The Decline of Mitteleuropa

Transcription

1 The Decline of Mitteleuropa A 89er s Thoughts on the Fading of Constitutionalism Gábor Halmai Jiří Přibáň is a leading Czech academic and public intellectual who graduated from Charles University in Prague in 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution, in what was, at that time, still Czechoslovakia. He was appointed professor of legal theory, philosophy and sociology at Charles University until he moved to the School of Law and Politics of Cardiff University. But even living in Wales, through his articles and interviews, Přibáň is frequently present in Czech public life, and has cultivated personal relationships with a number of figures from the modern Czech art scene. (This is the reason that the book is illustrated with several contemporary Czech art works; Přibáň makes several references to them in the text.) As Petr Pithart, the last Prime Minister of the Czech Republic when it was still part of Czechoslovakia and President of the Senate of the independent Czech Republic, writes in his preface to the book, the author acts like Socrates walking the streets of his home town, obliged to no one, a rival to nobody, speaking his mind freely. The last essay of the book demonstrates that Přibáň has found a home in Wales, too, where quoting George Voskovec he also can hang his hat. (Expats, like myself as well, cannot hope for more.) This collection of essays, which first appeared in the Czech language, concerns the transformation of constitutionalism in the Czech Republic and beyond. The book s subtitle is a reference to the Czech politician Tomáš Garrigue 1 Masaryk s study, The Czech Question. Masaryk, after unsuccessfully trying to change the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, became a devoted proponent of an independent Czechoslovakia and its first President. As Přibáň claims, when the 1992 preamble of the new Czech constitution incorporated the principle of a civic Jiří Přibáň, The Defence of Constitutionalism. The Czech Question in Post-national Europe, and Karolinum Press, Charles University, Professor and Chair of Comparative Constitutional Law, European University Institute, Florence; gabo.halmai@eui.eu 1 Masaryk took his wife Charlotte Garrigue s family name as his middle name. 1

2 nation in the spirit of the inviolable values of human dignity and freedom as the home of equal and free citizens, it hinted at Masaryk s belief in the universal validity and critical power of democracy and liberty (pp ). Přibáň s essays are not about the nation s historical struggle for survival and independence, but rather the decline of democratic constitutionalism and civility in post-national Europe, with a particular emphasis on the region once known as Central Europe. He sadly observes that instead of the Masarykian ideal of the nation as a community united by the universal ideas of mutual equality and freedom of citizens, the current political imagination in Central Europe has increasingly been influenced by the political demons of the 1930s: by the feelings of ethnic exclusivism, hatred of everything foreign, and the idea of the state in the service of exclusively national interests (p. 181). Přibáň thinks that the political extremism in Hungary since 2010, when Viktor Orbán came to power, in Poland after PiS electoral victory in 2015, but also in Robert Fico s Slovakia, is a symptom of a much deeper crisis of Central European statehood. For him, the Austrian presidential election and the 2013 Czech parliamentary election, where Andrej Babis ANO already represented a new approach to politics in which politicians and political parties are not needed because they can easily be replaced by experts and business management, similarly to the first direct presidential election, after which Czech President Zeman tried to move towards a semi-presidential system. The success of the radical right in the 2016 Slovak parliamentary elections, the results of the 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections with the Freedom Party as part of the coalition government as well as Babis success at the Czech parliamentary election also in 2017 and Milos Zeman s at the presidential elections in 2018 all happened after the publication of the original Czech edition of the book. As Přibáň foresaw, these events reshaped the meaning of Central Europe already in 2014, and cannot merely be the consequence of the migrant crisis, which started in Using Jacques Rupnik s term of early-onset fatigue, Přibáň argues that the region s political elite is still battling over the nature of the state and struggling for a sense of state sovereignty instead of dealing with much more specific political issues and topics (p. 182). 2 See this argument in A. Kazharski, The End of Central Europe? The Rise of the Radical Right and the Contestatin of Identities in Slovakia and the Visegrad Four, Geopolitics, DOI: /

