Abstract
Democracy isn't doing all that well in Central Europe.
Americans usually assume that established democracies are here to stay, in part because the democratic credentials and enormous power of the United States enable it to widely promote the benefits of free-market democracy—peace, prosperity, and the rule of law—through aid, trade, and investment. The West also believes itself able to create democracies by simply negotiating with the elites of society.
These are dangerous assumptions.
In places where institutions once appeared stable, market-generated prosperity firmly rooted, and interstate war or domestic strife incomprehensible, there are now signs that democracy is in crisis. This is Central Europe at the start of the twenty-first century.
In places where Western government officials believed the irresistible force of consumerism would pacify and democratize, the danger of war is palpable and the recurrence of authoritarian rule at hand. From Beijing to Moscow, the prognosis of democracy and the promise of peace seem to have evaporated as trade surpluses mounted and oil prices rose.
Government officials thought there were blueprints for how to create or sustain democracy. But it looks as if what they thought they knew about democratization was wrong, and that they have pursued policies with no results or bad results.
Democratic governance is fickle; it plays no favorites. You must want it dearly and fight to keep it. In Central Europe, where the electoral process is sacrosanct and rules are plentiful, “statist democracy”—democratic in form but unfree in spirit—is common. It skates on the thin ice of legitimacy by adhering to process and maintaining order. In Russia and China, opinion polls as well as official behavior suggest that the passion for democratic governance exists only among a thin layer of the urban population. Commitment to the rule of law or to norms of tolerance and pluralism is neither broad nor strong.
Hemorrhaging democracy
Democracy in Central Europe is wounded.
In a late 1999 parliamentary election, Austrians responded to the language of fear and paranoia by awarding the Austrian Freedom Party (the Freiheitspartei Österreich or FPÖ) almost 30 percent of the vote. At the far right of Austria's political spectrum, the FPÖ gained a prominent place by invoking the voters' fears—of foreigners, continuing immigration, the idea that a supra-national Europe would impose its will, high unemployment, and assorted other threats to their well-being. Austria, a small, conservative country at the edge of Europe's worst late-twentieth century conflicts, is adjusting to lowered stature. No longer the hosts of grand summitry, Austrians were ripe for a negative appeal. Without popular leaders like former Chancellor Bruno Kreitsky, the left and center responded poorly or not at all.
The FPÖ is the vehicle for the message, but its leader is the principal messenger. That leader—who has formally resigned from his party post but still retains personal control—is Jörg Haider. At 50, he is handsome, wealthy, athletic, media savvy—and a demagogue.
Haider's media persona might mask his demagoguery were it not for his words. But his visceral antipathy towards immigrants, or anyone who is different, leaps out. Yet 30 percent of the Austrian electorate believed that Haider, an apologist for Hitler and the SS, was a legitimate alternative to the two mainstream parties—the Social Democrats and the People's Party. After the election, Haider and his so-called Freedom Party were accepted into the coalition government of the People's Party.
Many excuses and reassurances have been offered. An Austrian diplomat, tired of answering criticism and questions about Haider's popularity, maintains that his country's democracy is rock solid, that Austrians would “never accept foreign interference to overturn the choice of the voters.” Others argue that, although repugnant, Haider's values reflect the views of citizens who cast their ballots in a free and fair election. Further, they say, as a member of the European Union and fully linked to a European economy, Austria can be nudged back into politically sensible behavior. They add that Haider, a photogenic ski-and-marathon enthusiast, is a far cry from the talent-challenged painter and former corporal who gathered his followers in Munich beer halls. If foreign critics would only lighten up on Austria and Haider, they suggest, this nasty episode will pass.
On the other hand, Haider as Austrian chancellor would be no picnic. Were he supported by a working majority in parliament, some discomfiting laws directed against immigrants could be expected. Unshackled by parliamentary coalitions, Haider could be expected to impose an anti-Europe ethos in foreign policy, driving his country in the direction of Meciar's Slovakia in the mid-1990s. The distinctly good news for Austria and Europe is that a Haider chancellorship is not around the corner.
