Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (63 page)

The foreign-policy implications took time to emerge. It was obvious that Gorbachev did not envisage the break-up of the Soviet empire, still less the Union itself. Yet he did stress that future cooperation between states and republics would need to occur on a non-coercive basis. “The time is ripe,” he wrote in 1987, “for abandoning views on foreign policy which are influenced by an imperial standpoint … It is possible to suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast, but only for a certain period.”
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Running to some extent counter to the new emphasis on cooperation was an insistence that east European regimes emulate the Soviet Union in its reform effort. Elites were told openly that “the adminis-trative-state model of socialism, established in the majority of East European countries during the 1950s under the influence of the Soviet Union, has not withstood the test of time.” Now Moscow was ordering them to reform, while expecting its influence to remain undiminished. Gorbachev himself won astounding popularity in the region, except among the hardline leaders, like Honecker, Husák and Ceaušescu. But then perhaps they saw more clearly than he did that his policies spelled the end of communism.
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THE CRISIS OF 1989

The fall of the empire began inside the USSR itself. In 1987 powerful environmental protest movements gave way in the Baltic states to large unofficial demonstrations commemorating the anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which had effectively sealed the fate of the inter-war independent republics. Further anniversaries also gathered large crowds, plunging the authorities into disarray and paving the way for the more intense political struggle of the following year. At the end of 1988 Estonia proclaimed its sovereignty as an autonomous republic—the first to do so in the USSR—and declared the primacy of republic over federal law. “National” emblems of the pre-war republics were increasingly visible in demonstrations organized by massively popular pro-autonomy groups which wrested unofficial recognition from the local authorities.

What weakened the latter and made them hesitate to crack down on the demonstrators were the signs from the Kremlin that it was opposed to a hard line. By early 1989 the popular fronts had scored a resounding success, trouncing the Party in elections to the new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and they started moving cautiously from demands for “autonomy” to full independence.
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But in eastern Europe, there was—outside Poland—little indication at the start of 1989 of the momentous events that were shortly to unfold there. In Poland itself, the post-Solidarity balancing act was clearly over, and a new wave of strikes threatened to escape the control, not only of the government, but more worryingly of the old Solidarity leadership as well. This time the threat was not of Soviet intervention, but of civil war—forcing the government first to invite Solidarity for round-table talks, and then to grant elections, in June 1989, at which the Party suffered a resounding defeat. Amidst these extraordinary events, Gorbachev reasserted his doctrine of nonintervention, and a meeting of Warsaw Pact member states proclaimed that “there does not exist any kind of universal socialist model, [and] no one possesses a monopoly on truth.” The government formed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki in August 1989 was the first in eastern Europe to be headed by a non-communist since the 1940s.
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In retrospect, communism had already ended that April, when the Polish communists implicitly recognized Solidarity’s legitimacy by inviting them to the round-table talks. Still, few at this stage predicted the changes that would so swiftly be triggered off across the region. After all, Gorbachev’s reform programme was really only safe after the defeat of his main conservative rival, Ligachev, in October 1988. Chance and error continued to reign as the empire fell apart. If change had occurred in Poland because of the Party’s weakness, it occurred next in Hungary because the Party was strong, overbearing and overconfident in the face of a fragmented opposition which it mistakenly thought it could control. What it did not realize until too late was that behind the political opposition was a massive public desire for change—manifested in the enormous crowds that gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the 1848 uprising (far larger than the previous year), the reburial of Nagy, or the alternative 1 May rally which dwarfed the official one.

Because change had come about in Poland where the economy was desperately weak, the regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia felt confident that they were protected by economic strength. Yet economic turmoil was not the only trigger for collapse. There was a kind of domino effect, too. When the Hungarians liberalized their border requirements with Austria in order to draw international attention to the plight of the Hungarian minority locked inside Romania, the unforeseen result was an exodus of East Germans through Hungary that summer which underlined the unpopularity of Honecker’s rule. The crisis of the
ancien régime
took months in Poland, but only weeks in the DDR and Czechoslovakia. As in 1848 one uprising triggered off another, but this time there was no imperial reconquest because no one believed any longer in empire.

In general, the changeover was astonishingly peaceful, marred only by police brutality in Czechoslovakia and the DDR; serious street fighting took place only in Romania, where the Ceaušescu tyranny was deaf to other forms of dialogue. Tiananmen Square was a model to be avoided for all but the most hardline apparatchiks, though Honecker came close. The smoothness of this transition—in contrast to the bloodshed in China—was in part a reflection of the ruling Party’s sense of its own weakness, its abandonment by Moscow and its own historic failure. But it also reflected the opposition’s weakness as well, insecure in its claim to power. What confronted all would-be participants in the political reformation of 1989 was the danger posed by the power vacuum created by communism’s failure. Public opposition to communism was unmistakable, and immediately reflected in the elections which followed over the next two years.

It is therefore understandable why many observers seemed transfixed by the enormous crowds which emerged to demonstrate against the old order in its dying moments. These crowds—making perhaps their last appearance in European history—were both an affirmation of communism’s bankruptcy, and a portent of the instability that might follow if a new and more legitimate political order was not constructed.

Working out the new rules was the immediate task of postcommunist politics. There was a striking parallel here with 1919: seventy years later, a new generation was again attempting to remake
democracy in the region. Once again, but for different reasons, west European political and constitutional norms were imported into eastern Europe, and clashed with divergent socio-political realities and historical memories. Political parties had to be founded in an environment where the very notion of a political party had been tainted by communism. Hence the Salvation Fronts, Solidarity, the Democratic and Civic Forums, and Union of Democratic Forces—anything to avoid the dreaded appellation. The suspicion of parties actually increased as the heterogeneous opposition coalitions which had been formed and held together to combat communism, fell apart in 1990–91. Solidarity’s split between liberal intellectuals around Mazowiecki and populist nationalists around Walesa prefigured the key fault line, as political and intellectual elites struggled to reforge links to the masses.