3 As the author makes clear in another essay in the collection, it did not start like this in He states that unlike the 68ers, who felt there was an alternative both to Soviet totalitarianism and the consumerist societies of Western democracies, the 89ers, among them Přibáň in Czechoslovakia (and the author of this review in Hungary), the main goal was the replacement of failed socialism and single-party repressive government with a market economy and liberal democracy. 3 (pp ). He also claims that the 89er generation was a liberal generation in the truest sense of the word, for which the first imperative was that freedom takes precedence over equality. The question is whether elite preferences matched those of the general population. Let me reflect on this issue with reference to the situation in Hungary. There, the transition to democracy was also driven by the fact that a large share of the population gave high priority to freedom itself, but especially to market freedom, which meant that people expected the new state to produce speedy economic growth, with which the country could attain the living standards of the West overnight, without painful reforms. 4 In other words, one can argue that the average Hungarian person looked to the West as a model in 1989, not so much in terms of its economic and political systems, but rather in terms of living standards. As Hannah Arendt argued, it is impossible to establish a republic based on freedom without liberation from poverty and misery. 5 Claus Offe predicted the possible backsliding effect of the economic changes and decline in living standards, warning that this could undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions and turn back the process of democratization. 6 This failure, together with the emergence of an economically and politically independent bourgeoisie, the accumulation of 3 This dual transition scenario characteristic for the post-communist states of East Central Europe in the early 1990s is significantly different from the scenario of single transition, where the only aim to achieve was a transition from a quasi-democratic or authoritarian regime to democracy, as happened in the middle of the 1970s in Southern Europe (Greece 1975, Portugal 1976, and Spain 1978). The terms single and dual transitions are used by A. Przeworski, Democracy and the Market. Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Later Claus Offe broadened the scope of this debate by arguing that postcommunist societies actually faced a triple transition, since many postcommunist states were new or renewed nation-states. See C. Offe, Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience, MIT Press, As Ulrich Preuss argues, the satisfaction of the basic economic needs of the populace was so important for both the ordinary people and the new political elites that constitutions did not really make a difference. See U. Preuss, Constitutional Revolution. The Link Between Constitutionalism and Progress. Humanities Press 1993, 3. 5 Arendt quotes Sain-Just: if you wish to found a republic, you first must pull the people out of a condition of misery, which corrupts them. H. Arendt, What Freedom and Revolution Really Means, Thoughts on Poverty, Misery, and the Great Revolutions of History, The New England Review, Cf. C. Offe, Designing Institutions for East European Transitions. Institut für Höhere Studies. 1994, 15. 3

4 wealth by some former members of the communist nomenclatura, unresolved issues in dealing with the communist past, the lack of retributive justice against perpetrators of grave human rights violations, and a mild vetting procedure and lack of restitution of confiscated properties, were reasons for disappointment. Regarding transitional justice, the Czech Republic has chosen another road. As Přibáň explains, unlike Hungary (and Poland for that matter), where Communists transformed themselves into Social Democrats and capitalist entrepreneurs, social democracy in the Czech Republic grew out of opposition to the communist regime. Therefore, he argues, decommunisation processes, represented by the rehabilitation and lustration laws, derived from the argument that democratic transitions must entail a change of personnel and experts. Consistent with the premise of militant democracy, he argues that it was correct and necessary to defend the constitutional order. 7 ( ). In other parts of the book, the author also proposes to use tools of militant democracy nowadays against politically organized manifestations of anti-democratic political parties and movements, such as the Czech Workers Party, which was dissolved by the Supreme Administrative Court. But while he argues for the rigorous application and enforcement of democratic self-defense in the field of political association, he also thinks that freedom of expression must be clearly distinguished from the freedom of political association and assembly; and in order to protect freedom of expression for everyone without discrimination, the state must be libertarian (p. 214). This appeal for clear differentiation is surprising because Přibáň also acknowledges that every society has its own unique history, complete with trauma and misadventure. Therefore, for instance, Holocaust denial can be a criminal offence in Germany, Austria, Hungary and many other European countries, including the Czech Republic (p. 205). Why then allow a ban of the neo-nazi Workers Party in the Czech Republic or the similar Magyar Gárda in Hungary, but not punish the Der Stürmer -like propaganda by the members of those dissolved organizations, which can represent a clear and present danger and even lead to violence against certain group 7 About the details of post-communist Czech experiences of dealing with the past see Jiří Přibáň s two recent works. J. Přibáň, Politics of Public Knowledge in Dealing with the Past: Post-communist Experiences and Some Lessons from the Czech Republic, in U. Belavusau and A. Gliszczynska-Grabis (eds.), Law and Memory. Towards Legal Governance of History, Cambridge University Press, , and J. Přibáň, The Kundera Case and the Neurotic Collective Memory of Postcommunism, VerfBlog, 2018/1/12, DOI: 4

