Journal of Democracy, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2016, pp. 20-34
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The Fading Mirage of the
“Liberal Consensus”
James Dawson and Seán Hanley
James Dawson lectures at University College London, where he has
served as director of the master’s program in Democracy and Comparative
Politics. He is the author of Cultures of Democracy in Serbia
and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics (2014). Seán Hanley is senior
lecturer in the comparative politics of Central and Eastern Europe at
University College London. He is the author of The New Right in the
New Europe: Czech Transformation and Right-Wing Politics, 1996–
2006 (2008).
Ivan Krastev’s influential essay “The Strange Death of the Liberal
Consensus” appeared in the Journal of Democracy in 2007 as part of
a special symposium in which contributors were asked to write about
whether they thought democracy was backsliding across East-Central
Europe (ECE).1
Krastev’s essay began with an alarming appraisal of
postcommunist Europe, but ended with a soothing prediction: Yes, the
rise of illiberal populism across the region signaled that the post-1989
“consensual politics” aimed at EU accession was coming to an end; no,
this was not a development that would lead to the collapse of democracy,
because democracy no longer had any serious ideological alternatives.
“Weimar interpretations” were wide of the mark: “The streets of
Budapest and Warsaw today are not flooded by paramilitary formations
in search of a final solution,” Krastev wrote, “but by restless consumers
in search of a final sale.”2
Krastev was broadly correct about the limited threat of far-right illiberal
populism. Although paramilitaries chanting nationalist and antiSemitic
slogans have now joined the shoppers in Hungarian towns and
cities, Hungary’s slide toward semi-authoritarianism is arguably an exceptional
case reflecting a specific combination of a restive conservativenationalist
right wing, strongly majoritarian institutions, and economic
recession. Even after years of socioeconomic pain and occasional political
turbulence following the Great Recession of 2008–2009, the situation
Journal of Democracy Volume 27, Number 1 January 2016
© 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
What’s Wrong with East-Central Europe?
21James Dawson and Seán Hanley
today in East-Central Europe and beyond does not mirror that of Weimar
Germany.3
Yet if Krastev was right that democracy in East-Central Europe will
not be going out with a bang, he failed to consider whether it might go
out with a whimper. In stressing the limited threat posed by extremist
outsider parties and elected strongmen, Krastev overlooked a subtler
threat—that illiberalism, represented by both entrenched economic
elites and latent forces of national and social conservatism, had never
actually gone away during the period of “liberal consensus” and was
thus already established in the mainstream.
The liberalism of the “liberal consensus”—as Krastev’s essay concedes—was
an elite project driven by small groups at the apex of politics,
business, academia, and officialdom. We argue, however, that this
narrow economic, technocratic variant of liberalism merged with existing
illiberal narratives and interests which pro-European elites generally
opted to accommodate rather than oppose. Despite appearances, in
East-Central Europe there is an absence of genuinely liberal political
platforms—by which we mean a range of mainstream ideologies of both
the left and right based on shared commitments to the norms of political
equality, individual liberty, civic tolerance, and the rule of law. As
a result, citizens are left unexposed to the philosophical rationale for
liberal-democratic institutions. Across the region from Poland to Bulgaria,
it is this configuration that sees ardently pro-European administrations
of both the center-left and center-right steadily undermining
liberal democracy.
The idea that democracy is backsliding in East-Central Europe is fast
becoming the consensus view. Much of the scholarship on backsliding
focuses on Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who at the head of
his ruling Fidesz party has stripped away formal checks and balances
to concentrate power in his own hands and who seeks support on the
basis of an exclusivist nationalism, as underlined by his declared intention
to build an “illiberal nation-state.”4
Yet mainstream politicians
elsewhere in the region have also used their big electoral majorities to
bend democratic and constitutional rules. Barely had the constraints of
EU conditionality been lifted when Bulgarian and Romanian administrations
moved to vandalize their countries’ institutions and reward financial
insiders. Even in the Czech Republic, a star democratizer, the
country’s first directly elected president, Miloš Zeman, wasted no time
after assuming office in March 2013 before trying to turn the country’s
parliamentary democracy into a semipresidential system, appointing a
technocratic government over the heads of the country’s political par-
ties.5
Viewed in the context of a decade of data provided by Freedom
House’s Nations in Transit (NIT), such episodes can be seen as part of
an established regionwide trend of backsliding away from democracy.
