The Politics of Krisis

WPF Historic Publication

Richard Sakwa December 31, 2010

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The Politics of Krisis

Richard Sakwa

Professor of Russian and European Politics, University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom

Originally published 2010 in World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations Bulletin 7, 57–74.

1 The fall of the communist systems between 1989 and 1991 represented anti-revolutions,

repudiating not just the systems themselves but also the political practices associated with

them.1 These anti-revolutions were more than simply counter-revolutions but sought to

transcend the logic on which the communist orders had been constructed. The collapse of the

communist systems signalled the exhaustion of the ideology of Enlightenment revolution, the

view that radical social change could be achieved by the application of reason and the political will of enlightened elites. Of no less importance, the anti-revolutions repudiated the logic of

Marxian emancipatory revolutionism, the idea that society could be transformed in its entirety by an act of revolutionary will. Marxian revolutionary socialism had deepened the primarily political Enlightenment revolutionism to encompass all aspects of social life. The end of the communist revolution put an end to a whole cycle of temporality and inaugurated a new type of historical time. It is the nature of this new temporality, and the politics associated with it, that this paper explores.

The era of the anti-revolution

The revolution in which the ‘subjects themselves become the rulers’2 has now given way to a

period in which the idea of ‘anti-revolution’ permeates social consciousness.3 The anti-

revolution repudiates the revolutionary method of achieving social change and historical justice,

but it is not necessarily reactionary. It opposes the logic of revolution and not just the

determinate features of a specific revolution, and is therefore more than simply a counter-

1 This argument is outlined in my ‘From Revolution to Krisis: The Transcending Revolutions of 1989-91’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 38, No. 4, July 2006, pp. 459-78. 2 Koselleck, quoting Hannah Arendt, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, p. 44. 3 For a discussion of the key features, see Richard Sakwa, ‘The Age of Paradox: The Anti- revolutionary Revolutions of 1989-91’, in Moira Donald and Tim Rees (eds), Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe (London, Macmillan, 2001), pp. 159-76. 2 revolution.4 Its basic spirit has been well described by Gorbachev and Ikeda. Although they

stressed the positive spiritual charge of the new epoch, the burden of expectation has noticeably

declined and it is difficult to retrieve a sense of ‘genuine human history’, 5 organised through the

Politeia rather than at the mercy of the fates in the Nomoi, where the life of a community depends less on its self-characterisation than on its inherent qualities.

Koselleck notes the shift in the understanding of historical time. Before the eighteenth century temporality was seen as the repeated unfolding of eternal truths. ‘All variation, or change, rerum commutation, rerum converse, was insufficient to introduce anything novel into the political world. Historical experience remained involved in its almost natural givenness, and in the same way that the annual seasons through their succession remain forever the same, so mankind qua political beings remained bound to a process of change which brought forth nothing new under the sun’.6 He goes on to describe the new quality with which historical time

was imbued as a result of the new concept of ‘revolution’ being more than circularity, but

overthrow and transcendence through a process of civil war.

The revolutions of 1989-91 put an end to the age inaugurated by Marx’s Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which tied the idea of revolution to the notion of the

liberation of a class. The Marxist revolution was thus inalienably associated with ‘civil war’, not

necessarily taking a violent form but dominated by the logic of a society driven by conflict and

characterised by a shifting war of position between two great forces, the so-called bourgeoisie

and the proletariat, in which politics was no more than instrumental. In Russia the civil war took

a very real form, and ushered in seven decades of communist rule. Like the 240 years of Mongol

4 The point is made by Joseph de Maistre, ‘Supposed Dangers of Counter-Revolution’, in Considerations on France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 83-105, at p. 105. 5 Koselleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, p. 45. 6 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985 [1979]), pp. 41-2. 3 suzerainty, the 74 years of Communist power endowed Russia with a layer of historical

experience that is unique in Europe.7

The domestic roots of the ‘Cold War’ should thus be stressed, which after 1945 took an

external form in the Cold War struggle between ideo-political blocs. This was a domestic cold

war in which the protagonists were allegedly locked in battle until the end of history. All this

was swept away in 1989-91, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold

War played out on the larger stage. Emancipatory revolutionism had exhausted itself and with it, almost as an afterthought, the Leninist party. The end of Soviet communism put an end to all talk of revolutionary socialism.8 Paradoxically, as we shall see, while the domestic sources of

Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form

of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States)

and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one.

Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutionism sustained critiques that sought to

transcend the brute reality of the given. With the crash of the future-oriented Enlightenment and

emancipatory revolutionary cycles, the naturalistic appears to have been restored, leaving only

the traditionalist revolt typical of the epoch of naturalistic cyclicity. History has lost its goal and,

as Jean Bodin always stressed, politics is once again concerned with chance and probability.

