The Forgotten Twentieth-Century

2011-11-29

The Forgotten Twentieth-Century

BERLIN – It has been 20 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which for many historians marked the real end of the “short twentieth century” – a century that, beginning in 1914, was characterized by protracted ideological conflicts among communism, fascism, and liberal democracy, until the latter seemed to have emerged fully victorious. But something strange happened on the way to the End of History: we seem desperate to learn from the recent past, but are very unsure about what the lessons are.

Clearly, all history is contemporary history, and what Europeans, in particular, need to learn today from the twentieth century concerns the power of ideological extremes in dark times – and the peculiar nature of European democracy as it was constructed after World War II.

In some ways, the great ideological struggles of the twentieth century now seem about as close and relevant as the scholastic debates of the Middle Ages – especially, but not only, for younger generations. Who now remotely understands – let alone takes the trouble to try to understand  – the great political dramas of intellectuals like Arthur Koestler and Victor Serge, people who risked their lives for and then against communism?

Nevertheless, much more than most of us would care to admit, we remain enmeshed in the concepts and categories of the twentieth century’s ideological wars. This was most obvious with the intellectual responses to Islamist terror: terms like “Islamo-fascism” or “third totalitarianism” were coined not just to characterize a new enemy of the West, but also to evoke the experience of the anti-totalitarian struggles that preceded and followed World War II.

Such terms seek to borrow legitimacy from the past and to explain the present – in a way that most serious scholars of either Islam or terrorism never found very helpful. Analogizing in this way seemed more to reflect a desire to re-fight the old battles, rather than to sharpen political judgment about contemporary events.

So how should we think about the ideological legacy of the twentieth century? For one thing, we need to stop viewing the twentieth century as a historical parenthesis filled with pathological experiments conducted by crazed thinkers and politicians, as if liberal democracy had been there before those experiments and merely needed to be revived after they failed.

It is not a pleasant thought – and perhaps even a dangerous one – but the fact remains that many people, not just ideologues, put their hopes in the twentieth century’s authoritarian and totalitarian experiments, viewing politicians like Mussolini and even Stalin as problem-solvers, while liberal democrats were written off as dithering failures.

This is not to make any excuses – it is not true that to comprehend is to forgive. On the contrary, any proper understanding of ideologies must reckon with their power to seduce and even genuinely convince people who care little about their emotional appeal – whether to pride or to hate – but who think they actually offer rational policy solutions. We must remember that Mussolini and Hitler were ultimately brought to power by a king and a retired general, respectively – in other words, traditional elites, not street-fighting fanatics.

Second, we need to appreciate the special and innovative nature of the democracy created by Western European elites after 1945. In light of the totalitarian experience, they stopped identifying democracy with parliamentary sovereignty – the classic interpretation of modern representative democracy everywhere but in the United States. Never again should a parliamentary assembly just cede power to a Hitler or a Pétain. Instead, the architects of post-war European democracy opted for as many checks and balances as possible – and, paradoxically, for empowering unelected institutions to strengthen liberal democracy as a whole.

The most important example is constitutional courts – a different animal from the US Supreme Court, and one specifically tasked with ensuring respect for individual rights. Eventually, even countries traditionally suspicious of “government by judges” – France being the classic case – accepted this model of constrained democracy. And virtually all Central and Eastern European countries adopted it after 1989. Importantly, European institutions – especially the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights – also fit this understanding of democracy through prima facieundemocratic mechanisms.

Today, many Europeans are clearly dissatisfied with this conception of democracy. Many have the impression that the continent is entering what the political scientist Colin Crouch has called a “post-democratic” era. Citizens increasingly claim that political elites do not properly represent them, and that directly elected institutions – national parliaments in particular – are forced to bow to unelected bodies like central banks. Passionate grassroots protest and surging populist parties across the continent are the result.

It will not do simply to reaffirm the post-war European model of democracy, as if the only alternative were totalitarianism of one sort or another. But we should be clear about where we are coming from, and why – and that there was no golden age of European liberal democracy, whether before World War II, in the 1950’s, or at some other mythical point.

Ordinary Europeans long trusted elites with the business of democracy – and often even seemed to prefer unelected elites. If they now want to modify the social contract (and assuming that direct democracy remains impossible), change ought to be based on a clear, historically grounded sense of which innovations European democracy might really need – and of whom Europeans really trust to hold power. That discussion has barely begun.

