Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (126 page)

One answer is a version of the ‘domino theory’, Once Communist leaders started falling in one place their legitimacy elsewhere was fatally impaired. The credibility of Communism rested in part upon its claim to embody necessity, to be the logical product of historical progress, a fact of political life, an inevitable presence on the modern landscape. Once this was shown to be palpably untrue—in Poland, for example, where Solidarity had apparently put History into reverse—then why continue to believe it in Hungary, or Czechoslovakia? We have already seen that the example of others clearly weighed in the balance.

Nevertheless, the striking aspect of Communism’s collapse in Europe was not contagion
per se
: all revolutions spread in this way, corroding the legitimacy of established authorities by cumulative example. That is what happened in 1848, 1919 and, in a minor key, in 1968. The novelty of 1989 was the sheer
speed
of the process. As late as October 1989 Imre Pozsgay in Hungary, or Egon Krenze in East Germany, fondly supposed that they could control and manage their version of
perestroika
. Most of their opponents tended to agree and continued to look for some interim compromise. Back in 1980 Adam Michnik had written that ‘a hybrid society is conceivable, one where totalitarian organization of the state will co-exist with democratic institutions of society’; well into the summer of 1989 he had little reason to expect anything else.

One novel factor was the role of the communications media. Hungarians, Czechs and Germans in particular were able to see their own revolution on the television news each evening. For the population of Prague, repeated television re-runs of the events of November 17th constituted a sort of instant political education, drumming home a double message: ‘they are powerless’ and ‘we did it.’ As a consequence, Communism’s crucial asset, its control and monopoly of information, was lost. The fear of being alone—the impossibility of knowing whether your own feelings were shared by others—was dissipated for ever. Even in Romania the take-over of the national television studios was the determining moment in the uprising. Not for nothing was the gruesome fate of the Ceauşescus filmed for broadcast to a national audience. This was not a new pattern, of course—throughout the twentieth century radio stations and post offices were the first objectives of revolutionary crowds, from Dublin to Barcelona. But television is
fast
.

The second marked characteristic of the revolutions of 1989 was their pacific quality. Romania was the exception, of course; but given the nature of Ceauşescu’s regime this was to be expected. The real surprise was that even in Timisoara and Bucharest the scale of bloodshed was far less than everyone feared. In part this, too, was a function of television. With the whole population—not to speak of much of the rest of the world—observing their every move, the Communist regimes were stymied. To be observed in this way was itself a loss of authority and severely restricted their range of options.
²⁹⁹

To be sure, such considerations did not inhibit the Communist authorities in China, who shot down hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4th of that same year. Nicolae Ceauşescu would not have hesitated to emulateBeijing had he been able to do so. And we have seen that Erich Honecker at least contemplated something similar. But for most of their colleagues that was no longer an option. At some crucial moment all dying authoritarian regimes vacillate between repression and compromise. In the case of the Communists, confidence in their own capacity to rule was evaporating so rapidly that the chances of clinging to power by force alone began to seem slim—and the benefits of doing so by no means clear. In the calculus of self-interest the balance of advantage to most Communist bureaucrats and party
apparatchiks
was rapidly swinging the other way—better to swim with the current than be washed away in a tidal wave of change.

That calculation might have looked different had the crowds been angry or their leaders belligerently determined to wreak revenge upon the old order. But for many reasons—including the example of Tiananmen itself, unfolding on television the very day of the Polish elections—the men and women of 1989 consciously eschewed violence. It was not just the Polish revolution that was ‘self-limiting’. With decades of violence to their discredit, and all the guns and bullets on their side, the Communist regimes had very effectively taught their own subjects the impropriety and imprudence of resorting to force. With the police still breaking heads in Berlin and Prague until the dying hours of the old regime, Slovaks were not the only ‘Public Against Violence’.

Distaste for violence was all that many of the revolutionaries of 1989 had in common. They were an unusually motley group, even by the standards of most previous insurrections. The balance varied from place to place but typically ‘the people’ included a mix of reform Communists, social democrats, liberal intellectuals, free-market economists, Catholic activists, trade unionists, pacifists, some unreconstructed Trotskyists and others besides. This very variety was itself part of their strength: it constituted
de facto
precisely the informal complex of civil and political organizations which is so inimical to a one-party state.

At least one significant fault line—that separating liberal democrats from populist nationalists—could already be detected, distinguishing Mazowiecki from Wałesa, for example, or Hungary’s left-leaning Free Democrats (led by János Kis and other dissident intellectuals) from old-line nationalists in the Democratic Forum. There was also (as we have seen) a distinct generational aspect to the crowds of 1989. Many of the seasoned leaders of the intellectual opposition shared a common history with the regime’s own critics within the Party. To students and other young people, however, they thus appeared cast in the same mould: part of a past that could not and should not be revived. In the image of its 26-year-old leader Viktor Orbán, Fidesz in Hungary was originally designated as a political party exclusively for people under thirty.
³⁰⁰

The memories and illusions of the ‘Dubček generation’ were not shared by their children, who evinced little interest in remembering 1968 or saving the ‘good’ aspects of the GDR. The new generation was less concerned with engaging its rulers in debate, or offering radical alternatives to their rule, than in simply getting out from under it. This contributed to the carnival-like aspect of 1989 remarked upon by some observers in Poland and Czechoslovakia; it also contributed to the unconcern with violent retribution. Communism was no longer an obstacle so much as an irrelevance.

This can be seen best in the language in which the objectives of 1989 were commonly expressed. The theme of ‘returning to Europe’ was not new. Long before Communism, the continent’s eastern half had been the Europe that sought recognition and acknowledgement;
Western
Europe was the Europe that ‘knew’ itself and from whom the acknowledgement was so longingly sought.
³⁰¹
With the coming of the Soviet bloc, the sense that their part of Europe was severed from its roots had become a leitmotif of intellectual dissent and opposition across the region.

But the lament for their lost European identity had acquired special significance for Eastern Europeans in recent years with the emergence in the West of something new: an institutional entity—a ‘European Community’, a ‘European Union’—built around self-consciously ‘European’ values with which East Europeans could all too readily identify: individual rights, civic obligations, the freedom of expression and movement. Talk of ‘Europe’ became less abstract and therefore, among other things, more interesting to young people. No longer just a lament for the lost culture of old Prague or Budapest, it now represented a concrete and attainable set of political goals. The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.

This was more than just a matter of rhetoric. Whereas the old Communist cadres could convincingly (and even with conviction) point to the depredations of an abstraction called ‘capitalism’, they had nothing to offer in place of ‘Europe’—because it represented not an ideological alternative but simply the political norm. Sometimes the thought was inflected as ‘the market economy’, sometimes as ‘civil society’; but in either case ‘Europe’ stood—squarely and simply—for normalcy and the modern way of life. Communism was now no longer the future—its insistent trump card for six decades—but the past.

Naturally, there were variations. Nationalists and even some political and religious conservatives—many of them active and influential in 1989—were not disposed to think so much of Europe as of ‘Poland’ or ‘Hungary’. And some of them were perhaps less interested in freedom and individual rights than others. The immediate priorities of the crowd also varied—the idea of somehow returning to Europe was more important in mobilizing popular sentiment in Czechoslovakia than in Romania, to take an obvious example, where removing a dictator and putting food on the table took precedence. And whereas some of the leaders of 1989 set out from the start to build a market economy (when forming his first government in September 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki memorably declared that he was ‘looking for my Ludwig Erhard!’) others—notably Havel—preferred to focus upon the civic foundations of democracy.

The significance of these nuances would only emerge later. It may be appropriate here, however, to offer an observation concerning the place of the
United States
in this story. Eastern Europeans, especially East Berliners, were perfectly well aware of the US’s role in containing the Soviet Union. They also understood the nuances distinguishing West European politicians—who, for the most part, were content to live with Communism so long as it left them alone—from American politicians like Ronald Reagan who openly described it as an ‘evil empire’. Solidarity was financed largely from the US and it was the US that gave the most insistent official encouragement to protesters in Berlin and elsewhere—once it was clear that they would probably win.

But it should not be concluded from this, as it sometimes is, that Eastern Europe’s captive peoples were yearning to become . . . American; much less that it was American encouragement or support that precipitated or facilitated their liberation.
³⁰²
The US played a remarkably small part in the dramas of 1989, at least until after the fact. And the American social model itself—the ‘free market’—was only occasionally posited as an object of admiration or emulation by the crowds or their spokesmen. For most people who had lived under Communism, liberation by no means implied a yearning for untrammeled economic competition, much less the loss of free social services, guaranteed employment, cheap rents or any of Communism’s other attendant benefits. It was, after all, one of the attractions of ‘Europe’, as imagined from the East, that it held out the prospect of affluence
and
security, liberty
and
protection. You could have your socialist cake and eat it in freedom.

Such euro-dreams were harbingers of disappointments to come. But few saw this at the time. In the marketplace of alternative models, the American way of life was still a minority taste and America, for all its global clout, was a long way away. The other superpower, however, was right on the doorstep. The satellite states of eastern Europe were all colonies of the Communist empire based in Moscow. Accordingly, there is only so much about the changes of 1989 that can be attributed to indigenous social or political forces—whether they were underground Catholic organizations in Slovakia, rock-music groups in Poland or free-thinking intellectuals everywhere. In the last analysis, it was always Moscow that counted.

In the heady afterglow of liberation, many East Europeans belittled the significance of Moscow, the better to highlight their own achievement. In January 1992, Democratic Forum’s József Antall, now prime minister of Hungary, bemoaned to a Hungarian audience the West’s lack of appreciation for Central Europeans’ heroic role in the downfall of communism: ‘This unrequited love must end because we stuck to our posts, we fought our own fights without firing one shot and we won the third world war for them.’ Antall’s embittered account, however flattering to his audience, misses the seminal truth about 1989: if Eastern Europe’s crowds and intellectuals and trade union leaders ‘won the third world war’ it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.

On July 6th 1989, Gorbachev addressed the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and informed his audience that the Soviet Union would not stand in the way of reform in Eastern Europe: that was ‘entirely a matter for the people themselves.’ At a conference of eastern bloc leaders in Bucharest on July 7th 1989, the Soviet leader affirmed each socialist state’s right to follow its own trajectory without external interference. Five months later, in a stateroom on the SS Maxim Gorky off Malta, he assured President Bush that force would not be used to keep Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes in power. There was no ambiguity about his position. Gorbachev, as Michnik had remarked in 1988, was ‘the prisoner of his foreign policy successes.’ Once an imperial metropole had so publicly acknowledged that it would not, could not hang on to its colonial periphery—and had been universally acclaimed for saying so—its colonies were lost and with them the empire’s indigenous collaborators. All that remained to be determined was the manner and direction in which they fell.

The collaborators themselves certainly understood what was happening: between July 1988 and July 1989 Károly Grósz and Miklós Németh, the leading reformers in the Hungarian Party, made four separate visits to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. Their colleague Rezsõ Nyers also spoke with him in Bucharest on July 7th 1989, the day after Kádár’s death, by which date it was already clear that their cause was lost. Gorbachev did nothing actively to precipitate or encourage the revolutions of 1989: he merely stood aside. In 1849 Russian intervention had sealed the fate of the Hungarian and other revolutions of that year; in 1989 Russian abstention helped assure their success.