Europe’s Debt Denied: Reflections on 1989 and the Loss of Yugoslav Experience of Direct Democracy
A conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist revolutions and politics followed the regime changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. The transition moved away from the initial demands for the democratization of socialism, towards capitalism and procedural democracy. In the process, the political experience of the democratic practices of socialism was obscured, as well as the anti-fascist resistance and revolutionary experience of a century-old struggle against authoritarian tendencies and for equality, which was also the driving force of the movement behind the 1989 uprisings.The chapter looks into the case of Yugoslavia and the mechanisms of erasure to argue that a political debt to the socialist past of Europe has been incurred by a deliberate politics of oblivion and discreditation both nationally and supranationally, within the EU institutions. The Yugoslav example is particularly significant given the direct democratic practices it developed despite the bureaucratization of the Communist party in its final decades. The debt thus incurred is however making itself felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit and the rising Far Right.