Epilogue
Postrevolutionary Paradoxes
Central Europe Since 1989
During the last sixmonths of 1989 the Communist regimes in the Eastern bloc
came down one by one: in July in Poland, in Hungary in September, in East
Germany in November, and in Czechoslovakia,Romania, and Bulgaria in December.
One thing allthese revolutions had in common was that theyobviously
displaced the old Communist order, and the coincidence of 1989 with the bicentennial
celebration of the French Revolution in 1789 was an appropriate
historical accident. Francois Furet, one of the premier French historians of the
French Revolution, drew parallels between 1989 and "the ideas of 1789 or the
American Revolution: human rights, the sovereigntyof peoples, free elections,
markets" and compared the Communist regimes with the ancien regime of
late-eighteenth-century France: hated, immobile, and incompetent.
Furet also took this opportunity to criticize the European left, which traditionally
interpreted the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 as a legitimate expression
of French revolutionary ideals. The revolutions of 1989 represented
the belated victoryof "old ideas"—the moderate, late-eighteenth-century
principles of liberal democratic revolutions—over the radically modern
ideas of early-twentieth-century "Bolshevik-Jacobinism":
We are witnesses to revolutions, which are simultaneously counter-revolutions:
uprisings bythe people in the name of the establishment or reestablishment
of liberal democracy; we are seeing the end of the revolutionary
idea that has determined the horizonsof the Left, far beyond strictlyMarxist-Leninist
circles, for two hundred years.
According to Furet, in 1989 the future of communism and socialist planned
economies ironically became democracy and capitalist market economies.
275
2 7 6 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
The driving forces between the revolutions of 1989were "thecontradictory
but inseparably related virtues of market economics and human rights."1
The fact that the guiding principles of the various revolutions of 1989
were fundamentally the same and that revolutionary synergyhelped topple
six Communist regimes in the region within the relativelyshort period of
six months actually obscures how different each of these revolutions were.
The moral and political (or human rights) dimensions of these revolutions
and the role that the ideas of market economics played were different in
each country; the durations of their "prerevolutionary" phases varied widely;
and the dynamics of the interaction among different actors in theserevolutionary
dramas—such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the regimes in power, intellectuals
and dissidents, organized opposition, and the populace at
large—were dissimilar.
On November 23, 1989,the seventh day of the Czechoslovak revolution,
the British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash met Vaclav Havel
in Prague and commented: "In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary it took
ten months, in East Germany it took ten weeks:perhaps in Czechoslovakia
it will take ten days!"2
His quip was remarkably accurate. The Czechoslovak
revolution ran its course in twenty-fourdays. Romania's bloody revolution
of December 1989was even shorter, figuratively it took "ten hours." One
of the amazing characteristics of the revolutions of 1989,with the notable
exception of Romania, was the absence of violence, bloodshed, andven-
geance.
There were at least four different revolutionary patterns in East Central
Europe.3
Poland's "negotiated transition" was carried by Solidarity, a wellorganized
coalition of antiregime forces that enjoyed broad popular support,
and it occurred from the bottom up. In Hungary, a new generation of
liberal reform Communists initiated a transition from the top down, byinviting
oppositional dissidents and intellectuals to participate in a dialogue
about restructuring the system under circumstances considerably different
from those in Poland. There wasneither widespread popular protest against
the regime in Hungary nor an identificationof the populace with dissidents
and intellectuals, or vice versa. Furthermore, there was a unique and, in
some cases, almost symbiotic relationship between opposition intellectuals
and the Communist Party in Hungary, which was by far the most open,liberal,
democratic, and reform minded of all the Communist parties in Eastern
Europe. For the most part, the Hungarian revolution took place without
the mass protest of "thepeople" in the streets.
The revolutions in the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia
fall into a third category. They were Gorbachev inspired to a certain extent.
They were not,however, instigated by reform Communists but by numerically
small groups of dissidents and sudden popular protest. Gorbachev
had openly criticized the repressive regimes of Erich Honecker in the GDR
and Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia for their lack of preparedness to reform,
and popular protest organized by regime criticsinterested in trulyreforming
socialism (in the case of the GDR) and by students and dissidents
(in the case of Czechoslovakia) dislodged the old guard. In both cases, new
POSTRKVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 277
Communist leaders, who quickly endorsed a Gorbachevite agenda, could
not contain the dynamics of popular protest and virtuallycapitulated to the
"democratic forces" that had helped bring them to power.
Romania and Bulgaria represent a fourth, southeastern European category
of Gorbachev-style revolutions based on the replacement of the old party
leadership by reformers, followed by constrained electoral competition.
Yugoslavia was an exceptional case of national, though not necessarily democratic,
revolution. Ivo Bariac called 1989/1990 a period of "Yugoslav non-
revolutions."4
Preceding the Polish elections in July 1989, the Solidarity movement in
Poland negotiated a "round table" power-sharing agreement with the
Jaruzelski regime, which provided for elections to the Polish parliament, the
Sejm. The electoral procedures were complicated and rigged in favor of
the Communists, who were willing to give Solidarity part of the power but
not to compete with the opposition in a free and democratic election. Although
the Communists reserved the position of president for Jaruzelski
and technically "won" the elections, Solidarityemerged as the moral and political
victor. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Catholic intellectual and Solidarityactivist,
was elected Poland's prime minister by an overwhelming parliamentary
majority at the end of August, and this marked the beginning of
Poland's transition from Communism to democracy.
Poland had the first revolution, and if one wishes to explain the events
of 1989 in terms of a "domino effect," it was the most important. Furthermore,
Poland also had the longest revolution—it started with the "Solidarity
revolution" in 1980—and the largest anti-Communist movement. It was
the biggest country in the East bloc and therefore the biggest problem in
the East bloc. Poland had the weakest tradition of collaboration of all the
states in the region, not only with the Nazis during World War II, but also
with the Communists thereafter. In addition, Poland had the strongest tradition
of resistance which wasbased partly on the spiritual and institutional
strength of Poland's Roman Catholic Church, the most formidable antiCommunist
institution in the Eastern bloc.
Hungary's revolution was substantially different, and some Hungarians
maintain that it actually was much longer than Poland's. It started in 1956
or during the initial liberalization of Hungary under the Kadar regime in
the 1960s. By 1988, when Kadar was eased out of office, Hungary had a
record of at least twentyyears of political liberalizationand experimentation
with market economics. By June 1989, a dynamic, younger triumvirate—
Imre Pozsgay, Rezso Nyers, and MiklosNemeth—had taken control of key
party and state offices, and they revolutionized Hungarian foreign and domestic
policy.
