Democracy Through the Lens of 1989: Liberal Triumph or ... - CiteSeerX

Forthcoming in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society

Democracy Through the Lens of 1989: Liberal Triumph or Radical Turn? Paul Blokker,1 University of Trento

Abstract In a political reading, 1989 has been predominantly interpreted from a liberal point of view, and its impact has primarily been taken as strengthening the liberal-democratic idea of a political community. 1989 is, however, not reducible to a mere confirmation of a universal status of liberal democracy. Rather, a reverse reading – i.e., the recognition of the emergence of innovative, radical democratic ideas and practices from the East – is equally important to do full justice to the complex events of 1989. As a set of ideas (more specifically, dissident thought) as well as a set of practices (negotiation, self-limitation, constitution-making), 1989 has provided important inspiration for innovation in the normative political theory of democracy, even if on the margins. The essay starts with a brief enquiry into the widespread triumphalist thesis of liberal democracy, and continues by arguing that a more radical reading of 1989 – in particular in the form of the radical notions of civil society and dissidence - is equally possible. The notion of ‘self-democratizing civil society’ offers important ways of preserving the radical legacy of East-Central Europe dissidence. The idea of self-democratizing civil society should, however, be read together with the ideas of radical self-limitation, an anti-revolutionary understanding of revolution, pluralistic sovereignty, and an ethic of dissent in order for one to fully appreciate its innovative potential for the radical reinvigoration of modern democracies.

Keywords: Civil Society • Dissidence • Liberal Democracy • Pluralism • Radical Democracy

Introduction In a political reading, 1989 has been predominantly interpreted from a liberal point of view, and its impact has primarily been taken as strengthening the liberal-democratic idea of a political community.2 In other words, the impact of the political transformations in the East has been mostly read as the confirmation of ideas of the political in the West. In this essay I argue, however, that 1989 is not reducible to a mere confirmation of a universal status of liberal democracy, and that a reverse reading – i.e., the recognition of the emergence of innovative, radical democratic ideas and practices from the East – is equally important to do full justice to the complex events of 1989. Indeed, I argue that 1989 has important implications for the democratic imaginary that are not sufficiently acknowledged in much of political theory.

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Department of Sociology, University of Trento, via Verdi, 26, I-38100 Trento, Italy. Tel. +39 0461 881332. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]. 2 See, e.g., Huntington (1991); cf. Isaac (1996).

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I argue that 1989, as a set of ideas (more specifically, dissident thought) as well as a set of practices (negotiation, self-limitation, constitution-making), has provided important inspiration for innovation in normative political theory of democracy. As such, 1989 should not be understood as marking merely the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but as equally involving the elaboration of alternative perceptions of democracy. As has been noted by Gideon Baker, ‘alternative voices’ that recognize an innovative component in 1989 have, however, been largely covered up by a liberal consensus since 1989 (Baker 2002). The task of the essay is then to bring back in the radical interpretations of 1989, as the radical side has remained rather on the margins of the debate on civil society and democracy. In this, the focus will be on reflections in political theory on the ideas and practices of 1989 as well as attempts to use such reflections for proposing a radicalization of liberal democracy. The one-sided reading of 1989 – in that the annus mirabilis merely consisted in a confirmation of the Western (European) model of liberal democracy – passes by or ignores a more variegated and complex reading of the event. A more critical reading reveals forms of theoretical innovation and qualitative shifts in focus, even if these are not necessarily sensed in the mainstream debate. The essay starts with a brief enquiry into the widespread triumphalist thesis of liberal democracy, and continues by arguing that a more radical reading of 1989 – in particular in the form of the radical notions of civil society and dissidence - is equally possible, taking as primary examples the works of Andrew Arato and of Jiri Priban. I argue that while Arato’s understanding of civil society can be read as having moved from a radical, civil to a more mainstream, political understanding of democracy, his notion of ‘selfdemocratizing civil society’ offers important ways of preserving the radical legacy of East-Central Europe dissidence. The idea of self-democratizing civil society should, however, be read together with the ideas of radical self-limitation, an antirevolutionary understanding of revolution, pluralistic sovereignty, and an ethic of dissent - notions also further developed by Jiri Priban - in order for one to fully appreciate its innovative potential for the radical reinvigoration of modern democracies.

1989 and the Triumph of Liberal Democracy It can be argued that the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ in 1989 has been predominantly understood as the affirmation of the conventional perception of political modernity as liberal democracy. As a consequence, the political transformation in East-Central Europe has been often regarded as a ‘banality’ and as primarily about ‘normalization’ (Outhwaite and Ray 2005). In the view of the predominant understanding of democracy in the West, i.e., the liberal reading, the impact of 1989 seems to be of limited import, in that 1989 has principally confirmed the superiority of liberal democracy as a political form, and shown the fundamental importance of constitutional democracy with its emphasis on rights and the rule of law as an antidote to totalitarianism (Garton Ash 1990; Habermas 1990). Rather than presenting us with a profoundly unique situation of democratization in post-totalitarian conditions that requires a context-specific