22 Journal of Democracy
Measured on a scale in which a score of 1 denotes the “highest level
of democratic progress” and 7 the lowest, Hungary and Slovakia have
regressed significantly since EU accession, each falling from highs of
1.96 in the mid-2000s to current lows of 2.96 and 2.61, respectively.6
Poland was listed even higher, at 1.75 on the eve of accession in 2004,
and it has now dropped to 2.18. Romania and Bulgaria, countries recently
seen as “successful laggards,”7
have regressed from highs of 3.29
and 2.86, respectively, to present lows of 3.46 and 3.25. Only the Czech
Republic appeared to buck this trend, until it too fell from 2.14 in 2013
to 2.25 in 2014. Hungary aside, these figures do not suggest a headlong
descent into semi-authoritarianism. They do, however, indicate that the
region’s purported democratic malaise is more than mere hyperbole.
Backsliding was a widely forecasted side-effect of the elite-focused,
incentive-driven reform processes in East-Central Europe overseen by
the EU. Just as prevailing explanations of the success of democratization
had focused on the incentives for elites to meet EU conditionalities,
warnings of possible backsliding hinged on the likely impact of the disappearance
of these incentives after accession.8
Such warnings rested on
the assumption that ECE elites had not internalized liberal-democratic
values and would violate or stretch constitutional norms if they could.
Now that the predicted backsliding has actually begun, studies are examining
cross-national variation in the forms and extent of backsliding
and alternative ways of motivating elites to preserve liberal institutions.
Despite the coherence—and to some extent realism—of these studies,
their understanding of democratic consolidation and progress as a
function of elite calculation rather than identification with liberal values
has always been in conflict with the equally taken-for-granted notion
that “democracy needs democrats” and the only slightly more contested
idea that “democracy needs democratic citizens.”9
The low levels of
civic engagement and the weakly embedded institutions in East-Central
European democracies, although long acknowledged, have usually
been framed as tough but surmountable legacies of communism.10
Only
a small number of scholars have flagged the more acute challenge that
such institutional hollowness poses to democratization. For example,
Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits note that ECE democracies, in contrast
to those of Western Europe, were born with a “hollow core” and
suggest that the lack of mass civic and political engagement is key to
understanding the region’s democratic malaise.11
Overcoming this hollowness and instilling meaningful identification
with core liberal-democratic norms in ECE societies would have
required a great deal of principled and philosophically consistent political
leadership as well as civic activism. Yet despite the presence of
many self-proclaimed liberals in mainstream politics, no such politicalcultural
project was ever attempted on a scale sufficient to embed liberal
norms and practices in contexts where they had previously been
23James Dawson and Seán Hanley
missing. Far from backsliding on limited earlier progress, East-Central
Europe’s democratic consolidation is better viewed as having always
been somewhat illusory.
Furthermore, the story of democracy in East-Central Europe is not
simply one of hollow institutions subject to the occasional predations
of newly uninhibited illiberal elites allowed by the inaction of genuine
but passive liberals. Across the region, the political center ground has
long been characterized by the subtle cohabitation of liberal and illiberal
norms, with the latter gradually overpowering the former. In our
view, this consistent weakness of liberalism is at the root of East-Central
Europe’s democratic malaise, with the well-documented problems of
fading conditionalities, corruption, and economic crisis providing opportunities
for elites to consolidate their power and for angry citizens to
vent their frustrations.
The Paradigmatic Case of Bulgaria
Hungary is commonly considered the paradigmatic case of democratic
backsliding in East-Central Europe, exhibiting the “same cancer”—
already metastasized—that is “present elsewhere on the continent, even
if it hasn’t come to the attention of diagnosticians.”12
Yet in our view,
another country is more emblematic of the malaise afflicting the region’s
young democracies: Bulgaria. Despite Bulgaria’s lower levels
of economic development and less favorable historical legacies, the
country’s democracy was considered one of the success stories of the
EU’s democratic conditionality. Bulgaria also exhibited the political
dynamics that were characteristic of, but concealed in, other successful
ECE democratizers. Whereas tenuous liberal traditions and legacies of
opposition to communist rule obscured the top-down, elite-dominated
nature of democratization in many ECE states, in Bulgaria pre-accession
democratization was an explicitly elite-driven process.13
In Bulgaria, we see liberalism—or rather the post-1989 economistic
and technocratic variant of it—merging with existing illiberal narratives
(ethnic nationalism and social conservatism), which pro-European elites
generally opted to accommodate rather than oppose. Thus Bulgaria’s proWestern,
reform-oriented government of 1997 to 2001, led by the anticommunist
center-right Union of Democratic Forces (SDS) and generally
credited with putting the country firmly on the path to democratic consolidation,
never actually advocated liberal norms beyond the bare minimum
required by a European Union eager to recognize a prospective new
member.14
SDS prime minister Ivan Kostov may have overseen Bulgaria’s
ratification of the Framework Convention on the Protection of National
Minorities, but he was also keen to stress his party’s “national credentials”
on the campaign trail. Predictably, the SDS never attempted to repeal the
illiberal constitutional prohibition on parties “formed on an ethnic basis.”15
24 Journal of Democracy
Similarly, though the SDS’s liberal economic policies (especially its
implementation of a currency board) aligned with the prescriptions of
Western governments and financial institutions, the party had a penchant
for “privatizing in [its] own favor.”16
The SDS, though undoubtedly
an improvement on the brazenly corrupt administration of the Bulgarian
Socialist Party (BSP) that preceded it, is thus better understood
as neither excessively progressive nor excessively regressive—hardly
the transformative force needed to realize a fully liberal democracy in a
political-cultural sense.
