The Autumn of the Nations - 25 years later: Aleksander Kaczorowski

The drive for freedom of the nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the years 1989-1991 led to the greatest geopolitical changes since the Second World War. In the area between the Adriatic Sea, the Baltic and the Black Sea the best remedy for the challenges of globalization, structural backwardness of the region and lawlessness was seen in a "return to Europe". However, the EU is experiencing an unprecedented crisis, and on its eastern border a new iron curtain is rising. The specter of post-totalitarianism is again hanging over Eastern Europe.

This term was coined years ago by Václav Havel. The author of The Power of the Powerless (1978) realized that the system prevailing in his country was a completely new socio-political phenomenon, the essence of which was a combination of dictatorship and consumer society. If it was said of the Habsburg monarchy that it maintained four armies: the army of standing soldiers, the army of sitting officials, the army of kneeling priests and the army of crawling informers, the post-totalitarian system also maintains a "fifth column" – the army of consumers, obediently posting propaganda slogans and getting rich in tune with the Slovak proverb, "If you do not rob the government, you rob your family."

In other words, even if on a summer night the Communist Party suddenly disappeared into thin air, and the former communists turned into (social)Democrats; if the Warsaw Pact was disbanded, free elections were organized, and the townhouses, factories and castles were returned to their owners (as it happened in the Czech Republic), it still would not mean a "return to Europe". The key issue was to turn consumers into citizens.

The post-totalitarian system survived wherever the citizens were content with the status of consumers: in the shape of the monarchy of Putin, Lukashenko’s state-owned farming estate, or the post-nomenclature oligarchies of the Ukraine. Their fate was not determined by Huntington’s phantasms, but by the lack of a real perspective for a democratic integration (not only in terms of capital, production or trade) with the West.

The history of post-war Europe has taught us that democratic and post-totalitarian systems can coexist and even do business with each other (propaganda wars serve mainly to disguise the true nature of these trade relations, resembling the relationship between the metropolis and the colonies). In 1975, when the Final Act of the CSCE was signed in the Finnish capital, Germany signed ground-breaking contracts for the supply of Soviet strategic raw materials, and 22 percent of Western European (mainly German and French) production of machines was sold to Eastern Europe. The Poles got a taste of Coca-Cola; in selected stores, for hard currency or so called vouchers, they could buy Western cigarettes, alcohol, jeans and Walkmans (does anyone still remember these Japanese wonders?). Who was bothered by that, you might ask, with the exception of such people like Havel? And how long would it have lasted, were it not for the collapse of the Eastern bloc economies? For these economies, at least the Polish one, generally were not able to sell for hard currency anything except grain, high-grade wood (and coal); just like in the days of farming estates.

"Revolts in Central Europe have something conservative, I would say almost anachronistic in them: they are desperately trying to revive the culture and history of the modern age, because only in this era, only in a world preserving the cultural dimension, Central Europe can still defend its identity and be perceived in line with its true nature,” wrote Milan Kundera in 1984. All the admiration and respect for the Czech-French novelist notwithstanding, we should note that at the same time in Central Europe it became a necessity to "find a different way of functioning in the international division of labor that an even deeper dependence on the Soviet Union"[1]. Gorbatchev provoked communist elites in Poland or in Hungary to support the changes desired by the most active sections of Eastern European societies when it turned out that a necessary condition of internal reforms initiated by him in the USSR was the deepening of economic dependence of the region. At the same time he himself encouraged them to act by ruling out military intervention in the region. He probably imagined that it would be possible to repeat the Prague Spring of 1968, that is a relative democratization (glasnost') and the consolidation of society around the Communist elite, allowing economic reforms to be carried out (perestroika). But it did not happen. For the era of Dubčeks had passed. Gordon Gekko times had begun. (Remember Michael Douglas in Wall Street (1987), shouting: "Greed is good!"? Right).

Perhaps now history is repeating itself. Perhaps the post-totalitarian regime of Putin, trying to preserve its influence in Ukraine, provoked some local oligarchs to support the libertarian and pro-Western aspirations of the most active segments of the Ukrainian society. Time will tell.

On the 25th anniversary of the Autumn of the Nations I turned to eminent political scientists, historians and intellectuals coming from Central and Eastern Europe, or people dealing with the region and its political transformation, for answers to the following questions:

1. What was the Autumn of the Nations in 1989?

2. Why did it occur at the end of the "short century" (1914-1989)?

3. Are there any parallels between that situation and today?

4. Can the events from a quarter-century back be an inspiration for contemporary Europeans?

5. Was the year 1989 the end of geopolitics in our part of the world?

Nine excellent essays bring sometimes radically different answers. Just like in the famous joke from the Soviet era: answering the question of a listener, who asked if you could predict the future, Radio Yerevan said: "Yes, we know the future precisely, with the past it is not so good, because it is constantly changing."

[1] J. Staniszkis, “Polskie dylematy,” Aneks 48/1987.

Aleksander Kaczorowski, editor-in-chief of Aspen Central Europe Review, previously he was deputy editor-in-chief of Newsweek Poland and Forum and chief editor of the Op-ed section of Gazeta Wyborcza. He is the author of a biography of Vaclav Havel.

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.