This section includes book notes of 150-300 words as well as some book reviews of 600-900 words on books of particular interest to the members of our group. If you have either suggestions for books you would like to review or see reviewed (including recent books of your own), please contact Cas Mudde.
Book Notes Uwe Backes (ed.), Rechtsextreme Ideologien in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Cologne, etc.: Böhlau Verlag, 2003, 400 pp., EUR 39.90, ISBN 3-412-03703-6 (hbk). Reviewed by Geoff Eley (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) These dozen essays assemble perspectives entirely consistent with the earlier activity of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research in Dresden, whose output since 1995 remains both impressively prolific and increasingly predictable. The most useful contributions are those offering contemporary analytical reportage, like Rainer Erb’s on the outlook of German “Neonazis” and “Skinheads,” Mischa Gabowitsch’s on current Russian “national patriotism,” or Eckhard Jesse’s on contemporary far Right intellectuals. But even these add a little more to a given body of knowledge rather than pushing in any interesting new directions. The volume’s main accent is in any case on the early twentieth century, and here its contributors show a distressing lack of historical grounding and depth. Several (Stefan Breuer, Andreas Wirsching, Roger Eatwell, Armin Pfahl-Traughber) proceed from strong arguments about the fascist specificities of the 1920s, but show shocking indifference to the fullness of the available historiography, particularly for the key period of the late Kaiserreich. Others (Bernard Bruneteau on five French intellectuals of the 1930s, Frank-Lothar Kroll on the equivalence of Nazi and Bolshevik utopianism, Norbert Kapferer on Carl Schmitt’s relationship to the discourse of “total war” against “Judeo-Bolshevism”) rehearse the shared paradigm with varying degrees of schematic formalism. Overall, the work convened in this volume seems increasingly committed to feeding primarily off itself. Its authors observe the protocols of a now familiar framework based on a limited understanding of political ideology, Wirsching’s invocation of the “linguistic turn” (p. 92) notwithstanding. For anyone returning to such discussions after experiencing successively the social history wave and the so-called cultural turn, this discussion conveys a distinct sense of the déja vu.
Xavier Casals Meseguer, Ultrapatriotas. Extrema Derecha y Nacionalismo de la Guerra Fría a la Era de la Globalización, Barcelona: Crítica, 2003, 479 pp., ISBN: 84-8432-430-3 (hbk). Reviewed by Beatriz Acha (Public University of Navarre) Ultrapatriotas is a very well written work on the rise of right-wing extremism, neofascism, and nationalism in Europe in the last decades. Although rather exhaustive in
his description –and even more so in the variety of sources consulted– Casals doesn’t aim to offer a detailed review of the phenomenon of right-wing extremism in Europe today, but rather, to contribute to the discussion on the blurry ideological edges of their various strands. The first part of the book analyses the “Europe of national preference” – placing perhaps an excessive emphasis on the French case, mostly related to the sound electoral successes of various right-wing extremist parties. Casals discusses how this heterogeneous group has been defined and termed, and describes national identity and welfare chauvinism as the cornerstones of their contradictory ideology, in line with mainstream interpretations in the literature. He also reviews some explanations of their success, like the role of the media, and some counter-measures. In the second part of the book, Casals traces the historical evolution of other marginal, radical and far-right movements since the end of World War II, which, in contrast to the above mentioned parties, show no traces of ambiguity in their Europeanism. Although highly illustrative, these chapters contribute less significantly to the overall theoretical discussion than the third part of the book, which focuses on the largely unknown Spanish case. Here, a full account of the reasons for the failure of the extreme right is offered, which includes historical, ideological, strategical and organizational factors. All in all, Ultrapatriotas is a highly valuable effort to clarify the illusive nature of right-wing extremism, which should be read by experts and beginners alike.