The revival of the medical metaphor of crisis in public affairs, one that was prevalent in the pre-

modern era, reflects the historiosophical reality that the practice and conduct of politics has

indeed ‘revolved’ back to an earlier period where class struggle existed but lacked the

dimension of societal emancipation, and where revolutions were liberating rather than

7 Communism in Eastern Europe was of a qualitatively different character. See, for example, Harald Wydra, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007); and also his Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000). 8 Capitalism, of course, is still prone to crises, but the immediate prospects of an ideology based on the abolition of private property and the market would appear to be slim. For an excellent debate on the subject, see Alexsandras Shtromas (ed.), The End of 'isms'? Reflections on the Fate of 4 emancipatory.

The decline in the pursuit of transcendental revolutionary goals, however, has opened

the way for the historically located pursuit of ‘politics’, concerned with temporal matters of

policy rather than the achievement of supra-political goals. The heresies that the Soviet regime called ‘dissent’, grounded in the religion of communism, has now given way to problems of achieving coherence within the constitutional state. The emancipatory revolution had fulfilled whatever historical potential it may have had, and the culmination of one era makes possible the anti-revolutionary integration of social existence on a new basis. As Zygmunt Bauman notes,

the disappearance of ‘emancipation’ from the historical horizon, and with it plans for the

wholesale reordering of human affairs, has profound effects on social theory and political

practice. Contemporary humanity has to get used to ‘living without an alternative’.9 This makes

possible a grounded politics, but it also opens the way for a brute politics based on a

technocratic-pragmatic rationality and a society of the spectacle and consumption, deprived of

progressive let alone transcendent ideals.

The end of the revolution

Epochal thinking since the ancient world is characterised by a sense of the unfolding of time,

but in the modern era this became allied to a progressive understanding of social change. The

Russian revolution was the first large-scale attempt to implement Marxist revolutionary theory,

the first attempt to build a society based on the rejection of Western modernity while trying to

fulfil it. This utopian project, as it is now called, displaced political discourse from grounded

reason towards a political practice that generated closure and exclusivity.10 The pursuit of

Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 9 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), in particular chapters 7 and 8. 10 For general analyses of utopianism, see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Philip 5 transcendent and universal (epochal) goals undermined appreciation of the particularism of the

raw human material and national specificity of the country in which the revolutionaries had to

work. In practice communism everywhere assumed national forms, but the tension between universalism and particularism did not disappear.11 Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership during the

period of perestroika (restructuring, 1985-91) attempted to put an end to revolutionism while

retaining the emancipatory core of Marxism, but this combination (which harked back to the

Prague Spring of 1968) ultimately failed.

This is what we call emancipatory revolutionism, and this was the project that in one

way or another Lenin and Stalin sought to implement in Russia and, after the Second World

War, in Eastern Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the notion of

emancipatory revolutionism had lost whatever popular resonance it once might have had in the

countries that claimed to be building communism. Thus the events of 1989-91, when one

Eastern European country after another shook off the communist power systems, represented

the overthrow not only of a specific regime type but also the repudiation of the social

philosophy of emancipatory revolution on which they were based. It was this, as much as the

geopolitical rearrangement of the international order that they entailed, that rendered these

events epochal.

The collapse of long-term eschatological projects, which have been the characteristic

feature of modernity has changed the nature of historical time. The ‘epochality’ of the fall of

communism derived from the repudiation at the social level of revolution as an emancipatory

act. By epochality we mean the eschatology of endowing parochial events with universal

Allan, 1990) and Jerzy Szacki, Utopia i traditsiya, translated from the Polish (Moscow: Progress, 1990); for application to the USSR, see Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); and for an interesting Soviet analysis, see M. P. Kapustin, Konets Utopii? Proshloe i budushchee sotsializma (Moscow: Novosti, 1990). 11 For a perceptive analysis of this tension in the post-Soviet period, see Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 6 significance. The emergence during the eighteenth century of a discourse of progressive social

change based on a universal model of rationality and development applicable to all societies was

clearly an event of epochal significance. This ideology in the hands of some Enlightenment

thinkers (but certainly far from all) was combined with a revolutionary approach to social

change – that the act of rupture itself had a liberating and progressive political effect. For want of a better term this can be called ‘Enlightenment revolutionism’. In the nineteenth century this idea of political revolution was combined with a social agenda, above all by Karl Marx, based on the idea that through an act of political rupture society could achieve its emancipation not only from oppression but also from subordination to contingency in the very broadest sense.

There is a price, however, to be paid for the end of the revolution, and this has been noted by the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘In France, politics has always been defined by the Revolution. If the Revolution ceases to be desirable, then so does politics. Perhaps what we are witnessing now is the death of politics’.12 The revolution has ended, but a ‘disenchanted’ order takes its place in which the unpredictable and multiple consequences of political intervention paralyse conscious political mobilisation. The bases for political intervention are not clear. The absence of utopia and the possibility (however illusory) of a total and revolutionary change in social existence afflicts art and culture in the broadest sense. Another place of the political imagination (so-called utopias) no longer exists. The very language we use to describe politics, the language of political analysis and the terms applied to describe political concepts, buckle under the pressures generated by the end of the revolution and the absence of a renewed dynamic for the conduct of a post-revolutionary politics. The very act of political imagination is condemned.

