ABSTRACT
Ever since the end of communism, the term ‘‘democratic revolution’’ has
become synonymous with sudden, comprehensive, and non-violent regime
change. The peaceful negotiated revolutions in East European countries
such as Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or the
‘‘velvet revolution’’ in Czechoslovakia in 1989 were followed more than a
decade later by democratic revolutions in Serbia in 2000, the Georgian
revolution of the Roses in 2003, and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in
2004. These events not only achieved regime change in a peaceful manner but also transformed the modern concept of revolution. With the exception
of Romania, they lacked the large-scale violence characteristic of the
French, Russian, or Chinese revolutions. The people bringing down the
Berlin Wall or forcing Czech communists to step down in November 1989
were not self-declared counter-revolutionaries against the Soviet-type regimes
originally established by the October Revolution. The political challengers
of the ‘‘old regime’’ did not look for a new society but seemed to be pre-
disposed to ‘‘craft democracies.’’ In this vein, 1989 saw double-rejective revolutions, aiming at rejecting communist rule domestically and foreign
influence from the Soviet Union (Holmes 1997). They were also anti-revo-
lutions in a wider sense, marking the end of belief in the tradition of revo-
lutionary socialism inspired by Enlightenment thought and the desire of
human emancipation by acts of revolution (Sakwa 2001: 162).
