Central and eastern Europe as playground of a conservative avant-garde

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban casts his vote in the Anti-Immigration Referendum in Budapest, Hungary, Sunday, October 2, 2016. Vadim Ghirda/Press Association. All rights reserved.Wir schaffen das – "We can do it" – was German Chancellor Angela Merkel's
rather bald slogan in the face of questions about her Flüchtlingspolitik (refugee
plan) last year as migrant deaths increased and yet numbers of new arrivals
continued to rise. This mass, outright opposition
to EU policy by a group of peripheral states is unprecedented in the history of
European integration.  

The European refugee crisis since 2015 has exposed
deep wounds on the continent. Fierce criticism
has been directed at the refusal of central and eastern European countries to
accept European Union mandated refugee quotas. These newer, eastern members of
the European Union – all former COMECON or Soviet republics – were expected to
provide open peripheral markets and obedient workforces for the west, but
recent events suggest their national elites have other ideas.

Initial court challenges
to the quotas by Slovakia and Hungary in December 2015 were followed this May
by opposition
to the European Commission's proposal to distribute refugees across the
continent via a so-called "fairness mechanism" which would charge
€250,000 for each refugee refused asylum in a member state. This mass, outright
opposition to EU policy by a group of peripheral states is unprecedented in the
history of European integration.  

Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orbán has drawn
particular ire for his country's behaviour during the EU's disastrous response
to the crisis. Over the course of just a few days in the middle of September,
Amnesty International reported, the
Hungarian government declared a "crisis situation caused by
immigration" and began policing its borders with Serbia. It amended its
Criminal Code and Asylum Law, established "transit zones" across the
country for refugees, and adopted a resolution which declared that Hungary
would have to "defend itself by any means necessary from waves of illegal
immigration." In July 2016, Hungary declared
a "border emergency" and detained sixty migrants crossing the Serbian
border.

Orbán's party, Fidesz, is a stalwart of the
central European right and the closest to a durable parliamentary entity in the
region, having come out of the anti-communist dissident traditions of the
1980s. But they are not alone. Poland's own hard right Law and Justice Party
(PiS) won a majority government in October 2015 and has recently refused
to take a single refugee. The Czech President Miloš Zeman, once a social
democrat, has declared
Islamic migrants "impossible to integrate." Slovakia's Prime Minister
Robert Fico went further, declaring,
"Islam has no place in Slovakia." Slovenia and Croatia have
both banned the transit of most refugees across their territories. The
northerly Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – have
built fences on their eastern borders to defend themselves from the
prospect of migrants arriving via Russia. Even the former East German länder,
integrated into the west at an annual cost of €70 billion between 1991 and
2010, are a stronghold of the eurosceptic, anti-immigrant Alternative für
Deutschland and home of the neo-fascist Pegida movement. 

An atavistic east?

Central and eastern Europe's rightward shift has
not gone unnoticed in the European press. Britain's Economist magazine argued
in January that, unlike the insurgencies of the west European far right, in the
east "it is governments… who trumpet some of the most extreme views. And
they are taking advantage of anti-migrant fervour to implement an illiberal
agenda on other fronts." "it is
governments… who trumpet some of the most extreme views. And they are taking
advantage of anti-migrant fervour to implement an illiberal agenda on other
fronts."

Though it is quite true that governments like
Fidesz are cracking
down on media freedom, this predates last year's intensification of the
migrant crisis by some time. Indeed Orbán's government and its creeping
authoritarianism was mostly
ignored by enlightened European opinion until very recently. Even last
year, the EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris
Avramopolous said he might have "disagreed with the means used" by
Hungary but broadly endorsed
the project of securing the EU's external borders. With the onset of the
migrant crisis, Angela Merkel made
pointed – though often private – criticisms of her Eastern European
neighbours, arguing that "isolation doesn't work" and that countries
could hardly sit out "certain developments of globalization." But
this terribly enlightened European response, emphasising the inevitability of
"developments" of globalisation against the "anti-migrant
fervour" of the east, fell on deaf ears.

Indeed much of the public reaction to the crisis
has emphasised technocratic fixes to problems diagnosed as little more than
simple atavisms. Andras Schweitzer in the Guardian
argued
that central and eastern European states, traumatised by past threats to their
existence, viewed ethnic homogeneity as a defence against the threat of social
collapse. However, all nationalisms are influenced by notions of ethnicity, and
underlying ethnic worldviews cannot fully explain the conjunctural rise of the
right. Where then might a more plausible explanation for the rightward shift of
central and eastern European politics lie? None of the eastern states which
were integrated into the European Union after the collapse of the Soviet system
has been immune to the dynamism of the new populist right.

