In today’s public discourse, we often hear about threats to Slovakia’s democratic identity and Western orientation. This narrative, however, overlooks the fact that while Slovakia’s entry into Euro-Atlantic structures guaranteed formal democratic competition after years of normalisation and the rise of ’Mečiarism’ [after the left nationalist populist leader and first Slovak Premier Vladimir Mečiar] it simultaneously narrowed its boundaries to such an extent that it created conditions for the growth of populism we observe today. It was not democracy, but the free market, positioned outside the democratic process through European integration, that determined the course of political development in Slovakia in the 21^st century.

In a recent reflection published in his bestseller “Postsedliaci” (“Post-peasants”), social anthropologist Juraj Buzalka seeks the causes of the collapse of the Slovak “liberal consensus” in the years following European Union accession. According to Buzalka, after the fall of Mečiarism, liberalism enjoyed relatively high support from the Slovak public. However, sometime between 2010 and 2015, “fatigue” with liberalism began to manifest in society.

Buzalka oscillates between apparent understanding of the reasons for liberalism’s retreat on one hand and, at times, almost mockery of segments of the public who lost faith in this project on the other. He rightly criticises the elitism of post-November 1989 Slovak liberalism and its blind faith in neoliberal economic reforms as the engine of liberal democracy. Moreover, according to Buzalka, it is impossible to grasp the fatigue with liberalism without understanding its relationship to the “European project, its crises and reforms”.

However, Buzalka’s critique of post-November liberalism mostly seems to be directed at its strategy, not its principles. Its flaws did not stem from the essence of this project, but from liberals’ inability to “sell” liberalism to the Slovak public. Euroscepticism, distrust of authorities, or aversion to the West can be explained by the underfunding of humanities education. This allows populists to feed the discourse about Slovakia’s peripherality, a “mythical (sic) victim of the global capitalist system”, thus maintaining power. The failures of domestic politicians, Buzalka suggests, are attributed by a naive Slovak public to Brussels or Washington.

The crisis of European democracy after 1989

Buzalka’s diagnosis cannot be adequately assessed without considering the relationship between post-November 1989 liberalism and democracy, which is surprisingly missing from his reflection. The fact that this relationship was not straightforward after November 1989 was predetermined by the tension that naturally always existed between liberalism and democracy throughout modern European history. However, the importance of a critical assessment of history was forgotten in 1989 in the spirit of Fukuyama’s “end of history”.

According to ’November’ ideology, liberalism and democracy were naturally interconnected; one was not possible without the other (the democratic socialism of the Prague Spring, suppressed by the Soviet military invasion, was quickly rejected by the elite discourse and zeitgeist of the time as a potential model for post-November reforms). Since socialism, according to post-November ideology, in its very essence denied both liberalism and democracy, 1989 was necessarily interpreted as Central Europe’s return to the liberal-democratic capitalist West, as Milan Kundera had predicted as early as 1983.

The November ideology, however, concealed, as ideologies tend to, two important facts. First, that people who took to the streets across Czechoslovakia in November 1989 were motivated by the vision of democracy and political freedoms much more than by a desire for capitalism. British historian Tony Judt noted in 2005 that Czechoslovak society remained markedly egalitarian even in the late 1980s, which was reflected in Václav Havel’s sceptical attitude towards capitalism. According to one survey from 1989, only three per cent of the Czechoslovak public favoured capitalism, while the rest were divided between those who wished to preserve socialism in a reformed form and those who preferred a mixed economic model. In other words, the political imagination of the Czechoslovak public was dominated by the legacy of the Prague Spring and the model of Scandinavian social democracy.

The second fact is that the West, of which Central Europe was soon to become a firm part again, was rapidly becoming much more liberal, especially in the economic sense, than democratic. As political scientist Peter Mair later described, the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s pacified previously relatively politically active Western European societies through the privatisation of public goods and the suppression of the trade union movement. The result was the withdrawal of people from public to private life and the undermining of the relationship between publics and their political representatives.