The rejection of allegedly utopian aspirations for human emancipation is the theme of

University Press, 1999). 12 The Observer, May 7,1995, p. 16. 7 James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. He casts such projects as Soviet collectivisation and

compulsory Ujamaa villagisation in Tanzania as reflections of ‘authoritarian high modernism’,

which combined ‘the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society’, ‘the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs’,

and the weakened capacity of civil society to resist these plans. 13 High modernism for him is a

strong version of linear beliefs in progress and modernisation that characterised Western Europe

and America up to the First World War. It is ‘a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits

of technical and scientific progress might be applied – usually through the state – in every field of human activity’.14 The historical basis of the argument is a powerful one; but the corollary

that purposive state action is necessarily destructive is one that reflects the anti-statist dynamic

of the ideology of globalisation, itself an ideology that was borne of the fall of communism in

Russia.

The krisis of our time

Reinhart Koselleck notes how the critique of the eighteenth century provoked a crisis whose

first major symptom was the French revolution.15 The meta-cycle of critique and crisis,

however, has not ended with the fall of the communist systems: all that has ended is one

particular sub-cycle (the Marxian revolutionary challenge), but the crisis continues. Crisis

denotes a special type of temporality which western society has endured, if Koselleck is correct,

for at least two centuries. The meta-crisis identified by Koselleck continues, but the post-

revolutionary era is trapped in the smaller cycle of disappointment and reaction.

We use the word ‘crisis’ in three senses. The first draws on the Greek word krisis to

13 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 88, 89. 14 Scott, Seeing Like a State, p. 90. 15 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society 8 suggest a period of reflection in the life of the community, suggesting a moment of

decision.16 Used in a second and conventional sense, evidence of ‘crisis’ is manifest in the contemporary world economy and, interestingly enough from our perspective, the current period is known as ‘the crisis’, to denote the turbulence that has been compared to the great depression of the 1930s. This brings us to the third sense in which the term is used. This draws on the Chinese approach that depicts a crisis as both a danger and an opportunity and is

reminiscent of the first meaning. As in the turning point of an illness, a crisis can prove cathartic: either the patient is healed, or they die. Thus crisis in this sense means not sclerosis but the struggle for life.

The central argument of this paper is that with the end of the idea of revolution as a way of overcoming contingency in human affairs, the notion of ‘crisis’ needs to be given greater elaboration. For the Greeks krisis was a moment to take stock of its situation, but the tragedy of

our times has been that the end of the Cold War and of the whole era of revolutionary politics

has not been used as just such an opportunity. Instead, the fall of communism turned out to be a

false turning point, only reinforcing the power and intellectual prestige of one of the

protagonists, without reflecting on the fact that the emancipatory revolution in part arose as a response to the crisis of that very model.

The transcending anti-revolution of our epoch has enormous consequences for the

conduct of politics in the post-revolutionary era. The new politics is torn between a return to

naturalistic cyclicity and the development of a new cycle of political activism grounded in the

practices of the transcending revolution itself. The language of crisis in part reflects a return to

(Oxford, Berg, 1988). 16 Note also the complementary Greek term krinein, meaning 1) to separate, to divide, to classify, to distinguish, to select, to approve, to define, to determine; 2) to judge, to discern, to explicate, to believe, to interpret; 3) to pass judgment, to decide, to sentence; and 4) to investigate, to explore. Despite the capaciousness of the term, the underlying sense, as with krisis, suggests a moment of decision based on judgment. I am grateful to my colleague Adrian Pabst for his help in distinguishing 9 naturalistic interpretations of human destiny, but it also poses a new challenge. Today we no

longer have revolution but we still have crisis; but now a crisis no longer born out of a belief in

progress but by its absence. Contemporary politics and popular political subjectivity has a

tendency towards the passive,17 but at the same time the positive spirit of the anti-revolution

lives on in movements such as the World Social Forum and, dare I say it, in this forum of the

Dialogue of Civilisations – World Public Forum.

The politics of krisis is a form of resistance to the passivity of naturalistic cyclicity and

provides an opportunity to devise non-epochal but not necessarily pragmatic-technocratic

solutions to the problems that arise from the realities of society. The utopian element in politics

remains necessary in that it allows a politics of transcendence – the refusal to be trapped in the

given by posing the vision of a new politics. More broadly, at the heart of the new politics is an

attempt to rethink ‘the political’, while striving for new interpretations of ‘the international’, rejecting the fatalism and passivity that is associated with the concept of globalisation while

generating new forms of political community.

