Tipurile de Revolutii Din 1989

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The 1989 Revolutions in Retrospect

a
Adrian Pop
a
National University of Political Studies and Public
Administration , Bucharest
Published online: 21 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Adrian Pop (2013) The 1989 Revolutions in Retrospect, Europe-Asia Studies,
65:2, 347-369, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2012.759719
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EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 65, No. 2, March 2013, 347–369
The 1989 Revolutions in Retrospect
ADRIAN POP
Downloaded by [Stony Brook University] at 08:24 02 November 2014
Abstract
Reminding us of the failure of academia to predict the East European revolutions, and the challenges
presented by the latter to the theories of revolution, the essay claims that in order to understand why the exit
from communism comprised so many varied modes, one should take a ‘path-dependence’ diachronic and
synchronic comparative perspective. Based on this dual approach and a set of variables, the essay advances a
typology of East European revolutions and argues that the issues regarding the type of political regime, the
development of civil society and its way of interacting with the state are of paramount importance for
comprehending how the ‘negotiated revolutions’ in Central Europe came about. Finally, the significance of
the Central European civil society strategy under late communism for the era of globalisation is addressed.
FOR THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY, THE EAST EUROPEAN revolutions were quite
embarrassing. The systemic political change and the rapid pace of events took Western
Kremlinologists by surprise. Adam Przeworski had good reason to state that the ‘autumn of
nations’ was ‘a dismal failure of political science’ (Przeworski 1991, p. 1).
Before the Gorbachev era, there were very few voices suggesting the possibility of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. In a book edited by Zbigniew Brzezinski on the future of the
Soviet Union published in 1969, six contributors (out of 14) considered that the collapse of
the USSR was a realistic possibility. For one of them, Robert Conquest, the Soviet Union
was ‘a country where the political system is radically and dangerously inappropriate to its
social and economic dynamics. This is a formula for change—change which may be sudden
and catastrophic’ (Conquest 1969, p. 72). In an essay inspired by Khrushchev’s
liberalisation published in 1970, Soviet émigré Andrei Amalrik suggested that liberalisation
was a function of the ‘growing decrepitude of the regime, rather that its regeneration’ and
that in the 1980s ‘the logical result will be its death, followed by anarchy’ (Amalrik 1970,
p. 35). Much in the same vein, in 1979 Emmanuel Todd spoke about the ‘decomposition of
the Soviet sphere’ (Todd 1979).
In 1986, after Gorbachev had taken office, sociologist Randall Collins—writing from a
Weberian perspective informed by the ethnic tensions and the Soviet Union’s legitimacy
problems—shocked the academic community by writing that the Soviet Union ‘had already
reached its limits . . . and was entering a period of . . . decline . . . with the likelihood of
extensive decline becoming very high before the 21st century’ (Collins 1986, p. 187).
In 1988, in a quasi-Marxist dialectical approach that put the emphasis on the dialectical
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/13/020347–23 q 2013 University of Glasgow
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2012.759719
348 ADRIAN POP
tensions between different parts of the Soviet system (some lagging behind others), the
social historian Moshe Lewin anticipated its breakdown (Lewin 1988).
Yet most social scientists and political analysts failed not only to anticipate the East
European revolutions but also even to consider them a realistic possibility. They were
convinced that Gorbachev’s reforms would remain within the framework of the Communist
regime. The differences in perceptions among Western experts on the Soviet Union were
about how much change was possible. Whereas Gorbachev’s admirers were quite optimistic
about it (Brown 1988, pp. 38–39), other Kremlinologists were rather sceptical, with the
prevailing view being that ‘Gorbachev himself does not intend systemic change’, but rather
‘a revitalisation of the old system’ (Odom 1987, p. 30).
Retrospectively, we now know that Gorbachev did indeed pursue systemic change, at
least from 1988 on. In fact, the trigger was provided by political and ideological change
introduced by Gorbachev himself, most notably in two seminal speeches in 1988. Both at the
19th Party Conference in the summer of that year and in his speech before the UN General
Assembly in December, the Soviet leader made clear that the people of every country,
without exception, had the right to decide for themselves what kind of political and
economic system they wished to live in. Moreover, as far as democratisation is concerned,
the first contested elections for a national legislature with real power took place in the Soviet
Union itself in March 1989. Announced in 1988 and put into effect in the first half of 1989,
the bold measures of democratisation and the new Soviet foreign policy helped generate
unrest and instability in Eastern Europe. They gave new hope to Poles and Hungarians and,
as an unintended consequence, a stimulus to national assertiveness, for in a number of Soviet
republics candidates of nationalist disposition were elected. Initiated by the Kremlin, the
dismantling of the Communist system spilled over into Eastern Europe, only to return as a
boomerang upon the Soviet republics and to accelerate the USSR’s breakdown—a
phenomenon aptly described by well-known Oxford University political scientist Archie
Brown as a ‘circular flow of influence’ (Brown 2010, pp. 563–65).
With one East European country after another becoming independent and non-communist
throughout 1989, ‘the flow of influence which had begun in the Soviet Union turned full
circle’ (Brown 2010, p. 564). Indeed, the momentous events in Eastern Europe throughout
1989 had far-reaching repercussions, affecting the Soviet polity both directly and indirectly
in multifarious ways. First, the systemic political changes deprived the Warsaw Pact and the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) of their main raison d’être, which
eventually led to their demise in the summer of 1991. Second, the sweeping political
changes in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, gave new impetus for Baltic and Ukrainian
independence movements and inspiration for popular fronts in other Soviet republics. When
the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact was declared null and void by the Congress of People’s
Deputies in Moscow on 24 December 1989, the Baltic and Moldovan secessions and at least
the partial break-up of the Soviet Union became inevitable. Third, the turmoil in East-
Central Europe helped fuel mass protests by Soviet coal miners in 1989–1991. Fourth, the
upheavals of 1989 dealt a major blow to Soviet intelligence-gathering in Europe. Fifth, the
upheavals in Eastern Europe discredited Marxist –Leninist ideology, as they were seen as
evidence of the bankruptcy of the Marxist– Leninist model. Sixth, the momentous changes
in the outer empire heightened the perceptions of the Soviet regime’s own vulnerability.
Seventh, what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 diminished the potential for the use of
force in the USSR to curb unrest. Eighth, the upheavals in East-Central Europe had a
THE 1989 REVOLUTIONS IN RETROSPECT 349
‘demonstration effect’ as far as non-violent resistance, Round Table talks and systemic
change, democratisation and market reform are concerned. Last but not least, the
disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and of the CMEA exacerbated the deep rifts among the
Soviet elite and sparked a bitter debate in 1990–1991 that constrained Gorbachev’s options
and helped fuel a hardline backlash against Gorbachev, which precipitated the coup in
August 1991 (Kramer 2003b, pp. 178–256; 2004, pp. 3–64; 2005, pp. 3 –96).
East European revolutions: a challenge to theories of revolution

None of these developments was apparent in the early 1990s. In fact, back then, political
scientists, sociologists and historians alike were still trying to determine whether the
systemic political changes that occurred in Eastern Europe throughout 1989 –1991 (or, as
some authors maintain, 1989–1992) meet the attributes of revolutions. The problem was
that the features of the East European revolutions fitted badly with almost all the definitions
of the concept of revolution advanced before 1989, especially with regard to the ideas of
violence, class-based revolt and inevitability embedded in them.
Particularly problematic was the issue of violence. Since the nineteenth century, Marxist
and Marxist-inspired thinking closely associated the concept of revolution with the notions
of violent overthrow, class-based revolt and historical inevitability. Marx, Engels and Lenin
saw in revolutions the ‘locomotives’ or ‘driving forces’ of history, agents of historical
change based upon social class affiliation. For Lenin, revolutions take place when the ruling
elite can no longer rule, and the general population can no longer be ruled in the old way. In
Marxist– Leninist thinking, revolutions are violent, ineluctable and progressive phenomena,
bringing about radical economic, social and political transformations, and starting a new
stage in the development of humankind (Marx 1964; Avineri 1969, p. 144; Tucker 1978, pp.
164, 473, 483, 523).
Although considered a fundamental characteristic of the revolution by the majority of the
relevant authors who analysed the phenomenon prior to 1989—including Marx, Arendt
(1963, p. 35), Brinton (1965, p. 4), Moore (1966), Huntington (1968, p. 264), Gurr (1970,
pp. 11, 334), Skocpol (1979, pp. 4, 285), Johnson (1982, pp. 1, 7, 11, 20) and Zimmerman
(1983, p. 405)—violence was not a feature of the East European revolutions, except for
Romania and partially for Albania and Yugoslavia.1
The idea of class revolt, present in the Marxist and the post-Marxist structural approaches,
particularly in Theda Skocpol’s idea that revolutions are accompanied—and in part carried
through—by class-based revolts from below (Skocpol 1979, pp. 4, 285), was also less
relevant, since the East European revolutions were not led by a certain social class; rather,
societal coalitions like ‘us’ versus ‘them’ confronted each other.
Nor did the model of the four stages of the revolutionary process, outlined by Crane
Brinton, provide a relevant tool for analysing the East European revolutions. Adopting a
metaphorical approach, Brinton compares the course of revolution to the course of fever: the
first stage includes, inter alia, ‘the transfer of loyalty of intellectuals’ and ends with the
overthrow of the old regime; the second stage is characterised by ‘dual power’—the new
government dominated by moderate revolutionaries, and the revolutionary extremists, better
1
The reason for referring to the Yugoslav case as one involving partial violence is that I consider the break-
up of Yugoslavia, which entailed prolonged wars, a separate phenomenon from the exit from Communism.
350 ADRIAN POP
organised, challenging the government; the third stage begins with the replacement of
moderates by extremists through a coup and is characterised by large scale terror; and in the
fourth stage restoration occurs (‘Thermidor’), by removing extremists and restoring things
to their normal track (Brinton 1965; Katz 1999, pp. 75 –99). Like Skocpol, Brinton believed
that the only long-term result of the revolution is a central government more effective than
the pre-revolutionary one. Apart from the Soviet Union, where there was an obvious
competition between the President of the Soviet Union (Gorbachev) and the President of the
Russian Republic (Yel’tsin), there was no ‘dual power’ (or, in Tilly’s (1993) terms,
‘multiple sovereignties’). Moreover, there was no terror à la Robespierre carried out by
‘extremists’, and no vetting of the Communist elite.
Not less irrelevant were the ideas of the inevitability of revolution, postulated by Marx, and
the idea of novelty, postulated by Arendt, for whom one can speak of a revolution only when
there is a pathos for novelty, in other words, when changes are made in the sense of ‘a new
beginning’, and violence is used ‘at least to institute freedom’ and a totally new form of
government (Arendt 1963, p. 35). Although for most East European countries the revolutions of
1989 marked indeed ‘a new beginning’, there was not much novelty in it. In fact, once could
argue quite the opposite: in most East European cases, revolution meant the return to the state of
affairs prior to the Communist takeover, and, thus a return to the original meaning of the
concept, which meant restoration (in light of its astronomical connotation).
A more problematic fact was that the revolutions of 1989 resembled only partly the major
revolutions in human history—the English Civil War, and the American, French, Russian or
Chinese revolutions. Comparing those revolutions with the events that led to the collapse of
Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, S. N. Eisenstadt concluded in 1992 that the East
European revolutions only partially meet the characteristics of those other major
revolutions. On the one hand, there were certain similarities: they generated rapid social
change with considerable consequences; they combined popular uprisings with inefficient
efforts to reform; they occurred in times of general dissolution of social order; and they
involved the participation of intellectuals. On the other hand, they missed some of the
fundamental features of classical revolutions: violence (except in Romania and partially
Albania and Yugoslavia); class ideology; charismatic vision; confidence in politics as an
instrument of change; and resistance of former power owners (Eisenstadt 1992, pp. 21 –22).
By the time the East European revolutions took place, a certain notional and theoretical
confusion prevailed in Western scholarship concerning the concept of revolution. The
confusion was derived partly from the characteristics attributed to this phenomenon and the
different perspectives from which it was addressed—a form of historical transformation
(Marx and Skocpol), a form of social change (Johnson), a form of political change (Arendt),
a form of social and political change (Zimmermann), a form of political violence (Gurr) or a
form of collective political action (Tilly).
Against this background, it is no surprise that different authors tried to encapsulate the
essence of the 1989 revolutions in various formulae. Timothy Garton Ash tried to make
sense of the combination of reform strategies with revolutionary goals in the unfolding of
the 1989 events by labelling them ‘refolutions’ (Ash 1989). Unfortunately, the hybrid nature
of the term did nothing but increase the confusion about the nature and significance of this
fundamental turning point in European and world history at the end of the twentieth century.
Referring to the ‘incomplete’ nature of the 1989 revolutions, mainly due to their peaceful
and non-violent character, Ernst Nolte spoke of the ‘conservative revolution’, which he
considered to be a complement to the European civil war launched by the 1917 Bolshevik
revolution (Nolte 1991, p. 27). Starting from the central concept of modernity and referring to
the mimetic and restorative trends of the 1989 revolutions which, in turn, point to the semantics
of the pre-modern concept of revolution, Jürgen Habermas interpreted the 1989 events as a
‘rectifying revolution’ (Habermas 1990). Underlying the rift over the revolutionary model of
1789 and accepting the default equivalence of Communism with a failed form of modernisation,
Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér spoke of ‘post-modern revolution’ (Heller & Fehér 1990). In
order to emphasise the triumph of the open society in East Central Europe, Ralf Dahrendorf put
forward the term ‘liberal revolution’ (Dahrendorf 1990, pp. 27, 75–76). Pointing to the
grassroots movements that made possible the revolutions of 1989 and the transnational links
between Central European civil societies, Padraic Kenney referred to the 1989 annus mirabilis
as ‘a carnival of revolution’ (Kenney 2002). Underlying the simultaneity of the territorial issue,
the issue of democracy, and the issue of economic and property order at stake in the systemic
changes of 1989–1991, Claus Offe spoke of a ‘triple transition’ (Offe 1991). More to the point,
Leslie Holmes described the events of 1989–1991 as the ‘double rejective revolution’
encompassing a rejection ‘of the communist power system’ and ‘of what was perceived to be
external domination—by the USSR in the case of most Eastern Europe, mainly by the Russians
in USSR, by the Serbs in the case of Yugoslavia’ (Holmes 1993, p. xi). Since the systemic
changes in Eastern Europe throughout 1989–1991 have revolutionised the entire state system
and the whole subsystem of international relations in Eastern Europe, perhaps a more
appropriate term for them would be that of ‘triple rejective revolutions’: national revolutions
rejecting the external hegemonic power (the Soviet Union), political revolutions rejecting the
dictatorial regimes in each of the East European countries, and economic revolutions rejecting
the command economy.
Be that as it may, the most puzzling feature of the 1989 revolutions—their largely peaceful
character (Bunce 1999a, p. 5)—remained to be properly explained. As mentioned before,
classical theories of revolution prior to the revolutions of 1989 more often than not presumed ab
initio its violent character. In fact, historian and political scientist Charles Tilly is the only
theorist before 1989 who accepted the possibility of non-violent revolution. Although reducing
the concept to its strictly political dimension—the replacement by force of a group of power
holders by another group (Tilly 1978, pp. 191, 193, 200)—Tilly implicitly admits the possibility
of non-violent revolutions, and this is precisely his major contribution to the understanding of
the non-violent character of most East European revolutions.
Tilly addresses the concept of revolution from a comprehensive diachronically
comparative perspective, which draws a fundamental distinction between revolutionary
situations and revolutionary outcomes. Whenever ‘multiple sovereignties’ coexist, i.e. there
are groups with alternative and exclusive claims to government control, there is a
revolutionary situation. But in order to secure a revolutionary outcome, ‘a significant
segment of the population’ has to support these claims. Consequently, a revolution is
defined by Tilly as a transfer of state power by force during which at least two distinct
groups of opponents make incompatible claims on the control of the state and a significant
proportion of the population gives its consent for each group’s claims. For Tilly, a revolution
‘begins when a government previously under the control of a single, sovereign polity
becomes the object of effective, competing, mutually exclusive claims from two or more
separate polities’ and it ‘ends when a single polity—by no means necessarily the same
one—regains control over the government’. Therefore, a completely revolutionary episode
352 ADRIAN POP
starts with a burst of sovereignty and hegemony, undergoes a period of confrontation and
ends with the restoration of sovereignty and hegemony under a new leadership (Tilly 1993).
Tilly’s notion of revolution, which emphasises the nature of the revolution as a process,
has the great advantage of clarifying the relationship between revolution and other related
violent forms of transfer of power, such as popular uprisings, coups, rebellions, civil wars
and social upheavals in general. The relationship between these phenomena is that between
whole and part: while the revolution designates the extensive process of the transfer of
power and systemic changes over time, the related phenomena mentioned above are
separate sequences of it (during a revolution one or more of them could occur).
Such a perspective is useful for making sense of those East European cases where coups
and popular uprising are intertwined in the revolutionary process, as, for instance, in the
Romanian case. Although in Romania, as in other East European countries, a genuine
revolution took place, unlike in other East European cases, the revolutionary process here
included—both as separate and intertwined sequences in its development—a coup and a
popular uprising. In turn, this combination generated the violent nature of the systemic
political changes, both in terms of the use of violence against the population and the physical
liquidation (a unique case among the East European transitions) of the party and state leader
who transformed the political regime in Romania into a personal dictatorship. Precisely due
to this feature, the Romanian revolution of 1989 is perhaps the one that most closely
resembles the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of October 1917,
although, unlike 1789 and 1917, it exhibited the least amount of social mobilisation prior to
1989.
Modern theories of revolution admit both violent and non-violent forms of revolutionary
upheaval. Furthermore, modern theories of revolution, based on the same fundamental
distinctions of constitutional/unconstitutional change and negotiated/non-negotiated
change, tend towards the integration of the revolution phenomenon into the spectrum of
other forms of political change.
Central European ‘negotiated revolutions’: a ‘path-dependence’ perspective