John Foran (ed.), The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Era of Globalization. London and New York: Zed, 2003, pp., GBP 15.95/USD 25.00, ISBN 1-84277-033-0 (pbk) / GBP 49.95/USD 75.00, ISBN 1-84277-032-2 (hbk). Reviewed by Jonathan M. Acuff (University of Washington) This edited volume, a product of several workshops run by Foran, incorporates contributions from over 20 scholars. The volume’s expansive topical range is bracketed by three summary discussions.
Several themes emerge from these transcribed roundtable conversations. First, the existent theories employed by most scholars of revolutions are inadequate, as they are too state-centric in an era of globalization. Accordingly, revolutionary movements will in the future include the state as only one site among many for revolutionary action. Secondly, social revolutions, mass, class-based revolts from below, will be infrequent in the future. The authors cite various reasons for this, ranging from the near to medium-term penetration by international capital markets to the “third wave” of democratization, which tends to reduce, though not eliminate, the intensity of social conflicts that have historically led to revolution. Finally, we need not conclude from past experience that social revolutions will invariably have negative outcomes.
This volume is explicitly a work of critical theory, with the objective of re-structuring debates, not convergence on conclusions. Yet, almost all of the authors take more conventional theories of revolution less as a starting point and more as their bête noir, with many seeking to resurrect or reconfigure some variant of Marxism as a replacement. Devotees of Skocpol, Goldstone, Popkin, Tilly, and Arendt will likely be largely frustrated, though Parsa’s article is a useful counter-balance to a kind of theoretical monism. The quality of the work varies widely, both according to theoretical findings as well as writing. Parker’s essay contains some gems amidst its nearimpenetrable prose, while the pieces by Paige, Goodwin, Tétreault, and Foran stand out in particular.
Thomas W. Gold, The Lega Nord and Contemporary Politics in Italy, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003, 172 pp., GBP 35.00, ISBN 0312296312 (hbk). Reviewed by Carlo Ruzza (University of Trento) For a small ethno-regionalist party the Italian Lega Nord has attracted more than its share of academic and media attention. Its theatrical action forms might be responsible for this interest - they include the unlikely manufacture of a full set of nation-state symbols ranging from anthems and flags to coins and uniforms – elements which appear surprising if not worrying when emerging in the context of the stable polities of the European Union. These aspects of its action repertoire have also contributed to a particular academic debate. There is an abundance of books and articles – several in English – which consider the Lega Nord with reference to the literature on theories of nationalism, particularly the literature on the symbolic construction of nations, or in relation to social movement research. Thomas W. Gold’s book is different. It looks at the emergence of the League in broad historical terms and in relation to the North-South and centre-periphery dynamics. Its ‘internal colonialism’ approach is enriched by the historical awareness that ethno-nationalist formations can change their organizational features, ideologies and coalition behaviour in accordance with shifting structural and dynamic political opportunities, and looks at both kinds of political opportunities over the entire post WWII Italian history. The book reflects on the Lega’s fortunes in terms of short-term constitutional factors such as changing electoral laws, but also – and in this the book it is distinctive – it focuses on reactions to the frequent and largely failed attempts to decentralize decisionmaking in a political system that has as consequence paid a high price in economic terms. This failure is examined in a set of historical chapters that make the book a useful teaching tool for examining Italian politics.
Piero Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 270 pp., GBP 40.00/USD 65.00, ISBN 019-829325-9 (hbk)
Reviewed by Elisabeth Carter (Keele University) Piero Ignazi’s book has three aims: it assesses the ideological meaning of the right and the extreme right and explores its political expressions in both a historical perspective and in the contemporary period; it provides an analysis of the post-war evolution of the extreme right in Western Europe; and it discusses the factors that help explain why extreme right parties (ERPs) have been able to prosper in the last thirty years or so. The book accomplishes all three aims quite well. Indeed, Chapters 1 and 2 provide a sound examination of the different meanings and varieties of the right, as well as a useful overview of how the different ideological traditions have informed the world-views of the contemporary ERPs, and how the new cultural setting of the 1970s and 1980s provided fertile ground for these parties. In addition, Chapter 2 contains a good discussion of the different terminologies and presents Ignazi’s well-known methodology for identifying ERPs (as first put forward in his influential 1992 EJPR article). The new political climate that provided a favorable opportunity structure for the ERPs is discussed in further detail in the last substantive chapter of the volume. By contrast to the opening two chapters and to the last chapter, the country chapters offer little to the study of the extreme right that is substantially new. Ignazi explains in the preface that he did not have the ambition of generating an original data set, and as a result, the country chapters do not differ greatly to those found in the existing edited volumes on the topic. That said, they are comprehensive and (with the epilogue) reasonably up-to-date.