A classic instance of this passivity and political fatalism is the New Labour

administration in Britain after 1997. The government became locked into a pragmatic-

technocratic mode of governance (governmentality) that undermined the already weak practices

of popular democracy and in the end destroyed the Labour Party as a political organisation,

while missing a historic opportunity to recast British politics. The technocratic-pragmatism of

the Putin system in Russia, while undoubtedly providing an important range of public goods

(the elimination of wage arrears, support for the budgetniki, the end of the egregiously political

power of ‘the oligarchs’, and some domestic and international consolidation of Russian

positions, on which its enduring popularity relies), yet the regime’s lack of a transcendent vision

the various meanings of krisis and krinein. 17 Andrew Gamble, Politics and Fate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 10 means that it inevitably succumbs to the social power of the bureaucracy and the security

apparatus while espousing a liberal-conservative ideology.

Only a critique of naturalism can allow human development itself to become the subject

of history. In the countries of the anti-revolution this remains latent. Contemporary Russia and

other post-communist countries have done little more than to objectify social processes in ways

reminiscent of Enlightenment and emancipatory revolutionism, but now without a social subject

other than the state itself acting in the name of objectified processes like ‘globalisation’ and

‘marketisation’. The anti-revolution has not yet fulfilled its potential by provoking a politics of

krisis.

Krisis and the displacement of temporality

At the present time two types of post-communist crisis intersect. There is the thirty-year crisis

of globalisation, focused on banking deregulation and financialisation beginning from the

mid-1970s, which ultimately provoked the meltdown of the international financial system

from August 2008 to create ‘the crisis’. The disappearance of the communist alternative allowed capitalism to weaken the regulatory regime that had accompanied the post-war

welfarist bargain, which had in part been generated as a response to the communist threat. At

the same time, there is a geopolitical crisis provoked by the disintegration of bipolar bloc

politics. Russia in particular is involved in this new twenty-year crisis, beginning from the

collapse of the communist system in 1989-91. None of the problems facing Europe, if not the

world, provoked by the disintegration of the Soviet pole in the international system have yet

been resolved. Early hopes that the extension of the existing instruments of European security

(Nato) and solidarity (Council of Europe), accompanied by the broadening of the remit of

common security bodies, such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe

(OSCE), would adequately respond to the new circumstances were soon disappointed. 11 Instead, both Nato and the OSCE became the source of conflict rather than instruments to

build an enduring post-cold war security system.

The post-communist era remains liminal. No stable new order, in security or political

terms, has been established in the post Cold War era, to which all the parties are committed.

On the one side, Russia is certainly not a fully-fledged revisionist power. The basis for its

new assertiveness is not an attempt to change the normative basis of the existing world order

but the claim that its equal participation in that system has not been fully acknowledged.

There is a more profound element in the contemporary crisis, however. The new twenty

years’ crisis emerges out of the very nature of the anti-revolutions of 1989-91. These

revolutions repudiated the logic of what went before, and not just the facts of the previous

era. The postcommunist era is based on a fundamental asymmetry: the active repudiation of

one set of principles and the passive acceptance of another. The asymmetry itself provoked a

permanent crisis in post-Soviet Eurasia. There is an absence of the ontological basis for a new

‘normality’. Russia since 1991 has tried to adapt to a normality that is itself in crisis. Russia

represents a parallel sphere where the conscience and bad faith of our era are played out.

Disappointment with the utopian aspirations of emancipatory socialism has given way to a

reaction that not only repudiates the communist system but also the intellectual terrain from

which the movement sprang.18

The post-communist era is associated with endings, collapse and crisis, which lacks, other than in the most primitive Hegelian triumphal form, a sustained collective vision of what the ancients called ‘the good life’. Lacking a basis in contemporary epochality, there is an intensified structural demand on the past to provide legitimacy and the ordering principles for the postcommunist present. This has provoked attempts to revalorise important aspects of the

18 Something done most brilliantly by John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings (London, Allen Lane, 2009). 12 communist past. This is why the struggle over history textbooks and the politics of memory have become so critical in postcommunist public discourse. The broader problem has been explored by Sergei Prozorov, who reinterprets Hegelian notions of the end of history through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. He argues that with the demise of the communist order Russia has entered a post-historical terrain in which the teleological dimension of politics has been demobilised.19 In his view the 1990s in Russia was a period of ‘timelessness’, and postcommunism in general can be characterised as paradoxical ‘time out of time’ in which the ordinary flow of temporality is disrupted, and the lack of the teleological dimension provokes an exaggerated political praxis oriented to the maximisation of the present.20

Easy expectations of a transition from one type of historicity to another were disappointed. The temporality of the so-called transition in Russia ran aground on the realities of spatiality (the geopolitical struggle for territorial influence and prestige), and instead of conforming to the ready-made political praxis devised elsewhere, Russia entered into a period of intensified liminality generated, however, not only by its own civilisational identity but also reflecting the broader crises of our epoch.

