoritarian mindset” that led many people in Hungary and Poland to defect from the post-1989 liberal democratic project. Since Applebaum claims to belong to the Polish right, it is even more difficult for her to acknowledge that the authoritarian turn in Poland of the 2010s had anything to do with the pre-war Polish political tradition to which this right claims allegiance. In effect, the anti-totalitarian perspective sets aside the internal ideological sources of authoritarianism, xenophobia and anti-pluralism in East Central European societies in favor of insidious external ones. Since the home-grown nationalist right was not the main culprit of the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s, it cannot be the main culprit of the authoritarian turn in the 2010s.
Snyder’s and Applebaum’s historical works epitomize an anti-totalitarian framework which gained a more or less hegemonic status in the societies of East Central Europe in the 1990s. Its prevalence in the politics of memory had important practical effects on politics tout court in that decade. By focusing on more extreme forms of interwar anti-Semitism and authoritarianism outside East Central Europe, adherents of this framework could rehabilitate the national conservative interwar regimes, while keeping silent about their dark side: xenophobia and anti-Semitism. If we look at the interwar decades in Poland and Hungary without anti-totalitarian blinders, however, we can clearly see that it was neither home-grown fascists nor foreign usurpers and their domestic collaborators but rather national conservative forces who were ideologically responsible for the authoritarian and anti-Semitic character of the Polish 2nd republic and Horthy’s regime in the last years before WWII. Is it any wonder that Kaczyński and Orbán, in resurrecting the legacy of those regimes, are so tempted by authoritarian rule and ready to play the anti-Semitic card?
II
In the immediate aftermath of 1989, the new national conservatives had to strike a compromise with cosmopolitan liberalism and endure the latter’s ideological ascendance. Only after those two ideological streams, sometimes working together in one political party or even one person, finished their post-communist task of transition, formally signaled by NATO and EU membership, could they go their own ways in search of other projects. This divergence happened in Poland and Hungary during the 2000s and in most other East-Central European countries in the 2010s. Freed from the tutelage of liberal globalism, national conservatives found their own distinctive voice. Their more extreme views which had been muted or sidelined during the first post-communist decade could finally come to the foreground.
This caused a shock, especially in the West, since Western observers usually did not go deep in their analysis of the post-communist consensus and were satisfied with hearing the right noises on the surface. The feeling that there was a radical about-turn stems from an optical illusion. Outside observers saw the liberal-globalist façade of the new East-Central European regimes but did not realize that they were seeing only one side of the liberal-conservative consensus which buttressed the transition.
The surprise and exasperation might have been less if the observers had taken into account the ideological power of the anti-totalitarian paradigm which shaped both memory and politics in the 1990s. This paradigm allowed the reconstituted East Central European Right a very easy ride. It did not have to repent for its pre-war anti-Semitic and authoritarian sins, since they paled in comparison to the Nazi and Communist crimes. The Right in the East Central European countries fully exploited this advantage at the moment of the breakdown of the post-communist consensus in the 2000s and 2010s.
Neither Snyder nor Applebaum is able to understand the important political role which the premise of moral equivalence between Communism and Nazism played as the stepping-stone for the national conservative offensive in East Central European societies. Likewise they also cannot see the crucial role which the “Jewish question” played in this process. Because the nationalist Right in those countries has associated (and its extreme wing directly identified) the communists with the Jews, they were able to explain the crimes of their nations against the Jews not only by blaming them on pro-Nazi collaborators, but in part also by presenting these crimes as a not completely illegitimate response to the Judeo-Bolshevik enemy who was — as the premise of moral equivalence states — just as inhuman as the Nazis were. In line with the premise, the idea of the uniqueness and incomparability of the Holocaust was attacked by the new post-communist elites in the 1990s and 2000s who began to claim the same status for communist crimes. Applebaum’s Gulag and Red Famine and Snyder’s Bloodlands became instant bestsellers in East Central Europe precisely because they resonated strongly with this project.
When the post-communist transition was completed in the 2000s and the national conservatives ended their alliance with the liberals, they began to promote xenophobic and racist views without any fear that they would be stigmatized as extremists. The shield of the anti-totalitarian paradigm protected them from such a possibility. On the one hand, the suffering of the members of their nations at the hands of communists was given the same moral status as the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust. On the other hand, the Holocaust itself suffering was fully attributed to the Nazis, while the importance of the anti-Semitism of their pre-war states and the help of some of their nationals this genocide was minimized.
