From Leipzig to Kyiv through Brussels: How the Revolution of 1989 Defined an Era

I

What made 1989 a revolutionary year was its abrupt departure, as a result of civic initiative, from the revolution that Mikhail Gorbachev had called perestroika. ² The impetus for this departure came first from the citizens of Leipzig in October and then from denizens of Prague in November, changing the scope of the possible even in Poland and Hungary, which had hitherto followed the more cautious path of negotiation between representatives of regimes and oppositions, with Gorbachev’s approval, that Timothy Garton Ash called “refolution.” ³ To be sure, there was negotiation in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, too—one of the bywords of the year was “dialogue”—but in these countries negotiators frequently had to revise their agreements under pressure from the mobilized populace, which fatefully was not the case in Poland or Hungary. ⁴ As Padraic Kenney points out in his contribution to this forum, “neither country experienced catharsis in 1989,” despite their vibrant dissident culture. In Romania it was likewise popular mobilization that forced the pace of change, though the more limited extent of its organization hindered the civic movement’s ability in the short term to effect the kind of sweeping transformation that took place in central Europe. ⁵ Developments in the Baltic states more closely followed the East German and Czechoslovak pattern, with citizens themselves acquiring a sense of agency over their collective destiny, though it took longer to achieve the initial breakthrough. ⁶

If Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche was one of the epicenters of 1989’s seismic shifts in the organization of hearts and minds, Kosovo Polje was another. The collective effervescence that began in Leipzig sacralized citizens as a whole (“we are the people”), but at Kosovo Polje, it sacralized one national group at the expense of others. ⁷ Both movements were reactions to systemic violence, but in central Europe this reaction crystallized into opposition to violence of any kind, while in Yugoslavia it ended up invoking violence to resist violence (real or perceived). In the case of Slobodan Milošević, it was also a means of consolidating power. His “anti-bureaucratic revolution” may have appealed to popular, democratic sentiment, similar to that welling up elsewhere in the region, but the sense of responsibility and respect for universally applicable rules that permeated the civic movements in central Europe was perverted into a blame game, and populism turned to demagoguery. ⁸ The Yugoslav case was extreme, but the populist strategy for claiming and consolidating power was widespread, especially in southeastern Europe. Ion Iliescu, with his National Salvation Front, successfully claimed to embody the revolutionary spirit of 1989—and then sent miners repeatedly against citizens calling for genuine democratization. ⁹ As Robert Austin recounts in his contribution to this forum, Albanian apparatchiks managed in this way to remain in power until 1992; the story in Bulgaria was similar.

Should we therefore speak of one revolution in 1989 or several, and how important is it to distinguish where revolutions occurred from where they did not? What constitutes a revolution, after all? With respect to political culture, what matters is not whether any particular set of events matches some etic definition of revolution, but whether citizens perceive themselves to have been participants in revolution. As Jan Kubik reminds us in his contribution, every collective, if it is not to be amorphous, requires a mythical foundation to give it definition and structure possibilities for determining shared meanings. It is therefore consequential that citizens of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Baltic states saw themselves as revolutionary actors in 1989, using the word to describe their experience, while citizens in Poland, Hungary, and much of southeastern Europe did not. Founding myths even in the latter countries, once post-Communist regimes were established, still needed to explain what happened in 1989, and as we will see, the sense that something more revolutionary should have happened in that year would structure political debate in those countries for decades to come. We can therefore agree with Austin when he writes, “It is still fair to say that Albania had a revolution because everyone else in the region had one.” There was an Idea of revolution in 1989, and whether or not citizens in any particular country saw themselves as its agents, it structured their thinking in ways that would define the subsequent decades.

Revolutions are not just about the demise of old regimes; their success is measured in how well they establish new ones. Domestically, at least, the frame of reference is always the ideals that the collective effervescence of revolution rendered sacred. ¹⁰ The heightened social interaction of this period—in which, as one Slovak journalist wrote, “Suddenly we all want to assemble as much as possible, to listen as much as possible, and to speak as much as possible”—facilitates the collective articulation of a body of ideas and ideals that the assembled community accepts as defining; participants acquire a real sense of drafting a new social contract. ¹¹ In places where the collective effervescence of 1989 was less decisive, like Poland and Hungary, earlier instances (1980 and 1956) could stand in as referents, though the programs articulated then were less tailored to present conditions.

