The 1989 Revolutions and the Idea of Europe
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1992.tb00702.x |
| Date | 01 September 1992 |
| Published date | 01 September 1992 |
| Author | Krishan Kumar |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political
Studies
(1992),
XL,
439461
The
1989
Revolutions
and
the Idea
of
Europe
KRISHAN
KUMAR*
University
of
Kent
at
Canterbury
’Central Europe’, as an entity historically and culturally different from ‘Eastern
Europe‘. was a rallying cry and
focus
of opposition
for
many intellectuals in East
Central Europe during the
1980s.
In the
1989
revolutions it seemed
to
have found its
time. the moment when
it
could seek to realize itself in practice. What are the claims for
Central Europe? What do they tell
us
about the aspirations
of
the post-communist
states in the region? What idea
of
Europe do they presuppose and how valid is it? The
future shape
of
Europe will depend -at least
in
part
-on
such conceptions
of
its past
character and present alignments.
For
a thousand years, Czechoslovakia was part
of
the West. Today,
it
is part
of the empire to the east.
I
feel a grcat deal more uprooted in Prague than in
Paris. (Milan Kundera,
1987)
It is in the West’s own interest to seek the integration
of
Eastern and Central
Europe into the family of European democracy because otherwise
it
risks
creating a zone
of
hopelessness, instability and chaos, which would threaten
Western Europe every
bit
as
much as the Warsaw Pact tank divisions of old.
(Vaclav Havel,
1991)
The
1989
Revolutions
as
an International Phenomenon
Revolutions have always, since the seventeenth century at least, been inter-
national. They have embodied ideas
-
the rule of law, tolerance, justice, freedom,
equality
-
which, whatever their particular form and provenance, have crossed
frontiers to become the property
of
a host of nations. Increasingly they have
become the inheritance
of
the whole world. Even where, as
in
the English Civil
War and the American War
of
Independence, the participants may have
genuinely thought they were arguing particular cases, appropriate to their
particular countries alone, it proved impossible to contain the forces of example
and emulation. The ideas of the English Civil War survived the Restoration to
inspire the men of
1776
across the Atlantic; the Americans’ struggle against the
British in turn provided an example and a rallying cry to the French
in
their own
conflicts in
1789.
*
This is a revised version of a paper first given at the conference, ‘Building the Common
European Home’. in Moscow,
7-1
1
April
1991.
I
am grateful to all the participants for helpful
comments. Thanks also to Kevin Robbins
for
help with material.
0032-32 I7/92/03/0439-23
0
1992
Poli!ical Studies
440
The
1989
Revolutions
and
the
idea
of
Europe
It was the French who generalized their revolution to make its principles the
principles of the whole world. Since the time of the French Revolution
it
has
indeed been possible, and plausible, to argue that revolution in the modern world
partakes of the character
of
an international civil war.’ Revolutionaries have
appealed to like-minded people in other countries, as potential allies; counter-
revolutionaries have done the same. The armies of many nations have marched
back and forth across national frontiers in pursuit
of
various revolutionary or
counter-revolutionary aims. Often a country could, without direct intervention
but merely by a show of support or displeasure, influence the outcome of a
revolution. Such was the case with both Britain and Russia throughout the
nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the
US
and the
USSR
have played
similar roles. Communist revolutions, the principal revolutions
of
our century,
are indeed more or less by definition international, irrespective of the will or
intention of the revolutionaries. In this sense the Russian Revolution of 1917 set
the seal
on
the international character of modern revolutions.2
So
there
is
nothing strange, in principle, in considering the 1989 revolutions in
Central and Eastern Europe from the point of view of their international
significance. Neither participants nor observers, in fact, seemed capable of
thinking about them in any other way. The 1989 revolutions were accompanied
by a series of apocalyptic utterances that purported to see in the revolutions not
merely a transnational significance but an almost metaphysical symbolism. The
1989 revolutions, it was said, spelled the end of communism, or of socialism.
They were the decisive repudiation
of
all utopian experiments. They represented
no
less than ‘the end of history’, the final and irreversible victory of modern
liberal ideas over all competitors. The very form of the revolutions, as a chain
reaction spreading rapidly across the middle of the continent, suggested a force
and a purpose that transcended the concerns
of
individual countries3
Even with the less grandiose claims, there was a distinct sense of an objective
movement sweeping across a whole continent. The 1989 revolutions, many said,
represented the ‘return to Europe’, after a lengthy period of exile. They were also,
so
some claimed, the assertion or reassertion of a distinctively Central European
identity, a culture and a set
of
values that had their own unique contribution to
make to the totality of European society. They were the recovery of earlier
traditions and earlier histories whose principles and artificially arrested
development the revolutions had set free. In this view the 1989 revolutions spelled
not
so
much the end as the rebirth of hi~tory.~
All
these claims serve to underline the extent to which the 1989 revolutions
were an international phenomenon right from the start. In this they continued the
’
See
S.
Neumann, ‘The international civil war’,
World Politics,
1:3 (1949).
333-50.
See also B.
Knei-Paz, ‘The national revolution as an international event’,
Jerusalem Journal
qf
International
Relations,
3:
1
(1
977). 1-27; P. Calvert,
Revolution and International Politics
(London, Frances Pinter,
1984).
A brilliant early study
of
the international character
of
the Russian Revolution is
F.
Borkenau,
World Communism: a History
of
the Communist International
(Ann Arbor, University
of
Michigan
Press, 1962; first published 1939). See also
E.
Nolte,
Der
Europaische Burgerkrieg 19/7-1945:
Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus
(Berlin, Propylaen Verlag, 1987). It might be added that the
Iranian Revolution
of
1979 has also intensified the international character
of
revolution, though in a
wholly different way
from
the Russian Revolution.
See on this K. Kumar, ‘The
1989
revolutions: capitalism, socialism and democracy’,
Theory
und Society
(forthcoming).
See
M.
Glenny,
The Rebirth
oJ
History: Eastern Europe in the
Age
of
Democracy
(London,
Penguin Books, 1990).
’
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