Why was the year 1989 one of the most momentous in the twentieth century

These days 1989 isn’t what it used to be. Not so long ago the wildfire revolutions that swept across eastern Europe during that momentous year were routinely celebrated as the grand victory of liberal democracy over Soviet-style communism. Tribute was paid to what dazzled participants and scholars alike reverently designated the annus mirabilis, or ‘year of miracles’. That the central European uprisings of 1989 were bookended by the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square in early June and the live televised execution of the Ceauşescus on Christmas Day helped to lend these ‘velvet revolutions’ an improbable and even otherworldly glow. The Red Army occupation of eastern Europe that had lasted for two generations came to an end abruptly, unexpectedly and peacefully, doubly signalling the conclusion of the Cold War and the Second World War. Viewed more widely, 1989 also marked the continental foreclosure of the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as the Versailles order created two years later, all the while stirring the ghosts of 1789 and 1848 to boot. The upheavals of 1989 were often seen (especially in France) as the greatest bicentennial paean to the French Revolution being celebrated that summer, and there was much talk that autumn that 1989 was a late twentieth-century version of the ‘springtime of nations’ in central Europe in 1848. Francis Fukuyama’s bestseller The End of History and the Last Man (1992) has provoked strong criticism about the way in which he trumpeted 1989 as the world-historical triumph of liberalism over its political rivals ever since its publication, even more so after 9/11, but his prediction about the end of history has come true in one sense: 1989 continues to serve as the chronological finish line of most university courses and historical interpretations of twentieth-century Europe.1

That may not be so surprising, yet we have now reached a point in which the post-Cold War era (one that still escapes a descriptive label) is nearly a third of a century old. The absence of the Berlin Wall (twenty-nine years) has now surpassed the actual presence (twenty-eight years) of the ugly divider of a city, country and continent. This in itself should give cause for reflection, but recent developments in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere on the continent — which in various ways all invoked 1989, either as inspiration or as negative foil — behove us to reconsider the effects of that fateful year in central Europe from a different perspective. The rise of xenophobia, resurgent populist politics on both the radical right and the left, as well as the spread of ‘illiberal democracy’ across Europe, the United States and elsewhere, have predictably generated great alarm. Some have drawn comparisons with the 1930s or the period just before the outbreak of the First World War for historical perspective and moral bearing. However one judges the validity of these analogies, it’s the connection of these more recent events to 1989 that deserves renewed attention. Plenty of commentary on the comeback of authoritarian anti-liberalism in central Europe has claimed that we are witnessing a kind of ‘return of the repressed’, a dangerous repudiation of the golden principles of 1989 three decades after the uprisings. But 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. With distance the inheritance of the ‘revolutionary autumn’ appears more mixed and precarious, and much harder to classify, than it once was. Strong political crosswinds emanating from Warsaw, Budapest and Berlin all but assure that the thirtieth anniversary of 1989 will be quite different from the more upbeat retrospectives in 1999 and 2009.

Since the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Cold War in central Europe in 2009, Europe has changed dramatically. The openness of frontiers and the free flow of ideas and peoples that for many came to symbolize the very meaning of 1989 have met stiff resistance by new regimes in central Europe. Recent years have witnessed the erection of over 1,200 kilometres of fences and new borders in eastern and south-eastern Europe, mostly in reaction to the refugee crisis that started in 2015. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has gone so far as to say that the refugee crisis has become ‘Europe’s 9/11’ in terms of the way in which it has violently unsettled the once seemingly unassailable political order and liberal values of the European Union (EU). Migration is the ‘new revolution’ that departs from classic twentieth-century revolutions of the masses in being a more ‘exit-driven revolution’ of individuals and families. More important for Krastev, however, is the way in which the refugee crisis has transformed issues of rights and economics into a new security discourse. For many eastern Europeans, elitist cosmopolitan values of free movement are seen as a threat, not a source of identity. Open borders, long proclaimed by 1989ers as the expression of freedom and human rights, are now identified as the very causes of insecurity.

The same even goes for liberal democracy more generally. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has made clear that democracy itself is dangerous and destabilizing, and the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has not been shy in asserting that ‘A democracy is not necessarily liberal. Just because something is not liberal, it can still be a democracy’. What we are experiencing, Krastev continues, is a virulent renationalization of politics across the old East–West divide, one that is leading to a new ‘browning’ of European society, in terms of both immigrant skin colour and neo-fascist sympathies. The democratic revolution of 1989 has been followed by a demographic counter-revolution against the openness of 1989. In 2017 Timothy Garton Ash was one of the first to call these developments an ‘anti-liberal counter-revolution’, and other commentators have elaborated on this ‘counter-revolution’ as the new face of contemporary European politics more generally.2 Back in the 1990s Tony Judt and Vladimir Tismăneanu voiced concerns about the crumbling of the long-nurtured dream of European unity in the face of rising ‘post-communist populism’ and ‘velvet counterrevolutions’. But I would argue recent attempts to characterize these new impulses as simply an oedipal rejection of a liberal 1989 are misleading, since many contradictory elements were present in 1989 from the beginning.3

To be clear, there was little love lost for the range of sclerotic dictatorial communist regimes that lorded over eastern Europe for two generations. Even the most diehard romanticists of the bad old days before 1989 tend to pine for their former socialist societies, not their states, usually in the form of rosy recollections of plucky everyday solidarity within local communities faced with the state’s mismanaged material resources and consumer bottlenecks. Like all revolutions, 1989 brought in its train a mixed bag of dreams and disappointments, stark ruptures and stubborn continuities. But its legacy has largely been written as a bright story of liberalism triumphant, with comparatively less attention towards some of the grey and even darker tones of the inheritance.

At this point it may be worth recalling the chaos of 1989. The topsy-turvy quality of political life that year brought electricians and dissident playwrights to power, and saw revolution hatched in the unlikely venues of folk-music festivals (Estonia), Baltic shipyards (Poland), underground theatres (Czechoslovakia) and church-led candlelit processions (East Germany). Padraic Kenney’s pioneering Carnival of Revolution (2002) best captures the rip tide of grassroots events and cultural happenings across central Europe that both created and reflected this exhilarating sense of political possibility. The proliferation of these small groups of activists, which included feminists, peaceniks and artists, played a key role in helping to up-end what not long before looked like formidable state fortresses.4 The power of these movements in part lay in the fact that they were often leaderless, at least outside Poland, testifying to the effects of people power in a unique moment of suspended political order. But just because we know how it all turned out shouldn’t blind us to the fear and danger palpable at the time.