On May 2, 1989, Hungarian border guards started taking down the
barbed wire along the Austrian-Hungarian frontier. In the summer of 1989,
Hungarian border officials barely prevented hundreds of East Germans,
who were vacationing in Hungary, from fleeing to Austria, and in September
the Hungarian government stopped observing an old East bloc agreement,
by allowing citizensfrom other Communist countries in the region to
2 7 8 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
leave Hungary for Austria. Thousands of "vacationing" East Germans began
leaving Hungary legally, and this hole in the Iron Curtain helped bringdown
the Berlin Wall in November. Hungary maintained that a United Nations
convention on refugees, which it had signed as the first East bloc state
in March 1989, had abrogated its obligations to prevent GDR citizens from
leaving the country.
In June 1989, the Hungarian Communist Party also started round-table
negotiations with opposition groups, which by Polish standards were small,
poorly organized, and, to a certain extent at ideological odds with one another.
Urban liberals and rural nationalists and conservatives already had
good (and different) ideas about what they wanted. The strategy behind the
Hungarian round table was to work out a program of major political and
economic liberalization, and the initiation of these negotiations reflected
the party's tradition and strategy of paternalism: power sharing "from
above." The Hungarian opposition groups proved to be tough negotiators,
and after Hungary's reform Communists sawhow the Polish electorate had
responded to elections that had been rigged in favor of Poland's Communists
in July, they abandoned the idea of limited compromise in favor of unfettered
electoral competition.
Hungary's reform Communists enjoyed genuine popular support in the
summer of 1989. They assumed that they could not only compete with the
opposition but also beat it. at the ballot box. The reform Communists concluded
a round-table agreement with opposition groups in September,
which provided for free and democratic elections in the spring of 1990.They
officially abandoned Marxism as a party doctrine in October and changed
the party's name to "Socialist." Then they suffered a devastating defeat in
the 1990 elections, receiving only 9 percent of the vote. The Hungarian revolution
of 1989 was relatively fluid and nonconfrontational, and Hungarians,
like Poles, can claim substantial responsibilityfor the demise of the East,
bloc. They reformed Communism to death and opened the Iron Curtain in
the process.
The maverick foreign policy of Hungarian reform Communists had domestic
political consequences for the German Democratic Republic,whose
leaders were surprised by the sheer number of GDR citizens who wanted to
flee the country. The Honecker regime increased the political pressure in
the GDR by quarantining East Germans with travel restrictions, and it addressed
the issue of fleeing GDR citizens with a combination of arrogance
and "socialist self-confidence,"by branding those who left as morally inferior
renegades whose loss was not to be lamented. The exodus of tens of
thousands of East Germans and the contemptuous and restrictive conduct
of the Honecker regime led in September 1989 to the formation of a homegrown
protest movement in the GDRwhich crystallizedaround intellectuals,
artists, peace activists,environmentalists, and Protestant pastors and churches.
The first wave of protest in East Germany was inspired by the idea of radically
reforming the GDR and creating a truly democratic socialist society,
not anti-Communism or German unification.At increasingly larger demonstrations
in September and October, protesters chanted Gorbachev's nick-
Tessek Vdlasztani (Please Choose), a poster of the Alliance of Young Democrats
(FIDESZ), a Hungarian liberal party founded by young people that initially limited
its membership to people under thirty-five, from Hungary's first free election campaign
in 1990. Above: Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (left) giving East German
leader Erich Honecker a kiss that was part of the "fraternal socialist"ritual between
Communist heads of state in the Eastern bloc. Below:Young Hungarians with oversized
FIDESZbuttons. (Courtesyof the Allianceof Young Democrats [FIDESZ], Bu-
dapest)
279
name, "Gorbi, Gorbi," "Weare staying here," and "Weare the people." At
the beginning of October, the GDR celebrated the fortieth anniversary of
its establishment with a series of pompous and pathetic events. Two weeks
later Erich Honecker resigned from his offices and was replaced by a
younger functionary, Egon Krenz. But there were irreconcilable tensions
among the "stayers" (Dabkiber) in the GDR's new opposition movements,
with their sense of solidarity, socialist vision, and newly felt empowerment;
the "leavers" (Weggehei), who wanted to get out in one way or another; and
the party authorities, who were confounded by the challenges that both
groups presented.
The Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, for the same reason
it went up in 1961: to keep people in the GDR. The strategy of the GDR's
new leadership was that liberalizing travel restrictions would not only enhance
the credibility of the new government but also keep the East Germans
at home by giving them a chance to travel back and forth. It backfired.
Krenz's political career lasted just seven weeks, and after his resignation a
new reformer, Hans Modrow, formed a government that began awide-ranging
dialogue with critics of the regime. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans,
especially members of the younger generation, distrusted the government,
decided to "vote with their feet," and left for the Federal Republic
of Germany, and the slogan "Weare owe people" began appearing at demonstrations.
(This phrase also meant "Wewant one currency," the West German
Mark, and "Wewant the West German standard ofliving.")
Public scrutinyof the regime bycitizens' investigatory committees led to
sensational revelations about the luxurious and self-aggrandizing lifestyles
of party leaders, widespread corruption, and the unimaginable reach of the
state security police's surveillance, networks of informants, and records on
individuals in the country. The idea of reforming the GDR faded rapidly,
and by the time the first free elections in the former Eastern bloc were held
in East Germany in March 1990, reforming the GDR was a minority proposition.
German unification was on its way and a reality within six months.
Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Revolution" was preceded in 1989 by an increasing
amount of popular protest on symbolic dates. On August 21, 1989,
the twenty-first anniversaryof the Warsaw Pact intervention that ended the
Prague Spring, police broke up a peaceful demonstration of students in
Prague and arrested more than 350people. On October 28, the seventy-first
anniversary of the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic, the police
forcibly dissolved the largest organized protest the country had seen in over
twenty years and arrested another 350 people. On November 17, students
transformed an officially sanctioned rally to commemorate the anniversary
of the death of Jan Opletal, a student killed by the Nazis, into an antiregime
protest, and the police and special antiterrorist squads reacted brutallywith
tear gas and truncheons. The escalating conflicts between students and the
state and the ruthlessness with which the state dealt with its own citizens
helped coalesce Czech and Slovak dissidence and broad antiregime sentiment,
which was fueled in turn by the success of protest elsewhere in East
Central Europe.