A significant cause must surely be the lived
political-economic experience of people in these countries since 1989, an
experience that has done so much to shape present conceptions of society and
broader expectations of political life. By 1989, according
to Joachim Becker in the New Left Review, "dissident circles in these
countries were moving in a (neo-)liberal direction." Much of the communist
state apparatus had reoriented itself towards capitalism while a de facto
alliance between a dissident intelligentsia and state technocrats emerged in
the form of what
one group of authors terms a "second Bildungsbürgertum" (or
developmental bourgeoisie) aiming to integrate these countries into the global
economy on a neoliberal basis. This strange alliance filled the vacuum where a
formal, property-owning bourgeoisie would otherwise have existed.

The same authors go on to explain that the most
powerful figures in post-communist systems were not the owners of traditional
firms but "bank managers, managers of investment funds, experts at the
Ministry of Finance, advisers at the IMF and the World Bank, and experts
working for foreign and international financial agencies." Eastern Europe
found itself quickly locked into an acute form of what the economist Costas
Lapavitsas calls "subordinate financialisation." Given the
collapse of COMECON markets for industrial goods and the influx of foreign
credit, western-controlled finance would inevitably pull the economic strings
in the region. The predominant power of western-controlled financial markets
over eastern European access to consumer goods, credit, new construction and
much of its industrial base (the globalised car industry in particular)
resulted in weak states and a weak, clientelistic bourgeoisie. The extent of
foreign ownership has encouraged conspiracy theorists in Poland's Law and
Justice Party to allege
that Angela Merkel may be a Stasi agent and that German foreign investment
in Poland is in fact a way to re-partition the country. 

Legacy of collapse

The scale of the economic collapse was spurred on
by the "shock therapy" policies endorsed by post-communist
governments across the region, undertaken in attempts to free up capital and
labour and attract foreign investment. The
opposition of this radical right to the perceived liberalism of the EU does not
in any way extend to a criticism of capitalist institutions as such.

According to data in an IMF working paper reproduced
by Joachim Becker in New Left Review,
Poland's economy alone shrank by 11.6 percent in 1990. This was nothing
compared to Latvia, where the economy contracted by 34.9 percent in 1992. For
the entire region a rapid collapse of internal and COMECON markets led to
extraordinary levels of depression. For most of these countries GDP had not
returned to its pre-1989 levels even by 2000. During the 1990s wage levels
collapsed too, often by margins of 30 percent. Welfare spending was cut to historic
lows, leaving central and eastern European incomes in a death spiral for much
of the 1990s. Privatisation was carried out rapidly, often without any real
compensation and with no growth in productivity or new jobs appearing in fresh
industries. Unemployment remained stubbornly high across the region despite the
massive buy-ups of the post-communist industrial infrastructure by foreign
firms. By 2006, 15 percent of European car production took place in Central
Europe. Telecommunications were taken over by western firms. Foreign investment
was particularly high in real estate.

As with much of the advanced capitalist west,
cheap credit flooded the region in the 2000s, driving a consumer boom which
partly compensated for the region's very low wages. And then in the wake of the
US subprime mortgage crisis, the flow of credit dried up and the underlying
weaknesses of the region's economies reasserted themselves, though this time
more unevenly. After accession to the EU, emigration increased and has not ever
really fallen. The singular goal of budding national elites – integration with
the EU – has undermined national capital formation.

Though central and eastern European countries may
be statistical outliers – their household income and welfare spending lower;
vulnerability to foreign capital movements greater; national industries weaker;
the downsides of EU integration further accentuated than elsewhere – they are
at the extreme of a single European trend. It is this fact that explains the
"baffling"
hostility to immigration of the wider public and the reliance of governments on
racist sentiment in particular. Though these countries have, in most cases,
fewer refugees and migrants than elsewhere, they have already suffered the full
social devastation of financialised capitalism and neoliberal-driven austerity.
These factors shape conceptions of politics and society and ultimately limit
acts of social compassion and solidarity: if a decent life and home are not extended
to citizens, it is inevitable that they will turn their anger on their
perceived rivals. Racism is also an integral component of the worldview of the
hard right, and it is to the hard right that the electoral spoils of the 2008
crisis have fallen.

The crisis of 2008 struck deep into the already
fragile, often credit-fuelled consumer economies of Europe's eastern periphery.
The result has been the upending of already-fragile parliamentary systems, with
major parties either shrinking or disappearing. As in the rest of Europe,
social democratic parties which embraced neoliberalism and austerity have
suffered a particularly crushing blow. The Hungarian Socialist Party is a good
example: having re-branded itself after the fall of the Warsaw Pact system, this
new western-style formation enthusiastically
backed privatisation and neoliberal policies. The party went on to dominate
the post-communist transition period in Hungary. In 2006 the party was returned
to power with 43.2% of the vote, but immediately after the 2008 crisis their
support collapsed.