In this respect 1989 was a tale of two 4 Junes, the first in Beijing and the second in Warsaw. Chinese students from Beijing had camped out in Tiananmen Square since April, accompanied by makeshift placards and a small rendition of the Statue of Liberty. Student leaders such as Wang Dan were apparently inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement and round-table discussions with the government a few months before, and directed most of their grievances against Chinese state corruption on various levels. On 4 June the Beijing authorities grew impatient with the defiant protesters, and ordered the army to attack. Although it is still difficult to obtain precise figures, standard estimates put the death toll somewhere between several hundred and several thousand, with those jailed estimated at several thousand. The rough imposition of order by the Chinese government at Tiananmen Square drove home to non-participants the state’s uncompromising stance towards public agitation, marking the first rollback of the democratization process under communism initiated by Gorbachev’s reforms. That most of the demonstrators had gathered to protest party malfeasance rather than calling for democracy (despite Western media coverage to the contrary) underscored that this was first and foremost a national struggle, with unclear application to other regimes and regions around the world. Yet the message was plain that Gorbachev-style glasnost would not be tolerated in the People’s Republic.5 By this time it had become axiomatic within the Chinese governing circles that Gorbachev’s twin-pronged reform programme of glasnost and perestroika was a welcome initiative, but mistakenly had been introduced in the wrong sequence. For the Chinese Communist Party, reforms (as started under Deng Xiaoping) must first begin with economic restructuring, gradually followed by a tightly controlled policy of openness, which is still reigning orthodoxy. This containment of democracy met with strong criticism among eastern European citizens, giving rise to demonstrations of solidarity with Chinese protesters in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest.6 The Chinese crackdown accelerated discussions between the Hungarian government and opposition round table that June, turning the reburial on 16 June of the deposed prime minister Imre Nagy (removed from office in 1956 and executed in 1958) into a massive political rally of radical reform in its own right.7

The Beijing version of 4 June served as a fearsome antipode to Warsaw’s 4 June. As it happened, 4 June was election day in the Polish lower house of parliament, the Sejm, and the Polish senate, whose outcome was nothing short of shocking. Of the 161 seats (35 per cent of all seats) in play in the Sejm election, Solidarity candidates won them all; Solidarity also swept ninety-nine of a hundred seats in the senate. Even if only 62 per cent of the electorate voted that day, those Polish voters who did resoundingly cast severe judgement on their communist government for the first time in two generations. Elation soon turned to trepidation, as there was mounting anxiety among Solidarity members that the election results would not be permitted to stand. Newly elected Solidarity members of parliament actually conspired to cast the deciding vote in favour of the beleaguered Communist Party leader, General Jaruzelski, in the name of managed transition. The shock of the new was hardly restricted to the electoral result. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who was installed as the new prime minister of the first non-communist government in eastern Europe since 1945, was so overwhelmed by the improbability of the dizzying turn of events that he fainted during the swearing-in ceremony on 24 August 1989.

Fear and confusion were also etched on the faces of those brave Leipzigers who took to the streets in the Monday marches in September and early October, long before it was at all clear that the marches would eventually lead to the undoing of the state itself. The only known set of photographs chronicling budding Leipzig civic courage, Wolfgang Schneider’s DemoTageBuch (1990), records the protesters skittishly running from police water cannons and nervously looking up at newly installed police surveillance cameras mounted on walls as ominous emblems of stepped-up state security. In those comparatively small early marches there were no placards on hand, lest the demonstrators could be easily identified by Stasi camera surveillance and police on the ground. Song was the preferred mode of collective engagement, and the tunes of choice were ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘The Internationale’, combining elements of both resistance traditions: the Church and the proletariat. There are very few photographs of the events of 1989 anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, outside Poland and Hungary, pointing to the palpable danger of documenting the changes around them in an atmosphere of profound uncertainty. In the anticipated showdown of 9 October in Leipzig, the Stasi was deployed along the parade route armed with water cannon, tear-gas and live ammunition, during which instructions were supposedly given to local hospitals to keep extra doctors and fresh supplies of blood plasma on hand in anticipation of a serious clash with citizens. Apprehension was rife that the general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, Erich Honecker, would opt for a ‘Chinese solution’, in reference to Beijing’s brutal suppression of Chinese demonstrators three months before.8 This was hardly unfounded paranoia: on the day after the Tiananmen Square debacle, the official newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Neues Deutschland, warned that Beijing’s crackdown was a necessary response to the ‘counter-revolutionary uprising of an extreme minority’.9 And just before the planned protest on 9 October, the Leipziger Volkszeitung darkly intimated that ‘law and order would be restored once and for all’, by use of force if necessary.10 It was only when the demonstrations swelled in size and confidence that people began to document the moment in photography; the shift from Leipzig to Berlin in November 1989 as the telegenic focal point of German revolution marked the media transition from clandestine Leipzig photographs to international wall-to-wall television coverage.11 The point was that the 1989 revolution, at least in its key early phase, was not televised, let alone photographed.

Another indication of the fear and incomprehensibility of events at the time was the cutting of a hole in the Iron Curtain by Austrian and Hungarian diplomats on 2 May 1989 in a heavily forested border area between the two countries. The event received wide coverage in the West, and was spread by word of mouth across eastern Europe. Significantly, it was a full two months later before ordinary people dared to traverse the opening. Most of the initial chancers were ordinary East Germans on their August holiday in the area, who seized the opportunity to stream through the porous border en route to West German embassies in Vienna and Budapest so as to apply for political asylum. The crowds of East Germans demanding entry to the embassies provided some of the most memorable images of the demographic haemorrhaging of the East German state and the general breakdown of order across central Europe. Yet the delay reflected the slow and hesitant realization among ordinary citizens about the actual meaning of this diplomatic and literal perforation in the long impregnable Cold War order.12

It is also worth recalling other sentiments of the immediate period. For starters, the main concern of commentators during the heady days of autumn 1989 was less fist-pumping triumphalism about the collapse of central European communism than real disquiet about the unsettled status of Europe freed from its long-familiar Cold War confines. Policy makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain had learned to love not only the bomb, but the Berlin Wall. The French Nobel Prize writer François Mauriac’s famous comment that ‘I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them’ was emblematic of a decades-long perception across the Iron Curtain that a divided Germany was the price to pay for peace in Europe. By the autumn of 1989 things seemed in dangerous flux, and the future role of a new Germany at the centre of Europe preoccupied the minds of the international community, even if Reunification was still almost a year away. In 1989 the map of Europe was splintering into smaller pieces as the first step in the dissolution of the Soviet empire, one that would find its tragicomic denouement in Gorbachev’s final television address on 25 December 1991, in which he unceremoniously announced the end of the Soviet Union and handed the keys to the Kremlin to his rival Boris Yeltsin. Ironically, it was Stalin who emerged as the guardian of the Versailles order after the Second World War, as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia were restored after being dismantled under Hitler;13 but in 1989 the upheavals up-ended Stalin’s map of eastern Europe for good, as the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia’s ‘velvet divorce’ were further instances of early post-Cold War state disintegration, followed by the full dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The fracturing of the map of central, south-eastern and eastern Europe was accompanied by the consolidation and growth of one country at the heart of the continent, Germany. It is easy to forget just how common the anxieties of a Fourth Reich were at the time, and there was a huge amount of soul-searching and hand-wringing about the trustworthiness of the ‘German character’ given the country’s bloody history.14 The ‘orientalist’ discussion about Germany and Germans revealed the extent to which the breaching of the Berlin Wall conjured up the spectre of the Second World War, drawing attention to the ways in which the Cold War had literally immobilized many of these deep concerns in Cold War concrete. Now worries about the comeback of the Germans were ubiquitous, as fears of German revanchism and the resumed dominance of the core of Europe, and possibly more, were the stuff of daily discourse. Günter Grass’s famous ‘ohne mich’ (‘count me out’) condemnation of prospective German Reunification on the grounds that historically unified Germany had only brought disaster for Germany, Europe and the wider world during the hothouse period of 1871–1945 was shared by many. Concern with the German legacy of 1871, 1914 and 1939 (to say nothing of 1933) was hardly limited to the West German left, and became a common refrain among Europeans across the Cold War divide. More reassuring voices entered the debate too, but even these were put in relation to the Second World War, perhaps best noted in Simone Weil’s famous comment in 1990 that the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the coming of German Reunification finally meant that ‘la guerre est finie’.15 So whereas many commentators later interpreted 1989’s significance in terms of spelling the end of the Cold War, it was 1989’s intimate relation to the Second World War — for perpetrator and victim countries alike — that animated European discussion at the time.

