Abstract
We are happy that communism ended mostly peacefully in East-Central Europe in 1989. That civil society channeled peaceful dissent in the northern part of this region was important. Nevertheless, it is wrong to minimize other factors. The action of the main leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States were equally or more crucial. Gorbachev’s unwillingness to sustain old Soviet interventionist policies and Reagan’s decision to treat Gorbachev with respect and agree to weapons reductions against the advice of many of his most hawkish advisors were necessary for this to come out well. But unfortunately, because the role of civil society was blown out of proportion, and also because the transition from communism went relatively smoothly, mistaken conclusions were drawn by American policy makers. They came to believe that civil society everywhere in the world was inclined to be democratic, peaceful, and pro-American. In fact, that has not been the case, and the kind of easy transition to free market democracy that marked much of East-Central Europe has not been replicated elsewhere, particularly not in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It might have been more appropriate to conclude from the events of 1989 that Yugoslavia, not Poland, was the case that most resembled the ethnically and religiously divided parts of the world, and to remember that even in Poland the homogeneity of the population was the result of brutal genocide, mass expulsions, and forced boundary changes that had taken place as a result of World War II.
None of us would ever deny how wonderful it was that communism collapsed in East-Central Europe in 1989, or that this marked the end of the Cold War and the start of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But now, a quarter of a century later, perhaps we would do well to reconsider the implications of the events that led up to 1989. We have to look more dispassionately at some of the faulty conclusions that were drawn from the “annus mirabilis,” and face the unfortunate fact that subsequently they produced some misleading analogies that distorted our understanding of other parts of the world.
There are two different kinds of approaches that we would do well to consider more carefully. One is the role of key individual, powerful leaders and their personalities, a topic social science is poorly equipped to handle because it deals with idiosyncratic and unpredictable variables. The other is what cases to use as a basis of comparison if we are to take what happened in one region as a way of understanding other regions. Specifically, I want to raise the question: what if for the rest of the globe what happened in Yugoslavia is more relevant than what took place in Poland?
Near the start of his essay, Vladimir Tismaneanu briefly mentions, almost in passing, the “Gorbachev factor,” that is, Mikhail Sergeyevich’s renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine that had claimed the Soviet Union’s right to intervene in any of its Warsaw Pact allies to preserve communism. Gorbachev should get much more credit than a passing mention. What would have happened if the Soviet Union had actually intervened? It is most unlikely that the United States would have done much about it. In the long run, maybe communism was failing because it had lost its legitimacy, but the Soviets had the military power to crush reform in 1989, and there was nothing to guarantee that a Putin-like figure would not emerge as the boss. There were plenty of them in the Party and security services, and there still are in Russia, though now they no longer command such enormous military or political power.
In 1989 very serious protests in China were brutally repressed even though all the conditions of disillusionment with communism, the loss of its revolutionary fervor, and widespread poverty (far worse at that time than in most of East-Central Europe) were present. Civil society was able to mobilize, but was crushed. 1 Subsequently, economic reform continued, and the Chinese Communist Party rebuilt its legitimacy and power on material success and nationalism, not Marxism-Leninism. China is a success, but hardly a democratic society or one that has ever come to grips with Maoism’s sinister record that killed tens of millions. Vietnam, which began to reform itself in 1986, remains an autocratic, repressive state controlled by its Communist Party. Somewhat later, in North Korea, a period of devastating famine and unending economic ruin may have delegitimized the regime, but Kim Il Sung and his heirs have held on by sheer, vicious brutality. Its small elite has given up on Marxism and its only ideology is the deification of its monarchy. Despite endless predictions of its coming downfall, the vicious Kim dynasty survives. Cuba’s faltering communist regime is still in power, despite all of that island’s economic woes, its ample stirrings of intellectual discontent, and America’s best efforts. Civil society can be crushed. 2
We have to be frank in saying that Gorbachev’s fundamental decency and naiveté were crucial. He was unwilling to cause massive bloodshed, which is what would have been required. It is not that Tismaneanu is wrong about the power of ideas. On the contrary, an important part of Gorbachev’s decisions came from his own faith that socialism was still workable, so that if given a chance to be freer, the Soviet people would accept it and make it work better. Stephen Hanson understood this right away and published his first academic piece in 1991 saying so. 3 Gorbachev was completely wrong. To survive, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have had to take the Chinese path of allowing socialism to wither away while maintaining a repressive party autocracy. Deng Xiaoping was more of a realist in that he understood that if given the choice, the Chinese people might well overthrow the Party, but at the same time, that socialism was not going to work very well.
