ABSTRACT
The search for new political myths is simply more visible in the East, where all social contrasts are exacerbated and where the individual senses these tragic breakdowns of old identities with more acuity (Katherine Verdery writes about an ongoing cosmic re-ordering).'5 But the phenomenon is worldwide: the return of myth is part of the universal uneasiness with the cold, calculated, zweckmiissig rationality of the iron cage: prophets and demagogues (often the same persons) do have audiences in the East as well as in the West. The latter is, however, better protected: institutions function impersonally, procedures are deeply embedded in the civic cultures. In the post-communist world they are only incipient. This study looks into these uncertainties and the psycho-ideological responses to them: they may be considered fantasies in that they give a wishful image of reality, rooted in imagination, approximation and magic thinking. Things are of course extremely complex: there is indeed a feeling of exhaustion, of too much rhetoric, a sentiment hat politicians are there simply for cheating. Corruption seems to be universal, and most of these societies are closer to Latin America (or Southern Europe) than to any Anglo-Saxon model of pluralism. On the other hand, it is precisely this exhaustion of traditional worldviews, this postmodem syndrome of repudiation of grandiose teleological constructs in favour of mini-discourses, that is conducive to ennui and yearning for alternative visions which would not be scared of boldness and inventiveness. This is a secularised world, but the profane substitutes for traditional mythologies still have a future. Fascism as a phenomenon is not simply linked to one personality or the specific conditions in Italy or Germany in the 1920s and 1930s: its roots are to be found in the readiness of desperate masses to follow highly self-confident individuals.
