1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-communist Future

Political scientists have documented significant variation in political and economic outcomes of the 1989–91 revolutions. Countries bordering on western Europe have become relatively democratic and economically successful, with both democracy and wealth dropping off as one moves east and south. Explanations for this variation and the replication of an older pattern on the Eurasian landmass have moved farther and farther into the past. Yet in moving to the longue durée, more proximate events such as the revolutions of 1989, the demise of communism and even the communist experience itself recede into the background and are themselves accounted for by antecedent conditions. The article discusses how two more proximate factors helped to change older patterns in central and eastern Europe: the impact of communist modernisation and the prospect of European integration. In my family, only my grandfather, Isadore Kopstein, appreciated my career choice. He loved speaking Russian and especially enjoyed correcting my grammar and word choice. Having attended school only until the age of nine, he was nevertheless a keen and not untalented amateur Sovietologist. In the months before he died in 1992 he expressed two regrets, first, that he never visited Russia after leaving it (in some haste) in 1911 and, second, that he would not live long enough to see the final chapter of communism’s demise. He did make some predictions, however. First, he said that Czechoslovakia would once again become democratic. Germany, having basically learned its lesson, would play a much more positive role in the region than before the Second World War, ensuring that Poland and Hungary also became democratic. Russia and the east Slavic countries would toy with democracy but ultimately give it up in favour of a new tsar, and Central Asia would return to the barbarism from which, in his opinion, it had never strayed too far. What about the revolutions we had just watched on television, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto ON M4V 1A9, Canada; [email protected]. Contemporary European History, 18, 3 (2009), pp. 289–302 C © 2009 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0960777309005050 Printed in the United Kingdom 290 Contemporary European History I asked? Not surprisingly at the age of ninety-six he took the long view and did not believe that very much would change. Nothing ever really did, after all. 1989s come and 1989s go. Russians, they stay the same. Crude stuff, to be sure, but cleansed of his stereotypes and recast in terms of ‘culture’ and ‘history’, he was on to something. In any case, social scientists have not done much better than my grandfather in predicting the final outcomes of postcommunism. The countries of the post-communist world turned out pretty much as any thoughtful person would have predicted – those bordering on western Europe ending up (relatively) democratic and (relatively) wealthy, and both democracy and wealth dropping off as one moves east and south. What social scientists have done, however, is to try to pinpoint causes behind the variation in outcomes. In doing so they have moved farther and farther into the past to account for variation in the present. This is something historians should welcome: thoughtful comparative historical accounts that search for ever deeper contextualisation. Yet as we move into the longue durée, the more proximate events such as the revolutions of 1989, the demise of communism and even the communist experience itself recede into the background and are themselves accounted for by antecedent conditions. Of course, these are familiar problems to everyone engaged in comparative historical research, but for scholars of my generation – those who were fortunate enough to see the dull tyranny of Brezhnev’s communist world end in a ‘carnival’ of revolution – the thought that these countries lie on some kind of ‘equilibrium path’ shaped by much longer-term historical forces and from which they cannot easily depart is somehow sobering, even depressing.1 Did communism change anything? If so, what? Did 1989 matter? What has really changed? In what follows, I address these questions. Getting to them, however, requires a short detour through the thickets of comparative politics theories on the historical roots of post-communism. In search of the relevant past The collapse of communism led to important changes in political science. Students of communist countries had long been ghettoised in the discipline.2 They viewed 1989 as a perfect opportunity to reintegrate themselves into the broader field. It should not be surprising that students of post-communist politics looked to their colleagues who had been studying transitions to democracy in other parts of the world since the beginning of the ‘third wave’ in 1974.3 Of course, there was much debate, some 1 Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 2 On dissatisfaction with this ghettoisation see Jerry Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Huntington identifies three ‘waves’ of democratisation – a long, first European wave, running from the middle of the nineteenth century until the crisis of the inter-war period, a second, post-colonial wave from 1945 to 1960, and a third, ‘global’ wave that he dates from Portugal’s re-democratisation in 1974. 1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-communist Future 291 of it heated, about whether the ideas and concepts of ‘transitology’, which had been developed using the cases of southern Europe and Latin America, were appropriate for studying the post-communist experience.4 The critics of transitology remarked not only on its teleological character – it appeared to anticipate no other possible outcome than democracy – but also on its lack of attention to the history of particular cases. It was probably inevitable, however, that once the totalitarian regimes of eastern Europe disappeared, students of other areas would find it easy and irresistible to apply their methods and concepts to a new region. Additionally, the kinds of question that the transitologists asked were important ones. What are the modal sequences by which authoritarians cede power to those committed to multiparty elections?5 Under what conditions is the transition peaceful or violent?6 How can a sense of community be reconstructed after a brutal dictatorship?7 How can the competing demands of different ethnic communities be accommodated?8 Do some kinds of constitutional structures and political institutions work better than others? The transitologists never claimed that democracy was inevitable, but the answers to these questions implied that whether it did take root was a function of human will and choice. The literature on transitions to, and the consolidation of, democracy expressed a deep commitment to the importance of human agency.9 In doing so, it was responding to an earlier generation of theorists who claimed to have found a set of preconditions for democracy, the most important one being economic development.10 Yet the collapse of communism and the rapid fielding of multiparty elections almost everywhere appeared to demonstrate that there were no preconditions for democratic rule, or, if such preconditions existed, they were minimal and could easily be compensated for by committed leaders, sensitively handled transfers of power and cleverly crafted institutions. What was really wonderful about the transitological episode in political science is that if you were excited about 1989 and followed it closely, this paradigm told you that you had learned something very important. The events leading up to 1989 – the demonstrations, the roundtables – and the events immediately after – the first elections and constitution-making – mattered a great deal. Of course, it is always good to know about the histories of the countries you are studying – even political 4 Philippe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, ‘The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?’, Slavic Review, 53, 1 (1994), 173–87; Valerie Bunce, ‘Should Transitologists be Grounded?’, Slavic Review, 54, 1 (1994), 111–27. 5 Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). 6 Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). 7 Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8 David Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 9 Giuseppe DiPalma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 10 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1963). 292 Contemporary European History scientists believe this – but one did not need to know about the differences between Habsburg, Russian and German Europe in order to account for the variations in the way in which these countries exited from communism or even why some appeared to be having an easier time of it in re-establishing viable institutions of democratic representation or even just state authority. Or so it seemed. It was only a matter of time, however, before comparativists took the next step and attempted to identify the conditions under which democracy became ‘the only game in town’.11 Using cross-national research designs and drawing on the experience of Latin America and southern Europe, students examined the impact of different executive–legislative and electoral system designs on democratic outcomes. One finding was that the stronger the presidency, the less likely a country was to become and remain a democracy.12 The lesson was clearly to choose the right institutions. Other comparativists remarked on the importance of driving the communists from office quickly in order to set the stage for good economic policy and economic recovery, which in turn would help to consolidate democracy.13 Some comparativists maintained that while comparisons are crucial, the concepts and ideas drawn from other regions may not easily travel to the post-communist world. The most salient distinguishing feature of the post-communist context, of course, was the experience of communism itself.14 Empirical research quickly confirmed that there was indeed something different about the post-communist world. For example, Marc Howard’s cross-national research on civil society showed membership of social organisations to be systematically lower in all post-communist societies than in other formerly authoritarian countries.15 Likewise, transition economics repeatedly noted how different the political economy of post-communism would be due to the lack of a pre-existing moneyed middle class.16 Last but not least, the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the initially hot and then frozen conflicts in the southern portions of the former Soviet Union demonstrated how difficult it would be to construct viable national communities after decades of ethnic ‘gardening’ from above.17 But if the legacies of communism were ubiquitous, their impacts were unevenly distributed. Some countries managed to establish stable institutions of democratic 11 Adam Prezeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12 Linz and Stepan, Democratic Consolidation; M. Steven Fish, ‘Democratization’s Requisites: The Postcommunist Experience’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 14, 1 (1998). 13 M. Steven Fish, ‘The Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-communist World’, East European Politics and Societies, 12, 2 (1999). 14 Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Stephen E. Hanson, ‘The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change’, Comparative Political Studies, 28, 2 (1995). 15 Marc Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 16 Michael Burawoy, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17 Amir Weiner, ‘Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socioethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’, American Historical Review, 104, 4 (1999), 1116. 1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-communist Future 293 representation, viable market economies and reasonable modes of intercommunal relations. Others could not. If the difference between the cases of success and failure was really one of human will that set some countries on the right path and others on the wrong path, what explained this distribution of choices? In fact, looking at the map of the former communist world, it became apparent that the virtues associated with the right choices (parliamentary versus presidential government, removing communists from office in the first election, quickly marketising the economy, finding a mode of coexistence between ethnic groups) were distributed in a remarkably neat and regressive geographical pattern across the Eurasian landmass.18 If post-communist outcomes were path-dependent, if there was a significant lock-in effect from the initial institutional and policy choices made by post-communist societies and elites, then a natural question to ask was, what determined the path? It was at this point that political scientists took a deeper, historical turn. The first and most prominent example of this was the work of Herbert Kitschelt.19 Kitschelt was one of the new ‘trespassers’ in the field who had come to the study of east-central Europe from west European politics. The team of researchers from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria whom he led attempted to explain why some post-communist countries managed to establish Western-style political parties that competed with each other on the basis of platforms expressing different visions of the public good, whereas others fielded Latin American style patron–client parties or, worse, charismatic one-man shows. Kitschelt’s explanation was that despite external appearances of institutional uniformity, communist regimes were actually very different from one another. First, East Germany and Czechoslovakia built their communist regimes on the basis of strong bureaucratic authority that could incorporate an already mobilised working class. Hungarian and Polish communism was built and stabilised on the basis of an accommodation during the 1960s with a mobilised nationalist elite.20 Bulgaria’s communism was patrimonial (so, too, by extension were all communist regimes of the non-Baltic Soviet Union) in character because it could only be built on the basis of a highly personalistic state administration already in place when the communists took over after the Second World War. There was, in short, not one communist legacy but three: bureaucratic-authoritarian, national-accommodative and patrimonial. Of course, the finding of significant differences between the European and Eurasian communist regimes was not new. Historians had already shown this to be the case even within east-central Europe.21 Yet in the hands of those trying to 18 Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David Reilly, ‘Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World’, World Politics, 53, 1 (2000). 19 Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 20 In Hungary and Poland, following the crises of 1956, communist rule was stabilised through selective compromises with the traditional elites and institutions that catered to nationalist sensitivities, such as the Catholic Church, the family farm, writers of village prose and historians representing ‘national’ perspectives. 21 John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 294 Contemporary European History account for the broad variation in contemporary outcomes, the relevant past became highly salient. Other political scientists also located the sources of different postcommunist outcomes in important variation in the communist experience. Anna Grzymala-Busse, for example, found that the degree and form of embeddedness of the communist parties in the societies of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic determined the extent to which these parties managed to recast themselves as viable left-of-centre parties in the post-communist era.22 Ekiert and Kubik found in Poland’s history of contentious politics and highly mobilised civil society under communism a source of democratic dynamism and robustness in the post-communist era.23 Still others pointed to the long record of economic experimentation and its history of contact between Hungarian economists and their counterparts in the West in accounting for Hungary’s willingness to craft early and effective economic reforms.24 Clearly what kind of communism a country experienced mattered. But