The Revolutions of 1989: Twenty Years Later. Michael Bernhard. Ehrlich Professor of Political Science. University of Florida

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1 The Revolutions of 1989: Twenty Years Later Michael Bernhard Ehrlich Professor of Political Science University of Florida Abstract: What were the causes and consequences of Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe? The causes lie in the exhaustion of model of Soviettype economic organization, the failure of reform efforts in the USSR, and the persistence of opposition to Soviet-type rule in Central Europe. The ramifications of the events are examined through the prism of three questions: 1) how do they change our evaluation of the past?; 2) what was the significance of 1989 a moment in time?; and 3) how have the shaped the present? Anniversaries are artificial constructs, but they nevertheless provide us with an opportunity to reflect on the momentous events of the past. Those of a hagiographical bent are apt to grasp onto one great leader to explain the end of the Cold War as the product of that person s visionary leadership. In this discussion I will endeavor to limit my invocations of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, or Pope John Paul II as the motors of history. My task today is to consider the meaning of the Revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe with twenty years hindsight. I want to focus on their causes and their consequences. This reflection will be structured into several sections. I will begin with a theory of the causes of those momentous events that put an end to communist regimes in Europe. My perspective is that of a political scientist who takes development in a comparative and international context as a crucial motive force in history. But I do not want to omit those who actually engaged in struggle in the countries where the revolutions took place. This discussion of the causes of the revolution will conclude with a brief overview of the events of I will then address its consequences from 1

2 three perspectives. First, it has importance in terms of how we understand the past. Second, as an event it had profound historical meaning on its own terms. And third, it has shaped our contemporary world, in particular the current international system. The Causes of 1989 The most important cause of the Revolutions of 1989 was the exhaustion of the Soviet model of economic development. Had their economic model succeeded, it is highly unlikely that we would have witnessed the demise of the system. And, on the face of it, this is confirmed by the continued viability of one-party states in places like China and Vietnam, which have managed to overcome the limits to growth that undid Soviet-type regimes in Europe. At the same time, the trajectory that the events in 1989 took was conditioned by two movements. The first of these was the movement for political economic reform in the Soviet Union itself. The persistent failure of these reforms accounts for the continued deterioration of Soviet-type economies and opened the room for maneuver with which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe reasserted their sovereignty vis-à-vis the USSR. The second of these movements was the persistent resistance of the populations of Central Europe to the constraints that the Soviet Union imposed upon them. Economic Stagnation and the Failure of Reform It is important to recall that communism, in the middle part of the twentieth century, posed what seemed like a viable alternative way of achieving modernity without relying on capitalism. It allowed two very large and underdeveloped countries, Russia and China, to industrialize on the basis of their own large resource bases and reserves of agricultural labor. The system of centralized planning allowed them to translate the preferences of the party-state elite for rapid industrialization into practice. By taking physical control of material assets and directly assigning labor to its place of employment, planners could mobilize underutilized labor (mostly peasants whose marginal productivity on the land was quite low, as well women who 2

3 worked in the household economy), control the balance between investment and consumption (to the detriment of the latter), and channel investment into the heavy industrial and military sectors they favored. They thus were able to mobilize larger and larger amounts of labor and capital into the economy and achieve substantial rates of economic growth for sustained periods of time. Classical communist economies were mobilization economies, effective in using underutilized resources in agrarian societies, but notoriously less effective in making those factors of production more efficient once they were mobilized. In practice, this meant that the communist developmental model was effective in industrializing up to a point. It brought countries into the age of machino-facture, the mass-production of manufactured goods in factories organized according to production lines. Lenin and his followers were notoriously enamored with Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor (Beissinger 1988). This economic model proved to be ineffective in meeting the challenges of development in an age when microelectronics and data processing, rather than heavy industry, came to dominate development. Sometime in the 1960s and 1970s almost all communist economies in Europe reached the limit of this kind of extensive growth. They were fully mobilized and the only solution to their stagnation was to increase the productivity of already mobilized labor and capital, socalled intensive growth. They did not effectively meet this challenge. Figure One presents the rates of growth for seven Soviet-type economies from the 1950s to the 1980s. While rates of growth do bounce around a bit from year to year the obvious trend in terms of rates of growth is downward. This is reflected in the downward slope of the trend lines that have been added to the figure to smooth out short-term variation in performance. [Figure One Here] The crisis of growth was not enough in itself to trigger far-reaching changes in the Soviet Union. History abounds with examples of stagnant empires that go on for years. Change is a 3

4 product of necessity. Rulers who are not challenged have little incentive to change. However, when the power of rulers comes under threat from challengers, particularly external challengers that have technological or organizational advantages, stagnation is no longer viable. The choice becomes innovation or defeat (conquest, relegation to a secondary status, etc.). At such junctures reform becomes a necessity. By the 1980s, within many sections of the Soviet party leadership and among Russian intellectuals, it was clear that the Soviet system was in severe need of reform. Two previous attempts at reforming the system failed. The first, Khrushchev s de-stalinization campaign, was political in nature. It partially disclosed the crimes of the past, restored the party to the central apparatus of rule, and replaced one-man rule with collective dictatorship. Its economic innovations were even less radical. It allocated additional resources to agriculture and tinkered with replacing the branch-line organization with regional economic organization. The political reforms were too much for the conservative party apparatus and led to Khrushchev s downfall. His attempts to reorganize the economy were abandoned. The leadership that overthrew him, initially more of a duumvirate of Premier Alexi Kosygin and First Secretary Leonid Brzehnev, did not completely back away from economic reform, but tried to rationalize planning in the spirit of economist Evsei Liberman. The essence of his ideas was to replace gross output as the main indicator with realized output. Such an indicator gave managers an incentive to worry about the quality and salability of their goods. Incentives for efficiency and innovation were put in place by giving managers a share of profit to invest as they saw fit. The central planning apparatus and industrial ministries were unhappy with this greater degree of managerial authority, and worked to curtail these provisions (Schroeder 1990). This urge to reform the system in the Soviet Union in the 1980s was not because the leadership became misty at the thought of democracy or embraced the reason of the market, but because they felt that the state of their economy posed a threat to their power. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 provided them with an opening which allowed them to 4

5 push both radical political and economic reforms. This push to reform had both internal and external sources. From the external perspective, the Soviet leadership feared falling further behind the West and other competitors in the international system in terms of economic power and technological prowess. The slow growth of the Soviet economy was not only an undesirable element in an absolute sense, but perhaps even more so in a relative sense. Figure Two, which looks at economic growth in the USSR, Eastern Europe, and other world regions highlights this relative context. [Figure 2 Here] In the 1950s and 1960s the USSR (column 3 in each cluster) and Eastern Europe (column 2) grew faster than the world as a whole (7). Both still grew slower than both Western Europe (1) and Asia (5) but faster than either Latin America (4) or Africa (6). By the 1970s, though Eastern Europe still grew a bit faster than the world mean, the USSR grew at the mean rate. By the 1980s both regions grew slower than the world mean and considerably slower than Western Europe or Asia. While the USSR and Eastern Europe outperformed both Africa and Latin America in the 1980s, powers in neither region were the Soviet Union s international competitors. The powers more central to Soviet security concerns Western Europe, Japan, and China were growing even faster. The Soviets thus found themselves in a situation where their position as the second largest economic power on the globe deteriorated. Japan was rapidly closing in on the USSR and would become the world s second largest economy sometime in the mid-1980s. The West Europeans were on the verge of integrating one large market, even larger than that of the United States, and the Chinese were showing no sign of economic doldrums. While the Soviet economic model fell into stagnation, the economies of many of its competitors showed a surprising vibrancy. 5

6 Furthermore, the nature of Soviet power was shockingly one-dimensional, overwhelmingly based on military might (Bialer 1986, ch 14). But military power is not sustainable in a stagnant economy, particularly when one s competitors are growing at a faster rate. And in this regard, the arms race that the Brezhnev leadership initiated with the United States was not particularly helpful. 1 The slow pace of Soviet growth was not the only economic threat to Soviet military power. The transformation of the economies of the West and Pacific Rim into information economies in the late 1970s and early 1980s also posed other challenges. Not only were innovations of information processing, computer and microelectronics technology revolutionary in terms of productivity, they had ramifications for the design of weapons. Without a reform of the economy, the Soviet elite worried that it might fall behind the OECD countries to an even greater extent economically, but also militarily because of innovations in weapons' technology. An economy designed for the Blitzkrieg was entering into the age of precision guided munitions, satellite-based battlefield intelligence and command and control, and pilotless drones. Soviet economic decline also had important ramifications for the internal stability of the regime. For most of the postwar period, the Soviet Union had been a highly stable political entity. The regime enjoyed a relatively strong level of social support on the basis of peace, slow but sure economic progress and the emergence of the USSR as a recognized world power (Bialer 1986, 22-23). Still, developments in the Soviet bloc showed that a deteriorating economic situation could undermine domestic political support and stability. Here the Polish crisis and the emergence of Solidarity was of critical importance. The specter of workers rebelling and breaking the party s monopoly of political organization because the party-state was unable to provide for their material needs gave the Soviet elite pause. It was conceivable that the stagnation that had set in the Soviet economy could threaten the party s hold on power, and for this reason reform was also a necessity (Ibid, 231). 1 It has always struck me as odd that the American press has credited Ronald Reagan for forcing the Soviets into overspending on its military when the Soviets initiated the escalation in that particular phase of the arms race. 6

