‘Bliss was it in that Dawn’ … or was it?

Paul Betts rightly observes that 1989 ‘isn’t what it used to be’.1 His recent essay ‘1989 at Thirty’ captures the melancholy many observers feel as they recall what once seemed the exhilarating developments that saw the communist regimes in eastern Europe collapse at the end of the 1980s, epitomized in the media by the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Betts’s analysis seeks out the roots of populist nationalism in the national energies that surfaced in and after 1989. He writes that ‘construing recent developments in central Europe as simply an anti-1989 backlash does not get us very far, not least because the unrest of 1989 carried within it the seeds of illiberalism as well’.2 Well, it certainly carried within it the seeds of the neo-liberalism advancing in both West and East in the 1980s and 1990s, and Betts acknowledges how that development has been documented by Philipp Ther’s recent book Europe since 1989.3 But he further asserts that the current nationalism and populism is more than a revolt against the intervening neo-liberalism. With our ever-growing chronological distance, we can now perceive that potentially xenophobic tendencies tainted the transformations of 1989 from the outset. This powerful claim rests on two underlying arguments. The first is that the events of 1989 in eastern Europe should be viewed in the broad context of a revival of nationalism, manifested in recent years by Viktor Orbán’s programme of ‘illiberal democracy’ for Hungary, the aspirations of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, and the rise of the Alliance for Germany and of leaders such as Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini. It was also evident in the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s, and is demonstrated today by Portuguese and Greek laments that the revolutions of the 1970s have been betrayed, as well by the revival of Catalan nationalism. We forget, Betts points out, that 1989 did not merely let east central Europe join the West; it also aborted, he claims, a socialist internationalism that had produced a rich texture of ties with the global South. I am less certain about the importance of this claim: so many of these connections consisted of state-sponsored tours and conferences (curated today by the German political party foundations). Even the suppression of the Arab Spring of 2011 allegedly reveals this disappointing upshot of radical renewal. (I am also less certain that the developments in Egypt or predominantly Muslim societies, with their deep intra-religious divisions, can be readily integrated into Betts’s model, but would defer to scholars of the region.) Related to this reassertion of nationalism, space for which was created by the decline of the Soviet imperial grip, is the subsequent sense of disillusion with the halfway transformations of 1989, when communist leaders who saw the wind shifting joined opportunist winners in what, according to Betts, Orbán contemptuously viewed as a ‘“red and pink” stitch-up between communist and post-communist elites’ for a mutually profitable settlement.4 Of course, the East Germans probably had less scope for post-communist institutional creativity as they were soon absorbed into the pre-existing Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) without a constitutional convention, and their state-owned industries were turned over, whether in pre-existing productive units or as fragmented assets, to West German proprietors via an interim Treuhandanstalt, or national holding company. To be sure, this Velvet Anschluss was what a plurality of East Germans wanted once Chancellor Kohl had guaranteed the substantial preservation of middle-class savings by means of a one-to-one currency conversion rate.5 As a reading of political moods by an immensely sensitive historian of private as well as public life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), Paul Betts’s re-evaluation of 1989 commands respect. He has provided a bold new interpretative scheme for placing the transition in a historical framework lasting to the present day at least from the 1980s: an ambivalent transformation that we believed had been a revolution on behalf of liberty formed part of a global reassertion of ethno-nationalism and a co-optation of emancipatory hopes by old and new elites. And with each ever more dampened decennial commemoration of 1989, the worm in the apple has become more evident. Let me acknowledge the scope of the argument, but also express my uneasiness with its broad conclusions, and not merely because as a witness I partook of the ‘bliss was it to be alive’ mood of 1989–90. Like Betts, I agree that the readings of ‘the end of history’, or the renewed ‘third wave’ of democratization, were short-sighted celebrations.6 Nonetheless, I think we have to be very careful about how we relate the populist tendencies of the past decade, including the backlash against migration, to the developments of 1989. I agree with Betts in viewing the events of 1989 thirty years after with a tincture of disillusion, but I would suggest other grounds for current feelings of disappointment. Consider the longer and more encompassing history that Betts provides, some of it cheering, much of it sobering: southern Europe’s liberation from military-inspired dictatorship in Portugal, Spain and Greece in the 1970s, to which might be added the return of democracy to Chile, Argentina and Brazil in the 1980s; all to be contrasted with ‘the Chinese solution’ of June 1989, when the regime