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analysis, and, in this, could shed new light on possibilities of democracy as such, the events in the East have been greeted as confirmations of the liberalism-cum-human– rights prevalence in the West. What is more, the political discourses that sustained the Eastern European ‘revolutions’ are for the most part read as confirmations of the Western liberal discourse, and as without any innovative content (at least not beyond the communist or (post-)totalitarian context), and ultimately expressing the wish to repeat Western experiences, or as strongly grounded in Western ideas of liberal democracy to begin with (cf. Falk 2003). The significance of alternative, radical democratic elements in dissident thought and the novelties emerging from the events of 1989 themselves have been largely overlooked, underestimated, or simply ignored3 by a quite number of political thinkers. As has often been noted, one of the more prominent of such interpretations was Jürgen Habermas’s idea of the ‘catch-up revolution‘ (nachholende Revolution). In 1990, he argued that the revolution of 1989 ‘gibt sich als ein gewissermassen rückspülende Revolution zu erkennen, die den Weg frei macht, um versäumte Entwicklungen nachzuholen’ (1990: 180). In the central and eastern European countries ‘artikuliert sich am deutlichsten der Wunsch, verfassungspolitisch an das Erbe der bürgerlichen Revolutionen und gesellschaftspolitisch an die Verkehrs- und Lebensformen des entwickelten Kapitalismus, insbesondere an die Europäische Gemeinschaft, Anschluss zu finden’ (1990: 180). Habermas makes his interpretation explicit when he argues that the revolutions are without any innovative content, i.e., they are characterized by a ‘fast vollständigen Mangel an innovativen, zukunftsweisenden Ideen’ (1990: 181). A further example of a negation of potential novelty of 1989 for democratic thought can be found in the reflections of Bruce Ackerman. On the face of it, Ackerman, in his reflections on the ‘future of the liberal revolution’, seems to appreciate the impact of the events of 1989 more widely than Habermas. As he argues, ‘[i]t would be a tragic mistake to look upon 1989 as if it “merely” involved the end of the Cold War. It should instead be seen as part of a larger challenge’ (Ackerman 1992: 2). This larger challenge might be in his view a ‘second age of liberal revolution that will change the face of Europe and the world’ (Ackerman 1992: 3, emphasis added). Ackerman’s proposal is that the events of 1989 ushered in a period of renewed ‘activist’ liberalism, and the idea of a self-correcting liberal system that can be revolutionized from within, by political means, without having recourse to the violence of the revolutionary tradition of the French revolution and its idea of radical rupture. The significance of 1989 is then, in his view, that it represents us with the idea of ‘peaceful democratic revolution’ and the reactivation of a liberal revolutionary tradition that is non-violent and understands revolution as a cyclical renovation of the political system, as is most prominently characterized by the American tradition (Ackerman 1992: 17). While Ackerman seems here to appreciate a political significance of the 1989 revolutions that goes beyond the immediate Eastern 3

As Isaac argued in the mid-1990s, American political theorists basically ignored the events of 1989 (Isaac 1995).

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European context and its return or transformation to democracy, his point seems to be that, ultimately, the 1989 revolutions underline, or reactivate, a liberal revolutionary tradition that is firmly grounded in the American constitutional tradition. In other words, Ackerman seems to suggest that the 1989 events might help Westerners remind themselves of a successful tradition of their own, indeed the ‘return of revolutionary democratic liberalism’ (1992: 1, emphasis added), rather than involve the generation of something possibly novel and innovative, and therefore of specific significance for renovating modern democracy.4 The understandings of 1989 as either a mere rerun of, or fulfilling of, 1789, in terms of a catching-up of East-Central Europe with the achievements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, as in Habermas, or as a reminder of latent Western traditions, as in Ackerman, do not do justice to possible elements of uniqueness of the event of 1989 and the ideas that informed it, as well as its reposing of innate problématiques of political modernity (cf. Howard 1995; Wagner 2006). Even if the 1989 revolutions were predominantly ‘rights revolutions’ in some sense (Sadurski and Priban 2006) and had an outspoken ‘liberal legalist character’, and the dissident ideas informing these changes had an important liberal, rights-based component, 1989 cannot be reduced to this. Radical ideas of democracy were also always part of the dissident legacy, and were played out in the changes of 1989, as the same dissidents also pointed to the limitations of the rule of law and human rights, and the necessity of a rethinking and radicalisation of the liberal democratic project.

The Taming of Civil Society Probably the most widely acknowledged influence of dissident thought and political action on democratic theory is its inspiration of a renaissance of the idea of civil society. Paradoxically, while it has been argued that the radical notion of civil society that emerged in 1989 has inspired a fundamental challenge to the conventional liberal theory of democracy,5 at the same time this radical idea has apparently been ‘tamed’ in the aftermath of the collapse of communism (Baker 2002: 89). While the importance of ‘anti-politics’ as a critique of the totalitarian or post-totalitarian state has been mostly acknowledged, the validity of a radical idea of civil society for the rebuilding of democracy after 1989 has been increasingly put into doubt (see Renwick 2006). A good deal of the interpretations of civil society, while stimulated by the changes in East-Central Europe, ultimately reduces the concept to its liberal meaning (Isaac 1996; Baker 2002). The tamed, liberal understanding identifies the locus of sovereignty in the state, rather than in civil society, and substitutes a representative and elitist understanding of democracy for civil self-determination. Civil society as 4 This is of course not to suggest that Ackerman’s United States-inspired model does not have important merits in itself - such as the emphasis on a democratic form of constitutional politics - that go beyond classical understandings of liberal democracy. 5 The renewed focus on civil society has been seen as the ‘second renaissance’ of the concept, see Wagner 2006. See also Cohen & Arato 1992.

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such is de-radicalized and understood in an instrumental way, as a support of political democracy and a liberal political culture. Its purpose is reduced to a fairly uncomplicated, depoliticized one, i.e., to a dense form of civic interaction outside of the state, comprising a plurality of interests that is to be represented by political society. In this, civil society becomes a mostly descriptive term that identifies a set of civil associations, deemed essential for the consolidation of democracy but without any political function (Baker 2002: 89ff). This view clearly interprets 1989 as a reconfirmation of an important Western tradition and rereads civil society as ‘a support structure for democracy ‘proper’ at the level of the state – shaping parliamentary deliberation by providing a voice to public opinion, educating citizens in democratic values, and generally acting as a ‘watchdog’ over those in power, but otherwise leaving ‘real’ business of democracy to representatives’ (Baker 2002: 1). This reading offers little further reflection on contemporary legitimacy problems of modern democracy, and fundamental tensions such as state-civil society relations including the problématique of social self-determination. In this, the often concomitant, but undeserved, celebration of civil society as a panacea for the contemporary problems of modern democracy tends to forego deeper reflections on the role of political society and politics in the establishment as well as maintenance of democracy and underestimates the pluralism, diversity, and potential for self-rule within civil society itself. Some observers have raised doubts over the usefulness of such a rather unspecified and celebratory notion of ‘civil society’. Krishan Kumar, for instance, has argued that the concept does not seem to express anything that cannot be also grasped by terms such as ‘constitutionalism, citizenship, and democracy’ (Kumar 1993: 391). The argument here is, in contrast, that the taming of the radical vision of civil society in the post-1989 era has not prevented some theorists from seriously rethinking the democratic project and to show the significance of a particular interpretation of civil society as a locus of democracy that indeed emerged in 1989. Here, the work of one prominent political theorist, Andrew Arato, is particularly relevant and can serve as important evidence of the inspiration that the dissident experience and the 1989 ‘revolutions’ have provided for rethinking, rather than merely reconfirming, the modern democratic project in a theoretical sense. In my view, the radical dimension of 1989 contradicts, or at the very least, gives important nuance to the general apprehension of the notion of civil society as it emerged in the East as merely confirming a Western understanding of civil society as grounded in individualist liberalism and as only complementary to state power (cf. Hann & Dunn 1996; Jensen & Miszlivetz 2006). The works of Andrew Arato (1981; 1990; 1992, with Jean Cohen; 1993; 2000) can indeed be read as an important re-interpretation of 1989 with radical implications for our understanding of democracy. Admittedly, while it can be argued that Arato’s Habermasian project has ultimately pulled the sting out of the radical notion of civil society as a form of self-management (see Baker 2002), I will argue that this interpretation is not entirely accurate, and that, especially in his work Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy (2000), Arato has managed to preserve a radical,