After the breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe, the place of Sovietology in Russian
and East European studies was taken by transitology. As a reaction to the excessive
extrapolations and generalisations of the latter (Collier 1986; O’Donnell et al. 1986a, 1986b,
1986c; O’Donnell & Schmitter 1986; Linz & Stepan 1996), throughout the 1990s an
alternative school of thought that places an emphasis on the significance of the Communist
past for understanding the post-communist transition started to be developed. The approach
has rehabilitated the significance of historical factors and the relevance of the region as a
logical explicative unit. Known as the ‘path-dependence’ school of thought, this perspective
underlines the fact that the various ways in which socialism operated in Eastern Europe
decisively influenced what followed after its breakdown (Offe 1991; Jowitt 1998; Róna-Tas
1998; Roeder 1999; Fish 1999; Lynn 1999; Bunce 1999a, 1999b).
The two decades since 1989 have shown that between the negotiated character of the
revolution and the subsequent consolidation of democracy (the rule of law, accountability,
participation and elections) there is a strong correlation that cannot be ignored. Where the
‘negotiated revolution’ was successfully completed, there was a relative stabilisation of
democracy. Where the ‘negotiated revolution’ could not be applied or failed, there was an
imperfect democratisation, marked by significant setbacks. The reasonable assumption that

genuine democracy is a result of ‘negotiated revolution’ and, therefore, a native product
created ‘at home’ rather than imported is one of the major lessons of the 1989 revolutionary
events.
The path-dependence approach explains best the appropriate combination (in varying
proportions) of popular protest and negotiations among elites, in other words, the
‘revolution from below’ (involving the masses) and ‘revolution from above’ (involving the
elites) that characterised the East European revolutions. Taking a ‘path-dependence’
perspective, one can more easily understand why Eastern Europe and the former USSR
experienced basically six different ways of abandoning Communism. They include
negotiation (Poland and Hungary), capitulation (former GDR and former Czechoslovakia),
coup d’état (Bulgaria), popular uprising and coup d’état (Romania), popular uprising
(Albania) and implosion (former USSR and former Yugoslavia).
As Valerie Bunce has pointed out, the significant differences between East European
socialist dictatorships ‘were along virtually all the dimensions that would seem to be highly
relevant to not just the practice but also the decline of socialism’ (Bunce 1999a, pp. 3–4).
Among those dimensions or key variables would be included at least: the type of political
regime prior to the system’s collapse; the earlier crises prior to the system’s collapse; the
earlier strategies of political change prior to the system’s collapse; the degree of
development of civil society; the involvement of the elites and/or the masses in the political
transition process; whether the transition was negotiated or non-negotiated, peaceful or
violent, top down or bottom up; the fate of the Communist Party; the first free elections; the
presence of former dissidents in the new power structures; the manner in which the
constitutional framework was changed; and the ways of abandoning Communism. Thus, we
propose a typology of East European revolutions grounded in a ‘path-dependence’
perspective that preserves the traditional distinctions between constitutional/unconstitu-
tional and negotiated/un-negotiated political change, and the involvement of masses/elites,
respectively, but complements the synchronic perspective with a diachronic one, drawing a
fundamental distinction between the long- and short-term dimensions of the transition (for a
summary illustration of our perspective on the East European revolutions typology see
Table 1).
Scholars have pointed out the correlation that exists between previous tendencies of
reforming the Communist system, the development of Communist reformist wings, the
existence of a well- or moderately well-developed civil society, and the interplay between
the establishment and civil society on the one hand and the negotiated character of
revolution in Central Europe on the other.
In both the Polish and Hungarian cases of transition, the negotiation played a crucial role.
The model of this type of transition is to be found in the Spanish case, which experts
unanimously consider one of the most successful regime changes out of 20 such changes
that took place between 1974 and 1988. In Spain the transition from authoritarianism to
democracy occurred as a result of neither a radical break with the past, nor by a self-
transformation of the political regime itself, but rather as the result of a number of pacts in
which several political actors were key players in a negotiated reform, followed by a
negotiated rupture. This reality is described by the Spanish terms ‘reforma pactada’ and
‘ruptura pactada’. While the first term encapsulates the element of continuity related to the
TABLE 1
354
TYPOLOGY OF EAST EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS

Variables Poland Hungary GDR Czechoslovakia Bulgaria Romania Albania USSR Yugoslavia
Type of Post- Post- Totalitarian Totalitarian, Totalitarian Hybrid Totalitarian Post- Post-
political totalitarian totalitarian conservative conservative conservative between a conservative totalitarian totalitarian
regime reformist reformist with some with some totalitarian reformist reformist
prior to the reformist reformist and a sultanist
system’s apertures apertures regime
collapse conservative
Earlier 1956—‘Polish 1956— 1953— 1968—‘Prague 1977—Strike 1956—De- 1971—
crises prior October’ Hungarian Workers’ Spring’ 1981—Strike Stalinisation ‘Croatian
to the 1968—Student revolution revolt 1987—Popular Spring’
system’s protests uprising
collapse 1970—Strikes
and protests
1976—Strikes
1980 – 1981—
Strikes and
Solidarity’s
legalisation
1988—Strikes
Previous Present Present Present Present1968— Absent Absent Absent Present Present
ADRIAN POP
strategies of 1956— 1956— 1953— ‘Revolution 1956— 1971—

political ‘Revolution ‘Revolution ‘Revolution from above’ ‘Revolution ‘Revolution
change from above’ from below’ from below’ from above’ from above’
prior to the 1980 – 1981—
system’s ‘Self-limiting
collapse revolution’
TABLE 1
(Continued)
The degree of Well Well Weak Medium Weak Weak Weak Weak Weak
development developed developed pacifist developed environmental individual individual cultural pacifist
of civil society KOR Samizdat movements Charter 77 movements and isolated and isolated and national movements
Solidarity opposition Evangelical pacifist Perestroika initiatives initiatives movements
Catholic environmental Church movements support Samizdat
Church movements human rights movements opposition
pacifist pacifist movements
movements movements
environmental
movements
movements
against
society’s
illnesses
human
rights
movements
Elites’ Important Important Partial Important Insignificant Insignificant Insignificant Important Partial
involvement
in the process
of political
transition
Masses’ Partial Insignificant Important Important Partial Important Important Important Important
involvement strikes mass mass demonstrations popular mass ethnic ethnic
in the process demonstrations demonstrations uprising demonstrations mobilisation mobilisation
of political
transition
Ways of Negotiation Negotiation Capitulation Capitulation Coup d’état Coup d’état Popular Implosion Implosion
THE 1989 REVOLUTIONS IN RETROSPECT
abandoning and popular uprising

Communism uprising
Type of Negotiated Negotiated Un-negotiated Un-negotiated Un-negotiated Un-negotiated Un-negotiated Un-negotiated Un-negotiated
political peaceful peaceful peaceful peaceful (‘Velvet peaceful extremely mildly violent slightly violent slightly
transition revolution’) violent violent
Initiation Top down & Top down & Bottom up Top down & Bottom up Bottom up Bottom up Top down Bottom up
and direction bottom up bottom up bottom up
of transition
355
TABLE 1
356
(Continued)
Subsequent It changed It changed It changed Czechoslovak It changed It was It changed It was It was
fate of the its name to its name to its name to Communist its name to abolished. its name to abolished. The abolished.
Communist Polish Hungarian Party of Party—second Bulgarian Socialist Socialist Communist Socialist
Party Social Socialist Democratic place in the Socialist Labour Party— Party of Party was Party of
Democratic Party Socialism 1990 elections Party ephemeral Albania— outlawed Serbia—
Party successor to first place in in Russia. successor
the former 1991 elections. It was re- to Serbian
Romanian Communist established Communist
Communist Party of as the League
Party Albania— Communist
ephemeral Party of the
successor of Russian
the former Federation
Party of in February 1993
Labour
of Albania
Initial ways Amendments Amendments Amendments Amendments New New Amendments Amendments Amendments
of changing the repeals repeals repeals repeals; new constitution constitution repeals repeals repeals
constitutional constitutions 1991 1991
ADRIAN POP
framework Slovakia and

Czech
Republic 1992
First free and 4 June 1990— 25 March – 4 18 March 8 June 1990— June 20 May 31 March 26 March April –
partially free partially free April 1990— 1990—free partially free 1990—free 1990—free 1991—free 1989— December
elections free partially free 1990—free
The presence Lech Wałe˛sa; József Václav Zhelyu Sali Berisha
of former Tadeusz Antall Hável Zhelev
dissidents Mazowiecki
in the new
power
structures
Francoist regime, the second envisages the break from it. What had actually started as a
reform ended up being a radical change (Powell 1991).
Similarly, the common ground of the Polish and Hungarian cases has to do precisely with
the existence of certain groups—within the power elite, but also within the opposition—that
understood the need to compromise. In both cases, reforming Communists negotiated
agreements with the opposition, sitting at the same Round Table and thus marking the way
out from Communism. In both countries, party-state leaders tried the economic reform
solution at the beginning of the transition period, but did not abolish the political institutions
of the old regime.
In the case of Poland, both the power holders and the opposition understood that only the
Round Table negotiations could get the country out of the deadlock and the catastrophic
economic situation it was in. Interestingly enough, there was no delegation of the
government’s authority towards the group of governmental negotiators, and their

