The Politics of Krisis

WPF Historic Publication The Politics of Krisis Richard Sakwa December 31, 2010 Original copyright © 2010 by World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations Copyright © 2016 by Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute The right of Richard Sakwa to be identified as the author of this publication is hereby asserted. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the original author(s) and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, its co-founders, or its staff members. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher: Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute gGmbH Französische Straße 23 10117 Berlin Germany +49 30 209677900 [email protected] 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).

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