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republican dimension in his democratic model of constitutionalism, a dimension which remains part of his understanding of ‘self-limitation’ and a politics of civic participation. To any informed observer it is obvious that Arato’s political theorizing is much indebted, in terms of learning and reflection, to the political events of 1989 as well as the discourses and self-understandings of dissidents. One of the most important contributions to the civil society debate is indeed Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s Civil Society and Political Theory (1992). But, while in this work East-Central European discourse forms an important source of inspiration for the redefinition of the notion of civil society, it can be argued that the understanding of civil society in the book ultimately takes a liberal turn by relegating it to the status of one of three sub-systems in modern democracy, the others being political society and the economy, and by placing the political in the sphere of political rather than civil society. Such a reading seems indeed corroborated by this work in that one of its more salient observations is that in dissident thought the self-organization of society was not only conceptualized as a form of ‘anti-politics’, i.e., as a pitting of an autonomously organized civil society against the repressive state (an observation which informs one of the major points of critique against its utility after 1989), but also as a way of influencing the sphere of official politics. At least some of the dissidents went beyond a self-referential anti-politics by arguing for the necessity of influencing state policy (cf. Renwick 2006), and clearly invoked an element of compromise and negotiation, and the partial politicisation of civil society.6 For instance, in his widely influential ‘Antipolitics’ Gyorgy Konrad did not just argue for a radically non-political anti-politics,7 but also, in a more accurate reading, for the democratisation of both civil society and the state: ‘[a]ntipolitics strives to put politics in its place and make sure it stays there, never overstepping its proper office of defending and refining the rules of the game of civil society’ (Konrad 1984: 92). Konrad perceived the role of civil society, and of intellectuals in particular, as one of pushing political society into the right direction: ‘[t]he intellectual aristocracy has no desire to bring down governments […] [but] is content to push the state administration in the direction of more intelligent, more responsible strategies. Its members do this as part of the self-governing intellectual community, even though they act individually, independent of the state’ (Konrad 1984: 224-5). In this, the experience of dissidence not only revealed the importance of autonomous civil society as a sphere set free from political power and as an antitotalitarian strategy (cf. Hann & Dunn 1996), but it also evidenced the role of political society in the establishment of modern democracy and the importance of its elaboration as a distinct category (contrary to fully anti-statist, anarchist tendencies). The main argument is that political society needs to be understood as distinct from, 6 This is confirmed by Falk (2003: 308-9), who has argued that in Hungarian dissident thought, and in Konrad’s work in particular, a more inclusive notion of politics, including both civil society and the state, was there all along. 7 Walzer, among others, seems to understand Konrad’s ‘Antipolitics’ as only about an anti-statist antipolitics (1995: 21).

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but at the same time open to, demands and contributions from civil society (Cohen & Arato 1992: 60, 65; cf. Walzer 1995). In other words, the polarization that might result from an over-united, over-mobilized, and ‘anti-political’ civil society, which is feared by many observers in the wake of 1989 (see, e.g. Linz and Stepan 1996), can be corrected by a ‘turn to political society’ (Cohen & Arato 1992: 67): Such ties [between political and civil society, pb] would presuppose a programmatic openness of the political to the civil and a sufficient strengthening of the latter to allow it to function in institutionalised forms. What is needed, in other words, are programs that not only establish an ongoing process of political exchange with organizations and initiatives outside the party political sphere but also strengthen civil society with respect to the new economic society in formation. Only such a program could offer something genuinely new with respect to the present models of Western politics, thereby transcending the bad choice of either economic liberalism and elite democracy or direct democratic fundamentalism (1992: 82).

This insight can indeed be taken as one of the ways of ‘taming’ the more radical notion of civil society as it emerged from the ideas of dissidents such as Havel, Konrad, and Michnik (see Baker 2002: 100). In itself, Arato’s dualistic interpretation can be read as a ‘political turn’ that significantly modifies the status of civil society and confirms a liberal democratic imaginary of the modern polity. The risk it involves is that of collapsing civil society into a notion that indicates the mere external support for liberal democratic politics, which is ultimately situated within the sphere of representative, professional politics. It seems to me, however - contrary to Gideon Baker’s interpretation of Arato’s argument as caving in to a liberal understanding of civil society - that there is an important radical residue in his notion of a ‘self-democratizing civil society’ (2000: 4). Arato goes importantly beyond a rigid dualistic understanding – which would confine politics to political society - by including a participatory dimension, that he directly derives from the political developments of 1989, that radicalizes liberal understandings of democracy and prioritizes an enduring civic autonomy and participation over state politics. This can be shown by analysing the complex series of arguments Arato makes in, among others, his work Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy. His argumentation is grounded in the idea that the foundation of democracy through constitutional politics can – and should - never be entirely closed (he draws, here, among others, on Cornelius Castoriadis’ radical imaginary signification, and his notions of instituting and instituted society). I will argue below that Arato is indeed able to preserve a political momentum of civil society – civil society as an end in itself - in attributing to it a sense of political priority, autonomy, and democratic action (the demise of which in political theory is so much, and rightly so, lamented by Baker). Indeed, the loss of political momentum is exactly what the taming of civil society has been about: ‘... the central change to the theory of civil society so understood is that civil society is now seen as external to democracy. This is because democracy itself is viewed exclusively as a political mechanism for representation in the state such that civil society, while it furthers such representation and is therefore indispensable to a democratic polity, is effectively not [part] of it’ (Baker 2002: 92).