7 A History of Prolonged Resistance Mass resistance to communist rule in Eastern and Central Europe emerged initially after the death of Stalin in Unrest was enabled by the emerging succession struggle in the USSR and efforts to reform the system and eliminate its worst excesses. The earliest mass event of this wave of resistance was the East Berlin Uprising of June Working class protest over the tightening of work norms led to large demonstrations that spread to several major cities and included several tens of thousands of protestors. The East German authorities relied not only on their own police forces but Soviet troops to quell the uprising (Ostermann 2003). In 1956 events in Poland and Hungary pitted recalcitrant Stalinists against other more pragmatic party politicians who sought nationally specific paths to communism. In March of 1956 workers in the city of Poznan in Poland also went on strike in response to the tightening of work quotas. The Polish security forces contained and dispersed over 100,000 demonstrators. Revelations about the crimes of Stalinism, ferment in intellectual circles, and continued popular protests provoked internecine struggle within the Polish party between reform-oriented and hard-line elements. In October, the crisis in the party came to a head, leading the Soviets to send a delegation from the Central Committee to Warsaw. In a series of tension filled meetings, the Soviets acceded to the ascension of Wladyslaw Gomulka as the leader of the Polish United Workers Party. Gomulka, a leader of the domestic communist underground during World War II who had been placed under house arrest by the Stalinists, was able to bring the situation in Poland under control (Paczkowski 2003, chapters 5 and 6). In Hungary, a reformist government under Imre Nagy emerged in Nagy was outmaneuvered by the Stalinist Rakosi, who tenaciously held on to power and exacerbated the situation by blocking reform efforts and securing the removal of Nagy in Throughout 1956, students and intellectuals continued to press the Stalinists, and secured Rakosi s resignation in July. When reform came in Poland, this emboldened Hungarian students and intellectuals, who were soon joined by ordinary Hungarians in massive public protests in 7

8 October When the Hungarian secret police began to shoot openly at crowds, elements of the police and army defected to the side of the protestors and the Stalinists conceded power to the reformers. A new government under Nagy began to openly discuss multiparty elections, economic reform, and greater national sovereignty in an atmosphere that continued to be charged with dissent and protest. All this proved too much for the Soviets who intervened militarily and provoked an outright national revolution. This was also met with armed resistance, which was brutally crushed by November 10. Nagy and his confederates then requested and received sanctuary at the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest (Litvany et al. 1996). This failure of national communism through Soviet intervention (Hungary) or dilution over time (Poland) did not bring an end to resistance in the region. The next phase looked to infuse orthodox Marxism with a dose of humanism. Nowhere but in Czechoslovakia did politicians with such sentiments assume power. The Prague Spring was a brief flowering of Socialism with human face, combined with experimentation in economic decentralization, and the expansion of cultural freedom all in the carnival atmosphere typical of the youth culture of the decade. This also was too much for the Soviets who claimed the Czechoslovak Communist Party under Dubcek was abrogating its leading role in society. The Kremlin orchestrated an invasion by the combined armies of the Warsaw Pact (less Romania) in August 1968 (Skilling 1976). Nonviolent resistance was difficult to maintain in face of harsh normalization under Gustav Husak (Simecka 1984). Humanist currents also had a relatively strong resonance in circles of party intellectuals and students in Poland. Polish revisionism was contained within the party and youthful resistance to censorship was crushed by the unleashing of paramilitary toughs on nonviolent demonstrations (Eisler 1991). Poland continued to be the center of resistance within the bloc throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s there were two strike waves in response to price increases that adversely affected worker welfare. The first set of strikes took place in and was initially concentrated on the Baltic seacoast cities of Szczecin and Gdansk in December. In this case, the army was called in, leading to bloody clashes between demonstrators and the 8

9 military. Order was restored following discussions between workers and the new party leadership under Edward Gierek. This order was short-lived as strikes broke out in the textile mills of Lodz in January-February Consequently, the price reform was cancelled. A second attempt at raising prices in June 1976 led to a new round of strikes. This time the centers of greatest strike activity were in the city of Radom and the Warsaw industrial suburb of Ursus. In Radom protesters sacked the local party headquarters and were met by fierce repression by special internal security forces. The resulting repression was harsh, and led to the founding of Workers Defense Committee (KOR) by prominent intellectuals. This was a definitive moment in terms of the revolutions of KOR represented the first attempt to build an underground alternative political sphere which abridged the state monopoly on organization characteristic of communist regimes. Prior to the round of strikes that gave birth to the Independent and Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity, the Poles had created a multifaceted resistance movement which included organizations of differing political orientations, a underground press and publishing movement, and fledgling committees organized to defend the interest of workers, peasants, and students (Bernhard 1993). The emergence of Solidarity during the strikes of the summer of 1980 was the pinnacle of this movement. Its fifteen months of legal above-ground activity ended due to a Declaration of Martial Law in December Despite the harsh repression that ensued activists from the movement managed to keep an elemental infrastructure and the spirit of the movement alive throughout the 1980s (Penn 2005). A Brief Review of the Events Themselves There has been some debate over whether what transpired in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 should be characterized as a revolution. Scholars of revolution have included the events in 1989 (Goodwin 2001, Bauman 1994, Dahrendorf 1990) in their on-going debates. Others such as Ash have raised the issue of whether such events are revolutionary given their overwhelmingly peaceful and sometimes negotiated character (1990). In the vast literature on 9