Jürgen Lang, Ist die PDS eine demokratische Partei? Eine extremismustheoretische Untersuchung, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003, 196 pp., EUR 29.00, ISBN 3-8329-0414-X (hbk). Reviewed by David F. Patton (Connecticut College) In recent years, scholarship on Germany’s Party of Democratic Socialism has tended to focus on its place within the German party system. Lang returns to an earlier question: Is the PDS democratic?, which he answers by employing a normative, theoretical approach. He posits that extremist parties, in contrast to democratic ones, have not unconditionally accepted fundamental democratic principles such as pluralism, representative government and human rights. Drawing extensively upon party documents, Lang examines the PDS’s ideology, strategy and internal organization in order to assess whether it has internalized core democratic values. He compares the positions of the party’s dominant reform wing with those of the minority orthodox wing. Although they clashed repeatedly, both wings generally, it is argued by Lang, viewed individual rights as a means to societal protest rather than as virtues unto themselves; conceived of the party’s role as primarily one of fundamental opposition; and tolerated political extremists whenever expedient. For
Lang, this suggests that the PDS has not unconditionally accepted democratic norms, even if a partial democratization is currently underway, and therefore it cannot, not be viewed as essentially democratic in nature. His picture of the PDS at times resembles that of a not yet fully domesticated wolf in sheep’s clothing. In retrospect, however, the opposite may well have been true: namely, that the party more closely resembled a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Certainly its carefully cultivated bad boy image, enhanced by its regional populism, its SED roots, its political isolation and its links to far left groups, attracted protest votes, thereby helping the struggling party compete in a crowded electoral field. Now as a reliable governing party in Schwerin and Berlin, the PDS is searching for a partisan identity that is both distinctive and credible.
Neamatollah Nojumi, The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan: Mass Mobilization, Civil War, and the Future of the Region, New York: Palgrave, 2002, 260 pp., USD 18.95, ISBN 0312295847 (pbk). Reviewed by Hooman Peimani Being published a few months after the Taliban’s fall, Nojumi’s book seeks to find the roots of the Taliban in the 1978 pro-Soviet coup which was a catalyst to bringing about a series of major events, including the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its preceding civil war, which ultimately prepared the grounds for the Taliban’s rise. Using the theory of mass mobilization, Nojumi analyzes the political development in Afghanistan from 1979 to 2001. Accordingly, during that period leftist groups, the proSoviet Afghan regime and the radical Islamic and the nationalist/Islamic political parties failed to turn themselves into a viable political entity representing the Afghan national interests around which the majority of Afghans could rally, although the latter participated in the process of political mobilization. According to Nojumi, when the pro-Soviet regime collapsed in 1992, this failure prompted a new round of civil war this time among the Mujahedin groups. Added to those groups’ extensive abuses and the Afghans’ desire for peace, that failure and Pakistan’s pursuit of its national interests facilitated the Taliban’s formation. Once in power, the Taliban also failed to turn themselves into a popular regime for their inability to mobilize the majority of the Afghans around a nationalist program as they implemented their harsh and discriminatory religious rules, which alienated the ethic and religious minorities and disgusted many Sunni Pashtuns. Nojumi sees the Taliban’s fanaticism and its harboring foreign fundamentalist groups as developments alien to the Afghan’s values caused mainly by the imported fanatic ideologies from the Middle East. This book provides a comprehensive historical account and an interesting analysis of Afghanistan’s political developments since the 1970s. The author correctly identifies domestic and foreign factors as contributing factors to the Taliban’s emergence with devastating implications for the Afghans and many other nations.