The SDS did, however, usher in a period of broad elite-level consensus
in favor of building liberal institutions with a view to Euro-Atlantic
integration, a feat that would have been far more difficult had the SDS
articulated these goals as part of a strongly progressive liberal platform.
Accordingly, Bulgaria made rapid progress in establishing liberal institutions,
earning it NIT’s designation of “consolidated democracy” by
2006 and gaining it admission to the EU in 2007.
The postaccession period in Bulgaria witnessed no autocratic Fideszstyle
power grab, nor even any major electoral breakthrough of far-right
populists. The country is barely mentioned in much of the backsliding
literature. Yet the democratic norms enshrined in the country’s institutions
were nonetheless undermined in a piecemeal, pragmatic manner.
The BSP-led coalition that came to power in 2005 quickly fell afoul of
the EU on corruption and connived with parliamentary allies to tamper
with electoral rules in 2009. Although the gambit failed and allowed the
new pro-Europe center-right party Citizens for European Development
of Bulgaria (GERB) to win the 2009 election and install celebrity Sofia
mayor Boyko Borisov as prime minister, the turnover did nothing to arrest
the steady decline of the country’s NIT rating, which had already slipped
to “semi-consolidated democracy” by 2009, just two years after EU entry.
One obscure incident illustrates well GERB’s flexible approach to
both EU regulations and democratic norms: In 2011, the European Commission
(EC) reproached Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry for accepting private
donations, a practice that “casts doubts over the independence of
police investigation.”17
Yet GERB interior minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov
denied any exchange of favors (despite the Ministry’s having received
in-kind donations amounting to several million euros per month) and
resisted banning the corrupt practice until Borisov, under pressure from
the EU, agreed to do so. Tsvetanov, however, said that private donations
would be phased out gradually rather than stopped all at once. In the
end, the rise of GERB simply meant that a different set of elites was now
overseeing the erosion of institutional checks and balances.
That such flagrant postaccession abuses elicited only limited intellectual
and public dissent shows that institutional vandalism is a symptom
rather than the cause of the country’s democratic malaise. The underlying
problem is that citizens who have never been exposed to any unam-
25James Dawson and Seán Hanley
biguously liberal political-cultural project can only weakly hold illiberal
elites to account. This was demonstrated by the aftermath of the 2013
waves of mass protest, which first targeted GERB, bringing down the
Borisov government, and then the successor government formed by a
BSP-led coalition (although GERB won a plurality in the 2013 elections,
it failed to form a government).
The second wave of demonstrations, which began in June 2013 and
was sparked by BSP prime minister Plamen Oresharski’s naming of
a young oligarch to head the State Agency for National Security, was
backed by most of the intelligentsia and clearly embraced some liberal
norms, criticizing the government’s ties to oligarchic power with a creative
protest repertoire. But the movement’s ideological stance echoed
the SDS-era formula of advocating “Europe” and “democracy” while
neglecting and often seeking to delegitimize the interests of disadvantaged
sections of society.18
The familiar absence of any call for a more inclusive political community
also meant that the longstanding tolerance for ethnic particularism
among the country’s right-leaning liberals was left unchallenged.
Ultimately, the protests barely changed the political landscape. The Reformist
Bloc, a five-party coalition created in 2013 that includes the SDS
and draws support from the same highly educated urban demographic
driving the protests, has thus used its position as part of the GERB-led
government that came to power after elections in October 2014 to target
Roma for discrimination.19
Bulgaria’s “liberal consensus” continues to
unravel not because of far-right or conservative intrusion, but because
the so-called liberal consensus was illusory in the first place.
