Democracy in Europe, Thirty Years After the Berlin Wall fell

Sooner or later, history always brings you the bill. Often it is a salt bill - and at other times - that does not lack irony. And it has to be ironic that history, that the May 26th European elections, the first to be at stake was the survival of the European Union itself, have occurred at exactly the thirtyth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which became a crucial factor in the reunification of Europe.

And it has to be about a <x0tacle” of history, that the choice of Donald Trump as president of the United States, a powerful driving force for European populisms and sovereigns, happened the same day as the fall of the Wall, November 9th, almost as if he wanted to reject, twenty-seven years later, false hopes, illusions and prospects (“What day! What a day! Non-liberal democracy is over, I feel relieved of political accuracy”, Victor Orbán commented on the outcome of the American presidential election. But in history as in dreams, Froydy has taught us, numbers coincidences are never random: they put us on the road to lost or distant tracks, allowing us to rebuild, more reliablely, the genealogy of a forgotten present.

In the present we have a European Union who on May 26th sighed relievedly, rejecting the sovereign-populistic threat, but which remains separated from the deep gaps of territorial, economic, political, cultural, cultural, towards which the obligation to be unitary risks doing, increasingly tempting and effective. Where do such mistakes originate, and how are they corrected? Deprived as it is of historical weight, politics gives no answers, or gives them wrongs. Facing the economic rift between the north and the south, which expanded with the 2008 crisis, The EU responded with the policy of saving and disciplining debt, as well as with the story of ants and cicadas, further burdening division.

In the face of political division between the north and south, marked by experiments by “non-liberal democracy” in Hungary and Poland, unbounded democratic transitions in Serbia and Ukraine, or neo-authorist regimes in Belarus and Azerbaijan, the EU hid, relying on the strength of the liberal Western democratic model, against the sovereign spectrum. But the result, even in this case, was the expansion of its gap and reproduction in the interior of Western states, mostly in the Italian laboratory, always zealous. And finally, in the face of the third gap, the immigrant crisis which permanently destabilises borders, even so fragile, The EU continues to give no answers, fuelling increasingly vulnerable policies to security, as well as allowing the establishment of thousands of fences, in full opposition to the image of “borderless space” and “open society”, which should characterize Europe.

That's enough or enough to conclude that the stubborn reproposal of the neoliberal recipe has produced and reproduced the economic, political and demographic crisis of the old continent: and that it needs to be changed roads, turning back the European construction tape and accepting errors, illusions, misunderstandings, paradoxes. The 30th anniversary of 1989, should be the right opportunity to do so, but on the condition that we get out of the single and triumphal turquoise events of that year, which to this day have been the strong core of Europeist ideology. “Pa wall: The two Europes after the collapse of communism”, a review of the writings of politicalologist Jacques Rupnik, put us on track for this review of the past three decades. Born in Prague, the adviser to Vaslav Havel in the 1990s, a member of the International Commission for the Balkans and Kosovo, docent at several European and American universities, Rupnik crosses his view on Eastern, Central and Western European issues after <x2-revolutions of the 1989 and the eastern expansion of the European Union in 2004-2007, rebuilding a political, social and cultural riddle of the continent, more complete and more complex than we are taught. But the book's motive is political, and it is summed up in two questions about today.

Two Questions About Today

The first: the climbing of populist, sovereign and anti-European movements and governments, declared unliberal or prominently neoauthorial, signals a problem in Central and Eastern Europe, due to perhaps the legacy of the Soviet regime, or perhaps warns of a trans-European and transatlantic tendency of contemporary post-democracys. How much more if we bring the Italian government, Brex or President Trump into account in the United States? So it's about a return of birth, or a sunset? Second: are we looking at today and not from now on, the collapse of all promises and promises of eighty-nineths to the contrary: from the fall of the wall, to the building of barriers for immigrants, from triumph to the crisis of liberal democracy, from Europe's reunification to the new divisions that are opening up brazda, from the triumph of the market economy, to the 2008 financial disaster, from open society to identifying isolation, from the continental project to nationalism, from the unrecognitional movements of human rights to the laws against the laws of human rights The NGOs, from the myth of global governance to the sovereign castles. How should this overthrow be interpreted? Were these false promises or false promises? Or both?

