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Global Society
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Introduction
Holly Case; Florian Bieber

Online publication date: 08 January 2010

To cite this Article Case, Holly and Bieber, Florian(2010) 'Introduction', Global Society, 24: 1, 3 — 8
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 Global Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, January, 2010

Introduction

HOLLY CASE and FLORIAN BIEBER

Over the last two decades a multitude of books and articles have appeared in the
social sciences and humanities which begin with “After 1989 . . .” The function of
“Once upon a time” in fairy tales had thus found its equivalent with this reference
to the watershed of 1989 in scholarship. Just as not everybody “lived happily ever
after” this mythical beginning or year zero can be more misleading than helpful
for understanding social reality today. Thus looking back on two decades since
1989, this collection does not begin with “After 1989 . . .”
Instead, this issue seeks to explore the global implications of the events of 1989
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in East-Central Europe not just as a watershed but also as part of a continuum. Our
original desire when planning this collection was to move the study of 1989 out of
the realm of transitology, opening it up to new methodologies and approaches and
new ways to consider its significance, both within and beyond the region. In this
brief introduction we would like to lay out what we think the following essays
have contributed to our understanding of the events of 1989, but then to go a
step further and propose a research agenda for future scholarship on the subject.
The essays in this issue represent a variety of perspectives on “The Global
Impact of 1989”. A 20-year distance from the events has allowed the contributors
to re-examine the “watershed of 1989” and to think beyond well-trodden narra-
tives about 1989, what preceded and what followed it. In particular, the distance
of two decades allows us to look back at this “annus mirabilis” not as a clear divider
between a “before” and an “after” but as a marker of a continuum of changes
which stretched across it. The contributions in this collection thus highlight
both the processes which led up to the fall of communist regimes in Central
and Eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989, as well as the long-term trends in
the region and elsewhere in the world which were moulded and reinforced by
the events of that year.

The Essays in this Issue

Our issue opens with a truly path-breaking essay by Zsuzsa Gille, who writes of
the “mutual constitution of Western and Eastern histories” during the Cold War
and after. In this vein she notes how, just as the global trend in turning towards
“ecological development” gave strength to dissident groups under socialism, so
was the “emergence and endurance” of the welfare state in Western Europe and
elsewhere affected by the social safety net constructed by governments for inhabi-
tants of the Eastern Bloc. Gille also points to the fact that, far from possessing a
wholly different economic system from that in the West, the economies of socialist
ISSN 1360-0826 print/ISSN 1469-798X online/10/010003– 6 # 2010 University of Kent
DOI: 10.1080/13600820903431938
 4 Introduction

states in East-Central Europe came to be very much a part of the “same system” of
global capitalism in which they could not help but participate. Throughout, Gille
persuasively points to these areas of mutual influence between “East” and “West”
during the Cold War, calling on us to reconsider our understanding of the political
spectrum. In doing so, we start to find the origins of present-day phenomena in
the most seemingly unlikely places, recognising the “new left” anti-globalisation
drives’ influence on the resurgence of the extreme right in Hungary, for example,
or how neoliberal economics may have been the spawn of a leftism now forgotten.
As such, Gille’s contribution opens up a whole new range of issues for scholars to
consider when they write about the Cold War, the transition in East-Central
Europe, and the global politics and economics of the post-Cold War era.
The story of consistency in change raised early on by Gille is one that surfaces in
the piece by Mark Keck-Szajbel, who notes in his contribution on travel in socialist
and post-socialist East Germany that the events of 1989 set not only politics but also
people in motion. The flood of visitors from East-Central Europe to Berlin then set
off a reaction on the part of the government, which began to construct an invisible
wall between East and West in Germany—in the form of visa requirements—where
the old one had been. It seems that one of the characteristics of the transformation,
then, is that it altered rather than eliminated the faultlines established after the
Second World War, lending them a different kind of institutionalised legitimacy.
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Keck-Szajbel’s piece, by drawing our attention to travel patterns and policies

