"The landscape of Central Europe's weakening pluralism"

Östliches Mitteleuropa image from

From Charles King, "Hitler usually wins: On the return of individual authoritarianism," The Times Literary Supplement (December 17, 2017), pp. 26-27:

"Bonapartism in all it forms is as European a tradition a tradition as democracy", notes the philosopher Agnes Heller in conversation with Ellen Hinsey, whose collection of essays and interviews, Mastering the Past, surveys the landscape of Central Europe's weakening pluralism. One of the key questions in Hinsey's account is the degree to which a commitment to pluralism took root in post-communist Europe. Some of her interlocutors, like Heller, are sceptical that the twin attractions of integral nationalism and state-centric politics were ever fully eradicated. The recent shift to the Right in Hungary and Poland seems to bear them out.

For none of this really about a turn. It is rather the re-emergence of a deep strand in party politics of Central Europe that was there all along. Throughout the Cold War, a paragon on US policy in the region had been support for Central European nationalism as a way of undercutting the legitimacy of Soviet domination. Diaspora groups, many draw from the patriotic Right, fought rearguard actions from Western capitals. The concept of "captive nations" -- a term popularized in a directive of 1959 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- emphasized national oppression as the central evil of communism [JB emphasis], not the violation of human rights, or the trampling of liberal values.

That is also why the region's exiles tended to erect memorials not to the horrors of Marxism-Leninism but rather to their national heroes: the St Volodymyr statue in Holland Park, the Taras Shevchenko memorial near Washington' Dupont Circle, not far from he one to Tas Masaryk, which is itself down the street from Lajos Kossuth House.  National liberation was the de facto vehicle of anti-communist struggle -- the mirror image, in fact, of Soviet policy in the developing world, where communist revolution was meant to be a lever against Western colonialism. This approach also produced some bizarre readings of history. The Victims of Communism Memorial, near Washington's Union Station, reproduces a version of the "Goddess of Democracy" that briefly stood in Tiananmen Square. But the text on the memorial references once again the plight of "captive nations" -- which is a peculiar way of thinking about China. 

A sizeable number of Europeans rediscovered the sovereign nation state precisely at the moment when globalization was pushing much of the Atlantic world away from it. That is Orbán 's central message: Hungarians should reject trading in nation-negating communism for equally nation-negating globalism. Pan-European liberalism has had its triumphant moments in the former communist zone, sometimes gloriously so. But state-centric nationalism has been the droning constant, especially when encouraging it was in the interests of Atlantic democracies. In this sense, the strong-man populism of Fidesz is not so much a betrayal of 1989 as the culmination of the subtle invocations of national destiny, ethnic exclusion and anti-pluralism that persisted in Hungary, as they  did on the Continent as a whole. ...