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PARTISAN REVIEW
Gennan or Prussian!) style of political obedience, the expectations that
the state be a kind of paternal figure, the resentment toward parliamen–
tary debate (perceived as chaotic, strident, and frivolous) and the nostal–
gia for order and discipline. The moral costs of the transition to a
Reichtsstaat
society cannot be ignored: many of the fonner victims have
had to accept this philosophy of restraint as a price for the establishment
of an order where past abberrations would not be repeated. The phe–
nomenon has been described by Adam Michnik as "velvet restoration"
and by Stephen Holmes as "the end of de-Communization." A stronger
tenn, that refers to the general disparagement of the fonner dissidents,
the politics of despair and ressentiment, and the rise of ethnocentric
populism, would be "velvet counterrevolution." What Habennas and
other observers of the fonner GDR have noticed is a trend in the entire
region: the marginalization of the fonner dissidents, the discrediting of
the principles of anti-politics as they were fonnulated by the anti-author–
itarian groups and movements of the 1980s. But ideas do not simply
vanish, and sometimes they enjoy an underground, invisible life. The
ethos of the civil society as it had emerged in the anti-totalitarian strug–
gle has survived as memory and could one day inspire new forms of
political practice in all these countries. After all, liberal democracy in its
parliamentary conventional forms has experienced its own serious
troubles, in spite of the triumphalist chorus of the "end of history"
school.
Why is the experience of the fonner GDR important? I suggest at
least two compelling reasons: first, that the special nature of the revolu–
tion that took place in that country is in many respects a continuation
of the aborted revolutionary upheavals of 1918 and 1953; and second,
there are the peculiarities of the transition, where the final destination is
basically known. This relative certainty about the future and the pace of
refonn makes the East Gennan case different from other East European
countries where, as Philippe Schmitter has argued, we still don't know
whether liberal democracy will be the
terminus ad quem .
At the same
time, I think that the collapse of the Leninist world has dramatically
changed the nature of the perspectives of the first world as well. For the
first time since the 1930s, the liberal democratic project can be seriously
jeopardized in its own fortresses . Ernest Gellner, in his recent book
Con–
ditions of Liberty,
is right: civil society (understood as the conjunction of
political pluralism, state of law and market economy) has rivals both
outside and inside its boundaries. What is at stake is the future of reason
as it has taken shape in the liberal order inspired by the Enlightenment.
Once again, the politics of anger, malaise, and despair seems to get the
