The Autumn of Nations – 25 years after: Aviezer Tucker
1989 was essentially the adjustment of the rights of the late-Communist elite to its interests. The rest was an unintended consequence of this process.
1. What was 'Autumn of Nations' 1989 about and how should the events of that time be understood?
1989 was essentially the adjustment of the rights of the late-Communist elite to its interests. The rest was an unintended consequence of this process.
Rights do not necessarily serve the interests of their holders. Rights holders tend to attempt to adjust their rights to what they perceive as their interests, they attempt to acquire new rights that are needed for the realization of what they consider their interests and neglect or extinguish rights that are not in their interest.
The late-totalitarian elite inherited from its revolutionary predecessor extensive rights to control aspects of the lives of their subjects, to jail them, decide on their employment and the level of education they and their children could enjoy and so on. The extensive rights of the elite against their subjects were of little use to people who perceived their interests as enrichment and passing on their wealth and status to their families. The late-totalitarian elite also inherited from the revolutionary elite some duties against its interests. Ritualistic duties such as marching on May Day and listening to long, jargon filled and meaningless ideological speeches must have been very exciting for the revolutionaries; but for the second-generation bureaucrats they represented a meaningless waste of time. The duty to hide from each other their wealth, avoid engaging in conspicuous consumption and the restrictions on passing on hidden wealth to their families were painful.
The late totalitarian elite had naked liberties to appropriate wealth from the state. Naked liberty allows somebody to act, without any rule that protects that action or guarantees that one can repeat such action in the future, for example, squatters have the naked liberty to live in a house until somebody evicts them. Naked liberties are inherently insecure. Property rights are much better.
The second-generation bureaucratic totalitarian elite gradually ceased to exercise their rights to control the minute aspects of their subjects’ lives, granted them negative liberties. On the other hand, they attempted to gain for themselves property rights and release themselves from the ritualistic duties of Communist ideology. They attempted to exchange their political rights for property rights. Since members of the elite were in charge of enforcing their duties on each other, they could spontaneously relax their mutual controls through neglect and liberate themselves of themselves, first expand their naked liberties, and then turn them into rights. When this process advanced sufficiently, it brought down the state and ended totalitarianism.
Following 1989, some late totalitarian elites lost political rights that were not in their interest, but augmented their economic rights, both by spontaneously appropriating the properties they had managed prior to the end of totalitarianism, and by separating assets from liabilities, rights from duties, possessing the first and transferring the second to the state. The opening of the borders and the creation of modern financial institutions in post-totalitarian states, allowed the elite to further transmute naked liberties into property rights by moving liquid assets they spontaneously privatized to foreign bank accounts. Once liquid assets were transferred to banks in the U.K., or Cyprus (so they thought….), and so on, the naked liberties became ordinary property rights, protected by duty holders in the governments and legal systems of those countries. As Solnik[1] explained, the less “specific,” was the asset, the more uses it could have, the easier it was to appropriate it. Liquid assets are the least specific. Some bureaucratic rents were very specific, for example, selling licenses to businesses or draft deferments to the families of conscripted soldiers required corrupt bureaucrats stay in their positions; they could not move their rent generating “assets” elsewhere. The more tied wealth was to the soil in natural resources, the more specific it was, the more was it in the elite’s interest to cling to political power, directly or indirectly, which partly explains the interest of the Russian elite in politics following the meteoric rise in commodity prices.
internationally shunned communist system.”[2] The adjustment of rights to interests was spontaneous; it did not follow deliberation or a collective decision of the elite to adapt its rights to its interests. The adjustment of rights to interests just happened as the aggregate of individual spontaneous decisions and actions.
Post-totalitarian popular freedom was not Republican self-government by a community that could determine its fate; it was negative liberty from control and interference by the late-totalitarian elite. The people could elect their political representatives and express themselves, if they were so inclined. But the democratic electorate could not determine via elections the distribution of rights that benefited the late-totalitarian elite. The political and geopolitical results of 1989-1991 were the unintended consequences of the adjustment of the rights of the nomenklatura to its interests. By “unintended” I do not mean unforeseen or unpredictable, but uncared for and indifferent to. Private nomenklatura vices generated public democratic virtues.
