The Autumn of Nations – 25 years later: Brendan Peter Simms
What was the ‘Autumn of Nations’ in 1989 about and how are the events of that time to be understood?
In 1848, much of Europe erupted in revolt against the old order. From Paris in the west to Posen in the east, from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Italy in the south, liberals took power hoping to inaugurate a ‘springtime of the peoples’, in which national and political aspirations of all the European peoples could be reconciled. Their immediate target was the conservative Habsburg Empire which – in a later parlance – was believed to be a ‘dungeon of peoples’. The main enemy, however, was Russia, which had been the bête noire of European liberals for the past decades, partly on account of its repression of the Poles, and partly because of its status as the reactionary lender of last resort in the European system. By 1849, however, liberal hopes had been dashed, as the old regimes proved far more resilient than expected, and far from the revolutionary side showing international solidarity, it was Russia which ultimately intervened to crush the Hungarian Revolution, while the national aims of the liberal revolutionaries proved incompatible in places like Posen and Prague.
The autumn of the peoples in 1989, by contrast, was a truly collective effort. Starting with the breakthrough of the Polish Solidarity movement and the opening of the border between Austria and Hungary that summer, the populations of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and ultimately Romania rose against their respective communist dictatorships. There were, to be sure, some signs that the collapse of communist fraternalism would summon back old nationalist ghosts – for example, the riots between Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania in March 1990. It was only the former Yugoslavia, however, that disintegrated into ethnic bloodshed as extremists manipulated by Belgrade pursued the dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’. In central and much of eastern Europe, the ‘autumn of the nations’ saw a revival of national pride in the countries emerging from Russian tutelage, but in general the vacuum was filled by the twin transnational integrative projects of NATO and the European Union, which spread ever further eastwards in the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This seemingly irresistible process was not intended to threaten Russia, and did not really do so, but was rather designed to reduce the tensions between the new member states, to spread stability, and also to ‘hedge’ against the inevitable revival of Russian activisim.
Why did it take place at the twilight of the short twentieth century 1914-1989?
Historians like to talk of long and short centuries. Some speak, for example, of a ‘short’ eighteenth century between the treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the French Revolution in 1789, and of a ‘long’ nineteenth century between 1789 and 1914. The idea of a ‘short’ twentieth century was first mooted by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and it hinges on the idea that the start of the first world war and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, culminating in the disintegration of the USSR itself in 1991, are its terminal points. Why it happened at exactly that point is surely the result of both structural and contingent factors. The Soviet Union had been slowly worn down in the 1980s by the Reaganite arms race, the sense of technological inferiority, the debilitating war against the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, the costs of empire more generally in Europe and elsewhere, and an oil price deliberately depressed by Saudi Arabia. This enabled the rise of a reforming Soviet General leader such as Mikhail Gorbachev, but it was the determination of civil society groups in eastern Europe to take advantage of these conjunctures, often showing considerable physical courage in the process, which proved decisive. This revolt reflected a profound disenchantment with the Marxist political project, which had failed across eastern Europe, as the laboratory conditions of divided Germany demonstrated beyond all doubt. It took advantage of the small window that opened for civil society groups under the Helsinki Accords in the mid-1970s, in order to hold the Soviet and allied regimes to Human Rights promises that they themselves had signed up to. It also followed a discovery of past models, such as the Habsburg Empire, whose ability to reconcile the peoples of central Europe, was recognised and somewhat transfigured in Mitteleuropa enthusiasm of the 1980s, which emanated as much if not more so from Budapest and Prague as the German lands.
Can the events of 25 years ago be an inspiration for contemporary Europeans?
The events of 1989 should inspire Europeans, today more than ever. They show that we should not take our current freedoms for granted: that the lifting of the threat of nuclear war and Soviet aggression and the spread of democracy was made possible by a robust policy of deterrence in the west and the bravery of protestors in the east. Over the past few months, the courage of the Ukrainian ‘Maidan’ crowds has demonstrated that democratic aspirations are equally strong on the eastern periphery of our continent, where men and women have done something that our jaded age had not thought possible: they have died ‘ for Europe’, to keep open the possibility to join the European Union. Brussels should seize this opportunity to declare the Maidan a European ‘lieu de memoire’, and it could do worse than to name one of its many buildings after a martyred protester.
Are there any analogies between the past and present?