across the socialist and post-socialist periods, thus highlights the necessity of his-
toricising various aspects of the post-socialist era with an eye to determining
how they fit into—or diverge from—the stories we like to tell about 1989, about
the opening of borders and greater freedom of movement, for example.
The stories that are told about the past are themselves a product of Cold War
and post-Cold War politics, as Evgeny Finkel reveals in his insightful contribution
on the politics that have informed memories of past violence in Eastern Europe
since the collapse of communism. The essay dissects the ways in which govern-
ments and interest groups use the international arena to make claims about the
past that have ramifications for the present and the future. They do so by
seeking international recognition for mass violence—like the “Holodomor” (the
mass killing by starvation of Ukrainians during the 1930s) or various “genocides”
perpetrated against ethnic populations in the Eastern Bloc and the former USSR—
in order to cement claims to territory, economic resources, membership in certain
international organisations, legitimacy, or alternatively to challenge neighbouring
states’ claims to the same. The geopolitical implications of what the Poles call
“historical policy” (polityka historyczna) is thus truly global in scope, demanding
the attention of the United Nations, NATO, the European Union and other
transnational institutions and organisations. Nor are the politics that inform
recognition of past violence unique to this region, as post-Cold War debates
around the role of the Japanese in Korea and China during the Second World
War, or the controversies surrounding recognition of the Armenian ‘genocide’
of 1915 in Turkey and France have revealed.1 It is also striking how both
Eastern and Western Europe re-evaluated the Second World War past following
1989 and how politicised this process has been.

1. See, for example, “French in Armenia ‘Genocide’ Row”, BBC News (12 October 2006), available:
,http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6043730.stm., accessed 23 November 2009.
 Introduction 5

As histories of genocide have been crafted to provide sources of legitimacy to

new regimes and states, the past as both a source of legitimacy and a cause
of regime weakness is discussed in Matt Killingsworth’s contribution on
“Legitimacy and Lustration”. By highlighting the continuous struggle with the
legitimacy of Central European governments (and states) before and after 1989,
he points out that the “legitimacy crisis” of the old communist regimes was insuf-
ficient in itself as a source of legitimacy for the new governments and political
system. In fact, the efforts in relation to lustration, which effectively sought to
de-legitimise the pre-democratic regimes, have been difficult and often wrought
with fierce domestic opposition. As Killingsworth argues, it has generally been
not the party but the security apparatus which has been the target of lustration,
since the party had already lost its legitimacy well before 1989 but became the
legitimate, yet contested, reservoir for the technocrats of transition.
Whereas all countries which experienced the end of communism in 1989 or
subsequent years faced the need to re-establish the legitimacy of the political
system, multinational federations faced the additional challenge to the very exist-
ence of the state. Not one of the three socialist federal countries (the USSR, Yugo-
slavia, Czechoslovakia) survived the end of communist rule. As Igor Štiks argues,
the ensuing violence in Yugoslavia was determined primarily by the failure of the
country and its constituent republics to define new, inclusive modes of citizenship.
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While state dissolution since 1989 has been confined largely to the territories of
socialist federations, the question of cascading state dissolution remains signifi-
cant even 20 years after the federations began the process of dissolution.
The significance of 1989 as a marker of change derives not only from the
collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe but also from a
patchwork of events which have had a formative impact on the contemporary
world. As the contribution by Nicole Falkenhayner demonstrates, the 1989
Rushdie affair’s impact upon British culture speaks to the phenomenon of parallel
watersheds, whereby the death throes of the Cold War order were marked by an
event heralding the emergence of a new set of values and ideas centred more on a
presumed cultural confrontation between “the West” and “Islam” rather than the
politico – economic confrontation of the Cold War. The “Rushdie affair” refers to
the strongly negative response of several Muslim political and cultural elites—
including the issue of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran calling for Rushdie’s
execution—to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 book The Satanic Verses
for its alleged sacrilegious character. The essay moves skilfully from the
“macro” to the “micro” implications of the Rushdie affair, highlighting how this
new confrontation has been fashioned through British literature, journalism and
film, and above all how it has affected and informed British multiculturalism.
Above all what is evident from these contributions is that there are numerous
aspects of the events of 1989 that we are only beginning to grasp, and many
more will follow. In what remains of this introduction we would like to point to
the ways in which future scholars from a variety of disciplines might pursue
the study of this watershed in the global context.