C E N T R A L E U R O P E2 8 0
POSTRKVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 281
Two citizens' organizations formed by dissidents, artists, and students,
the Civic Forum and the Public Against Violence, emerged almost simultaneously
in Prague and Bratislava, and they articulated the empowerment of
a citizenry that took virtual control of the streets in regular and increasingly
larger demonstrations. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution contained elements
of the Polish, Hungarian, and East German revolutions that preceded
it, and it represented a distillation of their essences. Within weeks,
nonviolent, mass protest led to a negotiated power-sharing arrangement
with the Communist regime that culminated in its abdication. On December
29, the representatives of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic's Federal
Assembly elected Vaclav Havel—playwright, dissident, former political prisoner,
and mastermind of the revolution—president. This was an appropriate
symbolic ending for the astonishing, exhilarating, and happy year
of 1989.
After the revolutions of 1989, grand plans for a cooperative or confederatlve
reorganization of Central Europe were popular. The pending unification
of Germany was something all politicians in the region officially
greeted, but it also awoke long-standing and deep-seated fears. Furthermore,
the Soviet Union was still intact, and the assumption at the time that
Gorbachev's experiment could fail and that he might be replaced bya much
more orthodox and aggressive Communist leader also wasmore widespread
in East Central Europe than in the West. Under these circumstances, it
seemed only reasonable for the countries in the region to find ways of cooperating
that would offset the burgeoning influence of a future unitedGermany
and the potential threat the Soviet Union still represented.
The assumption that Europe that would find new modes of regional cooperation
after the disintegration of the militaryand economic blocs that
had dictated the division of Europe, as well as the scenario that Central Europe
as a region would play an important role in the "new Europe," enjoyed
a brief heydayafter 1989. For example, at a meeting of the foreign ministers
of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, held in Bratislava in April 1990,
Vaclav Havel envisioned a Baltic confederation consisting of Poland, the
Baltic states, and Finland and perhaps also Sweden and Norway. Austria,
Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Italy could form a second Danube—Adriatic confederation,
and Czechoslovakiawould provide the "logical nexus"5
between
these two regional associations which, by virtue of their collective sizes and
geopolitical affinities, would peacefully offset the influence of large neighbors
like a unified Germany and the Soviet Union. (The absence of Romania
and Bulgaria here isboth striking and symptomatic of Central European
perceptions of Central Europe. Havel's vision for the region also had remarkable
similarities to Thomas Masaryk's ideas about Central Europe in
1918.)
Czechoslovak, Polish, and Hungarian heads of state also held a Central
European summit in Visegrad in 1990. The meeting site on the Danube
north of Budapest, a magnificent medieval castle of the Louis the Great,was
full of symbolism. In 1335, the kings of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland had
met there for a medieval regional summit to discuss multilateral coopera-
2 8 2 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
tion and regional concerns. Age-old patterns of cooperation among these
states, which subsequently were labeled the "Visegrad group," were being revived.
The pending dissolution of COMECON and the Warsaw Pact (inJanuary
and March 1991) made it necessary to investigate new forms of cooperation.
Furthermore, Czechoslovak.Polish, and Hungarian politicians saw
great advantages in coordinating the region's "return to Europe." They assumed,
for example, that they would have more political leverage if they
demonstrated solidarityby acting as a group.
The idea of Central European cooperation wasnot merely an inspiration
for former Eastern Europeans. In May 1990 at meetings held in Vienna and
Bratislava, the foreign ministers of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria,Yugoslavia,
and Italy discussed the idea of "pentagonal" cooperation among
the five states: a split-site agenda that symbolically demonstrated the end of
the East-West division of Europe and the promise of new forms of regional
cooperation. In 1991, Poland joined the "pentagon," thereby creating a
"hexagon," and after the breakup of Yugoslavia this multilateral forum for
regional cooperation wasrenamed the Central European Initiativein 1992.
(The Central European Initiativefloundered after the deterioration ofYugoslavia.
Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are its ex-Yugoslav
members.)
After 1989, unrealistic expectations were an understandable part of the
postrevolutionary euphoria in the former Eastern bloc. But visions of new
modes of Central European and Pan-European cooperation have died hard
since then. Three different processes have determined the prospects and
the position of Central Europe in Europe since 1989: the wars that accompanied
the deterioration of Yugoslavia, the disintegration of the Soviet
Union, and the economic and political integration of Western Europe.
The fall of Yugoslavia is a complicated and tragic story that testifies to
the successof indigenous nationalism and the failuresof international diplo-
macy.6
Slovenia managed to extricate itself from the Yugoslavmess most elegantly
in 1991; Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina did not. The combination
of Croatian independence, resurgent. Croat and Serb nationalism, and Serbian
minorities in Croatia created an explosive situation. The Yugoslav
prime minister (and Serb) Slobodan Milosevic used the breakup of Yugoslavia
as an excuse to begin twowars of Serbian territorial expansion: first
in Croatia and then in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has become the main battlefield
and has suffered the greatest lossesin this fratricidalwar. It: emerged
along the overlapping historical fault lines betweens Central Europe and
Southeastern Europe, the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire,Roman
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Croatia and Serbia, or "West" and
"East." No one ever expected that the old Habsburg military frontier would
be a site of warfare again.
Between the outbreak of hostilities in 1991 and the end of 1995, an estimated
300,000 people were killed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia that
turned over 3.7 million inhabitants of the region into refugees. They were
partly victims of the Western European and international diplomatic community's
inability from the start to deal decisively with Serbian aggression.
POSTREVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 283
Only after massive NATO airstrikes on Serbian positions in Bosnia in 1995
and considerable U.S. pressure were the Serbs willing to seek a "diplomatic"
solution with Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The agreements the warring
parties reached at negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995,
combined with the deployment of large NATO peacekeeping force in the
region, may mark the end of armed hostilities. However, the resolution of
the conflicts in the region will undoubtedly take years.
The end of the Soviet Union's "internal empire" in 1991 was a logical
consequence of the demise of its "external empire" in East Centra) Europe
in 1989, and although the social, economic, and political structures of the
Soviet Union as well as the dynamics of protest were considerably different
from those in East Central Europe, the collapse of the USSR may be interpreted
as a belated 1989 revolution. Many of the same ideas were at work,
such as human rights, democracy, and national self-determination. In the
spring of 1990, declarations of independence by the Soviet Union's Baltic
republics—Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia—marked the beginning of a
process that ended eighteen months later with the disintegration of the Soviet
Union.
Well over half the Sovietologists in the West thought that some kind of
liberalization or systematic reform was possible in the Soviet Union, and
roughly one-quarter of the others assumed that the system could keep bumbling
along because that iswhat it had done in the past. One minority in the
profession envisioned the deterioration of the system leading to collapse at
some point in an undetermined future, and another minority, usuallydismissed
for being either emigres or alarmists, feared a worse case scenario:
the possibility of a reactionary backlash combined with a reversion to old
Soviet policies7
The intellectuals and dissidents who were members of the
first generation of leaders in the fledgling democracies of the former East
bloc shared fundamentally the same assumptions, but in inverted proportions
and the reverse order. Based on their experiences with Communism
and the Soviet Union, they viewed the pessimistic scenarios as more probable
than the optimistic ones. No one expected the Soviet Union to collapse
rapidly and completely as a result of the failure of Gorbachev's reforms and
the failure of a reactionary counterreform putsch. But this is exactly what
happened.
