Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Between 1945 and 1989: the rise of ‘illiberal democracy’ in post-Communist Europe

Peter Verovšek 9th November 2019

The strength of ‘illiberal democracy’ three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall can only be understood by reference to the prior cold-war trajectories of east and west.

illiberal democracy
Peter Verovšek

The revolutions of 1989 seemed to signal the victory of liberal-democratic capitalism in Europe. The states of central Europe, which Milan Kundera called the ‘kidnapped west’, abducted from their heritage by the Red Army at the end of World War II, quickly adopted political, legal and economic reforms based on the liberal-democratic model. On May 1st 2004, a mere 15 years later, the first post-Communist states were celebrating their accession to the European Union; the reunification of Europe seemed complete.

Another 15 years on—from the vantage point of 2019—this narrative appears hopelessly naïve and Panglossian. Although EU membership was supposed to turn the border between east and west into a relic, cold war divisions are still salient, with states on either side operating with different understandings of democracy, as well as of the role and value of the nation-state.

Memory cultures

In contrast to the postwar system of liberal democracy established in the west, which protects human rights and privileges the rule of law over national sovereignty, in post-Communist Europe a different model of ‘illiberal democracy’ has emerged, which emphasises the popular sovereignty of the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’ over external claims to protection, legal procedure and international law. To understand this bifurcation, we need to pay attention not only to economic and cultural factors but also to the influence of memory cultures on contemporary politics.

While the historical imaginary of western Europe continues to be defined by the defeat of fascism in 1945, across central Europe it is dominated instead by 1989. These divergent frameworks of collective memory bring strikingly different lessons to bear on the present.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

In western Europe, collective remembrance is shaped by the traumatic events of the second world war, culminating in the victory over fascism. Immediately after the end of the war, key political leaders concluded that lack of protection of human rights at both the national and international levels had played a central role in enabling the atrocities of the Holocaust. Acting as what Jeffrey Alexander refers to as ‘collective agents of the trauma process’, they argued that pooling sovereignty in institutions beyond the nation-state and establishing systems for the international protection of human rights were the only ways to overcome the national antagonisms which had led Europe into two world wars.

This conclusion had important consequences for postwar democracy. Although popular sovereignty was still important, 1945 showed western Europeans that ‘the will of the people’ could only function properly within a constrained democracy, which privileged the protection of human rights above majoritarian popular sovereignty. The postwar liberal-democratic order in western Europe thus sought to ensure that nation-states could not deploy national law to ‘kill the juridical person’ by taking away basic rights from unwanted individuals—the first step in the administrative process which culminated in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

The lessons of 1945 also have important implications for the relationship between democracy and the nation-state. The postwar fear of nationalism in the west led to the emergence of the EU, which sought not only to ‘make war unthinkable’ through greater political co-operation but also ‘materially impossible’ via a common market and other economic measures of integration. Additionally, the Council of Europe was established to protect human rights at the supranational level, both through monitoring and legally through the European Court of Human Rights, which can enforce the European Convention on Human Rights juridically.

Totalitarian occupation

Memory culture in the east developed very differently. While 1945 is also an important symbolic date in central Europe, in this region it stands for the transition from one form of totalitarian occupation to another—from Nazi to Soviet rule enforced by the quick development of one-party states. The legacy of Communism therefore has important consequences for views of democracy and the nation-state.

Ágnes Heller points out that across the region the Communist Party was seen as ‘a mechanism for executing the will of the Central Committee, and thus the will of Moscow’. As a result, in much of post-Communist Europe ‘1989’ does not evoke a turn towards the liberal protection of human rights, but a desire for self-government.

Just as memory entrepreneurs in the west helped to shape the lessons of 1945 by emphasising the protection of rights and privileging the universalistic state over the parochial desires of the particularistic nation, the post-Communist narrative has also been disseminated and institutionalised by important carriers within these societies. Most notably, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland have both focused on the nation and national sovereignty, creating narratives which treat the past as a history of disasters imposed by external powers. These national leaders thus downplay the dangers of Nazism and nationalism which form the core of the western narrative, in favour of a story that emphasises the need for national self-rule.

Refugee influx

These different understandings of democracy, as well as the place of the nation-state within European and international politics, became especially politically salient as the influx of refugees from north Africa, the middle east and beyond increased in 2015. Coming on the heels of the Great Recession of 2008, this so-called ‘invasion’ fuelled xenophobic, right-wing populism across the continent.

However, whereas some governments in the west, as well as the institutions of the EU, have sought to push back against these trends—moving to defend liberal principles by upholding the international right of refugees to claim asylum and developing quotas for the distribution of asylum-seekers at the European level—the post-Communist states responded by tightening asylum laws, rejecting refugee resettlement arrangements, erecting barbed wire and even criminalising assistance to refugees. This has resulted in what the former president of the European Council, Donald Tusk of Poland, called a split ‘between east and west … compounded by emotions which make it hard to find common language’.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

It is easy to blame central Europe for holding on to an outdated, dangerous conception of democracy, rooted in nationalism and the nation-state. However, this view disrespects the historical experiences and collective memories of post-Communist Europe. Despite their desire to integrate central Europe into the EU, many western Europeans have found it difficult to understand the importance of 1989 to the post-Communist historical imaginary.

A series of hearings and conferences organised by the Slovenian presidency of the EU in April 2008 thus ‘brought to light a strong feeling that the Member States in Western Europe should be more aware of the tragic past of the Member States in Eastern Europe’. In its subsequent  declaration on ‘European conscience and totalitarianism’ (2009), the European Parliament observed that ‘Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its history, recognises Nazism, Stalinism and fascist and Communist regimes as a common legacy and brings about an honest and thorough debate on their crimes in the past century’.

A greater appreciation of the importance of collective memory in shaping politics in the present also has important implications for international development and attempts to consolidate democracy around the world. Most notably, recognising the importance of history and memory in the consolidation of democracy might help development agencies and international organisations to realise that the very term democracy will mean different things to different people because of their differing historical experiences. This has important implications for democratic consolidation, both in Europe and beyond.

Peter Verovšek
Peter Verovšek

Peter J Verovšek is an assistant professor of politics / international relations at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War (Manchester University Press, 2020).

You are here: Home / Politics / Between 1945 and 1989: the rise of ‘illiberal democracy’ in post-Communist Europe

Most Popular Posts

meritocracy The myth of meritocracy and the populist threatLisa Pelling
consultants,consultancies,McKinsey Consultants and the crisis of capitalismMariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington
France,pension reform What’s driving the social crisis in FranceGuillaume Duval
earthquake,Turkey,Erdogan Turkey-Syria earthquake: scandal of being unpreparedDavid Rothery
European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani

Most Recent Posts

gas,IPCC Will this be the last European Gas Conference?Pascoe Sabido
water Confronting the global water crisisMariana Mazzucato, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Johan Rockström and 1 more
Hungary,social media,women Hungary’s ‘propaganda machine’ attacks womenLucy Martirosyan
carbon removal,carbon farming,nature Environmental stewardship yes, ‘carbon farming’ noWijnand Stoefs
IRA,industrial policy,inflation reduction act The IRA and European industrial policyPaul Sweeney

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube