30 years after: revolution unfinished
Slovaks protest against government’s corruption in 2018. Photo: Dávid Duducz
Peter Sterančák / November 17, 2019
( 5 min read )
The revolution is like drinking too much vodka. The first few shots are hopeful – even euphoric. The world seems to be in equilibrium with your improving mood – ready for a personal revolution, everything seems bright and shining, solutions seem easy and within a grasp of another shot of vodka. Then, as the ethanol in your veins increases in amount, things start to look blurry and incomprehensible. The next day is always the worst. The headache, the remorse, self-questioning, stomach pain, you name it. The inevitable question “why did I do that?” seems to point at the clear-cut resolution: “Never again!”
I was born in April of 1989 and it is fair to say that at that time I had no experience of either the concept of revolution nor the concept of drunkenness. Today I am 30 years old, just like the Velvet revolution and I have made reasonable progress in understanding both. To be sure, I am tremendously thankful that I spent my childhood and the rest of my life in a democracy. I have nothing but appreciation for the generation of young people that forced the communists to resign and give away their power to democratic forces. And yet, here we are in the year 2019, and I cannot help having the feeling that we are in the phase of a headache after having too much to drink. The feeling of dissatisfaction from the events of The Velvet revolution permeates our society. A recent poll by the Slovak Academy of Science (SAV), reveals that 38 % of Slovaks believe that the economic system during the communist rule was better than the one we live in now. Moreover, according to the 2017 INEKO poll, 40% of Slovaks believe that the quality of democracy in Slovakia is poor. In the same poll, it was also shown that one-fourth of the Slovak population believes that a dictatorship would be more effective than democracy.
The signs are clear even without the data. The non-fascist (according to the verdict of the Slovak Supreme Court) fascist party (according to common sense) ĽSNS [People’s Party Our Slovakia] is one of the strongest opposition parties in 2019. New revelations about the real state of our justice system after the murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiance further enforced the general public feeling that democracy does not really work. The popularity of anti-system extremist parties like ĽSNS perhaps suggests that many people equate democracy with the form it has taken in Slovakia during the last 30 years. They blame democracy, they blame liberals, they blame politics for the lack of a safety net against modern life and globalization. Perhaps they are right in their feeling of dissatisfaction with the political system (if not the objects they blame for it). Today, it seems that corruption, nepotism and the mafia practices of the state never really went away after 1989. But can we blame democracy and its liberal form for it? Or is it the case that we never really had liberal democracy in practice in Slovakia?
Protests of ĽSNS supporters when the ruling of the supreme court in Spring 2019 was awaited whether the party will be banned on the basis of promoting fascism. Photo: HN/Pavol Funtál
I think the latter is true. Just like in the analogy with drunkenness, we never really sobered up after the Velvet revolution. I would argue that we are still in the headache phase the day after. The wild privatization of the 90s gave tremendous wealth to people that were already powerful (if not rich) during communism. The communists themselves were never really punished and legally persecuted for their crimes after 1989. In fact, most of them carried on in politics, business, and social life, as if we considered communism just one long-drunk night where nobody was really responsible for their actions. However, as some say, history repeats itself. The protests against the government of the ruling party SMER after the murder of Ján Kuciak and his fiance and the subsequent public pressure to deal with the revelations of corruption, nepotism and mafia practices of the state, reveal that, for a resolution of any sort to come, public traumas need to be resolved and crimes of the past need to be punished.
Freedom requires responsibility. In the best-case scenario, political freedom without responsibility results in a descent into populism. In the worst, it results in authoritarianism. Economic freedom without responsibility results in what we essentially experience today: the devastation of the environment and the abuse of power by the most robust actors of capitalism. And, without responsibility, we will never recover from the headache of having too much freedom and get drunk again and again.
There is a demand for change, not only in Slovak society but globally. People feel that something is wrong. The system, whether it is political or economic, does not work for them. It is not important whether their feeling is justified by reality. We know that actually many things are better than we perceive them to be. What is important is that we need to sober up and take responsibility for our past and deal with it. Because we cannot afford to lose democracy as we know it, we cannot afford to get drunk again with tasty drinks of authoritarianism that are in display in cheap liquor stores of our political arena today. If we won’t offer something better, people will buy them and another headache is due to come. Because as for now, it seems to me, that the 89’ revolution remains to be unfinished…