The connection between the national-conservative agenda and the anti-totalitarian paradigm burst into the open in the diplomatic conflict between Poland and Israel in 2018 over a draft law by which the Polish parliament wanted to criminalize any claim of Polish collaboration in the crimes against humanity during the war. It is hard to take seriously Applebaum’s indignation and surprise at the law because nationalist efforts to revise the history of WWII were not an innovation of the PiS government of 2015. These efforts had begun under the PiS government of 2005 in which her husband served as Defense Minister, and even as far back as 1999 when he, as Deputy Foreign Minister, initiated the official protests by the Polish government against the use of the phrase “Polish concentration camp.” While the ex-communist president Kwasnievski officially acknowledged the crimes of some Poles against the Jews during the war and asked for forgiveness during the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre on July 10, 2001, the new politika historiczna of the anti-communist PiS government wanted to reverse the process of repentance and reconciliation. Under Janusz Kurtyka, the new head of the Institute of National Memory appointed by the PiS government in 2005, the “true” Poles were to be exculpated from any wrongs which happened to the Jews during the war, and the two groups were to remain separated as belonging to two different national identities. This did not exclude good relations with the Jewish state, to which the surviving “true Jews” (i.e., those who conceived their Jewishness as a national identity to be separated from Polish and other national identities) had migrated. After all, was not the support of Jewish emigration to Palestine an official policy of the last “free” Polish government before the Nazi and Soviet occupation?
While in the Polish context the equivalence thesis is at least understandable, given the historical events such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and subsequent attempts of both empires to destroy the Polish nation, in the Hungarian context it can only work if we omit two important facts. First, far from being a victim of the expansion of Nazi Germany eastwards like Poland, Hungary (as well as Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania) gained either nominal independence, territory, or both from joining the Axis. Second, the murder of more than half a million Jewish-Hungarian civilians after the occupation of Hungary by the German Army is not comparable to any crimes the communists committed during the Soviet occupation of Hungary. To deny or sideline the importance of those two facts is not a matter of interpretation but clearly an expression of Hungarian ethnic nationalism, if not anti-Semitism.
This is not so obvious to Applebaum. She is so blinded by the anti-totalitarian paradigm that she praises the House of Terror museum in Budapest, conceived and directed by Mária Schmidt, precisely for the symmetry with which it treats the crimes of the Arrow Cross and the Communists, two categories of collaborators with two “evil empires” which invaded Hungarian territory and terrorized Hungarian society. The clearly ideological function of the Museum’s permanent exhibition eludes Applebaum completely: by focusing on the crimes against humanity committed on Hungarian territory by these two groups, Schmidt swept under the carpet the anti-Semitism of the Horthy regime which prepared the ground for the smooth collaboration of many Hungarians in the deportation of Hungarian Jews that took place between March 1944, when Hungary was occupied by Germany, and October 1944, when the Germans handed control of the Hungarian government over to the Arrow Cross.
By shifting the focus from the content of a political project to the form of its promotion or the way it governs society, the anti-totalitarian framework relativizes not only the difference between the far right and the far left but ideological differences in general. It conjures up an image of a gulf between a good — peaceful and pluralistic — society and the evil totalitarians who violently crush it. No matter which ideology from within a given society the far left and the far right may claim to represent, they are presumed to have imposed that ideology from without by force. In other words, totalitarian movements are always external to the societies they try to govern. In this sense, they can always be seen as “foreign” and their supporters as “collaborators.” This framework implies that the morally reprehensible things that happen on a given national territory under their rule cannot be attributed to the nation or any of its loyalists, but exclusively to foreign usurpers and their domestic agents.
The extension of the equivalence thesis to the relation between the far left and the far right plays an important role in Snyder and Applebaum’s interpretations of the authoritarianism of the 2010s. They see such movements as a return of totalitarian evil, combining elements of both political poles. Snyder’s Road to Unfreedom depicts Putinism as a mixture of far-right and far-left elements; Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy finds the same mixture in Trumpism and the anti-liberal European movements of the past decade. She treats all of them indiscriminately as authoritarian, no matter what specific ideas they promote and what organizational structure they have. Thus, she lumps under one roof Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos and Vox, Alexis Tzipras and Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Matteo Salvini. This drawing of equivalences between left and right sweeps under the carpet the anti-authoritarian and non-violent strands of the former which are absent in the latter, not to mention the difference between the moral universalism which motivates the far left and the racist particularism which fuels the far right
The same confusion between racists and anti-racists, nationalists and anti-nationalists is found in Applebaum’s depiction of Trump as an inheritor of both the American far right and the American far left. Applebaum’s attempts to render Trump an exponent of both white nationalists and leftist anti-racists has no foothold in reality. Sure, Trump famously reacted to the confrontation of those two camps at Charlottesville in the summer of 2017 by saying that “there are fine people on both sides.” If, however, we take into account the fact that antiracist values have become, at least in principle, part of the American mainstream, while white supremacy has been ousted from it, Trump’s statement actually did not signify a neutrality between the two movements, but an expression of support for white nationalists against their leftist opponents. Trump continued to confirm his allegiance to the far right thereafter as well. There is, however, a deeper logic in Applebaum’s application of the equivalence thesis to the current American situation. The (con)fusion of the far right with the far left allows her to depict Trump not as a representative of a nativist and particularistic kind of American nationalism but rather as somebody with an anti-American agenda. It also inadvertently sheds light on her own position: she does not attack him from some sort of disincarnated or transcendental standpoint, but rather from the point of view of another American nationalism, in this case a universalistic and messianic one.
