1989 as the Last European Revolution?
The political transformation that took place in 1989, along with its consequences, has undoubtedly and radically revolutionized the life of the citizens of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Whether the way in which the change occurred can be interpreted as revolutionary is another question. In other words, did what was called a ‘velvet revolution’ deserve to be considered ‘The revolution’?
The year 1989 had first been experienced by many citizens of that part of Europe through the mediation of television images, often incredible, that had flowed for days on end. What was happening in a single country had an immediate impact on other states in the region. News and especially images induced people to overcome the barriers of an ‘existential fear’ that had for decades, and more efficiently than secret services, prevented participation in collective political action of dissent. The falsified image of the regimes in question, normally offered to the national and international public, was suddenly stripped of any ideological filter; the stark nakedness of events perhaps reached its peak in the exhibition of the lifeless bodies of the Ceausescu spouses.
The critical mass of people, men and women of all generations, who took an active role in the events started to grew steadily. One after another, the communist governments, from East Germany and Poland to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, were forced to surrender their totalizing political power, monopolized for decades. The first more or less democratic elections took place in all countries of the region no later than the spring of 1991. However, the revolutionary nature of these events was revealed in the years to come, this time without any mediation, upsetting the life-world of many people. It is still difficult, after three decades, to give an exhaustive interpretation of it.
Seventeen years later in 2006, the protagonist of the Romanian film East of Budapest, a local TV journalist in the small, outlying town of Vaslui, asked the direct participants in those historical events ‘whether there had been any revolution in their town’. In this ironic fashion, the director of the film, Corneliu Porumboiu, raised two questions: if these people had been active participants in the revolution or just passive spectators of an inevitable collapse and, more crucial, what Romanian society had become in the post-Ceausescu period. To understand both of them, he suggested, we should return to the source of the historical moment and try to capture, in a Weberian way, the motivations and interpretations that the actors themselves gave to their actions.
Why should it be so important to understand the extent of awareness with which the actors of the 1989 revolution faced the complexity of the transformation triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall? The key words in his reflection were: crisis, de-legitimation and collapse of the communist regimes and, above all, social agency. So, who are the actors in the seizing of power as a genuine revolutionary act? Members of civil society in every single country involved? Revolutionary movements like Solidarnošć in Poland or the ethno-nationalists of former Yugoslavia? New political elites thrown up from the communists ranks? In addition, how and how much did these actors contribute to the crisis, de-legitimation and collapse of the communist regimes? Did the action of the masses, in terms of participation in the revolutionary ‘liberation’ of their societies, occur when the regimes had already imploded? Finally, what was the model of citizenship that transition, more or less liberal and democratic, produced in these countries, many of them nowadays effective or aspiring members of the European Union?
The effort to search for answers to these questions could reveal an important dimension of the transformation: what ideals and value systems constituted the model of the 1989 revolution and to what extent do contemporary societies correspond to those ideals? It seems that it is no longer enough to talk in terms of ‘liberal democracy’, taking almost for granted the meaning and content of these magic words. The majority of the new parties involved in the first democratic elections, and almost all parties currently active in the political life of the CEE states, indicated liberal democracy as the main political foundation for their programmes. Nevertheless, political practices in many cases reveal patterns and behaviours far removed from the ideal proclaimed, both yesterday and today. Moreover, the ideal itself, especially when connected to overwhelming, globalized capitalism, has been called into question by many scholars, with a criticism towards the neoliberal dominance on a global level1 (Altvater et al. 2013; Biebricher 2017; Burchardt and Kirn 2017; Fraser 2013; Harvey 2006; Piketty 2013; Streeck 2013; Žižek 2009).
The current political and social crises of the EU member countries, and even more of the aspirants to the EU, and the response in terms of austerity measures have provoked protests that had been emerging from 2010 onwards in a particularly violent way in the Southern EU, Turkey, Ukraine, and to a certain extent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia, and other Western Balkan countries. The ‘common denominator’ of the protests could be defined as a sentiment of indignation about a new system of social inequalities produced by neoliberal forms of exclusion from social citizenship, which put them in relation to new global social movements (Della Porta and Mattoni 2014). Still it is not yet clear which latent social rifts are becoming manifest through this organized civic dissent, expressed in claims for new social justice, nor what kind of political challenges these movements have brought out, either for single nation-states or in particular for the EU leadership. Reconsideration of the democratic transition process from 1989 on turns out once again to be of enormous importance.
Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Coining New Concepts, Building New Realities
Transition theories have developed within the research on political, social, economic and cultural transformations of the national states’ regimes and systems throughout the twentieth century. Particularly important for this analysis was the inquiry that considered the differences between two transitional models: denazification and the democratization of totalitarian regimes after World War II and changes involving authoritarian regimes in the Southern European and Latin American states. The aim was to create a hermeneutical and methodological frame within which it was possible to build up a common language for the analysis of the phenomenon and to produce conceptual tools capable of dealing with complex historical processes in real time. The scholars were moved by a need to describe, understand and interpret the ongoing transformations of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes into democratic ones, but also by a new awareness of the deficiencies of democratic regimes that had turned out to be unable to avoid the rise of Nazism and Fascism as democratically legitimated systems.
Democratic transitions as ‘waves’ were the key concepts of the interpretative models that have undergone transformation processes all around the globe and were finally applied in the case of the Central and Eastern European societies. The transition, in this sense, was explained in terms of the continuity of changes in all social spheres with the aim of increasing liberal democracy and a capitalistic market economy in Europe, and globally. Huntington, for example, interpreted the events of 1989 as the last stage of the ‘third wave of (democratic) transition’, initiated by the transformations in Southern Europe, Latin America and Asia after World War II. Democratic elections in the United States in 1828 were considered the starting point of the first wave, which involved many of the Western democracies. Fascist and Nazi regimes had first blocked and then abolished this process for several decades. Once these regimes were defeated in World War II, a second wave of transition began in Europe involving Germany, Italy and Austria, extending to some Asian countries such as Japan and Korea. According to Huntington, this cycle ended in the mid-1960s, having had a significant influence on the liberation of colonized countries (Huntington 1991).
One of the most important approaches to the study of democratic transition and consolidation was developed in the 1980s by O’Donnell, P.C. Schmitter and L.Whitehead in their four volumes of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (1986). The book collected the results of a seven-year project investigating the prospects for democracy in the countries of Latin America and Southern Europe. The project involved a great team of scientists, including Stepan, Whitehead, Cardoso and Przeworski.
The authors set a general frame for their research, in terms of an analysis of the transition of authoritarian regimes in the direction of something that remains uncertain: either the establishment of a political democracy or the return to a new authoritarian form. At the first stage of transformation, they stressed, a state of chaos or at least general confusion could appear, and blow up into violent conflicts or even revolutionary movements with more radical tendencies and demands (O’Donnell et al. 1986: 3). In order to understand the direction in which the actions are likely to advance, “a theory of abnormality in which the unexp...