10 democratization those who pay attention to the mass mobilization of publics favor the tools that are used to study revolution and other forms of mass collective action (Kuran 1991, Ekiert and Kubik 1999, Beissinger 2002) whereas those who focus on the role of elites are more likely to think in terms of the tools used to study democratic transition (Linz and Stepan 1996, Elster 1996). Although the collective action and the elite bargaining paradigms have different foci one can readily acknowledge the contribution of both perspectives to understanding events such as 1989 which contained both mass and elite dimensions. And from this perspective there is nothing that is incompatible with seeing these events as revolutionary depending on one s definition of that term. By revolution I understand the rapid, simultaneous, and fundamental transformation of a society s mechanisms of rule and economic allocation. This is irrespective of whether the means to achieve these ends are violent or non-violent, or whether the representatives of the ancient regime negotiate the transfer of power, or are chased from power. The most important sites for the revolutions of 1989 were Moscow, Warsaw, Budapest, and Berlin. The first part of the previous section established why Moscow was essential for 1989 even though its own revolutionary events would not transpire until However, with regard to Central Europe, Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisors came to a determination that their own domestic reform efforts made the control of Eastern Europe prohibitively expensive. According to Gaidar, by the late 1980s the Soviet elite was both cognizant of and felt constrained by the threat that the USSR would go bankrupt (2007, ch. 7). They could little afford to subsidize the region any longer and certainly, in their precarious economic condition, did not want to alienate western governments and bankers. Thus they decided to let their 10

11 Eastern European neighbors experiment with their own reforms. Gorbachev announced as much in his speech to the United Nations in 1998 (Brown 2009, 527). The place where reform was first transformed into revolution was Warsaw. After declaring Martial Law and crushing the public face of Solidarity in 1981, the government of Wojciech Jaruzelski found itself at an impasse. It had not fully destroyed Solidarity, which continued underground, nor was it able to effectively address the economic crisis which provoked the emergence of Solidarity in Furthermore, the country experienced two waves of wildcat strikes in the late 1980s signaling that the deteriorating economic situation was now an uncontainable political problem. Solidarity no longer had to organize strikes; they were emerging on their own. With that in mind the Polish party state invited Solidarity to Roundtable talks to discuss its re-legalization and a national program for reform. Though the Solidarity side did not expect the party state s representatives to propose the holding of competitive (albeit only in part) elections, they embraced this and the Polish Roundtable talks led to elections with substantial guarantees for the regime in June Under the terms of the roundtable the party state and its representatives were to be guaranteed a supermajority in the main chamber of the parliament, the Sejm. Elections to a newly constituted Senate were to be fully competitive. In two rounds of elections in June 1989, Solidarity won a symbolic victory, taking 99 of 100 senate seats, and every competitive seat in the Sejm. Though this should have kept the party state authorities in power, two elements in the regime the United Peasant Party, and the Democratic Party, formerly independent parties that had been forcibly incorporated into the regime in the 1940s, defected, making the formation of a Communist-led government 11

12 impossible. After protracted negotiations a coalition government of all political parties under a Solidarity Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki took office on December 29, While the ball started rolling in Poland major events were also occurring in both Hungary and East Germany. The Hungarian Communists, the most consistently reformist in the region, moved to engage the more modest opposition in their own country. These efforts also led to a Roundtable in Hungary as well as free elections in March of The most significant act of the reformists in Hungary though was a relatively innocent international gesture early in the summer of In the spring Hungary and Austria began to dismantle the fortified border between them and in June the foreign ministers of the two countries, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, cut a symbolic piece of barb wire. By August, East Germans knowing of the border, used vacations as a means to cross over into Austria en masse, abetted by the willingness of the Hungarians to turn a blind eye. Soon several hundred East Germans were camped out in the compound of the West German embassy in Prague demanding passage to the West. The echo of this exodus through Hungary had critical ramifications. An agreement was hammered out to let these East Germans pass to the West but their trains were forced to pass through East Germany for symbolic reasons. As the train carrying these people passed through East Germany, they were met by cheering crowds. These crowds helped to catalyze a regular Monday protest movement which had emerged in Leipzig and other cities that Fall. The celebration of the Fortieth Anniversary of the GDR which took place in early October was hardly a celebration. Mikhail Gorbachev who attended the commemoration purportedly told Erich Honecker the leader of the GDR -- "Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben" (He who comes too late is punished by life). What was 12