Joseph S. Tuman, Communicating Terror: The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003, 156 pp, GBP 46.00, ISBN 0-7619-27654 (hbk) / GBP 23.00, ISBN 0-7619-2766-2 (pbk). Reviewed by Daniel S. Gressang IV (Joint Military Intelligence College) In Communicating Terror, Joseph Tuman offers a compelling look at one of the more commonly acknowledged, but rarely examined, aspects of terrorism: the perceptual and rhetorical aspects that color the way we interpret and study the phenomenon. Few assessments of terrorism have explored the associated implications the way in which Tuman does. This book examines terrorism as it is constructed and used to frame audience interpretations and responses, either in support of or opposition to the violent group. In contending that the meaning of terrorism is socially constructed, Tuman offers little to the already existing literature. Nevertheless, there is considerable value in his examination of the mechanisms used by terrorists and their opponents to shape and manipulate perceptions of the struggle. In assessing terrorism as a communicative process, Tuman highlights the emotional aspects of fear and uncertainty inherent in terrorism while deconstructing the process of forming and conveying meaning in a way useful for those seeking a fuller understanding of terrorism’s dynamics. Tuman does this admirably by incorporating a keen understanding of symbolism, oratory, and mass media’s use of verbal and visual cues. This book is easy to dismiss as only tangentially associated with the study of terrorism, since it does not specifically address the causes of violence, the tangible conflict between terrorist and state, or the operative ideologies which motivate terrorists. Yet those who would dismiss Tuman’s work deny themselves a fuller understanding of terrorism. The most glaring weakness, however, lies in the disproportionate amount of time spent on the way others portray terrorism – a discussion more akin to the mythology of terrorism and the terrorism of myth.
Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom. Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, London: W.W. Norton, 2003, 287 pp., GBP 18.95, ISBN 0-393-04764-4 (hbk). Reviewed by Cas Mudde (University of Antwerp) To be honest, I only started reading this book to criticize it. Fareed Zakaria, now the editor of Newsweek, had popularized the term ‘illiberal democracy’ in a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs, when he was still editor of that journal. The academic and media fallout of that article had given me the impression that Zakaria was just one of the many recent cheerleaders of the Bush administration that had made it big. For this, I sincerely apologize.
This book is a highly intelligent and an engaging account of Zakaria’s intellectual struggle with the inherent tensions of liberal democracy. In short, he criticizes the current deification of popular democracy and points to its serious dangers to liberalism: “Democracy is flourishing; liberty is not.” (p.17). In a plea that is so retro that is again avant-garde, he calls for the reintroduction of and re-emphasis on the elitist elements of liberal democracy or constitutional liberalism. While much of his book deals with the United States, the arguments could also be applied to other liberal democracies. However, his warning is most powerful with respect to current non-democratic countries, most notably in the Islamic world. Is there nothing to complain? Of course there is! Zakaria is virtually uncritical of capitalism, has a blind belief in the developmental theory of democracy, and too often uses democratization as a synonym of popularization. This notwithstanding, much of his argumentation is lucid and nuanced, daring to ask questions to which he himself doesn’t necessarily has the answer. This makes The Future of Freedom the most important book of the last years, and essential reading for all who truly care about both aspects of liberal democracy.
