A tale of two Slovakias

SSEES marks the 20th anniversary of November 1989 with two contrasting Slovak speakers - a nice touch, as the fall of communism in the Czechoslovakia is so often reduced to events in Prague. The Magic Lantern, Václav Havel, speech from the balcony of the Melantrich building, vast crowds packing Wenceslas Square, more crowds crowds jangling their keys in unison at rallies on the Letna plain to ring out the change of regime. Dozens of local transitions get forgotten as does and a fully fledged Tender (or Gentle) Revolution (Nežná revolúcia) in Slovakia. Similar, but different to the Velvet Revolution played out in the neighbouring Czech lands
.

The first visitor to SSEES is Fedor Gál, Slovakia sociologist, researcher, opposition activist and (latterly) film-maker and media entrepreneur, who is presenting his new documentary Dobré ráno, Slovensko (Good Morning, Slovakia) which chronicles the last days of the regime, the revolution and first six months of 1990 as the Public Against Violence movement Gál chaired (see photo below) started to be bruisingly pushed aside and internally fracture under the growing pressure from Slovak nationalism, some of it animated by ill concealed anti-semitism. Gál left to live in Prague in 1992, but is still well known enough to drawn an audience of 60-70. Most, as I later discover, are young Slovak and Czech students, though almost none from SSEES curiously enough.

Things get off to a bad start when, after opening remarks, it becomes clear that the English language version of the film won't play. We can, however, show it in Slovak, which is OK for around 80% of the audience and perhaps a blessing in disguise as the English version is overdubbed, rather undermining its effect, rather than subtitled. The film, however, is powerful and well made and in the Q and A that follows Gál shows himself to be a magnetic and charismatic speaker. If you wondered why he was a revolutionary leader, this would answer your question. The questioners are all young, the question all in Czech or Slovak, self-translated in English. Everyone agrees that communism-nationalism-and-populist social-democracy are all part and parcel of the same illiberal conundrum that plays to the lowest, materialistic and most provincial inclinations of the Slovak and Czech populace and still haunts the region. Why did thy not handle things more smartly? Boli sme blbí, Gál tells his listeners in a line you feel he's probably used before. But given the revolutionary avalanche of events and the fact he bowed out of politics almost two decades ago, that's perhaps a more than acceptable answer.

Showing up in the grander circumstances on 17 November itself to give a lecture, Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico represents precisely that Other Slovakia (my phrase) that Gál and his listeners so dislike. We had expected a bland speech, but characteristically Fico decided to deal with controversial issues bluntly and head on: not everything under communism had been all bad -welfare standards were higher and teaching in universities 'more systematic'; there had been privations and bureaucracy - he himself had had to queue through the night to book his honeymoon to Malta; the revolution was not a cause for unbridled celebration as the 'tribunes of the revolution' didn't deliver on promises of fairness and freedom and hacked away a lot of ordinary people's social certainties in their pursuit of economic and party self-interest (until the arrival of R. Fico and Smer, you understand. Politically, this is some extent a necessary move as in 1989 Fico was a member of Communist Party of Slovakia (having joined in 1987) working at the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences, although on the other hand some Czech Social Democrats have similar backgrounds as bright young things in the late socialist nomenklatura and don't feel the need for such a 'balanced' assessment of the old regime.

The main achievement of the revolution in this rather interesting Fico-ean interpretation was that it opened up the way for an independent Slovakia and for further economic modernization, although an over dependence on car construction for export would entail an economic strategy based on high public spending in these days of global recession, partly to invest in education.

In the Q & A Fico switched to Slovak, ostensibly for the sake of not being misquoted or misunderstood by the Slovak media in not quite perfect English, but presumably also because he knew he was going to say something worthy of that night's TV news. There were three questions to which he gave long, unfazed confident answers, perhaps being Robert Fico he could guess what he was going to be asked: the quality of Slovak higher education (admittedly poor, too many universities, too much local pride at stake); what would he do if he were a Slovak Hungarian (cherish and protect his own culture and learn to speak perfect Hugarian); and did he think there was a trade-off between freedom and prosperity (no but golden plated freedom could be a bit costly - Slovak officials weren't well resourced enough to deal with too many freedom of information requests).

My sympathies were, it must be said, not with Fico, who made a more convincing case for himself on his last visit in UCL in 2006. On the other hand, he has turned out to have played the smarter political game and, as one leading specialist on Slovak politics, reminded me after afterwards it is a sign of progress to have 'bog standard left-wing politics' dominating the Slovak political scence not the more paranoid and dangerous nationalism of the Mečiar era - a period oddly absent from Fico's speech - albeit suffused with a bit of dodgy nomenklatura nostalgia for social cosseting of the normalization era.

The text of the speech doesn't seem to be on the net yet, but extracts from YouTube can be seen here. Gál's film (broken down into 14 short episodes) can be seen (in Slovak) here.

Update: A video of the full lecture has now appeared on the UCL-SSEES website here.

BNP on Question Time: Kilroy wasn't here

I sat in the front of the TV with one eye on a sheaf of article from the Czech press and one eye on BBC TV's widely billed, controversial edition of Question Time, it flagship panel discussion programme featuring British National Party leader Nick Griffin: the first time the far-right has been accorded the accolade of such recognition, although the BNP has had relatively easy access to the airwaves with its representatives regularly being interviewed on the radio. And, of course, British far-right parties have regularly been exposed and infiltrated by TV documentary makers since 1970s.

To make up for the howls of protest, the programme makers decided to make Nick Griffin's appearence on their programme the central issue, so the format largely shifted from multiple current affairs questions and familiar party ding-dong to a series of critical uestions about the BNP and its leader: specifically were its views whacky, extreme and racist and its leader someone who cannot explain away his earlier public record as neo-fascist and Holocaust denier.

The answer, of course, is that they were and he couldn't. All in all, it was reassuringly unimpressive performance by the BNP leaders, lacking not only any credible answers but also professionalism, poise or personal charm. I remember once watching Jean Marie Le Pen comprehensively outmanoeuvre a left-wing opponent on TV discussion with a mixture of sure footing cunning and avuncular bluster on French TV in the 1980s. Happily, the BNP leader clearly wasn't in this league.

I was just about to turn back to Prague municipal politics, however, when suddenly I caught flash of the kind of leader the British radical populist far-right probably does need and the kind of politician we probably should fear: it was Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrats' spokesperson for home affairs - up to that point a grey and totally forgettable presence on the panel, - launching into an eloquent tirade about how Britain should have closed its borders to citizens of new (that is predominantly, East European) EU member states for as long as possible and wasn't it awful that the government that the government didn't do this and lots of them came over here... Open borders in an opern liberal Europe. What a disaster.

For a fleeting moment, I though Mr Huhne, an unsuccessful contender for his party's leadership in 2007, was making a pitch for the BNP leadership, which to judge from his poor performance Nick Griffin might soon be vacating. Then I realised, of course, that, having slipped out of anti-fascist mode, he was simply illustrating the well established truth that immigrant-bashing and playing up to the public xenophobia is OK provided you are a respectable person from a resepctable mainstream party. And, Mr Huhne, - public school, Oxford, the City, economist and financial journalist, long-serving MEP, policy expert - is certainly that.

