Nationalism and Democratisation

Politics of Slovakia and Slovenia

Erika Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138729674
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351746953
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2002: The year 1989 marks a turning point in world history. The rigid division of Europe into East and West and the bipolarity of the Cold War system disintegrated, with communism as a political system dismantled by 1991. In the wake of the communist multinational federations came successor states, with each accompanied by many ethnic and national conflicts. This book is concerned with the relationship between nationalism and democracy in a particular setting - the larger framework is postcommunist Eastern and Central Europe, the focus is on newly dependent democracies, explored through the case studies of Slovakia and Slovenia. The purpose is to seek an answer to two related questions: what is the role of nationalism in the democratic process?; and under what conditions is nationalism less or more compatible with the democratisation process?

1 The End of Communism and the Crisis of Identity

The beginning of the 1990s enters history as the end of communism¹, but also as a period of an intense ethnic and national reawakening, often with dramatic consequences. Years of postcommunism have made it clear that the transition to democracy was inseparable from the issues of the nation and that political pluralism entailed an upsurge of ethnically based politics. The map of Eastern/Central Europe (henceforth ECE)² was profoundly changed by a number of new states, whilst domestic politics of nearly all states in the region involve seeking a solution to demands from minorities. The essay on nationalism and democracy by Ghia Nodia states boldly that ‘nationalism is the historical force that has provided the political units for democratic governments’³. It further argues that if Ernest Gellner says that ‘nationalism engenders nations’⁴, then it is equally true that “democratic transitions engender nations”⁵. It cannot be denied that some 28 new states⁶born out of the disintegration of the ex-Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, give credibility to Nodia’s view that ‘democracy never exists without nationalism’⁷. The degree to which this is true is one of the questions this book attempts to answer.

There is no doubting a link between nationalism and democracy, but that link is not teleological - not all nationalism leads to emancipation, not all national emancipation ends in democracy, and not all transitions to democracy will end as democracies. The ‘revolutions’ of 1989 in ECE were ‘nationalist’ only in the sense that they sought national sovereignty out of the Soviet Empire, but it cannot be argued that newly independent ECE states emerging as a consequence of the postcommunist democratisation ever developed any authentic separatist movement prior to their independence⁸. It also pays to remember that we do not know whether the earlier attempts at liberalisation (e.g. the Prague Spring 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956), might have possibly led to further democratisation without nationalist mobilisation⁹ if they had happened in another geopolitical space and without interventions by the Soviet Union. National solidarity energized the 1989 revolutions and created the context within which these transitions became so euphoric, but it was also nationalism that eliminated much of that euphoria and finally killed it in the Balkans.

All that can be asked is why was it democratisation that engendered nationalism of the ‘Old’ kind, the ethnically based nationalism of blood-language-religion-culture mixture, which paradoxically is often referred to as ‘new’¹⁰. The ‘new’ context of this latest wave of nationalism in ECE -the integration into transnational structures, the requirements of the international community for the provisions for the protection of minorities and the possibility of democracy itself - are precisely the ones that make its resurgence seem so anachronistic.

While recognising the strength of Nodia’s argument, the fact is that only a few of the new states in ECE are true nation-states, that is that only very few consist largely of one national group (and that is indeed where the transition seems to have progressed faster)¹¹, and that democratising and nation-building simultaneously are fraught with contradictions. What is clear is that nationalism, certainly for the first few years of the transition process, was central to politics in the new states of the region. Neither the glorification of its effects on democracy, nor the more traditional dismissal and underestimation of the nationalist phenomenon, are helpful in solving this question.

The task of this chapter is to examine more closely the conditions under which contemporary nationalism spreads in the new states and to seek an answer to two questions: one, why has there been an intensification of nationalism in postcommunist societies and two, is nationalism an ‘indispensable element’ of democracy in general¹², or is it merely a necessary and logical concomitant of postcommunist transitions? The discussion in pages to follow is divided into three parts: 1. the particular features of the 1989 revolutions which inaugurated democracy in the region and how these processes differed from other transitions from other authoritarian regimes; 2. what is meant by nationalism in the context of this book; 3. analysis of the various factors, often mutually reinforcing, that contribute to the salience of nationalism in the region.

The principal argument is that democratisation itself has contributed to nationalist mobilisation. However, the intensity of nationalism varies in line with the particular histories of those countries, including the very recent history of the end of the communist regime and where applicable, the extrication from the former communist federations. In answer to the second question, the conclusion argues that nationalism is the logical concomitant of transition to democracy in postcommunist societies, not because democracy has to go hand-in-hand with nationalism, but because the weakness of these states and their democratic institutions allows nationalism to take up a position of the great unifier, mobiliser and legitimiser in all tasks that a newly independent democracy needs to perform.

Revolutions of 1989

In the first years of post-1989 revolutions in ECE many comparisons were made between the French Revolution (1789)¹³ and the ‘1989 revolutions’, which started with the toppling of the Berlin Wall and led to the end of communist rule in the whole region. To compare the inglorious end of the communist parties’ monopoly of state power to the execution of Louis XVI might appear farfetched. However, the comparison is relevant, for we must agree that there are certain events whose consequences have profound implications for human existence and therefore merit to be called historic -the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the ‘1989 revolutions’ were such events¹⁴.