For some it may be surprising that eastern Europeans have exhibited little interest in commemorating the transition moments of 1989. The Czechs still celebrate 17 November as a national day, and of course the Germans have made the anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, 9 November, a national holiday. That 9 November also happens to be the day of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich (1923) and Kristallnacht (1938) has rendered any commemoration of that day a laden and solemn affair. By contrast, the Hungarians do not recognize any date or event in 1989. The same goes for Poland, whose monumental election of 4 June 1989 still goes uncommemorated. Underscoring the national indifference towards any retrospective celebrations is the fact that the biggest ten-year anniversary of the victory of Polish Solidarity in 1999 didn’t even take place in Poland; instead, the once lionized heroes of Solidarność assembled at a conference at the University of Michigan to discuss the historical significance of what they achieved.16 By the same token, there are no regional or transnational events to remember the ‘velvet revolutions’ collectively, driving home the point that these were national revolutions first and foremost, with ambivalent legacies for the next generation. The result is that the events in Berlin on 9 November tend to stand in for the collective story of half a continent in uprising that year.

In the international press, the major anniversaries of 1989 provided some pretext to reflect on what has changed in Germany and central Europe. Interestingly, the fifth anniversary of 1989 was mostly taken up with articles about the fallout of the failures of German Reunification culturally, in particular that the hoped-for ‘psychological melding’ of East and West Germans was not working.17 The physical Wall may have been dismantled, so journalists reported, but the more persistent ‘Wall in people’s heads’ very much persisted.18 The sluggish rate of change peppered the coverage, though American outlets like the Wall Street Journal lauded the ongoing transition to capitalism from communism as akin to moving to a ‘natural state from an unnatural one’; the French press was most cautious about the overall balance sheet for Germany and Europe.19 The presence of the past remained a central concern for journalists and politicians alike. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s commemorative speech in Berlin in 1994 voiced apprehension about the electoral success of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the grouping of ex-communists that grew from seventeen to thirty seats in the German parliament that year, having won about 20 per cent of the East German vote. In his speech, Kohl patronizingly proclaimed that ‘We cannot allow the spiritual and political successors to those who were responsible for the Wall to call themselves the defenders of east Germans today’.20 Cultural divisions seemed as wide as ever, with no indication that the Germanys were blending together as predicted.

By the time of the tenth anniversary of 1989, there was a palpable sense of missed opportunity to bring about a more lasting social democratic Europe, whose European unity was still far away. Concern, too, was expressed about the growing gap between rich and poor, as well as rising ethnic tensions.21 Commentators noted that the heroics of 1989 seemed very much a thing of the past. One Washington Post piece argued that the lack of commemorative interest in 1999 was perhaps the main positive story: what we were witnessing in Europe was ‘a sense of normality’ where politics had ‘lost its epic quality’, one in which ‘the world of black and white, evil empires and honorable democracies’ had been replaced by ‘the world as it usually is, a complicated place colored more in pastels and grays’. What this lost epic quality of politics meant was not clear, though one New York Times reporter saw the new normal in less sanguine terms: ‘What happened in 1989 was that our enemies gave up their own faith without necessarily acquiring ours’, pointing to the electoral successes of former communist candidates and parties.22 Interesting, too, is that there was more explicit praise for Gorbachev as the benevolent patron of these revolutions. One American reporter wrote that the last Soviet emperor ‘deserves to be remembered for what he did, and perhaps more important, for what he refused to do’, having chosen ‘not to defend a dying system with a final, futile spasm of murderous force’.23 In Germany itself, the official tenth anniversary celebration seemed more dutiful than heartfelt, as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder praised 1989 as the result of East German Zivilcourage. Spice was added to the festivities when the famed Rostock pastor Joachim Gauck, who played a key role in 1989 in East Germany, intoned that East–West German cultural unification was still far from being realized. In his speech, he acidly remarked that ‘after Reunification, many of us felt like strangers in our country’, concluding that ‘we dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia’.24

With growing distance the excitement and enthusiasm of 1989 continued to fade from view. Most of the commentary on the fifteenth anniversary still tended to focus on the lack of any reunified German culture as the stubborn by-product of political and economic integration.25 By 2009 it was clear that the fall of the Berlin Wall had subsumed all the regional stories to serve as the shorthand emblem of the upheavals. This was even the case within Germany. Where 9 October (the first large-scale candlelit demonstration in Leipzig) and 9 November (the breaching of the Berlin Wall) were initially celebrated separately, by 2009 the November event now stood in for the unity of the German people, even if Reunification wasn’t formalized until 3 October 1990. The original signification of 9 November as the celebration of East Germany’s revolution dropped away in official national retrospectives;26 and, for many around the world, the fall of the Berlin Wall has served as the most potent symbol of the collapse of communism: in the United States, for instance, there are no fewer than seventy large sections of the wall on public display in various museums and venues across the country.27 The twentieth anniversary, in 2009, saw more reflective inventories of 1989’s legacy. One article in the Independent reported that ‘the broad hopes’ have been ‘amply fulfilled’, to the extent that the fall of the Berlin Wall ‘led to freedom for Eastern and central Europeans and the collapse of the Soviet Union’.28 Others were more cautious, accusing Europeans in 2009 of being ‘sunk in the narcissism of minor difference’ about ‘national narrowness’, oblivious to the coming dangers of Russia and China.29 One journalist from the Times was even more circumspect: ‘The end of communism brought also the collapse of stability, the unleashing of ancient hatreds, the unrealisable hopes of peoples unprepared for the twentieth century and an explosion of crime and corruption’.30

