Volume 10 Number 4

Fall 2001

Feature: From Postcommunism to Post–September 11

Introduction
Stephen Holmes

The fall of the towers in 2001 and the fall of the wall in 1989 seem to occupy two different, noncommunicating worlds, although both events were extraordinarily dramatic, in almost Biblical ways. Can we nevertheless identify any connection between the two? A relation, however tenuous, is worth exploring because liberal politics and economics are again under siege, after the attacks, as they have not been since the end of the Cold War. For one thing, free markets, democratic transparency, and the rule of law have all been compromised in the attempt to respond effectively to September 11. This should not be surprising, since liberalism always cedes ground during national emergencies. Security checkpoints are now clogging the cross-border exchange of goods and services. The protections of the Bill of Rights have been, to some extent, withdrawn from noncitizen residents and visitors in the US. An unaccountable and secretive paternalism has weakened the ordinary oversight of the executive branch by legislators, judges, and the free press. Internationally, a kind of global propiska system, designed to stem unregulated immigration from the undeveloped periphery into developed center, is being reinforced. But how will the West’s new emphasis on security at the expense of liberty indirectly shape developments inside the former Soviet bloc? What effect will it have on American relations with Russia and the Central Asian republics? And how will it influence EU relations with Eastern Europe? Will the end of the illusion of American invulnerability really set previously shaky partnerships, tarnished by a decade of distrust, on a new track?

Formulated differently: Will a new Iron Curtain be built in order to shield the West from transnational terrorism? And, if so, what effect will the new “segmentation” of the planet have on the spread of liberal political and economic models beyond the developed world? Will Russia and Eastern Europe be invited in or locked outside the civilization under siege? These questions are misleading to some degree, admittedly, since al-Qaeda cells already operate “behind enemy lines,” moving in the interstices of liberal Western societies, and cannot therefore be stopped in their tracks by an after-the-fact tightening of border controls. But frontiers will be battened down. And this raises the question, in rather urgent form, of how to decide about who is in and who is out. How will the war on transnational terror refashion relations between the West and the countries of primary concern to the EECR? The following symposium, organized in haste, is meant to provide some very preliminary reflections on that question.

Russian proximity to, not to mention knowledge of, Central Asia make it a valuable ally during the current military operation in Afghanistan. And America’s direct experience of terrorist violence has effectively silenced those in the US administration who might otherwise be tempted to criticize Russia’s apparent strategy, in Chechnya, of burning down the house to kill the cockroaches. So Russian-US relations seem to be undergoing some sort of positive revolution, based on a shift of national priorities from liberty to security, congenial-for different reasons-to both Bush and Putin. The effect of September 11 on prospects for EU enlargement has been less dramatic, or at least less visible. But the more the EU thinks of itself as a security community, rather than as a mere network of consumers and producers held together by a common currency, the more prone it may become to fortify its eastern flank by making financial commitments to the candidate countries. And the greater its success in shutting down the inflow of guest workers from the Muslim south, the more it may need to import cheap labor from the Slavic east. After World War Two, it is worth recalling, West Germany was included in the Western alliance without preconditions-that is, without waiting for “reformers” to leap through a series of harmonization hoops-because it was seen as an essential building block of Western security. Will something similar happen today?

Postcommunism and globalization

The long postcommunist “decade” (1989-2001) was also the heyday of happy globalization. True, the fall of the wall triggered, in defensive response, some hardening of rules governing westward migration, transient workers, and asylum seekers. But the most dramatic, and psychologically disorienting, aspect of the end of communism was the suddenness with which formerly closed societies were opened up to the world. The new accessibility of a formerly walled-off zone was postcommunism’s essential contribution to globalization.

Without the Soviet Union, arguably, some version of globalization would have occurred much earlier. By his obstinate, ideologically inspired war against foreign infiltration, Joseph Stalin single-handedly refuted one of the principal predictions of Marx’s Manifesto. Barricading the East bloc behind xenophobic walls, Stalin obstructed the otherwise nonstop tendency of market economies to metastasize across the surface of the earth. When the walls fell down, in 1989, the dam broke and capitalism gained unhindered access, with a few exceptions, to the entire planet. Paradoxically, then, the collapse of the political movement that Marx set in motion released from historical hibernation the economic development that Marx foretold.