And then it struck me that, here - not necessarily in the person of Mr Huhne - but some of some ambitious, well educated, well spoken, reasonably well known figure public figure gone maverick that the real threat of more articulate, credible and dangerous far-right lies. No of burden of neo-fascist pedigree or a penchant for anti-semitism tor seeing the positive side of Hitler that, fortunately for us, encumbers Nick Griffin (and later held back Le Pen and Joerg Haider). Political or media skills already honed. Stock of political respectability already laid in.

Such figures seem to be media personalities with a certain political-cum-academic commentators (Pym Fortyn, Robert Kilroy-Silk) or frustrated members of existing parties, who turn maverick or decide to air views on race, minorities or immigration they have previously kept to themselves. Interestingly, Liberal parties, typically often under electtoral pressure from bigger competitors of left and right, whose identity is often a rather unstable mix of anti-establishment, pro-market, pro-market and pro-little person/geographical periphery appeals, seem especially vulnerable to such occasionally odd mutations: Haider's Austrian Freedom Party was originally a liberal grouping, controversial anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders was once an MP for Holland's Liberals the VVD; Germany's FDP was hit by accusations of anti-semitism in 2002-3 because of statements of one its then rising stars, the late Jurgen Molleman; in the mid-1990s factions in the FDP associated with the nationalist Neue Rechte intellectual (unsuccessfully) sought a Haider-style transformation of the party.

I don't, of course, expect to see Mr Huhne leading the BNP or indeed some populist confection (although I'm sure he'd do an excellent job if he did), but as the comedian Alan Davies pointedly pnoted on the This Week programme that followed Question Time's BNP-fest, Griffin's party are not a hugely successful or professional outfit and don't deserve high profile controverst treatment and still less the back-handed compliment of being banned from Question Time.

The real threats lie elsewhere. We clearly had a lucky escape when ex-Labour MP and chat show host Robert Kilroy-Silk proved too maladroit and egomaniacal to take over the UK Independence Party in 2004. Celebrity populists and mavericks peeling away from already opportunistic mainstream seem a potentially far more potent force than the wafer thin veneer of respectability and normality of a welfare chauvinist niche party that can't escape its neo-fascist roots like the BNP.

Bulgaria: blogged down

Transitions Online reports on the heavy handed attitude of the Bulgarian authorities to a blogger, who promoted an ecological ‘flash’ protest on his blog. The more interesting element is less the Bulgarian state’s dislike of civic protest or being held to account that the nascent movement of bloggers claiming to be the country’s ‘real’ civil society. The political role of blogging and the internet has been endlessly hyped. I personally am sceptical that it does much more than allow well educated elite groups to talk to each other and co-ordinate a little more quickly and easily. This probably matters for the emergence of liberal minded anti-establishment challengers - the emergence of Estonia’s Res Publica party seemed to have taken place largely over email - but the real issue seems to be that, blogging or not, such forces lack the social and political weight to have much impact.

Perhaps more interesting to track, however, would be whether CEE officialdom has generated any anonymous insider blogs such as the UK’s Civil Serf (now taken down), which can shed some light in the ‘black box’ of day-to-day public administration in the region.

Kosovo independence prompts pan-Slav stirrings in Bulgarian intelligentsia?

I had assumed that Bulgaria’s intelligentsia had, by and large, had a liberal pro-Western orientation and that pan-Slavism - or perhaps I should call it pan-Othodoxy - was a sort of residual cultural baggage without the intellectual and political clout it still seems to have in Russia or Serbia. However, the framing of the open letter, signed by 30 (or in later reports 100) Bulgarian intellectuals, cultural figures and churchmen against their government’s decision (in the end) to recognise Kosovan independence, reported in the Sofia Echo, suggests otherwise. A longer report in Novinite.com does, however specify that the letter was signed by intellectuals of the left.

I lack background to analyse this properly, but I wonder whether such sentiments will feed into the electorally emergent Bulgarian radical right, which - as far as I am aware - has so far been a ragbag of populist and racist positions without much intellectual ballast. A Bulgarian student tells me that it should be regarded as a new post accession phenomenon, not one with roots in historic nationalism (like say the Slovak National Party). Interestingly, other new phenomena - Kosovan independence and the rise of Putin-era pipline politics - seem to have opened up further intellectual and political space for it.

Christmas cheer for democracy?

Despite an email from a student on Boxing Day asking about the critical case study method (I was sufficiently impressed by such dedication to answer at some length) and some very riotous kids fighting over a Peppa Pig playset, I had enough time over Christmas to catch up books I was supposed to be reviewing. Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) has been widely reviewed outside academic journals and gained media airtime on intellectual slots like Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed on Radio 4. Leif Lewin’s Democratic Accountability: Why Choice in Politics is Both Possible and Necessary (Harvard University Press, 2007) was pitched at the same kind of level at academic/intelligent general reader crossover market, but seemed to attach less attention, perhaps because of its more standard concerns with rescuing and re-inventing democracy, rather than saying there was too much of it because more voters are economically illiterate and incorrigibly populist as Caplan (backed by survey data) does.

Lewin’s books seeks to challenge a range of intellectual motifs in political science, which hethinks undermine the notion of politics as purposive rational activity and hence suggest that politicians cannot meaningfully be held accountable for their actions. He develops this analysis in thematic chapters, each discussing the intellectual origins and political science manifestations of one such argument then knocking it down it through an empirical counter-example.

Politicians are, he says, firstly are not prisoners of historical forces, whether structural or ideological. Some strategic choices, such as the US policy-makers’ decision to implement the Marshall Plan, not only radically affect historical outcomes big time, but are contingent and contested instances of Churchill’s ‘hinge of history’ Nor are policy-makers deprived of choice by some supposed inherent tendencies towards conflict in the international system or the recent globalization of the world economy. The formation of the EEC in 1956, Lewin argues, shows political actors can opt for deep, long-term co-operation. Tentative international agreements on climate change - very tentative, as he admits - suggest that the global market is (potentially) subject to political regulation. Neither can we discount politicians’ accountability because of trade-offs and compromises involved in consensus-building and coalition formation. Inclusive power sharing arrangements can simply generate corrupt, collusive political systems like that of the Italian party system - although unfortunately, its post-1994 to adversarial politics of alternating blocs of left and right as he admits hardly seems to have rectified this.

Lewin also doubts whether accountability is always diminished because politicians’ strategies are distorted by self-interested bureaucrats or because social complexity and the longue durée inevitably produce unintended consequences. Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of 1980s show how even a long established, independently minded civil service can be made to implement policies it dislikes, while successful Social Democratic strategies for Sweden’s unemployment insurance system of 1920s aimed at promoting unionisation suggest that long-term consequences can be intended. He concludes with an appeal for a democratic politics centring on choice and competition and a more informed, open and reflexive political class willing and able to face up to issues of democratic accountability.