crushed the Tiananmen demonstrations by force. At the time, the Iranian Revolution of 1978–9 also seemed a moment of emancipation. We might usefully extend the list to the end of Apartheid in the mid 1990s. In short, the end of the twentieth century witnessed a decade in which authoritarian, military-backed regimes, with the exception of China, seemed to recoil from using the military and police power at their disposal to crush the percolating demands for human rights. The forces of order in the European socialist countries divided between an older generation, who had constructed these repressive regimes and might have been prepared to crack down once again, and their juniors, along with some notable intellectual founders, who came to believe that the authoritarian control exerted hitherto was a dead end. How and why the would-be reformers came to that conclusion is a history still to be written; somehow it involved a realization that the economies and societies evolving out of the simpler class divisions that seemed so paramount in earlier decades required a different form of political management. As he considers eastern Europe, Betts rightly invokes the more spontaneous performative moments such as those celebrated by Padraic Kenney’s histories and Timothy Garton Ash’s reportage from The Magic Lantern. As his sober contemporary perspective suggests, however, carnival is hard to sustain, indeed represents a liminal state (theorized so persuasively by the late Victor Turner) and always fated to lose its effervescence.7 Betts insists further on the importance of John Paul II’s assertiveness in Poland and elsewhere as a factor in the crumbling of communist rule. How to measure that impact is difficult, of course; it was certainly important for Poland, but probably less decisive in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the Church played less of a political role. But in making the case for the continuities of 1989 and 2019, Betts is right to signal the importance of popular Catholicism. Betts acknowledges that the very real and courageous demonstrations in Leipzig and elsewhere really did push the regimes to breaking point. The demonstrations did so, of course, because Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was no longer willing to enforce Communist Party rule in eastern Europe, as Stalin’s successors had done in East Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Neither did the Kremlin claim the option of leaving the possibility of intervention menacingly ambiguous as it had with respect to Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski claimed he must impose martial law lest the Russians take charge.8 But I believe that the protests in the streets also proved critical because a significant portion of the ruling Politburos in each country realized that what had been Brezhnev’s legacy had intellectually and morally bankrupted the late communist vision for state socialism. Gorbachev’s own initiatives for glasnost and perestroika confirmed this decay. The result was that, apart from the older generation of party leaders, there was little stomach for repression. Sidelining the rigid ageing communist hold-overs was important. Yet the upshot was not foreordained. Peaceful demonstrations might easily have slipped out of control. Panicked police recruits might have used their weapons against the crowds. A renewed wave of repression was possible, although it would likely not have lasted long; society had changed too much. It was too differentiated to fit into the old Marxist categories of proletarian or worker and bourgeois, even the newer versions involving technical workers and managers.9 In the years immediately after 1989, many Western voices sought to play down the uprisings of 1989, using such minimizing terms as ‘implosion’ and Wende (originally applied to the conservative turn away from the Social Democratic Party in the FRG of the early 1980s). God forbid politics should take place in the streets! But in fact it did: the process of 1989 involved (as do most serious revolutionary transformations) both regime fecklessness when confronted with a late-life crisis (often fiscal) and crowd pressure from a hitherto passive populace, which had become aware that it might be able to change the shabby and repressive political conditions it was living under. How and when that conjunction catches fire is always contingent, and requires historical reconstruction as well as sociological analysis. Economic developments were critical in creating the sense that changes were necessary even among Communist Party leaders in Moscow and Budapest and increasingly in East Berlin. The wealth of the FRG remained a reproach to the countries of the socialist bloc even as Western credits facilitated the ‘Goulash Communism’ of the Hungarian leader János Kádár and the similar consumer concessions manipulated by the Polish leader Edward Gierek after suppression of the labour unrest in 1970. The CDU–CSU leadership in West Germany (including Franz Josef Strauss) extended credits strategically to the GDR after 1982. State indebtedness grew after 1970, and it alarmed the east European leadership. Had they been capitalist policy makers they might have been less alarmed. The East German external debt in 1989 was about 13 per cent of gross domestic product; the Greek external debt in 2016 was close to 200 per cent of GDP. But the members of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have had less compunction about curbing indebtedness through austerity, unemployment and shutting down inefficient