Russia for many generations has acted as the canary in the cage of modernity. At the boundaries of European civilisation and an uncomfortable member of the club of European powers, Russia since the reforms of Peter the Great has endured a type of permanent liminality, which waxes and wanes in intensity.21 The fall of communism signalled a period of intensified liminality, given the absence of a normality to which Russia could adapt, thus indicating a condition of permanent krisis. Some societies can find themselves in a liminal state for quite

19 Sergei Prozorov, The Ethics of Postcommunism: History and Social Praxis in Russia (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 20 Sergei Prozorov, ‘Russian Postcommunism and the End of History’, Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 60, pp. 207-30. 21 Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap, 2000). 13 some time, and in Russia’s case the journey from the anti-revolution of 1989-1991 to krisis was a short one. The crisis reflects not only Russia’s permanent liminality but also the liminality in the global system. For Koselleck the crisis has become pathological and has itself become the new normality.

The measurement of time is a way of assessing the historicity or historical quality of a particular era. Time is, indeed, of the essence; and the interaction of time with historical thought has insistently come to the fore, suggesting that contexts are not timeless but connected with epistemic and moral consciousness.22 Gorbachev notes that the ‘Idolization of the future

inevitably led to scepticism about the present, in which millions live’.23 Temporality concerns the immanence of an era, an issue explored by Eric Voegelin in his essay on consciousness, where he discusses the ‘time-consciousness of world-immanent man’.24 Awareness of an event

in time distinguishes one epoch from another, the before from the after, and when raised to the

level of philosophy it become constitutive of an understanding of history as a process. The

novelty of the new century from this perspective is what could be called the ‘detemporalisation’

of time. Koselleck argued earlier that the more intensely a particular time is experienced as a

‘new temporality’, the greater ‘the demands on the future increase’.25 This may well have been

the case in an earlier era, but it is no longer so. When the ‘epochality’ of an era diminishes,

collective ‘demands on the future’ decline, and increasingly focus on individual strategies and

an obsession with the past.

22 The theme is explored by Tyrus Miller (ed.), Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context (Budapest, Central European University Press, 2008). 23 Mikhail Gorbachev and Daisaku Ikeda, Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century: Gorbachev and Ikeda on Buddhism and Communism (London, I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 139. 24 Eric Voegelin, ‘On the Theory of Consciousness’, in Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, translated and edited by Gerhart Niemeyer (Notre Dame & London, University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 14- 35, at p. 14. 25 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Preface’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by 14 The politics of krisis in the post-revolutionary era

The devalorisation of time, lacking a sense of the progressive dimension of an activist politics,

has the inevitable consequence of ‘decitizening’ the individual, with the concomitant advance

of a consumptionist ideology, in a society populated by consumers, in which even passengers

are reduced to ‘customers’. A side effect is that intellectuals become part of apost-revolutionary

lumpen-intelligentsia. New Labour, incidentally, represents precisely the ideology of this new

lumpen-intelligentsia class, where scholarly work is measured by ‘impact’, itself defined in

technocratic-pragmatic terms of effect on the market. Liminality of transformation has given

way to liminality of change without meaning, purpose and direction. The citizen has been

privatised, purposive collective action constrained, corporate power extended into governance,

and the state increasingly acts as a corporate entity in a competitive global environment where

‘brand democracy’ seeks to assert its values in a permanent market war.

For Wolin the features of ‘inverted totalitarianism’ in advanced democracies have

become increasingly pronounced, generated by the development of a new totalising power.

Totalising power is based not on charismatic or personal characteristics alone but is sustained

by a system in which the leader is not so much the architect as its product.26 He talks of

‘managed democracy’ in the United States focused on ‘containing electoral politics’, and

accepts social democracy only to the extent that it provides a literate and socially competent

workforce for its economy and effective soldiers for its armies: ‘Voters are made as

predictable as consumers; a university is nearly as rationalized in its structure as a

corporation; a corporate structure is as hierarchical in its chain of command as the military’.27

An active citizenry has been replaced by an ‘electorate’, whose support provides legitimacy

Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985 [1979]), p. xxiv. 26 Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008), in particular pp. 238-48 and 287. 27 Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 47. 15 for the system but citizens are reduced to a pre-political condition. As in the Soviet system, there is ‘politicisation without politics’: 28 ‘Inverted totalitarianism reverses things: It is all

politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political’.29 Let us now

examine in more details the features of the contemporary politics of krisis.

a) The end of epochal time

Historical time, according to Koselleck, is defined by differentiating between past and future, or

(as he puts it), in anthropological terms, experience and expectation.30 In the post-communist

world the balance between experience and expectation is heavily weighted to the former as a

result of the failure of utopian aspirations vested in the permanent civil war of emancipatory

revolutionism. Transcendental emancipatory historicism has given way to the mean localised

historicism of the Fukuyama type. Although demands on the future are structurally increased

(given the failure of the past), the expectation that the future will fulfil these expectations is

decreased. Societies where modernist progressivism reached its apogee are being re-introduced

to modernity at a time when social optimism is on the wane. The future is no longer justice but a

thin rationalistic technocratism; the price of the pursuit of justice proved too high. Today the

weight of the future in social consciousness has decreased, compensated by the enhanced value

of foreign role models as temporal utopianism gave way to spatial ones.31

Liminality turns in on itself, and the threshold becomes the world, with movement

backwards and forwards constrained. Permanent liminality no longer permits novelty and

innovation but imposes formlessness and disorientation as a technique of governmentality.