Overall, Lewin’s hypothesis that political science agendas inadvertently combine to deny democratic accountability is a striking one. However, for me the quality of his book’s argumentation largely fails cut the mustard. Authors and cases selected as counter-examples are seem idiosyncratic and unconvincing. Italy, for example, is an odd test for Lijphart’s consensus democracy model - Holland, Austria or Sweden might be more convincing choices. And Lenin and Hobbes are not perhaps the best representatives of neo-realist views in modern politics, which I suspect do not say that war is inevitably, merely than conflict of some kind based on self-interests is. Despite a nod towards Mill’s comparative method, the book’s broadbrush essayistic studies also offer no compelling argument that cases are critical cases rather than exceptions proving the rule. Democratic Accountability is thus perhaps best an interesting, if undemanding, essay in democratic theory - the intellectual equivalent of a well dunked biscuit over a tepid cup of tea (or several)

Caplan, by contrast, is a much tougher cookie. Backed by survey evidence, he argues that the failures of democratic governance stem less from the rational ignorance of voters, as traditional Public Choice models suggest, than their irrational anti-liberal economic prejudices. Compared both to professional economists and a minority of well informed voters, most Americans he finds suffer from marked irrational biases when assessing the working of the economy and economic policy: an anti-market bias stigmatizing profit-seeking and unequal remuneration as greed; an anti-foreign bias favouring protectionism and autarchic measures costly to most consumers; a ‘make-work’ bias which wrongly sees employment as a something to be husbanded and protected, rather a resource whose input should be minimized; and a pessimistic bias, which wrongly assesses the economic situation and most aspects of economic policy as negative and deteriorating. Adapting the classic ‘rational ignorance’ perspective, Caplan suggests that such biases, in fact, represent ‘rational irrationality’: citizens cling to populist beliefs that bolster psychological well-being and identity when (as in politics) the marginal costs of doing so are low, but behave rationally in consumer markets when confronted with narrower, more immediate cost-benefit decisions

Such systematic biases, he claims, void conventional Public Choice arguments for the essential rationality of voters - to prop up the key analogy between political and economic markets - such as cognitive short-cut, cues from friends and family, retrospective voting on how the government didor the ‘miracle of aggregation’. Rational politicians thus demagogically play to majority economic prejudices, but then ignore campaign promises knowing that the electorate will punish them if the economy deteriorates because of its populist nostrums. This explains why democracies make policy with some degree of efficiency. Contrary to the prevailing ‘democratic fundamentalism’, we are, Caplan concludes, already bumping up against the desirable limits of democracy. We should therefore introduce economic literacy tests for voters and abandon efforts to boost turnout likely to mobilize less educated, less economically rational voters.

Although refreshingly iconoclastic, Caplan is not wholly convincing. The case for systemic voter ignorance seems made, but empirical evidence for ‘rational irrationality’ appears patchy. Even given its US focus, the book’s dismissal of self-interested (class-based) voting is sweeping. Politics is often a zero-sum game with clear winners and losers, not (just) an exercise in generating a single, rational socially optimum outcome. Caplan’s ‘democratic pessimism’ also seems to point as much to technocratic elitism as the greater marketization he clearly favours. Nor, as he is happy, is his argument very new. Indeed the books comes with self-consciously liberal (no pun intended) helping of quotations from classical liberal economists of the C18th/C19th (Smith, Bastiat, Spencer) and early 20th century elitist and democratic sceptics like Le Bon and Mosca - both intellectual influences on fascism, as I recall, but I guess that might be just historical contingency. The difference is that whereas then the uneducated nature of masses could in the views of someone like J.S. Mill (perhaps rather oddly not referenced by Caplan) justify civic literacy tests and an unequal if universal franchise (extra voters for graduates) as a form of quality control before their full admittance to democratic citizenship, now we have education galore. But rising levels of education, as Caplan is happy to point out, have not brought rising levels of knowledge about politics.

Caplan’s reputation-making brickbat thus adds to a growing contemporary literature identifying the success of liberal democratic societies with liberalism rather than their democracy, and placing the onus for democracy’s failures on citizen incompetence, rather than flawed institutions. The Future of Freedom and Stealth Democracy immediately come to mind. And, of course, as mentioned in the previous post there are sharp resonances in CEE, where the liberal intelligentsia have longer suspected the populace of being too collectivistic and too stupid to be trusted with extensive democracy, hence the current vogue for ‘counter-majoritarian institutions’. The herd of docile sheep on the cover of Caplan’s book - presumably intended to represent the mass of dozy citizen-consumers - is an analogy used not only by J.S. Mill in On Liberty, but also in my hearing by a leading liberal Slovak politician. No wonder they vote for Robert Fico, a man seemingly more cut for democratic politics as outlined by Caplan as he seems to half-believe in the populist solutions he offers.

Guns 'n Ponies: Christmas shopping sees sun set on liberal values

Newly minted Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg may think we're a nation of untapped liberal and progressive sentiment, but when Christmas shopping in Brighton I mugged by reality. It's not unpleasant and is less hellish than I imagined and all the toyshops are conveniently clustered in the mall that is slowly swallowing up the town centre. But, alas instead of looking for Pinkie Pie pony, I find myself drawn to the array of toy weaponry in Gamleys, which includes not only swords and ray guns, but also a life-sized orange-and-yellow plastic double barrelled shotgun for the aspirant bank robber. Most other toyshops, it's true, are far too politically correct to have such things - or perhaps it doesn’t sell well in Brighton, where a Green councillor has just romped home with a huge vote in a by-election .

Coming from redneck (or should that be blue-neck?) mid-Sussex, however I feel an involuntary twinge of envy for whichever gun toting eight year old is going to lay his hands on this mini-arsenal. My own parents in the 1970s ,very responsibly, made Santa leave all firearms hanging in his grotto, but as George Orwell says 'toy pacifists just won’t do’. My job in Gamleys, however, is buy up a selection of princesses and ponies - what have we done to encourage such gender stereotyping? - and I efficiently do before heading out onto the freezing seafront just in time to catch the sun going down.

Julian Baggini speaking on Radio 4’s Start the Week - and in a forthcoming article in Prospect - claims to detect less the liberal England Nick Clegg hopes to tap into, than robustly (if reasonably) communitarian society with a tinge of moderate nationalism. Czech-style national liberalism, if you will. I’ve always been a bit sceptical of the conservative communitarianism Prospect seems to push - especially when (as very often) it is incongruously packaged as part of some a progressive, modernizing agenda, rather than just the extended political holding operation that British politics seems to consist of these days, but Baggini's argument seems reasonable. Certainly, there are a few shotgun wielding lecturers, who may need watching...

Will Europe's real liberals please step forward?

An interesting discussion of the similarities and dissimilarities between Britain’s Liberal Democrats and Poland’s Civic Platform

(PO) written by Ed Maxfield appears on the Lib Dem Liberal Voice website followed up by very intersting and intelligent discussion of the highways and byways of - that lost tribe of European politics - the liberals as European party family. Given some less than liberal social position and desire for a flat tax revolution, it strikes that PO are more Cameroonian conservatives minus the upper class social baggage, or perhaps an equivalent of the party that would emerge of the dull kaleidecsope of British (actually English) party politics got shaken up and some of the more assertively free market Lib Dems teamed up with some of the more socially liberal, decentralist Tories to form a kind of Blue-Orange Alliance (interestingly, the campaign colours of both Civic Platform and fellow Czech liberal-conservatives/conservative liberals in the Czech Civic Democrats) . I guess that would leave the hang ‘em and flog ‘em rump of the Tories as a kind of English nationalist Law and Justice party. The analogy, of course, breaks down because of the strength of the British social democratic left, which - despite a close shave in 1983 – has refused to go down the tubes electorally in the manner of post-communist parties in Poland, Slovakia and (possibly) Hungary.

