Thinking through Transition: Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989 by Piotr (eds) Kopeček, Michal and Wciślik Po Devětaosmdesátém: rozpomínání a přemítání by Petr Pithart (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 792 Nevertheless, the sheer wealth of information and immersion in primary sources make this book an essential companion for any scholar who wishes to take Havel seriously as a thinker, artist and political actor. Northwestern University Andrew Roberts Kopeček, Michal and Wciślik, Piotr (eds). Thinking through Transition: Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989. CEU Press, Budapest and New York, 2015. vii + 599 pp. Notes. Index.£49.00: €58.00: $75.00. Pithart, Petr. Po Devětaosmdesátém: rozpomínání a přemítání. Academia, Prague, 2016. 490 pp. Illustrations. Index. Kč450.00. Social science disciplines as diverse as political science and anthropology were quick to incorporate East Central Europe (ECE) into existing international academic agendas following the collapse of Communism in 1989. Mainstream political scientists and liberal economists saw the region through the lens of comparative democratization theory or standard recipes for economic reform. Left-leaning critics in sociology and political economy, while more sensitive to historical context and path dependency, over-emphasized macro-structures and sometimes assimilated ECE too easily — and too abstractly — into global critiques of neo-liberalism. Both groups were, Kopeček and Wciślik suggest in their introduction to Thinking through Transition, burdened by ‘a monist historicalimaginationinwhichpoliticalmodernityhadasinglegoal,acapitalist liberal democracy composed of the advanced post-industrial countries of the West’ (p. 11), differing only in how social-democratic they hoped ECE’s endpoint would be and how optimistic they were that it could be achieved. A side effect of the integration was a loss of interest in home-grown ECE understandings of politics and a rich vein of local political thought. There is, Kopeček and Wciślik argue, space for a ‘possible future intellectual history’ (p. 2) of ECE examining ‘the transfer and circulation of ideas from a bottomup perspective’ (p. 17), focusing on specific contexts but retaining a broad sense of regional commonalties. It is this goal that their collection sets out to address. The book is organized into sections on liberalism, conservatism, populism, the new left and the politics of memory, with most chapters taking the form of country-specific studies. In geographical terms the book focuses on the Visegrad states, although there are chapters on Romanian populism and feminist assessments on democracy in Croatia and Serbia. In many ways, however, the issue that most unites the volume’s contributions is how the pursuit of democracy and liberalism went wrong in a region where REVIEWS 793 the pro-Western post-1989 liberal consensus came increasingly under strain. Indeed, they speculate that post-1989 democracy in ECE may yet come to be seen as an interregnum between periods of authoritarianism, much in the way that the 1920s and 1930s are seen as the ‘interwar’ period. Moreover, many of the debates about liberalism and illiberalism, history and national identity that inform contemporary debates were present, at least embryonically, in the intelligentsia debates of the late Communist period. ECE’s liberal traditions, for example, have always been defined by fear of various forms of authoritarianism, collectivism and populism. As Ferenc Laczó and Piotr Wciślik relate in respective chapters on Hungary and Poland, although diverse in their beliefs, liberals in the late Communist era and the early 1990s were already almost as fearful of the authoritarian (or even ‘totalitarian’) potential of national conservative opposition as they were of the declining, Communist regimes and their successor parties. Even in the Czech Republic, where conservative nationalist traditions were weakest, liberalism, argues Milan Znoj, emerged in diminished and skewed forms: the economistic market-centred neo-liberalism of Václav Klaus and the civil society-focused ‘moral populism’ of Václav Havel. Moreover, as Paul Blokker’s chapter relates, liberal ‘legal constitutionalism’ focusingonentrenchedindividualrightsisfarfromthedominantconstitutional narrative in ECE. An alternative, ‘communitarian’ framing of democratic and market institutions which stresses the underpinning of national community is both intellectually available — and already embodied in aspects of the Romanian and Slovak constitutions, as well as in Hungary’s 2011 constitution passed by the conservative Fidesz in the wake of his landslide election victory in 2010. Conservative traditions also appear problematic. As Rafal Matya’s study of Poland illustrates, by...