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Jeffrey C. Isaac: Conclusion: Shades of Gray: Revisiting the Meanings of 1989
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Jeffrey c. isaac Conclusion Shades of Gray: Revisiting the Meanings of 1989 In 1789, the French Ancien Regime fell, with a resounding crash that echoed throughout the European continent. Immanuel Kant spoke for many “enlightened” thinkers when he observed that: “The revolution of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry … this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators … a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm.”1 Almost exactly two hundred years later ramparts again came crashing down, this time in the East of Europe. Symbolized so dramatically by “the fall” of the Berlin Wall, the entire edifice of Communist rule—a truly immense superstructure weighing down upon its people—and with it the “Iron Curtain” dividing Europe from itself, came tumbling down, and democratic oppositions long subjected to persecution and marginality were swept into power.2 It did not take long for a powerful consensus to take shape on behalf of a “post-historical” and avowedly liberal interpretation of these events, most famously articulated by Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed that we have reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”3 But Fukuyama was not alone in his enthusiasm. Marc Plattner, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, 1 Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill , 1963), 148. 2 See Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down. 3 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989), 4. See also his The End of History and the Last Man especially 39–51. 560 THE END AND THE BEGINNING seconded him, declaring optimistically that we now find ourselves in “a world with one dominant principle of legitimacy, democracy.”4 Many commentators from across the political spectrum followed suit. Even Jurgen Habermas declared that the revolutions of 1989 were “rectifying revolutions” that simply restored Eastern Europe to the “normal” liberal democratic trajectory of political modernity.5 Such optimism was soon challenged by many liberal democrats of a more cautious bent. Jean-François Revel warned against “an overhasty assumption that the movement toward democracy represented a sort of reverse millennium, the arrival of the eternal kingdom of history.”6 Even more skeptical was the advice of Samuel P. Huntington. “To hope for a benign end to history,” he wrote, “is human. To expect it to happen is unrealistic. To plan on it happening is disastrous.”7 Yet even Huntington and Ravel seemed to agree that liberal democracy was the principal issue placed on the historical agenda by the “fall of the wall.” They simply, though importantly, endorsed a less idealistic, more realistic set of policies designed to maximize the likelihood of the scenario that Fukuyama only prematurely heralded (Huntington, of course, soon moved toward an even more jaundiced view of a “clash of civilizations.” But even this formulation entailed that Europe had a common and essentially “liberal” destiny, even as it denied that this destiny was universal).8 4 Marc Plattner, “The Democratic Moment,” in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 5 Jurgen Habermas, “What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left,” New Left Review (September-October 1990), 3–22 6 Jean-François Revel, Democracy against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse (New York: Free Press, 1991), 14–15. 7 Samuel P. Huntington, “No Exit: The Errors of Endism,” The National Interest (Fall, 1989), 3–11. 8 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). See also Guiseppe di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and the essays collected in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). [52.55.55.239] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:09 GMT) 561 Conclusion In 1996, I published an essay in the journal Social Research entitled “The Meanings of 1989” that began in much the same way as the text above—only the tenses have been changed—and proceeded to call into question the then-emergent liberal consensus.9 I argued that it minimized the importance of the most exciting developments of 1989, the non-electoral forms of “anti-political politics” improvised by the Central European democratic oppositions...