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

Vladimir Tismaneanu: Rethinking 1989

Vladimir Tismaneanu Rethinking 1989 The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges their nature, a true world-historical event: they established a historical breaking point (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after ‘89. During that year, what appeared to be an immutable, ostensibly indestructible system collapsed with breath-taking alacrity. This happened not because of external blows (although external pressure did matter), as in the case of Nazi Germany, but as a consequence of the development of insuperable inner tensions. The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades of toying with the ideas of intrasystemic reforms (“institutional amphibiousness,” as it were, to use X. L. Ding’s concept as developed by Archie Brown in his writings on Gorbachev and Gorbachevism), it had become clear that communism did not have the resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within, but outside, and even against, the existing order.1 The demise (implosion) of the Soviet Union, consummated before the incredulous eyes of the world in December 1991, was directly and intimately related to the previous dissolution of the East European “outer empire” provoked by the revolutions of 1989. It is 1 See Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 157–189. In this contribution I elaborate upon and revisit the main ideas as I put them forward in my introduction to Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), as well as in my book Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; revised and expanded paperback, with new afterword, Free Press, 1993). 16 THE END AND THE BEGINNING now obvious that the historical cycle inaugurated by World War I, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, and the long European ideological warfare (or rather a global civil war) that followed had come to an end.2 The importance of these revolutions cannot therefore be overestimated: they represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism and police dictatorship.3 Rooted in an individualistic concept of freedom, programmatically skeptical of all ideological blueprints for social engineering, these revolutions were, at least in their initial stage, liberal and non-utopian.4 Unlike traditional revolutions they did not originate in a millennialist vision of the perfect society and rejected the role of any self-appointed vanguard in directing the activities of the masses. No political party headed their spontaneous momentum, and in their early stage they even insisted on the need to create new political forms, different from ideologically defined, traditional party differentiations. The fact that the aftermath of these revolutions has been plagued by ethnic rivalries, unsavory political bickering, rampant political and economic corruption, and the rise of illiberal parties and movements, including strong authoritarian , collectivistic trends, does not diminish their generous message and colossal impact. And, it should be noted, it was precisely in the countries were the revolutions did not occur (Yugoslavia) or were derailed (Romania) that the exit from state socialism was particularly convoluted, tottering and in the long run problematic. 2 See Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–91 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 461–99; see also George Lichtheim on “The European Civil War,” in his book The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), 225–37; Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 666–704. 3 See Václav Havel’s reflections on post-1989 politics in his Summer Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) and To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007). 4 For the exhaustion of ideological-style secular religions, see Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1991) and S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes,” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Revolutions of 1989, 89–107 17 Rethinking 1989 The revolutions of 1989 created a fundamentally new and potentially dangerous situation in which the absence of norms and predictable rational behavior on the part of the involved actors could result in global chaos. This is not to deplore the end of the pre-1989 Cold War arrangements, but simply to point to...