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Self-democratizing Civil Society Arato’s dualistic approach that acknowledges the importance of both civil and political society should be understood from within his wider understanding of civil politics as grounded in radical self-limitation. Arato claims that this latter notion, as it was promoted through such ideas as ‘new evolutionism’ or ‘self-limiting revolution’ and within the context of a self-organizing and autonomous civil sphere, was more than just a strategic instrument against the intrusive politics of totalitarian states. Rather, he suggests that the notion of ‘civil society’ as it emerged in East-Central Europe harbours an element of radical democracy that has validity beyond the antitotalitarian struggles, i.e., it provides a hint of ‘how to save something of the spirit of revolutionary public freedom in settled constitutions’ (Arato 1990: 30). In this, Arato argues that a crucial lesson that emerges from the 1989 revolutions is that democratization cannot merely mean to ‘use the elements of civil society… as mere stepping stones for a new elite democracy’ (1990: 30-31), but should include attempts to preserve a radical, revolutionary but self-limiting spirit also in the construction of the post-revolutionary democratic orders. Already in 1990, but re-emphasizing and broadening this in his later works (see, in particular, Arato 2000), he suggested a number of ways how a political prerogative for the civil sphere could be preserved: The establishment on the level of the constitutional structure and political culture [of] an active role for initiatives (petitions, citizen initiatives, self-organized referenda) from civil society concerning constitutional revision itself. Such provision could range from a strong conception of constitutional rights that leave by definition room for learning through civil disobedience, as well as a multi-channeled process of legislative and constitutional tradition, confirmation and revision that would recognize and institutionalize the right of an organized society to participate in the determination of its own fundamental rules. (Arato 1990: 30) (emphasis added)

Leaving aside the question of whether such a revolutionary spirit has actually been successfully included in the constitutions of the region (Arato himself gives a brief but thorough analysis of this, see Arato 2000, chapter 4; see also Blokker 2008a), it is clear that this suggestion for the incorporation of a radical spirit in contemporary democracy goes beyond a mere confirmation of the classical liberal distinction between the political and the social with its emphasis on confining the political to the sphere of state politics, as well as against the contemporary foundationalist spirit of constitutionalism, grounded in a purely rights-based vision of democracy and an emphasis on constitutional courts as the guardians of democracy and the rule of law (a ‘republic of judges’). As will be shown below, the novelty in the concept of civil autonomy in its EastCentral European version is indeed multi-faceted and amounts to a convincing alternative to contemporary forms of democratic disenchantment. It does this by means of its emphasis on a reflexive strategy of civil self-limitation, which includes the refusal to impose fundamentalist projects on the rest of society, the endorsement of a pluralistic view of sovereignty and democratic practice, and a ‘power of

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persuasion’ and an ‘ethic of dissent’ rather than the logics of competition over political power. The lesson to be learned from the East-Central European experience is based on the endurance of this ‘more self-reflective model of reason able to build its own history into its model of action’ (Arato 2000: 9). In other words, the preservation of a continuous ‘revolutionary spirit’ within the democratic system itself, through which civil society participates in continuous civil politics that can add in a minimalist sense a democratic mode of correction, as in a form of mode of democratic distrust (cf. Rosanvallon 2006), and in a more maximalist sense, the reformulation of the ground rules of the polity through civic participation in constitutional politics. At this point, it is good to take a step back and bring out the essential features, innovative potential, and wider relevance of the notions of ‘self-democratizing civil society’ and ‘self-limiting revolution’. I will argue that by means of a more detailed revisiting of these notions it will become clear how the revolutionary ideas and experiences of 1989 have been used to formulate a kind of third way that forms an alternative to both a closed idea of liberal constitutionalism that risks to seriously diminish the civic participatory component of democracy and a state of permanent, totalizing revolution that is characterized by continuous instability and heteronomy. The rest of the essay is an attempt to bring out the novelty of such an approach of ‘self-democratizing civil society’ by focussing on three essential aspects as they emerged in East-Central Europe and have been picked up by Arato, but also others such as Priban and Preuss, in political and legal theory: the rejection of the classical understanding of the modern Revolution, the pluralist notion of sovereignty, and the idea of an ‘ethic of dissent’.

Revolutions against the Revolution The rejection of utopianism, or any kind of foundationalism or absolute Truth is of major importance in the notion of radical self-limitation. It is clear in this regard that the 1989 events cannot be seen as revolutions in the “classical” sense of modern revolutions, as in the tradition of 1789 and 1917, in that a radical rupture and uncompromising transfer of sovereignty (in the French revolution from the absolutist monarch to the people) was not the aim of the dissidents. The experience of the communist projects, in which the vanguard claimed to be shaping the present according to an unshakable vision of the future, made that renewed attempts at the implementation of grand narratives were rejected tout court. This deviation of the 1989 events from the classical – Jacobin and Bolshevik – revolutionary repertoire was sensed, even if not fully picked up, by a good part of the observers, who designated the events as ‘peaceful revolutions’, ‘velvet revolutions’, or ‘refolutions’. The main characteristics of the 1989 revolutions were in this view their non-violent character, the willingness of all significant parties to negotiate the revolution’s outcome rather than to impose an absolute will, the agreement to pursue incremental rather than revolutionary, radical change, and the continuing participation of the forces of the ancien régime in the political order in construction. Generally, it is assumed that this choice for a ‘self-limiting revolution’ emerged

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primarily from strategic considerations. As however Arato argues, a normative, ideational component should be equally appreciated. While these revolutions indeed had a non-violent, negotiated, and reformist character, this was ultimately grounded in a very distinct ontological understanding of radical change: In all this, East Central European democratic oppositions were helped by the one original theory of transition that emerged from the region, the Polish and later Hungarian conception of “new evolutionism”, or “self-limiting revolution,” which assumed from the outset that the changes in the periphery of the Soviet imperium would have to be rooted in the rebuilding of civil society rather than a direct struggle for state power. Thus, the road to transformation would have to be at all stages negotiated, involving as a result continuities in the existing system. Even if this idea was proposed originally for geostrategic reasons, some actors within the democratic oppositions, reflecting on the history of revolutions, developed a normative, “internal” relationship to it (Arato 2000: 173, emphasis in original).