Book Reviews Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, New York: W.W. Norton, 2003, 214 pp., GBP 14.95, ISBN 0-393-05775-5 (hbk). Reviewed by Raphael Cohen-Almagor (University of Haifa) After September 11, 2001, the United States became immersed with the study of terrorism, the enhancement of national security, and the study of Islam. The “Know your enemy” trend became prevalent. Paul Berman’s book is part of this trend. It is yet another attempt to understand the rift between the west and Islam, to try to make sense of the hatred that was grossly manifested on September 11, hatred that brought young, educated and skilled men, who had promising future ahead of them, to hijack four plans and fly them into the twin towers, the Pentagon, and to another designated location. In the first chapter, Berman justifies the war on Iraq, saying that “Saddam's regime was aggressive, dynamic, irrational, paranoid, murderous, grandiose and demagogic” (p. 4). The amassing of so many adjectives together is a sign for light writing, which has some advantages: it is quick, easy to read, and usually engaging. The downside of such writing is that it lacks focus and cautiousness. Berman goes on to describe the very intricate relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, which is based on business interests, without mutual appreciation or sentiments. Today’s superpower is an important ally for any country in the world, whereas Saudi Arabia has a strategic role to play, both because of its oil and its geography. For
Berman Saudi Arabia represents evil: the beheadings, the veils, the oppression of women, intolerance, and Satanic conspiracy theories about Jews (p. 14). In chapter 2, Berman begins a tour of the 19th century violent anarchists and bloody colonialists as well as 20th century totalitarian regimes. The tour is quite rapid, and no in-depth analysis is provided. Berman paints with a large brush, taking issues and immediately brushes them aside. Chapters 3 and 4 constitute for the most interesting part of the book. Berman speaks of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his admiration for the Nazis. He characterizes the Baathi and the Islamist movements as two branches of a single impulse; Muslim totalitarianism (p.60), and then discusses in depth the scholarship of Sayyid Qutb, whom he describes as the single most influential writer in the Islamist tradition, at least among the Sunni Arabs. The notion of Islam as totality, Berman ventures, is Qutb’s most important concept, which distinguishes Islam from other worldviews. The Koran offers a way of life, and the proper understanding of its teaching can be achieved only in an atmosphere of serious struggle against all (religious and political) alternatives. Terror and Liberalism contends that Islamic fundamentalism and Hussein’s Baath socialism are morally, ideologically and historically continuous with the totalitarian movements of the 20th century; that fascism and communism both fed on liberals’ resistance for comprehending the irrational nature of those movements; and that the same blindness is rampant today. The author thinks that September 11 did not come from a single man. Instead it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back. Afghanistan and Iraq were only the beginning. In chapter 5, Berman unfortunately abandons the in-depth analysis and returns to the ‘wide paint strokes’ methodology. He speaks of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, the IranIraq War, the civil war in Algiers (1992-97), terrorism in Israel, jihad in Sudan, the Lebanese civil war, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, leading to the emergence of Al Qaeda. For Berman, Al Qaeda is not a conventional political movement but a “chiliastic movement” whose goal is to Caliphate the world (p.116). The last two chapters of the book examine the failed peace process in the Middle East and the attack on the US. Here Berman provides extraordinarily long quotes of criticisms of Israel (pp.140-1) while explaining the success of suicide murderers. In his characteristic lively but insufficient rigorous prose, Berman jumps from one issue to another, from one character to another, skimming through events like a thirsty butterfly. He ends with a note on the gulf between the US and Europe, arguing that European intellectuals no longer see these two forces as one, Atlantic civilization. Terror and Liberalism contains many interesting ideas and is certainly thoughtprovoking. It is written in a dynamic prose, designated for lay people who are interested in the issue. It contains thoughts and speculations. There are quotes but no references.
Indeed, I was somewhat curious about Berman’s sources, and their reliability. For example, Berman writes in a blurry fashion that some passages in Qutb’s writings have been misinterpreted “in some of the Western commentaries on Qutb” (p. 87), without supplying any details about the identity of those commentaries and the character of the misinterpretations. At the end of the book, Berman included A Note to the Reader, citing the principal sources that guided his thinking; an atypical way to provide references that I certainly do not endorse. Also, the book lacks an index, which is sorely missed.
Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (eds.), Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability, New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 364 pp., USD 29.95, ISBN 1-4039-6094-1 (pbk). Reviewed by John Gledhill (University of Manchester) Campbell and Brenner have produced a book based on case studies that is more than the sum of its parts. Their excellent introduction succeeds in moving the understanding of death squads beyond the parameters set by the “weak state” and “economic calculus” perspectives that too hastily push the problem into an “elsewhere” detached from North Atlantic modernity. They argue persuasively that their key characteristics, such as links to private elite interests, clandestine nature, and non-reducibility to simple “tools” of the states that sponsor (but often cannot entirely control) them, presuppose the characteristics of “modern” political society. Indeed, members of some death squads may be “partially motivated by the very sense of social responsibility that is a cornerstone of both nationalism and democracy” (p 7). Linking death squads to the crisis of the modern state and its tendencies towards “subcontracting” suggests that they may still proliferate under conditions of (neoliberal) postmodernity, albeit perhaps increasingly “privatised” and intent on covering their tracks in order to escape international retribution. While mechanisms of international scrutiny also proliferate, the creation of new states of exception and spaces of impunity by the standard bearers of “advanced liberal” politics in the “war against terror” makes the more pessimistic side of this book’s analysis even more sobering. The book combines efforts to see death squads as part of a general historical movement with respect for careful contextualization of specific cases. The essays are grouped into four sections (Historical Cases, Democratic Regime Transitions, Social Control, and National, Ethnic and Religious Identity Conflict). The first contains chapters by Michael Schroeder on Nicaragua in the 1920s and 1980s and 90s, and Arthur Brenner on paramilitary violence under the Weimar Republic. These both provide a picture of continuity and change in relation to the volume’s main hypotheses and begin a process of comparative analysis that makes the case studies speak to differences in the scale and nature of violence and the conditions relevant to its escalation or reduction. Chapters by Cynthia Arnson on El Salvador and Eva-Lotta Hedman on the Philippines in the second section offer distinct but equally interesting insights into the effects of US power in its sphere of influence. Arnson shows that the Salvadorian death
squads were deeply rooted in official security bodies, while Hedman shows how the postcolonial state after 1946 continued to reflect the decentralization and privatization of coercive apparatuses promoted by the North American colonial regime, offering valuable lessons for other regions in which so-called “fanatical sects” and “warlords” are persistent phenomena. She also draws attention to popular understanding of violence, arguing that phantasmagorical rumours, tsismis, (re)order the insecurity that people experience in everyday life “into the familiar script and dominant discourse of binary contestation for power between, ultimately, government and anti-government forces” (p. 145). Edward Kannyo’s analysis of Uganda, in section three, also addresses the postcolonial condition, exploring not simply what happened under Amin, but why successor regimes failed to punish those responsible for the carnage. Robert Cribb’s analysis shows that Indonesian death squads have principally been a tool of intra-elite struggles, representing an exceptional development because of the absence of legal constraints on the repressive capacity of the state itself and refusal of the military to tolerate armed forces beyond their control. This section ends with Martha Huggins on Brazil’s police death squads, which she argues are a by-product, along with the vigilantism of justiceiros and informal “death squads for hire”, of a “functional symbiosis” between at first sight contradictory tendencies towards “recentering of state control over internal security” and decentering of social control (p. 223). The institutionally attached but secret arm of the police system thus operates in a liminal space perpetuated by the inevitable failure of regular policing to “win” a war against crime that, one might add, inevitably becomes a war against the poor under neoliberal democracy. In the final section Keith Gottschalk’s analysis of death squads under Apartheid in South Africa brings out the importance of exploitation of divisions within the movements opposing white rule, while stressing that Inkatha Freedom Party’s relationship to the apartheid state was more complex than that of the Mozambican RENAMO. Patricia Grossman’s study of the Indian government’s deployment of death squads in the Punjab and Kashmir indicates the crushing effects of these campaigns on militant organizations –whose own militants were “turned” and recruited into the ranks of the killers– while also emphasizing the costs of pre-emptive violence targeted at persons far removed from the militant “hard core” and human rights defenders. James Ron’s analysis of the role of Serbian paramilitaries in the Bosnian war, adds an ironic final twist to the comparative analysis by arguing that while the Serb groups meet most of the general criteria for death squads defined by the book, their deployment was in part the Serbian state’s response to a well-intentioned international regulatory effort to restrict its action in “sovereign” Bosnia. Thus “the paramilitaries were a rational solution to an immediate problem faced by the Serbian state, not a cultural phenomenon hardwired into Serbian or Balkan society” (p. 293), while the efforts of human rights activists to restrict the actions of states may make death squads the “unanticipated offspring” of human rights norms (p. 309).