interlocutors did not officially have the mandate from civil society. Begun on 6 February
1989, the negotiations reached an agreement on 5 April 1989. Solidarity (Solidarność) was
to be made legal again and partially free parliamentary elections were to be held in June
1989. The institutional framework was revised through the introduction of the presidency
institution and the Senate as the upper chamber of the National Assembly (Parliament). The
president was to be elected by both chambers of the National Assembly for a six-year
mandate, and important prerogatives were extended to him in foreign policy, national
security and domestic policy, including the right to dissolve the parliament and to veto the
laws of the lower chamber, the Sejm. The members of the Senate were to be elected on a free
vote basis, so Solidarity could propose candidates for all 100 seats. In the Sejm, 35% of seats
were ascribed to the opposition, 38% to the Communists and the remaining 27% to small
parties that had been the Communists’ collaborators. There was also a national list put up by
the government, composed of 35 persons, including participants to the Round Table
negotiations, who were running for office without having to face any competition. The
Communists continued to control key ministries (the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry
of the Interior) and the opposition was allowed to have, besides its own publications (a daily
newspaper and a weekly), limited access to the electronic mass media controlled by the
regime. Also there was a new wage-indexing plan that provided compensation for up to 80%
of the rise in living costs for workers and pensioners (Cipkowski 1991, pp. 24–26; Gross
1992, pp. 56 –84).
In the first round of parliamentary elections, held on 4 June 1989, the Polish democratic
opposition secured an extremely good electoral result. In the Senate, it won 92 out of the 100
seats, although none of them, according to the prior institutional agreement, was reserved
for them. In the Sejm, out of the 165 elected members, 160 were members of Solidarity, and
the remaining five were members of the Communist coalition, two of them being on the so-
called national list. Of the 35 candidates proposed by the authorities on the national list, only
two gained the minimum percentage (50%) necessary to be elected to the Sejm. For the
national list’s candidates, not initially foreseeing a failure, the electoral law did not allow for
a second round. At this crucial moment, Solidarity declared that it would respect the
negotiated proportion of the seats in the Sejm and would support the governmental coalition
in its attempt to change some of the electoral law’s articles so that the power holders could
take the unoccupied 33 seats in a second round on 18 June 1989. The change to the electoral
law allowed important Communist leaders to be elected, including Jaruzelski.
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The electoral outcomes after the second round of the first partially free elections in post-
war Poland (the first completely free elections were to be organised four years later, in 1993)
confirmed the Communists’ inability to generate mass support. None of the governmental
coalition’s candidates was elected for the Senate, 99 out of the 100 seats being allocated to
the opposition (and the other one to an independent), while in the Sejm the governmental
coalition won 299 seats and the opposition 161. Out of the 560 members of the National
Assembly in both the Sejm and the Senate, 299 represented the government coalition, 260
the opposition and one was independent.
Thus, after eight years of illegal activities, in the summer of 1989, Solidarity’s
representatives entered parliament. It was the first time that elected representatives of an
opposition party had secured seats in the parliament of a Communist country. In the 19 July
1989 presidential elections, as seven deputies and senators of the government coalition were
not willing to automatically vote for Jaruzelski—considering him responsible for the Round
Table’s concessions and the poor results of the parliamentary elections—a few of
Solidarity’s most prominent deputies waited for the votes to be counted and deliberately
invalidated their own in order to assure Jaruzelski’s election.
Another relevant moment, besides the Round Table and the elections, which testifies to
the importance of negotiation, compromise and mutual fair play between the power holders
and the opposition in Poland’s political transition, is represented by the creation of the new
government. Initially, Solidarity did not feel ready to govern, nor liked the idea of forming a
government with the Communists. But eventually, after negotiations, it agreed to enter into
a grand coalition government with the United Peasants’ Party, the Democratic Party and the
Polish United Workers’ Party (the Communists), in order to salvage the country from the
difficult economic and political situation it was facing. On the other hand, Jaruzelski
eventually accepted that the prime minister should be a Solidarity member and forced the
new head of the government, former Deputy Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak, to resign
(Bush & Scowcroft 1998, pp. 136–37). Thus, on 12 September 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki,
a prominent Catholic intellectual, a lawyer with vast political experience associated with
Solidarity’s creation, a representative of the moderate wing within the trade union, editor-in-
chief of Solidarity’s weekly Tygodnik Solidarność and Walesa’s counsellor, became the first
non-communist prime minister of a Warsaw Treaty member country.
Recognising each other as necessary partners in dialogue, both the power holders and the
opposition accepted that the need for compromise lay at the very foundation of their joint
political action. Fostering an elite pact, by the simple fact of sharing common experiences
and the effort of finding negotiated solutions for Polish society’s problems, the two sides—
the moderate wing of the power holders and the moderate wing of the opposition—moved
closer, thus laying the foundations for the future political class of post-communist Poland
(Cipkowski 1991; Gross 1992).
A similar case of transition is the Hungarian one. After the removal from the leadership of
János Kádár in May 1988, the competition between party groups became more
straightforward. The conservative group (but still reformist in relation to the Kádárist
group), led by the new first secretary, Károly Grosz, was in favour of weakening the role of
the party apparatus and censorship, and a strengthened role for satellite organisations. The
reformist group, led by Imre Pozsgay, was in favour of increasing the role of autonomous
organisations, focusing on an authentic dialogue with civil society.
Starting in the second half of 1988, the political opposition was dominated by the
Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SzDSz) and the Alliance of
Young Democrats (FIDESZ). The first, more moderate, was the expression of national,
Christian and rural traditions in Hungary. The other two, more radical, represented the
liberal, urban and secular wings of the opposition (Bruszt & Stark 1992, pp. 30– 48). Shortly
after the symbolic onset of its political activity on 15 March 1988, eight organisations
representing the democratic opposition joined hands under an umbrella federation: the
Opposition Round Table.
Fears about the way in which the economic situation could bring about a social and
political crisis similar to the 1956 one made the regime leaders look for a compromise with
the organised forces in society. On the other hand, the lesson of Soviet intervention in 1956
made the leaders of the opposition look for a compromise with the regime, rather than
question its legitimacy.

Beginning on 13 June 1989, Round Table negotiations—formally tripartite ones
(Communist Party—Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP), satellite organisations,
opposition), but in reality, bilateral, since the ‘social organisations’, i.e. satellite
organisations, could not block any decisions made by the other two parties—were held in
12 subcommittees and involved 1,302 negotiators and expert consultants who spent around
1,000 hours in 238 work sessions. Apart from a few plenary sessions, meetings were held
behind closed doors in the parliament building, most of them recorded on videotape by a
team of journalists called the ‘black box’. The democratic opposition had the merit of
introducing into the discussion the liberal values of human rights and civil society.
However, neither the liberals nor the nationalist-populists were the ultimate guarantors of
the peaceful, negotiated transition; rather, it was the reformist socialists. These critics of the
regime provided ready-made solutions for the Round Table negotiations in the summer of
1989. Those present only had to choose between several variants of draft bills and policy
documents likely to appear in a common platform (Tőkés 1996, pp. 208, 334). Eventually,
the negotiations were concluded on 19 September 1989, when an agreement was signed that
included a series of draft bills and constitutional amendments—the result of a series of
important concessions made by the Communists to the opposition, particularly to the
representatives of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (SzDSz and FIDESZ refused to sign the
document).
What specifically distinguishes the Hungarian from the Polish case is mainly the fact that
both reformists and opposition members were too weak to implement the compromise they
had agreed upon. Reformists were too weak to speak on behalf of the regime, while the
opposition was too weak to speak on behalf of the whole of society. Communist reformers
were forced to take action by an opposition that was well-organised and that, provoked in its
turn by the party ‘hardliners’, replaced the initial strategy based on compromise with a
different one, focused on mobilisation and lacking the will to compromise. The mobilisation
and confrontation strategy chosen by the opposition triggered a polarisation of forces and
accelerated the ascendancy of reformers within the regime. In its turn, the anticipation of the
opposition’s electoral weakness made reformers give up the confrontational policy and
focus instead on free electoral competition.
Although both were negotiated transitions, the Polish and Hungarian cases differ also in
terms of the institutional results they obtained at the end of the first stage of transition. In
Poland, the fact that the opposition was perceived as being strong led to an institutional
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arrangement combining aspects of liberal democracy with aspects of party-state