While being grateful to individuals with ideas that facilitated the events of 1989, we have to thank Ronald Reagan too, but not entirely in the way he is revered by his Republican Party today. He was also strangely naïve about something, that is, his faith that an anti-missile defense could work. The United States has to this day not yet mastered an effective way of stopping even a fairly limited intercontinental ballistic missile attack, but the money poured into research by the Reagan administration frightened the Soviet military. The United States already had a significant advantage in electronic warfare, and the Soviets feared that further American progress would leave them even farther behind. So they, and the Soviet intelligence services, knew they needed to reform their system to make it more flexible and progressive. That is why they chose Gorbachev to succeed Chernenko instead of a more conservative alternative. 4
Melvin Leffler’s great book on the Cold War stresses something even more important: Reagan actually came to trust Gorbachev and vice versa. It is not that Reagan had to give up much of anything, but nevertheless, one of his closest advisors and friends, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, was opposed to signing any agreement with the Soviets. Both the American Department of Defense and the CIA tried to convince Reagan that he should distrust Gorbachev’s proposals for a treaty limiting nuclear weapons. The right wing of the Republican Party felt that Reagan was betraying the United States and was about to lose the Cold War. Ed Meese, another close Reagan advisor and friend, agreed with Weinberger, but Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, and England’s Margaret Thatcher all understood better what was going on. Both Reagan and his much maligned successor, President George H. W. Bush, handled the dismantling of the Soviet Empire very well by not pushing too hard, by being gracious to Gorbachev, and not overtly pressing their advantage or bragging too loudly. 5
So, yes, let us praise civil society and explain how communism lost its legitimacy because of its failures, but that does not mean we should forget that there were some exceptional leaders involved without whom things could have gone horribly wrong and resulted in a bloodbath in the Soviet Empire, and perhaps a return to a particularly nasty Cold War. The personalities of individual leaders are critical, particularly but not only when it comes to conducting foreign policy or making decisions about war and peace. Larger social forces are important, of course, but even in democracies a few key individuals can make a huge difference. That is one of the big reasons why social science fails to predict so many important events.
The second main problem about interpreting 1989 and drawing conclusions applicable to other parts of the world is the exaggerated faith in civil society that emerged at the time. It was clear, as Tismaneanu has explained in prior work as well as in the essay that begins our present discussion, that civil society did play a major role in building the foundations for successful transitions away from communism to democratic capitalism. Civil society at every level, including a far wider base than just its leading intellectuals, could have been crushed. But it was not, and so its beneficial effects in several East-Central European countries was allowed to deeply influence political outcomes. That some subsequently prominent intellectuals were crucial in exposing the lies, corruption, and general moral bankruptcy of communist rule is perfectly true. Many of the most influential also supported a liberal—one might say “Enlightenment”—vision of the future for their societies.
But is all civil society always as benign? Do intellectuals elsewhere who are disgusted by the corruption and hypocrisy of their autocrats always believe in the Western Enlightenment? Is civil society the answer that throughout the world can bring democracy, end ethnic and sectarian conflict, and eventually result in a world safe for the American, or at least the Western, way of life? It happened once, so why not again and again, helped along by a strong America standing firm and showing others the way? Sadly, no; civil society is not always the answer, but in the enthusiastic atmosphere of the 1990s and early 2000s, the consensus was that yes, it could be.
Not all anti-communist intellectuals in communist countries believed in the Enlightenment. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn never did, and though after 1991 he seemed to be a marginalized figure, it is his vision of what Russia should be that is on the ascendant, and not that of Andrei Sakharov. Nor is it clear that Viktor Orbán has ever bought into the kind of open tolerance or belief in democratic practices that were supposed to become the norm in post-communist Europe.
Much worse, however, is what can be called civil society in some other parts of the world that were never part of the Western Enlightenment tradition. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood created in Egypt in 1928 was very much a genuine civil society organization led by intellectuals determined to free themselves of a corrupted monarchy completely subservient to British colonial interests. Later, after supporting the revolution against that monarchy in 1952, and soon realizing that Gamal Abdel Nasser was just another dictator, it turned against him and was repressed. In the long run, its most influential intellectual was Sayyid Qutb, whose most important book, Milestones, is a vicious attack on democracy, the West, Jews, and all Muslims who want to modernize and adapt their religion to today’s world. He was executed by Nasser in 1966, but since then his influence has only grown, a signal lesson for anyone who thinks that powerful ideas can be repressed just because they are wrong. 6 In today’s revitalized Egyptian military dictatorship, it is the Muslim Brotherhood or worse, a more radical offshoot that will in the long run be the most important civil society organization in that country. Liberal democracy is not what they have in mind. And what about the Taliban? They were also a part of civil society that fought against the corrupt warlord rule that replaced Afghan communism. Most of us might not consider their leadership to consist of intellectuals who emerged from non-state institutions, but what else were they originally if not, as their name means, “students” following Islamic scholars. 7 Even more obviously, the Iranian Revolution of 1989 was inspired by some very prominent, inspirational thinkers, most notably the scholarly Ayatollah Khomeini and the activist students’ intellectual hero, Ali Shariati, who combined Islam and Marxism in his writing. 8
Some would say that religious organizations ought not be considered part of civil society. Why not? In Poland, the Catholic Church played an absolutely key role in combating communism.