Nor are Austria and Haider the main issue here. The kernel of the matter is democracy—what it is and what it is not. Reductionist democrats accept the statist variety as good enough, given democracy's imperfections: If you have nicely done elections, what more can you ask? Isn't democracy the rule of the people? If so, there is no danger to democracy in the Austrian vote.
But is democracy speaking when demagogues are elected? Or do enemies of democracy understand how to use fear to mobilize and slogans to deceive? If you mix a free and fair electoral process with a civility guaranteed by the rules, you can produce a pro forma democracy. But if the rules of civility guarantee extremism and intolerance the same protection as core democratic beliefs, is that democracy in action or a contemporary version of the Trojan Horse?
The Haider phenomenon is not insulated from other Central European trends—particularly in Germany and the Czech Republic.
Democracy in Germany has been shaken by the complacent assumption that German politicians were somehow better than their American, British, or French counterparts. Now it seems clear that the party long in power took cash contributions from almost any source: oil companies, arms salesmen—it didn't matter, as long as Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) center-right party built up its campaign coffers.
Now Kohl refuses to come clean. He insists that, once caught, he owes society nothing more than cash repayment. He further asserts that protecting the reputation of personal friends who gave money to him and his party is a higher principle than public accountability (this from a national leader).
That someone who was the German chancellor for nearly two decades has sunk so low has the elements of tragedy. But greater danger looms ahead. The CDU is in shambles, with Kohl's own designated heir, Wolfgang Schäuble, resigning under a cloud while other would-be heirs like former Defense Minister Völker Rühe failed to lead the CDU to a respectable showing in his own Land (state). As a consequence, the party's general secretary, Angela Merkel, was tapped for the leadership post—a choice that is likely to unsettle the party's alliance with Bavaria's right-wing Christian Social Union. With the party weakened—possibly enough to splinter—an increasingly vocal minority of Germans are saying, as a Berlin cab driver said to me, “We Germans need a Haider—but a stronger Haider.”
“No, this is NOT election central.”
There is now an opening for a truly reactionary right-wing movement. Were such a movement to arise, it would be dangerous not because it might garner anything close to a plurality, but because it would push the mainstream parties toward the intolerant rhetoric and policies that German democracy has long eschewed. Meanwhile, high unemployment in some sectors and regions and the substantial German antipathy toward the Turks and other minorities who live in that country's major cities provide fertile ground for the rise of extremism while the political drama of mainstream conservatism unfolds.
Democracy has been hemorrhaging in the Czech Republic as well. The Czechs were rewarded with NATO membership in 1999. After all, their country seemed so appealing: It was a haven for German investment; Old Town Prague drew the tourists; there was even a playwright-president. West Europeans and Americans offered medals to Vaclav Havel as tour groups converged on the Charles Bridge.
International financial institutions swallowed Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus's claims throughout the 1990s that all was well—privatization under way, and the economy humming along. (Klaus's self-aggrandizing collection of speeches, Renaissance, was published just as his government was collapsing.)
The economy resembled a Potemkin village, with bank fraud, insider privatization deals, and other assorted illegalities hiding behind the façades. Meanwhile, human rights organizations were becoming increasingly aware of the Czechs' reprehensible behavior toward the Roma and other minorities.
Few in the United States or Western Europe wanted to exclude the Czechs from the first round of NATO enlargement. From all appearances, the Czech Republic met the real political criteria for NATO membership—it looked, sounded, and smelled like the other members. Despite concerns over minority rights and the warnings of some analysts that the Czech Republic was “free-riding” into the Alliance, Czech “familiarity” and Madeleine Albright's stamp of approval said it all.
But questions about the Czech place in the club of Western democracies have arisen over the past year and a half. The country's support for its NATO partners was negligible during the Kosovo conflict. And it now looks as if the Czechs are unwilling to share any of NATO's burdens; they want nothing of the cost of being part of the democratic club, but they will refuse none of the benefits. With old-line communist politicians surging to the forefront in Czech opinion polls, it is clear that NATO's enthusiasm for enrolling the Czech Republic was premature.