The implosion of the Soviet Union changed the relationships of the new
democracies of the former Eastern bloc to the East as well as with the West.
As long as a Soviet threat existed, many Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, and Hungarians
assumed that the West would move quickly to fill the vacuum created
by the demise of the Soviet empire and to incorporate or "reincorporate"
East Central Europe into the West where it belonged. The Visegrad states
considered themselves not only historical but also logical economic, political,
and strategic partners of the European Community and NATO, twoorganizations
caught completelyoff guard by the events of 1989.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the sense of urgency in
the region dissipated somewhat, and the reform governments in East Central
Europe suddenly found themselves in the strange position of compel-
ing for Western politicalattention and Western economic aid with the states
and reform governments that emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union.
Conflicts among the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union
are one of the biggest problems in the former Communist East, and Russia,
despite its lost of prestige and power, is still a superpower.
The European Community (EC) was a product of the Cold War, and its
plans for intensifying Western European integration were based on the
East-West division of Europe, not an extensive development or foreseeable
enlargement of the Community.After the mid-1980s, the twelve EC member
states began discussing strategies for the next phase of European integration.
The creation of an economic and monetary union was the central
objective, and the pursuit of this goal stimulated debates about the intermediate-range
"political dimension" of European integration and the longrange
dimensions of collective defense, security, and foreign policies. However,
after the denouement of the East-West,conflict, two new7
groups of
states showed great interest in participating in the Western European integration:
the prosperous, nonaligned, and neutral democracies that had
been situated "between" the EC and the old East—Austria,Finland, Sweden,
and Switzerland—as well as Norway, a NATO but not an EC member, on one
side, and the "new democracies" of the former Eastern bloc, on the other.
Negotiations among the twelve EC members on increasing the breadth
and depth of integration, which began before 1989, led to the conclusion of
the "Treaty on the European Union" in Maastrich in 1992, and the "Community"
became the European Union at the end of 1994. Between 1989 and
1992, Austria, Finland, Sweden. Switzerland, and Norwayexpressed their interest
in accession, and on January 1, 1995,Austria,Finland, and Sweden became
full members of the European Union.8
The accession of these three
states to the EU in 1995 increased the number of its member states from
twelve to fifteen and, along with German unification in 1990, moved itsfrontiers
east, but there have been no real attempts to move them farther in that
direction soon.
After 1989, the European Community initiated a series of programs designed
to help the countries of "Central and Eastern Europe," and by 1995
it had concluded association agreements with six of them: first with Hungary
and Poland, then with the Czech Republic and Slovakia,and finally with
Bulgaria and Romania. The official EU terminology is a bit confusing because
the term "Central and Eastern Europe" not only excludes the former
Soviet Union, but it also officially refers to one region (despite the "and"),
not two. (Sometimes the abbreviation CEE-6is used. Bythe end of 1995, the
European Union also had negotiated, but not ratified, bilateral association
agreements with Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that may turn the
CEE-6 into the CEE-10 in the course of the 1990s.)
The European Union has initiated a "structured dialogue" with associated
countries and stated that "accession will take place as soon as an associated
country is able to assume the obligations of membership by satisfying
the economic and political conditions required." Among these conditions
are the "stabilityof institutionsguaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, huE
N T R A L2 8 4
CENTRAL EUROPE IN TRANSITION,
1989-1995
Member states of th e European Union
States associated with th e European Union (Europe Agreements in force), 1995
Newly independent states in th e formerYugoslavia and th e former Soviet Union
1991-1992
Per capita gross domestic product, 1993
285
$1,140
2 8 6 C E N T R A L EUROPE
man rights and respect for and protection of minorities;the existence of a
functioning market economy; [and] the capacity to cope with competitive
pressure and market forces within the Union." Given the disparities between
the political and economic structures of the ELI member states and those of
the new democracies in "Central and Eastern Europe" with their new market
economies, it is clear that it will take quite some time for them to qualify
for membership in the EU. Furthermore, "the Union'scapacity to absorb
new members, while maintaining the momentum of European integration,
is also an important consideration.'9
In other words, Western European integration
isobviouslythe EU'smain priority, and it will decide who gets into
the EU and when on a case-by-case basis. The most successful reform states
to date—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia—appear to be
the most logical candidates for the next phase of EU expansion,whenever
it may come. If and when they join the EU, they will assume the responsibility
of maintaining the EU's "external frontier" and once again become
"bulwarks of the West."
The Iron Curtain went down in 1989, and as far as many East Central Europeans
are concerned, the "Golden Curtain" went up shortly thereafter.
The European Union and its member states have introduced restrictive immigration
and trade policies designed to keep competitive products—such
as agricultural produce, textiles, and steel—and people from East Central
Europe (and beyond) out of Western Europe while at the same time it isexporting
well over twice as much to the region as it imports from it. Customs
and immigration officials in Germany, some of them former soldiers of the
German Democratic Republic's "National People's Army" that policed the
Iron Curtain, now help patrol the German-Polish border, and Austria has
deployed army units along its frontiers to help its understaffed border personnel
prevent illegal immigration. The initially high, post-1989 expectations
of the West held by many people in the old East bloc have been disappointed,
and they now feel that the EU association treaties are not
instruments for getting them into the European Union as soon as possible
but, rather, mechanisms for keeping them out as long as possible.
The same feelings apply to NATO's "Partnership for Peace" initiative
which has loosely affiliated just about everystate in Europe with NATOwithout
actually bringing any new states into the alliance. The Visegrad states
would be logical candidates for an expanded NATO, but there is no consensus
among NATO decision makers in the West about, increasing the alliance's
membership. Under these circumstances,many East Central Europeans
feel that the West's old foreign policy priority—not to antagonize
Russia—makes measures that would enhance the security of their newly
gained freedom and independence into issues of secondary importance.