The experience of Bulgaria calls into question the notion that liberal
democracy was ever really institutionalized in postcommunist Europe—and
not just in the so-called successful laggards, but even in the
seemingly successful and high-performing Visegrád states (the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). If the “liberal consensus”
underpinning democratization never really existed, as we believe, then
democracy in the region may be moving toward an equilibrium in which
liberal-democratic institutions are gradually eroded as the illiberalism
of the political mainstream discreetly consolidates, perhaps making Bulgaria
an illiberal trailblazer rather than a democratic laggard.
Mainstream Illiberalism in the Visegrád Countries
Despite important variations in their patterns of democratic development,
all three of the ostensibly robust Visegrád democracies—the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, and even Poland—bear key hallmarks of the
pattern of illiberal consolidation exemplified by Bulgaria. This pattern
is rooted in the interaction of a compromised form of liberalism with
residual illiberal structures inherent in postcommunist societies. These
26 Journal of Democracy
same conditions are evident to varying degrees across East-Central Europe,
leaving even relatively high-performing states such as the Czech
Republic and Poland vulnerable to a creeping illiberal consolidation of
politics facilitated rather than blocked
by the “ersatz liberalism” of the political
mainstream.
As Krastev’s account makes plain,
liberalism in East-Central Europe has
rested not only on a narrow social base
but on a narrow intellectual base as
well. The only clear ideas binding together
the region’s liberal elites in the
late 1990s and early 2000s were their
Euro-Atlantic foreign-policy orientations
and their conformity with the
liberal economic recipes of the World
Bank, IMF, and acquis communautaire
(EU law). This threadbare faux liberalism sidelined the emancipatory
concerns of marginalized constituencies, thereby allowing elite “reformers”
to avoid confrontation with existing bases of illiberal power in society—namely,
economic elites with origins in nomenklatura structures
and forces of national and social conservatism found among the intelligentsia,
churches, and nationalist subcultures. This lack of commitment
to liberal-democratic norms from the outwardly prodemocratic political
mainstream—including small avowedly liberal parties—explains the
growth of illiberal power in ECE politics and society, of which institutional
“backsliding” is a mere symptom.
It is important to stress, however, that these remain competitive
democratic systems whose landscapes of institutions and parties are
modeled on those of Western Europe. At the same time, these systems
are increasingly undermined by popular distrust; corrupt and collusive
relationships linking business, media, and political elites; and periodic
eruptions of civic anger and anti-elite populism. These systems are also
characterized by a revealing lack of public discussion and civic activism
around touchstone social issues, such as the treatment of Roma populations
or LGBT rights, and a lack of substantive, informed debate on the
political power of economic elites. Such gaps set de facto limits on the
scope of liberal democracy.
The Czech Republic. The Czech Republic, a consistent high achiever
in terms of democratic progress, has few structural obstacles impeding
its path to becoming a fully liberal democracy. Czech nationalism
has always self-consciously embraced ideas of political and economic
liberalism, and there is no obvious clash between Czech national identity
and liberal democracy. Furthermore, the country has an activist
Despite the Czech Republic’s
hallowed liberalnationalist
traditions,
the lack of a strong and
progressive civil society
limits liberal influence
on issues of inclusive
citizenship and national
identity.
27James Dawson and Seán Hanley
subculture dating back to the early 1990s—with roots in the dissident
movement of the 1970s and 1980s—that advocates a broader, more
emancipatory version of liberalism.20
Unlike many new EU members,
the Czech Republic also had a stable lineup of plausible “standard”
parties (Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Communists, and
promarket conservatives) that competed, at least until 2010, over socioeconomic
issues. Since then, this left-right axis has been weakened
by the emergence of business-backed protest parties, notionally animated
by good-governance and anticorruption agendas rather than illiberal
populism.
But the strength of the country’s parties and the fixation of its politics
on economic growth and well-functioning institutions reveal the
limitations and underlying weakness of its democracy. President Václav
Havel often pointed out in the 1990s that the early consolidation of political
parties came at the expense of civic activism, the impact of which
was further reduced by a turn toward establishing project-driven NGOs
that often served as EU subcontractors.
The unhealthy merger of the political and economic spheres—and the
penetration of business interests into the voluntary sector—has been a
consistent feature of Czech democracy. This has recently been brought
into sharp relief by the political rise of billionaire Andrej Babiš, who
owns a massive business and media empire while also playing an extensive
role in government as deputy prime minister and finance minister.