Democracy is fragile and its foundations can erode quickly. Its foundations quake when core institutions and personalities show their principles to be no loftier than the highest bidder, and when publics prefer state welfare guarantees and an interior ministry that controls minorities. When they reject competition, tolerance, and pluralism, there's not much room for the consolidation of democratic practices.
Central Europe was presumed to be the leading edge of what scholars like Samuel Huntington call democracy's “third wave,” which swept the continent's eastern half after the Cold War. But “democracy is coming” no longer rings true.
Collective risk and common good
Those who take chances for democracy, who risk a dangerous vote or step out into the street without knowing if batons and gas will beat them back, plant democracy's deeper roots. Dumping tea, marching for suffrage and civil rights, boycotting to exert economic pressure on companies and governments—taking collective risks for common good— bonds people to process and to policy. Yale University political scientist Robert Dahl was right when he asserted that extensive participation is not a necessary condition of democracy. But it is also true that, absent popular empowerment, democratic processes are a sham—no more substantive than elections in communist states.
Some scholars hold that democracy cannot happen without a pact by the elite—and this is the top-down model that Central Europe followed, with democracy imposed in some countries with post-war Western occupation, and in others in 1989, when it was derived from “roundtable accords” or negotiated revolutions that brought velvet rather than violent ends to communist rule. But the democracies thus created, externally imposed and elite driven, lack popular legitimacy.
In Central Europe, democracy is taken for granted. Within “the club”—the European Union and/or NATO—the umbrella of the organization defines its members as democracies. Institutions and behaviors seem to conform and confidence reigns.
This is the false confidence of the politically naïve and historically blind. Democracy doesn't “just happen,” and it is not, once in place, immutable. While its tenets are unquestionably valuable for the quality of life within and among states, lasting democracies do not appear without extraordinary individual and collective efforts. We cannot find and keep the benefits of democracy without absorbing the costs of creating and defending it. The willingness to take collective risks for the common good—not for personal liberty or private gain—is essential.
Democracy's continuing vitality, which is less measurable than audible and visible, may take root not where things are stable, prosperous, and peaceful, but where the need for competition, tolerance, and justice is most acute. In those countries where the United States has committed the most funds and energy to encourage “stable” transitions—name-ly China and Russia—democratic progress cannot be discerned. Ziang Zemin runs an increasingly well-financed militarized one-party dictatorship; Vladimir Putin has the KGB background and traits to make a highly professional autocrat.
Conveying democratic principles as an adjunct to McDonalds and Boeing has worked poorly, if at all. Recognizing the futility of such efforts means not pretending any longer that engagement and largesse evoke democratic behaviors.
Toting up the score
In recent events in Central Europe we see again, poignantly and dangerously, that the price of democracy is high. Gaining the peace and prosperity that democracy promises requires that the powerful be held accountable, that the weak be protected by law, and that demagogues be firmly excluded from respectability. If Helmut Kohl were on trial or in jail, Jörg Haider declared person non grata in Austrian politics, the Czech Republic told that its place in the queue for membership in the European Union had been lost, these few tangible steps might underscore the price of democracy.
After thousands of seminars on political party development, legislative oversight, civil society, and the interagency process, whether funded by USAID, George Soros, or others, it's time to stop and reassess.
After a decade of post-communist Europe, it seems that how far people come and how hard they fight may be much more critical to building a lasting democracy than how well their country scores on a test of supposed pre-democratic criteria. Those who are trying hardest, sacrificing the most, and beating the odds could be the best bets. Orderly elections, sophisticated campaign slogans, and computerized election results are elements of style, not spirit.
There are no democratic genes. But rule by consent of the governed—guided by norms of tolerance, pluralism, and the rule of law—is almost universally admired. If the West's sense of democracy and democratization reflected relative achievement, NATO membership might have been first offered to Romania and Bulgaria, and the malfunctions in the Austrian, German, and Czech democracies might be taken more seriously.
Western governments did not expect, and still do not recognize, that democracy might be endangered in Central Europe. Russia and China suggest that democracy can't be taught or bought. The time to absorb this lesson is now, not after established democracies unravel, global rivalries are renewed, or nascent democratic movements ignored.