Does "populism" in Europe's new democracies really matter?

Demokratizatsiya

Volumn 17, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 310-323

  Dimitrov, Philip ^a  

^a CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

"red brown" phenomenon; Export of lawlessness; Populism; Totalitarianism

Indexed keywords

COMMUNISM; DEMOCRACY; DEMOCRATIZATION; POLITICAL VIOLENCE; POPULISM; VULNERABILITY;

EASTERN EUROPE; RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 73849149403     PISSN: 10746846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3200/DEMO.17.4.310-323     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Ivan Krastev, "NATO in the Age of Populism," Riga papers, NATO Summit - Riga, Latvia, November 28, 2006.
2. I use the term Eastern Europe instead of the more popular Eastern and Central Europe, because no matter what the differences among the countries that joined or aim to join North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union are, the similarities associated with the shared Communist history and legacies are unfortunately more telling. Furthermore, the reintroduction of the term Mittel-Europa confuses the discussion by charging it with clash-of-civilization connotations.
3. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw (New York: Time Books, 1990).
4. Bulgaria was the only country in Europe that managed to save about 50,000 Jews from deportation to Hitler's death camps by popular and institutional effort, and it ended the war with a larger Jewish population than it had had at the beginning.
5. John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 36.
6. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismeneanu, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000).
7. Contrary to the generally accepted notion, Communism was not alien to strong nationalist and ethnocentrist tendencies, even though the Communist regimes manifested an obligatory flavor of Russocentrism because of their slavish subservience to Moscow. It is enough to mention the ridiculous claims that all major scientific discoveries had first been made by congenial Russian peasants. Communist xenophobia was not as easy to detect when it was disguised as class phobia. However, from Stalin's ethnic displacements during and after World War II via the anti-Semitic trials around Eastern Europe in the 1950s, to the persecutions of the Bulgarian Turks in the 1980s, the Communist regimes were ready to forget internationalism (which was designed to work on a purely anti-class and thus anti-Western level) and resort to violent imposition on the ethnically and culturally different.
8. Umberto Eco, "UR-Fascism," New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
9. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
10. Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, Co.: Lynne Reiner, 2000), 16.
11. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
12. Values and perception of normalcy are also skewed and stimulate emotional satisfaction by being under attack or having wounds inflicted. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 99-100.
13. Romania Mare was reduced to 3.15 percent during the 2008 elections, and, for the time being, has no representation in either the national or the European Parliament. However, it would be rather premature to claim that the Romanian populist movement has been defeated. The plummeting popularity of its leader, Vadim Tudor, may simply result in the rise of another leader or populist party.
14. These actions show a tendency typical of junior populists in countries striving for European accession; they often try to prove their right to be European, even as they claim to be anti-European. This only betrays the deep sense of inferiority behind their exploits.
15. Jacques Rupnik, "The Populist Backlash in East-Central Europe in Democracy and Populism in Central Europe," in Democracy and Populism in Central Europe, ed. Martin Butora (Bratislava: IVO, 2007), 162.
16. Karl Olaf Lang, "Populism in 'Old' and 'New' Europe: Trends and Implications," in Democracy and Populism in Central Europe, 127-30.
17. Tatyana Vaksberg, Milosevic and the Tribunal (Sofia, Bulgaria: CIELA, 2008)
18. Philip Dimitrov, Jumping into the Atlantic (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2003).
19. Yeltsin's attempt to revive the old Russian imperial approaches in 1993-95 with the doctrines of the Orthodox Arch, the Pan-Slavic Community, and the Byzantino-Slavic Cultural Space should not be forgotten. The first attempt recurred in Russian political discourse almost until the 1996 elections, when Western, and especially American, help was eventually estimated as still crucial.
20. Ronald Azmus, Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 20-29.
21. For a nice effort to present reality while avoiding harsh terms, see Thomas Magstadt, Contemporary European Politics: A Comparative Perspective (Belmont, CA: Thomson / Wadsworth, 2007).
22. Mazeikiu Nafta, the sole oil refining company in the Baltic states, is one such example.
23. Letter from Reporters Without Borders to President Barack Obama, published on July 3, 2009. http://www.rsf.org/Reporters-Without-Borders-Letter. html. It reads, "Russia is currently ranked 141st out of 173 countries in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. According to our research, at least 20 journalists have been killed in connection with their work since Vladimir Putin became president in March 2000. The latest victim was local newspaper editor Vyacheslav Yaroshenko, who died on 29 June of injuries received in April."
24. A great deal has been written on the importance of the party in a totalitarian regime. This is beyond doubt for the Nazi Party and Soviet Communist regimes, but the party did not have the same significance in fascist Italy. Putin's party should not be deemed insufficient. The efficiency of the youth organization Nashi has never been questioned.
25. Carl Friedrich and Zbiegnew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 22, 124-25.
26. Ibid. Friedrich and Brzezinski's definition of Communism and Nazism include two more elements: state terror and near-complete monopoly of the effective use of all weapons of armed combat. However, I tend to believe that times have changed and, just as the impact of Internet has altered the character of media control, state-sponsored lawlessness tolerates some weaponry in the hands of criminal groups, which serves as terror substitute; there is no SA (Hitler's Sturmabteilung), just organized crime that can be crushed more legitimately if needed.
27. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
28. I have not seen a recent study on the linguistic aspects of Putinism. However, I have experienced, at democracy-promoting conferences, a complete, overwhelming divergence between the language of Eastern European and some Russian participants.
29. Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 116-20.
30. Some of the ex-Communist parties in Eastern Europe have both historical and strong personal links with Russia. One telling example is Bulgaria, where the leadership of what is now the Socialist Party includes a number of children and grandchildren of former Communist leaders who have lived and studied in Russia and have strong Russian family connections.
31. Ivan Krastev, "Introduction," The Anti-American Century, ed. Ivan Krastev and Alan McPherson (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 1-7.
32. Khristo Khristov, The Secret Life of Picadilli (Sofia, Bulgaria: CIELA, 2008), 57-63.
33. Momchil Metodiev, The Role of State Security in the Communist State (Sophia, Bulgaria: CIELA, 2008), 141.
34. It is still disputed whether the Bulgarian KGB had direct involvement in the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II. What is not disputed is that Mehmet Ali Agca, the shooter and a member of the Gery Wolves, was visiting Bulgaria and that terrorists like him were welcomed by the Bulgarian KGB.
35. The frequent use of Communist clichés by prominent democratic leaders in the new democracies could be the subject of a separate study.
36. Alen MacPherson, "Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean," in Krastev and McPherson, The Anti-American Century, 49-76. Curiously enough, as late as 2007 some still claimed that there were no political prisoners in Venezuela. Examples of olitical prisoners include Nixon Moreno, who still hides in the Papal Nunciatura in Caracas, after being accused of rape despite being miles away at the time, and Eligio Cedẽo, a financier accused and imprisoned for supporting the opposition. Still, the Chavez regime generally is treated as if it was not clearly totalitarian.
37. A good example of this trend is a book by the leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, (ex-Communist) Sergey Stanishev, entitled Why Are We Socialists (2008). In a bold combination, he put the names of international terrorists and political mass killers (e.g., Che Guevara and Georgi Dimitrov) together with nineteenth-century Bulgarian national liberation figures (e.g., Hristo Botev and Tonka Obretenova) and leaders of the contemporary European socialist movement (e.g., Tony Blair and José Manuel Baroso), and no acting European politician (to my best knowledge) expressed the slightest indignation.