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Th e F a i l u r e o f t h e Con s e r vat i v e P r o j e c t…
Admittedly, this placed clearly ideologically committed parties, such as the Conservatives,
at a disadvantage. It would be simplistic, however, to blame this tectonic shift merely on
the results of President Adamkus’ power-brokering effort.
The political climate in Lithuania was, in addition, influenced by Western trends, and
it is in this connection that one may discern two important and related developments.
The first is the emergence of the phenomenon of the “new left” with Tony Blair’s victory
in 1997 and Gerhard Schröder’s in 1998 (and with Bill Clinton providing an important
trans-Atlantic dimension). It indicated the swing of the Western political pendulum away
from the center-right orthodoxy of the early 1990s with which Lithuanian Conservatives
more or less directly associated themselves. Inevitably this made the Conservatives look
and feel like a fading, obsolete force – a fact that the hostile media did not fail to exploit
polemically.
The “new left” was closely linked with the politics of the “third way” which set itself as an
alternative to both the traditional right and left ideologies. Blair’s espousal of the free mar-
ket along with the values of social state erased the conventional distinction between right
and left values, and confused many minds in Lithuania. This blurring of the political map
harmonized with another trend that reached Lithuania’s shores at the time: the slogan of
“non-ideological politics.” The anti-ideological stance promoted the ideal of politics as a
care-taking, non-controversial (and therefore, ultimately, non-political) technocratic ex-
pertise. The dominant rhetoric became that of “solving problems” vs. “peddling ideology.”
The Conservatives, the only consistently ideological party in Lithuania, could not but feel
that the tide was turning against them.
One continues to speak of the Conservative ideological commitment despite the fact that,
from the point of view of its contents, this ideology was seldommore than a jumble of un-
related and occasionally contradictory ideas. I shall relegate the discussion of its contents
to a later point in the text; for the purposes of the present discussion it will suffice to say
that it is still accurate to speak of the Conservatives as an ideologically committed party
insofar as its political identity was characterized by a belief that conservative policies must
be based on a shared body of doctrine.
With regard to the question of what exactly that doctrine amounted to, opinions of-
ten varied. The meaning of “conservatism” ranged from robustly patriotic sentiments
with an admixture of pro-Western orientation, on the one hand, to economic liber-
alism and suspiciousness towards ideology in the Anglo-Saxon mold, on the other.
(“Conservatives emphasize that they are distinct from other ideologies in that they
have no ideology,” asserted Andrius Kubilius in 1997.) These differences concerning
the content of the conservative project indicate certain growth-related problems in
conservative identity.
In the immediate aftermath of the restoration of Lithuanian independence, the political
field was primarily defined through the attitude to the Soviet past: right-of-center
Sąjūdis
repudiated it wholesale, while the ex-Communists sought some continuity with, and justi-
fication for, Soviet Lithuania. This distinction, however, grew increasingly insignificant as
Lithuanian independence ceased to be a burning political issue and became an established
fact. When the democratic, pluralist political mechanism and market economy became
entrenched, a new set of realities and problems came to life.