III
If we consider US-led liberal globalism to be one ideology among many, rather than exceptional and universalist, we might ask also why East-Central Europe pursued this particular ideological path in the first place. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes address this question in The Light that Failed: A Reckoning, describing the post-1989 transition of East-Central Europe as a sort of voluntary cultural colonization, which they characterize as “imitation.” If the Westward turn was a process of colonization, then Snyder and Applebaum (and Holmes, for that matter) belong to the colonizers, while Krastev is one of the colonized. Snyder and Applebaum are the native children of the West; Krastev has become its adoptive son.
Despite being himself a successful individual case of assimilation into the colonizing West, Krastev sees the national conservative backlash in East-Central Europe as the failure of this assimilation on the collective level. He and his co-author explain this failure by drawing out its inner contradiction. Although they do not refer to Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence, it is there that one can find the best exposition of this contradiction, illustrated using the example of Jewish emancipation in the 19th century. Simply put, assimilation promises equality of the imitators with the imitated, but in reality, it merely confirms their ongoing inequality. No matter how generous the imitated might (or might not) be, the process inevitably produces humiliation and resentment among the imitators. Once they realize that the promised overcoming of their stigmatizing difference is indefinitely postponed and they will forever remain inferior to the imitated, some of the imitators decide to reverse their choice and reaffirm their particular identity. Think Theodor Herzl and other “post-assimilationist Zionists,” as Kurt Blumenfeld called them.
Krastev and Holmes’s primary example of how this psychological mechanism played out in the post-communist context is the reversal of the cosmopolitan liberalism of the young Viktor Orbán into an ethnic Hungarian nationalism. According to the authors, Orbán experienced a double humiliation: as someone born on the Hungarian rural periphery, he had to face the condescension of the cosmopolitan elite in Budapest, and as a Hungarian politician, he had to face the condescension of the elite in Western capitals. His response to this double humiliation was to embrace his Hungarian-ness and to uphold ethnic and national particularism in the face of a supposedly universalist ideology that kept him on the margins.
Applebaum also applies this post-colonial lens at times, but she clearly does not give it the status of the most general explanation of the failure of the post-communist transition that Krastev and Holmes claim do. Two reasons may account for this difference. For one thing, Applebaum groups these turns toward ethno-nationalism in East Central Europe in the same bag as other stories of anti-liberal about-turns from her acquaintances from the 1990s and early 2000s. Some of these were East-Central European ex-dissident elites, but many were from conservative Tory circles in London (Simon Heffer, Roger Scruton) or neo-conservative circles in New York (Laura Ingraham) or Madrid (Rafael Bardaji). If Westerners could undergo reversals similar to those of Easterners, then surely Krastev’s and Holmes’s post-colonial explanation can have at most a limited validity.
The second reason why Applebaum is not really sensitive to Krastev’s insight is that she occupied the opposite position to him during the first twenty years of post-communist transition. As a part of the idealistic wing of the neoconservatives, she identified the unipolar moment with the global spread of human rights and democracy. Since she takes America as a direct embodiment of those universalistic values, however, she cannot find Krastev’s analogy between the post-1989 Westernization of East Central Europe and cultural colonization convincing. Such a comparison would be appropriate only if the West were just one particular culture or civilization among others and not an incarnation of universal values.
Why Applebaum does not feel like a cultural imperialist becomes clear if we recall an insight shared by many European observers and most famously expressed by G.K. Chesterton: in the eyes of its loyal children, America is not a nation, but a religion. It is not a particular territorial state projecting its power outside its borders (a “Great Power”) but rather a church spreading its universal creed. Its cultural hegemony, therefore, arises not through colonization but rather through proselytization: acceptance of the creed, its norms and corresponding way of life transforms the proselyte into a universal man, a direct imago Dei, not somebody assimilated into the culture of another particular nation.