The analogies between the Maidan protestors and the civil society groups who finally overthrow communism in eastern Europe are very clear. In both cases, men and women have risked everything to articulate not so much economic desires, though these are keenly felt, as a yearning for basic human dignity. The demonstrators in Kiev were rejecting outside interference, endemic corruption and political repression. Then as now, Russia (then Soviet) power menaces the freedoms of Europeans and even the sanctity of borders. If the Red Army kept Eastern Europe firmly in check after 1945, intervening openly in Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, today it is the Russian forces of Mr Putin which have occupied and annexed Crimea, and stand ready to strike on the eastern borders of Ukraine. Sadly, the analogy breaks down when one looks at the western response. In 1989-1991 Europe was fortunate in having a visionary German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and a far-sighted US President George Bush, senior. They steered the continent through the collapse of the Warsaw pact, German unification and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Today, it is very different. To be sure, figures as Samantha Power, the US representative at the UN and Secretary of State John Kerry have challenged Russia directly over Crimea. There is no sign, however, that President Obama himself is able to rise to the challenge or even to understand it. He signalled in a speech in Brussels shortly after the annexation that there was no strategic reason to engage over the Ukraine only a sentimental one related to the dead of the world wars. The President has in fact consistently sought to accommodate rather than contain Russia, starting with his famous ‘reset’ at the start of his first term and continuing with the attempts to employ Russian leverage in Syria and over the Iranian nuclear programme. He suddenly dropped the plan for a common missile defence, embarrassing the eastern European governments who had supported it. Above all, Mr Obama is driven by the desire to ‘pivot’ to the east, to balance the rise of Chinese power, and has thus taken his eye off the European ball.
Accentuating the problems posed by the American withdrawal is the lack of a visionary German leadership. Already embattled on the common currency front, Berlin has shown no desire to step to its responsibilities over Ukraine as the most powerful Eurozone state with the potential to lead Europe, or even to pull its weight. The government remains heavily invested in Foreign Minister Franz-Walter Steinmeier’s failed policy of engagement with Russia. It may be that Chancellor Merkel is slowly and quietly turning that particular supertanker around, but no real change of course is visible yet to the naked eye.
In fairness, it must be added that there are several significant differences between the two situations. 1989-1991 was about managing the end of the Soviet Empire, 2014 is about its recreation, at least in part. Then, communism no longer had anything to offer Europe, and it was also in global retreat. Today, Mr Putin’s brand of authoritarianism has many admirers across the world, as governments and elites experiment with various forms of partial modernisation. Moreover, the Russian juggernaut of 2014 is not the demoralised Red Army of 1989, which had seen a steady erosion of its combat capability and morale during the long slog in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. It has been the recipient of substantial investment over the past years, and has learned from the invasion of Georgia in 2008. The western militaries, by contrast, had fully recovered from the Vietnam and other costly extra-European struggles by the end of the 1980s, whereas they have not even fully disengaged from the last war (on terror) today. If western leaders sound a deeply uncertain note in their response to Mr Putin, this reflects domestic views. That said, it should be the task of those leaders to make opinion rather than simply follow it, even if an activist policy post-war on terror remains a very ‘hard sell’.
Was 1989 the end of geopolitics in this part of the world?
It was widely hoped that the end of the cold war would bring with it the ‘end of history’, after which there could no longer be any fundamental ideological disputes in Europe, or at least a lasting ‘peace dividend’ as the large military establishments west and east were reduced. This expectation was soon belied by events, however, as Yugoslavia collapsed and the continent was confronted with the revival of an extreme nationalist ideology believed dead since 1945 and saw the resulting mass murder and deportations nightly on its television screens. The slow response of ‘Europe’ to the outbreak of violence owed much to the persistence of traditional geopolitical thinking, in particular British and French fears of the revival of German power after re-unification. When the west, led by the United States, finally intervened in Bosnia in 1995, and again in Kosovo in 1999, it motivated as much by strategic considerations about the need to uphold European stability as it was by purely humanitarian motivations, though the two strands were complementary.
Nor did the collapse of the Soviet Union end the Russian preoccupation with old-style geopolitics. The Kremlin spent the 1990s and the early 2000s fretting about the steady eastwards advance of NATO, and more recently of the EU as well. It frequently issued dire warnings that Russian ‘interests’, by which it meant the right to hinder the west from preventing ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or to deny neighbouring states a free choice of western political systems and alliances, were being disrespected: during the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War and leading up to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. The occupation of Crimea and the intimidation of the rest of the Ukraine is thus part of a longer-term pattern. The Germans, by contrast, did take a holiday from geopolitics after 1989 as the eastward expansion of EU and NATO gave them the secure borders they had always lacked historically. Now, however, Berlin is facing the return of geopolitics as it confronts Baltic and eastern European concerns about Russian aggression while hoping to maintain trade and energy links with Moscow. Unfortunately, German public opinion, which would like their country to act as a kind of ‘super-Switzerland’ on the world stage, entirely concurs with this policy and is blind to the growing concern to the east.
If there is a silver lining in all this, it is the fact that the challenges of today may be the opportunities of tomorrow. Mr Putin has robbed Europeans, or at last many of them, of their complacency. He may over time generate the pressure needed to weld the Eurozone together into a true Democratic Union. If that happens then we can say that twenty-five years on, we began to complete the work of 1989.
Brendan Peter Simms, Irish historian and Professor of the History of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, an author of Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (2013)
Article written as part of the Freedom Express project - an international social and educational campaign launched on the 25th anniversary of the “year of changes” – the year 1989. The project is organised by European Network Remembrance and Solidarity with the support of ministries of culture from Central European countries and in cooperation with many institutions dealing with the history of the 20th century.