Sucked into a democratic black hole

Surfing the web after an exam board made bearable by biscuits and tangerines on the house, I come once again on Ivan Krastev on OpenDemocracy.net comes up with a typically barbed commentary about the ‘black hole’ of populist politics in CEE. The basic picture presented is less than original (and I suspect less than true) – populist bad guys like Robert Fico and the Kaczynski are stalking the region driving off decent liberals like himself from office and influence. I did, however, like the usual cynical-cum-ironic take with CEE seen as more akin to France, and perhaps more the France of the mid-19th than the early 21st century. True, there are differences

“In France, pensioners are beneficiaries of the status quo, and so never protest; in central Europe, pensioners are the losers and so protest all the time. Moreover, in Paris almost everyone is frightened by the invasion of the fabled Polish plumber, while in Sofia or Warsaw the public is indifferent or at least less hostile to the invasion of the French banker.”

CEE liberals are, however, like their mid-19th century French counterparts in wishing to bypass and restrict the democratic influence of the market-hating masses through the introduction of limited suffrage. These days – in fact as J.S. Mill realized, even in those days – that couldn’t mean anything is crude as a property qualification, but a cut off based on education and a notion of citizenship based on ‘capacity’ (that favourite EU buzzword) rather than rights. Krastev then hits the bulleye, astutely noting that

“It is perverse but true – in this age of democracy, elites in Europe are secretly dreaming of a system that will deprive irresponsible voters from the power to violate the right of wisdom. At the same time most citizens are convinced that they have the right to vote but not the right to influence decision-making.
(…)
The outcome is politics where populists are becoming openly anti-liberal, and elites are becomingly secretly anti-democratic. What central Europe is lacking is genuine reformism: the kind that is responsive to the demands of the people without falling victim to populist primitivism. This gaping black hole in the national politics of the member-states, more than anything else, threatens the European project today.”

He is thinking of Bulgaria and CEE, as coursem – where as we know populism is vapid, anti-elite but is basically ‘centrist’ and moderate, not the Neanderthal force Krastev rather crudely outlines which , if not ‘genuinely reformist’ and hooked up with society in the way he enviages, seems able to deliver some of the goods some of the time. More irksomely still (although as good CEE modernizing liberal he doesn't say it) his comments could, I suspect, also apply to established West European and North American democracies rather than just being part of some post-accession, post-communist malaise.

Wot, no Portuguese liberals?

Stumbled across in interesting academic blog essay on the non-emergence of a liberal party in Portugal by a University of Sussex PhD graduate.

A liberal helping of democracy? Perry Anderson on Putin's Russia

A Petya Federov, seemingly a Russian based in London, has thoughtfully posted an article (part 1 and part 2) on his blog about Putin’s Russia from the London Review of Books by veteran New Left intellectual Perry Anderson . Slightly to my surprise, Anderson clearly knows Russia and its politics and culture very well, although the reported ideas of Russian thinkers he is familiar with are rather more interesting than his own. Slightly conventionally, his focus is on the fate of Russia’s Western oriented liberal intelligentsia, who played such a prominent role in perestroika, allied themselves with Yelstin’s flawed reform coalition and were then marginalized – or corrupted - by the evisceration of the public sector, the rise of trash commercial culture and the semi-authoritarian ‘virtual politics’ embodied by the Putin era. Some well educated Russia (ex-?) intellectuals write detective stories (Boris Akunin) or serve in the legions of cynical, well paid ‘political technologies’creating the stage front for the grim pantomime of Russia politics. Oh horror.

However, the most interest aspects of the article from an academic point of view was Anderson’s dissection of the conflict between the ‘national’ (actually in Russia, more the ‘imperial’) and the liberal, which has some distant echoes in the travails and compromises of liberals in CEE (the long march of Hungary’s Fidesz under Orbán; the embrace of traditional Czech nationalist paradigms by Václav Klaus and the Civic Democrats in the late 1990s and – I dare say – the difficult relations between liberalism and nationalism in Serbia or Romania). Some of the more interesting parts (for me) are excerpted below