Babiš has astutely managed to coopt anticorruption and goodgovernance
NGOs into the service of his nominally reformist Action
of Dissatisfied Citizens movement while simultaneously drawing many
former members of the secret police into his political entourage.21
But
the Czech postcommunist liberal project has always been rooted in such
compromises—between dissident liberals and the economic liberalism
of technocratic elites, and between emerging mainstream politicians and
the old-regime economic elites who would later become the backbone
of the new business class.22
Despite the country’s hallowed liberal-nationalist traditions, the lack
of a strong and progressive civil society limits liberal influence on issues
of inclusive citizenship and national identity. For example, the
post–World War II mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia
remains a taboo topic in mainstream politics, so much so that
it was considered a gross political error when presidential candidate
and former foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg said during the 2013
election campaign, “What we committed in 1945 would today be considered
a grave violation of human rights, and the Czechoslovak government,
along with President Beneš, would have found themselves in
The Hague.” This statement drew rejoinders accusing Schwarzenberg of
“talking like a Sudeten German” and insulting the Czech nation.23
Although Czech public opinion has become more liberal toward
28 Journal of Democracy
homosexuals, Roma continue to be targets of engrained public hostility
and are largely ignored in political debates, save for periodic angry
outbursts from populists and sometimes
even mainstream politicians. Although
the populist radical right seems likely
to stay on the electoral margins, a string
of grassroots protests in 2011 showed
that anti-Roma sentiment is more than a
latent phenomenon.
Slovakia. Progressive liberalism has
been even more elusive in Slovakia.
Unlike the Czech Republic, Slovakia is
widely viewed as having turned to liberal-democratic politics after an
initial period of illiberal posttransition backsliding. From 1992, an illiberal
nationalist ruling party—Vladimír Meèiar’s Movement for a Democratic
Slovakia (HZDS)—and smaller radical-right parties were able to
scapegoat the country’s Hungarian minority and exploit anxieties about
Slovakia’s vulnerability as a newly independent state.
When HZDS was displaced in 1998 by a pro-European coalition
of “standard” parties, including both Christian Democrats and Social
Democrats, the country started its rapid climb toward EU membership.
Whereas the liberal anti-Meèiarism of the 1990s had focused on catching
up with Europe and implementing the acquis (passing legislation
and building institutions), the center-right liberals who took office after
1998 focused on neoliberal welfare and labor-market reforms.24
The
political system appeared to “normalize” around left-right competition
with the emergence of Robert Fico’s Direction–Social Democracy party
(known as Smer) as a mainstream, pro-Europe, center-left party.
Yet, just as in the Czech Republic, these conventional left-right political
dynamics are starting to be overtaken by the politics of anticorruption
and good governance. One product of this shift is the rise of
liberal protest parties such as Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), formed in
2009, and its offspring Ordinary People and Independent Personalities
(O¾aNO), formed in 2011. Another is the wave of protests in early 2012
over the so-called Gorilla scandal, in which leaked notes of wiretap recordings
from 2005 and 2006 implicated high-officials in mass corruption
involving privatization contracts.
Unsurprisingly, there is little evidence that any of the country’s political
parties—or the bulk of its citizens—ever seriously rejected illiberal
norms. Smer was able to absorb the nationalist camp electorally, and to
some extent ideologically, by fusing elements of ethnic nationalism with
a populist slant on social democracy.25
Consistent with this orientation,
the party formed a coalition with the far right from 2006 to 2010, earning
it a temporary suspension from the Party of European Socialists. Smer
There is little evidence
that any of Slovakia’s
political parties—or the
bulk of its citizens—
ever seriously rejected
illiberal norms.
29James Dawson and Seán Hanley
justified this alliance on both pragmatic and political grounds, claiming
that it promoted stability and that it was a means of taming the far right.
Yet the government’s subsequent passage of restrictive legislation (such
as the 2009 Language Law) hinted at a closer ideological affinity.
Other developments also highlighted how the “pro-Europe” politics
of anti-Meèiarism had obscured the illiberal nature of key parts of the
pro-European center right. For example, in 2014 Smer joined the opposition
Christian Democrats (KDH) in passing a constitutional ban on
gay marriage (a move justified by Smer as a quid pro quo for opposition
support of judicial reforms). Smer also supported the conservative
Alliance for the Family’s 2015 referendum initiative that sought to define
marriage as only between a man and a woman, to ban adoption by
same-sex couples, and to abolish compulsory sex education. Although
both SaS and O¾aNO were liberal parties, both were top-down formations
that subordinated liberal social demands to promarket economics
and fiscal conservatism, in the case of the former, and to antipolitical
showmanship, in the case of the latter. Finally, even the Gorilla protests,
which seemed to signal a reawakening of civic activism, left no lasting
political effect, yielding only a semi-coherent antipolitics message that
was directed against all parties and, to some extent, against the very notion
of representative democracy.
