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Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Giuseppe Di Palma
Giuseppe Di Palma
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe because the regimes, no ionger justified by their Soviet hegemon, lost confidence in their “mandate from heaven.” Domestically and internationally discredited, East European regimes had traditionally shielded themselves behind a principle of legitimation from the top that saw communism as the global fulfillment of a universal theory of history. Once the theory became utterly indefensible, a crippling legitimacy vacuum ensued. Reacting against that theory, East European dissent, and a civil society of sorts, survived under communism not just as an underground political adversary but as a visible cultural and existential counterimage of communism. This fact must be given proper weight when assessing the capacity of civil society to rebound in postcommunist Eastern Europe.

Type
Liberalization and Democratization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
Information
World Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , October 1991 , pp. 49 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1991

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References

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2 Pye himself points out in his address (fn. 1) that all crises of authoritarianism are marked by a clash between the Western culture of modernization and national political cultures. Who will win “(and hence the outcome of any particular crisis of authoritarianism) will depend on the character of the [national] political culture” (p. 12). On why the demonstration effects of modernization are unlikely to produce convergence, see Bendix, Reinhard, Force, Fate and Freedom (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1984), 108Google Scholar–22.

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6 For a more extensive treatment of the comparison, see Giuseppe Di Palma, “Democratic Transitions: Puzzles and Surprises from West to East” (Paper prepared for the Conference of Europeanists, Washington, D.C., March 1990).

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22 Of course, some nondemocratic regimes can still live without either virtue or support.

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21 Mihajlov, Letter to the Editor, Commentary, February 1986, p. 4.

29 Brecht retorted in an unpublished dirge that the Communist Party might just as well dissolve the people and elect itself a new one; cited in Garton Ash, Timothy, “East Germany: The Solution,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 1990, p. 14Google Scholar.

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32 The “patriotic war” against Nazism was also an antidote. Interestingly, however, the use of the war to legitimize Stalinist rule introduced new elements of legitimation from the bottom.

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35 Khrushchev reasserted continuity by treating Stalin's crimes as products of the cult of personality. The leadership and cadres that replaced Khrushchev reasserted it by trying to erase the memories of those crimes and soft-pedaling de-Stalinization. According to Agnes Heller, this was necessary to give the Party a new self-legitimation by virtue of its continuity with tradition. See Heller, “Phases of Legitimation in Soviet-type Societies,” in Rigby and Feher (fn. 18), 57–58.

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41 Jowitt (fn. 17).

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44 In connection with this exchange, as well as to clarify the concept of civil society, Grze-gorz Ekiert introduces a useful distinction between “domestic” and “political” society. Domestic society “represents the domain of purposeful action restricted to the private sphere and organized in terms of material needs and self-interests.” (See Ekiert, “Democratization Processes in East Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration,” British Journal ofPolitical Science 21 [July 1991], 285–314, at 300.) It is the domain that is offered protection under communist normalization. Political society refers to a critical and politically relevant public sphere. It is the domain to be sacrificed in the exchange. But the distinction is heuristic. I will argue later on that, despite regime expectations, the survival of domestic society may have beneficial implications for civil society proper (political society, if you wish).

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46 See a more extensive treatment in Di Palma (fn. 6), 17–19.

47 Vujacic (fn. 4), 24–25.

41 Many of these analysts are discussed in Vujacic (fn. 4); I am much indebted to his in-lights in this section. On political discourse, cognitive monopoly, logocracy, and similar expressions of communist appropriation of the area within which public opinion normally operates, see several of the contributions in Hermet (fn. 10), as well as those in the double issue of Social Research 55 (Spring-Summer 1988).

49 If economic independence were necessary, civil society would be possible in most Western dictatorships but impossible in communist states. On normatively driven Marxist equivocations concerning the early modern capitalist origins of civil society, see Alvin W. Gould-ner, The Two Marxisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 355–63. Andrew Arato suggests three potential agencies for the constitution of civil society: the capitalist logic of industrialization, the etatist logic of modernization, and a public sphere from below. He examines the third possibility in connection with Poland. See Arato, “Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980–81,” Telos 47 (Spring 1981), 23–47.

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55 Di Palma (fn. 6), 26. That select nomenklatura! had exclusive access to a better and more plentiful market negated communist egalitarianism where it ultimately matters most: on life chances. See Magagna, Victor, “Consumers of Privilege: A Political Analysis of Class, Con sumption and Socialism,” Polity 21 (Spring-Summer 1989), 30–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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57 Benda (fn. 18) speaks of a parallel polis. Theoretically, parallel courses, in Benda's per spective, can eventually meet.