“ Fifteen years later, what has become of this [pro-Western, liberal] intelligentsia? Economically speaking, much of it has fallen victim to what it took to be the foundation of the freedom to come, as the market has scythed through its institutional supports. In the Soviet system, universities and academies were decently financed; publishing houses, film studios, orchestras all received substantial state funding. These privileges came at the cost of censorship and a good deal of padding. But the tension bred by ideological controls also kept alive the spirit of opposition that had defined the Russian intelligentsia since the 19th century – and for long periods been its virtual raison d’être.With the arrival of neo-liberalism, this universe abruptly collapsed. By 1997, budgets for higher education had been slashed to one-twelfth of their late Soviet level.
(…)
For a time, even with shrinking sales, the better newspapers provided a lively variety of reportage and commentary, in which many good journalists won their spurs. But as factional struggles broke out in Yeltsin’s court, and the grip of different oligarchs on the media tightened, corruption of every kind spread through the press, from back-handers and kompromat to abject propaganda for the regime. In this atmosphere, a race to the bottom followed, in which the crudest tabloids, devoted to sensations and celebrities, predictably won out. Meanwhile, the print media as a whole were losing importance to television. Initially a dynamic force in awakening and mobilising public opinion – it played a key role in the overthrow of the old order in August 1991 – Russian TV started with a high level of professional skills and public ambitions. But it too sank rapidly under the tide of commercialisation, its most-watched programmes descending to levels of crassness and inanity rivalling deepest America
(…)
The spectacle of this migration into a universe of shady banking and trading, ‘political technology’ (campaign-running and election-fixing) and public asset-stripping, in turn affected those left behind. Others, who had specialist scientific skills, got better jobs abroad. In these conditions, as the common values that once held it together corroded, the sense of collective identity that distinguished the traditional intelligentsia has been steadily weakened.The result is a cultural scene more fragmented, and disconnected, than at any time within memory.
(….)
Outside, the Tverskaya with its boutiques and chain stores sets the tone. The culture of capitalist restoration looks back, logically enough, to the object-universe of late tsarism, whose garish emblems are everywhere. Moscow retains its autumnal beauty, even if as elsewhere – Weimar or Prague – too much new paint tends to coarsen older buildings rather than reviving them. But now it is enveloped in a smog of kitsch, like ancient regalia buried within a greasy wrapper. The city has become a world capital of bad taste, in which even the postmodern can seem a caricature of itself. All this physical trumpery reflects the dominant landscape of the imaginary. Within a few years, Russia has spawned a mass culture fixated on postiche versions of the dynastic past. The country’s most successful author, Boris Akunin, writes detective novels set in the last third of the 19th century. Among other stirring deeds, his upright hero Erast Fandorin thwarts a plot to hold the coronation of Nicholas II to ransom.The poverty of all this retro-tsarist culture reflects the impossibility of any meaningful repossession of the world of the Romanovs. The old order incubated a rough-hewn capitalism, but itself remained patrimonial to the end, dominated not by merchants or industrialists, but nobles and landowners. No living memory connects with this past: it is too different, and too remote, from the present to serve as more than vicarious pap. The Soviet past, on the other hand, remains all too immediate, and so in another way unmanageable. With few exceptions, the intelligentsia repudiates it en bloc. The population, on the other hand, is deeply divided: between those who regret the fall of the USSR, those who welcomed it, and those – perhaps the majority – whose feelings are mixed or ambivalent. The Soviet Union was not the Third Reich, and there is little sign of any Vergangenheitsbewältigung along German lines. In the culture at large, the tensions in social memory have produced a patchy amnesia.
(…..)
Economically, culturally, psychologically, the Russian intelligentsia has been pulled apart by the changes of the last fifteen years. The term itself is now repudiated by those for whom it smacks too much of a common identity and a revolutionary past: contemporary intellectuals should shun the suspect traditional term intelligent in favour of the neologism intellektual, of healthier American origin, to denote the new independent-minded individual, distinct from the collective herd of old. Such dissociations themselves have a long history, going back at least to the denunciations of the radical intelligentsia by Vekhi, the famous symposium of writers on the rebound from the 1905 Revolution, who might now be called neo-conservative, but were then nearly all liberals. Today, vigorous questioning of the self-images of the contemporary intelligentsia can be found across the spectrum, but attacks on its historical role again occur mainly in liberal journals – the debate in the autumn in [critical intellectual journal] Neprikosnovenny Zapas is an example. But their context has altered. The events of 1991, not those of 1905-7, constituted the first revolution liberals could call their own. Politically, how then does Russian liberalism stand today?Hostility – often, in private, verbally extreme hostility – to Putin’s regime is widespread. But of public opposition there is little. The reason is not only fear, though that exists. It is also the knowledge, which can only be half-repressed, that the liberal intelligentsia is compromised by its own part in bringing to being what it now so dislikes. By clinging to Yeltsin long after the illegality and corruption of his rule was plain, in the name of defence against a toothless Communism, it destroyed its credibility in the eyes of much of the population, only to find that Yeltsin had landed it with Putin. Now, with a mixture of bad conscience and bad faith, it struggles to form a coherent story of the change.
(…)
It was clear from the very beginning of the August overturn that a test of the new Russian liberalism would be its handling of the nationalities question, where the old – Vekhi and its sequels – had conspicuously failed. During the first Chechen War, it acquitted itself honourably, opposing Russia’s invasion and welcoming its acceptance of defeat. But the second Chechen War broke its moral spine. A few protests continued, but by and large the liberal intelligentsia persuaded itself that Islamic terrorism threatened the motherland itself, and had to be crushed, no matter what the cost in lives. A year later, America’s own war on terror allowed a gratifying solidarity with the West. Today, few express much enthusiasm for the Kadyrov clan in Grozny: most prefer to avoid mention of Chechnya. Leading courtiers of Yeltsin, still flanking or advising Putin, are more outspoken. Gaidar has explained that it is difficult for outsiders to understand ‘what the aggression against Dagestan in 1999 meant for Russia. Dagestan is part of our life, part of our country, part of our reality’ (sic – Russians make up 9 per cent of the population). Thus ‘the issue was no longer the Chechen people’s right to self-determination. It was the question of whether Russian citizens should be protected by their own government.’ Chubais has been blunter: Russia’s goal in the new century, he recently declared, should be a ‘liberal empire’.Such views are naturally welcome enough in the Kremlin, though these particular voices are something of a liability. Around the regime, however, are more credible forces, recruited from the democrats of 1991, who provide it with critical support from a distinctive position within the liberal tradition. Grouped around the successful weekly Ekspert – a business-oriented cross between Time and the Economist – and in the back-rooms of United Russia, their outlook could be compared to Max Weber’s in the Second Reich. The fall of the USSR was, they believe, the work of a joint revolt by liberal and national (not just Baltic, Ukrainian or Georgian, but also Russian) forces. But under Yeltsin, these two split apart, as more and more Russians with a sense of national pride felt that Yeltsin had become a creature of the Americans, while liberals remained bound to him. Putin’s genius, in this version, has been to reconcile national and liberal opinion once again, and so create the first government in Russian history to enjoy a broad political consensus. The market-fundamentalism and retro-Communism of the 1990s, each now a spent force, are no longer alternatives. In bringing calm and order to the country, Putin has achieved ‘hegemonic stability’.By their own lights, the intellectuals who articulate this vision – typically from scientific or engineering backgrounds, like many novelists – are clear-eyed about the limitations and risks of the regime, which they discuss without euphemism. Putin’s style is to give concessions to all groups, from oligarchs to the common people, while keeping power in his own hands. He is ‘statist’ in every instinct, despising and distrusting businessmen; though he does not persecute them, he affords no help to small or medium enterprises, so that in practice only the huge raw materials and banking monopolies thrive. Politically, he is a ‘presidential legitimist’, in a Congress of Vienna sense, and so will respect the constitution and step down in 2008 – after choosing his successor.
(….)
Those who have cast their lot with hegemonic stability risk repeating the trajectory of the original liberal intelligentsia under Yeltsin, who kept thinking that their advice and assistance could steer him in the right direction, only to find that he gave them Putin, under whom they tremble. Unable to come to terms with their own responsibilities in backing the attack on the White House and the fake referendum on the constitution, with all that followed, they are now reduced to complaining that a ruinously Sovietised Russian people have proved incapable of accepting the gift of democracy ‘we were striving to bring them’. Today’s national-liberals are more lucid than the democrats of the 1990s, but it is not clear that they have much more real influence at court than their predecessors. If one of the candidates they most fear – the defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, or even the pallid premier, Mikhail Fradkov, for example – were to be put into the Kremlin, they could find themselves in much the same situation as the limpets of Yeltsin. They hope it will be someone more amenable, like Putin’s other favourite, the first deputy premier Dmitri Medvedev, whose task is to give a socially caring face to the regime. But they will have no more say in the choice than other citizens.Historically, Russian liberalism came in a variety of shades, and it would be wrong to reduce them all today to the pupils of Hayek or Weber. Amid the different adaptations to power of the period, one mind of complete independence stands out. Tall but stooped, almost hunched, with the archetypal bookish look of a scholar, in a square, squinting face lit up with frequent ironic smiles, the historian Dmitry Furman is of White and Red descent. His grandmother, who brought him up and to whom he was always closest, was an aristocrat, his grandfather – the couple were separated – a high Stalinist functionary, who even as a deputy minister lived quite poorly, devoted to his cause and work. Furman explains that he grew up without any Marxist formation, yet no hatred of Communism, regarding it as a new kind of religion, of which there had always been many sorts. After graduating, he did his research on religious conflicts in the Late Roman Empire, and then became a specialist in the history of religions in the Academy of Sciences. He never wrote anything about contemporary events, or had anything to do with them, until perestroika.When the USSR collapsed, however, he was virtually alone among Russian liberals in regarding the overthrow of Gorbachev as a disaster. For a year afterwards, he worked for the Gorbachev Foundation, and then returned to the Academy of Sciences, where he has since been a researcher at the Institute of Europe, and a prolific essayist on the whole zone covered by the former USSR. He has perhaps the most worked out, systematic view of post-Communist developments of any thinker in Russia today. It goes like this. The country is a ‘managed democracy’: that is, one where elections are held, but the results are known in advance; courts hear cases, but give decisions that coincide with the interests of the authorities; the press is plural, yet with few exceptions dependent on the government. This is, in effect, a system of ‘uncontested power’, increasingly similar to the Soviet state, but without any ideological foundation, which is evolving through a set of stages that parallel those of Russian Communism. The first phase sees the heroic destruction of the old order, a time of Sturm und Drang – Lenin and Yeltsin. The second is a time of consolidation, with the construction of a new, more stable order – Stalin and Putin. The leader of the second phase always enjoys much broader popular support than the leader of the first, because he unites the survivors of the original revolution, still attached to its values, and the anti-revolutionaries, who detested the anarchic atmosphere and the radical changes it brought. Thus Putin today continues Yeltsin’s privatisations and market reforms, but creates order rather than chaos. The successor to Putin in the third stage – comparable to Khrushchev – is unlikely to be as popular as Putin, because the regime, like its predecessors, is already becoming more isolated from the masses. Putin’s high ratings in the polls are entirely a function of his occupancy of the presidency: the rulers of Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan – Nazarbaev or Aliev – can match them, because their systems are so similar.
(….)
Might not nationalism provide such a basis [for regime renewal after Putin], if it is not already doing so? Furman dismisses the possibility. Russian nationalism is too low-powered to take the place of democracy as a legitimation of Putin’s rule. It is not a fanatical force like the nationalism that sustained Hitler’s regime, rather an impotent resentment that Russia can no longer bully its neighbours as it once did. The current campaign against Georgians is an instance: an expression of the frustration of a former master-people, that has now to treat those who were once its inferiors as equals. The result is a pattern of sudden rages over minor issues, explosions that are then as quickly forgotten – disputes with Ukraine over this or that dam, clamours over Serbia, and so on. These are neurotic, not psychotic symptoms. Such petty rancours are not enough to found a new dictatorship. That is why legitimation by the West remains important to the regime, and is in some degree a restraint on it. Since it has no ideology of its own, and cannot rely on a broken-backed nationalism, it must present itself as a specific kind of democracy that is accepted by the G7 – Russia as a ‘normal country’ that has rejoined Western civilisation.
(…)
Asked his view of Pipes’s diagnosis of Russia’s deep political culture – no popular understanding of democracy, or rule of law; tyranny always preferable to anarchy – Furman answers matter-of-factly: yes, it is more or less accurate, but Pipes is wrong to think this is uniquely Russian. It is a very widespread political culture, which you can see throughout the Middle East, in Burma, in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. We should not whitewash or embellish Russian political culture, but we should also not think of it as exceptional. Nor is it correct to imagine that there has been any significant revival of religion in post-Communist Russia. The Orthodox Church has been absorbed as an element of national identity, and officiates at baptisms and funerals. But not weddings – sexual life is completely secular – and rates of regular attendance at church are among the lowest in Europe.If the second phase in the cycle of managed democracy is now coming to an end in Russia, what of the third and fourth phases, comparable to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods under Communism? The whole cycle, Furman replies, will be much shorter – not seventy, but about thirty years. We are probably at midpoint right now. As for the future: the Russian intelligentsia was briefly in power in 1991, but its ideology was primitive and its outlook naive. So when the democracy it wanted was discarded by Yeltsin, the defeat of democracy was the defeat of this intelligentsia too. Only when Russian intellectuals have produced a self-critical assessment of this experience will it be able to develop new and sounder ideals for the future.This is an impressively level-headed diagnosis of the country’s condition. Its limitation lies in the unargued premise of the argument. Managed democracy à la russe is tacitly viewed as a transition that, with all its warts, leads towards genuine democracy. Within the very sobriety of the scheme, a hopeful teleology is at work. Only one terminus is possible: the liberty of the moderns embodied in the Western Rechtsstaat. Realist in its judgments about Russia, the model is idealist in its assumptions about the West. Certainly, the two remain very different. But can the differences, and their direction, be captured by Furman’s implied dichotomy? For who imagines the political systems of the West to be ‘unmanaged’ democracies? Their own regressions are not factored into the evolutionary scheme. The idealising side of Furman’s construction exposes itself to the tu quoque retorts with which Putin and his aides now relish silencing criticism by the West.”