Jan-Werner Mueller teaches at Princeton University. His latest book is Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe.

Copyright: Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org

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Συνέφαγε με τους αστέγους o Παπαδήμος

Ο πρωθυπουργός Λουκάς Παπαδήμος βρέθηκε ανήμερα της Πρωτοχρονιάς κοντά στους αστέγους και τους απόρους του Δήμου Αθηναίων, στο πλαίσιο των εκδηλώσεων αλληλεγγύης που διοργανώνει ο δήμος. 

Στο κλειστό γήπεδο του Ρουφ, όπου παραχωρήθηκε το γεύμα, τον πρωθυπουργό υποδέχθηκαν ο δήμαρχος Αθηναίων Γιώργος Καμίνης και ο υπουργός Επικρατείας και κυβερνητικός εκπρόσωπος Παντελής Καψής.

Μετά το πέρας της επίσκεψης, ο πρωθυπουργός και ο δήμαρχος έκαναν τις ακόλουθες δηλώσεις:

Λ. ΠΑΠΑΔΗΜΟΣ: Είμαι ιδιαίτερα ευτυχής που είχα την ευκαιρία να γιορτάσω την Πρωτοχρονιά με τους συμπολίτες μας που έχουν τη μεγαλύτερη ανάγκη. Ήταν μια όμορφη, πιστεύω, και ζεστή ατμόσφαιρα και θα ήθελα να συγχαρώ τον δήμαρχο Αθηναίων, τους συνεργάτες του, τις εθελόντριες και τους εθελοντές και όσους υπεύθυνους, που οργάνωσαν αυτή τη γιορτή, η οποία έχει μεγάλη σημασία για όλους μας. Και πιστεύω να βρουν και μιμητές και υποστηρικτές. Είναι αναγκαίο αυτές οι προσπάθειες να διευρυνθούν και να ενισχυθούν. Καλή χρονιά.

Γ. ΚΑΜΙΝΗΣ: Εγώ, από την πλευρά μου, να ευχαριστήσω τον κ. Πρωθυπουργό που μας τίμησε σήμερα με την παρουσία του. Η παρουσία αυτή έχει έναν συμβολικό χαρακτήρα: δείχνει ότι η Πολιτεία είναι κοντά στους ανθρώπους που αυτή τη στιγμή έχουν τη μεγαλύτερη ανάγκη. Άλλωστε προχθές ανακοινώθηκαν συγκεκριμένα μέτρα και από την πλευρά του κράτους και από την πλευρά του δήμου, ο οποίος θα ενισχυθεί από την κυβέρνηση σε αυτό το έργο που έχει αναλάβει – να βοηθήσει, στο πλαίσιο της επιβαλλόμενης κοινωνικής αλληλεγγύης, τους ανθρώπους που έχουν τη μεγαλύτερη ανάγκη. Σας ευχαριστώ πολύ και καλή χρονιά.

Επιμέλεια: Μαριάννα Μαρμαρά (Zougla.gr)

EUROPE’S OTHER CRISIS – AUTHORITARIANISM

Jan-Werner Muller

Contesting Democracy by  Jan-Werner Mueller is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe – both West and East – to appear since the end of the Cold War. In his article, originally published on Open Democracy, Mueller argues that the political conditions of EU membership are more fundamental than the economic ones, and Hungary, who are busy creating a nightmarish “managed democracy” while Europe has its gaze turned to its other crisis, should not be allowed to stay in the club while flouting basic democratic principles.

Article by Jan-Werner Mueller was originally published in the independent online magazine opendemocracy.net

These past few weeks European leaders have declared time and time again that the European Union is going through its gravest crisis ever.  They are right – except that it is a double crisis: one is about the Euro; the other has nothing to do with the common currency and is not unfolding in Rome or Athens, but further north: in Budapest.  There the national-populist government of Viktor Orbán, in power since April 2010 with a two-thirds majority in parliament, has been systematically undermining the rule of law and dismantling democratic institutions.  It is the first time ever that an EU Member State is sliding back towards authoritarianism.  Failure to prevent the emergence of a ‘managed democracy’ within the EU puts the promise of European integration into much more serious doubt than the troubles of the Eurozone – because that promise was at heart always political, not economic.  If European leaders continue to care only about financial matters, they’ll miss a much more dangerous form of contagion.