Yet most of this ambivalent stock-taking came later, as the early 1990s saw a bullish tendency to project the miracle of 1989 both backwards and forwards as a new historical model of revolution. In the 1990s the legacy of 1989 became closely linked to the liberalization of southern Europe in the 1970s, and in doing so consolidated its Whiggish interpretation. We have grown accustomed to the argument that one of the key effects of 1989 was how it bequeathed a new vocabulary to the political science of revolution itself, best evidenced in the seemingly oxymoronic designations such as ‘gentle revolution’ and ‘velvet revolution’. Yet it is worth remembering that this terminology was hardly novel to 1989: it was used in the 1970s to describe the transitions from authoritarianism to liberal democracy in southern Europe. The unlikely peaceful transition in Spain, Portugal and Greece prompted scholars like Nicos Poulantzas to christen these developments a ‘southern paradigm’.31 The liberation of eastern Europe from communist control prompted a whole cottage industry of scholarship linking ‘democratic transitions’ in different parts of Europe as part of the same trajectory of liberalism on the march. Such a view was central to Samuel Huntington’s influential The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991), which framed these events within three historical waves of democratization: 1828 to 1926, 1943 to 1962 and finally 1974 to the early 1990s.32 Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man extended the story of liberalism victorious to Latin America. Other scholars followed suit, and with time this south-eastern European comparative paradigm of the move from illiberalism to liberalism fuelled the new academic fields of ‘transitology’ and ‘transitional justice’,33 whose ideological drive took its cue from Hannah Arendt’s Cold War assumption, outlined in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), that fascism and communism shared similar anti-liberal traits that would eventually lead to their undoing.

That said, international commentary at the time missed some key elements that seem more relevant to us today. The first is the central role of Christianity in the events of 1989 in most of the countries. John Paul II’s legendary visit to Warsaw in 1979, when he turned his speech into a huge Catholic mass with outsize altar table, is, of course, the classic example. Many still deem him a prime mover behind the collapse of communism across eastern Europe, to the extent that his tour galvanized eastern Europeans into trading their communist identities (and loyalties) for Christian ones.34 The Christian foundation of these new post-communist polities was perhaps most pronounced in Poland. After all, Prime Minister Mazowiecki’s first visit to a foreign authority was to John Paul II, during which he apparently asked the Polish Holy See to ‘please pray for me’.35 This is not to say that the hoped-for re-Christianization of ex-communist eastern Europe came to pass. One of the durable legacies of two generations of communism has been secularization, and even after 1989 the Churches (especially the Protestant ones) have had a hard time attracting parishioners, especially among the young.

The rise of conservative parties in recent years has placed the issue of Christian identity back at the centre of discussion, especially during the refugee crisis. It was precisely against this backdrop in 2015 that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán repeatedly insisted that immigrants from Syria and elsewhere threatened the continent’s ‘Christian roots’ and ‘Europe’s civilization’.36 Orbán is scarcely alone, as political leaders in Poland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Serbia and the United Kingdom have peddled strikingly similar views about a European continent and identity under serious threat. Such views of a Christian civilization under siege have even served as a bridge to the West. President Trump’s infamous speech in Warsaw on 5 July 2017 referred to the defence of civilization five times, entreating Europe and the United States to join forces in the fight against terrorism and the ‘new barbarians’ amassing at the fragile frontiers of the West.37 Of course, the mixture of religion and nationalism varied from country to country, party to party, and covered the full spectrum from liberal to conservative to xenophobic reactionary. Yet in recent years the defence of Christian identity has become for many Europeans a way of articulating their country’s place and mission in the world beyond domestic politics. Poland’s vociferous abortion debates in 2016 were part of this resurgence of traditional Christian values as cultural compass across central Europe.

No less relevant is to recall the strong presence of nationalism in 1989 in various ways. Amid the atmosphere of political possibility the nation as an imagined community took on many hues, ranging from anti-Soviet patriotism to harder-edged versions of ethnic belonging. In its early days the revolutionary thrust of 1989 was as much about empowering society as it was about national liberation. Indeed, ‘citizen’ and ‘society’ were the favourite terms of mobilization rather than ‘Pole’, ‘Czech’, ‘Hungarian’ or ‘nation’; free and fair elections were the desired goal and ultimate weapon, most notably in Poland.38 Yet the pope’s visit to Warsaw was a lightning rod for Polish nationalism. The same went for the reburial of the deposed Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy and four of his comrades in Hungary, and Latvians sang national folk songs to mark their liberation from Soviet control. In most eastern European demonstrations, protesters flew their national flags with the communist hammer and sickle cut out. At times nationalism shaded into ethnic racism. Estonia and Latvia imposed strict language requirements for citizenship to isolate the Russian minorities in their midst, who in 1989 made up no less than one-third of these populations. Occasionally such nationalism became violent. On 20–21 May 1989 over a hundred ethnic Turks were killed when Bulgarian police put down protests against forced assimilation, and by June some three hundred thousand Turks were expelled or had fled from Todor Zhivkov’s Bulgaria.39 So sudden and overwhelmed was the Turkish government that the prime minister, Turgut Özal, was forced to close the country’s borders to Turkish refugees. That Bulgaria’s expulsions did not provoke any international outcry supposedly inspired Slobodan Milošević to follow suit later.40 The first half of the 1990s also saw pogroms against Roma communities in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

In some places nationalism was tinged with anti-Semitism. On 14 July 1989 the American rabbi Avraham Weiss and six other American Jews staged a demonstration in front of a Catholic convent in Auschwitz, on the grounds that the Roman Catholic Church had promised to dismantle and move the convent in February. The Polish cardinal Józef Glemp delivered a sermon in response, saying that the protests against the convent at Auschwitz ‘offend the feelings of all Poles’, and coarsely demanded that Jews ‘not talk with us from the position of a people raised above all others’.41 Such anti-Semitism was hardly an isolated incident, perhaps best evidenced in Corneliu Vadim Tudor’s Greater Romanian Party in the late 1990s and, more recently, the Hungarian press’s demonization of the Hungarian American Jewish philanthropist George Soros.42 Anti-Semitism had been present in the region for decades, but this is not to say that these events were inevitable or predictable. The events of 1989 did see, for example, a well-intentioned philo-Semitism among educated elites across eastern Europe, many of whom saw the end of communism as a chance to learn about and acknowledge the region’s complicity in the Holocaust, a theme that had been repressed under communism.43 These expressions of nationalism ran the gamut from liberal to conservative, inclusive to exclusive, and, like the religious context, very much depended on specific political constellations in each country that bridged the pre-revolutionary period with what came after. The Bulgarian unrest, for example, dated back to the mid 1980s and in this case was regime-driven. The issue, however, is not to peddle the old cliché of 1989 that eastern Europeans were only primarily seeking a conservative national revival, using the rhetoric of democracy towards this end. On the contrary, the national discourse at the time (and since) encompassed a variety of visions and agendas of political regeneration and collective identity-formation, of which Western-style liberalism was a major (but by no means the only) programme on offer. The point is that today’s potent brew of nationalism, religious conservatism and racism in eastern Europe is hardly just a recent reaction to 1990s neo-liberalism, but found overt expression in 1989 as well.

