Populism in East-Central Europe
Populism in East-Central Europe

Summary/Abstract: In February 1989 I gave a talk at the IWM in Vienna which was entitled ‘After Communism, What?’ Its main thesis was that the crumbling of communism in East-Central Europe brings with it the prospect of democratic change but that its success will depend on the new balance found between the democratic ethos of opposition to totalitarianism and the resurfacing of deeper undercurrents of the region’s political culture. Just as the term ‘return to Europe’ was ambiguous, so the term ‘return of democracy’ was problematic for anybody who had studied pre-communist politics of East-Central Europe. The test case, I thought, would be Poland, and I had ventured the following proposition: The mix of Catholicism and nationalism that prevailed in Polish society had made it particularly resistant to communism (certainly in comparison with the egalitarian, social-democratic ethos of the legacy of Masaryk’s pre-war Czechoslovakia). However, the question was: Would these ‘assets’ of the Polish political culture in a context of resistance be also the most conducive to the establishment of a liberal democracy after the collapse of dictatorship?

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