As in 1919 the constitutional order had to be remade, but this time the trend was distinctly gradualist and unrevolutionary. In Hungary and Poland, amended communist constitutions served for several years in place of completely new versions, underlining the desire for a smooth transition rather than an abrupt dismissal of the past. Remaking constitutions was hampered initially by the uncertain legal situation created by the communist abdication of power—who had the legitimacy to make a new constitution in 1990?—and later by the collapse of the initial anti-communist consensus. Only in Romania and Bulgaria were entirely new constitutions brought in swiftly.

And as in 1919, these looked better on paper than in reality. The desperate economic crisis made new promises of social and economic rights sound hollow, even (perhaps especially) in comparison with the communist past, while civil, human and political rights were often checked and limited by arbitrary state power and nationalist authoritarian impulses. Free speech could be curbed, for example, when adjudged to conflict with “public morality” or the “constitutional order,” while in Romania, the law prohibited the “defamation of the country and the nation” as well as “obscene acts contrary to good morals.” The fact that similarly illiberal statutes remain on the books in countries like Greece and Italy is a reminder that it is not just in eastern Europe that residues of past authoritarian attitudes survive.
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Just as in 1919, moreover, the new constitutions failed to address what remained of minority rights. Democracy once again involved the re-creation of a
national
community, and there was less international concern about minorities, or protest on their behalf, than in the days of the League of Nations. The Baltic republics introduced citizenship laws which turned ethnic Russians and Belorussians into “foreigners”—some 50 per cent of Latvia’s population, and 40 per cent of Estonia’s: protests from the Council of Europe brought only minor improvements in their situation. In the Balkans, the constitutional commitment to national languages allowed local authorities to block the teaching of minority languages in schools and universities. The citizenship laws of the new Czech Republic excluded gypsies and Slovaks. Hungary stood out for the liberal way it treated its own minorities, even if its constitution talked unsettlingly of a “responsibility for what happens to Hungarians living abroad.”
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But the parallels were with 1945 as well as with 1919. As after the Nazi occupation, the question of the continuity of the state—of law and administration—with the old order had to be faced. As the communist apparatus of terror was dismantled, East Europeans had to decide who should be punished, who compensated. “Lustration” of the communist
nomenklatura
recalled the 1940s purges of elites tainted by wartime collaboration. Similar debates about the focus and range of such purges took place, as it became clear that there was simply no way to remake society afresh. In Czechoslovakia and the former DDR—perhaps the two most enthusiastic purgers—it soon became clear that secret police files were an unreliable instrument of vengeance. In general, there were surprisingly few witch-hunts, probably because everyone was aware of how deep complicity in the old system had gone. As in the 1940s, there were strong practical arguments in favour of burying the ghosts of the past. Transition rather than revolution meant keeping the administrative and economic expertise that lay in the hands of the old elite, even if this allowed it the chance to expropriate state property and retain some degree of power. In fact the transition after 1989 was smoother than either of those after the First and Second World Wars, a sign perhaps of the growing political sophistication and experience of the region.
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Perhaps the best proof of the new system’s resilience was the victories
won by former communists in parliamentary elections in 1994. “Do people forget so quickly?” complained a conservative Hungarian politician facing defeat at the hands of former communists. “Yes, the bad things, at any rate. Voters associate the Left less with the horrors of the 1950s and more with the easygoing ‘goulash communism’ that made Hungary the ‘jolliest barracks in the socialist camp.’ ” The problem for Hungarian conservatives was that before 1989 Hungarians had compared themselves to Romania; now it was Austria which provided the benchmark.
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In general, the newly liberated east Europeans had one dream: nervous of being left alone, they could hardly wait to “rejoin Europe.” But what Europe were they rejoining? A Europe of freedom, to be sure, but beyond that lay a Europe they had thought little about and that thought little about them, preoccupied by its own welfare crisis, fiercely protective of its industries, and largely uninterested in the practical difficulties of helping smooth their transition to democracy and capitalism. Western neo-liberalism, and political introversion at the highest levels, ruled out any attempt to emulate the kind of comprehensive aid provided by the Marshall Plan after 1945. On the contrary, in the first few years at least, Western advisers implied that the mere dismantling of the institutions of state socialism, and the creation of a legal framework for functioning markets, would allow capitalism to take root and flourish.

Thatcherite policies which had been sensibly shunned by most of western Europe were implemented on a breathtaking scale in the East. Directed by an army of Western economists, consultants, accountants and lawyers, privatization swept across the region. Nearly 80 per cent of the Czech economy, 40–60 per cent elsewhere, was in private hands in five years. It was a transfer of resources—within countries, and from states to foreign investors—on an unprecedented scale.
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The result was the destruction of the old communist welfare system without anything being put in its place. At most, Western banks provided the kind of short-term financial aid for monetary stabilization which had been forthcoming to communist regimes throughout the 1980s. As once before—in the 1920s—Western governments tended to keep out of the region, leaving the provision of investment capital to the private sector. It was simply not
enough. Between 1990 and 1993, foreign investment in the entire former Soviet bloc came to $12.5 billion, yet Singapore alone attracted almost half that amount in one year. Faced with legal uncertainty over property claims—the German federal restitution office alone had more than one million claims outstanding in 1993—foreign investors remained cautious. Meanwhile the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development—a worthy heir to Lloyd George’s abortive scheme after the First World War—spent most of its initial funds on marbling sumptuous headquarters in London rather than on eastern Europe.