Europe, 1550-1800: A Revisionist Introduction

42Historically Speaking · September 2003 have hesitated to tackle that moment is out ofuncertainty about what to call it. At die time, it looked like a revolution, with all the right cinematic attributes (crowds ofgiant proportions, statues toppling, people reaching across barricades, secret files burning or cascading from looted offices to the streets below). Since 1989 we have set our sights lower: it was a "transformation," a "transition ," a "refolution"—a transfer ofpower, in otherwords, without anynew ideas, but simplythe adoption oftried and true norms. And ofcourse, there was onlythe faintestwhiffof violence, an essential attribute of every previous revolution. Yet it is also the case that every great historical change ofthe last century has led us to rethink our assumptions about revolution (or more broadly, aboutwhat sociologists call "contentious politics"): 1917, 1933, 1968, for example, all required us to rethink what we knew about how people resist injustice. The same has notyet been true for 1989. In trying to come to terms widi a revolution that was characterized neither by violence nor ideological conflict, I have employed the idea of the carnival. The use of this term by scholars over the last two decades or so has given it many connotations—reversal ofhierarchy, cacophony, etc. Each ofthese is relevant to die revolution of 1989. But I want to evoke here one meaning in particular, one that I believe can help us look anew at revolutions in general, and those of 1989 in particular. A revolution, like a carnival, is a rupture in ordinarytime . Duringthat rupture, the imagination is let loose; new ideas emerge, if only briefly. In 1989 these included ideas about radical political change—a "third way," a "Europewidioutborders," orradical democracy . But usually, diese new ideas were more quotidian: people should be able to perform on die streets, or design dieir ownprotests, or write or believe what they please, or retreat from society, or negotiate with leaders and sit in parliament. These ideas are in the end important more for their form than dieir content (just as itwas forms offreedom, and not specific blueprints , diat crossed borders). Most ofthem, after all, are never realized. The inertia oftradition and example and the pressures of everyday concerns turn revolutionaries back into ordinary people with jobs and families, and die exotic is pushed to the margins. But the experience of the carnival remains. In some countries, like Poland, that experience is long and lasting; the surprising resiliency ofcontemporaryPolish democracy (surprising , because ithas turned outcapable ofsurviving all manner of extremisms, crises, and dramas ofthe kind diat have destroyed Polish democracyin the past) is in parta result of this. In other countries, like the Czech Republic, thatexperiencewas relativelybrief (perhaps twenty mondis or so—still, radier more dian ten days), and die resultis noticeably greater difficulties with such tilings as relationswidi neighbors, with minorities, and with the past. These are lessons that take years to master. A critical eye turned toward Central Europe will thus prefer the ten-year revolution to die ten-minute one. The revolutions of 1989 did not lack for dynamic, innovative ideas, anymore than did previous ones. One can hope that the memory and experience ofthat time ofcarnivalwill remain one of 1989's lasting legacies. Padraic Kenney ?professorofhistory at the University ofColorado. His most recent book is A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989 (Princeton University Press, 2002). 1 Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (Random House, 1990), 78. 2 PetruSka Sustrová, "Polské dojmy," Sport 4 (November 1989): 26. Europe, 1 550-1 800:A Revisionist Introduction Jeremy Black At the beginning ofthe 1990s criticism of conventional views of absolutism led to the publication ofa number of self-consciously revisionist works including Nicholas Henshall's The Myth ofAbsolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern EuropeanMonarchy (1992) and my awnA Military Revolution?Military ChangeandEuropean Society , 1550-1800 (1991). Henshall was particularly vigorous, dismissing absolutism as an anachronistic historical construct, imposed on the period by later generations. An awareness ofthe pendulum ofhistorical research suggested that this approach would, in time, be countered, and indeed in 2002John Hurt published LouisXIVandthe Parlements: The Assertion ofRoyalAuthority, an impressive work diat explicidy contests die revisionist interpretation and, instead, seeks to demonstrate a harsh reality ofexpropriationand lackofconsultation atthe core...