The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History

Introduction

inTroducTion Preliminaries The present volume is an attempt to provide a fresh interpretation of the contexts, meanings, and consequences of the revolutions of 1989. It does not aim to search for ‘new truths’ or novel explanations for the fall of Communism and for the peaceful and sudden upheavals that took place in 1989. It does, however, emphatically argue for re-thinking, re-visiting, and re-assessing the filters and means that scholars use to interpret this watershed moment in our recent history. The editors perceive the present project more as a challenge to existing readings of the complex set of issues and topics presupposed by a re-evaluation of 1989 as a symbol of the change and transition from authoritarianism to democracy. In this context, the volume begins and ends with two essays that both bring together our present understandings on the subject and lay the ground for further realignment of scholarly analysis. Vladimir Tismaneanu’s contribution opening the volume is first of all an overview of the state of the art about the causes, meanings, and consequences of 1989. Secondly, though, the author insists in signaling out the four fundamental directions adopted by the volume’s contributors: (1) the possibilities of situating 1989 in both global and European history with the benefit of the hindsight of more than twenty years since the events happened; (2) the determining elements that brought the world to 1989 with a special focus on the relationship between core and periphery within the Soviet bloc; (3) the plural ways of comprehending the contexts that set up communism’s demise and the upheavals of 1989 in various Eastern European countries; (4) the multifarious nature of the way we can map out and interpret these revolutions and communism’s aftermath (e.g., intellectual and discursive legacies, challenges of 2 THE END AND THE BEGINNING transitional justice, structural backwardness, or emulation for further democratization movements). The working premise of the volume is formulated by Tismaneanu, who declares that understanding the ramifications of ‘the upheaval in the East’ helps us grasp the meanings of the ongoing debates about liberalism, socialism, nationalism, civil society, and the very notion of human freedom in the aftermath of a most atrocious century. At the same time, the author argues that, in the two decades that followed 1989, the discomfiture with democratic challenges and the prevailing constitutional pluralist model was not only linked to the transition from Leninism, but to the larger problem of legitimation and the existence of competing visions of common good and rival symbols of collective identity. Nevertheless, as all present contributions emphasize to varying degrees, the most important lesson of 1989 remains that societies can be peacefully transformed by the belief in, and the rehabilitation and affirmation of civility, decency and humanity. The book has four sections, each comprising approaches along the directions suggested in Vladimir Tismaneanu’s opening contribution . The first part deals with the memories and legacies of 1989. It begins with an article by Gale Stokes that discusses the legacies of 1989 from the point of view of the new type of politics brought about by the generalization of the liberal democratic economic and political structures in most of Europe. He argues that such social, political, and economic realignment led to a new and more stable style of largescale human interaction in which diversity, change, negotiation, compromise , and economic competition replaced warfare as the primary mode of international relations. However, the author insists that a full transition from the pre-1989 establishment is premised upon the overcoming of the self-centered, ethnocratic identitarian narratives that had been formulated during the various authoritarian experiences throughout most of the twentieth century. At the same time, Stokes cautions about the new ways of instrumentalizing history, especially by a coarse, unilateral anticommunism that rather functions as legitimator for various political actors rather than as a means through which to come to terms with the past. Stokes prefers to situate the events of 1989 within the larger framework of the developing political , supragovermental structures of the recent decades founded upon 3 Introduction principles such as pluralism, tolerance, and open instead of closed perceptions of national identity. Agnes Heller’s is a rather more personal account that counterpoises the expectations raised by 1989 and the realities of its aftermath. She first provides a brief theoretical overview of the nature of the communist regimes, trying to point to the blueprint common to...