In Czechoslovakia, the process of social demobilisation had been underway since the early 1970s, when the popular reforms of the Prague Spring were suppressed. However, this did not prevent Western free market and “democracy” experts, who replaced Soviet specialists in planned economy, from attempting to worsen the already fragile relationship between elites and the public in the 1990s. November thus quickly became a victory not for democracy, but for capitalism. Czechoslovakia, like other post-socialist states, had to duly implement neoliberal reforms to “streamline” its economies, regardless of the outcome of any elections. The free market was not so much the result of democratic choice as the reason why democracy needed to be limited. The driving force behind economic reforms was not Central European publics (who, it should be noted, quickly accepted the narrative about the benefits – or at least the necessity – of these reforms), but a new national elite who, whether out of conviction or for personal benefits, willingly opened the doors to Western neoliberal economists and foreign investors.

In this, according to Croatian philosopher Boris Buden, the situation in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 did not fundamentally differ from the 1970s and 1980s. While before, socialist societies were guided by the unbreakable laws of historical materialism, interpreted mainly by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after the fall of socialism, they were replaced by the teleology of liberal democracy, with its own preachers. Then, as now, the societies of Central and Eastern Europe were not destined to be the architects of their own fate.

No institution played such an important role in the process of deregulating post-socialist economies and depoliticising Central European societies as the European Union. The prospect of EU membership became the main driver of liberal economic and political reforms from the early 1990s. The privatisation of state enterprises, price deregulation, subsidy restrictions, and the implementation of existing European legislation were conditions for entry, with many of these reforms implemented in post-socialist states in a much more radical form than a decade earlier in the West.

Polish political scientist Jan Zielonka noted in 2006 that the Union, through the instrument of accession criteria, had become a de facto imperial power in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. European officials conducted inspections at ministries in candidate countries to ensure that reforms were proceeding according to EU regulations. Czech professor of European law Jan Komárek stated in 2014 in this spirit that the process of European integration greatly contributed to problems in building democracy in post-socialist Europe precisely because national political elites did not become accustomed to addressing public affairs through the domestic democratic process, as all solutions after 1989 came from the West.

The fact that citizens of post-socialist states did not have a democratic option to reverse, or at least soften, neoliberal reforms undermined the already weak political self-confidence of Central European societies. Even Zielonka, otherwise a great advocate of European integration, had to admit after the EU’s enlargement in 2004 that the Union had long ceased to meet the traditional definition of a democratic institution. However, according to Zielonka, this was not a problem because Europeans dissatisfied with the functioning of their country might not be able to achieve change through the ballot box, but thanks to freedom of movement, they could pack their bags and leave for another member state.

Slovakia at the end of history

Historical specificities caused Slovakia to soon fall behind its neighbours in the process of Euro-Atlantic integration after November 1989. The Slovak part of the federation was poorer compared to the more industrialised Czech Republic, and the Slovak public did not trust the neoliberal shock therapy prescribed by Czech Finance Minister Václav Klaus. In Vladimír Mečiar, they saw a way to slow down the pace of reforms. The result was the relative isolation of Slovakia after 1993, which also caused a slower pace of integration.

The reform government led by Mikuláš Dzurinda, formed after 1998, received a mandate to catch up. However, the feverishness of the integration process, partly caused by the distrust of Slovak and European liberal elites towards the Slovak electorate, which showed persistent sympathies for Vladimír Mečiar, made it impossible to build a sovereign state, which therefore never emerged in Slovakia. Especially between 2002 and 2006, Slovakia became a showcase of neoliberalism, without any progressive role for the state itself (except for creating a “favourable business environment”). However, Dzurinda could pride himself on gaining the trust of Western politicians and investors for Slovakia.

Participation in the illegal invasion of Iraq, led by the United States, played an important role. If the EU was a tool for depoliticising the issue of economic and social policies, NATO was its equivalent in the area of security and international relations. Military intervention in Iraq in 2003 alongside the US, the leader of the North Atlantic Alliance, was meant to demonstrate Slovakia’s firm anchoring in the West. The question of Slovak units’ participation in the Middle East could therefore not be opened to public debate, as famous publicist Peter Schutz suggested a month before the invasion. “Iraq is the politicians’ business,” he remarked, “let’s trust that they are guided by the right vector this time.” It is certain that the vector guiding Dzurinda’s government in 2002 and 2003 was not public opinion. In autumn 2002, according to surveys, only seven per cent of the public favoured Slovakia’s military participation in Iraq.