In Czechoslovakia, we know quite well what the “ideals of November” were, because citizens collectively expressed them in thousands upon thousands of declarations, programmatic statements, bulletins, flyers, and other texts drafted at the time. ¹² By all accounts the popular ideals in East Germany were similar (more research is needed on other countries). Humanness (lidskost/ľudskosť or Menschlichkeit) was the central ideal; fairness, self-organization, and opposition to violence in all its forms were also prominent. For the sake of comprehending more recent developments, however, the revolutionary understanding of democracy is most important. No one called in 1989 for “liberal democracy”; instead, citizens demanded “democracy without qualifying adjectives” (in opposition, of course, to the various adjectives with which Communists had qualified the democracy that supposedly characterized their regimes). What they meant in practice, as spelled out in the innumerable texts and speeches of 1989, was economic as well as political democracy, with a blend of direct and representative democracy. “We are for free elections—yes,” explained workers in Bratislava’s Slovnaft refinery, “but for free elections from basic units up (elections of shift leaders, leading economic workers in individual workplaces, directors, and central organs). ¹³ Where scale made direct democracy impractical, citizens nonetheless insisted on the accountability of representatives between elections, enforceable through recall votes if a certain number of constituents demanded them, and for popular checks on elected representatives through independent media and occasional referenda. They also imagined a model of representation that would reflect the socioeconomic diversity of society. The inspiration for this vision, naturally, was citizens’ own experience, not foreign models (as many foreign commentators have imagined). ¹⁴ In the same vein, very few in 1989 called for a restoration of capitalism, though there were degrees of openness to introducing market mechanisms.

Some aspects of this vision were eventually realized, but many were not. On some matters citizens changed their minds as they gained new information or experiences, but that is not a sufficient explanation. Instead, we must note a phenomenon that historians of the French Revolution have also observed in 1789–90: the efforts of new powerholders to end the revolution. ¹⁵ We can see this clearly with the “anti-chaos coalition” between former oppositionists and apparatchiks in East Germany, or when Petr Pithart in Czechoslovakia went on federal television to implore workers to stop implementing workplace democracy. ¹⁶ More provocatively, we might speak of a refined counter-revolution, seeking not to restore the old regime but to divert the revolutionary process from its more radical goals. This was a project in which Western actors participated, often in cooperation with new powerholders in the East, who saw in the West potential solutions to many of their pressing problems. Thus, as a rhetorical means of demobilizing citizens, figures like Kohl, Pithart, and many others rejected or questioned the term revolution; denying the existence of something can be a very effective means of opposing it. In a related fashion, some economists began arguing that the real meaning of economic democracy was competition among enterprises, not employees having a say in the running of those enterprises. ¹⁷ This is not to say that the revolutions were “stolen,” as some began to claim in the spring of 1990—after all, a critical mass of people at the time accepted these arguments, and East Germans voted to join the West on Western terms—but it does explain how many, sooner or later, would come to regard the outcome of the process as a swindle.

There followed, of course, a reaction against leaders who, by 1991, came to be seen as insufficiently democratic, in the sense that they did not heed “the will of the people.” ¹⁸ In Poland and Hungary, citizens voted for former Communists in the elections of 1993 and 1994; in eastern Germany, “Ostalgie” became a phenomenon. ¹⁹ In Czechoslovakia, members of the civic associations that had arisen in 1989 revolted against their leaderships in 1990–91, turning to Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar in order “to finish the revolution.” ²⁰ In their promises to heed the will of the people, Klaus and Mečiar identified themselves as populists, though Klaus of course had his own ideology and was somewhat more willing to work within the confines of the law. ²¹ Mečiar, in his opportunism, was somewhat more akin to the post-Communist survivals of southeastern Europe.

It is easy to forget today how uncertain the 1990s were. After the excitement of the decade’s beginning, most of the region settled into a kind of malaise—what Václav Havel called an “uneasy mood” (blbá nálada)—while in much of what had been Yugoslavia war continued until 1995 (returning, of course, at the turn of the millennium). The struggles of the 1990s were, in one form or another, struggles over how to institutionalize the ideals of 1989, how to represent whatever form of community the Revolution had recognized as sovereign. These struggles played out, as Martha Lampland documents in her contribution, not just in the political sphere, but in everyday life—in factories, on collective farms, in the home, and even within the self. Mona Ozouf and Lynn Hunt have shown how the revolution of 1789 reconfigured the sacred foundations of social life (the “transcendental foundation” of which Kubik writes) following the desacralization of the old regime in preceding decades. ²² Something similar happened in 1989, and as in the 1790s, so in the 1990s political conflict reflected the struggle to represent the new sense of sovereign community in stable institutions. Among these institutions, of course, were religious establishments, and Sabrina Ramet discusses in her contribution how Churches across the region both changed and did not change after 1989, and she typologizes the kinds of relationships that states sought to cultivate with Churches for the legitimacy they could convey.

