Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope,Dismay,and Neglect

Narratives of 1989 already have a history of their own. The divergence of these narratives constitutes a key element of political and cultural polarization, as attested by current developments in Hungary and Poland. For more than a decade, pro-European liberal democrats successfully managed to define the horizon of expectations on national and transnational levels. By the early twenty-first century, however, the persistent uncertainties of economic transformation and the new attraction of the notions of (national) memory and identity ¹ gave rise to conservative and populist mobilization—first within East Central Europe and then also on the larger European stage. As James Mark has perceptively argued, the velvet exit from communism has been followed by a growing conviction that the transformation was still incomplete, which in turn has fuelled a kind of nachholend anti-communism. ² From the perspective of the new Right, the post-communists still have to be thoroughly defeated, an agenda that mandates consistently confrontational politics. ³ In other words, public disagreement over 1989 and what followed from it has become a dispute over the legitimacy of the political order.

This special section of East European Politics & Societies and Cultures sheds new light on the reasons behind the continuing lack of agreement on the meaning of 1989. Our claim to originality rests on the application of concepts from memory studies. While the scholarly literature on Central and Eastern European transitions is already massive and research on the revolutions of 1989 has just been canonized in a monumental handbook, ⁴ examinations of the memories of those times have remained surprisingly few. Such a perspective not only promises to zoom out from a strictly political debate on the legacies of 1989 in order to include wider societal and institutional processes, thereby adding much needed nuance, but also to help us cope with discrepancies between continental, national, vernacular, and individual experiences and narratives. ⁵ Last but not least, exploring the dynamics of memory contributes to the historicization of post-communism. As it increasingly turns into a subject for historians, ⁶ the language of memory will undoubtedly become an important tool for the study of transformations.

To date, European memory studies have chiefly concentrated on the afterlife of the Second World War. The prime focus of this rich body of research has been the commemoration of the Jewish and other victims of Nazism and fascism as compared to those of the communist regimes. Many inquiries developed around the idea that a common European identity could emerge on the basis of fostering shared memories, a belief that has also been sharply criticized. ⁷ Yet memory research has tended to neglect 1989, despite the latter’s close connection to political change, contemporary European identities, and people’s life-worlds. The only major exception in English is Twenty Years after Communism, edited by Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik. ⁸ The collection contains studies of the politics of memory of 1989 in eleven countries, including the Baltics and Yugoslavia. The editors argue that fractured memory regimes with regard to 1989—the type in place in the majority of post-communist countries—constitute a risk to democracy. In fractured memory regimes, the strategy of one of the major political actors, the “mnemonic warrior,” is to delegitimize opponents as morally unfit for the political contest. The aim of this section is not so much to further qualify this theory as to add a new layer of understanding, drawing on historical and sociological perspectives in order to go beyond and below the official memory regimes and party politics of the nation-states.

In addition, several other volumes on the history of 1989 feature individual chapters dealing with the memory of this momentous year. ⁹ Still others discuss it within the broader parameters of recent developments in the European politics of history or realms of memory. ¹⁰ A few researchers have employed transnational or comparative perspectives to study the uses of 1989 in the domains of culture and civil society. James Krapfl ¹¹ and Susan C. Pearce ¹² analyze the performative, spectacle-like aspects of the twentieth anniversaries of 1989 and make similar observations on international diversity and disagreements. For instance, whilst Germany and Czechia organized essentially participatory, conflict-free, and upbeat anniversaries in 2009 (the Germans to celebrate democracy, the Czechs the improvements in their living standards), in Hungary the anniversary year 2009 was plagued by conflict, with public debate in crisis and the political elite isolated. In some countries, separate commemorations were organized by large cities such as Leipzig or Timişoara, to remind the public of the grassroots civic engagement of 1989, and sometimes to broadcast “revolution envy” to their respective capitals. According to Pearce, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 actually marked the beginning of its cultural memory in the region, not least due to the ongoing generational shift. She also argues that more time should pass before the events of 1989 can “take a prominent place in national collective memories” because the “unfinished business of revolution” does not allow for the proper pursuit of memory work. ¹³

Another article by James Mark, Muriel Blaive, Adam Hudek, Anna Saunders, and Stanisław Tyszka traces the evolution of memories of 1989 in the first two decades of post-socialism. ¹⁴ They provide a detailed account of the rise of discourses on both Left and Right that view the peaceful “refolutions” ¹⁵ as a “betrayal,” a “moment of great lost opportunities,” or a “historical mythology” used to support “unwanted forms of western political and economic colonization.” ¹⁶ Their conclusion, that with the exception of Germany and Czechia there is no consensual and unifying tradition of remembering 1989 in the region, closely echoes the findings of Bernhard and Kubik, Krapfl, and Pearce.

Against this background, several directions emerge in which memory research could contribute to a better understanding of the complex legacy of 1989. First, the diversity but also multidirectionality of narratives and commemorations in international and transnational settings, especially on the European level, deserves much greater scholarly attention—this is precisely what is pursued here in the papers by Aline Sierp, and Lars Breuer and Anna Delius. Second, the discrepancies between different meanings and positions become even more evident when the diverse symbolisms of 1989 are taken into account. The narratives of major events such as the Solidarity movement; street demonstrations in defense of students or around ecological issues; ¹⁷ roundtables; Imre Nagy’s reburial; ¹⁸ the Baltic Way; the fall of the Berlin Wall; or the Ceauşescus’ trial and execution ¹⁹ represent values and interests from different national and social contexts. ²⁰ Although there is some literature on the emerging heritage of 1989, more case studies are needed to sufficiently grasp the different milieux de mémoire that underlie these narratives. Third, but perhaps most crucially, we may possess many insights into the political discourses on 1989 but we know relatively little about vernacular memories of these events. Different people must have experienced 1989 in very different ways, and their memory of it was filtered through subsequent experiences, including economic and political developments, as well as biographical and generational processes.

