Content area
Full Text
WITHIN THE BURGEONING FIELD OF TRANSITION STUDIES, some of the most influential analysts maintain that a consolidated democratic politics is possible only if properly organised around well-behaved parties and interest groups that represent the key material interests of different sections of society, be they workers, business, farmers, particular industries, pensioners, the unemployed or the urban middle class. This consensus aligns scholars with a particular tradition in political theory: the liberal tradition which sees democratic politics in terms of the reconciliation and aggregation, within a constitutional structure, of interests defined privately. As Sartori puts it, `the winner is an entirely liberal democracy, not only popularly elected government, but also, and indivisibly, constitutional government; that is, the hitherto much belittled "formal democracy" that controls the exercise of power'.1
Those who in his words 'belittled' Sartori's `formal democracy' came mostly from a competing tradition which holds that democratic politics can and should rest on a widespread commitment to public values rather than private interests. Within developed democracies, this competing tradition informs recent interest in civic republicanism, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. Yet such ideas, if recognised at all, meet either scepticism or scorn from most students of democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), who argue that stable politics in emerging liberal democracies requires that key actors pursue their material interests rather than any notion of the public wellbeing.2
Here we take issue with such a position. We seek to demonstrate that the republican politics of public virtue not only can and does have an important presence within political systems just emerging from authoritarianism but can actually facilitate the democratisation project. Working from the liberal tradition, many transitologists mistake republican and `politics of truth' discourses for latent anti-democratic sentiments, inasmuch as they seem to imply hostility to the give and take of party politics. We argue in contrast that they represent not inchoate anti-democratic feelings but rather a coherent and positive outlook on democracy and democratisation, and an affinity for clean (uncorrupted) politics that in fact is likely to enhance the legitimacy of the democratisation project. Without these discourses of civic engagement, the legitimacy of the regime can rest only on pragmatic calculation on the part of citizens about what is in their material interest, or on mere...