But the promise, and to some extent the reality, of “an interconnected world without borders” is not the only point of intersection between globalization and postcommunism. American foreign policy, during the 1990s, rested to some extent on an implicit teleology. The world seemed to be moving inevitably toward a kind of frictionless condition; markets promised prosperity to the poor, and peaceful dialogue promised a solution to violent conflicts among ethnic groups with overlapping territorial claims. Add to these trends an expected progress toward democracy and the rule of law, and we have “transition.” The postcommunist version was only a local variant on a global theme. Although there would certainly be holdouts and backwaters (some of them in the former communist bloc), liberalism would eventually prevail everywhere on the planet. Or so it was very often said and assumed.

Already structurally weakened by a series of disappointments during the 1990s, the once-confident teleology of “transition” may have finally collapsed along with the World Trade Center. Globalization rests, above all, on a series of technical revolutions in transportation and communication. Two-way bridges connecting the center to the far peripheries of the world turn out to have left New York City, among other symbols of Western preeminence, nakedly exposed. That is globalization’s notorious downside or dark side. Celebrations of the global village cannot survive the realization that the village idiot is lethally armed and extremely dangerous.

The psychologically disorienting shock of September 11 was felt most acutely by privileged Americans who rarely experience random violence in their lives. They-and I mean officials of the federal government in particular-had been repeatedly warned that a major terrorist attack on American soil was inevitable. Perhaps because they were focusing single-mindedly on wealth creation, or perhaps because they were unable to organize a preemptive strike in the face of public apathy, they shelved the disquieting reports. Throughout the 1990s, the US government, for all practical purposes, ignored dire warnings about a coming onslaught of transnational terror. Whatever its other sources, this heads-in-the-sand approach reveals the unrealistic optimism of some key US policy makers. A good argument could be made, moreover, that the same cheery mind-set was busy shaping US policy toward “transitions” supposedly underway in Russia and Eastern Europe. Overconfidence in progress and perfectibility-meaning, essentially, the expected replication everywhere of American values and institutions-may even have had something to do with the conspicuous failures and dead ends of US policy in the region.

Even some mainstream American law professors have been publicly defending the creation of kangaroo courts that deny due process to foreigners suspected by an unmonitored executive on the basis of secret evidence of some concrete connection to, or even loose affinity with, terrorism. Such is the fate of liberalism in troubled times. The public itself seems perfectly ready to view the Bill of Rights as a Trojan Horse for the enemy within. Some Americans even worry that the brain drain from abroad, essential to the country’s scientific and economic preeminence, is tantamount to inviting mass murderers to dinner. This is no time, many seem to be saying, to make a fetish of procedural safeguards and the rights of suspects, so long as those swept up in police dragnets are not registered voters. Constitutionalism, it turns out, cannot be effectively sustained without an active citizenry. If democratic citizens, fearful for their safety, become passive or compliant, legal protections can be rapidly whittled away, however “entrenched” in the Constitution they may appear in ordinary times. The all-importance of a galvanized citizenry to the protection of basic rights, and the relative insignificance of written rules and their professional guardians in black robes, is one of the most important lessons to be drawn from the American response to September 11.

During the Cold War, civil liberties were an important component of America’s national-security doctrine. By extending due process to socially marginal and politically voiceless groups, the United States could distinguish itself sharply from the Soviet Union with its show trials and political incarcerations. Now that its great peer competitor has vanished from the scene, apparently, the US no longer needs to showcase its fondness for the presumption of innocence. This slackening of the American commitment to civil liberties, one can suppose, will not go unnoticed in countries around the world, including the formerly communist states, which are longing and striving to join the West.

Nonconsultative government

Students of postcommunism have had ten long years to learn that state weakness poses a major obstacle to the development of free markets and democracy. If the state cannot enforce contracts, protect title against never-ending challenges, regulate credit markets, enforce disclosure rules on publicly sold companies, impose rules of corporate governance on firms, and so forth, capital flight will remain difficult to stanch, and foreign investment may never rise above a trickle. Similarly, there is no good reason to seek popular influence over lawmaking (that is, to create democracy) if important actors, and perhaps the population at large, routinely violate the law, and government bureaucracies are too disorganized and corrupt to enforce it. That the rule of law presupposes an effective state goes without saying, since there can be no état de droit without an état, no Rechtsstaat without a Staat.

Unlike students of postcommunism, the Bush administration was ideologically unprepared to deal with the dizzying problems emanating from state weakness and state collapse. For, to the extent that it has a worldview, this administration is basically Reaganite. Its famous slogans are “government is the problem, not a solution” and “get the government off our backs.” After September 11, not surprisingly, the White House quickly ditched its antigovernment rhetoric, allowing that government is sometimes a solution. The state cannot simply withdraw from the society and expect private actors to behave harmoniously in the absence of coercive authority. It may be “your money,” but taxes are necessary to fund airport security, the stockpiling of antibiotics, and homeland defense. Free markets themselves will not function well unless protected by a community whose efforts are orchestrated by public officials.