What is important here is that the revolutions included a more fundamental, not merely pragmatic but normative difference that goes beyond the strategic approach of self-limitation dictated by the specific circumstances of collapsing Soviet communism. The normative programme of self-limitation contained an important anti-foundationalist, relativist streak that denies the Jacobin logic of the Revolution as such: While the full range of meanings in the concept of self-limitation was never really articulated, with hindsight it is possible to reconstruct the core of the conception in a way that goes beyond the original formulations, hopefully in their spirit. To link the notion of emancipation to that of self-limitation meant not only the need to avoid the transformation of the movement of society into a new form of unified state power, but also that one will not attempt to impose the logic of democratic coordination on all spheres by suppressing bureaucracy, and economic rationality. Movements rooted in civil society have learned from the revolutionary tradition the Tocquevillian lesson that such fundamentalist projects lead to the breakdown of societal steering, productivity, and integration, all of which are then reconstituted by the new-old forces of order by dramatically authoritarian means. (Arato 1990: 26)

In Arato’s view, the whole approach included not only the rejection of a bid for political power, but also a normative rejection by the dissidents of the metaphysics of the Jacobin-Bolshevik type of revolutions, grounded in the logic of a complete and violent break with the past, and based on a totalising and utopian vision of the future. In this, the changes in the former communist societies indicate the emergence of a potentially new - not only non-violent and reformist but radical - understanding of revolution, i.e., as ‘revolutions against the Revolution’ (Arato 1993: 673; 2000). The self-limiting revolutions contained a critique of the idea of the modern revolution as a force that founds a completely new society on the basis of an all-encompassing narrative of the future. In this regard, the project of “self-limiting revolution” ‘had to, and did, involve the renunciation of the utopia of revolution, in the sense of the dream of a single, imposed model of the good society that breaks completely with the present, that is beyond conflict and division’ (Arato 1990: 26). Jiri Priban brings out this radical aspect by referring to Havel’s notion of ‘living in truth’. It is not only that the 1989 revolutions were reformist rather than

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revolutionary, in which the incremental change of the system from within was preferred to its complete overhaul, but that the revolutions were aiming at the institutionalisation of a new order which provided for the possibility of ‘living in truth’, which in turn was to stand as the basis for civil autonomy and selfemancipation. Priban therefore characterises these revolutions as ‘existential revolutions’ (2002: 48-9). ‘Living in truth’ ‘means a possibility to escape from the evil which destroys the human individuality and singularity, [that] constantly measures individual’s actions and thoughts and exposes him/her to the light and judgments of the outside world of politics and ideology’ (2002: 52). Havel’s notion of ‘living in truth’ can indeed be seen to include a critique of political ideology and a form of anti-foundationalism, as he prioritized the individual as a ‘being capable of truth’ (Findlay 1999: 407-8). In this, Havel not only criticized forms of totalitarian heteronomy, but also acknowledged important flaws in Western, liberal democracy, such as mass indifference: ‘[i]s not the grayness and emptiness of life in the posttotalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies?’ (‘The Power of the Powerless’, 1992: 145). In an attempt at further grasping this normative dimension, it is useful to compare the notion of ‘living in truth’ with Cornelius Castoriadis’ notion of autonomy, which he juxtaposes to heteronomy: ‘the state where laws, principles, norms, values, and meanings are given once and for all and where the society or the individual, as the case may be, has no action upon them’ (Castoriadis 1997: 17). Autonomy, in Castoriadis’ terms can exist when a political form is instituted that breaks up ‘the closure of the hitherto prevailing instituted society and open[s] up a space where the activities of thinking and of politics lead to putting again and again into question not only the given forms of the social institution and of the social representation of the world but the possible ground for any such forms’ (1997: 17). Returning to Priban’s view, ‘[t]he demand to live in truth escapes every judgment and communicative procedure which seeks to define binding normative criteria of truth’ (2002: 49). In this regard, ‘[t]he 1989 velvet revolutions proved that no discourse has the power to declare itself universal or sovereign and therefore to claim to be the normative basis for political institutions. There is no actual voice or discourse which can speak in its name and define its normative framework... Democracy speaks in many voices’ (2002: 50). This meant that no binding, universal normative criteria for the new order were accepted, and, more importantly, that its foundational norms should be continuously be open to scrutiny, while remaining within the confines of the rule of law. According to Priban, ‘[i]n the post-1989 societies, then, preservation of heterogeneity has priority over the construction of the unified discourse framework of liberal democracies’ (2002: 50). The essential aspect of the existential revolutions was the fundamental aim to preserve heterogeneity and to create the structural conditions for the preservation of political plurality and difference. In his discussion of Heller’s and Feher’s post-modernist views on 1989, Arato equally recognises this dimension as the ‘rejection of utopian narratives and the hubris of making history’ (Arato 2000: 15).

