IN 1990, just a year after the wave of democratic revolutions that swept central Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, who was in the process of becoming the main interpreter of those events to western Europe, wrote with some confidence that "the thing" installed by Russian power after 1945, the thing variously called socialism, Stalinism, real existing socialism, totalitarianism – "that thing will never walk again", writes ENDA O'DOHERTY
Other analysts went further. Francis Fukuyama, in his book The End of History and the Last Man, wrote: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such ... That is the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Fukuyama makes an easy target: we can see clearly now (and many saw at the time) that there has been no inevitable progress towards the universal acceptance of Western political values. Tribalism and kleptocracy persist in Africa, often alongside formal democratic structures; in China a confident paternalism sponsors successful capitalist development in the absence of political freedoms; in Russia there is an elective democracy, but without the free media which in the West is considered its necessary complement; in South America, the left has risen from the grave and is practising, to the distress of the United States, a politics of redistributive populism which enjoys widespread support; in much of the Islamic world the choice seems to be between pro-Western authoritarianism and an anti-imperialist “guided democracy”. Not much liberalism there.
One obvious effect of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s temporary removal as an international actor was to encourage the US to believe that it had a free hand in the world and was well nigh omnipotent: hence the Project for the New American Century and the illusion of “full spectrum dominance”. George Bush jnr raged against the fanatics who resisted his policies because they “hate freedom”. But like it or not, it now seems an inescapable conclusion that the Western idea of freedom is not everywhere in the world considered the most desirable of goods.
Europe, however, is different. Though it may have come as a shock to some in the West when, in Czechoslovakia’s first democratic elections in 1990, the Communist Party, “that thing [that] will never walk again” won 13.7 per cent of the votes, it is certainly the case that in the longer term democracy in central and east central Europe has bedded down rather well.
The chief fears that Western pundits (Garton Ash, Ralf Dahrendorf and others) entertained in the early years of transition were that the economic shock therapy which accompanied a move to the free market – and which the experts considered absolutely unavoidable – might drive the suddenly impoverished populations to seek a solution to their misery in a new form of authoritarianism, whether of left or right.
That did not happen. Rather the pattern that established itself was the normal Western model of political alternance, where unhappy voters threw out government A and replaced it with government B and then, a few years later when B had not solved their problems either, replaced it with A again.
Some also feared a revival of the ultra-nationalist right, a political strand which had enjoyed rude health in the central Europe of the inter-war period. But while there are in existence, here and there, some rather unpleasant opportunists targeting Roma and other national minorities, similar groups exist in western Europe too. Nationalism and social conservatism, it must also be said, are not unforgiveable political sins but forces which are perfectly entitled in a democracy to dispute the ground with liberalism, social democracy and internationalism.
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, asked in the 1990s what he hoped his people might have learned from four decades of communist dictatorship, answered “resistance to stupidities”.
And so it seems they have. After two generations in the frozen embrace of Russian-style people’s democracy, 20 years ago the clocks started ticking again in central Europe when Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia began to share the same political system with the rest of the continent.
Far from ending, their history had begun again.