28 Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 65. 29 Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 66. 30 Koselleck, Futures Past, op. cit., p. xxiii. 31 See, for example, Bo Petersson, National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), esp. pp. 107-12. 16 There is permanent change but never transformation.32

b) The repudiation of revolution and the triumph of gradualism

An interesting interchange takes place between Ikeda and Gorbachev on the subject of the

French Revolution. Ikeda notes that Goethe, unlike Hegel, rejected the revolution ‘on the

strength of his organic sense of life’, and quotes Goethe’s comments on revolution as follows:

And, furthermore, nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants, without apish imitation of another; since what to one race of people, of a certain age, is nutrient, may prove poison for another. All endeavours to introduce any foreign innovation, the necessity for which is not rooted in the core of the nation itself, are therefore foolish; and all premeditated revolutions of the kind are unsuccessful, for they are without God, who keeps aloof from such bungling. If, however, there exists an actual necessity for a great reform amongst a people, God is with it, and it prospers. 33

This is a theme repeated by numerous Russian commentators. For example, Elgiz Pozdnyakov, the author of numerous books on geopolitics and the philosophy of state and law, devoted his recent work to the ‘fruitlessness of any attempt at substantial social changes by a people on the

basis of rational plans or ideas, not taking into account the deep roots of the society and state’.34

He developed this Hayekian theme to argue that ‘if the foundations of a society or state change,

it is not the result of some internal overturn, however radical they may be, but as a result of

lengthy and complex changes and adaptations to the changing world. Internal overturns, shocks

and revolutions create only better or worse conditions for this’.35 In this spirit contemporary

Russia is characterised by a profound anti-revolutionary spirit.36 Much Russian patriotic writing

32 Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 96 puts it well: ‘Change suggests a modification that retains a prior “deeper” identity. Transformation implies supersession, or submergence, of an old identity and the acquisition of a new one’. 33 Gorbachev and Ikeda, Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century, p. 134; quoted from Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (New York, Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 37. 34 E. A. Pozdnyakov, ‘Umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’…’ (Moscow, Voslen, 2008), p. 29. 35 Pozdnyakov, ‘Umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’…’, p. 41. 36 For Vladimir Putin’s views, see Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, 2nd edn (London, Routledge, 17 today comes close to the view, put forward most eloquently by Rudolf Kjellén, of the state as an

almost organic living organism, and it is not surprising that his book on The State as a Life

Form has recently been translated into Russian.37 Kjellén gives the state almost human

characteristics, including ‘temperament, will, character, and living features’. 38 The tendency to

anthropomorphise the state provides ready material for the international political anthropologist.

Indeed, one of the best books on the subject in Russia precisely claims to examine ‘the socio-

biological and cultural grounds of power, forms of social stratification and mobility’.39

The gradualist thesis, or the evolutionary approach to social change, has now triumphed.

While clearly this has developed in reaction to the terrors of the radical changes associated with

the Jacobin/Bolshevik tradition, some of the deeper implications of the repudiation need to be

explored. Above all, the idea of revolution, as Koselleck noted, imbued time with purpose and

direction, and thus inspired generations with a sense that the flow of time was intelligible and

that human intervention was purposeful and effective. A revolution marked the passage from

one condition to another; for the revolutionaries this marked the transcendence of former

inadequacies and through civil war entailed a rupture in historical development; whereas for

those of a more conservative hue the onset of a civil war could not but destroy the organic unity

of the nation and its historical trajectory (viz, Gorbachev, Pozdnyakov) and inaugurates a period

of timelessness (Prozorov).

Anti-revolutionism does not necessarily mean reaction or restoration, but it does entail

an organic philosophy of history and thus of social development. With the end of the era of

revolution a fundamental problem has emerged: how to be between two states when there is no

2008), pp. 46-47. 37 Rudolf Kjellén, Staten som lifvsform (Stockholm, Hugo Gebers Förlag, 1916); translated as Rudol’f Chellen, Gosudarstvo kak forma zhizni (Moscow, Rosspen, 2008). 38 From the introduction by M. V. Il’in, ‘Politicheskie professii Rudol’fa Chellena’, in Chellen, Gosudarstvo kak forma zhizni, p. 29. 39 N. N. Kradin, Politicheskaya antropologiya, 2nd edn (Moscow, Logos, 2004), frontispiece. 18 transcendence of the historical present. Permanent liminality gives way to suspended liminality.