13 true of Honecker was also true of those who replaced him later that month, Gunther Schabowski and Egon Krenz. Within weeks the protest movement became extensive enough that it forced the crossing stations at the Berlin Wall when the new leaders of the GDR announced that all citizens of East Germany were free to visit the West. There ensued the largest party in the history of Germany. Within weeks the hardline governments of the remaining Warsaw pact countries collapsed. This included the replacement of Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia with Vaclav Havel after protracted demonstrations led by the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, the toppling of Ceausescu regime in Romania, and the removal of Todor Zhivkov from power in Bulgaria. Without falling into retrospective determinism, these events precipitated major changes in the nature of our world. Today, Germany is one country; Czecho-Slovakia is two; and between them the USSR and Yugoslavia are over 20 different countries. Most of East-Central Europe is part of the European Union and the NATO alliance, and the most dynamic area of the global economy is Asia. There are at least two challengers to the half century of American economic hegemony the European Union and China. All of this, and many other changes, are attributable to the impact of revolutions of And this is the subject of the next part of this reflection. The Legacies of 1989 Like all Revolutions the events of 1989 took its participants and observers by surprise. While certain political scientists claim to have predicted this would happen, this is probably not 13

14 a case of the owl of Minerva flying at dawn but a function of luck or ego. 2 One political scientist with a rather strong record of prediction, even claims in retrospect that it would have been possible to end the Cold War even earlier, at the time of Stalin s death (Bueno de Mesquita 2009, ). Despite such claims, revolutions should shock us; after all they are momentous, sudden, and unprecedented events. And if we really could predict them, they should never happen. They cause us to reevaluate the way we view the past and they change the rules by which we live. An event like 1989 has significance for our understanding of the events that preceded it, has significance as a moment in itself, and influences what comes after it. In thinking about its legacy it is useful to think about all three of these time frames and the Past Revolutions, as unexpected events, shatter some part of that which was we believe about the ancient regime. They make us aware of aspects of that discarded form of rule that we missed or misunderstood. As such, revolutions expose our misperceptions of the past and can improve understanding of those old regimes. As the French Revolution changed the world s view of the Bourbons, 1989 changes our view of Soviet-type regimes. While they may have been the most successful form of modern dictatorship, they are, for instance, not seen as an alternative to capitalism any longer. In this discussion, I will discuss how 1989 challenges our past perceptions of the state, society, and national identity in Soviet-type regimes. The State Many of us who worked on Soviet-type systems held the view that the Soviet-type state was a Leviathan (Hirszowicz 1980). And by citing Hirszowicz here I mean her work no 2 See Gaddis (1992-3) and Ray and Russett (1996) for an overview of this debate. 14

15 disrespect, for at its core is what I would consider one of the most acute observations on the nature of Soviet-type regimes that I have ever read that it was the first instance of a sovereign bureaucracy in the history of rule. Yet most of us overestimated the strength of the Soviet state. We assumed that the system of rule in the USSR had very strong reserves of legitimacy. Those of us who did fieldwork in Central Europe in the 1980s, particularly in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia knew that the systems there were in flux. In Poland the regime was decrepit, in Hungary the whole country was beginning to reorient itself to the West, and in Yugoslavia, following Tito s death, the individual national parties were pursuing their own national interests at the expense of the federation. In Central Europe, it was clear that a combination of material incentives and coercive sanctions (with an external guarantee) that kept the status quo in place, and in any number of places its status was weakening. Still at the same time, like the Polish oppositionists Kuron and Michnik who directly confronted such issues, the Soviet Union was considered invulnerable, a stable constraint to change which had to be worked around (Kuron 1978, Michnik 1976). Writing in 1976 Kuron waxed that Finlandization (domestic sovereignty combined with a pro-soviet foreign policy) was probably too much to which to aspire (Kuron 1977). Even those who shook the system, felt that the USSR was unshakeable. As late as 1989, the Polish oppositionists who would constitute the core of Solidarity-led government under Tadeusz Mazowiecki still worried about Soviet reactions (Walesa 2009). One of the reasons why many thought this was the belief that the Soviets, and if not the Soviets, the Russians in particular, supported their regime out of affinity. Given its size and strength, and the domestic stability that it seemed to have, the expectation was that it was an 15