Both of these questions refer to processes caused by “revolution”, eighty-nineth, today of this controversial day in terms of definitions that have been made: explosion from within the Soviet system according to some; the non-violent practice of civil disobedience according to others; the revolution “superservative “, with no new idea full of strength and aimed only at imitating the West, according to Habermas; but no doubt, according to Rupnik, the final democratic revolution of the global European event, in other contextal context, so the 20th and the most crucial years of the planet.

From that year full of concessions, surprise and memorable, you can see, on the pages of the book, the whole movie: the events (Lajpcig, Dresden, Varshava, Prague, Budapest, Berlin, Bucharest); the precedents (Solidarnosc- 1980, Prague 1968, Budapest 1956, without forgetting the workers' strikes in 1976 in Random and Ursus; and in 1970 on the coast of Balls; the accelerated time and the domino effect (<x07). GDR ten weeks, Chekoslovakia ten days, Romania ten hours, Albania ten minutes... And of course protagonists Havel, Vales, Gorbachev, Kohl, Reagan, Thatcher and above all Pope John Paul II and their respective strategies. The reconstruction of the events does not fall into the rhetoric of spectacularity, nor the inconsistencies of the event: more is a reconstruction of the 1989 process, incubed into the long and deep Soviet crisis and knowingly accelerated by Gorbachev's reform, which in the end, however, fails to stem the consequences of the existence of the USSR itself. Trained first by Gorbachev, but also by Reagani, the end of the Cold War will coincide with the end of real socialism, with the ratification of its reforming inability, with the triumph of the Western model, but also with the victory of Ten Hsiaopin's authoritarian solution to the communist crisis, to that reformist of the Soviet leader.

But here I don't care to stop to the movie, which the 30th anniversary celebrations will make us see many times, rather than the continuation, the beginning of which always marks the end of a good movie. What starts in Europe, with the end of 1989? Central Europe was only a protagonist, or even a target, for powers that ended the Cold War, and the 1989 revolution? If that revolution restored the myth of the sovereign people, who took his fate, what is left of that people and that sovereignty, in today's sovereign population? If the push for that revolution came from a generation of radical youths and intellectuals, open, ironic, “not against the regime but already beyond that”, what happened to that generation and the disdension, to which it sounded? Finally, if the objects of the wishes of that revolution were democracy and the “conversion to Europe”, what happened today to democracy in Europe and Europe?

Unclean promises, betrayed promises

Orban's biographical and political path, raised in the last generation of Hungarian liberal discipline to end in 2016, to the formation of “Liberal democracy”, or the one of Jaroslav Kazzynski, formed inside of Solidarnosc and former Vales adviser, offer some data for reply. But Rupnik is articulating his analysis at a broader dimension, at the crossroads between the uncertainty of Eastern European revolutions and the betrayal of Western European promises.

The peace and gullibility of the premises are attributed to passion without criticism for the liberal Western democratic model, as well as to no criticism at “consensian neoliberist Washington”; putting emphasis on human rights, effective countering Soviet totalitarianism, but following was used as a source of legitimacy for the “humanitarian wars of the ninety-nine years and the American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Central European countries have been closer to the US, than the EU; the popular sovereignty concept, with the patriotism of the nationalistism against the nationalistism B RSS, and as a consequence, exposed since its origin to today's populist-Sovranist shadows.

On the other hand are betrayed promises of the West: offering an increasingly poor democracy, reduced into electoral rites, eroded by the crisis of representation, corruption, tyranny of markets and information means; myth of a post-National form of the EU, but never translated into institutional architecture ) without any kind of attraction for the nationalist feeling of central Europe; an expansion of Union in the eastern countries, much like one annex, than a “conversion into Europe <18>

The result of these two parabols has been a European construction filled with misunderstandings, and further compromised by the economic crisis and the immigrant crisis, the latter perceived by eastern countries as a slap of Western and postcolonial multiculturalism, on their illusion of contributing to re-entering continental identity, with the re-discovering of their national identities.