After the catastrophe of 9/11, 2001, the example of 1989 stood large in high-level thinking about what to do. In East-Central Europe, once the dictators were gone, democracy and free markets sprang up, perhaps imperfectly, but heading in the right direction. While working at the United States Institute of Peace in 2004–2005, I frequently heard in various conservative think tanks as well as from State Department people that this would happen in the Middle East once tyranny collapsed, starting with Iraq. Of course that is not what happened.
I do not want to exaggerate. The invasion of Iraq was based on more than just a misreading of 1989. The historian John Dower has shown that it was also a gross misrepresentation of the situation in 1945 when the United States occupied Japan and West Germany, then turned them into friendly democracies. There were many reasons for this success, one of which was the careful preparation that had taken place during the war. Also there was the fact that both these countries had had somewhat of a democratic period in the 1920s, were occupied by vast armies, and understood that any backsliding would result in their complete destruction. On top of this, they were not divided by sectarian or ethnic problems, and were encouraged to retain well-trained, functioning bureaucracies. 9 What happened in Iraq was not like this, or anything like East-Central Europe in 1989.
With all the warm perception of how peacefully the transition had gone in 1989, there was a deliberate forgetting by policy makers and a good many Western, particularly American intellectuals and policy leaders, of history. Perhaps instead of looking at Poland or Czechoslovakia as examples of how to bring about democracy, those eager to bring about the same results in the Middle East and Afghanistan might have looked at Yugoslavia instead. And in doing so, they should have understood how much of a wasted opportunity there was because Yugoslavia had actually had the most open economy and society in communist Europe, and it had a very large number of active, intelligent reformist intellectuals.
As Robert Hayden has shown, both West European and American statesmen and journalists misunderstood the situation in Yugoslavia and were unprepared to deal with a genuinely multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society. 10 Drawing lessons from 1989 based on thinking that somehow the world was like Poland, whose population already had been homogenized by massive genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the forced change of boundaries from 1939 to 1945, was more than foolish. It led to almost criminal errors, because if any part of Europe in 1989 was more like, say, the Middle East or Africa, it was not Poland but Yugoslavia, where different ethno-religious communities remained mixed together. The ways in which the West mishandled this situation by picking sides and simplifying complexity should have been used as a lesson. Instead, the Americans in Iraq decided to quickly dismantle the institutions that might have held that country together because they were dominated by “the bad guys.” Instead of moving very gradually toward reform, the Americans exacerbated a sectarian split. We see the results today.
Finally, were it not for the European Union’s inducement to post-communist countries in East-Central Europe, some of them would probably not have become anything close to being democracies. That seems evident today about Romania and Bulgaria, and the EU may be the only force holding Hungary to at least some observance of democratic norms. But this lesson also was not learned. Elsewhere in the world, there is no international organization as coherent, wealthy, and eager to help its members as the European Union. Today, alas, the EU is weaker, benefits from less legitimacy, and is not as willing to help as it was in the past, but in the 1990s it contributed greatly to the success of some of post-communist East-Central Europe.
It is not only the dream of Europe that has been partly sullied but also that of America. In the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the United States and Western Europe were admired as models in communist countries, and around much of the world. That certainly helped shape many of the reforms that took place in the post-communist space. But today, it is not only Europe that is in disarray. The United States is an over-militarized, deeply divided, dysfunctional democracy that far fewer people now think of as much of a model. In the future, we may look back at 1989 as a high point that was followed by a darker, less hopeful era.
What happened in 1989 was indeed wonderful, and most of East-Central Europe is far better off than it was then; but it was not the harbinger of a delightful new age. Indeed, much valuable scholarship pointed that out even in the early 1990s, and there has been much more since then. What I am criticizing is not at all the kind of work published by EEPS about that period and subsequent change, but rather what has been distorted and simplified by those with political agendas who wanted to see the events of 1989 as confirmation of their own ideologies, and therefore indulged in mistaken analogies and wishful conclusions.