If the great revolutions of the past claimed to be a beginning of a new era and indeed carried history forward, regardless of what we might think a better alternative would have been, the 1989 revolutions position in history is not so clear. Depending on one’s point of view, the year 1989 marks either the conclusion of the era which started with the Bolshevik Revolution¹⁵, or the extension of democracy, heralded by the French Revolution, to Eastern Europe, therefore a final stage in the European revolutionary tradition. Somehow the year 1989 is associated rather with ‘the end’¹⁶, than with ‘the beginning’. The reason for this perceived lack of novelty¹⁷ is occasioned by the often expressed idea of ‘return’, to either independence, common European home (Gorbachev), or democracy - all of which claims are open to questioning. For one, hardly any newly independent postcommunist democracies can claim to have been independent or democratic prior to the Second World War and the subsequent imposition of the Soviet rule.

Moreover, there was nothing new about the values or ideas that these ‘revolutions’ brought; the new order was even older than socialism. A plural political system, market economy and open society were already established values in the West. So, where does this leave the comparison with the French Revolution? The analogy can be made with the end of apathy, spontaneous mass action, the refusal to carry on in the same old undignified way and indeed the inauguration of a new social order, even if the values and norms were not new. These were ‘political revolutions’¹⁸and they transformed the existing order decisively and it would appear irreversibly. There is reason to doubt whether all new democracies will become stable functioning liberal democracies, but at the same time there is also enough evidence to be certain that the Leninist system based on ideological uniformity, coercion and suppression has been dismantled for a long time to come, if not for ever. The fact that these revolutions have been followed by ethnic strife, nationalist upsurge, rampant corruption, the rise of illiberal parties and a degree of nostalgia for the old regime does not take away the most important message of these revolutions - freedom of choice for all people.

The End of Communism and Democracy

The bankruptcy of state socialism seems to have given an almost undisputed credibility to liberal-democracy, to the point of its most famous adherent Francis Fukuyama’s claim of ‘the end of history’. A disproportionate amount of attention has been given to Fukuyama’s thesis possibly because it reflects, without any regard for the lessons learned by history and other similar claims of the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’¹⁹, what could be called a general assessment of the revolutions of 1989.

There are several implications to this ‘end of history’ interpretation of the end of communism which bear directly on the transition to democracy.

1. It neglects the historical evidence that the attempt to establish liberal democracy in conjunction with the formation of new states is also not new in the region - a similar situation arose after 1918²⁰. Yet none of the new states emerging from the Paris Peace treaties remained democratic for longer than a decade with the exception of Czechoslovakia.
2. Jeffrey C. Isaac argues that whilst he believes that ‘there is much merit to this liberal interpretation’²¹, it is politically and morally flawed. Politically because it ignores important forms of politics practiced by democratic oppositions that are not adequately covered by liberalism; morally because it marginalizes the importance of non-electoral, antiparliamentary forms of political activity (‘forum’ politics²²) that played an important role in the ending of communism and at the same time constitute a more grass-roots type of participatory democracy.
   The strategy for political action was more rooted in the resistance to the system than in direct achievement of political power. Secondly, was the appeal to internationalism. To Eastern European dissidents national independence was a condition for social reform and social decency, but this was clearly distinguishable from nationalism that elevates the importance of belonging to one particular nation and brings the pursuit of maximal conditions for that particular nation into politics. The initial anti-Communist struggle in Czechoslovakia did not seek self-determination for either the Czech or Slovak nation - that came later. Equally, the democratisation of Slovenia was followed by independence, but independence was not the intended goal behind the tentative democratising reforms sparked off by civic movements throughout the 1980s. Finally, the alliances formed were extremely broad, embracing liberals and the Orthodox Church, democrats and nationalists, socialists and conservatives, as well as workers and intelligentsia. They aimed at a new type of society, a self-managing civil society, or rather a civilized society, based on active citizenship, human rights and non-violence. One of the reasons for the quick end of ‘forum polities’ was that it was an idealistic vision at a time when the end of communism seemed too remote to contemplate, thus the actual government under these policies and with such unlikely alliances did not need to be scrutinised for its feasibility.
   As much as ‘living in truth’²³ was an admirable aspiration and struggle, it was not a daily practice of politics - this was democracy that could not be criticised or blamed, devoid of competition, ambitious politicians and decisions about mundane issues of allocation and taxes. C.S.Maier warns against the ‘feeling of anticlimax’, that succeeded the initial euphoria of 1989, a collective sense of disillusion which leads to ‘heightened xenophobia’ characterised by appeals to ethnic exclusiveness and the desire to ‘reinvigorate the national unit’²⁴.
   The Yugoslavian tragedy certainly warrants such pessimism. On the other hand it appears that the situation of the early 1990s, when the transition in ECE countries seemed to be completely overshadowed by the dangers of ethnic nationalism, has changed recently and nationalist pressures seem to be waning. Nevertheless it is clear that one of the forces that can divert democracy into more extremist path of politics is nationalism. This book attempts to shed light on how and why the best intentions of 1989 politics, once transferred out of opposition into parties, governments and parliaments, joined forces with nationalist ideologues and ended up, in many cases, in opposition to all that democratic reforms stood for.
3. Notwithstanding the above, the fact is that no matter how troubled the transitions to democracy in ex-communist countries are, and however legi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The End of Communism and the Crisis of Identity
• 2 How Compatible are Nationalism and Democracy?
• 3 Political and National Identity in Czechoslovakia
• 4 Reclaiming the Nation: Politics of Independent Slovakia
• 5 National Communism in Yugoslavia: the case of Slovenia
• 6 Independence and Democracy in Slovenia
• 7 National Identities in Post-Cold War Europe
• 8 Reconciling Postcommunism, Nationalism and Democracy
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index