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Pluralistic Sovereignty In relation to this normative programme of anti-foundationalism and the outright rejection of grand narratives (as recognized above, sometimes including some version of liberal democracy, cf. Findlay 1999 on Havel), the revolutions of 1989 did not repeat the classical revolutionary logic of designating a mythical people the archetypal role of pouvoir constituant of the new political regime. In Ulrich Preuss’s words, ‘they did not strive for power or any particular distribution of power, but for the constitutionalization of power altogether’ (Preuss 1991: 108). As also Priban has argued, the 1989 revolutions were revolutions ‘without the people’, i.e., without a basis in the fiction of a homogeneous popular will and sovereignty, and a general societal consensus on the new regime (Priban 2002: 38-9). The revolutions did indeed display a negative consensus – a ‘negative political will’ (2002: 43) - regarding the communist regime and its totalitarian control of society, but no singular attempt to constitute a new order grounded in the image of a unitary people moved by a singular revolutionary programme was attached to this. This aspect has normally been interpreted as the absence of any revolutionary ideas in the 1989 events (cf. Offe 1996). It needs to be acknowledged, however, that more was going on in that ‘[t]he velvet revolutions were not then conceptualised so much in terms of the sovereign power of the people, but rather in terms of freedoms and autonomy of those who make up the people. The sovereign people disappeared, and was replaced by a strategy demanding pluralisation and autonomisation of different forms of life’ (Priban 2002: 44). The multiplicity of programmes, the widely shared recognition of such irreducible ideational variety, and the recognition of a plurality of political agents was exactly what was novel in these revolutions. In Preuss’ words, the ‘main characteristic of these revolutions is the disbelief of the proponents in the postulate of a homogeneous unitary popular will which imposes itself on society’ (1991: 107). He goes on, ‘it is the uniqueness of the radical changes of 1989 that they in fact revolutionized the political systems and the societies as a whole and that the people did not act as a constituent, but as a constituted power. By doing so, the people yielded to the self-imposed discipline of constitutionalism...’ (Preuss 1991: 112). In this, constitutionalism did not take the classical form of expressing the unified will of the people, but rather it instituted ‘the right to diversity, plurality, to difference and to dissent, without threatening the capacity of the society to refer to itself and its problems in terms of politics’ (1991: 113). Preuss’ point is that the self-limiting revolutions saw a shift from a monist model of political sovereignty to a pluralist model that prioritizes civil society. A plurality of political agents substituted for a singular pouvoir constituant, and constituted in their totality an open forum for deliberation in the drawing up of the foundations of the new polity (the Roundtables are sometimes interpreted in just such a sense). As observed by Arato (2000: 40), Preuss himself, however, quickly became rather pessimistic about the ‘chances of a civil society-based “reflexive” constitutionalism anywhere in Eastern Europe’. Much later, in 2001, the same Preuss argued:

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This was the problem of the revolutions of 1989. They were not only characterized by a vacuum of rules – which is normal in a revolution – but, what is by far more serious, by the non-existence of actors who represented consolidated interests and had the moral, intellectual and physical power to assume responsibility for the whole society. (Preuss 2001: 185)

Preuss now identified the main distinguishing characteristic of the 1989 revolutions in their emphasis on national identity or a form of ‘communitarian constitutionalism’ (Preuss 2001: 194-5; see also Preuss 1993, 1995): That is why the European revolutions of 1989 differ from those which we have known since 1688. The latter were about freedom versus tyranny, and this statement applies to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 as well in that this revolution aimed at the social and political emancipation of the working class. In contrast, the revolutions of 1989 appear to be primarily concerned with collective identity, the acknowledgement of previously oppressed social groups and their constitution as political entities. Their battle cry is not so much liberty as liberation: the act of liberation is an act of collective self-creation and self-constitution, the ‘self’ possessing a slumbering pre-political, quasi-natural quality which manifests itself in a distinct common spirit... It is this distinctive feature of the revolutions of 1989 that dampens the expectation that they will move in the same direction and will create the same social and political structures that are characteristic of the ‘classic’ constitutional states such as Britain, the US, or France. They have yet to arrive in ‘Europe’.

In contrast, Arato remains more positive – even if in a cautious manner - about the chances of a civil society-based form of democratization in East-Central Europe. And what is more important for the argument of this essay, one can view his suggestions also as attempts to translate the denunciation of the myth of a unified will of the people into a more general political model of democratic plurality and a variety of forms of participation. In this sense, Arato’s suggestions for a democratic constitutionalism and self-democratizing civil society provide us with a way to imagine the prolongation of the experiences of the ‘self-limiting revolutions’ into the post-revolutionary era and simultaneously the reinvigoration of ‘advanced’ democracies tout court. His emphasis is in particular on a radical correction of an elitist understanding of democracy – grounded as it is in representative politics, and the demobilization and depoliticisation of civil society – but also on forms of rightand left-wing populism. In both instances, democracy can be reinvigorated, and excesses resulting from disenchantment staved off, by means of the facilitation of significant patterns of civic participation and the openness of (constitutional) politics to such participation for the legitimation of a democratic regime. Regarding institutionalized forms of civic participation in the context of constitutional democracy, Arato has suggested three desiderata for the further radicalization of democracy. His original proposal regarded the specific Hungarian context in the early 1990s, but can be taken to have a more general significance. The radicalization of liberal democracy needs, first of all, the ‘continuation of the original East European method of constitution making’, i.e., the pursuit of radical change without, however, violating the principle of legality. Second, he suggests the broadening of the sphere of politics by means of the guarantee of a plurality of constitutionally relevant political agents, which means that the fundamental rules of

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the polity need to be open to ‘the creative input of a wider range of social forces’. And third, in order to improve the legitimacy of democratic politics, it is important to provide the ‘opportunity also for the less-formalized participation [in constitutional politics, pb] of the public by individuals and concerned organizations’ in order to create a ‘Tocquevillian moment of constitution making’, in particular by means of public discussion and forms of deliberation (2000: 196-7). The three desiderata indicate a democratic model grounded in legality but allowing for significant modification, in particular through the possibility of continuous constitutional politics, in which a plurality of actors can participate and which entails a prominent weight of civic actors in the democratic process. It should be admitted though, that in its insistence on the principle of legality, these desiderata in itself might be taken to indicate a kind of ‘liberalism-plus’, even if it goes beyond the classical liberal distinction between political and civil society, and increases possibilities of civic participation. The latter might be understood as to ultimately add up to a supportive and informative, and therefore in the last instance, extra-political function. However, the picture changes decisively if to this model an extra-legal dimension of civic dissidence is added.