The first signs of fatigue with post-November liberalism can be observed already in the defeat of Dzurinda’s coalition in 2006, several years earlier than Buzalka identifies them. As Jakub Dovčík recently wrote, the political programme of post-November liberalism seemed “exhausted by entry into Euro-Atlantic structures and the adoption of neoliberal socioeconomic reforms by the second Dzurinda government” after 2006. Despite the fact that Robert Fico’s first government reintroduced a progressive tax and strengthened workers’ rights, thus correcting the most pronounced excesses of Dzurinda’s reformers, the basic economic and political model remained unchanged and the flaws of the privatisation process were not remedied. The Gorilla scandal, which confirmed to the Slovak public that the state was not governed by representatives of the people but by a newly created class of oligarchs, thus completed rather than initiated public disillusionment with post-November liberalism.

Seven years later, after the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, according to Buzalka, “people were driven to the streets by the realisation that those whom they thought were in control of everything, actually controlled nothing”. He is right about this. However, it should be added that although Slovakia may slightly deviate from the European norm in the extent to which the democratic process is permeated by oligarchic power (although even here one should not harbour any illusions about countries to the west of us), the goal of preventing politicians from effectively governing the state had been rooted in the DNA of the Euro-Atlantic integration project since the 1990s. It is natural that a disoriented, weakened, and demobilised Slovak society was neither politically nor intellectually prepared to prevent the capture of the state.

Democracy versus populism

Saving democracy is in vogue in Slovakia today. However, the question arises whether it is really democracy that liberal elites are so fiercely saving today, or post-November liberalism, whose relationship to democracy is questionable at best. More than thirty years after the departure of Soviet troops from Slovak territory, it is increasingly common to hear in the media and parliament that the government’s actions are unacceptable because they contradict the expectations of our Western allies. However, the last sixteen months, during which our Western allies financed or at least quietly tolerated genocide in Gaza, have definitively destroyed the West’s remaining moral legitimacy and dispelled any illusions about the EU and NATO as guarantors of international law and peace. It is therefore appropriate to ask whether it is time to stop looking to the West as a source of political legitimacy and start seeking legitimacy for public policies at home, among voters.

Last year, the DEKK institute published a report on distrust in the “system” in Slovakia. At the end of the publication, the authors write: “The Slovak anti-system is not pro-Russian – it is anti-Western. It rejects the Western and ’systemic’ narrative, and thus logically reaches for alternatives. And these are now, among other things, also (pro)Russian by coincidence. But the average Slovak does not want more Russia in his life – he wants less of the West. And less of the West, in his understanding, means a less cruel and more egalitarian economic system, stronger rights for the majority, more comprehensible political decision-making, less complicated and bureaucratised interaction with the state, and a more community-oriented and solidary lifestyle.”

Slovakia’s EU membership, according to surveys, consistently maintains high public support (Slovak society has been somewhat less favourable to NATO membership in the long term). But even on this issue, things are beginning to change. Recent public opinion polls suggest that a plurality of voters of Smer, the strongest governing party [under Premier Robert Fico], now favours Slovakia’s exit from the Union. It can therefore be speculated that segments of the Slovak public are beginning to associate EU membership with the democratic deficit that has existed in Slovakia since November 1989. Moreover, after a decade without economic growth in the eurozone, liberal outcries about the EU as a guarantee of prosperity seem increasingly detached from reality to many voters.

“Paradoxically, it was the Union that fully emancipated populists to be freely and democratically proud of their own opportunism,” writes Buzalka, and this is evidenced by European populists’ reluctance to push for their countries to leave the EU (recall, for instance, Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni, who have long abandoned the exit position, or Viktor Orbán, who, despite his criticism of the EU, has never advocated this position). Is this really a paradox, as Buzalka claims? Or is it the nature of the EU, an organisation where all important political decisions in Europe are now made behind closed doors, as a result of which national politics is transformed into an empty carnival of hysteria and cultural wars?

EU membership suits Smer’s populist instincts. It is thus premature to claim that Smer would be preparing a “Slovexit” in the foreseeable future – despite frequent declarations about the sovereign policy it allegedly implements. The EU is now a welcome autopilot for politicians who have become unaccustomed to exercising power over decades. The theoretical exit of Slovakia from the EU would thus, paradoxically, likely play not only against the liberal opposition but also against its populist counterparts. For this reason, it cannot be expected in the coming years. At the same time, however, one cannot count on the Slovak political situation moving from the freezing point where it finds itself today without coming to terms with the legacy of three decades of democratic deficit with which post-November liberalism has been associated from the beginning.

Jakub Bokes
The author is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London