Poland. On the surface, Poland appears to be the exception to EastCentral
Europe’s democratic malaise. It has experienced sustained economic
growth, bucked the economic turmoil of the Great Recession, and
produced a strong liberal governing party, Civic Platform (PO). Poland
also offers one of the few examples of an ECE protest party defined by
radical social liberalism, the upstart Palikot’s Movement, which entered
parliament in 2011.26
Yet Poland’s status as a champion of liberalism—or bulwark against
illiberalism—may owe more to its party-electoral configuration than to
any deep cultural embrace of liberal norms. Like many promarket liberal
parties in the region, PO pursues a narrowly defined technocratic
program that is economically liberal but socially conservative. Moreover,
as a prominent observer of the Polish political scene has noted, the
country’s “national and local elites are bound to Civic Platform primarily
by the access that it provides to state patronage and the main factions
are personality-based rather than ideological.”27
In addition, the prominent conservative-nationalist opposition party
Law and Justice (PiS) has long hoped to refashion Polish democracy
by creating a “Fourth Republic” based on conservative Catholic values
and an explicit rejection of the compromises made in the transition
settlement between the regime and opposition in 1989. PiS’s attempts
to realize this project—most directly through minority governments in
2005 and 2006—foundered due both to the party’s inability to expand
30 Journal of Democracy
its electoral base and to the more proportional, power-dispersing nature
of Poland’s political institutions. But the dynamics, if not the final outcome,
of Polish political competition in the early-to-mid 2000s, were
similar to those of Hungary. These same dynamics led Krastev in 2007
to designate Poland as the “capital of Central European illiberalism.”28
In our view, Poland is a case of illiberal conservative nationalism
held at bay, and its prospects are gloomier than the current political
situation might imply. Poland remains a divided society in which liberal
rights for constituencies such as sexual minorities and women are either
opposed or only reluctantly tolerated by many.29
Strong bases of conservative
nationalism can be seen not only in the strength of PiS but also
in the tendency of the more liberal parties to accommodate positions
of the Catholic Church (the declining Palikot’s Movement, now called
Your Movement, is an exception in this regard). Although the Catholicconservative
right has backpedaled on its earlier Fidesz-style project of
cultural and constitutional transformation (the “Fourth Republic”), the
key building blocks of illiberal consolidation are firmly in place.
Toward a Bulgarian Scenario?
All these societies fit the Bulgarian paradigm in several key ways:
the persistence of taboos on nationally sensitive issues; the lack of debate
on the incestuous relationships between political and economic
elites; and the predominance of narrow, economistic outlooks among
liberal parties. The relative stability of these states since EU accession
has been supplied not by liberal institutions—or the aftereffects of an
EU-enforced “liberal consensus”—but by the relative absence of liberal
challenges to illiberal power structures and norms. Bulgaria’s present
situation, in which superficially liberal institutional forms mask the illiberal
parameters constraining political and cultural change, could well
be the future situation for all of Central Europe.
Such a prognosis might be unduly pessimistic. Liberal traditions, legacies
of dissidence, and civic activism are certainly stronger in, say, the
Czech Republic and Poland than they have ever been in Bulgaria. Citizens
and officeholders in Prague and Warsaw may more readily recognize
that the norms implied by labels such as “Europe” and “democracy” are
incompatible with the overt scapegoating of ethnic minorities or the blatant
funding of police forces through private contributions. It is possible
that some or all of these East-Central European societies may yet become
functionally liberal democracies.
But they are not on course to do so as long as liberal accommodation
of illiberal norms endures. In failing to confront the flawed designs of
economic elites or to provide alternative political-cultural projects to
counter national and social conservatism, ECE liberals have consistently
opted to pretend that they live in liberal societies rather than
31James Dawson and Seán Hanley
to set out to actually make them so. We therefore need to reassess the
contribution of those “liberals” who are better at winning elections
than at being liberal.
This implies that the task at hand is not necessarily the rescue and
reform of deconsolidating democratic experiments. Rather, the recent
experience of East-Central Europe suggests that the limits of what
sound institutional planning can achieve in the absence of strong liberal
civil societies have already been reached. Liberal institutions can lock
in norms upheld by a liberal civil society by giving them legal force.
But this only can temporarily substitute for a liberalism that is absent.
That is the actual predicament of East-Central Europe. In this region,
the erosion and circumvention of institutions—which indexes like NIT
capture—are not evidence of “democratic backsliding” but rather symptoms
of the interaction between democracies that were born hollow and
a “liberal consensus” that never was.
What does the “Bulgarian scenario” forebode? First, it leaves ECE
democracies vulnerable to the breakdown of norms of democratic representation
as the Potemkin-like character of mainstream parties and
politicians becomes apparent. This leads only to the further empowerment
of elites, despite formal structures of accountability and open competition.