A Research Agenda
In addition to the “mutually informing” East and West elaborated in Zsuzsa
Gille’s essay, scholars are now beginning to recognise the countless ways in
 6 Introduction

which the Cold War order gave or denied legitimacy to particular regimes and
ideas. With the collapse of the bipolar world, that legitimacy was lost or recovered.
The most often-cited case is Yugoslavia, a multinational state (re-)fashioned by the
socialist Tito, which dissolved shortly after 1989.
As in the cases highlighted in Finkel’s essay, socialist-era interpretations of past
violence were simultaneously de-legitimised while other interpretations emerged
to take their place. The socialist states’ glossing of the persecution of the Jews and
the Holocaust during the Second World War, as well as socialist-era persecution of
various groups of people, is now being revisited. This has resulted in countless
attempts to recontextualise the Holocaust, or to use the powerful rhetoric of
victimisation that has grown up around it to gain recognition for other episodes
of violence during the 20th century. The politicised debates around the label of
“genocide” speak to this concern. Nor are the politics of memory neatly contained
within the European context.
In fact, the collapse of authoritarian regimes in the Eastern Bloc produced strong
ripple effects well beyond the Continent of Europe. In 1989 the president of Zaire,
Mobutu Sese Seko, who had been clinging to one-party dictatorial rule for over 25
years, watched the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu on television and
was moved to yield, albeit reluctantly, to a pluralist system.2 In the months that
followed, five other African states made gestures towards multi-party rule
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(Benir, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Zambia, and Tanzania).3 Scholars have also noted
how the longevity of South African apartheid was most likely tied to that of the
Soviet Union, meaning that the one could hardly have long outlived the other.4
Taking it a step further, is it possible that certain entrenched and polarised pos-
itions on race in the United States could only thaw once the Cold War was
over? In other words, is President Obama a uniquely post-Cold War phenom-
enon? If we consider that Martin Luther King Jr was criticised for his leftist
“anti-American” and “pro-communist” ideas (on the Vietnam War and US
policy in Latin America, for example), we can see the remnants of those Cold
War critiques in the views articulated by opponents of Obama, which resound
in the same Cold War language of “communist” policy with frequent mentions
of “Russia”. Indeed, the Soviet critique of US race relations was a potent one,
but the very fact that it came from the Soviet Union may have ultimately done
more to de-legitimise that critique than to shift the political landscape.
Just a few months ago the post-war one-party monopoly on power of the
Japanese Liberal Democratic Party also gave way. The shift was greeted by one
Japanese political analyst with the following statement: “We have been trying
to outgrow this old one-party system ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
It took two decades, but we finally made it.”5 The collapse of one-party rule in
the Soviet Bloc gave hope to those who opposed it elsewhere.

2. See Thierry Michel, Mobutu, roi du Zaı̈re, DVD, Belgium (1999).

3. Lisa Beyer and Marguerite Michaels, “Africa Continental Shift”, Time (in partnership with CNN)
(21 May 1990), available: ,http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,970130,00.html.,
accessed 23 November 2009.
4. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism,
and Ethnography after the Cold War”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2009), p. 21.
5. Martin Fackler, “With Bold Stand, Japan Opposition Wins a Landslide”, New York Times
(30 August 2009), available: ,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/world/asia/31japan.html.,
accessed 23 November 2009.
 Introduction 7