governance. The result of this compromise was a presidential parliamentary system,
different from the classic one. In Hungary, the fact that the power holders perceived the
opposition as being weak led to a parliamentary system that did not rely on a previously
negotiated arrangement. Faced with a weaker opposition than that mounted by Solidarity, as
well as with a different organisational identity and institutional configuration, Communist
reformists chose direct electoral competition as a means of power stabilisation, even if it
lacked contractual guarantees.
To be sure, purely totalitarian settings, which did not provide room for reformist wings
within the establishment or for opposition to the Communist parties to develop, would have
made the ‘negotiated revolutions’ impossible. That is why the issues of the type of political
regime, the development of civil society and its particular way of interacting with the state
are of paramount importance for a proper understanding of how the ‘negotiated revolutions’
in Central Europe came about.
In his 2009 book, focusing exclusively on the Communist establishment or, as he calls it,
the ‘uncivil society’ in three former Soviet-bloc states—East Germany, Romania and
Poland—Stephen Kotkin presented a revisionist account of the breakdown of Communism.
Expecting emergent East European civil society in the late Communist era to perform tasks
that are usually expected of civil society in democratic settings, not (post)-totalitarian
ones—such as ‘to have recourse to state institutions, to defend associationism, civil liberties
and private property’—he went as far as to argue that ‘civil society in Eastern Europe did not
actually exist’ (Kotkin 2009, pp. 7–9). His generalisation is untenable. Whereas in the
Romanian and East German cases the breakdown of the Communist regimes did indeed take
place ‘in the absence of organized opposition’, in the Hungarian and Polish cases, the
organised opposition was not only present, but, together with the reformist wing of the
Communist party, played a crucial role.
In fact, the prevalent situation in terms of state–civil society relationships in late Central
European Communist societies was one of ‘institutional amphibiousness’. The notion
‘highlights indeterminacy in the character and functions of individual institutions, and of
boundaries among them’ as well as ‘the interweaving and interpenetration of different
forces at play in political transitions’ (Ding 1994, p. 299).2
The case of Poland is illuminating from this viewpoint. The basis for a new contractual
relationship between the state and civil society was actually established by the signing of the
Gdańsk Agreements on 31 August 1980. The recognition of the first independent union in a
Communist country and of its right to strike would not have been possible if the Inter-
Factory Strike Committee of Gdańsk had limited its demands to those of an economic and
social nature. But in addition to those regulating work and wage relationships, among its
2
See also Brown (2007, pp. 157–90). Indeed, the ‘negotiated revolutions’ in Poland and Hungary were the
combined outcome of the basically post-totalitarian and reformist features of the Polish and Hungarian late
Communist regimes and the non-violent change strategy proposed by the former Central European dissidents.
Arguing the need for non-violent, rather than violent change, the former Central European dissidents were
taking into consideration not only geopolitical constraints (fear that violent protest could precipitate Soviet
intervention), but also ‘a moral dimension, including a desire to expose the systematic falsity of communist
party regimes’ (Roberts & Ash 2009, p. 32). Self-limited and focused on incremental change from below,
whether in the form of the civil society’s ‘self-defence’ and ‘self-management’ (Jacek Kurón), ‘new
evolutionism’ (Adam Michnik), ‘parallel polis’ (Václav Benda), ‘power of the powerless’ (Václav Havel),
‘anti-politics’ (György Konrád) or ‘new social contract’ (János Kis), this strategy successfully cleared the
way and prepared the ground for the Central European ‘negotiated revolutions’ of 1989.
demands were included manifestly political requests, such as the freeing of political
detainees; an investigation into the reasons for their arrest and into the reasons for firing on
participants in the 1970 and 1976 strikes; the relaxation of censorship and guarantees of free
speech in public and professional life; granting access to the media for religious
organisations and associations (including an obligation for the government to start radio
broadcasts of the Sunday religious services); the selection of cadres based on aptitude and
merit and not political affiliation; and accelerating the preparation of economic reform,
centred on autonomous means of operation and workers’ councils’ participation in
management (Legters 1992, pp. 253–61). After the signing of the August 1980 agreements
and following the Solidarity model, professional associations independent of official union
organisations started to appear spontaneously across the country, which took steps to be
officially registered as free unions.
The Solidarity movement constructively assimilated the lessons learned from the failure
of the two previous strategies of political change in Eastern Europe: the ‘revolution from
below’—the GDR workers’ uprising (1953) and the Hungarian revolution (1956); and the
‘revolution from above’—the de-Stalinisation (1956), the ‘Prague Spring’ (1968) and
the ‘Croat Spring’ (1971), respectively. Relying on the previous successful experience of the
Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR)/Committee for Social Self-defence KOR (1976–
1980) that opted for the novel, pragmatic and incremental solution of the ‘self-defence’ and
‘self-management’ of society, Solidarity proposed a third strategy that made civil society
both the motor of change and its target, within a self-limiting programme of gradual political
change (Laba 1991; Goodwyn 1991; Zuzowski 1992; Bernard 1993). Solidarity was willing
to renounce immediate economic and political benefits in exchange for its institutionalisa-
tion, able to assure its greater societal impact. In the early days of Solidarity, the workers on
strike were willing to forgo wage increases in exchange for acquiring the right of free
association and other civil rights. A fundamental condition of this exemplary behaviour was
the clear consciousness of the moral superiority of a powerless ethics over a corrupted,
immoral authority. Compared to other previous attempts at bringing about political change,
Solidarity’s programme proved to be more pragmatic, more moderate and less violent. Self-
limiting and constructively assimilating the lessons of the past, it combined the aim of
avoiding antagonising the Polish party-state and the Soviets with that of grabbing a sphere of
autonomy from the former as large as possible. Essentially, Solidarity’s decision in 1980–
1981 not to attempt to seize power was based on the concept of a ‘self-limiting revolution’, a
project of gradual change appealing to self-limitation for strategic and normative reasons,
stopping short of threatening the Polish government or party politically and the Soviet
sphere of influence geopolitically. Applying this programme would have meant the
‘Finlandisation’ of Poland and the development of a ‘self-governed republic’ centred on the
continued existence of a strong, pluralistic and independent civil society (Malia 1994,
p. 398).
Even after the imposition of martial law in December 1981, Solidarity continued to exist
clandestinely, and small new underground civic movements started to emerge. By the mid-
1980s, a new generation of Central European activists, known as the konkretny generation
because of its pragmatic orientation towards everyday problems and effective means of
overcoming—or at least exposing—them, started to challenge the establishment (Kenney
2002, p. 13). Furthermore, by the time of the radical political change, the Polish political
regime had already made significant openings towards society and had tried several
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‘cooptation’ strategies. The suspension of martial law on New Year’s Eve 1982 led to the
freeing of most Solidarity leaders. In 1983– 1984, the regime tried to promote the idea of
workers’ self-management, in a futile attempt to deprive the Solidarity movement of one of
its legitimating bases. After September 1986, when a general amnesty for political prisoners
was announced, Poland became the first Communist country without political detainees. In
December 1986, a Consultative Council was created by the Chairman of the Council of
State, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, in order to broaden the scope of social dialogue
(Machewicz 2001, pp. 94–95).
Equally illuminating is the Hungarian case. Among the East European Communist
parties, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party cultivated one of the longest reformist
traditions, its distinctive feature being its well-known moderation. After launching his
famous slogan ‘whoever is not against us is with us’ in December 1961, János Kádár
implemented an ambitious reform programme, its most important element being the New
Economic Mechanism. In addition to this—which was conceived as an attempt to preserve
political stability and indirect political legitimacy by experimenting with unorthodox
economic policies—the agricultural production cooperatives, beneficiaries from the 1960s
of important public subsidies, helped Hungary to become the only East European country
self-sufficient in food production. This decisively contributed to the support of the
Hungarian goulash-communism model.
Although ultimately unsuccessful, the New Economic Mechanism experiment remains
remarkable for its unexpected consequences. On the one hand, from the early 1970s on,
formal and informal interactions between the party-state and interest groups and semi-
autonomous political lobbies in consultation, decision making and policy implementation
processes marked the end of the Stalinist political model and shaped an institutional
pluralism avant la lettre (‘institutional proto-pluralism’). On the other hand, the partial
release of the potential productive side of the secondary economy would itself lead to the
restoration of private initiative, and wage bargaining, as a central dynamic element, would
pave the way for the ‘market’ as an economic reality already operating in the late 1980s.
Moreover, starting with the local and parliamentary elections of 1985, the regime began to
experiment with multiple candidate elections in certain constituencies. Introducing the option
between two candidates was designed to promote several of the regime’s objectives, among
which re-legitimising the parliament and the augmentation of its real power were the most
important. Contrary to expectations, a remarkable number of voters used this opportunity to
promote local issues and support candidates who promised to act in the interests of local and
regional communities. The local notables entering the national political arena marked the
beginning of the formation of the new political elites who would play important roles in post-
communism (Tőkés 1996, pp. 96–102, 104–5, 107, 264–66, 268).
Characterised by an overall accommodating behaviour, the Hungarian opposition was
basically a ‘tolerated’ and ‘semi-co-opted’ one (Schöpflin 1993; Tőkés 1996). The regime
entertained a rather ambivalent relationship with it. On certain occasions, the opposition’s
suggestions were actually taken into account by the power holders. For instance, the
preliminary discussions relating to the social aspects of the introduction of the New
Economic Mechanism were partly inspired by the studies of enterprise management by the
reformist sociologist and former Prime Minister András Hegedüs. In 1974, the Propaganda
Section of the Central Committee of the HSWP made good use of the study on the impact of
the secondary economy by dissident sociologist Iván Szelényi and his team. Throughout the
1970s, the Economic Policy Section of the Central Committee of the HSWP ‘assimilated’
many rather critical studies by the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences. And in the 1980s, it even organised a brainstorming session on the economic
policy options proposed by leading Hungarian experts, including dissidents. Moreover, the
repressive measures taken against dissident intellectuals such as György Lukács, András
Hegedüs, Miklós Haraszti, György Bence and János Kis were rather mild. Dissident
intellectuals were free to sign petitions, publish in samizdat publications and send letters to
Western newspapers (Tőkés 1996, pp. 171–72, 175).
The Hungarian opposition rewrote the Polish programme, insisting that changes from
below within society had to be suitably (even less radically) accompanied by changes from
above in the sphere of the party-state. By mid-1987, this programme took on a coherent form
when the samizdat publication Beszélö, whose editor-in-chief was Hungarian dissident
philosopher János Kis, devoted a whole issue to the idea of the need for a new social contract
between the powers that be and the citizens. The preamble of the document delivered a clear
strategic and unequivocal message: ‘Kádár must go!’ (Kis 1989, p. 143).
The publication of the Social Contract almost coincided with the publication in July 1987
of a programme for economic development, which provided the foundation for a drastic
reorganisation of the economy (Kis et al. 1991, pp. 244–47). For instance, the introduction
in 1988 of value added tax (VAT) made Hungary the first Communist country with a
Western-style tax system. But in the view of the Hungarian opposition, a programme of
economic reform could not be successful unless complemented by a programme of political
change focused on a multiparty system, parliamentary democracy, and self-management at
the community and workplace levels, as well as national self-determination for Hungarian
communities abroad and neutrality in foreign policy. Eventually, stimulated by the inputs of
the opposition that encouraged the reformist wing at the top of the political establishment,
economic reforms were accompanied by the development of political projects that
reconceptualised the relationship between party and state, the party bureaucracy and
technocrats, and re-evaluated both the roles of the main state institutions and the civil
society sector. Thus, the Hungarian parliament enacted a series of laws that allowed the
development of a multiparty system, and on 20 February 1989 the Central Committee of the
HSWP voted in favour of abandoning the party’s leading role in society (Tőkés 1996, pp.
296–301; Brown 2010, p. 531). On 17 March 1989, Hungary became the first East European
country to sign the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, and the 1967 protocol that
followed—circumstances that enabled 13,000 Romanian citizens of Hungarian nationality
to take refuge in Hungary, followed in June by waves of refugees from East Germany
(Roberts 1994, p. 185). In fact, all major political decisions taken in 1989 –1990 by the
nationalist Hungarian Democratic Forum-led government were (at least in part) a
materialisation of the 1987 Social Contract political programme.
In sharp contrast with the negotiated and peaceful transition experienced by Poland and
Hungary stands the Romanian case. Romania was the only country in Eastern Europe in
which the end of the old regime and the transition to the new society were marked by
extreme violence (although present in the Albanian and Yugoslav cases, the violence was
rather mild and episodic). The decisive element that meant that Romania could not
experience a Round Table negotiated transition was its special type of Communist political
regime. The high degree of merging of the private and public sphere, the extreme
personalisation of power, the corruption and client-based character of an institutional
364 ADRIAN POP
bureaucracy typical of the Ceaus escu regime led certain analysts to define Ceaus escu’s
regime as a sultanistic one, i.e. an extreme form of patrimonialism. According to Max
Weber,
Patrimonialism and, in the extreme case, sultanism tend to arise whenever traditional domination
develops an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master
. . . . Where domination is primarily traditional, even though it is exercised by virtue of the ruler’s
personal autonomy, it will be called patrimonial authority; where indeed it operates primarily on
the basis of discretion, it will be called sultanism . . . . (Weber 1978, pp. 231–32, emphasis in
original)
The British researcher Peter Siani-Davies re-examined and nuanced the idea of
assimilating the Ceaus escu regime with a sultanistic one, concluding that the Ceaus escu
regime was a ‘hybrid product’ between totalitarianism and sultanism, but closer to the
former than to the latter (Siani-Davies 2005).
Be that as it may, the point is that the total lack of dialogue between power holders and
society on the one hand, and the impossibility to have a real core of civil society on the other
(except for a few isolated voices), resulted in the failure to articulate a genuine anti-
communist resistance during the 1970s and the 1980s. While the Central European countries
underwent a resurrection of powerful alternative groups able to form a national opposition
structure before a transfer of power took place, the fragile and reduced Romanian
intellectual dissidence was either forced to emigrate, or silenced, or even put under strict
Securitate surveillance.
Mass opposition to and actions against the Communist regime were not altogether absent,
however. It included the Jiu Valley (summer of 1977) and Motru Valley (October 1981)
miners’ strikes, and in particular the popular demonstration in Brasov (15 November 1987),
perceived as a prelude to the December 1989 revolution. But all attempts to coagulate into
an independent Solidarity-like union movement, such as the Free Romanian Workers’
Union (SLOMR), ultimately failed.
Since the higher echelons of power were staffed with obedient people who lacked
personality and owed their careers to the dictator and his wife, there was no room for any
burgeoning of a reforming faction inside the Romanian nomenklatura, as had happened in
Hungary and Poland. The very-late-to-appear ‘Letter of the Six’, signed in March 1989 by
Constantin Pı̂rvulescu, Alexandru Bı̂rlădeanu, Gheorghe Apostol, Corneliu Mănescu,
Grigore Răceanu and Silviu Brucan, was hardly the expression of a genuine internal
opposition vis-à-vis the Communist Party hardliners. What it actually reflected was the
helplessness of a certain segment in Ceaus escu’s nomenklatura, as well as the frustrations of
some old Stalinist party hacks (the youngest of whom was older than Ceaus escu, while the
oldest was 94) whom the dictator had been side-tracking for many years.
With no reformist wing in the Romanian Communist Party and no real core of civil
society, there were no actors to play in a Round Table negotiated transition scenario. And
since the alternative to negotiations and compromises has always been and always will be
sheer violence, the political transition in Romania was extremely violent.
Having the aspect of a putsch accelerated by spontaneous manifestations of popular
dissatisfaction, Romania’s way of abandoning Communism in December 1989 was a
combination of a coup d’état and a popular uprising. However, a paradox is noticeable: even
though in Romania the Communist Party was disbanded by decree, the regime that emerged
after the December 1989 events proved to be the most acceptable of the successor regimes,
from the point of view of the Kremlin.
Another important feature that gave the Romanian transition a uniqueness was the fact
that the opposition, which had an important role to play in the post-December 1989 political
arena, was not born during the Communist era, as in Hungary or Poland, but came together
during the days of the revolution around either the survivors from parties disbanded by the
Communists—the National Christian Democratic Peasant Party (the former National
Peasant Party), the National Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party—or activists of
new political movements with ecological and ethnic outlooks (the Ecological Movement
Party and the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania, respectively). Yet the
representatives of the ‘historical’ parties shared power with the National Salvation Front
from the time of the formation of a provisional parliament in late February until the 20 May
1990 elections, which resulted in a landslide victory for President Ion Iliescu (85% of the
vote) and a considerable one (two thirds of the seats) for the Front. Eventually, a new
constitution providing for a multiparty system took effect on 8 December 1991. But the
change in government through the accession to power of the anti-Communist opposition
only occurred for the first time in 1996, seven years after the revolution, thus confirming
once more the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Romanian case of transition (Pop 2001, pp. 289–94).
The Central European strategy in retrospect