16 effective brake on systemic change. And what was shocking was that it actually crumbled very quickly when division in the elite put restraints on its coercive capacity and economic woes led to widespread dissatisfaction. This process was particularly rapid in the non-slavic Republics (Beissinger 2002). We also thought Soviet-type states were large and encompassing states. After all, the USSR was the first national form of rule in this part of the world to establish a permanent presence at the local level (Skocpol 1979). This impression was reinforced due to the fact that the main mechanism of economic allocation was bureaucratic. Processes that were selfregulating in the West were directed by a very visible hand of the state. However, even if this state was inefficient, we also now have a sense that it was probably understaffed. The postcommunist countries that have made the most rapid progress toward liberal-democratic capitalist modernity have added bureaucrats and state capacity (O Dwyer 2006). It turns out that liberal democratic states that need to manage their market economies require states with an even greater capacity. Society under Communism Neither a Vast Conspiracy nor Homo Sovieticus While the nature of society under Soviet-type regimes was subject to different assessments at different times by different observers, there was a tendency to think of these societies as homogenous or even monolithic entities. Depending on one s perspective, societies in this part of the world were thought of as either militantly anti-communist, or as fully adapted to life under communism and thus incapable of becoming the subjects of democracy. For instance in the case of Poland, with the Solidarity trade union that claimed a membership of ten million in 1981, and widespread underground resistance both before and 16

17 after its short period of legal existence, there was the widespread idea that the party was a completely isolated and alien presence in society. In other countries where societies were more cowed by security apparatuses, we had a tendency to think of them as beset by Leninist legacies (Jowitt 1992) or populated by new Soviet men (Homo Sovieticus in Aleksandr Zinoviev s terms) keeping them docile and incapable of action (Zinoviev 1986). We even see this in the juxtaposition of terms in the title of a recent reissue of some of some of Jozef Tischner s best known works -- The Ethic of Solidarity as well as Homo Sovieticus (Tischner 2005). Reality is rarely so dichotomous. In all these societies there were complex relations between the state and society, and fluctuating levels of support for the regime. Some of the best public opinion research we have from the 1980s was conducted in Poland, the so-called Poles studies under the leadership of Wladyslaw Adamski. They show a society that is torn between strong resistance to the regime, apathy, and support for the regime (Powiorski 1995). It is important to remember that resistance movements as powerful as Solidarity had trouble winning the support of fifty percent of the population. Lech Walesa lost in the run-off round to the postcommunist candidate, Aleksander Kwasniewski, in his failed reelection bid in Furthermore, in countries that seemed resigned to authoritarianism, there were sentiments for change that remained submerged. When coercive structures failed, this became manifest. One can see this in the massive demonstrations that played a role in the end to communism in places like Czecho-Slovakia and East Germany (Kuran 1991, Karklins and 17

18 Petersen 1993). What is important to remember is that all these societies contained complex patterns of resistance and adaptive behavior. And where this adaptive behavior had positive payoffs for some groups, there was a basis of support for the regime. This explains why postcommunist parties that committed themselves to democracy and defending the losers of the transition remained important political actors after transitions to democracy. For certain parts of these societies, particularly that part of the working class that was unskilled or semi-skilled, and that part of the nomenklatura that converted its political position into private wealth, such parties offered protection. Nationalism, State, and Society The wreckage of multiethnic states in the wake of the great transformation of was the great trauma of the end of the Soviet Empire. For people in the former Yugoslavia, or the Caucuses, the postrevolutionary era has been more traumatic than any period since World War II. As a result of the bloody conflicts waged in these regions, we have come to believe that within each ethnically divided society in the region there is some sort of age-old primordial conflict that remained stifled under communism. Historically, we also know that there were periods of ethnic discord and peacefulness in the region. What became clear is that the ethnic discord that came around the time of transition was not just a product of primordial hatreds, but of legacies of communist state structures, opportunistic politicians, and their ability to harness resources. One of the great regularities of this ethnic discord has been that those groups that had access to communist-era federal state structures had an almost universal record of effectively 18

19 seceding from communist states or their successors. This was universally true in the former USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czecho-Slovakia. Here ambitious politicians, most of whom had long records of service in the communist power structure used federal structures and the power resources associated with them (e.g. bureaucracy, police forces, access to finances) to harness nationalist discord and continue in power against the will of the federal center (Beissinger 2002, Bunce 1999). Curiously, we did not spend much intellectual energy studying these sub-national governments in the Soviet period; rather we thought of them as transition belt organizations that conveyed the desires of the center to the periphery. We did not treat those who argued that nationalist discord was the potential source of dissolution of the USSR seriously enough (Amalrik 1970, d'encausse 1984). In places where there were fewer resources available to ethno-national movements, the probability for successful secession was considerably diminished. The ultimate point here is that smoldering long-term so-called primordial ethnic hatreds do not alone explain secession and ethnic violence. In the public sphere in the West our first reflex is to explain such events by reflexively explaining them on the basis of who killed whom in the past, without also understanding that other factors such as legacies of communist state structures and residual elites protecting their privileges explain a good part of it as well. The Significance of 1989 as a Moment 1989 was a revolution that broke the back of revolutionism as an ideology in Europe. It was a revolution that was conspicuously made without professional revolutionaries or a revolutionary ethos. The revolutionary tradition, which runs from the Jacobins through the Bolsheviks and their imitators on the right, including the fascists, was abandoned with a few 19

