After the Flood

Bogdan Denitch After the Flood World Politics and Democracy in the Wake of Communism Contents Preface vii 1. European Unity, Neocorporatism, and the Post-Cold War World 1 2. The Decline of the United States: Costs of a Hollow Victory 28 3. The Future of (Dys)topia: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union 55 4. North/South: The Third World in the New International Environment 86 5. Democracy for the Twenty-first Century: The Question of Socialism 114 6. Conclusion: Between Demos and Ethnos 142 Notes 157 Index 169 Preface ... and so there were many that began to cry out that the days of darkness had lasted too long . .. And they said, "Come let us build our homes around this bush that has burned throughout the ages." Now it happened that one by one the branches were consumed and fell in ashes to the ground. Even the roots were burned out and became cold cinders. And once again there was darkness and cold. Then voices were raised, crying: . .. "We must start again even if we have to plant a new bush." Blessed be those who speak such words! May the stones be not too cruel to their feet; may their courage equal our suffering . —From The Burned Bramble, by Manes Sperber1 Experts Agreed: Communism Was the Wave of the Future My epigraph is drawn from the preface to a significant political novel written at a time which was probably the nadir of hope for democratic radicals, one of whom was Manes Sperber. The Burned Bramble was one of many contemporary doomsday works written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, although, unlike most, its author had retained at least a conditional hope and a general left orientation. Other major books in that now all but forgotten intellectual wave included Arthur Koestler's The Age of Longing, the edited volume, The God that Failed, and George Orwell's 1984. These writers shared a vision of the Stalinist totalitarianism that seemed then to be triumphant and invincible, vastly more efficient and ruthless than the flabby liberal democracies and social democratic movements of the West. Capitalism was discredited in part because conservative political and economic elites in the West had been compromised by large scale concessions and collaboration with fascism and Nazism. The rich in France, Belgium, Holland, and even to some extent in Britain had preferred to do business with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco than with their own mild reformist labor and socialist parties. Whatever else capitalism seemed to be at the end of World War II, it was not seen as a defender of democracy or equality. For that matter it was not even particularly efficient as a system. The relative inefficiency of capitalism, particularly one untrammeled with Keynesian viii Preface state interventionism, was readily conceded by a great many social theorists and most political economists. The necessity of certain forms of state intervention and planning was by then taken for granted everywhere, except perhaps in the United States. Some kind of more or less centralized collectivist state seemed to be the wave of the future right after the Second World War. The most dynamic, brutal, and well organized of these collectivist systems was the Soviet one, which had just played the major role in smashing Hitler's armies and had thereby established hegemony over half of Europe. After a devastating decade of fascist ascendance in the advanced industrial societies of Europe and a World War that had introduced weapons of such mass destruction as to place the continued existence of humankind in question, Stalinism appeared both monstrously efficient and irresistible. For the time being, Stalinism seemed to have either effectively absorbed or displaced the international mass left. At the point in time, and for four decades to come, the abject defeat and total disappearance within forty years of official Communism as a significant world movement, system of state power, and international force was unimaginable. This was an outcome that was completely unpredictable, as even a more modest internal evolution from totalitarianism to authoritarianism was not considered possible by most Western scholars and policy makers for decades after Stalin's death. After all, that particular rhetorical distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian was used by inveterate cold-warriors to justify backing pro- American dictators in the struggle which was defined as a global contest between two incompatible world systems, a struggle that included a number of local, sometimes extremely nasty, little wars against popular, communist-led insurgents around the world. Authoritarianism, the queasy Western and American political publics were told, could change into parliamentary democracy, and was therefore, despite all of the atrocities of any specific authoritarian regime, the lesser evil. On the other hand, popular movements against these admittedly authoritarian, American- backed dictators were more often than not under the leadership of open or covert Marxist-Leninists, who would inevitably (how ideologues loved that word!) attempt to set up totalitarian systems. As a notable Secretary of State once said, the United States was not about to allow a people, through their own stupidity, to democratically vote in a communist regime. Excessive humanitarian softness and liberalism were, we were told, the cardinal weaknesses of Western democracies, though these were qualities that may have been less than obvious in Vietnam, Cambodia, Algeria, and the many squalid dictatorial regimes in the third world that were staunch allies of the West in the battle against communism. Totalitarianism was supposed to be immutable and was expected to tri- Preface ix umph over a self-indulgently tolerant and very imperfect West. That triumph was not set in some impossibly distant future either, but loomed before the end on this century. As late as a decade ago communist totalitarianism was seen by some as inherently the stronger and more vital of the two contending blocs. Books such as Jean-Francois Revel's How Democracies Perish,2 which argued that thesis, were bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. There were countless books, novels, and spy stories repeating the same message of the greater viciousness and efficiency of communism in the grand world conflict, compared to the soft, capitalist rival bloc led by the United States. Instead, it turned out that the long, dull Brezhnev era represented the high water mark of communism as a world system. Those were, perversely as it may now seem, the good old days of communism, when the Soviet Union became a world-class super power, projecting its power globally, and when the living standards at home were rising, modestly but steadily. There even seemed to be developing some kind of a grudging truce between populations and regimes within the East European Soviet alliance; both began to believe reluctantly that they were fated to coexist, and that they might as well make coexistence as tolerable as possible. There were repeated rumblings from below in the communist bloc, to be sure,3 in recent years mostly in Poland, where Solidarity began its long, and then seemingly doomed, struggle against its own communist regime in 1980. Early on, most friendly observers in and out of Poland believed that it was conceivable Solidarity might gain some minor economic concessions, that it might even win begrudging recognition as an independent trade union, strictly bound to an economic role. Only wild-eyed Utopians believed that Solidarity could topple the Polish regime. These Utopians believed in the ability of people to transform their systems with massive pressure and organization from below, and believed that common struggles and experiences would develop leaders and organizations; such visionaries were and are scarce, in the East and the West. Any robust concept of democracy must necessarily be based precisely on that belief in the abilities of broad layers of the people, citizens and workers, to transform politics through self-mobilization. And yet, alas, genuine belief in substantive democracy is rare in real life, East or West. By the late 1980s, an irresistible wave of unexpected and unprecedented upheavals from below, throughout the region, had culminated symbolically in 1989 with the toppling of the Berlin Wall. This was followed by the swift, complete, and abject collapse of all Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. By 1991 the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist, replaced by an unstable, visibly fragile, and obviously temporary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Despite desperate efforts to reform and change, the communist parties throughout the region x Preface faced dissolution, confiscation of their property, and in some cases even banishment and persecution. Above all these parties faced the rejection and contempt of most voters. How long this will last is another story, but for the time being most communist parties, no matter how genuinely transformed they might actually be, are at the very least in purgatory. Gross mismanagement of the economies in the new post-communist states, as well as sharp increases in differences between the small number of those well off and the large number of poor, may lead to some kind of revival of communist parties. However, I believe that while there might be some "hard" left communist parties on the scene in Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union, they will be relatively marginal. Parties dealing with social issues, unemployment, and egalitarianism will be either nationalist-populist, a sort of East European "Peronism" combining nationalism and social demagoguery, or will be, in the best case, social democratic and allied with the social democratic and labor parties of Western Europe. In any case new and morally (or at least politically) uncom-promised people will have to emerge to play a role on the new political scene.

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