The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe

From Communism to Pluralism

Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526103475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This book reassesses a defining historical, political and ideological moment in contemporary history: the 1989 revolutions in central and eastern Europe. Bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, the volume examines the rapid dismantling of the communist regimes in the late 1980s and the transition to pluralism in the 1990s.

1

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe: origins, processes, outcomes

Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe

‘People think of history in the long term’, comments the narrator Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, ‘but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing’.¹ While Roth was referring to the social upheavals in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their impact on the town of Newark, New Jersey, when he wrote this, it might equally apply to the political transformations in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even in January 1989, few observers predicted how speedily, completely and irrevocably the communist systems which had dominated this region since 1945 would disappear, to be replaced, in the main, by liberal parliamentary systems based on the western model. Western leaders were left struggling to find historical parallels. The French president François Mitterrand, for instance, declared at an important international summit in Paris in November 1990 that this was ‘the first time in history that we witness a change in depth of the European landscape which is not the outcome of a war or a bloody revolution’.² Only in the much darker circumstances of the civil war in Yugoslavia, during which he visited the besieged town of Sarajevo on the historically significant date of 28 June 1992, the 78^th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was Mitterrand able to regain some of his historical bearings.³

More than twenty years have now passed since these pivotal events in European and world history.⁴ Even so, historians are still wrestling with many intractable questions that arise from the revolutions of 1989: why did the seemingly impregnable fortresses of communism disintegrate so rapidly in the autumn of that year?; with the notable exception of Romania, why was this historic transformation achieved so peacefully?; to what extent were these ‘revolutions’ in the classical sense of the term, or were they rather, in Timothy Garton Ash’s famous compound, ‘refolutions’?; were internal or external developments the main motor of change?; what role did ‘the people’ play in the overthrow of communism, or, conversely, did the machinations of leading individuals account for the extraordinary events?; how far do political, ideological or economic factors explain the demise?; was the collapse inherent in the utopianism of communism’s modernising spirit and its unshakable belief in hyper-centralist economic and political structures?; to what extent can we speak of a unitary revolutionary phenomenon across the eastern half of the continent, or are national and regional specificities as important as common features?; and, perhaps most contentiously, what is the legacy and meaning of the fall of communism and what discursive strategies have East Europeans themselves employed since 1989 to characterise their recent history in the search for a usable past? These issues form the backbone of the chapters in this book.

Much ink has been expended by both political scientists and historians on the roots of communism’s dissolution and several grand narratives expounded on the annus mirabilis of 1989.⁵ One highly influential concept is that of ‘civil society’, which has often been emphasised as the crucial element in the transformations. In this view, it was the ‘dissident’ intellectuals and other nascent pluralistic oppositional forces who in their constant ‘heroic’ struggles against the repressive banality of the ‘system’, exposed the immorality and paradoxical powerlessness of the communist state.⁶ It is a compelling theory, but one that has its opponents. Stephen Kotkin, for example, has categorically rejected the notion that emergent ‘civil societies’ essentially brought about the end of the communist regimes. For him, ‘civil society’ was a consequence of the revolutions, not the cause. It was rather the implosion of ‘uncivil society’, the ‘incompetent, blinkered, and ultimately bankrupt Communist establishments’, which hastened the collapse.⁷ Others have maintained that the revolutions were an unintended outcome precipitated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), and particularly his refusal to bail out the beleaguered ‘dinosaurs’ in the misguided hope that popular reformist mini-Gorbachevs were waiting in the wings of the East European parties to replace the despised conservative hardliners. Indeed, what Archie Brown calls the ‘Gorbachev factor’ is a key variable that informs much of the thinking on 1989, Vladimir Tismaneanu aptly summarising the opinions of many experts thus: without Gorbachev ‘the revolutions of 1989 would have been barely thinkable’.⁸

In another recent overview, Constantine Pleshakov argues provocatively, and not always internally consistently, that ‘what happened in Eastern Europe was a clash of classes revealed as civil war in Poland and Romania, nonviolent revolution in Czechoslovakia, and peaceful transfer of power in Hungary and Bulgaria’.⁹ Robin Okey, both in his contribution to this volume (chapter 2) and in an earlier monograph, has adopted a longue durée comparative methodology, contextualising the East European events through the lens of the revolutionary traditions and spirit of 1789, 1848 and 1917.¹⁰ Mary Buckley, in chapter 3, also provides a succinct overview of recent theoretical and social scientific writing on revolution. Building on this, many of our other contributors seek to historicise and problematise the notion that revolutions, in order to be genuine, radical or true to a supposed tradition, necessarily also have to be violent. This was certainly the view in the 1990s, when attachment to political ideologies, and hopes of mass mobilisation for positive political ends, seemed to have faded and instead all political action, by leaders and dissidents, the privileged and the under-privileged alike, was seen as being motivated solely by a never-ending desire for power. As late as 2000, for instance, Robert V. Daniels could argue that ‘the anti-Communist revolutions [of 1989–91 were] quite unrevolutionary in form, however revolutionary their consequences’ and that ‘more than anything else [they represented] a triumph of ethnic identity’.¹¹

Yet, over a decade on from this there are signs that the twentieth anniversary of the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe, combined with more recent events such as the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine and the Arab Spring of 2011, have caused some historians, particularly on the left, to highlight the essentially peaceful, revolutionary and radical-democratic aspirations of 1989 and to look for possible precedents and parallels in the past.¹² Others, acting outside classical left-wing assumptions, have used comparative approaches in order to stress the ‘contingent’, ‘fragile’ and ‘partly tactical’ nature of non-violence in some revolutions and movements of civil resistance, the role of force, bloodshed and outside military intervention in others, and the different/subtle forms of inter-connectedness between these two scenarios.¹³ For Chris Armbruster, for instance, the notion of a ‘peaceful revolution’ might describe what happened in 1989 but cannot satisfactorily explain it except in overly simplistic terms as ‘one bright moment’ in an otherwise bloody twentieth (and early twenty-first) century. Instead he prefers the model of a ‘self-limiting’ or ‘negotiated revolution’, as this ‘recognises the continuing hold of violence and the prevalence of conflict’ in the world since 1989, and also the ‘dark legacy of fascism and communism’ for the people of Central and Eastern Europe in particular.¹⁴

The position we take in this volume is that 1989 was a genuine and popular revolution in both form and content, with complex political and social, local, national and international, violent and non-violent, and long-term and short-term causes, but this does not mean that we believe that the collapse of communism was inevitable or predetermined. Rather, following Okey, we argue that communism was not simply an ‘unnatural yoke’ around the necks of many East Europeans, but was a powerful, and not entirely negative, historical force capable of remoulding and modernising societies, cultures and economies.¹⁵ We have also been influenced by the work of scholars like Mary Fulbrook who avoid the pitfalls of the standard linear accounts of the downfall of communism ‘in stages’ (with emphasis on ‘flashpoints’ like 1953, 1956, 1968, 1980–81) by offering a more nuanced view of the interplay between societal developments and state policies.¹⁶ Finally, while many historians place the GDR, and in particular the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the centre of their narrative of the events of 1989,¹⁷ more recent interpretations – which we follow – focus on the pivotal role played by Hungary’s reformist communist leaders in destabilising the East German regime and the entire Warsaw Pact alliance by opening up their country’s border with Austria and then allowing East German refugees to pass through.¹⁸

