The Green-oriented Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung broadcast a Facebook video on Sunday (today) featuring a discussion between political scientist Ivan Krastev historian Holly Case on the topic "Europe ’89: The promise recalled." At one point, Krastev talks about how in a time of drastic change like 1989 in eastern Europe is that there is an advantage in not having a biography. Because that means that one is not constrained in the political sphere by statements made over the last 20, 20, 30 years. (An advantage that Joe Biden would love to have in the 2020 US Presidential election.)
This sheds some light on the phenomenon that after the 1989 changes in several countries, people who had been active for years in the opposition to the previous regimes often did not play prominent roles in national politics in their countries after the change. Part of the reason is that oppositionists themselves were often committed socialists who looked to reform and democratize the existing Communist systems, and in the new environment their politics were suspect for many. And, of course, there were exceptions like Lech Wałęsa in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia (now the two countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia).
But the advantage of having a limited public political biography gives a person the freedom to adopt positions that are popular at the moment without having to backtrack from previous positions. Angela Merkel, who was a chemist in East Germany in 1989, made full use of this advantage. As did Viktor Orbán, the current authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, who became famous and popular in the early 1990s as a prominent democratic reformer.
Orbán, born in 1963, was a founding member of Fidesz, which began as an independent youth organization in 1988 when Hungary was already experiencing some liberalization as a result of the perestroika period in the Soviet Union. Fidesz became a political party in 1989 and is Orbán's ruling party today. Fidesz was seen as a moderately left liberal party when it first won seats in Parliament in 1990. Orbán himself achieved his first national fame with a speech in June 1989 before a large demonstration in Budapest, in which he criticized the ruling Communist Party and called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. (Béla Rásky, Wie das System Orbán Ungarn seine Zukunft raubt Die Presse 13.06.2019)
Showing posts with label revolutions of 1989. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revolutions of 1989. Show all posts
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Two 2019 "anniversaries" coming up: a flawed peace treaty and an amazing European transformation
Publishers of books, documentaries, and magazines use "round" anniversaries of multiples of 10 years to do retrospectives on important historical events.
I'm particularly interested in two "anniversary" events that are up on the calendar again in 2019.
The Revolutions of 1989
The fall of the Berlin Wall happened in 1989 and became the symbol of the process by which the Warsaw Pact countries first became independent of the Soviet Union and eventually resulted in 1991 in the end of the Soviet Union itself.
The process of independence was followed by mostly peaceful internal political revolutions in the former Warsaw Pact countries, a process former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer memorably described as "revolution by implosion". It was not a foregone conclusion that such a thing would happen. Even authoritarian regimes have a social basis. And a dissatisfying present can often look more promising than a change leading to a possibly more uncertain future.
In the 1999 and 2009 round 10-year anniversaries, a triumphalist "end of history" narrative shaped the public perceptions of those events in the US and western Europe. That's not the case in 2019. The End Of History has now clearly ended.
The Versailles Treaty
The treaty that ended the First World War in Europe signed June 28, 1919 in the palace of Versailles after long months of negotiations. It officially came into force in January of 1920.
The popular impression of the Versailles Treaty in the United States is that President Woodrow Wilson successfully negotiated the creation of the League of Nations with the reluctant heads of government in Europe. But Republican isolationists in the Senate refused to approve the treaty, thus tragically and short-sightedly undermining Wilson's visionary, idealistic image.
In reality, it was a bad treaty and its implementation and supplementary decisions by the Allies were also generally bad.
The reparations required of Germany were crippling, and made recovery from the world war more difficult. Germany's borders were drawn in such a way that encouraged revanchist sentiments, e.g., leaving the German city of Königsberg (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad) as accessable only by see. The French occuptions of the Ruhr District and the Rhineland particularly stimulated German revanchism in the 1920s.
The treaty did apply something like Wilson's principle of self-determination to the successor states of the Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian Empire. But all over the empire, people from various nationalities with competing territorial claims were mixed with each other, from Poland to Ukraine to Bosnia-Herzogovina. Romania wound up with the territory of Transylvania, which was also claimed by Hungary. It was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that formally comfirmed that arrangement, because the Allies wouldn't negotiate with the Communist government in power in Hungary for a few months in the second half of 1919. Hungary's authoritarian President Viktor Orbán is still today promoting revanchist goals to recover the territory from Romania. Trianon also removed several other areas that had previously been considered part of Hungary, including Slovakia.
The groups that understood themselves as German, even in areas where they were a large majority, didn't all get German self-determination out of the deal. The last Habsburg Emperor, Kaiser Karl, made a fumbling attempt at the end of 1918 to reorganize the Empire on a new basis with more autonomy for the parts. His proposal very quickly provoked the empire's disintegration, in which the areas of Bohemia and Moravia were lumped into Czechoslovakia. Austria declared its independence as Deutsch-Österreich (German Austria), as illustrated by this stamp:
The new nation's position was that they wanted to become part of Germany, then in the beginning years of the Weimar Republic. But the Allies would not allow such a unification to take place. Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia all became revanchist targets of Nazi Germany, none of which the Allies defended militarily when Hitler annexed them.
