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04 September 2009
Several Aspects of 1989 Revolutions Made Them Remarkable
This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.5 MB).
By: Ronald H. Linden
Nineteen eighty-nine began with Europe divided, as it had been since the end of World War II. More than one hundred million people lived in states dominated by the Soviet Union and national communist parties of Eastern Europe. Václav Havel, a renowned playwright and proponent of human rights, languished in jail in Czechoslovakia; Nicolae
Ceauşescu and Todor Zhivkov were in their third and fourth decades of tyrannical rule in Romania and Bulgaria, respectively. And in Germany, a 12-foot-high wall cutting through and around the city of Berlin symbolized most poignantly the real and symbolic division of the continent.
By the end of the year, Václav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia, dictatorships from the Balkans to the Baltic Sea were overturned, and the people of Eastern Europe, having regained their sovereignty, began the task of building democracies and free economies. The opening of the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9, 1989, was emblematic of the end of the separation of Europe.
Apart from the breathtaking speed and scope of these events, several features make them remarkable. First, while analysts and political actors had noted the deficiencies of communist regimes, their nearly simultaneous fall in Eastern Europe was unexpected. Previous challenges usually had been confined to a single country. This time the demonstrations and societal demands were infectious — and the results sped from the replacement of the communist prime minister in Poland at the end of August to the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania on Christmas Day.
In addition, with the exception of Romania, the revolutionary changes were nonviolent. The regimes were challenged not by foreign armies but by their own peoples, convinced that the governing doctrines of the past 40 years had brought not liberation but repression. But the upheaval went beyond mere dissatisfaction with failed policies. These events also demonstrated the importance of governing legitimacy, the idea that governments have the right — not just the power — to rule. From the beginning, East Europeans viewed local communist rulers not as “theirs” but rather as the product of Soviet domination. When Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who had been pushing reform in his own country, removed the threat of intervention, the derivative regimes of Eastern Europe were swept away.
Two other factors made possible the end of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. One was the spread of information, both about the West and about the real situation in Eastern Europe. Knowledge about how West Europeans and Americans were governed, and how they lived, enhanced the appeal of alternative models. While notions of democracy and freedom in Eastern Europe may not have been fully specified, the knowledge that these concepts worked elsewhere proved a powerful motive.
None of this would have mattered had the people of the region not shown the courage and vision to seize the moment, to recognize that their time had come to undertake the tasks of both tearing down — as they did the Berlin Wall in 1989 — and building up — as they do now every day in newly democratic societies.
[Ronald H. Linden is a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. A Princeton PhD. (1976), he was director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Pitt from 1984–89 and 1991–98. From 1989 to 1991 Dr. Linden served as director of research for Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany. He is the author of numerous works on Central and Southeast Europe and is the associate editor of Problems of Post-Communism.]