Over the course of the 1990s, the European Community and then the European Union increasingly came to occupy the position of a sacred center—a deus ex machina, guaranteeing that achievements of the Revolution would be lasting. A new sense of direction was palpable in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia following the invitations they received in December 1997 to begin accession negotiations, even if the outcome remained uncertain. This development also stimulated renewed civic mobilization in countries not invited, to avoid being permanently left out in the cold. Czech rejection of Klaus’s party in the 1998 elections had only marginally to do with his Euroskepticism, but the defeat of Mečiar the same year had everything to do with Slovaks’ fear that the former boxer’s talk of orienting the country eastward might really come to pass. The 2000 overthrow of Milošević in rump Yugoslavia partook in this movement toward the sacralization of “Europe,” and even Mečiar came around in the early naughts, sensing as a populist where the wind was blowing. In Hungary, new productions of János Brody’s rock opera István, a király (Stephen the King) suggested a parallel between EU accession and the Christianization of Hungary—an idea that could co-exist with Prime Minister Orbán’s dramatic transfer of the Holy Crown from the National Museum to Parliament in 2000, one thousand years after Stephen had accepted it. ²³ Just as in 1989 it was possible to imagine that the revolution would inaugurate “the most beautiful world,” so it was possible to imagine that all manner of good things would follow EU accession. ²⁴ Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia were invited to begin negotiations in 2000, and in December 2002, the EU formally invited eight post-Communist countries to join on May 1, 2004. Bulgaria and Romania, likewise invited to begin negotiations in 2000, would join in 2007. Referenda on accession were held in most of the invited countries, and everywhere they were held, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor.

Practical cooperation across party lines in pursuit of a common goal, which presupposed fulfillment of the EU’s Copenhagen criteria (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, respect for human rights, a market economy, etc.) led many commentators to speak of a “liberal consensus.” ²⁵ It was actually a strategic alliance, contingent on popular sentiment and the absence of desirable alternatives. The Slovak Christian Democrat Ján Čarnogurský, for example, had argued in 1991 that the fall of socialism should be followed by the fall of liberalism (ideally by 2007), and though he participated in the post-Mečiar government that brought Slovakia into agreement with the Copenhagen criteria, he did not abandon his ideological preferences (later, indeed, he would become a fan of Putin’s Russia). ²⁶ Soon after the goal of EU membership was achieved, the coalition began to fracture.

The accession of 2004 (or 2007) was of course not complete. Most “old” member states still closed their labor markets to workers from the “new” states for up to the allowable five years, and the Schengen area was not extended until 2007. As Barbara Törnquist-Plewa details in her contribution, moreover, a common European memory is still only beginning to coalesce. Nonetheless the EU enlargement was a happy moment, even if a significant minority still had reservations. Some even called it the fulfillment of the Revolution. ²⁷

II

The story of the current populist wave begins not with Orbán in 2010, but with Hungary’s Socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány in 2006. After a recording was leaked of a party meeting where, in quite vulgar language, he acknowledged lying about the economy in order to win recent parliamentary elections, citizens were justifiably incensed. This was not the kind of democracy they had imagined in 1989. In response, the opposition party Fidesz coordinated regular protests in central Budapest for the next several years. Already in 2006, the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 became the occasion for antagonistic commemorations, with Fidesz’s large rally on Blaha Lujza tér staking a middle ground between the pious, government-sponsored commemoration on Andrássy út and a nationalist attempt at insurrection near Parliament, where many innocent bystanders were injured in the police crackdown. Speakers at the Fidesz rally emphasized Orbán’s role in 1989, and in the streets, one could hear more references to 1989 than to 1956.