Viktor Orban

Viktor Orbán was prime minister of Hungary once before, from 1998 to 2002.  He already then behaved in sufficiently illiberal ways that Washington in particular was not pleased and denied him a much-desired invitation to the White House.  But his government was not illiberal enough to delay Hungary joining the EU in 2004.  Hungarians, like all other new entrants to the EU, felt that both political stability and prosperity were now safely ensured.  But the left-liberal parties which ruled from 2002 onwards discredited themselves by a series of corruption scandals and by lying about the state of the economy.  They also ran up huge debts.  The result: Orbán collected around 53 percent of the votes in the 2010 elections – but the peculiarities of the electoral law gave him a huge majority in parliament.  He promptly used that majority to erect a new ‘system of national cooperation’.

In practice, this meant curtailing the powers of the courts (the Hungarian Constitutional Court, internationally highly respected, in particular), passing a draconian media law which the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe compared to the rules on press freedom in totalitarian states, and hastily enacting a new constitution which entrenches the highly partisan vision of Orbán’s party without popular consultation or referendum.  The constitution’s nationalistic preamble also rehabilitates the authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy – one more symbolic act in an antiliberal Kulturkampf, which has already seen the appointment of openly anti-Semitic intellectuals to prestigious cultural posts.

All this was possible because Orbán has a two-thirds majority in a unicameral parliament — and, to be sure, support in the population, at least up until recently, when the economy took yet another turn for the worse.  In fact, his majority is still busy enacting so-called ‘cardinal laws’ to specify many of the general provisions of the constitution.  One is a new election law which disadvantages smaller parties — which, to be sure, is not in itself necessarily undemocratic — but, more important, redraws elections districts in such a way that Orbán’s party would have won every single election since 1998 (that is to say: also in 2002 and 2006, when the socialist-liberal coalition clearly outpolled them).  Even more worrying is that the government is staffing many state posts (especially courts and media boards) with its own people for exceptionally long periods – a fact which reinforces the impression that Orbán is trying to create a system where ideally he never loses an election – but even if he were to lose one, his party would never fully lose power.

To be sure, other Central and Eastern European countries have had their ups and downs with liberal democracy — one need only remember the Polish Kaczyńskibrothers a few years back.  In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that the security of actual EU Membership precisely allows national leaders to act up a little, while never quite going over the authoritarian brink.  But this time really is different: never before has a constitution rendered a decidedly antiliberal political vision permanent, and never before have both an opposition and potential countervailing powers — such as the Constitutional Court — been so systematically weakened.  Western observers have been right to warn of ‘Putinization’ and the emergence of a ‘Lukashenko lite’, a milder version of Belarus’ ruthless authoritarian ruler, inside the EU.

Hillary Clinton made the displeasure of the US obvious in a meeting with Orbán in the summer, and Washington should keep up the pressure on what after all is a NATO ally.  But the real burden is on Europe.  Officially the European Union has no mechanism for excluding countries – they can only leave voluntarily.  However, Brussels can name and shame – and ultimately suspend the voting rights inside the EU of states that violate core values of democracy and the rule of law.  Of course, this can sound like a typical Eurosceptic nightmare: Europe dictating to a democratically elected government and giving nationally legitimated politicians lessons from on high as to what a proper understanding of people power is.  But Europe is, after all, a club with its own rules (and particular understandings of those rules); any club has the right to enforce them for members who have entered the club voluntarily.  European understandings of democracy and the rule of law are indeed diverse – but not infinitely so.

Still, European leaders have been reluctant to open a second political front, when saving the Euro is seemingly consuming all available political capital.  But if they are willing, for instance, to threaten Greece with exit from the Eurozone, why are they not prepared to confront the Hungarian government, when actually so much more is at stake?  The European Union might sometimes get it wrong on economics and survive – but it can’t afford to get it wrong on politics.

…

Jan-Werner Muller teaches politics at Princeton University. His previous books include A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identityand Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-century Europe, all published by Yale University Press.

http://yalebooks.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/author-article-by-jan-werner-mueller-europes-other-crisis-authoritarianism/