It seems that far from belonging exclusively to recent history, the Central European strategy
for non-violent and gradual change is viable not only for late Communist and post-
communist realities, but for the era of globalisation too. The notion of non-violent,
incremental change from below has a double added value—normative and strategic. From
the normative point of view, it helps to introduce a perception of political change in
accordance with which democracy is seen as an aim rather than a tool. From a strategic
standpoint, it does provide a practical tool for expanding the frontiers of liberty in societies
marked by democratic deficits, showing how the trend of actual annihilation of the
opposition and of depriving civil society of its instruments of self-defence, self-
emancipation, self-organisation and self-institutionalisation can be reversed. Such a
political environment would amount to a new form—albeit ‘soft’ and dressed in ‘democratic
clothes’—but no less treacherous to dictatorship. The concept of dictatorship is understood
here in its classic definition, put forward by Franz Neumann: ‘the rule of a person or group of
persons who arrogate to themselves and monopolize power in the state, exercising it without
constraint’ (Neumann 1957, p. 233).
Current mass society favours only the instrumental aspect of democracy that provides,
through elections, a procedural, legal legitimacy to those elected. The social aspect of
legitimacy, which requires keeping open the social channels of communication between
rulers and ruled, is often overlooked or deliberately obscured. The Central European
strategy offers not only the prospect of bringing to life that legitimacy, but also a possible
site for reconciliation of economic liberalism with political democracy, taking into account
the fact that both the free market and the democratic state can become truly strong only if
there is a strong civil society. When civil society is weak, political society is corrupt and the
state presents significant democratic deficits, the risk of derailing from democracy and
366 ADRIAN POP
relapsing into authoritarianism (in various shapes and sizes) is rather high. The Central
European strategy offers the prospect of holding in check the excesses of the powers that be,
regardless of their nature.
The value of Central European civil society’s experience under Communism for the era of
globalisation was implicitly recognised by Jeffrey Goldfarb when he grounded his ‘politics
of small things’, inter alia, on the experience of the Prague Spring, and the revolutions in
Eastern Europe in 1989. As he put it, in Poland ‘people acted as if they lived in a free society
and a free society resulted’ (Goldfarb 2007, p. 69). Indeed, in substance if not in form, ‘the
politics of small things’ is nothing more than an adapted version of the Central European
civil society’s strategy to the context and concrete realities of globalisation.
As Jeffrey Goldfarb has argued, ‘spaces for democratic practices are constituted in both
established and nascent democracies, as well as under modern and post-modern tyrannies’
(Goldfarb 2007, p. 3). To understand how larger movements for change and opposition to
tyranny are born and gain momentum, it is necessary to understand the ‘micropolitics’ of
human interaction. Such movements may occur not only in revolutionary contexts, but in
seemingly harmless environments and contexts, such as a private dinner, a literary club, a
conversation in a café, or mediated by an internet socialisation network, etc.
Hence, besides the ‘big things’ that make up world politics—the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction, terrorism, globalisation, etc.—one should also pay attention to the
‘politics of small things’. The latter occurs when ‘people freely meet and talk to each other
as equals, reveal their differences, display their distinctions, and develop a capacity to act
together’ (Goldfarb 2007, p. 4). No matter how oppressive the politics of big things
becomes, individuals acting in intimate settings can nurture their own miniaturised version
of civil society and provide a public space for resistance.
Goldfarb argues that people can ‘live in truth’ when they stop ‘using the official
language’, extend the kitchen table by finding places where it is safe to do so, and then form
publics by networking with other groups who are engaged in similar behaviour (Goldfarb
2007, pp. 8, 16, 47). In cyberspace, the ‘politics of small things’ finds a natural and
favourable space of manifestation in social networks and actions mediated through websites.
Furthermore, Goldfarb believes that the internet and the autonomous public spaces (even
virtual) that it can generate are a powerful tool for challenging the excesses of globalisation.
Conclusions
In retrospect, it is clear that the events that took place in Eastern Europe at the end of the
1980s needed a ‘green light’ not only from indigenous elites, but also from Moscow. In fact,
the trigger of systemic change in Eastern Europe was provided by political and ideological
change introduced by Gorbachev himself from 1988 on in the years of perestroika.
Operating in a ‘circular flow of influence’ mode, the dismantling of the Communist system
was initiated by the Kremlin, spilled over into Eastern Europe, and returned as a boomerang
upon the Soviet republics, accelerating the Soviet Union’s breakdown.
A challenge to theories of revolution, the Polish and Hungarian cases of regime change in
1989 offer the alternative model of non-violent, ‘negotiated revolution’. As demonstrated by
the ‘path-dependence’ school of thought, the past makes a crucial difference for the
essentially different ways of exiting Communism and structuring the post-Communist paths.
For their proper understanding, one should take a comparative synchronic and diachronic
perspective. In particular, to understand how the ‘negotiated revolutions’ in Central Europe