Anderson then goes on to review Alena Ledeneva’s How Russia Really Works, whose conclusions he finds too sanguine, and Andy Wilson’s Virtual Politics which he finds ‘searing’ and slightly more to his taste, although this sits rather oddly with his earlier argument that we should examine Russian society more than the state. He finishes by noting Russia’s demographic crisis and the country’s unpredecented geo-political weakness in facing a strong EU to the West and a rising China to the East. On the other hand, Will Hutton predicts trouble for China and the CIA research has seriously entertained the break-up of the EU’s semi- confederal system as a contingency to be considered, so perhaps Putin’s successors will have the last laugh. Certainly, they’ll have enough gas and oil to keep the lights on.

Reform in post-accession CEE: long unwinding road?

I get to chair an interesting seminar presentation from Prof Geoffrey Pridham of Bristol University at SSEES on post-accession ‘conditionality’, although as transpired from presentation and questions this might be better thought of as monitoring or transparency via a large number of different actors (European parliament, local media and NGOs, domestic oversight institutions set up to meet the acquis but now flexing their muscles, rather than the formal, bureaucratic oversight of the European Commission seen in the accession process. The big question is if (and how) the reforms (supposedly) enforced by the EU conditionality will unwind. The coming to power of the populist-nationalist government of Robert Fico in Slovakia and the similarly extremist backed minority coalition formed in Poland seemed a sign of such unravelling, although Geoffrey’s stress was on more on the culture, values and commitment of local elites than electoral politics. In this perspective generational turnover – indeed any kind of turnover of communist-era elites in the judiciary and elsewhere – is a key mechanism of change.

Sketching out hypotheses for the fate of EU backed reforms (institutional inertia; path depednet-style lock-in; social learning; domestic pressures for rollback) he paints a mixed picture based on the experience of Slovakia and Latvia, where – according to much conventional academic wisdom - the pressures exerted by the EU during accession process displaced the illiberal democracy of Vladimír Mečiar and dampened down the inherent potential for ethno-national conflict in a society where some 30 per cent of the population is composed of Russophone minorities. For me the most interesting aspect of the talk was the way it filled the post-accession hiatus with some structured ideas and hypotheses about the EU-domestic politics relationship and, in particular, its view of elites and outcomes as more important than formal institutional building per se in the post-accession domestic arena. Here Geoffrey seems close to the ‘elite network state’ concept of Anton Steen, rather than the checklist of formal institutions set up to meet the acquis (used by Anna Gryzmala-Busse in her (admittedly differently focused) work on politicization of the post-communist state).