58 Di Palma (fn. 6), 15–17.

59 In some cases, as in Poland, preciously few intellectuals and professionals survived the Nazi occupation. See Kovacs, M. M. and Orkeny, A., “Promoted Cadres and Professionals in Post-War Hungary,” in Andorka, R. and Bertalan, L., eds., Economy and Society in Hungary (Budapest:Hungarian Sociological Association, 1986), 139Google Scholar–53; A. Gella., Development of Class Structure in Eastern Europe: Poland and Her Southern Neighbors (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1989), 167–202Google Scholar. Both are cited in Ekiert (fn. 44), fn. 55.

60 Marody, “Antinomies of Collective Subconsciousness,” Social Research 55 (Spring—Summer 1988), 97–110.

61 Kolarska-Bobinska, “Social Interests, Egalitarian Attitudes, and the Change of Economic Order,” Social Research 55 (Spring-Summer 1988), 111–38.

62 Sampson, “The Informal Sector in Eastern Europe,” Telos 66 (Winter 1985–86), 44–66, at 50. For an experiential account of survival through the second market, see Martin Krygier, “Poland: Life in an Abnormal Country,” National Interest 18 (Winter 1989–90), 55–64.

63 Kazimierz Vojcicki, “The Reconstruction of Society,” Telos 47 (Spring 1981), 98–104, at 102–3. See also fn. 44. The ability to forge a private and alternative microcosm was greater in Eastern Europe, where communism had been imposed from the outside. Still, this is not to say that in the Soviet Union there were no motives for articulating resentment and no groups to articulate it. Speaking of day-to-day reality in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Kenneth Jowitt writes that “for those members of Soviet society who were more educated, urban, skilled, but above all more individuated, articulate, and ethical this reality was embarrassing, alienating, and offensive; the source of increasing resentment, anger, and potentially of political rage.” See Jowitt (fn. 17), 276.

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71 In the words of Kolakowski (fn. 52):

In the functionaries’ minds the borderline between what is “correct” and what is “true,” as we normally understand this, seems really to have become blurred; by repeating the same absurdities time and again, they began to believe or half-believe in them themselves. The massive and profound corruption of the language eventually produced people who were incapable of perceiving their own mendacity, (p. 129)

72 Vujacic (fn. 4).

73 Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter treat extensively the significance of the resurrection of civil society in recent Western transitions. See O'Donnell, and Schmitter, , Transitions front Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986Google Scholar). The vast literature on civil society in Eastern Europe under communism adds new evidence to the point of survival. But Linz's extensive work had already consistently stressed the fact that dictatorships are rarely of one piece in their treatment of civil society.

74 Di Palma (fn. 6).

75 O'Donnell (fn. 65).

76 Hirschman (fn. 64).

77 Jowitt (fn. 38).

78 Jowitt (fn. 17).

79 Similarities with the French Revolution hold up much less well, however. The rejection ofcorps intermSdiaires, the religion of general will, the creed of revolutionary rationality, other aspects of the French revolutionary discourse amounted to the denial of the autonomous public sphere that had been emerging before the Revolution. In this, Jacobinism anticipated communism's cognitive monopoly. But revolutionary France and the Eastern Europe of recent months existed in radically different international environments. The Jacobins denied an autonomous public sphere, in part because revolutionary France lived in a continuous Kate of war in order to protect itself from the great powers of Europe. East European transitions are occurring in a more hospitable setting, one able to accommodate a postcommunist intellectual mobilization committed to civil society.

80 More extensive treatments are in the original version of this essay, prepared for the conference “La rifondazione dei partiti politici nell'Europa orientale,” Società italianadif scienza politica, Ferrara, Italy, October 1990; and in Palma, Di, “Why Democracy Can Work in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Democracy 2 (Winter 1991), 21–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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83 Ibid., 337–38, emphasis added.

84 Roper, Trevor, “The Lost Moments of History,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1988Google Scholar.

85 See fn. 79. For an extensive treatment of these and similar points about the culture of postcommunism, see Goldfarb, Jeffrey C., Beyond Glasnost: The Post-Totalitarian Mind (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989Google Scholar), chaps. 4–7.

86 For an analysis of why prevailing theories of social movements and social mobilization left us unprepared for the wave of protest mobilization in Eastern Europe, see Sidney Tar-row, “‘Aiming at a Moving Target': Social Science and the Recent Rebellions in Eastern Europe,” PS 24 (March 1991), 12–20. Tarrow suggests that cycles of protest produce a “master theme” that links the emerging social movements. “It will be interesting to see,” he writes, “whether the new movements now forming in Eastern Europe build on extensions of the themes of 1989 or-as some have feared-return to ‘primordial’ sentiments” (p. 15).