and polluting industries than did the communist policy makers whose policies incurred recurrent shortages but sustained high, if less productive, employment.10 They had learned by the 1970s that price rises or efforts to extract longer working hours risked provoking renewed public protest and unrest. The communist countries originally enjoyed one great asset in the 1970s: cheap Soviet oil that was priced below the world-market levels that OPEC price increases raised so sharply in 1974. But this differential was a waning asset by the 1980s, and while Comecon sought to mutualize the indebtedness of socialist states, increasingly all its members needed access to Western credit to rule their publics.11 One dimension I should add to Paul Betts’s article is the virtual disappearance of the idea of civil society in recent discussions of the transition. It plays little role in his account, and that is logical in so far as he seeks to narrate the disillusionments after 1989. Still, its absence is evidence perhaps of one of the great moral changes of intervening years. The emergence of the forces of civil society became critical to earlier interpretations of the fall of communism. The transformations testified to the fact that labour unions (in Poland), the churches and peace movements (based on the Protestant churches in the GDR), and underground intellectuals were liberating themselves from bureaucratic state socialist control. Civil society was celebrated and theorized; it became the darling concept for prising funding from Western foundations (often imitative in their efforts to midwife change), whether for direct support of east European organizations or for research projects on the part of social scientists. The forces of civil society allegedly found expression in the round tables that helped to ensure a peaceful transformation in Poland (from 1988 on), in East Germany (in the winter of 1989) and in Czechoslovakia in the same period. The opposition groups took the names Civic Forum (in the Czech transition) and New Forum (in the waning GDR). Trade unions, of course, had emerged as vital actors in the Polish thrust for democratization after 1980, and the synthesis of labour activists and the intellectuals who celebrated their role in the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) gave rise to an exhilarating sense that the fusion of intellectuals and masses outside normal politics could shape the Polish future. In the GDR, organized initiatives outside government control emerged later and focused their efforts on issues that did not directly challenge the party state. There was no union movement that intellectuals could guide; old heavy industry was strongly controlled and the Socialist Unity Party organized Kampfgruppen, or labour militias, within factories. The Berlin uprising in 1953 was a generation earlier, and took place before the Wall had been erected, whereas in Poland the conflicts of 1970 remained a more immediate memory. Instead of a fusion of workers and intellectuals, in the GDR the opposition incubated in a congeries of cells: the peace movement that worked with Protestant ministers, or the environmental activists who published underground broadsheets, or the writers and novelists who rattled the cages of the party’s official literary guild. I do not mean to denigrate these protesters — many were brave (there were always informers, after all) and critical — but they did not have the collective leverage that had existed in Poland. The presence of the FRG gave them a safety valve for their work and a channel of communication with the West. They produced a literary œuvre in which a wistfulness and irony prevailed. The great utopian hopes invested in civil society dissipated quickly after the events of 1989–90. Transition is hardly a state to sustain collective enthusiasm. In Poland the union of forces that made Solidarność so exciting quickly fell apart as the association made itself into a political party. Betts’s evocation of the role of John Paul II and the strength of popular Catholicism helps us to make sense of the potential for populist Catholicism that has entrenched itself in the last decade. In the elections for the last Volkskammer (legislature) of the GDR in the spring of 1990, the parties that were organized as cousins of the parties in the FRG overwhelmed the New Forum, and with the promise of unification on the horizon, including the subsidies that had been pledged to preserve East German savings, the briefly entertained alternative of a confederally reunited Germany quickly dissipated, as did the ebullience of the previous autumn. In Czechoslovakia the Civic Forum soon dissolved, and the latent national divisions preoccupied much reformist energy. Velvet Revolution was soon succeeded by Velvet Divorce. Throughout eastern Europe, currents that had briefly united within the movements of opposition to the communist regimes soon divided, certainly over the role of the Church in Poland, over the question of how severely to sanction earlier collaboration with the secret police (an issue that particularly preoccupied the Czech Republic and united Germany), and also over the appropriate economic policies to adopt in the face of the legacies of a hyper-industrial state socialism. ‘Civil society’ as it was envisaged in the heady years after 1990 remains a vague and feel-good descriptor for the interest group articulation of most modern society.12 But history moves on: the political parties that reclaimed their role as the governing institutions of modern society have slipped into