Retroactive Politics

On the Secret Service Logic of Inventing Reasons

Abstract

During the Cold War, the secret services and state security services of the party dictatorships in Eastern Europe did not simply observe the opposition and critics of the system in order to find reasons to arrest them, but often produced these reasons themselves. I refer to such fabrication of reasons as “retroactive politics”. Retroactivity, ex-post intentionality or metalepsis summarises the reversal of cause and effect or of before and after in various disciplines. The aim is to produce something that can be assumed to be the reason in retrospect. In this article, I show how this invention of reasons took place and how a very similar practice is currently the practice of autocratic politics.