In his review of Applebaum’s book, Krastev claims that she does not really take into account how much her erstwhile East Central European friends who underwent a national conservative about-turn resent people like her. But she cannot really gauge the depth of this resentment unless she drops her naïve universalistic understanding of America and the West and sees them instead as culturally particular entities exerting political, military, and economic control and influence over non-Western parts of the world. Only if she were to concede that Westerners like her are not members of the universal church of human rights and democracy, but rather members of the richest and most powerful nation on earth — which until recently had felt entitled to dominate, represent, and lead the rest of the human race — might she begin to appreciate the depth and intensity of the resentment Krastev is talking about.
IV
In the same review, Krastev also rightly claims that the post-communist consensus and its accompanying ideological compromises held together only so long as the negative reference to communism made sense, that is, until the integration of East Central European nations into the main institutions of the West (such as the EU and NATO) was completed in the mid-2000s. I would add that by that time, both Central and Western Europe began to face challenges which were related much less to the communist past than to the capitalist present. It was then that some of Applebaum’s former friends, both in the West and in the East, became her enemies. This shift happened not because of some irresistible psychological lure of authoritarianism, as Applebaum claims, but rather because the period of post-communist transition had passed and the challenges of overcoming the Cold War division of Europe were replaced by the challenges of capitalist globalization.
Some protagonists of the East Central European anti-totalitarian right, as Ryszard Legutko, one of the leading ideologues of the PiS, does in his The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptation in Free Societies, were able to connect the two kinds of challenges by claiming that the present threat of globalist liberalism, with its potentially “totalitarian” ideologies such as “genderism” and “multiculturalism,” shares a common ideological substance with the past threat of internationalist communism, with its totalitarian ideology of Marxism. Some protagonists of the Western anti-totalitarian right, on the other hand, lost confidence in the ability of the West and America to control the process of globalization which they had unleashed: whereas victory in the Cold War and the ensuing Westernization of the East Central Europe in the 1990s confirmed the greatness of the West and America and their centrality to world history, the failure to Westernize the Middle East in the 2000s and the rise of the global ambitions of China in the 2010s signaled that globalization was no longer in the interest nor fully in the hands of Western nations.
In other words, when some of the carriers of the liberal-conservative consensus of the 1990s found out that instead of enhancing the relative power and standing of America and its Western allies, globalization had begun to lessen them, they turned against it and parted from their liberal friends. Their alliance was tied to the triumphalism of the West in the 1990s. It could not survive its defeatism in the 2010s. As a result of the passing of the post-1989 era, some of Applebaum’s ex-dissident and anti-communist Eastern friends joined Orbán and Kaczyński, some of her old Tory friends supported Brexit and Boris Johnson, and some who like her had been American neocons became Trump supporters.
V
According to Krastev, Applebaum’s blindness to the passing of historical time makes her cling to the outdated worldview of a past era instead of reflecting upon its blind spots. He calls on her to abandon a Cold War kind of liberalism and reinvent it for our present times. This call may be even more readily addressed to Snyder: after all, Applebaum represented the conservative side of the post-1989 consensus, whereas Snyder claims the left-liberal legacy of his mentor Tony Judt. The centrist liberals Krastev and Holmes made the first step towards a critical examination of their creed when they reinterpreted the post-communist transition to Western democracy as a case of cultural colonization and imitation. They then, however, spoiled this promising beginning by presenting the contradictions of imitation as the main, if not the only, explanation of why the post-communist transition failed. We should, however, understand the contradictions of imitation not as the primary driver of change, but rather as a super-structural aspect of asymmetrical political-economic relations between the “core” and its “semi-periphery” which were established during the last wave of capitalist globalization.
Once it is placed within this framework, Krastev and Holmes’s analysis of the Westernization of East Central Europe from the point of view of the colonized remains incomplete without a description of the same process from the point of view of the colonizers — those who belong by birth to the victorious nations of the West, whose way of life and economic and political system was copied and imitated by the post-Soviet East. If we put aside Holmes, who assisted Krastev, neither Snyder nor Applebaum are willing to take up this task. In order to do this, they would have to abandon their self-image as the carriers of universal values and recognize that America is not a church, but a nation like any other. After having written histories of others from an allegedly meta-historical point of view, they would have to historicize themselves and look at themselves not as impartial observers but as partial actors whose attitude towards others is determined by their belonging to a collective entity with particular interests and identity. The recognition of the particular place from which they speak to the world would have to go hand in hand with the abandonment of meta-historical pretensions. They would have to acknowledge that they do not see history from without, but from within.