Petr Kopecky and Cas Mudde (eds.), Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 188 pp., GBP 65.00, ISBN 0415265851 (hbk). Reviewed by Jeffrey Kopstein (University of Toronto) The simple version of what can be called the “civil society” hypothesis goes something like this: strong associational life is important for consolidating democracy and ensuring effective government. Over the past decade, refining and testing this hypothesis has become a small industry within political science. Only recently, however, have political scientists started exploring what Cas Mudde in his concluding essay of the present volume terms the “dark side” of civil society, that is, the associations and civic movements that are either highly contentious or just downright illiberal. The essays in this interesting volume and especially the introductory and concluding essays advance three important arguments. First, associational life in post-communist countries is not solely or even mostly made up of groups committed to liberal democracy. Second, it is important for theoretical and empirical reasons to include contentious politics within the study of post-communist civil society, even when these groups are illiberal. Third, the activity of illiberal groups, whether they are associational or contentious, in civil society need not be a source of too much concern for committed liberal democrats. The first two propositions are sensible and well supported by the case studies. The third is more controversial. The chapters consist of short case studies of nationalist and fascist groups and movements in Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Croatia. There are also two additional case studies, one on civic protest in the Czech Republic and a second on the Ukrainian coal miners’ strikes during the 1990s. The authors are correct to note a number of anomalies in the study of civil society in the post-communist region. First, the conventional accounts stress the importance of civil society in the overthrow of communist regimes. But then in explaining the rise of illiberal movements across the region, the conventional wisdom points to the weakness of civil society. So, which is it? Is civil society strong or weak? The answer is that the same nationalist movements that helped throw off communism (and were considered “good” or even “civic”) don’t look so appealing a decade later. But it makes no sense, the authors contend, to exclude “bad” groups from the study of civil society (if you define civil society as associational life). That would exclude far too many associations and lead to selection bias in favor of groups that receive western funding but often have little in the way of a domestic constituency. The chapters on the Croatian War Veterans Movement and Hungarian skinheads provide an important corrective to such a skewed view. Contentious politics also belongs in the study of civil society, even when these groups engage in their activities for admittedly anti-liberal purposes. The interesting chapters on Poland’s Samooborona (The Polish Self-Defense Movement) and the Slovak National
Movement indicate that protest activity and non-institutionalized political behavior is not necessarily a sign of democratic instability. It may in fact indicate democratic vitality. Especially in the context of EU enlargement, when all of the main political parties and even some populist ones restricted their message so as not to endanger their country’s chances for admission to the club of the rich, the political field was left open to unconventional protest politics. This last point is an interesting one and is worth pondering. Most students of democratization suggest that too many anti-liberal groupings and too much protest activity is bad for democratic consolidation. The essays in this volume, however, and especially the introduction and conclusion suggest otherwise. As long as the behavior stays within constitutional limits and as long as the elites of these groups can be coopted into playing by the rules of the game, “bad civil society” need not worry us too much. One wonders, however, what are the conditions under which this is true and when is it not true? It would seem that anti-liberalism is innocuous only when it is…innocuous, or at least when it is marginal. Protest activity is good for democracy or at least not too harmful when it does not shake the foundations of the system. But that simply begs the question of when that might happen. The stakes here are high. How much extremism can liberal democracies tolerate? What kinds of things can liberal democracies do to protect themselves against illiberal elements and uncivil society and still remain liberal? These are the questions that students of extremism naturally gravitate toward. The essays in this collection provide us with important empirical evidence for considering them.