The papers collected in this special section begin to address some of the issues identified above, laying the groundwork for further memory research into 1989. The authors employ a number of key concepts from memory research: lieu de mémoire, vernacular memory, memory regime, and generational memory. However, the section as a whole proposes “memory event,” recently coined by Alexander Etkind et al. in their study of the memory of Katyn, ²¹ as a particularly useful analytical category. The concept of memory event emphasizes memory-related agency in the present as well as its future-oriented nature, and can operate on both national and transnational levels. It thereby counters the repeated and somewhat malevolent charges against memory research as being at the same time past- and nation-fixated and solipsistic. It opens the field to the study of political interventions, moments of memory dynamism (which may or may not coincide with large-scale political change), and the transformation of narratives and values. In the long term, inquiries into the narratives of 1989 under the key concept of memory event may help us identify the circumstances under which changes in memory regimes on the political and institutional levels interact with vernacular memories, and those in which they fail to do so. This is a broad and underexplored subject to which our section can make but a preliminary contribution, thereby highlighting its potential.

The section offers four case studies on 1989 as a memory event. All of them reveal the embeddedness of memories in the present time, the grounding of their meanings in the current context and expectations, and entanglements with narratives of competing events. However different they may be, the narratives discussed in this section share one key similarity: they all demonstrate that the liberal understanding of the transition as an epochal overcoming of illiberal dead-ends has not been internalized as the dominant view of 1989. Instead, the case studies show how this narrative has been superseded by others at both national and transnational levels, how it remains absent from the “working memory” ²² of West Europeans, as well as widespread resignation, disappointment, frustration, and nostalgia for socialism in East Central Europe.

Aline Sierp’s article “1939 versus 1989: A Missed Opportunity to Create a European Lieu de Mémoire?” thus investigates the complex dynamics of policy making on the supranational level to explain why 23 August 1939 has been made into a Europe-wide Remembrance Day whereas, rather surprisingly, the events of 1989 have not become the subject of regular commemorations on the European level. Exploring the role played by the transnational party groups in the European Parliament, Sierp offers an alternative to theories positing a sharp East–West and Right–Left divide with regard to the key issues of memory in early twenty-first-century Europe. According to her, the anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939—after much conflict and compromise—was successfully institutionalized because it was understood as a gesture of inclusion of the histories and memories of the new EU member states and was seen to promote a unifying narrative. The article stresses that 1989 and, more specifically, 9 November still has the potential to be canonized as the second foundational moment for Europe, right behind the anniversary of the Schuman Declaration on 9 May 1950.

If Sierp’s article paints a rather reassuring picture of EU-level policy making, anticipating a more inclusive memory policy with 1989 right at the top of the European waiting list, Lars Breuer and Anna Delius’s “1989 in European Vernacular Memory” not only identifies important differences between vernacular and official memories, but also raises doubts as to whether 1989 could ever become one of the transnational foundations for a shared European memory. Drawing on focus group interviews in four of the six largest EU member states, Breuer and Delius show that neither Britons nor Spaniards consider 1989 to be a salient historical moment; and that both Polish and German respondents tend to display conspicuous national biases when discussing 1989, with little emphasis on its democratic achievements. Transnational curiosities seem to be more developed among their Polish than among their German interviewees, but this, ironically, is mainly the result of the Poles’ resentment about what they see as unjust neglect of their national history abroad.

Victoria Harms’s “A Tale of Two Revolutions: Hungary’s 1956 and the Un-doing of 1989” explores the growing politicization of history and memory in a polarized society. It shows that 1956 has been increasingly appropriated for nationalistic purposes following its rehabilitation in 1989. Drawing on analysis of public discourses, museums, monuments, and research facilities, Harms reveals how the Hungarian communist regime has come to be commemorated as a form of foreign imposition and a regime of relentless violence. Therefore the dominant images of 1956 depict the revolution as a symbol of national victimhood and unity, and use it to legitimize defense of national sovereignty. According to Harms, this has placed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution into the center of the official canon, at the expense of 1989, which is seen merely as a “change of regimes.”

If Hungary’s recent path led from liberal transition to nationalistic retrenchment with a heavy recourse to anti-communism, in Yugoslavia we are witnessing the resurgence of an emphasis on the more positive aspects of the late communist regime. Ljubica Spaskovska’s “The ‘Children of Crisis’: Making Sense of (Post-)Socialism and the End of Yugoslavia” explores mnemonic patterns that have led to such developments a quarter of a century after Yugoslavia’s demise. Analyzing how former members of the Yugoslav youth media and the cultural elite of the 1980s make sense of the socialist past and their own role at the time, Spaskovska finds that their narratives tend to revolve around the idea of betrayed hopes and a general disillusionment with politics. As the article shows, this disillusionment leads them to articulate alternative, non-institutionalized perspectives that, whilst not uncritical of the Yugoslav past, prefer to focus on its laudable sides. More specifically, the narratives analyzed by Spaskovska not only reveal signs of a generational concern with freedom bordering on the obsessive, but they also revisit the supposed “geo-political dignity” and cosmopolitan character of the late Yugoslav state.

All contributions to “Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope, Dismay and Neglect” underscore the malleability of the past. By discussing a topic that, surprisingly, has only recently begun to attract scholarly interest in memory studies, the authors of this special section uncover various contexts, forms, and layers of remembrance of a foundational event in East Central Europe’s recent past. In view of the current crisis of liberal democracy in the region, further investigations into its origins appear all the more crucial. This section hopes to contribute to such investigations by revealing underexplored chapters of relevance to the wider European context.