What these competing explanations share, in our view, is a salutary focus on the complex interplay between internal and external developments as opposed to an exclusive emphasis on Cold War geopolitical power struggles and the populist triumphalist rhetoric of how the ‘freedom-loving’ USA ‘defeated’ the ‘totalitarian’ Soviet Union. Our contributors have subsequently approached the East European revolutions from a variety of angles, emphasising in turn generational conflicts (Junes, chapter 5), socio-economic and domestic aspects (Pullmann and Simeonova, chapters 8 and 10), international features (Borhi, chapter 6), the ‘Gorbachev factor’ (Buckley and Grieder, chapters 3 and 4), and the role of peace movements (Nehring, chapter 7) or discourses on revolution (Adamson and Florean, chapter 9). In line with the sub-title of the volume, we have deliberately avoided imposing an overarching model or interpretation. Where we all agree, however, is in rejecting the idea that the 1989 revolutions were a ‘secondary phenomenon’, significant only in relation to the bigger issue, namely the collapse of the once mighty Soviet economy and of Moscow’s ‘central authority’ over the entire land mass ‘between the Elbe and the China seas’.¹⁹ In our view, the sudden demise of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe constitutes an important historical event in its own right, and should not simply be seen as a prelude to the break-up of the Soviet Union some two years later and the termination of the world-defying and world-changing project begun by Lenin in 1917.

Origins

The aim of this volume is to reconsider the origins, processes and outcomes of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Leaving aside the role of Gorbachev, which we shall return to at the end of this section and the beginning of the next, scholars have identified a number of key causes of ‘1989’.

Economic stagnation

While in the late 1950s and 1960s many observers spoke of a growing convergence between the economic and social models of industrial development adopted in the West and the Soviet bloc, both of which involved increasing amounts of planning, government intervention and advice from politically neutral scientific ‘experts’, by the early 1980s all the talk was about divergence. The West was associated with flexible labour markets, openness to new technologies, consumer-driven policies and a willingness to pay the political price of economic change in terms of high levels of unemployment. The East, on the other hand, was characterised by obsolete industries, bureaucratic resistance to reform, low labour productivity, high rates of indebtedness to the West and constant shortages of housing, basic foodstuffs and consumer goods. Above all it was being left behind in terms of growth, so that, for instance, whereas in 1870 and again in 1951 the per capita GDP of Eastern Europe stood at 51 per cent of that of Western Europe, by 1973 it had fallen to 47 per cent and by 1989 to 40 per cent.²⁰ Worse still, this poor economic performance came at a time when rising living standards in the West were increasingly visible to the populations of the East; for example, through television and radio, improved (albeit still limited) opportunities for travel abroad, family visits and reunions made possible under the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and the inward flow of western tourists to East European capitals and holiday resorts. Even relatively poor West European countries which at various points in the 1970s had looked like they might turn from right-wing authoritarianism to communism, such as Portugal, Spain and Greece, had apparently shown by the 1980s that capitalism, or a social democratic version of the same, offered the quickest route to prosperity, social harmony and stable parliamentary politics.²¹

East European leaders and their Soviet counterparts were not entirely unaware of these challenges. In the USSR military experts in particular were coming to realise that their own budgets, and their increasing inability to keep pace with the USA in terms of weapons technology, were intimately connected to wider issues of economic (non)performance. In Czechoslovakia, economists called for the removal of state subsidies and their replacement with ‘real’ prices as a means of introducing competition and related efficiencies.²² However, proposals for reform were generally blocked by party officials and managers who were concerned that change would lead to job losses or social discontent and thus harm their attempts to appease ordinary workers; indeed in the 1980s one of communism’s last remaining claims to legitimacy was that it had avoided the mass unemployment now characteristic of the capitalist West. Yet this policy was a double-edged sword, for the state’s assertion that it represented the true interests of workers might instead unite them in collective anger over wages, prices, shortages and lack of independent trade unions – as seen especially in Poland in 1970, 1976 and 1980–81.²³ By contrast, in the West even some on the left were beginning to recognise that the political power of labour, and in particular its ability to challenge state policies, including the privatisation of publicly owned industries and the introduction of new curbs on trade union power, was weakening as economies reli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and glossary of terms
• Timeline: Eastern Europe, 1945–91
• Leaders of East European and Soviet communist parties, 1945–91
• East European communist parties and their post-communist successors
• 1 The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe: origins, processes, outcomes
• Part I  The historical longue durée
• Part II  The ‘Gorbachev factor’
• Part III  The East European revolutions: internal and external perspectives
• Part IV  Then and now: continuity and change in the academic and cultural perceptions of the communist era and its aftermath
• Select bibliography
• Index