György Schöpflin, Kőszeg, 21 June 2009

1. Communism was not only a power-political system and an ideological language, but also came to create its own cultural capital. These meant forms of adaptation to the exercise of arbitrary power, transforming it where possible into predictability, accepting it, benefiting from it, resisting it. Gellner: communism was a negative moral order by which peole ordered their lives. One of the central requirements was not to accept the obvious as truth, but to look for hidden meanings and to insist that all events had a cause, that chance, accident, coincidence were unreal and, equally, that one's own agency was negligible. In a word, living with the communist system naturalised closed epistemologies and ideological thinking. Structures were all and structures could not be changed by individual action, even while collective action was doomed to fail because the power-political system was too strong. Coercion and the fear of the threat of coercion were real, but adaptation and cooptation made force less and less necessary. These features made up the cultural capital of these societies constituted a very serious obstacle to the introduction of democracy.

2. Institutional authority and the rule of law. There was an assumption in the West, and to some extent among reformers, that the introduction of new institutions was enough to ensure democratic behaviour. This was decidely naive. The new and old institutions did not command the same authority that they did in the West – they could hardly do so, given the deep-rooted belief in institutions as façades. The result was a degree of mimetic behaviour, though the extent of this varied in space and time. Communism was partly unsustainable, because it failed to develop trustworthy institutions, hence public cognitions and behaviour – including public perceptions of aetiology – became personalised. Individuals were interpreted as real, whereas institutions were regarded as the opposite. The outcome was that all phenomena in the public sphere tended to be understood as driven by persons and, above all, by personal interest and connections.

An essential element of democracy is reflexivity, a capacity for external self-apperception, which is the road to objectivity and the ability to accept value pluralism, alternative interpretations of the same event and the proposition one's own subjective, cultural baggage. Communism did nothing to enhance reflexivity, on the contrary it insisted on black-and-white interpretations of reality and the existence of a single truth.

3. Ken Jowitt, in his New World Disorder wrote of a Genesis Environment, where far-reaching novation was possible. But this reckoned without the established norms and the varying political will to bring about radical change. Here it is clear that where real or symbolic revolutions took place, the chances of a refoundation were better (Baltic states, Czech Republic), but other factors, like elite adaptation could put a brake on this (Romania, Slovakia).

4.The West's role. The West proceeded from the assumption that an economy-led transformation would (automatically?) result in democracy, ie. democracy via private property and prosperity, together with a new class of capitalists who would behave like Western capitalists, like accept risk taking. This had its ultimate origins in the Washington consensus, that free markets solve all problems. This, however, reckoned without the grey privatisations, which brought into being a new class of property owners, who thereafter had a belief in illegality as acceptable in economic activity and was committed to seeking political guarantees for the newly acquired state property. Economic activity was based on corrupt bargains that were subsequently given legal form – the law itself was treated as a soft constraint. The consequent sense of injustice on the part of those not a part of the grey privaisation was swept to one side, as was the paradox that the new capitalists were frequently the same as the old nomenklatura, including the secret police. The West appeared to accept this with equanimity, in some cases was complicit in the quest for easy profits.

5. The introduction of the democratic process brought into being new political groups, that had next to no experience of politics, administration and management, and were thus easy prey for the experienced nomenklatura bureaucrats. At the same time, the cognitive, semantic and intellectual deficits of the population made it very difficult for a civil society to emerge. Crucially, the reformers had no theory of the state, what the state could and should do, how it should be transformed, especially where the rule of law was concerned, together with how much continuity there should be from the past. In this the West pressed for a stability over radical change.

6. Caesura or no caesura? The velvet transformations were lauded as non-violent, but ended up as elite-led and elite-controlled processes, with the result that popular identification with democracy was lower than it should have been. That in turn allowed elites to appopriate the democratic agenda and to determine what the content of democracy was. The West stood by and watched. Where new states were founded, caesuras were easier to bring about. The deeper the caesura, the easier it became to reshape norms and political behaviour.

7. Weak institutional authority also applied to political parties, even while much of society had very little idea of competitive politics, looked instead for the kind of homogeneity that was articulated in CS 1968 and by Solidarity. The left inevitably carried over some of its communist past, especially where it was closely intertwined with the grey privatisers, while the right had to invent amd imagine itself from nothing – very few usable materals.

8. The West's theory of democracy was seriously deficient in that it had no understanding of what was required to construct democracy and citizenship against the cultural capital inherited from communism. The collapse came unexpectedly and neither the West nor the communist elites were prepared for the transformation. There was no intellectual input, just bureaucratic regulation, with some support from Western political parties, but the Social Democrats were more complicit with communism than was evident at the time. Regrettably, although the West made promises to support democracy, it did not really do so and left the new democracies on their own to face the triple transformation – democratisation, Europeanisation, globalisation.