A less positive unintended result of this late-totalitarian elite adjustment of rights to interests and granting of negative liberties for the people has been popular cynicism towards democracy. Since politicians and governments seemed unable to control the elite, and even worse, sometimes were be incorporated by it, some ordinary people became disillusioned with democratic politics. Desperate voters consequently returned Communist elites to political power through democratic elections. The “new new political class” was made of “people slightly lower down the Communist hierarchy who very rapidly adapt to the rather different techniques of acquiring and exercising power in a modern television democracy. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but the young dogs learn them in no time. After all, they joined the party in the 1970s not because they believed in communism but because they were interested in making a career and in the real politics of power.”[3] The nomenklatura capitalists financed the old-new Communist parties and so ensured there was no return to state ownership of privatized companies, but the state continued to subsidize and protect them.
The photogenic mass demonstrations in city squares in 1989 contributed to the impression that the end of totalitarianism was brought about by resurrected civil society. Still, by the end of “[T]he main reasons why the late communism’s elite, or its more dynamic networks, relinquished their political monopoly without resistance were… their conversion into capitalists, which suited their long term interests better than did the economically bankrupt and totalitarianism there was hardly any civil society left. Civil society was annihilated by revolutionary totalitarian regimes to create what Arendt called a mass society of unattached atomic individuals.
The late-totalitarian elite, was usually indifferent to democracy, it wanted private property but was hostile to economic free competition and the impersonal rule of law. It preferred a system of economic inequality and a clientelistic social model, the rule of well-connected individuals intertwined with the state from which they appropriated assets and to which they passed on liabilities. Consequently, the elite’s interests were not affected usually by the form of government. They needed little from the government, and they could buy it through bribing politicians and civil servants, forming joint ventures with them or their family members, financing political parties, and influencing elections through ownership of mass media. Democracy may be then an unintended effect of the elite’s relinquishment of direct political power in favor of economic appropriation.
2. Why had it place at the twilight of "short century" (1914-89)?
Throughout the eighties, Soviet Block elites acquired naked liberties and began participating in the second economy, a process that would lead eventually to spontaneous privatization. Once the late totalitarian elite acquired some naked liberties they attempted to gain more and transmute as many of them as possible into rights, according to their interests. In the Soviet Union, the 1987 Law on State Enterprises relaxed central control over managers and initiated in earnest the process of spontaneous privatization. “Once it became clear that the ministerial supervisors were unable (or unwilling, given then rent-seeking potential) to stop enterprise managers from claiming de facto ownership rights over assets the pace of spontaneous privatization accelerated. New “commercial banks” (themselves the result of spontaneous privatization within state banks) became active financiers of managerial buyouts. Industrial ministries consequently disintegrated well before the 1992 initiation of a formal privatization program in Russia.”[4]
This late totalitarian elite, like any upper class that wishes to maintain itself, needed transferable rights, like property rights, to secure its own future and pass on what it accumulated to its families. This had been predicted well in advance of the success of totalitarianism by Robert Michels, who foresaw a hundred years ago the emergence of a bureaucratic hierarchy under socialism, and its transformation into a ruling class when parents attempt to pass on their status to the next generation. Michels and likeminded thinkers, including most tragically Czechoslovak president Beneš, expected this process to quickly follow the revolution. But the first revolutionary totalitarian generation was too fanatic, too psychopathic, too impersonal, and too briefly in power before meeting a violent end to form a class. Class emerged only with the second and third post-revolutionary generations as a result of the selection of bureaucratic successors. This new class was totally in control by the late eighties through generational replacement.
3. Are there any analogies between past and present situation?
Post-totalitarian elite adjustment of rights to interests, transfer of assets to private hands and liabilities to the state resulted in macro-economic crises in practically all post-Communist economies. After a severe economic crisis and devaluation of the local currency, governments were forced to reform their market regulations, often distance themselves from the banks and insurance companies, and impose some measures of the rule of law. In Russia, however, the 1998 crisis did not lead to much restructuring and rationalizing of the market because the rise in the global prices of oil and other commodities happened to follow the crisis. The resulting cash flow has been financing what may be called a utopia of the nomenklatura ever since.