Another forgotten element is the fallout resulting from the shock therapy of eastern European economic life. As Johanna Bockman explains, the crude Western caricature of these economies as Stalinist hold-overs from the 1950s prevalent in the 1990s ignored the innovative ways in which many of these economies, in particular Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland, had been transformed since the 1960s, often in the name of a decentralized market socialism in which ownership of the means of production (firms and factories) was devolved back to the workers, sometimes called ‘worker self-management’. These experiments in ‘laissez-faire socialism’ revived some of the inter-war ideas of Trotsky and the Polish economist Oskar Lange, and were promoted in Yugoslavia and Hungary as successful examples of post-Stalinist market socialism. These viable anti-liberal economies were studied carefully in the West at business schools and in policy circles; Gorbachev’s perestroika was in certain ways a catch-up reform initiative based on this model. What happened in 1989 was not, as many eastern European economists had hoped, the chance to develop a stronger democratic market socialism. Instead, these new post-communist states, cheered on by armies of Western consultants, worked to undo the shrinking of the state and party’s management of economic affairs by shoring up the central state and recentralizing ‘ownership rights that had been de facto workers’ property’. The promotion of ‘privatization through recentralization’ then led to the hand-picking of directors of state property and the advent of crony capitalism, opening the door to widespread corruption.44 Calls for democratization were thus met by the new liberal state’s expropriation of worker property across eastern Europe.45 This was one of the most corrosive effects of the renationalization of life after 1989, one that paved the way for the elevation of neo-liberalism as the guiding liberation theology of economic managers and policy makers in the 1990s.46

Overlooked, too, in the commentary at the time was the contentious eastward expansion of NATO as an indicator of the uneasy place of a radically truncated Russia in the post-Cold War international (dis)order. The well-meaning if long-forgotten NATO-inspired programme Partnership for Peace, launched in 1994 to build trust between NATO members and the new independent states of post-Soviet eastern Europe and central Asia, did little to allay Russian suspicions of Western enlargement. Indeed, the dizzying demise of a superpower and the restoration of Russia under Putin as a central player in a new Eurasian axis with China has been one of the headline transformations of the new international world, though few in the early 1990s devoted much attention to it apart from former Kremlinologists and trained Russia-watchers. Russia’s marginalization from world affairs has fuelled confusion and resentment, and even some nostalgia for the old days under Stalin and Brezhnev.47 The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s moving tapestry of first-person accounts by everyday people, Second-Hand Time (2016), captures this attempt to make sense of living among the material and psychological debris of the former Soviet empire.48 But these shifts reflected deeper and enduring geopolitical tensions between the former superpowers, some of which were created even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. In 2014 Gorbachev, to the surprise of some observers, criticized Western triumphalism in its defence of Ukraine against Russian invasion. He did so by linking Russian distrust towards the West to the negotiations over German Reunification back in 1990, during which the former Soviet premier was supposedly given assurances from his Western partners that NATO would not expand eastwards if East Germany was allowed to become a NATO member.49 This alleged broken promise has been a source of rancour and controversy ever since, and recent scholarship has asserted that Gorbachev was generally right in his assessment.50 The expansion of NATO unsettled the old international order in forging a new alliance with ex-communist countries across eastern Europe, as the United States now extended its economic and military umbrella deep into former Soviet territory.51 The 1990s thus witnessed a kind of recycled Truman Doctrine in eastern Europe, as the banner slogans of freedom and democracy became the pretext for unprecedented American expansion in the region, an effect of 1989 that continues to colour international relations between the West and a newly expansionist Russian state.

Recent years have seen new interpretations of European history since 1989 as a historical era of its own, most forcefully articulated in Philipp Ther’s Europe since 1989 (2016). In it he argues that the post-Cold War period in eastern Europe is best understood as a mixed legacy resulting from the import of Western-style neo-liberalism across the region. Not that these ideas were unknown to the region before 1989. During the 1980s Hungarian economists were studying Pinochet’s model of economic liberalism and political authoritarianism as a blueprint for socialist reform, and in 1988 the Polish weekly Polityka remarked on the growing influence of ‘eastern Thatcherites’.52 But over the course of the 1990s such shock therapy was welcomed as the best means of overcoming what Western consultants called the failures of Stalinist economics and the need to ‘globalize’ the region in the name of trade and modernization. While such policies did initially lead to economic growth, they also accelerated growing social inequality, voter apathy and disillusionment with the political establishment, all of which are seen to have served as the fertile breeding ground for right-wing populism in the region.

This is in no way to dismiss popular enthusiasm to dismantle the old regimes across central Europe, or the excitement associated with joining the EU in 2004. For many the story of EU enlargement was the institutional expression of the hopes of 1989, and significant sections of the population in these former Eastern Bloc countries still see the EU as a symbol of belonging to ‘Europe’ and the realization of the political aspirations of 1989. After all, the events of 1989 made it possible for eastern and western Europeans to move freely across their continent for the first time, and huge numbers of Europeans continue to benefit from comparatively open media, liberalized economies and rights-based political life thanks to the brave actions of that revolutionary autumn.

Even so, there were serious economic problems and political constraints at the outset of the post-communist period. After all, the timing of 1989 was not propitious. The West was mired in a mini-economic recession, and the Second Iraq War and the resultant destabilization of oil reserves meant reductions of oil deliveries to the new countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Eastern Europe was also heavily in debt to Western banks and governments, and the post-communist disintegration of trade unions vitiated class-based reform and social protest.53 The influx of Western advisers and policy makers to the region was one of the hallmarks of the post-1989 period in central Europe, which brought with it a different conception of revolution that cast a long shadow over the region. Jan Gross identified 1989 as a unique kind of revolution, not only because of its velvet peacefulness. As he put it back in 1992, revolutions

used to be export commodities, presumably because the exporters had a blueprint for a better society to offer, or, in any case, because they represented something new. This one, judging by the number of outside experts crisscrossing eastern Europe (from business-school graduates to constitutional lawyers), apparently can be imported … It is so because, unlike those of its predecessors (that is, other great revolutions), the future, the destination, the end point of this revolution is well known. It actually exists. It can be reached by an overnight train.54

This chimed with statements by the French historian François Furet and the West German philosopher Jürgen Habermas that 1989 ultimately did not qualify as a proper revolution since it brought no new ideas and was more of a ‘catch-up’ revolution based on the ‘familiar repertoire of the modern age’. While Furet blithely remarked that for ‘all of the fuss and noise, not a single new idea has come out of eastern Europe after 1989’ and that at best it was essentially the long-belated extension of the principles of 1789 to eastern Europe exactly two hundred years later, Habermas dismissed 1989 for its ‘total lack of ideas that were either innovative or oriented toward the future’.55 Such views by no means went uncontested, as scholars such as Barbara Falk have made strong arguments that the eastern European articulation of civil society as a political force for change is one of its central legacies.56 But perhaps more relevant for the development of eastern Europe in the longer term was the way in which it opted for a model of imitation, effectively turning its back on its noble legacy of dissent.