The global financial crisis of 2007–09 was not the cause of populist and neo-fascist movements, but it played into their hands. Already in 2004, on the occasion of the revolution’s fifteenth anniversary, one could hear Czech students complain that “there is no one to vote for,” reflecting sentiment widespread across the region that the established forms of democracy did not live up to the expectations of 1989. ²⁸ At the same time, a new self-confidence became apparent in the later naughts, and in those countries that had joined the EU, citizens and states began shedding the attitude of supplicants and asserting increasingly independent stances—as evident, for example, with Czech attempts to block the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 or Slovak resistance to the Greek bailout in 2010 (“we had to tighten our belts, why can’t they?”). The EU conditionality that had moderated politics among applicant states before 2004 no longer applied, and at the same time, Russian disinformation campaigns started to become a serious factor. ²⁹

The twentieth-anniversary commemorations of key dates in 1989 made the long-term consequences of the different civic experiences of that year starkly clear. In Leipzig and Prague, citizens occupied the center stage of re-enactments that applied the revolutionary ethos to the present. Over 200,000 people participated in a march around the ring of streets encircling Leipzig’s old town—more than double the number who had marched in 1989—following prayers for peace in the Nikolaikirche (which had continued to be held every week over the intervening twenty years), a “Speech on Democracy” following the service, and a popular “Democracy Market” during the day. In Prague, over 24,000 retraced the route of the march that had begun the revolution, with participants carrying placards that expressed opposing positions on political questions of the present but agreeing on the format for expressing them, followed by a large party on Národní třída and a smaller happening organized by the student-led “Inventory of Democracy.” In Cracow, by contrast, where dignitaries from Poland and neighboring countries assembled in Wawel Castle for an official ceremony, barricades were erected to keep citizens out, and the only notable civic activities were small protest marches by renters and anarchists. Elsewhere in Poland larger protest demonstrations took place, and though Lech Wałęsa appeared at a well-attended concert in Gdańsk, the anniversary of the breakthrough 1989 election was an occasion more for strife than concord; on television, commentators discussed a survey in which most Poles opined that the 1989 elections had not brought Communist power to an end. In Budapest, police were a visible and intimidating presence, reinforcing barricades that had been erected to keep citizens away from official ceremonies on Vértanúk tere and Hősök tere. Commemorations in Slovakia and Romania were not as well attended as those in Germany and the Czech Republic, but they were closer to the democratic than the aristocratic model, with many activities organized “from below.” ³⁰

After the events of 2006 and 2009, the “electoral revolution” of 2010 in Hungary was no surprise, nor was the “constitutional revolution” that followed in 2012. Fidesz presented both as the revolution Hungarians should have had in 1989. ³¹ This rhetoric was comparable to that of Klaus supporters who, in 1990, had hailed his takeover of Civic Forum as the beginning of a “second revolution,” but the timing was significant. ³² The populist “revolution” of 2010 was less moderated than that of 1990 by popular memory of the ideals of 1989, which in any case had not been such a foundational experience in Hungary. Even after the rise of new populist formations in Germany and the Czech and Slovak republics (or existing parties’ turn to populism), the popular experience of democratic engagement that citizens had gained or reinforced in 1989 constituted a limitation on populists’ ability to win elections as decisively as Fidesz did in 2010. In Poland, by contrast—which shared with Hungary what Kenney calls “a profound sense of incompleteness”—precisely such a development took place in 2015.

Meanwhile, the failure to establish a robust democracy in Russia began to bear significant consequences beyond Russia’s borders. ³³ Already in 1995, Aliaksandr Lukashenka had essentially restored the Soviet state of affairs in Belarus, joining Moldova’s break-away region of Transnistria as an outpost of reaction. Vladimir Putin, shortly after becoming Russia’s prime minister in 1999, famously expressed regret at the passing of the Soviet Union, and the chief feature of his now quarter-century reign has been his aim, in one way or another, to undo the consequences of the perestroika “revolution.” ³⁴ This has not been a merely rhetorical counter-revolution, but one prepared to employ violence.

In Ukraine, by contrast, developing civil society intervened more and more successfully to move the country in the direction its western neighbors had been following since 1989. The 1990 Revolution on Granite provided the inspiration for the 2000–01 “Ukraine without Kuchma” campaign, which presaged the Orange Revolution of 2004, itself a rehearsal for the Euromaidan and Revolution of Dignity in 2013–14, which succeeded in transforming both politics and society. ³⁵ As in 1989, the effervescence of the 2013–14 revolution facilitated the collective articulation of values that Ukrainian citizens agreed should define their new society: the rule of law, self-organization, independence, and of course democracy. ³⁶ The European Union symbolized these values, but they did not depend on the EU, since Ukrainians had sanctified them with their own blood. ³⁷