Liminality without a philosophy of history is something very different from a liminality

conceived as a temporality that is rich with the promise of a different future. In other words,

while liminality in the anthropological literature suggests that it acts as the portal to a more

advanced state of maturity, when applied to the life of nations this directional characteristic may

well be absent. The era of revolutions has come to an end and with it the naturalistic restoration

of temporality as the eternal changing of the seasons. The exhaustion of the idea of revolution as the positive transcendence of a given condition allowed the return of the traditional meaning of the term as the eternal cycle of life at the mercy of the gods of fate. The practices of peace-time governance and the quality of peace are imbued with the shadowy quality and ambiguity characteristic of liminal periods.

c) The new governmentality

Postcommunist anti-revolutionism is accompanied by the demobilisation not only of liberatory and emancipatory movements but also by a new style in the management of public affairs. The central feature is the dismantlement of government in favour of governance. The underlying

public choice philosophy has intensified popular disempowerment, weakened political

accountability, and intensified the power of capital over polity, including the financialisation of

governance and markets. The privatisation of public functions is accompanied by their

commercialisation and the culture (from the Latin, tilling and nurturing) of effective public

participation has shrivelled. Instead the practices of Enron and WorldCom have become generalised, whose disastrous consequences were revealed in the crash of 2008.

The advance of democracy has everywhere been accompanied not only by the strengthening of the state in new ways (from the coercive to the infrastructural, to use Michael

Mann’s terms), but also by the extension of governmental intrusion into aspects of individual 19 daily life. Although the concept of governmentality in Foucault’s works is susceptible to

differing interpretations, reflecting the evolution of the concept in his thinking, it remains a rich

source of insight into understanding power and authority. The idea of governmentality

combines ‘the practice of governing and the necessary ‘mentalities’ of government that make

governing possible’. It focuses therefore not just on the behaviour of institutions but also on

discursive articulations of their operation as appreciated by the subjects of governance.40 In a

liberal democratic society institutional practices are accompanied by practices and techniques

that both reinforce and also subvert the proclaimed principles of governance. The idea of

governmentality is now also being applied to the study of international politics in an attempt

to move away from increasingly sterile juxtapositions of realism versus constructivism or

other binary systems.

There is, as Geoff Eley puts it, ‘a pervasive sense in our own times that the state has

been passing increasingly beyond accountability’.41 Traditional liberal-constitutional constraints

on executive power are increasingly weak, while substantive aspirations for popular control and

management become an increasingly distant memory. Power has become not only increasingly

remote, but is also, as Eley notes, ever less intelligible and susceptible to popular intervention.

Gramsci’s model of hegemony at least opened up spaces for resistance, however attenuated the

embedded notion of revolutionary transcendence may have been. In distinguishing between

coercion and consent, the latter provided an arena for counter-mobilisation against the

hegemonic power system. The residual idea of revolutionary transcendence may well have been

superfluous, but it provided inspiration for a politics of popular empowerment. The capitalist

state has never been homogeneous and has traditionally allowed sites for contestation and

40 Jonathan Joseph, ‘The Limits of Governmentality: Social Theory and the International’, European Journal of International Relations, forthcoming. 41 Geoff Eley, ‘War and the Twentieth-Century State’, Vol. 142, No. 2, Spring 1995, pp. 155-74, at p. 159. 20 incorporation.

In Gramsci’s reading these sites were intelligible, well sign-posted and focused on reasonably demarcated institutions of state power, although even formal institutions were understood to be embedded in networks of impersonal relations, whereas in Foucault’s model of dispersed infrastructural power it is not at all clear how and where patterns of resistance can be generated. Although power may be diffuse and take weakly-institutionalised and structurally undifferentiated forms, any theory of domination that lacks a modality in which strategies of counter-domination may be articulated ultimately becomes an accessory in that domination.

This is not for a moment to suggest that this is the outcome of Foucault’s analysis of the decentred patterns of contemporary capitalist domination. Foucault’s late notion of ‘care of the self’, an attitude of autopoesis, provides an insight into how strategies of personal spiritual resistance can begin to articulate a way of overcoming the modern apparatus of subjectivisation’.42 By exposing existing patterns of domination, they can begin to be

challenged; and thus perhaps a new cycle of revolution will be restored.

d) The international – back to geopolitics?

Gorbachev stressed that the ‘new thinking’ in the Soviet Union had put an end to the Cold War,

noting that ‘The Cold War was contrary to the interests of humanity’. However, he was well

aware that on its own, ‘the abrogation of ideological conflict did not lead automatically to a

general, definitive peace’. While the threat of nuclear catastrophe may have decreased (and even

this is not certain), new threats had emerged. As Gorbachev put it, ‘The Cold War froze

numerous geopolitical, national, and ethnic conflicts, not all of which were connected to the

Cold War itself. … The Cold War quasi-stability created a reassuring impression that the post-

42 One of the pioneers in bringing Foucault’s late works to a wider audience was Arpad Szakolczai. For a recent study, see Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London, Continuum, 2002). 21 conflict world order was predictable’.43 He went on to stress that ‘The ending of the Cold War

made our world no safer. Today many people are beginning to look on total Westernization as

they once did on the threat of total, forcible communalization. Apparently, the West is incapable

of dealing in a reasonable way with the results of the new thinking that freed the world from

bloc politics and total confrontation’.44 He lamented the fact that the fruits of the new thinking

were ‘withering away before our eyes’, and even though Russia had ‘rushed towards the West

with open arms and the best possible will’, the West had not reciprocated. It had been incapable

of ‘working out either a new doctrine of collective security or a new ideology of peaceful

development. Today the fate of the world is in the hands of institutes (sic) formed during the

Cold War’. The European process was sacrificed, in his view, to the eastward expansion of

NATO, and the ‘possible untoward consequences of this mechanistic approach to the problem

of European and global security are overlooked’. 45

e) From crisis to war?