Civil Disobedience or the Ethic of Dissent Although the majority of scholars seems to have discarded the radical understanding of civil society as it emerged from the East-Central European experience – Baker speaks of a ‘near consensus among analysts of democratisation that actually existing democracy is the only form of democracy on offer’ (2002: 90; cf. Isaac 1996) – the discussion above shows that a revisiting of the radical dimension of 1989 can importantly help to further democratize democracy in an age of democratic disenchantment (cf. Gauchet 2005; Rosanvallon 2006). Indeed, Arato and Priban, provide important suggestions for the translation of this radical dimension into a language of a more general relevance for democratic regimes, in other words, a language of democratic dissent. Rather than endorsing any thesis of the incompatibility of dissidence with ‘normal’ democracy, i.e., by pointing out the superfluous, compromised and even antidemocratic nature of dissidence in the post-1989 era, both Arato and Priban argue for the importance of the continuation of a ‘politics of civil disobedience’ or an ‘ethic of dissent’ in the enduring democratization of any democracy. The experience of dissidence in East-Central Europe not only provides us with a confirmation of the importance of a legal language of human rights and the rule of law as antidotes against forms of repression and totalitarianism and as a primary means to cut out a space of civil interaction. Rather, as both Arato and Priban show, the legality of the constitutional state is not sufficient for the establishment of democracy. The latter needs extensive public participation, the communication between legality and discourses of extra-legal legitimation emerging from civil society, and in particular continuous public scrutiny and dissent in order to be able to function as a legitimate democratic regime. Both Arato and Priban point to an approach that attempts to enshrine a revolutionary spirit in modern democratic regimes and recognises the

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significance of dissenting voices (even if illegal dissent itself can obviously never be institutionalized, see Cohen & Arato 1992: 587), offering in my reading a possibility for a radical alternative to liberal democracy,8 which could be labelled ‘civil democracy’ (cf. Rosanvallon 2006). The most important dimension of democratizing democracy consists of those civic strategies that do not merely confirm legality and the constitutional status quo, but that seek to deepen democracy from a peripheral position. It is in particular through such acts of civil disobedience - which Cohen and Arato label ‘examples of selflimiting radicalism per excellence’ (1992: 567) - that civil society transcends a defensive strategy of correcting democracy and can play an offensive and creative role in the democratization of democracy. Thus, in order to fully realize its emancipatory potential, the project of democratizing democracy needs to go beyond an exclusive focus on the defence of existing rights by means of civic politics (Cohen & Arato 1988: 56), and needs to tap into sources of civic creativity that scrutinize the outer limits of predominant understandings of politics and potentially elaborate novel discourses of democratic legitimation.9 Here, Priban’s work sheds important light on what he calls ‘the ‘strategy of dissent’, which he derives directly from the East-Central European dissident experience. In Priban’s view, democracy cannot consist merely of a procedural-legal structure, as ‘[h]umanity reduced to human rights and freedoms, that is, humanity as a category of the system of positive law, is a parody of the human condition’ (2002: 173). Legality in liberal democracies seeks to portray itself as the exclusive legitimation strategy, as a sovereign and universal language of democratic rights, and 8 According to Falk (2003), some observers, including Jeffrey Isaac, argue that the radical side of dissident thought can only help us to correct the liberal project. In other words, radical self-limitation merely constitutes an ‘add-on’ rather than a real alternative to liberal democracy, i.e., a ‘liberalismplus’ (Falk 2003: 339). And, in fact, Isaac, even if fully acknowledging the radical language involved in East-Central European dissidence, states that the civic initiatives of the dissidents involved ‘a different style of politics, one more rebellious and more participatory’, but ultimately ‘[t]hey do not present themselves as wholesale alternatives to liberal democracy’ (1996: 316). In my view, if the radicalization of liberal democracy and its implications for democratic politics is taken seriously, a structural incorporation of civic dissent would, however, seem to add up to such an alternative, in particular in its extensive widening of the sphere of politics beyond parliamentary representation (multiplying the loci of democratic politics) and its radical shift towards civil society. Rather than offering a kind of liberalism-plus, the dissidents’ new language was effectively a ‘dual language’ that both acknowledged the necessity of legality and the need to continuously put the legalist discourse itself to the test (cf. Priban 2002). In a somewhat analogous way, Rosanvallon argues for considering what he calls an ‘indirect democracy’ based on an ethic of distrust as a ‘political form in its own right’ (2006: 239). 9 It needs at the same time to be acknowledged that really existing civil society will comprise a variety of initiatives and discourses, of which a part will not be democratic at all. Some groups will not use their voice to contribute to the democratization of democracy, but rather pursue their self-interest or try to narrow the scope of democracy. As I have argued elsewhere, in some cases, as in populist criticism of elitist democracy, such non-democratic voices can still indicate a problem intrinsic to democracy, even if articulating this in a highly exclusionary language (Blokker 2005). Thus, a shift towards civil participation does not necessarily have to mean an acceptance of the idea of civil society as a ‘world of rationality and consensus’ (Alexander 1993: 801), but rather the idea of a sphere of competing discourses.

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tends in this regard to discursive closure and to contradict ‘ideas of democracy, freedom and political plurality’ (2002: 150). The anti-foundationalist spirit of EastCentral European dissidence becomes important here in that it points to a plurality of democratic discourses and the multi-interpretability of rights and freedoms, the impossibility of fully institutionalizing democracy once and for all, and the continuous ‘challenge of any systemic language claiming sovereignty’ (2002: 170) in order to prevent disenchantment with democracy. The role of civil society is crucial in its cultivation of alternative voices and of dissent as an ‘ironical struggle against systemic formalism’ and pointing out of ‘possible alternatives to existing legal normativity’ (2002: 162). Acts of dissidence play a critical role in reinvigorating a second dimension of constitutional democracy, that is, beyond a universally understood legal order institutionalizing individual rights, democracy is also always about emancipation and civic autonomy or self-rule (cf. Castoriadis 1997; Canovan 1999; Meny and Surel 2000). As also Cohen and Arato (1992: 587) argue, ‘[d]isobedience in the defense of individual rights does follow from the idea of fundamental rights, but civil disobedience proper, especially if it involves the creation of new rights, follows from the second normative underpinning of constitutional democracies, the other basis of constitutionalism forgotten by the liberal, namely, the idea of democratic legitimacy’. In Priban’s view, the ‘dissident strategy of legal legitimation goes beyond legalist discourse and is entrenched in a moral and existential vocabulary which does not perceive morality as some sphere of rules, prescriptions and governance, but as that sphere which opens up the possibility to experience human authenticity and independence’ (2002: 169). In this, Priban suggests the broader significance of a dissident ethic or, to put it differently, ‘a need for a radical version of liberalism’ (Priban 2002: 55), beyond the immediate context of the anti-totalitarian struggle. In his view, ‘the experience of anti-communist dissent may be generalised to apply to all to modern societies (for communist totalitarianism is a product of modernity as is liberal democracy) as a challenge of any systemic language claiming sovereignty’ (Priban 2002: 170). He further argues: The strategy of dissidence is applicable to the liberal democratic conditions of the rule of law because legality seeks to declare itself the sovereign legitimation framework there as well although this is done with the help of the moral vocabulary of human rights and democracy. Dissent is not only a political position and action. It is first of all an expression of the social requirement of understanding and comprehending every structure and normative system in order to make them legitimate.