The populist “elites-versus-the-people” structuring of politics
that Krastev viewed in 2007 as the boisterous (but ultimately benign)
future of European democracy exercises a corrosive effect in the ersatz
liberal democracies of East-Central Europe. Moreover, the capture of
pro-European politics by faux liberalism inhibits the formation of liberal
forces that could and should act as agents of the long-term cultural and
identity transformation necessary for any real progress toward a fully
liberal democracy.
The “Bulgarian scenario” is not inevitable, however—neither for
other Central European states nor even (in the longer term) for Bulgaria
itself. But avoiding it may require a reorientation of research and policy
agendas in the region. If there is one vital lesson to be learned, it is that
strong, progressive, liberal identities are unlikely to emerge without the
active promotion of liberal ideals in politics and civil society. Without
strongly embedded liberal identities, it is difficult to imagine on what
grounds citizens might call colluding elites to account when politicians
tamper with electoral codes or scapegoat minorities. In much of EastCentral
Europe, liberal institutions paradoxically give legal force to
norms that almost no one identifies with. It sometimes seems that liberal
rights are upheld only when they are not seen to be challenging some
nationalist or conservative norm.
Liberal politicians and civil society activists thus need to advocate
liberal principles consistently, in particular in areas where they clash
with existing illiberal norms. Frequently this may mean actively confronting
social constituencies such as nomenklatura-derived economic
32 Journal of Democracy
elites (often media owners and party backers), traditional nationalist
lobbies, and powerful factions in churches or in the military. In the short
term, there could, paradoxically, be negative effects—for example, harassment
of liberal groups might go up, and Freedom House democracy
scores might go down. But the path from an illiberal political culture to
liberal pluralism is a long one. It is sure to have obstacles along the way,
and it is unlikely to be negotiated without conflict.
NOTES
1. Mirroring Krastev’s article, we use the term “East-Central Europe” to describe the
Visegrád states of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, plus Romania and
Bulgaria. Ivan Krastev, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? The Strange Death of the
Liberal Consensus,” Journal of Democracy 18 (October 2007): 56–63.
2. Krastev, “Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus,” 58.
3. Cas Mudde, “The Myth of Weimar Europe,” Open Democracy, 20 August 2013,
www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/cas-mudde/myth-of-weimar-europe.
4. “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Speech at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free University
and Student Camp,” 26 July 2014, www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-
prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-
summer-free-university-and-student-camp.
5. Venelin Ganev, “Post-Accession Hooliganism: Democratic Governance in Romania
and Bulgaria After 2007,” East European Politics and Societies 27 (February 2013):
26–44; Seán Hanley, “Miloš Zeman’s Attempt to Impose a Caretaker Government in the
Czech Republic Is a Fundamental Challenge to Czech Parliamentary Democracy,” EUROPP
blog, 4 July 2013, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/07/04/milos-zemans-
attempt-to-impose-a-caretaker-government-in-the-czech-republic-is-a-fundamental-chal-
lenge-to-czech-parliamentary-democracy.
6. Sylvana Habdank-Ko³aczkowska, Nations in Transit 2014: Eurasia’s Rupture with
Democracy, Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/NIT2014%20
booklet_WEBSITE.pdf.
7. Dimitar Bechev and Gergana Noutcheva, “The Successful Laggards: Bulgaria and
Romania’s Accession to the EU,” East European Politics and Societies 22 (February
2008): 114–44.
8. On the “success” of EU conditionality, see Heather Grabbe, The EU’s Transformative
Power: Europeanization Through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse, “When
Europeanisation Meets Diffusion: Exploring New Territory,” West European Politics 35
(January 2012): 192–207. For early predictions of backsliding, see Frank Schimmelfennig
and Ulrich Sedelmeier, eds., The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005).
9. Grzegorz Ekiert, Jan Kubik, and Milada Anna Vachudova, “Democracy in the
Post-Communist World: An Unending Quest?” East European Politics and Societies 21
(February 2007): 7–30, 20. Some definitions of “democratic consolidation” include an
attitudinal or cultural dimension, yet these generally require rejection of nondemocratic
alternatives rather than a strong mass embrace of liberal-democratic or civic values.
See, for example, Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition
and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Postcommunist Europe (Bal-
33James Dawson and Seán Hanley
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5. For a wider discussion, see Andreas
Schedler, “What Is Democratic Consolidation?” Journal of Democracy 9 (April 1998):
91–107.
10. Marc Morjé Howard, “The Weakness of Postcommunist Civil Society,” Journal of
Democracy 13 (January 2002): 157–69.
11. Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits, Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 239.