Such alienation was not simply a reaction to 1990s neo-liberalism, but was already present amid the transformations of 1989. This is not to say that such disaffection was in any way pre-programmed, for the period witnessed a dizzying variety of political hopes, claims and possibilities. Yet rising abilities bred rising expectations, and new political elites often neglected or ignored their popular base. When the Solidarity spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicza and Lech Wałęsa’s chief political adviser Bronisław Geremek appeared on national television to comment on the dramatic electoral victory on 4 June 1989, they did not thank the electorate, reportedly to the consternation of many viewers.57 To many observers these anti-communist groups were simply starting to behave like standard political parties, as ‘anti-political’ movements quickly turned into political movements in a conventional sense. While such developments may have been inevitable in order to effect the transition of power, the revolutionary moment dramatically cooled as its popular base narrowed. Recall that in Poland and Hungary less than two-thirds of those eligible to vote did so in the first free elections, and not even 50 per cent took part in Polish local elections in May 1990.58 Just two months after the uprising in Czechoslovakia in November 1989, citizens complained that key decisions were again being taken ‘about them without them’.59 Students in Prague greeted the first anniversary of 17 November by referring to the ‘stolen revolution’, after which the events of 1989 were increasingly compared to events the year before as a ‘reversal’ (prevrat) or a ‘so-called revolution’.60 The disconnection between protest leaders and the people was visible in East Germany too. There the pleas from old socialist cultural figures to stay put and build true socialism found little popular support. On 9 November, the day the Berlin Wall was breached, the writer Christa Wolf addressed an assembled crowd, proclaiming that ‘the people stand on the tribune, and the leadership marches with them’. ‘Stay with us’, she pleaded, for ‘those who still go away lessen our hope. We beg you, do stay in your homeland. Stay with us’. Her fellow East German writer Stefan Heim caustically added, ‘Imagine there is socialism, and no one runs away’. A few days later New Forum desperately exhorted those who wished to emigrate to the West by saying, ‘You are the heroes of a political revolution, don’t be silenced’ by the allures of ‘travel and consumerism’.61 But few were listening. In the moment of revolutionary fervour, many of the GDR’s civic leaders were as out of touch as the ruling communists with the needs and desires of the people. The subsequent speedy takeover of the Reunification drama by Bonn led to further dismay among activists, who rhetorically downgraded the hoped-for revolution of reclaimed East German independence and sovereignty with the much more modest descriptor of Wende, or ‘turn of events’.

By the late 1990s there was widespread antipathy towards the apparent rapprochement between anti-communists and the old elite. Such sentiment fuelled Orbán’s Fidesz party, which built its profile on challenging the supposedly ‘consensual politics’ of the ‘Handshake Transition’ of 1989. Orbán was elected prime minister in 1998 with a campaign for a ‘fresh start’ that openly rejected what he called corrupt communists and hypocritical anti-communists.62 In his view — one largely shared by the Kaczyński twins’ Law and Justice Party — 1989 was no revolution, but rather was more of a ‘red and pink’ stitch-up between communist and post-communist elites.63 Such suspicions were present early on. At the reburial of Imre Nagy and his comrades on 16 June 1989, Orbán was asked to speak at the occasion. The event was a highly charged affirmation of Hungarian nationalism, a display of ancestor worship designed to redress the relationship between the dead and the living.64 That communists and anti-communists buried their differences in a spectacle of unity was part of the point. For his part, Orbán brazenly chose the moment to challenge the staged pieties of the event, provocatively asserting that the new era of young people was not beholden to this heavy and compromised past. As he put it:

We young people fail to understand many things that are obvious to the older generations. We are puzzled that those who were so eager to slander the Revolution and Imre Nagy have suddenly become the greatest supporters of the former Prime Minister’s policies. Nor do we understand why the party leaders who saw to it that we were taught from books that falsified the Revolution are now rushing to touch the coffins as if they were good-luck charms. We need not be grateful for their permission to bury our martyrs after thirty-one years; nor do we have to thank them for allowing our political organizations to function.

Padraic Kenney is certainly right to call Orbán’s intervention a ‘speech of the future, not of the past’, one that marked both the ‘climactic moment and the conclusion of Hungary’s revolution’.65 Orbán’s pointed speech was thus a spoiler, ridiculing this staged version of the nation as an artful deal that did not speak for everyone, precisely because it was built, so he claimed, on a fake premiss of elitist solidarity and limited generational warranty.

Orbán was hardly alone. After all, a number of commentators have defined the new generation of populist leaders as a group of counter-revolutionary politicians who have challenged the established order after 1989 from radically different political perspectives, including Marine Le Pen, Beppe Grillo, Matteo Salvini, Alexis Tsipras and Pablo Iglesias Turrión. In this telling, contemporary European politics is a contest between the winners of the post-1989 revolution and those who want to topple them.66 What is so striking now is that the ‘second generation’ of transition, both in southern and in eastern Europe, is rebelling against the settlements of the first liberal or neo-liberal generation. Catalonia has rejected the 1978 Constitution and declared itself an independent republic; in Portugal can be heard complaints (especially among a younger generation) that the political elites have betrayed the values of the 1974 Carnation Revolution; and in Greece angry citizens insist that the ‘Junta did not end in 1973’.67 This is similar to the voices of rebellion against the 1989ers taking place in Hungary and Poland. The eastern European radical right has often appropriated the popular language of 1989 to their ends. Nowhere is this more the case than with Germany’s infamous Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA). The Dresden-based organization was born in reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 and the reported sexual assaults in Cologne the following New Year’s Eve. It now has a sizeable network across the country, and has helped Germany’s new right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) to score its worrying electoral gains in recent elections. Just after the first anniversary of its founding on 11 January 2016, an angry mob of Germans gathered to prevent a bus full of refugees from reaching their shelter in Clausnitz, near the Czech Republic border. Significantly, the crowd shouted ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ (‘We are the people!’) as its mobilizing cry, the very same parole used by anti-communist protesters in Leipzig in 1989.68 The once revolutionary slogan demanding a voice in government and the end of a regime of walls and barbed wire was now being used to exclude foreigners and erect new barriers on the country’s borders.

A side glance at the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 may be worthwhile here. From the beginning this catch-all designation for the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya was clearly framed by European history, with particular reference to the ‘springtime of nations’ revolution across Europe in 1848 as well as to the Prague Spring of 1968. But this label was not imposed from the outside, as Arab activists themselves explicitly modelled their movement in the region on 1989 as a framework of peaceful democratic transition. What is particularly interesting is that the connection between 1989 and 2011 was chiefly mediated through the legacy of the Serbian youth movement Otpor, which had helped to topple Milošević in 2000 through the practices of non-violent protest. Cairo’s April 6 Movement of young protesters styled its logo, a red-and-white clenched fist, after Otpor’s, and some of the anti-Mubarak activists even journeyed to Serbia to meet their Otpor counterparts in solidarity.69 Recent years have seen more interest in comparing 1989 to 2011 as stories of popular mobilization and ‘eventful democratization’.70 So far most of these accounts have been written by political scientists, often using the strength or weakness of civil society to explain the success or failure of political transformation. In 2011 there was much hope that the Middle East would be swept along by its own version of 1989, ushering in a ‘fourth wave of democratization’ as a sequel to Huntington’s interpretative scheme of world history.71 Aspirations about the easy export of the principles of 1989 were soon dashed by what some commentators pejoratively called the ‘Arab Winter’. The implicit assumption was that 2011 served as the anti-1989, one in which these popular protests met with authoritarian restoration.72 As in 1989, the popular unrest in 2011 was a reversal of the normative social order and the upturning of social hierarchies; but the disappointments and anti-liberal blowback of 2011 had their parallels with the unfulfilled dreams of democratization in central Europe a generation before.73