Viktor Orbán's national-conservative Fidesz came
to power in 2010 with a huge majority, winning 54% of the vote. The Socialists'
result collapsed to just 24%. According to Becker the 2008 crisis cost Hungary
a serious recession. The forint depreciated sharply and servicing Hungary's
sizeable private-sector debts became much harder than in the boom years.
Hungary was the first of many European countries to seek an IMF credit line.
Though predominantly neoliberal in outlook, Fidesz in power have not simply
sold the farm, Becker explains, but introduced "an eclectic mix of
policies, both heterodox and orthodox." Among the many factors that make
Fidesz an appealing prospect to Hungarians is this posture of selectively
opposing EU and neoliberal orthodoxy in the service of an imaginary
"national interest" that seeks to exclude minorities.

Europe's
"conservative avant garde"

The likes of Fidesz are not without support in
the EU's core countries, as Orbán's meeting with former
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl attests. Fidesz may be hard-right outliers but
they are nevertheless integrated into the broad networks of the respectable
European right, as evidenced by European conservatives' quiet
tolerance of Orbán's
radical right-wing reforms. The phenomenon of Fidesz, like so many groups
on the hard right across Europe, can only be understood in the context of an
overall strengthening of European conservatism, neoliberalism and right-wing
thinking since the 1980s. Neoliberalism and the populist, racist hard right are
distinct, but the latter is a rebellious outgrowth of the former, not simply
its political antagonist. Jarosław Kacyński, the brains behind Poland's ruling
Law and Justice Party, may be thought of today as a crackpot conspiracy
theorist of the anti-liberal and nationalist right, but he started out as a prominent
member of Lech Wałęsa's
post-communist transition team. Social
democratic parties have been engulfed by the misery and corruption of both
neoliberal politics and the economics of austerity.

To return briefly to Germany and the example of
Alternative für Deutschland, the new right is capable of feeding off
distinctive street movements (in the form of Pegida) and at the same time
operating amongst pre-existing networks of right-wing intellectualism. As the
Princeton professor Jan-Werner Muller observes
in the New York Review of Books, the
AfD "was founded in 2013 by a group of perfectly respectable, deeply
uncharismatic economics professors." Starting off as a eurosceptic
grouping opposed to the euro, it was quickly taken over by more typically
populist and anti-immigrant figures (a trajectory very close to the UK
Independence Party). AfD's "leading intellectual" Marc Jongen, who
was once an assistant to the prominent German conservative
thinker Peter Sloterdijk, defines AfD as part of a new "conservative
avant garde" sweeping Europe. In a political
manifesto which coyly recalls Marx and Engels ("Ein Gespenst geht um
in Deutschland – das Gespenst der AfD"), Jongen bemoans the "revenge
of Planning", "Banksocialism" and the "suspension of the
law of the market" by the institutions of the EU and Germany's ruling
parties. It is a populism which calls on a supposedly "revolutionary
middle class" to restore dignity and sovereignty to Germany, against the
EU, the euro and the type of immigrant who does not wish to integrate. AfD
combines "free market ideas" and "Christian fundamentalism",
according to Muller: peculiar ideological bedfellows – also present in Poland's
governing PiS and Hungary's Fidesz – that look less peculiar when placed in the
broader context of the heterogeneous European right.

To be sure, these are radical breakaway groups
from the mainstream right, perhaps capable of winning support only temporarily.
Nevertheless they have risen alongside and within a resurgent right for the
past three decades, operating within intellectual and business networks,
pressure groups, policy think tanks, and political parties.

The opposition of this radical right to the
perceived liberalism of the EU does not in any way extend to a criticism of
capitalist institutions as such. Rather it re-articulates some of the concerns
of the conventional right – a small, non-interventionist state; a strong
nuclear, heterosexual family; national strength; law and order – with popular
grievances stoked by the neoliberalisation of politics and the financialisation
of the economy.

The key around which all this turns is hostility
towards immigration in general and Muslims in particular. If central and eastern
European hard right parties have proved capable of greater or more rapid
success than their western counterparts (who in many cases are nevertheless drawing
closer to electoral victory), it is because these countries have been
subjected to the worst effects of neoliberalism and financialisation.

Another key trend across Europe has been the
electoral collapse of the Left. The Alternative für Deutschland's astonishing
electoral success in Saxony Anhalt this year did not have much impact upon
Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. Rather it was Merkel's junior
coalition partner the Social Democratic Party whose vote fell
to a record low of 10.5%. Once the most powerful  party of European social democracy, the SPD
now languishes somewhere
around 20% in national polls. This echoes trends across every part of the
continent, where social democratic parties have been engulfed by the misery and
corruption of both neoliberal politics and the economics of austerity. Almost
every one of the major electoral representatives of the European centre-left
stands on the brink of extinction. While the various factions of the right
built up their intellectual weight, the traditional institutions of the left –
the trade unions, the various strands of communism, and the mainstream social
democratic parties – all decayed. Unless the Left can be reconstituted, we need
only look to its east for a dystopian vision of what lies ahead for Europe.