I’ve had several moving conversations recently with democratic reformers from southeastern Europe. They are near despair about their respective countries. Instead of quoting their confidential assessments, I’ll cite this summary by Tamas Dezso Czigler of LSE:

I have previously written a great deal about Hungary; the latest development is that the government has changed the election rules once more, and introduced the anti-democratic pre-registration of voters, which further heavily distorts the election system. The government also continues to fire judges, even though the act which made this available was annulled by the Constitutional Court. In Romania, the problems are similar and obvious – the government simply does not respect democratic institutions like the Constitutional Court or the President.

Both Hungary and Slovakia have seen the possibly racially motivated murders of Roma in recent years (including children). In addition, Slovakia has introduced a heavily anti-democratic language act, which bans Hungarians from speaking Hungarian in government offices, even if the client and the officer both belong to the Hungarian minority. … There are also fears as to whether Croatia will be able to stay stable, since it has had an even darker history compared to the others. And we hear news about extreme corruption in Bulgaria every day.

Czigler does not happen to mention the strongly anti-Semitic rhetoric in Hungary and Romania. That isn’t the primary issue; I think Jewish residents will be safe against outright violence, and they are few. He is right to highlight the murders of Roma. However, given the historical role of anti-Semitism in this region, it is distressing that explicitly anti-Semitic parties can capture large shares of the vote. This is a sign of deeply anti-democratic and illiberal tendencies.

I would be the first to recognize that US states have also passed “anti-democratic pre-registration” provisions and laws targeting language minorities. But the question is not whose democracy is better. The question is what to do about anti-democratic threats in Europe, given the fragility of the continental system and the importance (to the whole world) of making it work.

Thus I wonder:

A nation must be a democracy to get into the EU. Once it’s in, what happens if it backtracks so that it would no longer meet the specific political criteria for membership? And what happens if a member drops all pretense of democracy and goes the way of Belarus?

EU members face judicial review at the European level. But the governments in Romania and Hungary are contemptuous of their own nations’ courts. What happens if EU members simply ignore the European Court of Human Rights?

I am told that some Hungarian Jewish families have fled to Austria. If true, it implies that there are already refugees of one EU nation in another one. How would the EU handle larger flows of political refugees?

The anti-democratic parties are mostly far-right and nationalistic. That may make coordination somewhat difficult, because a Greek nationalist doesn’t intrinsically care about Hungarian nationalism, for instance. In the 1930s, the attempt to build a Fascist International “was marred by serious conflicts between the participants.” Yet the far right of the various EU member states have common enemies and can do a lot of mischief together. Will they unite?

At least in Romania and Bulgaria, an underlying cause appears to be corruption, meaning the political power of economic oligarchs. Can European economic policy constrain them?

Will the EU ultimately make its weakest members more democratic and liberal, or will those states make the EU as a whole more authoritarian and illiberal?

How do members with deep civic traditions but poor current systems of government (Italy, Belgium) fit into the picture?

The post what happens if EU members overturn their democracies? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. … Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

We cannot know whether the Egyptian revolution will prove a tragedy, a satisfying epic, or a farce, but the similarities to the French model are already notable:

1. Scattered tumultuous days of action begin with some kind of popular upheaval or violence and change the course of the revolution. Les grandes journées of the French Revolution included July 14, 1789 (the storming of the Bastille), August 10, 1792 (the monarchy overthrown), and 18 Brumaire, 1799 (Napoleon’s coup), among many others. In the Egyptian revolution, Jan. 25, 2011 (the Day of Anger), Feb. 11, 2011 (the Friday of Departure–Mubarak’s resignation), and July 3, 2013 (the coup against Morsi) play similar roles.
2. A mobilized urban populace in the huge capital city can bring down the government, but the urbanites may be at odds with the much more numerous rural population.
3. The constitution is problematic–both in content and origin–but it offers the “rule of law.”
4. The revolution is international. (Compare the Brabant Revolution of 1789 and Syria in 2012-13). The reaction is also international. (Today, Bashar al Assad plays the role of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II; Benjamin Netanyahu is William Pitt the Younger.)
5. The ancien regime still has its supporters, who are perceived as threats to the revolution.
6. Military leaders express support for the revolutionary constitution but are capable of taking over at will.
7. Outside the government and official parliament, strongly ideological groups (Jacobins and Montagnards, Muslim Brothers and Salafis) debate and organize collective action.

To be sure, there are differences. For example, the most radical French revolutionaries were anti-clerical deists, but one form of radicalism in Egypt is ultra-religious and clerical. Another difference: the reactionaries outside Egypt are not massing on its borders.

Professor Joseph Mossad says the term “Arab Spring” is “part of a US strategy of controlling [the movement's] aims and goals” in favor American-style liberal democracy. The phrase alludes to the “Prague Spring” liberal revolutions across Europe in 1848 (which prompted Marx’s article cited above). I don’t know if Mossad is right, but certainly analogizing current and past events has political significance. At the same time, Marx was right that the “tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” and revolutionaries “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.” So analogies are inevitable. The question is whether the Egyptians will borrow from Paris, 1789, Saint Petersburg, 1917,  Cairo, 1952, Tehran, 1979, or some other model.

I would recommend Prague, 1989. The Velvet Revolution (imitated by the various “color” revolutions of 2009) was not only nonviolent, but the revolutionaries were intentionally self-limiting. (See Timothy Garten Ash’s analysis.) But clearly, a whole substantive view of politics is built into that view.

The post Egypt and the model of the French Revolution appeared first on Peter Levine.