20 exceptions (again mostly in the Balkans and Caucuses). In its stead, most challengers to the old regime advocated a notion of evolutionary reform as the only legitimate way to pursue substantive change. In most places as well, the nature of the change demanded was not radical. Perhaps it can best be summarized in the slogan a return to Europe, a desire for the stability and material benefits of liberal democratic capitalist modernity mediated by welfare state protections. This approach to change grew out of the Solidarity experience in Poland. The resistance there was based on a notion of self-limiting social movements that pressed to change the system while trying to observe the external limitations on change posed by a history of Soviet intervention. Thus national revolution (the strategy of 1956) and the humanization and democratization of Leninism (the strategy of 1968) meant that the state needed to remain under the control of the communists. Non-violence and self-limitations were hallmarks of this new strategy which the Pole Adam Michnik called the new evolutionism (Michnik 1976; also see Kuron 1977). If we understand, as Leszek Kolakowski (1974) did, that the destruction of civil society was a central part of the Stalinist vision, the struggle to recreate, defend, and maintain an underground public sphere and social self-organization in a Soviet-type system by Solidarity, its predecessors, and the Solidarity underground represents more than a development in resistance strategies on the edges of the Soviet Empire, but a direct assault on the essence of the system. And its legacy in this regard has been to remind democrats worldwide of the centrality of civil society to democracy and its normative substance. This also challenges the point of view that democratization is something that originates only with a split within 20

21 authoritarian elites, a theory quite influential in the study of Southern Europe and Latin America (O Donnell and Schmitter 1986). It reminds us that one of the paths to democratization is initiated by popular pressures from below. The declaration of Martial Law in Poland seemed at first, to discredit new evolutionism as a strategy of change. These were certainly the conclusions that Gyorgy Bence in Hungary drew, and his reticence to continue with open and public resistance in Hungary led to a split in the movement there (Falk 2003, 281). But, perhaps those conclusions were premature. Solidarity survived underground where it initially grew up from the opposition of the 1970s. During the 1980s oppositionists from all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union travelled to Poland where in the words of Padraic Kenney they took Polish lessons (Kenny 2003). They learned how to organize underground, publish illicitly, use the rules of the system to defend activists, and continue to organize even when faced with repression. When change finally came in the USSR, the existence of oppositions allowed for a peaceful end to communism through roundtable negotiations. We see the continuation and institutionalization of this ethos of selflimitation and non-violence in the peaceful dismantling of Soviet regimes in much of Eastern Europe. Such large scale peaceful change was historically unprecedented. It is not to say that non-violence was invented in Eastern Europe. But 1989 was a watershed moment that built on a history of democratic peoples power movements such as the independence movement in India, the civil rights movement in the US, and the movement to overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. We see its echo in the present in the tactics used by the colored revolutions in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union. 21

22 It is important to note that 1989 was not universally non-violent. The burying of the Ceausescu regime in Romania followed the script of a classical coup d etat with dissatisfied elements from the elite and the army overthrowing the dictator and those elements in the secret police prepared to defend him. As discussed earlier, in the former Yugoslavia the pattern of federalism gave ambitious politicians the material means to pursue the divisive politics of ethno-national grievance with genocidal consequences. In certain regions of the former Soviet Union such as the Caucuses, Central Asia, and Moldova there have also been ugly violent ethnonational struggles. I should also add that while for most of Eastern Europe the legacy of 1989 has been democracy and improved living standards, this has not been universally true in the former Soviet Union, where the median result has been authoritarianism. The Legacies of 1989 Today The greatest legacy of 1989 that we still feel today is the end of the Cold War. Forty years of constant preparation for war, a good part of it under the threat of mutual annihilation came to an end. This obviously was a good thing. The end of the Cold War also meant that Europe finally ceased to be the center of the international system. The death of a bipolar world means that Europe is no longer the center of international conflict. It also meant, for a while, that we lived in a unipolar world with one superpower. That trend seems to be weakening. Curiously, the reasons for this are that the second Bush administration did not understand the lessons of 1989 for superpowers. The USSR s power was predicated by an overconcentration on military means, and its collapse was, as noted earlier, due in part to an inability to maintain the material conditions that could support such a military. The Bush administration with its decision to make an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq and to 22