And once we put the Arab Spring next to the ‘other 1989s’ of China, Romania and Yugoslavia, the ‘failure’ of the Arab Spring takes on a different perspective. The authoritarian turn in Hungary, Poland and Russia — to say nothing of the Balkans — makes the classic triumphalist story of 1989 in central Europe look more and more like the outlier, not the norm, with little in the way of export value. After all, election results in south-eastern Europe in the aftermath of 1989 hardly reflected a turn towards Western-style liberal democracy. Unlike in central Europe, reformed or renamed communist parties won clear electoral victories in Eastern Orthodox lands, such as Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania.74 What once seemed like a shiny template for the rest of central Europe, the Middle East and perhaps even China has proven quite limited in application, and has begun to crumble even in the very heartland of the ‘springtime of nations’. With time Romania’s brutal transition and Yugoslavia’s break-up and return to strongman politics may be the more telling tale of revolutionary transition, rendering the achievements in central Europe in 1989 not just exceptional, but possibly provisional. Viewed more broadly, violent nationalism, xenophobia and barbed-wire borders are just as much the legacy of 1989 as wall removal, free movement and cosmopolitanism.

There are other interpretative blind spots as well. For instance, much commentary has understood eastern European difficulties as the consequence of the fallout from a late twentieth-century version of the ‘shock of the global’. Indeed, one of the strongest myths of 1989 was that it brought with it the ‘re-internationalization’ of the long-cosseted rust-belt economies of eastern Europe. Certainly the 1990s witnessed the stark arrival of many symbols of the West, ranging from Harvard MBAs to McDonald’s, NATO to Pizza Hut. But Americanization is, of course, hardly synonymous with globalization. In this regard, it is wrong to say that 1989 was the moment when globalization caught up with the Eastern Bloc. On the contrary, eastern Europe had been engaged with the Global South in countless ways since the mid 1950s, as evidenced in the spheres of trade, labour training, military assistance, education, cultural promotion and humanitarian assistance. The 1960s and 1970s were the golden age of East–South exchanges of personnel across many sectors, including doctors, nurses, engineers, economic advisers, teachers, artists, filmmakers, archaeologists and journalists, to name but a few. The eastern European thrust outwards towards the Third World in the early 1960s was an effort to build bridges to Asia and Africa in the Age of Decolonization in the name of international solidarity. Some have even argued that the socialist world was more open than the West in terms of international trade and interaction for much of the Cold War, to the point that post-Cold War ‘neo-liberalism’ has its real roots in socialist eastern Europe.75

What we are witnessing now is the effects of these severed economic and political linkages with the Global South since the fall of communism, coupled with the retribalization of eastern European politics in new ways.76 Gorbachev’s reform policies played a forgotten role here too, as he made the rhetoric of a ‘common European home’ a central element of his cultural reform policy to think about a European identity beyond the Iron Curtain. Yet the growing sense of eastern–western European solidarity in the Global North often came at the expense of long-fought-for East–South allegiance, and by the late 1980s Gorbachev had cut back Soviet support for Latin American communist parties and leftist movements across the world.77 And even if Gorbachev’s views were primarily designed to lessen the tensions between East and West, Africans increasingly interpreted his idea of the ‘common European home’ as a new defence of Eurocentrism and the marginalization of their continent.78 The uprisings of 1989 only accelerated these distancing trends. The Nigerian major-general Joseph Garba, who was president of the United Nations General Assembly from 1989 to 1990, openly expressed concern in a series of speeches at the UN that 1989 would spell bad news for Africa, as Europeans formerly separated by the Cold War divide were now turning towards each other at the expense of the Global South. Garba pointed out how events in eastern Europe were already having an impact on the fortunes of the region’s long-standing trade and political partners in the Global South, coupled with the fact that Western aid and food supplies were being dramatically diverted from Africa to ‘the emerging (and white) democracies in Eastern Europe’. In his eyes, ‘the cold war is over, but Japan won, Eastern European States reaped the benefits, and Africa lost’.79 Other observers at the time also predicted that the fall of communism and Moscow as a pole star of leftist politics worldwide would make things much more difficult for underdeveloped countries in the future, to say nothing of the underprivileged classes in the industrialized world as well.80 Recent scholarship has only begun to think about the global impact of 1989 from a variety of international perspectives, but what is starting to become clear is that for eastern European countries 1989 was less a liberal story of re-internationalization than a tale of de-internationalization on the world stage.81

Why has 1989 not been seen this way? First, we need to recall that the study of globalization accelerated in the 1990s during a moment of capitalist triumphalism, and thus helped to solidify the links between globalization and Westernization. Eastern Europe by contrast was characterized as a world of walls, barbed wire and heavily policed frontiers, seemingly averse to the forces of market internationalization. Secondly, there was little desire in post-Cold War eastern Europe to write new global histories based on their experiences, since these newly liberated eastern European countries were largely preoccupied with composing new post-communist national stories and identities. The result is that the history of a globalized eastern Europe dropped from view. With it the division between post-communism and post-colonialism, which might have been a fruitful point of comparison, fell by the wayside.

From a longer perspective, eastern Europe in the 1990s and the Middle East in the 2010s may resemble Africa in the 1960s in terms of the difficulties of coming to terms with the fallout of post-colonialism. Not for nothing has 1989 been cast as the last chapter of European decolonization, one in which central Europe has thrown off the shackles of Soviet hegemony in a domino effect of ‘anti-imperial’ popular mobilization.82 What is so puzzling is what came next. For, like the western European attitude towards the Americans in the aftermath of the Second World War, eastern Europe’s embracing of the EU was a kind of ‘empire by invitation’ development after the revolution of 1989.83 At first this may seem odd, given that 1989ers at the time fondly recall the initial excitement of resuming their ‘rightful’ place in Europe, finally overcoming the tragedy of central Europe ‘kidnapped’ by the forces of Soviet occupation.84 But it was the neo-liberal makeover of central Europe, especially the remarkable role of American power and influence in the economic affairs of these post-communist transitional governments, that earmarked the era most indelibly. Arguably what we are seeing now is a second decolonization in the span of one generation. Whereas the first concerned liberation from Soviet control, the second involves how central European political leaders in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere are rejecting the cultural demands and moral mission (though not the financial assistance) of the EU itself. To call the EU an imperial entity may seem far-fetched in certain ways, not least because the EU’s expansion was welcomed at the time.85 It was the EU’s draconian actions against Greece and Italy’s debt crises that invoked the language of imperialism against the hard-line policy of Brussels and Berlin, and has continued to animate right-wing parties across Europe. Where the ‘global 1960s’ were often characterized with great worry by European conservatives as the seismic ‘revolt against the West’, perhaps best seen in the changing membership and tone of the United Nations, there is a new kind of ‘revolt against the West’ in the form of a reaction against international liberalism in central Europe, with offshoots in Britain and the United States. The central concern among observers in the 1960s was not just about the end of empire and the universalization of nationalism. Of equal apprehension at the time was that decolonization would spell the end of internationalism, leading to the Balkanization of the international state system.86 The renationalization of politics in eastern Europe has been one of the consequences of the anti-imperial 1989 and the rejection of internationalism, including both liberalism and socialism, has been one of the distinguishing features of contemporary Europe.87 The American political scientist Ken Jowitt’s prediction back in 1999 that much ‘of the Eastern Europe of the future is likely to resemble the Latin America of the recent past more than the Western Europe of the present’ is not so off the mark in this respect.88