"The former East Bloc countries, convinced that integration is essential to
their interests, have proposed a series of steps or trials in the direction of
membership [in the European Union and NATO]," the former Hungarian
dissident and essayist,Gyorgy Konrad, pointed out, "but all they receive for
their pains is a mysterious manana [tomorrow].. . . 'Now!Now! Now!' says
the East. 'No! No! No!' says the West."10
E U
POSTREVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 287
The fact: that the Westhas not come up with big solutions to the big problems
of post-Communism in the East is partly related to the fact that most
theories of East-West relations or Soviet studies relied on the premise that
the Communist systemwould not change dramatically. It might stagnate, deteriorate,
or be reformed, but it would not collapse. Although democrats
and capitalists in the West were convinced of the superiority of the democratic
and capitalistsystem,theynever expected to see itssuperiority demonstrated
in such a sudden and complete victory and therefore were completely
unprepared to deal with its consequences. Whereas Communists
wrote incessantly on the "transition from capitalism to socialism,"anti-Communists
wrote virtually nothing on the "transition from communism to
democracy" or "the transition from socialism to capitalism." After 1989,
there was a virtual absence of theories for addressing the problems of postCommunist
societies. Therefore, "transformation" has been a trial-anderror
process. Asone Polishjoke goes: "Socialismisthe longestpossible path
from capitalism ... to capitalism."
The guiding principles of the revolutions of 1989—national self-determination,
democracy, and market economics—naturallybecame the objectives
of gigantic transformation projects. But the perceptions of the indigenous
problems confronting each stale in the region varied because each
country had its own national experience with "building socialism": a Communist
heritage ranging from the realm of individual attitudes to the sectoral
structure of economies. Therefore, the project of "dismantling socialism"
or "building democracy and market economies" has proceeded along
the lines of different "national paths" which in turn have been influenced
by heated domestic political debates among politicians, economists, and social
scientists.Experts disagree about priorities,which methods are most appropriate
for achievingwhich objectives, and the costs and risks of individual
and global transformation strategies.
In addition, all post-Communist countries face the "dilemma of simul-
taneity"11
—a myriad of unanticipated problems that must be addressed at
the same time. In Western Europe, the development of independent nationstates,
capitalistic market economies, and democracy was basically a sequential
process spanning two centuries. Nation-states arose that gradually
developed capitalisteconomies and democratic institutions.Although these
three processes overlapped, they occurred more or less in that order. In East
Central Europe, however, people expected these three processes to take
place simultaneouslyin a relativelyshort period of time. "Sequencing" is another
complicated and related issue. If everything cannot be done at once,
what should be donefirst?
The best recent examples of the rapid modernization of underdeveloped
economies to which reformers in the East Central Europe could refer
are either politically undesirable or economically unfeasible.Militaryjuntas
in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Chile did a relatively good job of modernizing
the economies of these countries before they made their transitions to
democracy in the 1980s. The "Asian tigers" or "newly industrialized countries,"
such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, are another good ex-
2 8 8 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
ample of rapid economic modernization without much democracy, and
their success is even more problematic because it was based on a high degree
of state planning, a concept that has the status of a dirty word in East
Central Europe. Many people seem to assume that capitalism and democracy
go together. But there are enough counterexamples that show that
"capitalism first, democracy later" is a normal sequence of development.
One of the first big post-1989 surprises in the region was a result of the
achievement of national independence: the return of nationalism. In
Poland and Hungary, national and Christian national parties emerged right
of center on the political spectrum. Theoretically, they were the Eastern
counterparts of the Western European Christian Democratic parties, but
their political vocabularies and prejudices were reminiscent of interwar populism,
anti-Semitism,and authoritarianism.
For example, these new parties accused liberals and free-marketeers of
"cosmopolitanism," an anti-Semitic slur peculiar to the political culture of
the region; propagated the importance of "national values"; and openly
questioned the status and desirability of Gypsies and other minorities. Slovak
nationalism, tinged with post-Communist authoritarianism and an interest
in the maintaining the established political and economic structures,
played a considerable role in the Czech-Slovak confrontation leading to the
"Velvet Divorce," the breakup of the Czechoslovak Republic, in 1993. Czech
nationalism was an essential player in this process, too. Both Slovene and
Croatian nationalism contributed to the deterioration of Yugoslavia's multinational
federal state and its ensuing wars. The Milosevicregime in former
Yugoslavia has demonstrated that Serbian nationalism is compatible with
post-Communist authoritarianism. Nationalism was an important source of
anti-Communist sentiment before 1989, and since then its illiberal manifestations
have been an ongoing cause of concern.
Democracies and markets are complicated institutions, and although
the absence of Communism is a prerequisite for their emergence, the
demise of Communism did not naturally create democrats and capitalists,
nor did it automaticallydecentralize state institutionsor spontaneously create
a framework for market economies. Communist states were based on the
party's control of the state and the state's control of the economy. The revolutions
of 1989 in East Central Europe broke the Communist monopolies
on state power, but they left intact the monolithic state institutions and massive
state involvement in the economies. "Less state and more market" has
been a basic recipe for reform, but dismantlingor "rolling back" the institutions
of the totalitarian and paternalisticstate and privatizing state property
have been exceedingly difficult.
Some leaders of the movements that toppled Communism in the region
initially hoped that the experience of anti-Communistsolidaritywould provide
the foundation for a new, specifically East Central European form of
democratic political culture, and they speculated that they might even be
able to engineer a newform of political and economic organization, a "third
way" between the extremes of capitalism and socialism.
These fantasies faded quickly. The crumbling of Solidarity in Poland,
POSTREVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 289
far example, wasan acrimonious affair, and the Czech Civic Forum and the
Slovak Public Against Violence experienced similar fates in their respective
halves of the Czechoslovak Republic in the course of its demise. The
diversification of the political spectrum wasone of the first signs of the "normalization"
of postrevolutionary politics in east Central Europe. It led to
a "remarginalization" of the dissidents and intellectuals—who had been
important as moral authorities during the heydayof the revolutions—and a
brief blossoming of Western European liberal political theory and American-style
free-market economic theory. "Marketism" succeeded Marxismas
an economic dogma, and great hopes were placed in the spontaneity and
creative potential of market forces.
All this sounded fine in theory, but it was unrealistic in practice because
it did not take into account the virtual absence of private property, private
capital, capital markets, and a class of entrepreneurial capitalists as well as
"capitalistic" laws governing investment, banking, property, taxes, and businesses.
The absence of capitalisticinstitutionsand laws has ironicallyslowed
the West-East flow of aid and investments. According to a study by the New
York-based Institute for East-West Studies, less than one-third of the aid
committed to East Central Europe between 1990 and 1994 had been actually
disbursed by 1995 because the conditions stipulated by the granting
(capitalist) countrieshave not been fulfilled by the receiving (reform) coun-
tries.
The German Democratic Republic was not confronted with these problems
because it ceased to exist as an independent state after German unification.
