Class 8

The Leninist Legacy

At the end of WW1, the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire left a huge gap in the
conceptual geography of the continent.

THE INHERITANCE

Easter Europe resembles a historical blackboard on with Leninist chalk for forty years, erased by
Soviet actions in 1989, and waiting, tabula rasa, to be written on now in liberal capitalist script.

Timothy Garton Ash says: Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that what
communism has left behind is an extraordinary mish-mash

The Leninist experience in Eastern Europe reinforced the exclusice distinction and dichtomic
antagonism between the official and private realms.

The neotraditional secrecy characteristic of a ruling Leninist party; its corresponding distrust of
an ideologically unreconstructed population; the invidious juxtaposition of an elite in
possession of the real, but secret. Truth about the polity, economy, world affairs.; and a
population living in the cave of political jokes and rumor are legacies that continue to shape
the character of civil society in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Civil society is more than
economic and legal sociology; it is political culture

The men in power in the Eastern bloc talk constantly of internationalism, but no friendly
neighbor relationship of the type that as developed since the end if the war between the French
and the Germans has ever linked the Poles with the Russioans or the Czechs or even the people
of the DDR.

What no Leninist regime ever did was create a culture of impersonal measured action.

To put in bluntly: the Eninist legacy, understood as the impact of Party organization, practice,
and ethos, and the initial charismatic ethical opposition to it favor an authoritarian, not a liberal
democratic capitalist, way of life

THE FRAGMENTATION OF EASTERN EUROPE

The most vivid symbol of the Romanian uprising in December 1989 was the sight of the
Romanian flag with its Leninist center ripped out. Eastern Europe in 1990 and 1991 is like the
Romanian flag: its Leninist center has been removed, but a good deal of its institutional and
cultural inheritance is still in place.

And what one now sees taking place in Eastern Europe is more the breakup of existing identities
and boundaries than a breakthrough to new ones.
An established elite is one that recognizes the legitimate places of all of its members in the
polity despite genuine and deeply felt party, policy, and ideological differeces

Excepting Poland, no Eastern European country has an established ( democratic or

undemocratic) elite. That means they are fragile polities- highly fragile democratic polities.

They have not drawn up their detailed programs and have not clearly outlined the sociopolitical
model they want to establish in this country.

In Romania the governing elite does form an established elite. However, opposition elites ( ex
Liberal Party, Peasant Party, Group of Social Dialogue, Civic Alliance leaders in Romania)
fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the incumbents.

There is evidence of serious fragmentation within the governing parties themselves in Bulgaria
and Romania. The absence of democratic or undemocratic established successor elites in Eatern
Europe favors and furthers the maelstrom quality of life throughout the area.

Today Eatern Europe is a brittle region. Suspicion, division, and fragmentation predominate, not
coalition and integration. Sooner rather that later, attitudes, programs, and forces will appear
demanding and promising unity.

In response to enduring economic disorder, popular desperation will- and already has- led to a
large scale emigration that includes many of the youngest, most skilled, and most talented of the
population.

What is known is that all economists agree that things in Easter Europe will become far worse
before they become better. Like ethnic separatism and antagonism, emigration fragments a
nation and will generate national calls to end demographic fragmentation.

PAST,PRESENT,FUTURE

Now for the necessary genuflection, to national differences: they exists. It is clear that different
types of fragmentation will predominate in different countries, and that some will have lower
threshold of violence. But is should be equally clear that today the dominant and shared Eastern
European reality is severe and multiple fragmentation

It will be demagogoues, priests and colonels more than democratc and capitalists who will shape
Eastern Eurpes general institutional identity . Most of the Eastern Europ of the future is likely to
resemble the Latin America of the recent past more that the Western Europe of the present. Irony
of ironies it may be earlier writings by American academics on the breakdown of democracy
in Latin America rather than the recent literature on transition to democracy that speak most
directly to the situation in Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe fragmentation offers a firmer foundation for transition to some form of
authoritarian oligarchy than to democracy.
One likely area-wide response to fragmentation will be a growing political role for the Catholic
Church. The church offers a hierarchically ordered community white proximate in organization
and ethos to the patriarchal peasant and nontraditional Leninist Eastern European experience
prior to 1989.

One must be prepared to see Eastern European armies and their leaders become more self-aware
, confident, and assertive as the maelstrom develops.

To begin with, even those countries with a pre-World War II history of political activity by the
army, like Serbia, Bulgaria, Romaiaand Poland, have now had regimes for close to half a century
that have subordinated the army politically and denied it both a distinctive national mission and
institutional elan. Second at the moment neither the Czechoslovak nor the Hungarian army
appears to have any significant place in the polity. As for the Catholic Church, it is not strong in
the Czech lands or the Balkans.

Curently, there is a debate in and outside Eastern Europe as to what type of governance is best
suited to dea with Eastern Europes economic emergency.

THE TWAIN HAD BETTER MEET

The Leninist legacy in Eastern Europe consists largely not exclusively of fragmented,
mutually suspicious, societies with little religion-cultural support for tolerant and individually
self-reliant behavior; and of a fragmented region made up of countries that view each other with
animosity.

This would require enormous imagination, coordination, and intrusion on Western Europes( and
in a significant way, the USs) part: a massive economic presence, provision for major
population shifts on the European continent and intracontinental arty cooperation and action.