Perhaps Bush surprised himself when explaining to the public the preeminence of government over the private sector in a national-security crisis. In any event, the nature and origin of the attack made even clearer the irrelevance, even absurdity, of laissez-faire. For one thing, the September 11 attackers were “stateless” nomads, members of private terrorist networks who had left their country of origin and thereby put themselves beyond the coercive reach of their own governments. The final collapse of state authority in Afghanistan, after the Soviet withdrawal, opened up an unpoliced area in which itinerant murder gangs from abroad could set up training camps to butcher civilians. Liberal squeamishness about intervening forcefully inside the religious associations, prayer groups, and charities of immigrant communities in Europe and the US has provided a free space in which terrorist cells, taking advantage of civil liberties, have been able to plot mayhem and mass murder. In all these cases, clearly, the absence of government is not a solution but a problem.

What was truly new about September 11 was the theatrical demonstration that mass-casualty attacks against the United States can spring unpredictably from the unregulated and unpoliced private sector. Classical deterrence assumes that the wielders of mass-casualty weapons can be located on the map and are not suicidal-in other words, are states. To say that we can no longer make this assumption is to admit that we can no longer rely on deterrence. The only method available to fight loosely organized, shadowy, mobile, and transnational networks of terrorists (who may possess weapons of mass destruction) is detection and arrest, not deterrence. But the apprehension of terrorists before they strike requires the capacity of the police to monitor-and intervene strategically inside-the interstices of “the private sector.” To the extent that it is associated with protecting the private sector from public intrusions, therefore, classical liberalism seems to have little relevance to the handling of this particular crisis. The threat we now face means that the strengthening of state power, including the granting of massive discretionary authority to executive-branch officials, will become increasingly legitimate, even to those who formerly distrusted government, especially if more attacks occur.

So how will this fading of liberal distrust of government in the West affect political development in the former East bloc? We do not yet know. But the answer may depend on the degree to which the war on transnational terrorism will be conducted in a somewhat loosened but still recognizably liberal framework. What elements of liberalism can be preserved, compatible with the war on terror?

Remarkable about the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11 was the suddenness of its volte-face. Virtually overnight it switched from a rhetoric of laissez-faire to a rhetoric of paternalism. While some adjustment was inevitable, what was not inevitable was the administration’s apparent decision to bring the war on terrorism under the unilateral supervision of the executive branch. It would have been relatively easy to obtain judicial warrants to eavesdrop on attorney-client conversations in cases involving terrorism, for instance, but the administration seems dedicated to diminishing the role of the judicial and legislative branches of government. The injury to civil liberties here, however real, is arguably less serious than the threat to checks and balances. The administration is already revealing some of the “bunker mentality” one would expect when all government functions begin to be engrossed by a single branch. If it had vetted its proposal of military tribunals before announcing it, for example, it might have been told that the EU would be reluctant to extradite to the US the al-Qaeda operatives currently in custody. The intelligence loss from a delay in extradition surely outweighs the imaginary gains of announcing at this early stage the intention to institute military tribunals. The immediate threat posed by unlimited executive power, in other words, may not be tyranny but rather stupidity.

Executive power, in American history, tends to expand in wartime. The Imperial Presidency, which had gradually been whittled away after the end of the Cold War, came roaring back to life after September 11. The question here is: When can the executive branch be expected to relinquish the powers it has recently seized in order to deal with transnational terror? The fact that Bush’s executive orders have no sunset clauses suggests a disturbing answer. Normally, after hostilities cease, the legislative and judicial branches gradually claw back the powers that had been temporarily stripped from them. But the war on transnational terror may never end. It may simply become a permanent feature of international political life. In that case, the shift to secretive and unaccountable paternalism, or nonconsultative government, may be an lasting innovation.

Illiberalism breeds illiberalism. A fateful decision, in the US, to restrict essential government functions to the executive branch alone may also affect, by way of example, political development around the world, including in the former East bloc. As it is, the greatest weakness of postcommunist state building, during the past decade, has been the failure to create strong channels for negotiation and consultation between state and society. The EU, for its part, has done little to encourage responsive governance or active citizenship in Eastern Europe, for fear that such developments might derail economic reform. To the extent that the Western states, inside their own borders, begin to emphasize repression at the expense of participation, they may implicitly encourage, or at least do nothing to disturb, the various forms of nonconsultative government (which does not necessarily mean intelligent government) on display throughout the postcommunist world.

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