One might dismiss interpretations of post-communist eastern Europe as post-colonial as too fanciful and anachronistic. In Poland, for example, the usage of post-colonialism to describe the country’s historical situation after communism first began in the early 2000s, after which it was exploited by both the right and the left to describe Poland’s identity crisis. The connection between post-colonialism and post-socialism went unexplored until that point, partly because the language of anti-colonialism had long been integrated as an ideological plank of the communist state as one of its virtuous international causes; thus it was only with its fading memory that the rhetoric of post-colonialism was recast for post-1989 central Europe.89 But there were other places where these links were made from the very outset, notably in East Germany. The GDR was, of course, the one country involved in the uprisings of 1989 that did not end up with national sovereignty, and instead was effectively absorbed by the Federal Republic. A sense of disappointment suffused the attitudes and memories of many East Germans before and after Reunification, many of whom felt the end result of 1989 was nothing more than trading political masters from Pankow to Bonn. Nowhere else did the welfare infrastructure, school system and sensory world of favourite East German buildings, foodstuffs and everyday consumer goods vanish so quickly as in the former GDR, whose troubled history and material culture were shuttled off to the museum as the memorabilia of a failed socialist modernity. Shocked East Germans were the first central Europeans to express their situation in colonial terms, often playing on the West German chancellor’s surname to criticize the Bonn takeover as ‘Kohl-onization’.90 One could argue that their feeling, in the early 1990s, of alienation and annexation from an outside power has become a regionalized sentiment across eastern Europe in the last few years, with the EU now tarred as the new imperialists from the West.

There is another related issue that is rarely discussed in the ‘transitology’ literature. This has to do with the knock-on effects of regional disintegration of central Europe in 1989. It is surprising how few theorists devote any attention to how the events of 1989 may have affected western Europe as well, apart from its initial ideological windfall and opened trade relations.91 For if 1989 marked the end of the Eastern Bloc, then one could plausibly argue that 2016, with Brexit and the Trump election, signalled the strongest challenge to the ‘Western Bloc’ in the form of the EU and possibly even NATO. Neo-liberalism destroyed one bloc and has severely damaged the other, with Greece and Italy standing in for the unsure fate of those EU member states that have tried to resist the forces of imposed austerity. Kristen Ghodsee has gone so far as to suggest that all the major crises of 2015 — the Greek debt crisis, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS and the refugee crisis in Europe — ‘could be linked back to mistakes made after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc when fantasies about the world historic triumph of free markets and liberal democracy blinded Western leaders to the human costs of regime change’.92 At the very least such a statement makes clear that saying that eastern Europe, long regarded as the ‘Other Europe’, has once again become the ‘Other’ from the Western point of view is too pat and misleading. The groundswell of populism is hardly a singular eastern European problem. The key point is that the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc may be acting as a kind of contagion for the rest of Europe and beyond, auguring a very different thirtieth anniversary of 1989 than what was celebrated at earlier milestone anniversaries.

Another way to think about 1989 is that its legacy is still work in progress. In this respect one might recall Gorbachev’s defence of perestroika back in 1987. At the time his reform programme was roundly received in the West as evidence that communism was not working. In defence of his policy, the Soviet premier argued that, just as the French Revolution of 1789 needed 1830 and 1848 as follow-ups to fulfil its revolutionary promise, so the twin-pronged perestroika and glasnost was a kind of upgrade of 1917, one that drew a direct connection between Lenin and Gorbachev.93 The year 1989 can be understood in a similar manner: its breakthrough was no final victory, but only the first moment of a popular anti-authoritarian transformation which continues to require further engagement and renewal. Recent events have shown just how weak, vulnerable and reversible this legacy has become. Even the safe assessments of 1989 as a ‘return to diversity’ and a ‘new pluralism’ made in the early 1990s do not look so safe today.94 Like all revolutions, 1989 still awaits its democratic fulfilment, and its legacy cuts in many directions; it is not, and never was, just liberal and gentle, and has become a site of open struggle between wildly divergent political visions vying for power and the reinvention of the social contract.95

How this recasting of the inheritance of 1989 will look down the road is anyone’s guess, and the relationship between noises and signals will, of course, change. But it does seem that what we are experiencing at the moment is a significant refutation of the old liberal and Eurocentric understanding of 1989 as emblematic of the inexorable pageant of freedom and progress. Some doubts were already there in the reflections of the early 1990s, even among conservative champions. In his book The Third Wave, Huntington tellingly included sections on the historical blowbacks of anti-democratization. Specifically he identified the periods from 1922 to 1942 (particularly in eastern Europe) and from 1958 to 1975 (especially in Africa and Latin America) as ‘reverse waves’, and today’s developments in central Europe may be a third reverse wave. In his conclusion, Huntington awkwardly posed the question ‘Were the revolutions of 1989–90 in eastern Europe primarily anticommunist democratic movements or anti-Soviet nationalist movements? If the latter, authoritarian nationalist regimes might return to some eastern European countries’.96 This is not far off the mark in the current climate, even if its unquestioned framework of democratization is less convincing. Back in 1994 Tony Judt raised the issue of which European Era 1989 had ended, and then insightfully explored in turn various historical storylines of 1989 that began either in the Enlightenment, 1789, 1848, 1917 or 1945.97 The question for our time, I would argue, is not just which European Era 1989 has ended, but rather what European Era 1989 has started.

So perhaps we have been transfixed by the wrong 1989, or at least overly preoccupied by the exceptional ‘velvet revolutions’ aspect of it. This is by no means to downplay 1989’s remarkable influence on the so-called ‘coloured revolutions’ in the former Soviet Union between 2003 and 2005, nor to underestimate its role in inspiring democratic movements that helped to end apartheid in South Africa (1990–4) and in stoking non-violent democratic civil resistance further afield in Myanmar and Iran.98 Nonetheless, Arne Westad raised a troubling question back in 2010 about 1989’s legacy from a Chinese perspective, asking whether the outcome of China’s own 1989 was perhaps ‘more of a harbinger of things to come than the eastern European revolutions and the changes in Southern Africa and in Latin America’.99 This is the question that is very much of our moment. To try to tackle it, historians will need to shed romantic and uncritical views of 1989, and to start thinking harder about how its full and contradictory inheritance still shapes world events today, three decades later.

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