As for Czechoslovakia, the Czech and Slovakian parts mutually agreed to form separate countries in 1993.
John Maynard Keynes was part of the British delegation to the Paris Conference in which the treaty was negotiated. He left in frustration at the course of negotiations, later publishing a perceptive book called The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). John Kenneth Galbraith talked about Keynes' perspective in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):
I'm particularly interested in two "anniversary" events that are up on the calendar again in 2019.
The Revolutions of 1989
The fall of the Berlin Wall happened in 1989 and became the symbol of the process by which the Warsaw Pact countries first became independent of the Soviet Union and eventually resulted in 1991 in the end of the Soviet Union itself.
The process of independence was followed by mostly peaceful internal political revolutions in the former Warsaw Pact countries, a process former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer memorably described as "revolution by implosion". It was not a foregone conclusion that such a thing would happen. Even authoritarian regimes have a social basis. And a dissatisfying present can often look more promising than a change leading to a possibly more uncertain future.
In the 1999 and 2009 round 10-year anniversaries, a triumphalist "end of history" narrative shaped the public perceptions of those events in the US and western Europe. That's not the case in 2019. The End Of History has now clearly ended.
The Versailles Treaty
The treaty that ended the First World War in Europe signed June 28, 1919 in the palace of Versailles after long months of negotiations. It officially came into force in January of 1920.
The popular impression of the Versailles Treaty in the United States is that President Woodrow Wilson successfully negotiated the creation of the League of Nations with the reluctant heads of government in Europe. But Republican isolationists in the Senate refused to approve the treaty, thus tragically and short-sightedly undermining Wilson's visionary, idealistic image.
In reality, it was a bad treaty and its implementation and supplementary decisions by the Allies were also generally bad.
The reparations required of Germany were crippling, and made recovery from the world war more difficult. Germany's borders were drawn in such a way that encouraged revanchist sentiments, e.g., leaving the German city of Königsberg (now the Russian city of Kaliningrad) as accessable only by see. The French occuptions of the Ruhr District and the Rhineland particularly stimulated German revanchism in the 1920s.
The treaty did apply something like Wilson's principle of self-determination to the successor states of the Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian Empire. But all over the empire, people from various nationalities with competing territorial claims were mixed with each other, from Poland to Ukraine to Bosnia-Herzogovina. Romania wound up with the territory of Transylvania, which was also claimed by Hungary. It was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that formally comfirmed that arrangement, because the Allies wouldn't negotiate with the Communist government in power in Hungary for a few months in the second half of 1919. Hungary's authoritarian President Viktor Orbán is still today promoting revanchist goals to recover the territory from Romania. Trianon also removed several other areas that had previously been considered part of Hungary, including Slovakia.
The groups that understood themselves as German, even in areas where they were a large majority, didn't all get German self-determination out of the deal. The last Habsburg Emperor, Kaiser Karl, made a fumbling attempt at the end of 1918 to reorganize the Empire on a new basis with more autonomy for the parts. His proposal very quickly provoked the empire's disintegration, in which the areas of Bohemia and Moravia were lumped into Czechoslovakia. Austria declared its independence as Deutsch-Österreich (German Austria), as illustrated by this stamp:
The new nation's position was that they wanted to become part of Germany, then in the beginning years of the Weimar Republic. But the Allies would not allow such a unification to take place. Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia all became revanchist targets of Nazi Germany, none of which the Allies defended militarily when Hitler annexed them.
As for Czechoslovakia, the Czech and Slovakian parts mutually agreed to form separate countries in 1993.
John Maynard Keynes was part of the British delegation to the Paris Conference in which the treaty was negotiated. He left in frustration at the course of negotiations, later publishing a perceptive book called The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). John Kenneth Galbraith talked about Keynes' perspective in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):
The mood in Paris in the early months of 1919 was vengeful, myopic, indifferent to economic realities, and it horrified Keynes. So did his fellow civil servants. So did the politicians. In June he resigned and came home, and, in the next two months, he composed the greatest polemical document of modern times. It was against the reparations clauses of the Treaty and, as he saw it, the Carthaginian peace.I'm looking forward to the material that will come out this year on both anniversaries.
Europe would only punish itself by exacting, or seeking to exact, more from the Germans than they had the practical capacity to pay. Restraint by the victors was not a matter of compassion but of elementary self-interest. The case was documented with figures and written with passion. In memorable passages Keynes gave his impressions of the men who were writing the peace. Woodrow Wilson he called "this blind and deaf Don Quixote." Of Clemenceau he said: "He had one illusion- France; and one disillusion, mankind . . . "
On Lloyd George he was rather severe:
How can I convey to the reader, who does not know him, any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity.Alas, no man is of perfect courage. Keynes deleted this passage on Lloyd George at the last moment.
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