The "old GDR" became the "five new Lander" of the "new" Federal
Republic of Germany, and unification entailed the introduction of West German
institutions and laws in East Germany. In this respect, East Germany
as a region did not have to cope with many of the problems of reform and
innovation that trouble the other "new democracies"—in particular, deep
structural change, such as the creation of new public and private institutions
and bodies of lawthat correspond to the demands of "market democracy"—
because West Germany superimposed its legal system and structures on the
region. The new Federal Republic of Germany also sent officials and experts
from the "old FRG" into the "five new Lander" to assume leading positions
in the gigantic project of Aufbau-Ost:" (re)buildingthe East."
Furthermore, in comparison with the other former Communist states,
there has been no shortage of investment in East Germany. Massive public
funds have been transferred from the German west to the German east in
various forms, ranging from infrastructure improvement programs to social
security and retirement payments. In the five years following unification in
1990, the gross public expenditure of the Federal Republic of Germany in
the regions of the former GDR totaled more than 800 billion deutsche
marks (over $500 billion), a figure that does not take private investment into
account.
In this respect, the East Germans are in an envious structural and financial
position in comparison with the other peoples of the former East
bloc. However, German unification has been an ambiguous affair. Due to
290 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
the speed of economic and structural change, the high level of regional unemployment
in the former GDR is a great problem. There also are considerable
tensions between Germans in the west and in the east, Wessis and Ossis,
and resentment on both sides. West Germans have a variety of biases
about Germans from the east and accuse them of being lazy, passive,sullen,
and expensive for taxpayers. East Germans find Germans from the west condescending,
self-complacent, insensitive,and selfish.
Unlike other people in the "new democracies" after 1989, East Germans
did not have an opportunity to take their collective future into their own
hands. After unification, West Germany and West Germans assumed responsibility
for the east to a great extent. For a fair number of EastGermans,
unification has been a humiliatingexperience, and there is a certain quiet
pride among some East Germans, especiallyin their thirties and older, about
being "former citizens of the GDR." Germans from the "old FRG" and the
"old GDR"have problems with the fact that twofundamentally different German
national cultures evolved between 1949 and 1989, and the psychology
of German unificationwill undoubtedly continue to be a problem in the fu-
ture.
The theoretical and practical aspects of the transition from Communism
to capitalism are complex,12
and they are best illustrated by a joke popular
among economists in East Central Europe. "The transition from capitalism
to socialism is like taking a fish and making fish soup; the transition from socialism
to capitalism is like taking fish soup and trying to make a fish." The
great "achievements" of the socialist planned economies the were the abolition
of private property for all practical purposes13
(or its transformation
into "collectively owned" state property) and the replacement of market
economies with centrally planned state or command economies. One of the
biggest problems for the post-Communist states is privatizingstate property,
that is, transferring the ownership and control of assets from the state to
the private sector and diversifying ownership.
The so-called small privatization in the retail trade and service sector appears
to have been more or less successful in East Central Europe, and the
market is functioning for consumers, if the quality of food and service at
restaurants or the density of electronic goods or video rental shops can be
used as an indicator. Prices are high by local standards, but there are no
shortages of commodities, many of which are imported and thus contribute
to negative trade balances. Nonetheless, East Central European cities, once
renowned for being monotone, drab, and dreary, today make a vibrant impression
on visitors. Everything looks much better than in the 1980s.
Conversely, large-scale privatization—"aradical reallocation of available
productive resources, a restructuring of the institutional setting in which
production takes place, and the introduction of new methods of corporate
governance, freed from the most noxious kinds of politicalinterference"14
—
has been a slow and ambiguous process. Most East Central Europeans in industrial
sectors are still employed by large state-owned companies or conglomerates.
Despite the many innovativeschemes for transferring titles, the
introduction of holding companies, cross-ownership, "give-away"voucher
POSTREVOI.UTIOXARY PARADOXES 291
schemes, and the like, this form of privatization has been primarily on paper
because it has not broken up the concentration of ownership or economic
interest.
It also has been difficult, for the states to find buyers for their largest industries,
many of which are cost inefficient and not competitive. The shortage
of domestic capital and the lack of large-scale foreign investment have
forced states to hold their assets, whether or not they want to. Furthermore,
the managers of large enterprises and the unions of the laborers employed
at them have vested interests in keeping things as they are, as well as considerable
political clout. Privatization has been much more difficult than
initially expected and represents one of the most perplexing problems.
Those economies that have emerged are unprecedented hybrids: postsocialist
but not yet capitalist. Gyorgy Konrad described the structural peculiarities
of the region after more than forty years of communism and five
years of freedom: "It is neither East nor West; it is both East and West.."15
It has been somewhat easier for the post-Communist state to extricate itself
from structural legacy of Communism in terms of government—or too
much government. Extensive "cradle to grave" social services were part of
the old Communist social contract. Socialist states provided their citizens
with guaranteed employment, cheap housing, stable prices, universal medical
care, and retirement benefits, and there has been a some retrospective
glorification of how good the actually poor and inequitable social services
were under the Communist regimes as well as some nostalgic yearning for
the security of the "good old days."16
The pressure to perform under the old
system and the rewards for performance were not great, and egalitarian
mediocrity wasone of the characteristics of the socialistsocietiesof East Central
Europe. Most people managed to get by, or as an old East bloc saying
went: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." Socialdifferentiation
is process that people find difficult to accept who are accustomed to
egalitarian ideology and then are suddenly confronted with growing in-
equities.
It would be incorrect to confuse the popular rejection of socialism in
East Central Europe in 1989 with a widespread affirmation or understanding
of the game rules of participatory democracy or market capitalism. Participation
in the electoral process throughout the region has been
mediocre, and the "new democracies" have demanded considerable sacrifices
from their citizens. For most people, economic hardship—high to hyperinflation
and falling real incomes—was the immediate consequence of
the collapse of socialism. Increasing unemployment has been one of the
natural and unavoidable results of "marketization," and cutbacks in extensive
social welfare programs and the dismantling of the paternalistic socialist
state have been part and parcel of stabilization and austerity programs.
Economists view the processes of transformation from a rather detached
macroeconomic level and recognize that "displacement" is a necessary part
of structural change, and they have coined the term "transformational recession"
to describe the unique state of affairs in post-Communist economies.
But the recognition that things will have to get worse before they can get
292 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
better isseldom a source of solace for those confronted with microcconomic
hardship, and economists, businesspeople, and politicians have been surprised
by the dimensions of the economic decline.
During the initialyears of the transition, the gross domestic products of
the region's countries fell by around 20 percent, and industrial production,
by 40 percent. Peacetime economies have not experienced such dramatic
downturns in productivity since the Great Depression in the 1930s, and economic
recoveries have been uneven and fragile.17 Furthermore, economists
do not know when these economies in transitionwill bottom out or if they
will make dramatic comebacks in terms of real growth in the future. They
describe their expectations for the macroeconomic development of the
economies in transition in terms of a "J-curvc"that drops, bottoms out, and
then comes up, but they do not know how long or shallow the trough of this
J might be.