While there is no new world to be built, the principles of the old world are aggressively

advanced. As the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady

Zyuganov, put it in his report to the thirteenth party congress on 29 November 2008, ‘With

the destruction of the Soviet Union war has again become a legitimate policy instrument for

the leading imperialist powers’.46

Wolin notes the process of ‘anticommunism as mimesis: the character of the enemy

supplied the norm for the power demands that the democratic defender of the free world

43 Gorbachev and Ikeda, Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century, p. 57. 44 Gorbachev and Ikeda, Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century, p. 147. 45 Gorbachev and Ikeda, Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century, p. 147. 46 G. Zyuganov, ‘Political Report of the CPRF Central Committee to the 13th Party Congress’, 29 November 2008, http://kprf.ru/party_live/61739.html. 22 chose to impose on itself’.47 A ‘superpower’ is defined by Wolin ‘as an imaginary of power

that emerges from defeat unchastened, more imperious than ever’. 48 The ‘War’ in the abstract

has been declared, while the reality of great power rivalry is occluded.49 War is inevitable; the

only question is the form in which the conflict will become manifest, the intensity of the

fighting and the consequences for human sustainability.

Conclusion

The features of the post-revolutionary epoch can be briefly listed as follows: 50 a) the deceleration of historical time; b) evolution rather than revolution becomes the dominant principle, and thus the idea of civil war as an instrument of social progress is repudiated; c) revolts or rebellions against historical injustice, subordination or captivity will undoubtedly continue to occur, but these events have lost the transcendental significance as emancipatory acts with some sort of universal significance; d) as a derivative of this, the ‘utopian’ element in programmes of social change (belief in a ‘new future’) has been much reduced, if not delegitimated, because of the perceived ‘totalitarian’ temptation inherent in all utopian projects, accompanied by an overall disenchantment with the notion of ‘progress’ because of its earlier scientistic and rationalistic traps, tending towards the dehumanising managerial resolution of perceived problems; e) a shift from material to spiritual and moral concerns, including a new awareness of ‘the political’ accompanied by the repudiation of social revolutions; f) the spatial compression from ‘world revolution’ to national development; and g) if in the epoch of revolutions ‘all wars have been transformed into civil wars’, 51 today civil wars retain intense local resonance but little universal significance (including mostly the absence of the escalatory

47 Cf. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 37. 48 Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 40. 49 Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 31. 50 The points draw on Koselleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, pp. 46-5. 23 threat of nuclear war), and hence their increasingly protracted and intractable character. One act of violence succeeds the other, but the international organisations established at the end of the

Second World War lack the power or mandate to intervene effectively, while the former superpowers are each preoccupied with new problems of their own. The era of the emancipation of classes and the liberation of peoples has given way to a permanent krisis whose liminal potential (i.e., transformative capacity) appears minimal.

The fundamental consequence of the end of the revolution is that the epochal thinking associated with the modern revolutionary tradition has now given way to the possibility of a grounded politics. The Enlightenment revolutions were not followed by the anticipated metanoia, that change of heart on which a new society could be built, but rather the regimes, after the delay in the arrival of the anticipated millennium, adapted to the environment and native traditions;52 but for emancipatory revolutions it was precisely the impossibility of adaptation that endowed them with a fundamentally tenuous quality. It is for this reason, where the political is subsumed into the social revolution, that the post-communist restoration is more complex than those following the Enlightenment revolutions. Only with the fall of the revolutionary regime can a politics grounded in the political concerns of society emerge. Ethics and morality, ‘living by truth’ and rejecting the lie, worked as potent weapons against the party- state and they now act as the basis of a new moral culture. The new culturalism, no doubt, contains its own dangers, in particular the neglect of the inequalities emerging out of new patterns of stratification,53 but it also provides an opportunity to treat ‘the political’ as a moment to examine hierarchies of sovereignty.54 The anti-revolutions of 1989-1991 mark not only the

51 Koselleck, ‘Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution’, p. 54. 52 An argument made by Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, op. cit., p. 252. 53 A point argued, for example, by Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 203. 54 One author who has most systematically tried to deal with this question is Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 1993); The Democratic Paradox (London and 24 point at which the revolution ended but the inauguration of a new type of politics of ‘crisis’ whose resolution remains to be found.

New York: Verso, 2000), and other works.