23 pursue a shortsighted and unsuccessful economic policy seems to have accelerated the process of unraveling the unipolar world. The world now seems closer to a multi-polar world in which the US is still the most powerful player. The end of the Cold War has also inaugurated a much more anarchic world. The Cold War for all its waste and constant threat of nuclear annihilation meant that disorder could be used by one side to press its advantage over the other. Such attempts to exploit disorder were met with counter-pressures. However, in many parts of the world today disorder represents a threat to no-one but the inhabitants of the locality that falls into anarchy. It is for this reason that we live in an age of failed states. In the past it may have been in the interest of the US or USSR to prop up a dictator to prevent the other from gaining a strategic advantage in one corner of the world or another. Today, no power has an interest in propping up some kleptocrat who will commit substantial human rights violations. Disorder is preferable to difficult questions about unpalatable allies. The end of Leninism has meant a weakening of the left in a global sense. Revolutionary movements in the developing world have no easy place to turn for material support. Furthermore, the alternatives to capitalism seem exhausted. Bureaucracy has proved to be no match for markets as the primary mechanism of economic allocation. The end of Leninism does not mean that the world is any less dangerous a place. However, the most aggressive political forces in this day and age seem to lie more on the right than the left. The propensity to violence seems much stronger on that side of the political spectrum, and most disconcertingly often include the trappings of some sort of religious 23

24 justification. This is not confined to Islam, though it seems more prominent in the Islamic world at this moment. We also see a revival of xenophobic parties across Eastern and Central Europe, though few seem to have staying power. In the wake of the current economic crisis, support for this political tendency seems to be growing. In the 2009 elections in Bulgaria, the National Union Ataka (Attack), won nine percent of the vote and became the fourth largest party in the legislature (21 out of 240 MPs). While not in the cabinet it supports the current center-right government. In other places, political parties now gain support despite channeling elements of the interwar fascist past. One recent example is Jobbik, a new party in Hungary, which conspicuously uses the symbols of the Arrow Cross, a small Hungarian party put in power by the Nazis late during WWII. Its rise may not be so much an issue of an exogenous revival of arrow cross ideology, but disgust at the government of former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany and the powerful impact of the international financial crisis on Hungary. It took fifteen percent of the vote in the 2009 elections to the European parliament, and continues to poll third on a consistent basis for the upcoming general elections in Another critical development that accompanied the death of Leninism lies in the world of economic ideas. This, by no means, is meant as a lamentation of the death of Leninism, but with the collapse of Leninism, a kind of market utopianism became the economic ideology of the moment. There was widespread belief that the market was a comprehensive, unbiased, efficient, and just solution to all allocative decisions. It was this unbridled faith in the power of the market that served as an ideology for under-regulated financial markets and the meltdown 24

25 of the global financial system. The lesson of the Cold War should have been that embedded Keynesianism and provision of welfare states that mitigated market failures under capitalism was the thing that defeated and discredited Leninism. This was lost in the post-1989 euphoria. The fact that conservatives in Western Europe understood this and took it to heart helps to explain why even in the face of the present financial crisis, social democracy seems to be able to gain little traction. Conclusion Our current economic mess by no means obviates the spectacular nature of the events of 1989 as a liberating experience for the people of Eastern Europe. At the same time, it provides a lesson to us in the West that should be sobering. The triumphalism of the events of 1989 led to a market utopianism in economics and a renewed belief in martial invincibility in the United States, which in retrospect looks quite ill-considered. It is important to understand that it was the soft power of the West and the superiority of its socio-economic system, which not only produced a greater level of wealth, but also a greater level of justice that is responsible for a peaceful end to the Cold War. At the same time it is important to realize that the end of the Cold War did not inevitably lead us to this juncture. Politicians made choices under the conditions that they confronted. But quite often, by drawing simple and convenient lessons that accorded with their political preferences, they bring about outcomes sorely at odds with their intentions. The situation that we find ourselves in will constitute the first true test of whether the new democracies and market economies of Eastern and Central Europe have the wherewithal to sustain themselves through an era of economic crisis. In the interwar era, the severe economic 25

26 environment helped to destroy the fledgling democracies of the region, and did much to discredit democracy globally. Hopefully, the new institutions constructed over the last twenty years are made of sterner stuff. 26

27 References Amalrik, Andrei Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? New York, Harper and Row. Ash, Timothy Garton The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. New York, Random House. Bauman, Zygmunt A Revolution in the Theory of Revolutions? International Political Science Review 15: Beissinger, Mark R Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Bernhard, Michael The Origins of Democratization in Poland: Workers, Intellectuals and Oppositional Politics, New York, Columbia University Press. Bialer, Seweryn The Soviet Paradox. New York, Alfred A. Knopf. Brown, Archie The Rise and Fall of Communism. New York, Harper Collins. Bunce, Valerie Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future. New York, Random House. d'encausse, Helene Carrere Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republic in Revolt. New York, Harper Collins. 27