The Devil in History

role of “revolutionary subjects.” Euphoric accounts of the revolutionary wave, often compared to the 1848 Spring of the Nations, abounded, and Timothy Garton Ash offered some of the most eloquent articles along this line in his gripping contributions to the New York Review of Books, later collected in the volume The Magic Lantern.²⁵ Whether the term revolutions is the most appropriate to describe these changes is of course an open question. What is beyond dispute is the world-historical impact of the transformations inaugurated by the events of 1989 and the inauguration of a new vision of the political. In the twentieth century, many intellectuals engaged in a frantic search for utopia and frequently participated in the legitimation of ideology-driven despotisms: “It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffection of Europe’s intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche.”²⁶ According to Garton Ash,

The year 1989 left realities. Yet there was something new; there was a big new idea, and that was the revolution itself—the idea of the non-revolutionary revolution, the evolutionary revolution. The motto of 1989 could come from Lenin’s great critic Eduard Bernstein: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.”… So this was a revolution that was not about the what but about the how. That particular motto of peaceful, sustained, marvelously inventive, massive civil disobedience channeled into an oppositional elite that was itself prepared to negotiate and to compromise with the existing powers, the powers that were (in short, the roundtable)—that was the historical novelty of 1989. Where the guillotine is a symbol of 1789, the roundtable is a symbol of 1989.²⁷

One needs to keep in mind that the critical intellectuals of Eastern Europe, the agents of civil society in 1970s and 1980s, did not wish to seize power. The essence of their actions and writings, and implicitly of their influence over the subjects of Communist rule, was their commitment to the restoration of truth, civility, and morality in the public sphere, the rehabilitation of civic virtues, and the end of the totalitarian method of control, intimidation, and coercion. Stephen Kotkin accurately pointed out that the most vulnerable aspect of Communist systems was their endemic lying. In this context, I contend that the dissidents’ discourse of an active, self- conscious, empowered social body amounted to a formidable challenge to the party’s Big Lie. The rehabilitation of notions such as freedom, dignity, citizenship, sovereignty of the people, and pluralism provided a radical symbolic and practical-political challenge to the totalitarian world. Moreover, for the first time in the history of Communism in the region, there appeared a group of thinkers who by action and word tried “to fill the anomic space between the individual and the state.”²⁸ In other words, a different future for societies under Communism could be glimpsed once intellectuals and sectors of the population were no longer silent. Civil society did matter in the context of 1989. Anne Applebaum stessed, in a review of Stephen Kotkin’s Uncivil Society, that alternative forms of organization “helped form the crowds and then helped the crowds create change (impelling Vaclav Havel to the presidency of the Czech Republic, for example). Maybe more importantly, they affected the midlevel bureaucrats, the people who had been following orders all along but, with the threat of a Soviet invasion withdrawn, no longer wanted to do so. People like the policeman who spontaneously opened the barrier at the Berlin Wall, just to take one famous example, were moved to switch sides by, yes, the civil society that had been growing around them.”²⁹ Even if the civil society was not as coherent, numerous, influential, or visible as the uncivil one, it provided a mobilization ideal in an environment dominated by coercion, cynicism, and paralysis. I would go as far as to say that the importance of civil society lay not particularly in its political weight, but in the fact that it became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The dominant trend, however, was to regard the revolutions of 1989 as part of the universal democratic wave: a confirmation of the ultimate triumph of liberal democratic values over collectivist-Jacobin attempts to control human minds. It is thus clear that dissent was an expression not only of resistance to the dominant ideology of power, a repudiation of the power of ideology, but also an affirmation of a political community based on dialogue and open-mindedness: “Samizdat, and the creation of alternative cultures of resistance and dissent that were made possible by it, can be understood as the result of long-range historical processes and part and parcel of the trans-European project of modernity. After all, free expression made possible the creation and nurturing of the very idea of ‘the public’ and ‘public opinion,’ as Jurgen Habermas reminds us in his early masterpiece, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.”³⁰ Earlier, similar interpretations of the 1989 upheaval inspired the reflections on the future of liberal revolution by political philosopher Bruce Ackerman, for whom the dramatic changes in East and Central Europe were part of a global revival of liberalism. In other words, their success or failure would condition the future of liberalism in the West as well, because we live in a world of political, economic, and cultural-symbolic interconnectedness and interdependence.³¹

After decades of state aggression against the public sphere, these revolutions reinstituted the distinction between what belongs to the government and what is the territory of the individual. Emphasizing the importance of political and civic rights, they created space for the exercise of liberal democratic values. In some countries these values have become the constitutional foundation on which the institutions of an open society can be safely built. In others, the reference to pluralism remained somewhat perfunctory. But even in the less successful cases of democratic transition (Western Balkans), the old order, based on suspicion, fear, and mass hopelessness, is irrevocably defunct. In other words, while the ultimate result of these transitions is not clear, the revolutions have succeeded in their most important task: disbanding the Leninist regimes and permitting the citizens of these countries to fully engage in shaping their own destinies. In the end, “the return to Europe” heralded in 1989 stood for “normalcy and the modern way of life.” Echoing Judt, the vital step was made—Communism became the past.³²

As I mentioned before, the crucial question to be addressed is: Were the events of 1989 genuine revolutions? If the answer is positive, then how do we assess their novelty in contrast to other similar events (the French Revolution of 1789 or the Hungarian one in 1956)? If the answer is negative (as some today like to argue), then it is legitimate to ask ourselves: What were they? Simply mirages, results of obscure intrigues of the beleaguered bureaucracies that mesmerized the world but did not fundamentally change the rules of the game? These last words, the rules of the game, are crucial for interpreting what happened in 1989; focusing on them, we can reach a positive assessment of those revolutions and their heritage. In my view, the upheaval in the East, and primarily in the Central European core countries, represented a series of political revolutions that led to the decisive and irreversible transformation of the existing order. Instead of autocratic, one-party systems, the revolutions created emerging pluralist polities. They allowed the citizens of ideologically driven tyrannies (closed societies) to recover their main human and civic rights and to engage in the building of open societies.³³ Historian Konrad Jarausch argues that the emphasis on people power typical of these revolutions substantiated their novelty: their peaceful path toward regime change against all odds.³⁴ Moreover, instead of centrally planned command economies, after 1989, all these societies have embarked on creating market economies. In these efforts to meet the triple challenge (creating political pluralism, a market economy, and a public sphere, i.e., a civil society) some succeeded better and faster than others. But it cannot be denied that in all the countries that used to be referred to as the Soviet bloc, the once monolithic order was replaced by political and cultural diversity.³⁵ While we still do not know whether all these societies have become properly functioning liberal democracies, it is nevertheless important to emphasize that in all of them, Leninist systems based on ideological uniformity, political coercion, dictatorship over human needs, and the suppression of civic rights have been dismantled.³⁶

POLITICS AND MORALITY

In a way, the revolutions of 1989 were an ironic vindication of Lenin’s famous definition of a revolutionary situation: those at the top cannot rule in the old ways, and those at the bottom do not want to accept these ways any more. They were more than simple revolts because they attacked the very foundations of the existing systems and proposed a complete reorganization of society. It is perhaps worth remembering that Communist Parties were not in power as a result of legal rational procedures. No free elections brought them to the ruling positions; rather