East-Central European dissidence was, in his opinion, not only about the claim that the rights stipulated in the communist constitutions should be actually observed in political reality (legalism), but also entailed the insight that the observance of the law could only be the starting point, the necessary but not sufficient condition, for people to be able to ‘live in truth’, to lead authentic lives. Priban thus returns to Havel’s insistence of ‘living in truth’ and authenticity, and argues therefore that ’dissent is indispensable to all modern democratic regimes’ in that it does not allow for any legitimating discourse to claim full sovereignty (2002: 170). Crucial is his insistence

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on the critical role of civil society, which does not merely consist of a denunciation of dysfunctional elements and a call for the strict application of the law, i.e., the defensive approach mentioned earlier. Rather, Priban’s ‘ethic of dissent’ reveals the insufficient nature of liberal-democratic law (2002: 171) and suggests a mode of ‘permanent communication between the legal system and its environment’ instead. Such a communication prevents legal language from turning into a langue de bois or what Priban calls ptydepe (following Havel), an atrophied language incomprehensible for the rest of society. What is more, such a continuous dialogue between centre and periphery culturally embeds legal language into the discursive structures and political cultures of civil society itself. The ‘ethic of dissent’ understood as an intrinsic part of democracy offers a way of challenging the democratic system without fundamentally destroying it, being in this faithful to the idea of ‘radical self-limitation’. Crucial is the insistence on ‘the limited validity of every social system without attributing universal validity and binding force to itself. Dissent as a legitimation strategy means the end of all attempts at a universal legitimation’ (Priban 2002: 172). The role of civil society is to challenge the dominant logic of an ‘ethic of rights’ (see for the idea of democratic ethics, Blokker 2008b), and to articulate alternative ways of justifying the democratic regime in a pursuit of an ‘ethic of dissent’. The fundamental purpose of this ethic of dissent is to show that democracy is never entirely reducible to a singular justification of proceduralism and legalism, but, in order to enjoy legitimacy rather than just legality, needs social comprehension and continuous reformulation by civil society. In this, the experience of dissidence and the ‘double language’ of the various dissidents and dissident groupings show not only an appreciation of legality, the rule of law, and the indispensable nature of the protection of human rights (as argued by those that see 1989 as mostly or even exclusively a moment of ‘rights revolutions’), but also a sensibility for the fact that the rule of law can never be sufficient, and cannot stand on itself. Modern democracy cannot be reduced to the rule of law, and legal systems need a continuous correction by ‘dissenting’ citizens in order to prevent the rule of law from becoming a herbarium of ‘ice flowers’ (Priban 2002: 143).

Concluding Remarks In this essay I have attempted to show that the reduction of the events of 1989 and the ideas informing the historical changes to a confirmation of liberal democracy is problematic. I also argue that the view that 1989 has at most generated a form of corrective to liberalism does not give the radical, innovative nature of the dissident ideas and practices their due. Rather ,the new radical language of dissidence should be read as a dual language, i.e., on the one hand, as a language of rights, the rule of law, and the idea of the Rechtsstaat, while, on the other, as a language of radical selflimitation and of dissent. It is this second dimension, picked up only by a minority of political and legal theorists, that provides us with the most significant insights and worthwhile lessons of 1989 - also beyond the East-Central European context - for the further democratization of democracy.

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A good part of both theorists and empirical observers of democratization have contributed to the ‘taming’ of this second, radical dimension of 1989 by arguing that the radical, republican dimension to dissident thought do not add up to an discourse of real institutional value and ultimately constitutes a threat to the establishment of liberal democracy (e.g., Ackerman 1992; Linz & Stepan 1996). In contrast, however, I have tried to show that a number of key notions of the radical idea of civil society can indeed provide us with important instruments to confront contemporary disenchantment with democracy. In general terms, these notions can help to keep the democratic space open, contribute to the diversification of meaningful democratic practices as well as to enhance the democratic legitimacy of constitutional democracies. The notion of ‘revolutions against the Revolution’ or anti-revolutionary revolutions adds to the postmodern critique of grand narratives and all-encompassing discourses that propose the reconstruction of society on the basis of utopian understandings, but does not fall into the trap of relativism due to its acceptance of the need for legality. The pluralist nature of modern society and its increasing fragmentation demand forms of social imagination that are both self-reflexive and self-limiting, and that understand any form of institutionalisation of democracy as necessarily temporary and open to future modification. Such a view includes the realization that legality and legal-procedural stability cannot, by themselves, constitute a democratic regime, and is therefore critical of the predominant liberal view that risks reducing democracy to an elistist, purely rights-based and outputoriented form of politics. A democratic regime cannot be reduced to an a prioristic understanding of an institutionalised order, but needs to sustain the emergence of what Castoriadis called radical, institutionalising discourses (Castoriadis 1987). A democratic regime that is based on a rigid distinction between civil and political society, and the liberal idea of representative politics confined to political society, has few means to provide for meaningful forms of civic participation that help attenuate forms of disenchantment and political alienation. What is more, it has few means to confront the above-mentioned fragmentation and diversification of societies. The self-limiting revolutions pointed to the impossibility for politics to represent the whole of society or the ‘people’, and in this recognised a plurality of political agents, multiple loci of democratic politics, and a fragmented form of political sovereignty. The most innovative element that emerged in 1989 is then to be found in the idea of an ‘ethic of dissent’. A democratic regime that harbours the ideals of autonomy and an expanded, emancipatory notion of la politique needs to allow for, and endorse, the political activity of civil disobedience and dissidence. It is only through the latter form of civic input, stemming from the periphery of the polity, that contemporary democracy can be reinvigorated and further democratized.

Notes The author acknowledges an EU Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, previously held at the University of Sussex.

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