Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?
In In Mistrust we Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders? Ivan Krastev concentrates on why we live under conditions of “democracy without the possibility of choice, meaningless sovereignty, and globalization without legitimacy?” How does he do? Here is the polemical foreword to the Polish edition.
In the book In Mistrust we Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders? (TED Books) Ivan Krastev treats the major intercontinental routes: USA-Russia and USA-China, as well as China-Russia, although he himself hails from Europe. He is most esteemed for his intellectual mediation between the world’s most important countries. In the United States and Europe, he explains Russian policy, and in Russia… In Russia there is no one to whom he can explain American and EU intentions, because they are already clear to Russian politicians. This is why in Russia Krastev usually converses with intellectuals and social activists. He also closely follows the development of China and Turkey, which are becoming increasingly important to both European and global affairs.
Krastev skilfully employs the experiences he gained in a post-communist country and from its collapse in order to analyze Russia and the east as a whole. They are also useful for analyzing the west. Krastev often uses the collapse of political unions such as the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia in order to identify challenges facing the European Union (one of his essays bears the subtitle Seven Lessons From the Soviet Collapse). Thanks to his knowledge of Bulgarian history and Bulgaria’s Turkish minority, Krastev not only knows the Balkan region, a part of the world we should not forget, but also has a better understanding of Muslim countries. In analyzing the state of democracy and democratic transformations, he makes use of what he saw in 1989 and 1990, when Communism fell and all of Eastern Europe began the difficult road towards freedom and integration with the west. Today he lives in Vienna, where he is a permanent fellow at the IWM Institute of Human Sciences founded by Krzysztof Michalski. Few parts of the map remain untouched by his interest.
How and with what? The reader will quickly realize that Krastev is a seeker of contradictions. Indeed, every one of his conclusions is based on reversing some truism and checking whether it is now truer, and what that means. You believe that the government is not sufficiently transparent? You are mistaken—transparency hurts democracy. Everyone believes that Russia is an authoritarian country? Then we will demonstrate that it is not all that authoritarian after all, and that its elections are falsified precisely in order to conceal that fact and to convince the entire world, including Russians, that Putin is a strong leader. True authoritarianism can be found in China. But no, not at all—listen to the surprising story of how China is less authoritarian than Russia. A critic might argue that Krastev so likes to surprise the reader with showy sabotage of common beliefs that reality becomes of secondary importance. Truisms tempt intellectuals and provoke them to attack, but they rarely turn out to be false.
Krastev is known for the fact that he knows “everyone.” His profession requires contact with people in positions of power, not only from the sphere of politics, but also from economics, the sciences, and NGOs. That which dusty archives are to the historian (and the dustier, the more promising), living people are to political scientists. Krastev is known not only for his good writing and his interesting presentations, but also for his sharpened skills of observation. He attempts to locate symptomatic phenomena, those that can serve as an excellent introduction to more systematic studies. Even as a skeptic of the powers of intuition, he admits that the hypotheses he will later test as strenuously as he wants have to come from somewhere. Krastev’s famous sense of humour penetrates his writings.
Indeed, symptomatic observation and good jokes have something in common. This is what cognitive psychologists call the “Aha! reaction.” We suddenly perceive something that we had not realized before. This experience accompanies reading the best literature, for instance. A good joke often arises from a surprising association, which, moreover, often comes from noticing the erroneous substitution of one meaning of the same word for another.
If we reflect on the most important concepts in Political Science vocabulary (democracy, liberalism, authoritarianism, transparency, etc.), it becomes apparent that they are used with so many different meanings that it is easy to prove contradictory theses simultaneously, including a colloquial one and a new one, ours. This is a source of renewable energy in the humanities, but it is considered dangerous by some, or even contaminated (and hence the repeated attempts to distill the language of the humanities so that in the patiently anticipated future it will become a substitute for formal logic notation).
Some, traditionally associated with the Anglo-Saxon linguistic sphere, have therefore bet on precise definitions and logical reasoning, at the expense of originality and style. The use of quantitative methods and modelling helps confirm, and even inductively recognize, interesting dependencies, on the basis of which we can say something new and important about the world. Often, however, they merely give the appearance of scientificity, serving to prove what is commonly known. Even the master himself, Rawls, can be criticized in this vein—his 600-page Theory of Justice merely tells us what is already known to every inhabitant of this vale of tears: we must be careful because we do not know what might befall us. Models constructed using increasingly complicated mathematical methods tend to describe reality only when reality happens to fit the model. Hence the multitude of operative paradigms, even though one should logically follow from the other, and no one is surprised when every year the Nobel Prize goes to economists advocating contradictory theories.
Other scholars, true to the so-called “continental” tradition, are not overly concerned with the rules of logic, and often do not feel obligated to start with a definition. They therefore allow themselves inspiring thoughts, interesting observations, and unconventional form, but uttered with fewer claims to scientificity. The great schism between the two traditions can be traced back to positivism, the last ecumenical council, after which both sides excommunicated each other.
Krastev is ecumenical. He follows the work of the Anglo-Saxons and uses results of quantitative studies, but he writes in a more essayistic style... read more:
