ABSTRACT
In the course of autumn 1989, the existing regimes in East-Central Europe collapsed. In August, Poland secured the first government in the region for some forty years to be headed by a non-Communist and containing a majority of nonCommunist ministers. In September, Hungary allowed thousands of East Germans to leave for West Germany and, in October, it dropped its designation as a People’s Republic, effectively ending over forty years of Communist monopoly power. The most dramatic event in the month of November 1989, and indeed in the course of that year, was the fall of the Berlin Wall, heralding the demise of the East German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In November, Czechoslovakia’s Communist leader resigned following increasingly huge anti-governmental demonstrations, as did Bulgaria’s long-time Communist party chief – in the latter case as a result of an internal party coup. By the end of December, a leading dissident had been elected president of Czechoslovakia and the Romanian dictator had been summarily executed in the wake of the only mass bloodshed experienced in the region during those momentous months. Every one of these countries scheduled free legislative elections for 1990, with the exception of Poland where elections were to be held in 1991 – it was the partially free elections of June 1989 that had ushered in the Polish changes that year. The suddenness, the speed, the encompassing nature and the definitiveness of the transformation were bewildering to outside observers and inside participants alike, so much so that commentators have likened the process to the breaking of a dam.1 It is important to note that these events occurred well before the existence of Twitter and social media that have so often been invoked to explain the rapid succession of ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions. There was no social media, indeed there was no Internet in 1989. Western radio stations, notably the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and Radio Free Europe, transmitted news of events from one country to another but their audience was limited. In the absence of media contagion, the rapid succession and similar outcomes of events in EastCentral Europe suggest a common cause, though the modalities of change in each of the countries differed. The most significant cause of the changes was external to the region. It lay in the reconfiguration of the international system which was largely due to the
initiatives of the recently-elected Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. After attempting timid (and unsuccessful) internal reforms immediately after he came to power in 1985, Gorbachev embarked upon a campaign that shook the very foundations of the bipolar international order that had existed since World War II. There is much discussion about Gorbachev’s intentions in launching these initiatives – whether they were a self-interested effort to compensate for Soviet military weakness and internal problems or a more generous attempt to break down years of hostility in order to promote the common interests of humanity.2 Whatever the motivations, Gorbachev inspired rapturous enthusiasm among Western, and particularly some parts of Western European, public opinion though not among East-Central Europeans who were to be the principal beneficiaries of his initiatives. These populations may not have been impressed by such shows of ‘new thinking’ as Gorbachev’s United Nations speech in December 1988 where he promised to withdraw much of the Soviet military presence in East-Central Europe. However, Communist leaders in the region could not fail to note warnings from Moscow that they should not rely on Soviet force to maintain them in power, as it had in Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956 and as it had threatened to do in Poland in 1981 (in Czechoslovakia in 1968 Soviet armed might actually overturned a reformist Communist government, a sort of Gorbachevism avant la lettre, to restore a traditional Communist regime). The proof of Soviet intentions in 1989 only came when Moscow gave its blessing to the composition of a non-Communist cabinet in Poland and even more emphatically so when it restrained its own as well as East German forces from quelling the demonstrations that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ‘Gorbachev factor’ as it has been aptly named3 is too diffuse a process to be termed a ‘triggering event’.4 Moreover, its weight and even its relevance is hotly contested by East-Central Europeans who are loath to attribute the role of liberator to a leader who they are more likely to see as a prison warden. Even the metaphor of decolonisation, though seductive, does not fit the East-Central European case as these countries were more than nominally sovereign states, not colonies, and the withdrawal of the Soviet presence came about in a tempered manner that does not sufficiently explain the transformation that occurred. The Gorbachev factor may more accurately be considered a necessary but not sufficient framework for the changes that took place in East-Central Europe where the international system dictated the limits of each country’s degree of autonomy but did not provide the agency for the actions that each country undertook. These actions differed significantly from one case to another, certainly more so than the apparently seamless sequence and similar outcomes of the events of 1989 would suggest. It is surely an exaggeration to say that there were no revolutions in 1989 only different reactions to the Soviet decision to pull out5 but the weight of the external factor is undeniable.