The insight that democracy may actually hinder the transformation of
the economies in the region is another post-1989 paradox. When the former
Communist Party won the elections in Lithuania in 1992, Central Europeans
tended to dismiss this as an Eastern European phenomenon. However,
in 1994 the socialist and social democratic parlies (the reformed
successor parties of the old Communist parties) emerged from the 1994 parliamentary
elections in Poland and Hungary as the strongest single factions
in their respective parliaments, partly because the Polish and Hungarian
electorates were unhappy with having to bear the costs of transition. Although
the reformed neo-Communist, socialist, and social democratic parties
are substantially different from their historical predecessors in the region,
some people see a threat of "re-Communization,"and there is more
genuine anticapitalistic sentimentin the region today than there was before
1989.
The winners and losers of the postrevolutionaryperiod in east Central
Europe can be defined in terms of generations, social groups, and regions.
The old generations are among the big losers. Figurativelyspeaking, they
spent their lives "building socialism."Now they are among the first victims
of "building capitalism."Retired people living on the fixed incomes of modest
state pensions have been confronted with two- to three-figure inflation
and cutbacks in social services. Many people over forty, who are in the second
half of their work careers, find intimidatingor discouraging the insecurity
inherent in their newly gained freedoms. Younger generations obviously
are the big winners, and they are enthusiastic their the prospects.
Nonetheless, some of the most talented and qualified younger people from
the region have chosen to make their fortunes elsewhere, a "brain drain"
that is a source of ongoing concern. Why stay home and help "build capitalism"
if you can go somewhere else and enjoy it immediately?
Those social groups least prepared to cope with the political and economic
transformation in East Central Europe have born a disproportionate
amount, of the related costs: the retired and the aging, women, unskilledlabor,
large families, the rural populations, and minorities, such as the Gypsies.
These groups are at risk in most societies,and they do not have the kind
POSTRKVOLL'TIONAKY PARADOXES 293
of political or economic influence necessary to improve their lot. Ironically,
members of the former Communist elites in the region have been among
the big winners, because their material assets, such as nice homes, and their
social assets, such as university educations or important positions, which
they or their children received because of their party membership before
1989, have increased in value since 1989. In other words, the winners under
the Communist system have become the big winners of democracy and marketization
insofar as they have succeeded in converting their old political
privileges into new economic ones.18
Although there was some talk about "re-Communization"immediately
after 1989, it has failed to materialize, with the notable exception of East
Germany. (The Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Polish situations were different
because they themselves had to deal with the problems ofcomplicity.
After German unification, West Germans came in and dealt self-righteously
with the problem of East German Communists.)Exceptionally few people
can maintain to not have collaborated with the system in some shape,
way in the past, and qualified people, regardless of their political pedigree,
are in great demand. It thus would be inexpedient to exclude former Communists
from positions in public administration or industrial management,
where their experience and skills are needed most,19
and some of them have
actually turned out to be plausible democrats and good entrepreneurial cap-
italists.
Since 1989, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have been the big
regional winners of the former Eastern bloc, and each of them can claim to
be the most successful "transformer" to date, depending on which indicators
are used. Poles refer to the best statistics in terms of real economic
growth; Czechs are proud of their privatization programs and low unemployment;
and Hungarians have the highest per capita rate of foreign investment
and the most sophisticated market. Although Slovenia does not receive
nearly as much attention as this trio, it should be included among the
leading reformers. Slovenia extricated itself from Yugoslavia in 1991 without
becoming involved in the wars that have squandered lives and resources
in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. In many respects it has been the
most successful reform state with by far the highest per capita income of the
reformers. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia riot only
have those strong traditionsof western European orientation that are characteristic
of being Central European; they also benefit from their proximity
to the "economic West" of the European Union—Germany,Austria, and
Italy, in particular.
This leading quartet of reformers is followed by Slovakia. The division
of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1993 benefited the more highly developed
regions of Czech Bohemia and Moraviathan it did Slovakia,with its lopsided
industrial profile based partly on armament production and traditionally
underdeveloped agricultural regions. In comparison to other East Central
European states, Slovakia's transition to market economics and democracy
has also been more incomplete. One of the dominant figures in post-1989
Slovakian politics,Vladimir Meciar,a former Communist who has combined
294 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
Slovak nationalism with a penchant for authoritarian politics and retarded
the process of marketization, isone of the most problematic political figures
in the region.
Romania and Bulgaria form an intermediate southeastern European category
of their own, and they are followed by the states that emerged from
the former Soviet Union, which are "trailers" in the transformation process.
Of all former Soviet republics, the Baltic statesof Estonia,Latvia, and Lithuania
are in the best position. Their Baltic neighbors, Finland and Sweden,
joined the European Union in 1995, and they are the only countries from
the former Soviet Union with which the European Union has negotiated
preliminary association agreements.
In individual states, there also have been regional patterns of differentiation.
Traditional national centers of political and economic power, such as
capital cities and major urban centers, have been among the bigwinners,
whereas "old" industrial regions with outdated capital bases and technologies
(steel, heavy industry, textiles) as well as traditionally underdeveloped
rural and agrarian regions have been among the big losers. Furthermore,
regions in the west, such as western Bohemia and western Hungary, have
been helped by their proximity to Germany and Austria.
Germany and Austria also have had special historical relationshipswith
the states of East Central Europe, and they have been the most generous
providers of aid and the most important sources of foreign investment for
the region. For example, in 1992 Austriaand Germany each committed 0.20
percent of their gross domestic products to aid and expenditures for Central
and Eastern Europe ($365 million and $3.8 billion, respectively), which
accounted for over half the $8 billion that the world's twenty-four leading
industrial nations (G-24 or OECD members) committed to the region. The
United States, in comparison, committed 0.01 percent of its gross domestic
product, or $744 million. On a psychological level, German commitments
also are belated reparation for the transgressions of the Third Reich. Austrians
rely on a more pleasant and sentimental historical precedent: the
Habsburgs. Central Europe, or Milteleuropa, is a term that both German and
Austrian politicians use as an inclusive expression of solidarity with the reform
states.