In truth, ‘euro-realists’ like Václav Klaus could be found arguing for the need to customize the acquis well before accession and questions have been asked as to whether conditionalitiy was in, fact, not a myth. Wade Jacoby’s innovative study of different policy sectors highlights the uneven nature of the acquis, conditionality and implementation and studies of regionalization - admittedly, a hot (well, warm) topic in the region before accession got going have stressed how the acquis was simply instrumentalized and/or potemkinized in ongoing domestic struggles. Here James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon's Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU's Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe : the Myth of Conditionality (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is well worth a shufti.

UK Liberals' Estonian 'Cheeky Boy' may have hidden political depths (honestly)

I’ve always had a sneaking regard for the Liberal’s Northern Irish-born, Estonian-descended MP for Montgomeryshire in Wales, Lembit Öpik. As well as unusual family and political origins on the Celtic/Baltic fringe and some standard praiseworthy Liberal Democrat concerns with keeping rural post-office open and civil liberties, Öpik combines a eccentric range of personal and political interests: hang-gliding (which nearly finished him off), caravaning (he is a parliamentary consultant to the Caravaning Club of Great Britain), regular appearences on TV chat and talent shows (he plays the harmonica and does a decent stand-up routine) and appeals for increased spending to detect asteroids on catastrophic collision course with the Earth. He also seems to specialize in bringing the political kiss of death to other Lib Dems, having backed alcohol-impaired Liberal leader Charles Kennedy to the last last year as all around were finally giving up (Kennedy resigned) and then backed Lib Dem President Simon Hughes in the race to be his successor (whose chances promply collaped after relevations of hypocritically concealed bi-sexuality – Hughes was first elected to parliament in 1980 in a by-election which saw his Labour opponent subjected to some of the most virulently homophobic campaigning ever seen in Brtitish politics)

Interestingly, although Britain’s best known Estonian – he speaks the language fluently - and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Estonia, his voting record and webpages show Öpik somewhat inactive on (East Central) European issues. He does, however, seem to have a weakness for Eastern Europe and kitsch pop music. Not only did he attend the Eurovision song contest as a guest of Tallinn City Council in 2002 – the only recent Estonian related entry in the Register of Members’ Interests – but he is in the news once again for having dumped his fiancée, Welsh TV weather girl Sîan Lloyd for one of the Cheeky Girls, a UK-based Romanian kitsch pop duo – who I had never actually heard of until the Guardian Online (who else?) broke the story. Not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that.

Öpik is not really taken seriously by some of the more worthy and staid Liberal Democrats – “Anyone seen an asteroid?” a card carrying Lib Dem academic immediately commented when I mentioned Öpik in his presence last year. However, the piccareque, self-deprecating, media-hogging personality must it seems to me, in part, be cultivated and seems to be to be a potentially valuable political asset. Lib Dem MPs tend to rely on local bases and individual votes far more than those of the two large British parties and a colourful personality can shore this up as surely as grassroots constituency work. Both London Mayor Ken Livingstone and now booze-felled former Liberal leader Charles Kennedy (“Chatshow Charlie” ) built up personal followings that enabled them to outmanoevre duller, more standard politicians in their party establishments by developing the same kind of never-boring “cheeky chappy” image. I’m sure – politically speaking - we really haven’t heard the last of Lembit.

Liberal democracy: the heat is on

A thought provoking article by Stephen King (the HSBC economist and columnist, not the horror writer) in a The Independent (6 November) about green taxation and the prospects of averting catastrophic climate change. Taking the liberal/economic view of climate changes as an externality that has be factored into individual economic decisions, he points out that taxation does work, but very slowly and not on the scale required for climate change to be addressed in time (as set out in the Stern Report). Smoking has been reduced by half over about 40 years as taxes have crept up, but there the individual has a direct personal interest in not becoming ill – whereas climate change really only bites 2-3 generations on – and the reduction achieved is still less than the 80% cut in global carbon emissions required.

The real issues, as the article, bleakly highlights, is that climate changes is a giant collective action problem – the tragedy of the commons writ very large indeed - which requires states and individual voters/consumers to subordinate their immediate interests to those of future generations and the global population as a whole. The chances of this happening, King convincing suggests, seem minimal, so we are likely to be heading for a bad global scenario in 50-100 years time. As in many collective action problems, some actors (US, China, India) count a whole lot more than others because they (will) emit more. US votes in elections – mainly in a few swing states and districts – have disproportionate weight in deciding about us all.

And the political consequences? Diminishing economic growth and social disruption implies conflict, radicalisation and perhaps resort to authoritarian solutions. Although Green politics in Europe is libertarian, anti-statist and generally politically right on, the political logic of coping with climate change (or its consequences) seems to imply a strengthening of political authority, growing inequality (green taxes on consumption are, after all, flat - hence regressive; development in poorer countries may add to climate change etc) and – as George Monbiot has spotted - the Wellsian prospect of a kind of world government, more likely perhaps to take the form of world governance, as bigger states imposing their will on smaller, taking action on climate change but at the price of entrenching their dominance and privilege.

The Pentagon, of course, got there before me in a widely publicized 2003 report focused on US security needs, but I guess the message is that eco-liberals might need to be as worried about the growth of state power and the future political environment as they do about the physical environment. On the other hand, Liberals from Mill to Hayek have cultivated a professional pessimism about global trends driving the rise of new forms of authoritarian and usually been only half right... Indeed, perhaps the late 21st century will just be the same as the late 19th or the late 20th - a few wealthy fortress like islands of political liberalism in an otherwise poor and illiberal world.

"New elections please, duck" say Polish liberals

Despite the conventional wisdom about flat, stunted civic societies in Central and Eastern Europe, as Petr Kopecký and Cas Mudde suggested in an excellent edited collection a few years ago (Uncivil Society?, Routledge, 2002) waves of civic mobilization do break over CEE fairly regularly. These days, more often than not, however, they are semi-orchestrated by liberal and right-wing parties trying to depict opponents as authoritarian throwbacks threatening democracy against whom a 'new 1989' is needed. The militant right-wing Hungarian protest culture - which first emerged in full view with the founding of the 'civic circles' movement in 2002 after the right narrowly lost elections and has gained a new lease of life with the Hungarian Socialists PM's unwisely candid remarks that he had lied to win the election about a 'fucked up' economy (A European Commission report confirms Hungary has the worst fiscal stats in the EU - those other neo-liberal refuseniks, the Czechs and Slovenes do quite badly as well).

Now, reports OpenDemocracy, Poland's liberal Civic Platform (OP) party is co-ordinating citizen protests to press ahead with a scheduled parliamentary vote on holding easrly elections against the wishes of the conservative-nationalist government of the Kaczynski brothers (President and PM respectively) which also includes the ultra-conservative League of Polish Families (LPR), who also do their own in right-wing Christian line counter-protes. The minority coalition was recently unstuck by the secret taping of an injudicious attempt to 'buy' an MP from another party (a practice not totally unknown in Czech politics, although despite murky accusations hard evidence has never emerged) Playing on the Kaczynski surname and Polish word for duck, the movement has the witty slogan "Sorry, Kaczory, jutro wybory!, which (I think) means"Sorry, ducks, elections tomorrow".

