Illiberalism was once wrongly perceived to be specific to Eastern European politics, writes Ivan Kalmar. It is now clearer than ever that both East and West are being swept up in the same illiberal wave.
My book, White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Illiberal Revolt, was published less than three years ago, yet the world has changed so much that a good bit of it reads like it’s from another time altogether. The Visegrád quartet of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have splintered, with the first two countries steadfastly liberal and the second two ensconced in the illiberal, “Christian conservative” camp.
Meanwhile in the West, liberal democracy in Canada, the UK, France and Germany is holding on for dear life, and the illiberal counter-revolution has already won in Italy and the Netherlands. In America, Donald Trump, once seen as a capricious, “transactional” megalomaniac, has been re-incarnated in his second presidency as a megalomaniac with a consistent, decidedly illiberal programme.
So does it still make sense to talk of illiberalism as something specifically Central or “Central and Eastern” European, now that it has conquered so much of the “free world”? It doesn’t. But it did not make sense three years ago, either. In fact, it never made sense – and that was the whole point of my book.
Myths about East and West
A relatively short time ago, it was almost common wisdom that illiberal tendencies in the formerly communist parts of Europe were due to the region’s lack of experience with democracy. In their widely celebrated book, The Light That Failed, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes even suggested that in Eastern Europe “Western democracy” had never been more than an imitation of an imported model that, with no roots in the area, was sure to fail from the start.
Such conclusions are the result of fact-denying prejudice against Eastern Europeans, a persistent prejudice that, I believe, qualifies as racism. In reality, the West has struggled with “its” democracy ever since the liberal ideals of the American and French Revolutions won their fragile and reversible victories. Mussolini and Hitler, after all, rose to power in what we now call “Western Europe”.
In the East, on the other hand, the Polish constitution of 1791 was the first modern constitution in Europe. Interwar Czechoslovakia had a democracy no more flawed than France’s, and certainly more robust than Germany’s Weimar Republic. Illiberalism is not the dark Eastern European opposite of the shining “light” of Western democracy. Anti-democratic reaction has always accompanied, and was always entangled with, democratic progress in the modern Western world, including its periphery we call Eastern Europe.
A class alliance of the very rich and the not-so-poor
As in its ancestral manifestations – the monarchist and Catholic reaction of the nineteenth century, the fascism of the twentieth – the illiberalism of the twenty-first century expresses the ever-changing dynamics of social class. And as in its previous manifestations, its underpinnings are a class alliance between the very rich and the not-so-poor.
In earlier times, the not-so-poor were identified by observers, from Karl Marx to Berthold Brecht, as the “petty bourgeoisie”. In America today, they are often described as “white males without a college education”. There is indeed incontrovertible evidence that the lower middle class and the upper working class, i.e. small business people, middle and low income employees, and skilled blue-collar workers, tend to vote disproportionately for illiberal political candidates.
It is not necessarily most of them who do so, nor is it the case that only they do. But they do so more than others, especially if they are white. This is the case in Western Europe and North America, as well as in East Central Europe. I refer to the social position of the not-so-poor in my book as one of “partial privilege”. They are near the bottom, but not quite at the bottom, of the hierarchy, and are ever fearful of sinking all the way down.
Precarious partial privilege
Their precarious partial privilege has three interrelated aspects: a class aspect, a racial aspect and a spatial aspect. The class aspect is being lower middle or upper working class, but not unskilled or unemployable. The racial aspect is being white, but not quite – that is, white but being unable to mobilise full white privilege. The spatial aspect is mainly geographic. It is from this perspective that East Central Europe as a region is partially privileged as a whole. As part of Europe, it is privileged vis-à-vis the postcolonial Global South, but inferior to the core West.
In the world system of capital accumulation, the core areas are where capital largely flows to, and the peripheries where much of it flows from. The core extracts the fruits of labour from the peripheries, and in the form of migrants, increasingly the labourers themselves. It offers low wages unacceptable to the workers who are long-resident in the core. This has been a defining feature of North-South relations since colonialism. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became also the feature of relations between the capitalist West and the post-socialist East.
Or, at least, so it was envisioned by Western capital. However, Western capital soon encountered resistance, from both Eastern European capital and Eastern European labour. Eastern European entrepreneurs took advantage of privatisation and the influx of Western investment, soon gathering enough wealth to influence national and local governments to favour their interests, which sometimes clashed with those of Western capital.
The Western cliché of the “Eastern European oligarch” arose as a means of stigmatising, with at best partial justification, Eastern European capitalists as necessarily involved in gang violence, human trafficking and the like. This was a means of delegitimising them as competition. To be sure, Russian “oligarchs” are the prime target, but I show in my book that all Eastern European business people are also ostracised.
The illiberal wave
Eastern European labour took somewhat longer to rise to resistance. At first, the workers who were let go by failed socialist enterprises were happy to find what seemed like lucrative wages in Western-introduced assembly shops (while other workers sank into misery). But eventually they came to resent the wage disparity between them and their Western neighbours. Wage parity became the slogan of many right-wing nationalist organisations.
We see the same class alliance in the West, although here the enemy is different. in the core parts of it, including in America, the competition capital fears is from China. The competition partially privileged workers fear is not from workers in more privileged countries, but from migrants.
These include, importantly as Brexit shows, migrants from the East of the European Union. Yet illiberal Eastern Europeans join illiberal Western Europeans in loathing migrants from outside Europe – mostly people of colour, many of them Muslim – who compete with Eastern Europeans for jobs in the West.
Among the many paradoxes here is that although illiberalism in Europe potentially pits Eastern workers and capital against the West, for now East and West are swept up in an illiberal wave founded in parallel protectionist concerns and expressed by parallel class alliances.
It should now be clearer than ever that these concerns and alliances have nothing to do with the character of Eastern European culture and history. Illiberalism is no more Eastern European than it is Western European or North American. It never was.
For more information, see the author’s accompanying book, White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Illiberal Revolt (Bristol University Press).
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: European Union