crisis in their turn, as the very nationalistic forces that Betts describes cut across their constituencies, once, but no longer, arrayed into a more consistent social democratic Left and pro-capitalist Right. The irony was that the eastern states and economies achieved autonomy just as the nostrums of neo-liberalism had been triumphing in Washington and London. It was hard in that ideological climate to suggest alternatives to the privatization and fire sale of rusty East German industrial assets in the era of reunification, while in Prague and Warsaw the rigorous alignment with capitalist solutions also beckoned. Václav Havel, ensconced in the president’s Hrad (Castle), might command the moral high ground, but the prime minister, Václav Klaus, soon controlled policy. Leszek Balcerowicz, as Polish finance minister, pushed through a rapid liberalization of the Polish economy under the slogan of ‘shock therapy’. In the context of the neo-liberal Western context, these policies proved successful in Poland, the Czech lands and emerging Slovakia. Along with Hungary, the Slovak economy has become a vibrant maquiladora for German manufacturers, probably at the cost of the former East Germans, whose relative salaries, raised closer to West German levels for political reasons, may have helped to discourage the economic modernization of the eastern Länder.13 Did these policies contribute to the backlash against liberal values? The intervening economic crisis that began in 2008 makes it hard to determine. They may well have undermined a sense of social solidarity: a deficit that populist parties and strongmen seek to fill with a heightened nationalism and xenophobia. The upheavals in the late 1980s and 1990s were not, after all, the only transition under way. What we summarize as globalization with the related re-emergence of China in the world economy was also in full swing; the racial hierarchies of the United States and South Africa were being challenged; centuries of gender disparities were crumbling all at the same time. The continuing challenge for historians and social scientists will be to integrate all these transitions into a coherent history of global transformation since the 1970s and 1980s. All in all, to end on a personal note, despite the melancholy, I think that the transformations in eastern Europe were a great and hopeful achievement. We observers made the mistake, perhaps, of thinking that the utopian liminal sense of liberation might prevail against the more permanent bureaucratic structures that West and East had shared. I believe that the socio-economic changes of the neo-liberal epoch, including the costly world recession after 2008, need to be fundamentally integrated into any story of nationalist revival, whether as disillusion with the results of 1989 or as a longer-term phenomenon. Paul Betts is right to insist, though: the historian must always hold in view both the long term and the sudden transformation, the tectonic shifts as well as the earthquake. Footnotes 1 Paul Betts, ‘1989 at Thirty: A Recast Legacy’, Past and Present, no. 244 (Aug. 2019), 271. 2 Ibid., 272. 3 Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989: A History, trans. Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller (Princeton, 2018). 4 Betts, ‘1989 at Thirty’, 294 and n. 63. 5 On the legal issues (unification by means of a new constitutional assembly or by simple inclusion of the East German Länder into an enlarged FRG), see Peter E. Quint, ‘The Constitutional Law of German Unification’, Maryland Law Review, l, 3 (1991). For an approving perspective on the Treuhandanstalt, see Wolfram Fischer, Herbert Hax and Hans Karl Schneider (eds.), Treuhandanstalt: The Impossible Challenge (Berlin, 1996). Among the recent critiques, see Klaus Behling, Die Treuhand: wie eine Behörde ein ganzes Land abschaffte (Berlin, 2015); Jörg Roesler, War das Vorgehen der Treuhand alternativlos? Die Antwort des Wirtschaftshistorikers (Berlin, 2019). 6 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992); Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, 1991). The works (and the authors) were subtler, however, than their caricatured reputation. 7 Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989 (Princeton, 2003); Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York, 1990); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY, 1966). 8 For a narrative, see Vojtech Mastny, The Soviet Non-Invasion of Poland in 1980/81 and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC, 1998). 9 I tried to sketch these factors in Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, 1997). 10 For the outstanding analysis, see János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Oxford, 1992). 11 A massive literature exists on the economic difficulties of late socialism: see Maier, Dissolution, ch. 2, with references at 351–67; Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton, 1996); André Steiner, Von Plan zu Plan: eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Munich, 2004). 12 For a modulated view on the achievements of civil society, see Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989–1993 (Ann Arbor, 1999). The most developed theoretical discussion perhaps was Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). 13 For the east European economic record since 1989, see Gérard Roland (ed.), Economies in Transition: The Long-Run View (Basingstoke, 2012); Ther, Europe since 1989. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2020 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)