Snyder asks the American readers of his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017) to be patriots even if their president is not. But while Snyder and Applebaum invoke patriotism against an allegedly unpatriotic and un-American Trump, Trump in turn invokes patriotism against the globalism of Americans like them. Neither side of this dispute is right. It is not a clash between American patriotism and an un-American, unpatriotic attitude, but rather a clash of two patriotisms: the patriotism of a people chosen to lead other peoples and the patriotism of a people trying assert itself against and above other peoples. The former patriotism justifies the asymmetrical power of America vis-à-vis other nations by the care for their redemption, the latter patriotism takes this power as its own justification. Where Snyder’s explanation for Trump’s supposedly unpatriotic attitude is that he is an agent of Russia, Applebaum’s explanation is that he is an embodiment of the anti-Americanism of both the American far left and the American far right. Like them, she claims, Trump wants to destroy the most precious treasure of America — its status as the moral beacon of humankind, a model to be imitated, redeemer of the world.
As far as the last point is concerned, Applebaum is certainly right. This aspect of Trump’s project is masterfully captured in the American sections of Krastev and Holmes’s book. In terms which they do not use, we can summarize their thesis as follows: Trump has replaced the noble “universalistic nationalism” (to borrow a term from H. J. Morgenthau) of a people chosen to lead others out of history into the liberal millennium with the trivial nationalism of a particular collective entity asserting its place in the sun against other such entities. In Trump’s eyes, America should overcome its defeatism by becoming once again a great nation able to beat and subdue the others, but it ought to stop playing the role of a proselytizing church. The idea that Americans should be like anybody else — that they should relinquish their ambition to lead other nations — is unbearable to Applebaum and, implicitly, to Snyder too, as may be read from his hysterical reaction to the attempt by Putin in 2016 to do to America what Clinton was doing to Russia in 1997 when he helped Yeltsin to get elected to the presidency. One cannot help thinking that what pitted Applebaum and Snyder against Trump with such force is not so much an abstract creed of universal human rights and democracy but rather the hurt narcissism of the members of the chosen people.
Instead of merely invoking a universalist American patriotism, Snyder and Applebaum ought to challenge it. What does it mean to be a patriot of a country which has its military bases in most other countries of the world? If patriotism means defending the sovereignty of one’s country against interference from outsiders, what entitles American patriots to do to others what they do not want others to do to them? What would American patriotism look like without American exceptionalism?
Coda
The overall results of the efforts of our three 89-ers to cope with the collapse of their dreams are quite pitiful. In the face of the world-wide rise of nationalism, the two Americans have clung to a specifically American version of it, while the Bulgarian has rationalized it by depicting nationalism as an excessive response to liberalism’s own excesses — as the return of strong national identities which liberalism supposedly repressed. While Snyder’s and Applebaum’s naïve identification of America with the world testifies to their blindness towards both culture and structure, Krastev and his co-author Holmes have let structure and political economy be superseded by culture and political psychology. No matter how compelling their depiction of the contradictions of imitation, it distracts us from the two major flaws of post-1989 liberalism which are much more important: its faith in the trickle-down effects of capitalist globalization and its faith in the compatibility of Western liberalism with civilized human survival on the planet. These two premises of 1989 have been proven wrong by two catastrophic developments which for a growing number of people are now less and less disputable: socio-economic inequalities have undermined democratic institutions, and the ecological crisis has undermined the prospect of dignified life for future generations.
The responses of our three 89-ers to those two main challenges of the present era vary. Whereas Applebaum’s right-wing beliefs allow her to ignore them, Snyder’s left-wing beliefs cause him to devote one whole chapter in his Road to Unfreedom to the elaboration of the claim that inequality produced by the unregulated capitalism of the last 30 years has undermined American democracy. At least within America, he is able to take into account the structural base of political reality. Krastev, who is oblivious to the economic side of post-1989 liberalism in the book co-authored by Holmes, becomes critical of neoliberalism in Seven Early Lessons from the Coronavirus. There, he also opens himself to radical ecological interrogation of the globalist model of capitalist development and suggests that we re-localize our lives without losing our cosmopolitan aspirations. Not a bad new beginning for an 89-er!
*Pavel Barša (1960) was born too late to be a 68-er and too early to be an 89-er. His critique of the ideology of 1989 comes nevertheless from within. In 1988 he signed the manifesto “Democracy for All” which became the basis for the transition program of the Czech Civic Forum in 1989–90. Until 1992, he was an active member of the Civic Movement, a party that co-supervised the first two years of transition and claimed the legacy of what its members saw as the “original spirit” of the Civic Forum associated with Václav Havel. He gained an M.A. in Political Science from the CEU in Budapest, an outpost of intellectual Westernization of the region, in 1995. He has been teaching social and political theory at Charles University in Prague since 2002.
