The End of Communism and Europe United
20 years later it is a good time for conclusions. Where are we now? What does 1989 mean to us? What is the meaning of 1991?
Fortunately, we can observe that a number of pessimistic forecasts have proved wrong in the mean time. In 1994, historian Tony Judt saw the future in rather dark colours. He thought that the year 1989 had not only marked the end of the “European civil war” – the ideological battle between Communism and Capitalism – but regrettably also the end of the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 and the age of Enlightenment. He had no confidence in the final march to victory of liberal democracy. In his article “After Communism. What?” he warned that “in a variety of ways Europe is about to enter an era of turmoil, a time of troubles”.
In 1994, there were ample reasons to be pessimistic. The Bosnian War in the Balkans was still in full swing. A year later, in 1995, the largest mass murder in Europe after the end of World War II took place: in the killing fields of Srebrenica the Serbian army murdered more than 8000 Bosnian men and boys. The Yugoslav Wars cast a dark shadow over the revolutions of 1989-91.
Having witnessed the Bosnian genocide, many analysts were quick to conclude that Europe was about to (re)turn to nationalism and chauvinism. But the conclusion was premature: it was not extreme nationalism that raised its head in most of the countries but a healthy liberal patriotism. By now the Balkans – a traditional trouble spot of Europe – have by and large been laid to rest, too. We can, therefore, say that the big “awakening of peoples” in the years 1989-91 has not brought about a collapse of Western democracy.
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If some of the scholars were too pessimistic about the future of Western Europe, others were too optimistic about the developments in Eastern Europe. In contrast to the former Eastern Bloc as well as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia, which have all joined the European Union and the NATO, and in contrast also to the states created on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, which have started to move towards EU membership, the region further east has witnessed a series of bloody, still unsettled conflicts in the past 20 years. Russia’s wars in Chechnya, Russia’s war against its neighbour Georgia, the war over Nagorno-Karabakh and the crisis in Moldova's region of Transdniestria all point to the fact that the dissolution of the Soviet empire has not succeeded as painlessly as desired and that, unfortunately, there are too many of those who dream of the return of the imperial grandeur Soviet style.
One has also to note that the transition from Communism to a liberal market economy has not been as easy as was assumed back then. The scientists did not understand Communism properly. The Hungarian scholar György Schöpflin has written accurately that people underestimated the persistence of communist systems, their ability to produce “cultural capital”. The most serious issue, according to Schöpflin, is the complete alienation of people from power, the dominant conviction that the deeds of an individual cannot in any way affect the political system. For this reason the footprints of the age of Communism could well sit deeper within us, who have once been subjected to the communist rule, than we can suspect. This makes the construction of democracy and a civil society much more difficult in East-Central Europe and especially in Russia.
Do we have any hope? Václav Havel, the retired Czech president, lays his hopes on the young: “It is not that better people are born today than yesterday. Young people have naturally the same character traits, habits, mind set and abilities that can be observed in their parents and forefathers, but in one important sense they are different: Communism has not directly transformed them, they have not grown up in conditions, which constantly demanded masquerading and bowing, encouraged egoism and indifference towards fellow humans and xenophobia, they have not matured under a regime which incessantly babbled about the government of the working class but in reality cultivated the most pitiful kind of bourgeoisie. All who grew up in the age of Communism, including those, who openly fought against it, they wear a mark. Immorality poisoned us deeper than we could assume”.
The situation is thus not at all hopeless. A fairer, more honest society is within our grasp – if we care to strive for it!
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