The revolutions of 1989: Causes, meanings, consequences

Contemporary European History

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2009, Pages

  Tismaneanu, Vladimir ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77249103870     PISSN: 09607773     EISSN: 14692171     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0960777309005049     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 157-89
2. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-91 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 461-99
3. see also George Lichtheim on 'The European Civil', in Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), 225-37
4. Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 666-704
5. See Václav Havel's reflections on post-1989 politics in Havel, Summer Meditations (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) and
6. To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007)
7. For the exhaustion of ideological-style secular religions see Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1991), and
8. S. N. Eisenstadt, 'The Breakdown of Communist Regimes', in Tismaneanu, Revolutions of 1989, 89-107
9. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991)
10. Think of the street riots in Budapest in October 2006, provoked by the admission by the socialist prime minister Gyurcsányi of having resorted to blatant lies in the electoral campaign; the rise of the populist demagogue Gigi Becali (a former shepherd and now a multi-millionaire and owner of a major soccer team) in Romania in 2004-6 or the radical-absolutist calls for moral cleansing in Poland during the Kaczyński twins' hegemony
11. Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
12. Agnes Heller, 'Toward Post-Totalitarianism', and
13. Ivan Svitak, 'A Future Without Communism', both in Vladimir Tismaneanu and Judith Shapiro, eds., Debates on the Future of Communism (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 50-5 and 70-82
14. George Konrad, Antipolitics (San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)
15. Miklos Haraszti, 'The Independent Peace Movement and the Danube Movement in Hungary', in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., In Search of Civil Society: Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 71-87
16. Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990)
17. Jeffrey Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a particularly insightful analysis of the revolutionary upheavals of 1989 and their effects, with special focus on Poland
18. see Bronislław Geremek, La rupture: La Pologne du communisme à la démocratie (Paris: Seuil, 1991)
19. For ideological modern driven despotisms, see Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Times (New York: Free Press, 1994)
20. William Echikcson, Lighting the Night (New York: William Morrow, 1990)
21. Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics
22. Andrew Nagorski, The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993)
23. Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1992)
24. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolutions of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage Books, 1993)
25. Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
26. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Times Books, 1990), 111
27. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Nationalism, Democracy, and Myth in Postcommunist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)
28. For post-communist politics see Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2006)
29. Timothy Garton Ash, 'Conclusions', in Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and their Aftermath (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), 398
30. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
31. For the impact of 1989 on the rethinking of liberalism's agenda, see Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism after Communism (Budapest and London: Central European University Press, 1995)
32. Ira Katznelson, Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
33. Claus Offe, Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), especially 29-105
34. Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller and György Markus, Dictatorship over Needs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983)
35. Havel, To the Castle and Back, 296
36. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (New York: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1994)
37. Chirot, Modern Tyrants; see also Raymond Taras, ed., The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992)
38. Giuseppe Di Palma, 'Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe', World Politics, 44, 1 (1991), 49-80
39. In the same issue see Timur Kuran, 'Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989', 7-48. Kuran identifies Václav Havel and this author as among the very few commentators who 'came close to predicting a major change', 12
40. Karen Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
41. and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
42. 'The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: An Autopsy', National Interest, 31, special issue (spring 1993), especially the articles by Francis Fukuyama, Myron Rush, Charles Fairbanks, Peter Reddaway and Stephen Sestanovich
43. Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 306-15
44. A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
45. For the turbulent experiences with de-communisation, see Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghost After Communism (New York: Random House, 1995)
46. Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe's Democratic Transitions (New York: Palgrave, 2004)
47. Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
48. Mary Fulbrook, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)
49. Peter Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005)
50. Vladimir Tismaneanu, 'Romanian Exceptionalism? Democracy, Ethnocracy, and Uncertain Pluralism in Post-Ceausescu Romania', in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., Politics, Power, and the Struggle for democracy in South-East Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 403-51
51. Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)
52. Garton Ash, Magic Lantern, 131-56
53. for further interpretations of the implications of Jowitt's pioneering approach see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Howard and Rudra Sil, eds., World Order after Leninism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006)
54. This part of my contribution is based on my essay 'Leninist Legacies, Pluralist Dilemmas', Journal of Democracy, 18, 4 (2007), 34-9
55. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), especially Part 4, 'After the Fall: 1989-2005', 637-776
56. Vladimir Tismaneanu, 'Civil Society, Pluralism, and the Future of East and Central Europe'
57. and Maria Renata Markus, 'Decent Society and/or Civil Society?', both in Social Research, 68, 4 (2001), 977-92 and 1011-30
58. Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation, and Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
59. Havel, Summer Meditations
60. George Konrad, The Melancholy of Rebirth (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995)
61. Michnik, Letters from Freedom
62. See also Antohi and Tismaneanu, Between Past and Future
63. See John Rawls's discussion of criteria for asserting civic freedom and the idea of a well-ordered society in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30-40
64. For seminal contributions to this discussion see Szacki, Liberalism after Communism
65. and Ronald Dworkin et al., From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004)
66. See the commentary by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Paul-Dragos Aligica, 'Romania's Parliamentary Putsch', Wall Street Journal (Europe), 20 April 2007. On May 19 Basescu overwhelmingly won in a national referendum (74.5 percent voted against his impeachment)
67. This may explain the otherwise bizarre celebration in many media and academic circles of Slavoj Zizek's calls for a 're-enactment' of the Leninist moment in the history of the anti-capitalist praxis. See Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001)
68. and V. I. Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: a Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, ed. and with an introduction and afterword by Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2002)
69. For a devastating criticism of Zizek's recent writings see Adam Kirsch, 'The Deadly Jester', New Republic, 3 December 2008, 30-7
70. For the disarray of the left at the beginning of the twenty-first century see Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2008)
71. The full English version of the speech by Romania's president Traian Basescu before the joint session of the Romanian parliament on 18 December 2006 can be found at Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania - CPADCR, www.presidency.ro. The most vocal critics of this condemnation have been Vadim Tudor's Greater Romania Party (and its viciously antisemitic and anti-Western namesake weekly) and the Social Democratic Party, chaired by Mircea Geoana, former ambassador to Washington and foreign minister in 2001-4. Iliescu is the honorary chairman of this party