12. John Feffer, “Hungary: The Cancer in the Middle of Europe?” World Post, 6 July
2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/hungary-the-cancer-in-the_b_3402128.html;
see also Lise Esther Herman, “Re-Evaluating the Post-Communist Success Story: Party
Elite Loyalty, Citizen Mobilization, and the Erosion of Hungarian Democracy,” European
Political Science Review (February 2015 electronic preprint): 1–34.
13. Most accounts agree that those Bulgarian dissident groups that did emerge from the
communist period failed to inspire meaningful civic participation. Even the mobilization
of 1996–97 that forced the BSP from office is most commonly described as a reaction to
economic mismanagement strengthening the promarket elites rather than the expression
of a mass democratic political culture. Emil Giatzidis, An Introduction to Post-Communist
Bulgaria: Political Economic and Social Transformation (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2002), ch. 3.
14. James Dawson, Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape
Publics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 81–93.
15. The Turkish-minority–dominated Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) has
enjoyed electoral success, but avoids prohibition only by denying any mandate to represent
minority interests, instead resorting to patronage politics.
16. Zoltan Barany, “Bulgaria’s Royal Elections,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April
2002): 141–55, 148.
17. “EC Spokesperson Slams Donations to Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry,” Sofia News
Agency, 11 August 2011, www.novinite.com/articles/131048/EC+Spokesperson+Slams+
Donations+to+Bulgaria%27s+Interior.
18. For example, the economist and prominent liberal Georgy Ganev argued that the
task of lifting Bulgaria “out of the swamp” rested on the shoulders of the “bourgeois” who
had to defeat an alleged alliance of the oligarchs and the poor. “When They Laid Foundations
. . . in the Swamp,” 20 July 2013, Centre for Liberal Strategies, www.cls-sofia.org/
blog/?m=201307.
19. Health Minister Petar Moskov, representing the Reformist Bloc, announced in December
that he would no longer send ambulance staff into neighborhoods where they
risked attack by Roma, whom he referred to with the word populatsiya (a term generally
used to refer to livestock rather than people). Far from alienating Reformist Bloc voters,
the minister’s comments and defiant response to criticism won him support. “Incidents
with Sofia Emergency Teams ‘Not Related to Roma,’” Sofia News Agency, 9 December
2014, www.novinite.com/articles/165303/Incidents+with+Sofia+Emergency+Teams+%2
7Not+Related+to+Roma%27.
20. Michal Kopeèek, “The Rise and Fall of Czech Post-Dissident Liberalism After
1989,” East European Politics and Societies 25 (May 2011): 244–71.
21. James de Candole, “Comment: Why Is the Next Czech PM Surrounding Himself
with Police and Spooks?” BNE Intellinews, 14 January 2014, www.bne.eu/content/story/
comment-why-next-czech-pm-surrounding-himself-police-and-spooks.
34 Journal of Democracy
22. Gil Eyal, The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup
of Czechoslovakia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Gil Eyal, Iván
Szelényi, and Eleanor R. Townsley, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation
and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London: Verso, 1998).
23. See Jan Richter, “Beneš Decrees Re-Surface in Czech Presidential Race,” Radio
Praha, 21 January 2013, www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/benes-decrees-re-surface-in-
czech-presidential-race.
24. Sharon Fisher, John Gould, and Tim Haughton, “Slovakia’s Neoliberal Turn,”
Europe-Asia Studies 59 (September 2007): 977–98.
25. Grigorij Mesežnikov, “National Populism in Slovakia—Defining the Character
of the State and Interpreting Select Historic Events,” in Kálmán Petõcz, ed., National
Populism and Slovak-Hungarian Relations in Slovakia, 2006–2009 (Šamorín—Somorja:
Forum Minority Research Institute, 2009), 39–66; Petra Burzová, “Towards a New Past:
Some Reflections on Nationalism in Post-Socialist Slovakia,” Nationalities Papers 40
(November 2012): 879–94.
26. Ben Stanley and Mikolaj Czesnik, “Poland’s Palikot Movement: Voice of the Disenchanted,
Missing Ideological Link or More of the Same?” Party Politics (December
2014 electronic preprint).
27. Aleks Szczerbiak, “Polish Politics in 2014 (Part 1): Is the Ruling Party Back in
the Game?” Polish Politics Blog, 2 January 2015, https://polishpoliticsblog.wordpress.
com/2015/01/02/polish-politics-in-2014-part-1-is-the-ruling-party-back-in-the-game/.
28. Ivan Krastev, “Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus,” 56.
29. Aleks Szczerbiak, “A Model for Democratic Transition and European Integration?
Why Poland Matters,” SEI Working Paper No. 138, January 2015.