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Volume 46, Number 18 · November 18, 1999 Feature Ten
Years After The connection of the velvet
revolutions to the collapse of Europe's other communist multiethnic
federation, Yugoslavia, is less direct. Here, Slobodan Milosevic was
stripping Kosovo of its autonomy even as the Poles gathered at their round
table. The destruction of Tito's country had its own fearsome internal
dynamic. Yet the end of communism in Central Europe certainly precipitated
the end of the party that had held Yugoslavia together. The Yugoslav League
of Communists was effectively dissolved at its Fourteenth Special Congress in
January 1990. It is hard to imagine the subsequent bloody dismemberment of
Yugoslavia unfolding in the same way if there had still been a global
competition between East and West. Nineteen eighty-nine also caused,
throughout the world, a profound crisis of identity on what had been known
since the French Revolution of 1789 as "the left." It prompted many
to ask the question pithily formulated by the political philosopher Steven Lukes: "What's left?" What's left of the left,
that is, if there is no more utopian project? There have been some
interesting ironies in the ensuing debate. Take the "third way," for
example. It was the illusions of Gorbachev and his team about the
possibilities of a "third way" between old-style communism and
capitalism that made the revolutions in Central Europe possible. If they had
not believed that reform communists-- new Alexander Dubceks--
had a chance of building systems different from those in the West as well as
the old East, they would not have encouraged the Polish, Hungarian, and
subsequently East German and Czechoslovak leaders on the road that led so
rapidly from reform to revolution—or at least to what I christened in these
pages at the time as "refolution" (i.e.,
a new mixture of reform and revolution).[1] The
anticommunist leaders of those revolutions insisted, by contrast, that there
was no such "third way." Coming to power, they immediately reached
for the existing Western models of a free market economy, democracy, and the
rule of law. Yet in 1999, world leaders of the vaguely center-left, including
the American president Bill Clinton, the British prime minister Tony Blair,
the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and the
Italian prime minister Massimo d'Alema (a former
communist), came together at an extraordinary meeting in Washington to
celebrate their new ideology. And what did they call it? "The third
way"! By this they meant, however, only a more socially-minded version
of reformed capitalism. Another irony is the way the end
of Marxist regimes in Europe has contributed to a revival of Marxist
analysis. It is not just old Marxists who have pointed out that the raw,
early capitalism of the post-communist world recalls that described by Karl
Marx. In Poland's new private firms, for example, there are virtually no
trade unions. The new entrepreneurs like to negotiate individually with each
employee. It's each man for himself. As importantly,
the relentless globalization of the world capitalist economy-- to which the
end of the cold war certainly contributed-- has made some of Marx's
analytical insights (although not his solutions) seem more rather than less
relevant. "In place of the old local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency," Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto,
"we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of
nations." Well, one hundred and fifty years later, we do; as the result
of an anticommunist revolution. If we know more about the
consequences, we also know more about the causes. Ten years on we already
have most of the internal documents for which, in the case of the Russian
Revolution of 1917, we had to wait more than seventy years. These richly
augment the eyewitness account of the Central European revolutions I gave in
my book The Magic Lantern, and those of others present at the time.
Thus Czech sources add many interesting facts about the beginning of the
velvet revolution in Prague which were not available when I wrote about it.
For example, we now know that the student who was at first reported to have
been killed in the November 17 demonstration was actually a secret police
agent called Ludvik Zifcak.
Earlier this year, I interviewed him for a BBC television series on the
experience of the ten years since the revolutions.[2] Now a pawnbroker
in the remote Moravian town of Bruntal, Zifcak confirmed that he had orders to "die"
that day, while other secret police agents-- also posing as students-- spread
the news of his death to Western media. The idea was to provoke a little
local unrest, which would give more dynamic communist leaders a pretext to
take power. This is one of relatively few cases where behind a conspiracy
theory you find a real conspiracy-- although one that went rapidly and
gloriously wrong. They hoped, as he told me, to save communism; in fact, they
precipitated its demise. Meanwhile, the passage of time
produces its own peculiar distortions. One thing that happened rather quickly
in the early 1990s was that history was rewritten—not in the deliberate,
Orwellian way of communist states, but through the much more subtle,
spontaneous, and potent workings of human memory. Suddenly Western
politicians "remembered" how they had all along predicted the end
of communism. Suddenly almost everyone in the East had been some sort of
dissident. The ranks of the opposition grew miraculously after the event.
Former communist leaders also produced remarkable memories. Thus, in
conversations after German unification, both the former Soviet foreign
minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Aleksander
Yakovlev, a key Gorbachev adviser, told me that they had anticipated it as
early as the mid-1980s. Was there a record of that? Well no, you see, they
could not have said this out loud, not even to a small group of officials--
because to do so might have shaken the whole fabric of Moscow's relations
with Eastern Europe. (And the difficulty for the historian is that this is
also true.) Meanwhile,
newly opened archives disgorged more evidence of the hidden weaknesses of the
communist states. This was immediately added to the rapidly growing pile of
reasons for believing that the Soviet empire was bound to collapse when it
did. A good example is the revelation about East Germany's soaring hard
currency debt, which had been treated as top secret, and which it was barely
able to service from month to month. It emerged that there was a louche Stasi
colonel called Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski who
was selling to the West everything that would move-- old paintings, jewelry,
guns-- in a desperate attempt to pay next week's interest. "Aha!" politicians and
journalists exclaimed. "East Germany was bound to collapse in 1989
because it was bankrupt." Now these were interesting revelations.
Knowing that they were up to their ears in debt to the capitalist West
certainly would not have encouraged East German leaders to fight to defend
their regime against the aspirations of its own people. But so secret was the
information that most East German leaders didn't know it either. They were
victims of their own lies. In any case, states do not simply go bankrupt,
like companies. In extremis, they default on their debts, as Latin
American countries did. Yet so long as the Soviet Union was prepared to use
force to hang on to its East European empire, and so long as West Germany was
prepared to go on lending more money in order to keep East Germany "stable,"
the bankrupt state could have continued. You
can always find more than sufficient causes for every great event-- after the
event. Certainly there were major structural causes of what happened in 1989.
Not the least of these was the widening economic gap between East and West, a
gap which détente policies did enable ordinary East Europeans to appreciate
and resent. But we must beware of what Henri Bergson called "the
illusions of retrospective determinism." Interpretations that present
the events and outcome of 1989 as inevitable are probably further from the
truth than we were at the time, in our heady cloud of unknowing. The truth is that 1989 could have
turned bloody at any point, as China did on the very same day as the historic
Polish elections, June 4. In Warsaw, we watched the first pictures from
Tiananmen Square while waiting for the election results.
"Tiananmen" was a word that I would hear muttered many times in
Central and East European capitals over the next few months. What made the
difference in Europe was two sets of political leaders: the opposition
elites, and the Gorbachev group in Moscow. 1989 was further proof of the
vital importance of individuals in history. I
doubt that there are many factual revelations about 1989 still lurking in the
archives. What remains is the unending battle of interpretations. 1989 has
had its share of this over the last decade. It has been called "the end
of history" by Francis Fukuyama but the return of history by his
critics. The Yale political scientist Bruce Ackerman sees it as a test case
for "liberal revolution." The famous German sociologist Jürgen Habermas has described it as a nachholende
Revolution, a "catching-up revolution." An American writer,
George Weigel, has even celebrated it as "an
embodiment of the final revolution," which, in case you were wondering,
is "the human turn to the good, to the truly human-- and ultimately to
God." Others, including the distinguished historian of the French
Revolution François Furet, have argued that it was
not really a revolution at all. Furet maintained
that the Central European events were merely side effects of what was
happening in Russia, and, in ideological content and final effect, more like
a restoration. One claim I made in the last
chapter of The Magic Lantern has been the subject of controversy. This
is my assertion that the revolutionaries, or post-revolutionaries, brought to
the new Europe of the 1990s "no fundamentally new ideas." (That
was, incidentally, another reason Furet gave for
not considering it to be a proper revolution.) I have been challenged on this
by old friends and participants in the revolutions, such as the Czech
philosopher Martin Palous. However, they have not
yet managed to reveal to me what major new idea about the arrangement of
human society emerged from 1989. Instead, some of those things that
were pointed to in the immediate aftermath as possible candidates for the
title—for example, a new style of "forum" or "civic
movement" politics, as opposed to old-style Western party politics, with
its sterile battles between left and right-- soon disappeared, to be replaced
by local versions of arrangements to be found already somewhere else in the
world. These countries now all have conventional, Western-style party
politics, although the composition and character of their political parties
is, of course, unique. They often can be explained only by taking account of
pre-1989 political constellations: for example, post-Solidarity parties
versus the post-communist party in Poland. It is perhaps an irony that
revolutions led by intellectuals should produce no new ideas-- only new
realities. I compared 1989 to 1848, but in this respect it was the opposite
of 1848. Yet
perhaps this is to look in the wrong place. For the great new idea of this
revolution was the revolution itself. It was not the "what" but the
"how," not the end but the means. The new idea of 1989 was
non-revolutionary revolution. In talking of these events, the word
"revolution" has always to be qualified with an
adjective—"peaceful," or "evolutionary," or "self-limiting,"
or "velvet"—because the leaders of the popular movements
deliberately set out to do something different from the classic revolutionary
model, as it developed from 1789, through 1917, right up to the Hungarian
revolution of 1956. As I remember people actually discussing at the time in
the Magic Lantern theater in Prague, an essential part of earlier revolutions
had been revolutionary violence. Here, there was a conscious effort to avoid
it. The motto of these revolutions
might come from Lenin's great critic, the reformist Eduard Bernstein:
"The goal is nothing, the movement is everything." The fundamental
insight underlying the actions of the opposition elites, born of their own
Central European learning process since 1945, but also of a deeper reflection
on the history of revolution since 1789, was that you cannot separate ends
from means. The methods you adopt determine the outcome you will achieve. You
cannot lie your way through to the truth. As Adam Michnik memorably put it: those who start by storming
Bastilles will end up building new Bastilles.
Even without this last element,
the revolutions in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague have, we can now say,
succeeded. On the penultimate page of The Magic Lantern, written in
early 1990, I speculated as follows: You can, alas, paint with a rather high degree of
analytical plausibility a quite dark picture of the prospect for the former
Eastern Europe in the 1990s: a prospect in which the post-communist future
looks remarkably like the pre-communist past, less Central Europe than Zwischeneuropa, a dependent intermediate zone of
weak states, national prejudice, inequality, poverty and Schlamassel.
1989 might then appear, to participants and historians, as just one brief
shining moment between the sufferings of yesterday and those of tomorrow. For all the popular frustration
and widespread disappointment, those fears have definitely not become a
reality in the heartlands of Central Europe. At the same time, things much,
much worse than I imagined have happened elsewhere in post-communist Europe--
above all, in former Yugoslavia. What has characterized the post-communist
world has been this great divergence, so that the political distance between
Prague and Pristina is now much greater than that between Paris and Prague.[3]
Notes [1] "Refolution in
Hungary and Poland," The New York Review, August 18, 1989. [2] The three-part series is entitled Freedom's Battle,
broadcast on BBC 2 on October 31, November 7, and November 14. [3] Readers who want to know more about this great divergence
are referred to my book about Europe in the 1990s, History of the Present (London:
Allen Lane, 1999; Random House, forthcoming). |