For Heaven's sake

Another of the Czech Republic’s small liberal parties – the Liberal Reform Party (LiRA) attracts my attention. LiRA is a small Brno-based libertarian outfit led by the very energetic former Civic Democratic Alliance-member Milan Hamerský, which boasts one elected representative Brno Senator Jiří Zlatuška, the former Rector of Brno’s Masaryk University (who, one suspects, would probably have won as an independent).

LiRa, which will do well to pass the 1% barrier in next month’s elections has a rather different approach to the ‘New Freedom Union’s’ candid endorsement of the right to be a loser. In what I first thought was a sponsored link to a travel agent, tts web site promises Heaven on Earth (see above) seemingly in the form of a tropical island.

In practice, not unlike the dying Freedom Union, the party offers a scrappy, bullet-pointed programme of tax cuts, subsidy slashing and tuition fees (not an obvious voter winner with the New Political Generation the party is seeking to promote), albeit with the added novelty of leaving the environment to the free market to sort out. Perhaps the island represents the Czech Republic after global warming has set in…

"It's Legal to be a Loser" - And How!

The Czech Republic's small liberal Freedom Union (US-DEU) party, once the rising hope of reform in the wake of the Klaus era in 1998 and again in 1999-200 as part of the Quad-Coalition with the Christian Democrats and others in is now crashing out of Czech politics with some style. With poll ratings consistently at around 0.3%, it only real hope was to ally with the plethora of other small liberal groups just under the radar of Czech national politics and hope for an electoral upset.

When the chimera of such a ‘European Liberal Party’ proved illusory, US decided to contest the elections alone promising an election campaign based on electronic communications with ‘usual elements’ with a (not insignificant) budget of up to 20 million crowns (Lidové noviny 17 February). And they have certainly found a way to blow 20 million in style.

The Union’s campaign swansong is a radical re-branding exercise, which owes more to MTV than conventional political marketing. The self-styled "New Freedom Union" hasreplaced its logo with white pentangle on a purple background - resembling widely used the anarchist symbol - jaunty pop graphics and a range of cryptic English language slogans with a broadly libertarian message, such as ‘It’s legal to live’, ‘It’s legal to be different’ and (more appropriately) ‘It’s legal to a loser’ - I identify with this one and have already ordered the T-shirt.

However, as former leader of the liberal Freedom Union Jan Ruml (LN 8 April 2006) observed, the Union is in practice not undertaking any campaign, but giving some admen something good to put on their CVs. The Freedom Union's last minute attempt to revive itself from political death by re-inventing itself as a fashionable anti-establishment media phenomenon seens predicactably to be proving totally unsuccessful. The Greens despite their self-destructive urges do seem set to make it into parliament asrepresentative of the decent ethical liberal soft centre of Czech politics - and possibly if final polls are believed may do quite impressively.

Still as the New Freedom Union tells us It's Legal to Live...

Anti-totalitarian liberalism and Gellner's Viennese whirl

Read with interest of Ernest Gellner’s “Viennese theory” that the anti-totalitarian liberalism of Popper and Hayek reflects the experience of “the individualistic, atomized, cultivated bourgeoisie of the Habsburg capital had to contend with the influx of swarms of kin-bound collectivistic, rule-ignoring migrants from..the Balkans and Galicia”. People like Popper and Hayek – whom Perry Anderson writes of as a White Emigration, I think in his English Questions - “would seem to be haunted by the contrast between the creativity of an individual bourgeoisie and the cultural sterility of kin-hugging gregarious migrants from some Balkan zadruga, whose clannish and collectivist leanings threaten liberty and progress’ (Plough, Book and Sword, London, Collins Harvill, 1988, 26-30). This is basically familiar populist/liberal cleavage known in much postcommunist politics literature in a new guise, it seems. Shades too of the Victorian liberal reaction to the political rise of the working class and the influx of Irish navvies, except that this political/rule class succeeded in integrating such ‘swarms’ culturally and politically. There was no Habsburg Disraeli and no compelling Austrian political identity akin to Britishness, though as Tom Nairn suggests in recent writing the British state at the turn of the 21st century had a whiff of Habsburg Austria about it.

Hayek and 'planning postcommunist reform

Hayek had a number of political ideas about the liberal, democratic reconstruction of post-war Germany, principally federalism based on regional states (not Laender)

However, do many of the problems of democratic politics and planning he describes in Road to Serfdom and elsewhere not recur in ‘planning for freedom‘ especially in the context of transition from totalitarian rule – the problem of reaching prior agreement and subsequently agreeing to stick whatever the consequences. When no such agreement is forthcoming is there not here a tendency to fudge things with propaganda and the delegation of powers from divided parliaments to unaccountable all-powerful technocrats (or authoritarian modernizers?) and back again to populist politicians backed by collectivist democratic majorities. However Czech and CEE experiences – as Greskovits suggests was not this Latin American scenario this would imply Here, however, the slippery concept of ‘planning‘ needs unpacking. Can it be extended from an etatistic command planning to top-down technocratic policy-making. How did Hayek envisage the implementation of Constitution of Liberty with associated interventions into the democratic process as previously understood? What political vehicles did in anticipate – in practice the IEA and Mrs T, as we know, but what is implied in his writings. Time to read dear old Friedrich more carefully.

Snow White, Hayek, liberalism and national political culture

Read parts of the Road to Serfdom while watching Snow White with my daughter. Snow White is still impressive today and must have really wow-ed them in 1937. Hayek’s tract is more clunky and uneven and - despite its (then) heterodox message - more of its time. A rather inelegant restatement of classical liberalism, edged with the foreboding extinguishing of freedom that one can also find in the supposed Golden Age of classical liberalism Hayek looks to - Mill’s fears in On Liberty comes to mind, although here the tyranny of democratic majorities, social convention and the homogenising effects of mass culture and mass consumption are the main culprits

Hayek is at pains to stress that the liberal tradition he defends is a product of Western and/or European civilization, not of any particular national political culture. Similarly, although he speaks of collectivist and socialist thinking in terms of ‘German ideas’ he sees the collectivism he opposes as a general trend more advanced in certain countries than others.

He also notes that the propensity of collectivism for large-scale organization and centralization overrides the autonomy and identity of small nations, noting inter alia Marx and Engels’ dismissive views of the Czechs and other Central Europe nationalities as ‘unhistoric’ nations destined to disappear in the course of (German-led) economic modernization. Influences on Czech right-wing euroscepticism perhaps?

Political parties and Milton Friedman

One of my PhD students notes the obsession of the East European party literature with fitting theoretical models of party organization and reflecting cleavages, rather than considering parties as forms for participation. A very valid point. Most parties, especially in CEE of course, seem more oligarchies, networks of elites, closed clubs of enthusiasts or subcultures like stamp collectors or bungee jumpers – they are of course basically seen by the literature as service organizations or public utilities, but the old normative idea of party membership as participation lingers on . A select form of participation, at best then

I later return to Milton Friedman wondering whether he like Hayek had informed the Czech right’s fear of Third Ways. A quick reading of Capitalism and Freedom suggests Friedman, however, was less preoccupied with the drift to totalitarian collectivism, which he sees as checked half way by Anglo-American political culture and the inherent economic inefficiency of socialist planning – a judgement perhaps ultimately bore out by the collapse of communism itself- than the need to restrict the scope of politics to expand the scope of freedom.