Thus beyond affecting the ideological landscape, 1989 shook the foundations of
previously acceptable forms of legitimacy (communism and anti-communism), of
authoritarianism, politics, and state structures throughout the world. It led to the
proliferation of semi-authoritarian and authoritarian regimes which, while for-
mally endorsing the label of democracy or at least popular will, drew on earlier
authoritarian structures, at least for a time, including those of Slobodan Milošević
in Serbia, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, and a handful of authoritarian
leaders in Central Asia.6
It would be wrong, however, to characterise the post-1989 period as an era
devoid of ideology. The ideology that benefited from the collapse of the bipolar
world and the wholesale de-legitimisation of leftist centrally planned economies
was neoliberal economics, which emerged from the Cold War as the dominant
world economic model. The legitimacy deficit of leftist alternatives and the evap-
oration of the global search for a “third way” came to characterise the political
landscape in many parts of the world. Less than a decade ago a trade unionist
and former member of the Polish Solidarity movement thus commented that
“We should be leftists, but we aren’t.”7 The recent economic crisis may neverthe-
less cause many in the former Eastern Bloc and elsewhere to rethink the basis of
the neoliberal model and contemplate alternatives.
In contemplating the emergence of alternatives, we stumble upon another
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feature of the post-1989 landscape, namely the confusion of right- and left-wing
political positions around the issue of globalisation. In fact, the origins of this
confusion lie in the pre-1989 era, when the most successful dissident actions—
like the environmentalist movements in Hungary and Lithuania, or the trade
union approach of Solidarity in Poland—were very localised and essentially
anti-globalist in their conception, and new-left sounding in their rhetoric, but
soon dissolved into multiple factions after the collapse of state socialism, includ-
ing strongly populist, largely right-wing, and still expressly anti-globalist factions
that have raised concern about the resurgence of the extreme right. Thus the emer-
gence of Solidarity and environmental dissident movements seems to have pre-
disposed them to lean right eventually, given that the regime they had opposed
was an expressly leftist one.
One further aspect of the 1989 fallout that scholars might do well to investigate
is therefore the extent to which the right was able to cloak itself under the Cold
War radar, reinventing its programmes and finding new venues for right-wing
activism. The flood of Nazi and other European right-wing refugees to Latin
America and its impact on Latin American politics is still understudied, as is
the activity of the volunteers to the French Foreign Legion after the Second
World War, which is now being revealed to have a lengthening pedigree in
right-wing post-war and post-1989 violence, from the counterinsurgent activities
of the Legion during the wars of decolonisation, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession
in the western Balkans, to recent anti-Roma violence in Hungary. Above all, the
resurgence of the right in mainstream politics in Europe and elsewhere seems

6. Much has been written about democracies with an adjective (which might as well be called
authoritarian regimes with an adjective). See, for example, Marina Ottaway, Democracy Challenged:
The Rise of Semi-authoritarianism (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003).
7. David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, NY and
London: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 121.
 8 Introduction

to be a sign that the post-war polarised order did little to erode the legitimacy of
the extreme right, and indeed seems to have had the opposite effect.
Finally, the disappearance of the Cold War order has altered the terrain for a
variety of scholarly pursuits. Beyond the sharp decline in funding for the study
of Eastern Europe and the USSR, there has also been a shifting of the conceptual
geography that used to inform area studies. It is no longer clear, for example, what
“Eastern Europe” is, since what was “Eastern” has become “Central” (Hungary,
the Czech Republic, Poland), and what had been part of the USSR (Ukraine)
has become squarely “Eastern”. Furthermore, do these categories still help us
understand political and social reality when 10 countries of what used to be
“Eastern Europe” now form part of the European Union?
The changes have also raised the question of whether or not the communist era
should be bracketed as a strange diversion from the “true” paths of states in the
Eastern Bloc, or as integral parts of their history. It is also the case that scholars
are now seeking to overcome the “three worlds” division of the globe, as it was
Cold War modernisation theory that lent it its earlier legitimacy.8 In the words
of Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, “It is time to liberate the Cold War from
the ghetto of Soviet area studies and postcolonial thought from the ghetto of
Third World and colonial studies. The liberatory path we propose is to jettison
our two posts in favor of a single overarching one: the post-Cold War.”9
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As 1989 is placed along various timelines—now that we can see past it at least a
bit—new insights are emerging. The Rushdie affair thus reveals how what had
been background to Cold War politics prior to 1989 became foreground thereafter.
What might be some of the other macro trends at work in the pre- and post-1989
world and how are they related to the polarised Cold War order?
In fact we have only just begun thinking about some of the events and move-
ments of the pre-1989 period in a global context. The 1968 upheavals, for
example, can now at last be partially understood in a transnational context, as
can the consumerism that typified both the socialist and capitalist systems of
the 1970s. We also know about how various forms of diffusion have worked in
the international context: how the Non-Aligned Movement forged a global
coalition of interests, how dissident groups in authoritarian regimes communi-
cated with one another and shared ideas and tactics, and how authoritarian
leaders learned lessons from their counterparts elsewhere (Romanian dictator
Nicolae Ceauşescu from Kim Il-sung in North Korea, or how the Red Army
Faction was inspired by Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Frantz Fanon).
As the trail of time between the present and 1989 lengthens, no doubt alterna-
tive contextualisations of the events and significance of the events of that time
will become apparent. We look forward to these new developments and have
sought with this present issue to help usher in an era in which the global
context stands in the foreground.

8. Carl Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–1975”,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1981), pp. 565– 590.
9. Chari and Verdery, op. cit., p. 29.