what determined the nature of the communist experience? Kitschelt himself noted that East Germany and Czechoslovakia could only build their ‘bureaucratic authoritarian’ communism because the Party came to power in countries with highly developed and efficient bureaucracies.25 Bulgarian communists, by contrast, were forced to work with the patrimonial bureaucracy established and nurtured in inter-war Bulgaria. Communist parties, it turned out, had to work with the raw material they encountered and had only a limited ability to alter their administrative environments. Ultimately for Kitschelt, the determining factor was not the communist past but the state traditions established during the inter-war era. Pre-communist state traditions shaped communism (bureaucratic-authoritarian, national-accommodative or patrimonial), which in turn determined the quality of democracy after 1989. Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse go even farther back into the past in explaining post-communist outcomes.26 In their case, the explanatory variable of interest is the timing of mass literacy. Once mass literacy spreads over a region, they maintain, national and state identification is all but unchangeable and appears to the outsider as nearly primordial. Literacy itself, however, frequently took root not only before communism but before the advent of the nation-state itself. The logic is complicated but compelling: a precondition for ‘success’ in post-communism was removing the communists from office as quickly as possible, but the willingness of a given population to do so required 22 ‘Embeddedness’ means the percentage of Communist Party members occupying positions in politics, society and the economy. Anna Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 23 Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland,1989–1993 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 24 Jason McDonald, ‘Transition to Utopia: A Reinterpretation of Economics, Ideas, and Politics in Hungary 1984–1990’, Eastern European Politics and Societies, 7, 2 (1993). 25 Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems, 40. 26 Keith Darden and Anna Grzymała-Busse, ‘Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse’, World Politics 59, 1 (2006). 1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-communist Future 295 mass opposition to the regime – and that opposition in turn rested on notions of statehood and legitimate governance first inculcated by mass schooling. Attainment of literacy under a noncommunist regime led to the transmission of a national identity separate from, and often directly opposed to, the communist regimes. Pre-communist schooling thus lowers the magnitude of support for the communist party and increases the likelihood that widespread opposition to the communist party will arise.27 From very early on, then, the die is cast. Some form of pre-communist modernisation (in this case, the spread of mass literacy) determines the nature of public authority under communism (that is, whether communism was accepted or rejected), which in turn determines the path of exit from communism, which in turn determines the course of the post-communist journey. Clear enough. It is not my intention to take issue with any of these accounts. In fact, identifying critical junctures in a country’s or a region’s history is what good historians and social scientists are supposed to do. If, however, convincing accounts of comparative historical outcomes require that we move ever farther into the past, clearly the seemingly momentous events of the not-so-distant past lose some of their historical significance. If, for example, Poland’s post-communist present was largely determined by social processes that occurred in the nineteenth century, does not the early and sustained collective mobilisation against the communist regime (in comparison with, say, Czechoslovakia which remained largely quiescent from 1968 until 1989) diminish in explanatory importance? Why should we care that the Romanians shot their communist leader, while the Bulgarians merely imprisoned theirs? Or whether the Poles went into the streets early whereas the Slovaks did not? What difference does the kind of communism a country experienced or the path of its extrication from communism make if the outcomes in question can be convincingly tied to events long past? Are we then, in some way, not back with Isadore Kopstein, with the longue durée washing out the importance of even momentous kinds of change – in this case the experience of communism and its overthrow? Perhaps. But the only convincing way of dealing with this question is with a counterfactual thought experiment. Would things really have been the same in 2008 had there been no communism or 1989? I suspect not, and this is where the matter gets interesting. The counterfactual is a convenient way of saying that communism and its downfall did matter, that it did change the course of this (big) region’s development. The question is, how? The most obvious place to start is with the huge socio-economic changes that occurred everywhere that communists ruled. The impact of communist modernisation Political scientists have found very few regularities or ‘laws’ (in the Russian sense of zakonnomernosti or the German Gesetzmässigkeiten). Two come to mind. The first is that democracies do not fight each other – this is the so-called democratic peace thesis, one which caused much mischief in the first decade of the twenty-first