Putin’s reaction was swift. Within days, little green men occupied Crimea, leading to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in violation of international law. ³⁸ It was also not long before Russian support for “separatists” in the Donbas led to war between Russia and Ukraine in that theater, even if until 2022 it was a slow-burning one. Having gotten away with all that—and with the West even urging Ukraine to come to terms with Russia—Putin felt confident enough to launch the full-scale invasion of 2022. ³⁹ The resoluteness of Ukraine’s response caught many observers by surprise, but had they paid attention to the transformation of Ukrainian consciousness in and after the Revolution of Dignity, it should not have. ⁴⁰

By this time, of course, the counter-revolution was enjoying success within the EU and beyond. Already on the eve of their accession to the EU, Russia had begun its information war against the Baltic states. ⁴¹ After 2010, Putin gained allies among European populists and citizens dissatisfied with their perceived powerlessness—their sense of being ignored or disregarded by liberal democratic elites. ⁴² The expanded opportunities for disinformation that followed helped produce Brexit, and now Putin’s illiberal allies within the EU, calling for “peace in our time,” hamper the Union’s ability to assist Ukrainians who are literally dying to join. Putin’s aim, of course, is not just to conquer Ukraine, but to destroy the EU.

It is ironic that Orbán, a key figure of 1989, who promised to deliver the revolution that Hungarians supposedly missed in that year, is now leading the charge within the EU to undo many of the achievements of 1989. The transmogrification is not unprecedented, however. Many of the democrats of 1789 later supported the dictatorship of Napoleon.

III

In this outline of the past 35 years of European history, the three anniversaries we commemorate with this forum appear as key turning points. The Revolution of 1989 broke with perestroika and the orchestrated reform it had allowed in Eastern Europe to make citizens independent and, for a time, decisive actors in shaping their own collective destiny. It allowed citizens to imagine a new society, not copied from the West but arising from critical reflection on their own histories. In countries that experienced revolution in 1989, this experience provided the mythic foundation that Kubik insists must underpin systems of collective meaning; in other countries, the opening of 1989 could be grafted onto memories of earlier revolutions or alternate mythic foundations, though the sense of an “un-happened revolution” in 1989 quickly grew into a critical discourse. ⁴³ EU enlargement in 2004 marked an optimistic moment of harmony, common purpose, and a sense of having achieved many, if by no means all, of the goals of 1989. Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity revealed in 2014 the continuing power of the ideals of 1989 to motivate civic engagement, at the same time that Putin’s counter-revolution revealed itself in full force. Europe since then has been an arena of struggle, with a hot war in Ukraine and a hybrid war everywhere else. The struggle’s outcome will determine what principles will shape Europe’s future.

In this struggle, it has been easy to lose sight of the ideals that stood at the beginning of the process. The West, to be sure, was never particularly interested in knowing what they were, preferring to imagine that “they” simply wanted to be like “us”—a patronizing, self-fulfilling prophecy lubricated by West German Begrüßungsgeld. This fact itself is a large part of the answer to the question, “What went wrong?” Decades-long neglect of civic education in favor of subjects more likely to yield market returns has been another factor, giving some substance to the Czech senator Josef Jařab’s unfortunate pronouncement, in 2004, that most of the population was not intelligent enough to participate in politics. ⁴⁴ Gyurcsány’s 2006 deception was just a particularly low instance of a tendency on the part of too many liberal democrats to disregard citizens and the consequential civic dialogue for which the Revolution had called. Tragedy always finds its roots in hubris.

Dark times inspire historians to seek hope in the past. Georges Lefebvre in 1939 made the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen the climax of his book on The Coming of the French Revolution, emphasizing ideals that inspired concord once and could do so again. ⁴⁵ In our own dark times, it is worth revisiting the ideals that motivated transcendent unity in 1989. Like all revolutions, that of 1989 was motivated by a critique of systemic violence; accordingly, we can rigorously investigate how violence structures our societies today and how this violence might be overcome, in hopes of mobilizing once again a “public against violence.” ⁴⁶ Confession is necessary to overcome hubris—perhaps even, as Jan Patočka put it, “confession to history,” which means accepting the inherent problematicity of meaning that drives history and the responsibility that follows acceptance. ⁴⁷ We can build on the ideas about participatory democracy and human dignity that were elaborated in 1989, but never fully realized, recognizing that failure may have resulted not from the ideas themselves, but from failure to implement them. We may not be able to choose the manner in which our current historical period ends, but we can still seek to correct the mistakes of the past, and we can prepare to do a better job when the opportunity arises to begin anew.