Germany and Austria have less altruistic and concrete economic interests
in the region, too. Labor in the reform states is relatively well qualified,
motivated, and cheap, and the ecological restrictions on production are often
not nearly so rigorous as at home. Some East Central Europeans would
like to see more diversified foreign investment and regard the high profile
of German investment and capital as some kind of threat to their national
interests. For example, in early 1990 Rita Rlimova, the newly appointed
Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States, expressed concern about
the possibilityof a "Germanization of Central and Eastern Europe with the
peaceful and laudable methods of market economics" and feared that "the
German-speaking parts of Europe, including Austria, may succeed, where
the Habsburgs, Bismarck, and Hitler failed."20
Based on their historicalexperience with the Germans, East Central Eu-
POSTREVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 295
ropean anxieties are understandable. But it also is necessaryto askwhether
the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany is the same Germany that
unleashed twoworld wars in this century or if German interests and investment
in the region provide sufficient grounds for assuming that Germany
will take another run at the imperialistic version of Mitteleuropa. In light of
its size and economic potential, Germany undoubtedly will play a large and
an important role in the region in the future, just asAustriawill play a smaller
but important one. Germany, however, instead of being a major part of
Central Europe's problems as in the past, most likely will be an integral part
of the solutions to its problems in the future. German politicians are sensitive
enough to understand their friends' and neighbors' apprehension
about a renewed "Germanization" of Europe. At the same time, they reassuringly
assert that German participation in European integration, a "Europeanization"
of Germany, is their ultimate goal.
In the early 1980s, Milan Kundera defined Central Europe as "that of the
part of Europe situated geographically in the center, culturally in the West,
and politically in the East." Since 1989, Central Europe could perhaps be
best: defined as that part of the former Communist East that eventuallywill
make it into the political and economic haven of the West. From the midnineteenth
centuryuntil after 1989, manypeople in Central Europe assumed
that some kind of confederation of smallstates situated between Germany and
Russia ultimately would be the solution to the region's problems,but the desire
of East Central European states to become members of the European
Union, a Western European confederation of states that will enlarge to the
east, definitely has displaced the idea of a Central European confederation.
Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia are the prime candidates
for European Union membership, followed by Slovakia.If the next
phase in the enlargement of the European Union entails the membership
of this quartet or quintet of "new democracies"—and this seems most probable—the
eastern frontier of the EU will, with the exception of Croatia,
substantially correspond to the millennium-oldfault line between Western
(Catholic) Europe and Eastern (Orthodox) Europe. East Central Europeans
historically and culturallyhave identified themselveswith "the West,"and an
enlargement of the European Union eventually will put them where they
feel they always have belonged.
It is symbolicallysignificant that the European Economic Community
was established in Rome in 1957. The Treaties of Rome laid the foundations
for European integration, and the idea of an economically and politically
unified Europe is in many respects catholic: It entails the application of certain
"universal" principles. The old Roman Catholicidea of Western Europe
was based on "one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church"; the new catholic
idea of a unified Europe isbased on economic and monetary unification—
One Market and One Currency—as the basis for political unification in the
future.
Looking back on the twentieth century, there are striking parallels between
the years 1918 and 1989 in Central Europe. Both dates mark the
demise of great empires, a recession of Russian influence in the region as a
296 C E N T R A L E U R O P E
consequence of domestic revolution and turmoil, the advent of democracy
for oppressed peoples, and the beginning of national self-determination.
But post-World War I Europe failed to integrate Germany into the new European
order, and the relations among the "new democracies" of the region
were full of strife. The lack of "European integration"—Germanyas a freefloating
malcontent in the middle of the continent—and "Central European
integration"—effective cooperation among the smallerstates in the region
—were among the factors that ultimatelyled to World War II.
The post-1989 prospects for Central Europe are much better than they
were in 1918. Russian imperial influence in the region has receded dramatically
for a second time in this century, although the power and the unpredictability
of this reclusive giant are still a source of great concern. Furthermore,
Germany has been integrated thoroughly into the European
Union, which, in turn, places considerable restrictionson Germany's ability
to act as a completely independent player in European politics, and the
European Union has explicitly stated its intention of incorporating the
states of "Central and Eastern Europe" into its fold in the future. Nonetheless,
being situated in the geopolitical center of Europe, Central Europeans
continue to worry about the Russians and the Germans. They alsocontinue
to feel neglected by the West and threatened by the East. These are historical
constants in the region.
For example, in a speech to the Sejm, the Polish parliament, on May8,
1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Lech
Walesa critically reflected on what this commemoration meant for most
Poles, and he rhetorically asked whether Poland, which had been abandoned
by the democratic West to the SovietEast after the defeat of NaziGermany,
should celebrate this event as a victory. He also took this occasion to
point to Poland's precarious position between East and West, and he expressed
his concern about the isolationistic policies of the West and the potential
of a resurgent Russian empire in the East. This is Central European:
reflecting on lessons from the past, as a means of preparing for—or worrying
about—the future.
The fact that Lech Walesa lost, the Polish presidential election to the
young former Communist Aleksander Kwasniewski in November 1995
might be a sign of normalization in the region. The sixty-two-year-old
Walesa, one of the great heroes of the Solidarity movement, and Poland's
Roman Catholic Church both attempted to portray the forty-one-year-old
Kwasniewski, one of the leading figures in the social democratic party that
emerged from the Polish Communist party after 1989, as a Communist
threat. Kwasniewski, a handsome, telegenic, articulate, and well-dressed
younger man as well as a sophisticated, smooth, and seasoned opportunist,
conducted a Western-style political campaign based more on images than
substance, and he emphasized his commitment, to reform. He wasalso more
popular than the old-fashioned Walesa among younger Polish voters and
then won the election bya slim margin. Although immediatelyafter the election
Kwasniewski had to admit having mislead the Polish electorate—he lied
about being a university graduate during the election but never completed
POSTREVOLUTIONARY PARADOXES 297
his degree—and the fears that he will serve the economic and political interests
of Poland's post-Communist social democrats are justified, the fact
that he won the election can in its own waybe seen as a vote for a modern
Western democracy, as opposed to the post-Communist East Central European
democracy Walesa represented. It may have been a vote for the future
against the past. Younger people in the region are not interested in Communism
or post-Communism. They want to lead normal Western lives.
Regardless of which historical agent or agents one chooses—God and
the devil, fate, human error, or the blind forces of history—Central Europeans
seem to have been put through more than their fair share of trials,
and even if this is not the case, many of them tend to believe that it is. This
is one source of Central European exceptionalism, and Central Europe has
been an exceptionally conflict-prone and conflict-ridden region. History
does not seem to want to let Central Europeans go, or more appropriately,
Central Europeans do not show much inclination to want to let their histories
go. Conflicts and tragedies are constituent parts of the region's national
identities, and in some cases Central Europeans are deeply attached to the
idea of having suffered or to the peculiar feeling of moral superiority that
accompanies unjustified or inexcusable neglect. Despite the auspicious turn
of events in the region since 1989, many Central Europeans prefer to view
the future with caution or skepticism because history has rarely given them
occasions for optimism. One may only hope that the Central European obsession
with the past will not become an obstacle in the future.