5 of people, as was the case with refugees during the migration crisis in many Central European countries. This was the time when Czech President Milos Zeman declared: I do not want Islam in the Czech Republic, and Viktor Orbán, Hungary s Prime Minister, seconded: We would like Europe to remain the continent of Europeans and we want to preserve Hungary as a Hungarian country. 8 While it is not the only reason, the migrant crisis certainly contributed to the emergence of East Central European populism. Of the fifteen countries in the region, seven populist parties currently hold power, two belong to ruling coalitions, and three are the main opposition force in their countries. 9 This also means that not yet taking into account the outcome of the Italian election on 4 March - only East Central European populists compete successfully against traditional parties in elections. 10 This is reflected by Přibáň s observation that Europe has split again, this time into the culturally more advanced old Europe, which as Habermas says - wants to build federalism and spread democratic values across the world, and the new, noncore Europe (p. 57). Here Přibáň quotes the favorite Hungarian writer of the reviewer, the late Péter Esterházy, who was proudly promoted from an Eastern European to the rank of Central European, and finally became a New European. Similarly, Iván T. Berend, a Hungarian historian living in the US, claims that Central Europe has ceased to exist, and there are again only East and West. On the other hand, Přibáň in his note to the reader of the English edition, written in September 2016, mentions the general differences in values regarding Brexit and concludes that the present European crisis has turned out to be not just economic and political, but also intellectual (p. 15). Although he believes with Husserl that a European is someone who aspires to universal understanding and humanity, he adds that civilizations can decline, as happened with the Venetian maritime republic from 1516, when it set up the Ghetto Nuovo for its Jewish inhabitants (p. 69). To the signs of the intellectual crisis, and the loss of prestige, respectability and credibility of politics, Pithart in his preface, written after 7 November 2016, adds Donald Trump s election in the US, where, similar to some East Central European countries, we observe a fascination with authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China. We all remember Hungarian 8 See S. Pogány, A Tale of Two Europes: East and West, Social Europe, 22 January, M. Eiermann, Y. Mounk and L. Gultchin, European Populism: Trends, Threats and Future Prospects, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 29 December S. Sierakowski, How Eastern European Populism is Different, Project Syndicate, 31 January,

6 Prime Minister Vikor Orbán s famous 2014 speech proclaiming his intention to turn Hungary into an illiberal state, among others, following the models of Russia and China. 11 As a Socratic observer, instead of providing solutions for the fading liberal constitutionalism in East Central Europe, Přibáň as Pithart says - sends warning messages. These messages are very pessimistic towards the universality of critical thinking. This tradition, he argues, like any other attempt at a definition of universal Europeaness, besides a network of budget airlines, the Erasmus undergraduate exchange programme, or Champions League football, is a paradox, because the essence of every collective identity lies in the difference between us and them (p. 56). He thinks it is wrong to seek a common identity and values, where there is no glue in the form of political organizations, such as European political parties, or where there is a complete absence of a European civil public, whether in the form of a European press, trade unions, charities, and so on. What Europe really needs is common politics with a pluralistic system of political parties, special interests, and conflicts (p. 87). At the national level in the Czech Republic, as well as in other backsliding East Central European member states of the EU, the civil public, Přibáň warns, has no choice but to bypass the party and power apparatus and protest directly in campaigns of civil disobedience or open revolt. Let me add to this that achieving Přibáň s main goal with this book, namely to defend constitutionalism in a reinstated Central Europe, requires a civic interest in constitutional matters based on a certain constitutional culture. This constitutional awareness, which was mostly missing in the countries of East Central Europe after the democratic transition, means that citizens have to endorse what John Rawls once called constitutional essentials ; they have to be attached to the idea of constitutionalism, and from the debates about it a constitutional identity 11 In a speech delivered July 26, 2014 before an ethnic Hungarian audience in neighboring Romania, Orbán said that Hungary will undertake the odium of expressing that in character it is not of liberal nature. Citing as models he added: We have abandoned liberal methods and principles of organizing society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world Today, the stars of international analyses are Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia.... and if we think back on what we did in the last four years, and what we are going to do in the following four years, then it really can be interpreted from this angle. We are...parting ways with Western European dogmas, making ourselves independent from them...if we look at civil organizations in Hungary,...we have to deal with paid political activists here.....[t]hey would like to exercise influence... on Hungarian public life. It is vital, therefore, that if we would like to reorganize our nation state instead of the liberal state, that we should make it clear, that these are not civilians... opposing us, but political activists attempting to promote foreign interests....this is about the ongoing reorganization of Hungarian state. Contrary to the liberal state organization logic of the past twenty years, this is a state organization originating in national interests. See the full text of Viktor Orbán s speech here: / 6

7 can emerge. According to Rawls, the core of this kind of constitutional patriotism is a constitutional culture centered on universalist liberal-democratic norms and values, refracted and interpreted through particular historical experiences. 7