The Russian government’s expropriation of the natural resources that were privatized earlier was not a “re-nationalization” in the sense of a return of state ownership. This was a re-privatization whereby a different clan came to control the natural resources and the cash flow, first for its own benefits, then as a source of political patronage, and finally for strategic geopolitical interests. The cash flow from commodities has allowed the Russian government to continue to subsidize the inefficient parts of the economy and finance corruption and embezzlement without recourse to either printing money or borrowing it abroad. The cash flow paid the national debt of Russia and built a stabilization fund, should commodity prices fall. There was so much money that the elite even paid pensioners and nurses, in effect it restored the late-Communist social contract whereby the elite guaranteed minimal welfare in return for political acquiescence. This system of patronage can continue to thrive as long as the petrodollars continue to flow in.
If income from commodities falls (because Europe buys less, the Chinese would pay less, and the Americans export more), as in the late eighties and the late nineties, Putin’s restoration regime will come under severe strains and that may finally give Russia the opportunity to reform.
4. Do events of 25 years ago can be an inspiration for contemporary Europeans?
Totalitarianism is not dead, it merely disintegrated and melted into the social woodwork. If we are not vigilant it will return, it has already made a start, obvious one in Putin’s secret police restoration in Russia and less obviously in the incremental intrusion of the state into social realms where it has no place in a liberal democracy following the 2007-2008 crisis in Western Europe. For example, in a liberal democracy the state should have nothing more to do with managing higher education than it should have in managing religion or the judiciary; nevertheless it has been intruding to centrally plan the Bolshevization of higher education. To paraphrase Heidegger, only dissidents can save us now. In the long term, I think this will be the one positive legacy of totalitarianism. Dissidents who live in truth and believed in personal integrity and decency irrespective of the cost, are needed now more than ever. If the managerial state continues its steady march towards ever increasing concentration of power and hierarchical unification of social elites, the dissidents should return to revive the vital tradition that saved civilization from totalitarianism.
If there is one thing we learn from the recent crisis of 2008 it is that even the best liberal institutional designs fail. Financial regulation drew the best and brightest minds, not just the obvious fools and fraudsters who designed education systems to have an unaccountable managerial class in charge of meeting graduation targets and linked teacher evaluations to their evaluations of their students. Liberal institutional designs fail, degenerate, and become corrupted by power hungry managerial elites. When they fail, as they inevitably do, the Republican citizen must be there to step in to plug the holes in the institutional design, at least until a better institutional design is put in place and the managerial elite is overthrown or constrained by institutional designs to do less harm. This was the service the dissidents rendered to their societies. Non-totalitarian societies need such dissidents now more than ever.
5. Was 1989 the end of geopolitics in this part of the world?
Geopolitics can end only once politics is disjoined from geography, from territory and from sovereignty. The political theory that advocates non-territorial states in competition over citizens is called Panarchy. Europe is not Panarchic.
[1] Solnik, Steven L., (1999) Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
[2] Łoś, Maria & Andrzej Zybertowicz (2000) Privatizing the Police-State: The Case of Poland. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 107.
[3] Garton-Ash, Timothy (1999) History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s. New York: Random House, 169.
[4] Solnik, Ibid, 229.
Aviezer Tucker, political scientist, Assistant Director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, an author of The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel (2000). Tucker has held research positions at the Australian National University, New York University, Columbia University, the University of Cologne, and the Central European University. He taught in Austin TX, New York, Long Island, Santa Cruz, Olomouc, Prague, Brno, Hartford CT, and Belfast.
Article written as part of the Freedom Express project - an international social and educational campaign launched on the 25th anniversary of the “year of changes” – the year 1989. The project is organised by European Network Remembrance and Solidarity with the support of ministries of culture from Central European countries and in cooperation with many institutions dealing with the history of the 20th century.