came about, the issues of the type of political regime, the development of civil society and
its particular way of interacting and interplay with the state are of paramount importance.
Retrospectively, one could safely conclude that the strategy of incremental change from
below proposed by the former Central European dissidents under Communism cleared the
way for the ‘negotiated revolutions’ of 1989. Offering the option of a self-democratising
society, this strategy points to a notion relating to democracy which implies a broader
reference than state institutions, and which can be adequately understood as the end rather
than as mere means. Its relevance for the era of globalisation should also be recognised and
taken into consideration for future strategies of holding in check the excesses of the powers
that be, regardless of their nature.
National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest
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The 1989 Revolutions in Retrospect

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The 1989 Revolutions in Retrospect

East European revolutions: a challenge to theories of revolution

Central European ‘negotiated revolutions’: a ‘path-dependence’ perspective

imperfect democratisation, marked by significant setbacks. The reasonable assumption that

TYPOLOGY OF EAST EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS

strategies of 1956— 1956— 1953— ‘Revolution 1956— 1971—

abandoning and popular uprising

framework Slovakia and

government’s authority towards the group of governmental negotiators, and their

question its legitimacy.

arrangement combining aspects of liberal democracy with aspects of party-state

The Central European strategy in retrospect

perspective. In particular, to understand how the ‘negotiated revolutions’ in Central Europe

National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest

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