The process of uniting Europe, which viewed the Visegrad countries as examples of democratic transition and was crowned in 2014 by the election of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, as president of the European Council, thus became a producer of new francs. Today Europe is united, except for a multi-debated currency, only from the democratic crisis: but in which this is the question of “democrats” of the Visegrad countries look not like the remnant of the world that was, but as the threshold of the coming world.

The prosecutors of the non-liberal democracy “x1> of Orbanin State of Law in the name of an absolute concept of popular sovereignty; control of media and magic; authentic and nationalistic policies; cultural wars in defense of traditional values (God, Homeland and Family) against the new “tolitarianism of rights spread as a stain of oil in all European populations, as we have seen in the Italian laboratory, and not only those in Europe, as we have seen in the U.S. Trump. And they begin to emerge even where populisms do not flourish and govern, in increasingly empty post-democracy practices, as well as in increasingly attractive societies by strong people and simple solutions.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to Rupnik's conclusion, the cycle that opened in 1989 was historically fulfilled and will be politically closed with a non-continence decision. The western triumph, decreed at the end of the Cold War, has really coincided with the beginning of its fall in the face of the rise of Chinese power. The new global subx0> ” the US tried to impose by exporting democracy through weapons has produced wars, fundamentalisms, international terrorism and mass migration. Democracy, which was presented 30 years ago as the spontaneous or forced political destination of the entire planet, is now in an unprecedented crisis of shape, essence and legitimacy, primarily in countries that have the most experience. “The market's” is broken into an unprecedented economic and financial crisis. Globalization has raised enormous numbers of people from poverty in several regions of the world, but with the cost of inadequacy in other regions, marginalising the role of Europe compared with that of the US and China. And Europe, from a laboratory of a post-national union experiment, has become the target of domestic nationalist push, as well as the target of devastating external shocks, by the US of Trump and Putin's Russia.

Is there a way out? Not to be overlooked are the factors that today ensure Union stability, nor should the recent divisions in the Visegrad group, nor should the fact that, paradoxically, the very public opinion of those countries is seen in Europe, the only antibody against the deviation in authoritarianism, “the recent protection against our demons”. As sick as it is, democracy still has its cards to play against totalitarianism, east and west. But on one condition, according to Rupnik, that “reunite democracy and liberalisation, which means making the distinction between political liberalisation and economic liberalism”.

Here lies the sense and at the same time the limit of the author's analysis, which rightly blames “fusion and in fact co-operation between liberalisation and liberalism”, for social and political trouble, as well as the cultural locks of the cycle after 1989, but has the illusion as many liberalists that this confusion can be eliminated and this co-operation can be interrupted, rid of economic liberality and restoring liberal democratic normality. Neoliberalism, which dominates the world for forty years and has defined the trends and fortunes of 1989, is more than a superlocation or confusion, between economic liberalism and political liberalisation: it is a form of rationality, which sets on the foundation of the economic code of market and competition, the entire building of coexistence, from anthropological basis, to the institutional peak.

Liberal democracy and its traditional subjects, the rational individual, dèmos forged by participation and common values, parties as the centre of fixed conflict practice, power sharing as guaranteeing the rule of law, come out not conditionally but structurally. New populist and sovereign right-wing ones have perfectly understood, with their criticism of individualism, “reservience” of the sovereign people, the extreme contempt they have for the rule of law: and they travel on the path to unliberal democracy, as Vladimir Putin has confirmed in an interview for the “Final Times”, a few days earlier. In fact, it's from the left field, lacking a proposal up to time. If neoliberalism has been the last hegemonist ideology of nine hundred, to get out of its crisis requires an anti-hegemone invention with the same force, which is still not seen on the horizon.