‘Bliss was it in that Dawn’ … or was it?

Abstract

Paul Betts rightly observes that 1989 ‘isn’t what it used to be’.1 His recent essay ‘1989 at Thirty’ captures the melancholy many observers feel as they recall what once seemed the exhilarating developments that saw the communist regimes in eastern Europe collapse at the end of the 1980s, epitomized in the media by the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Betts’s analysis seeks out the roots of populist nationalism in the national energies that surfaced in and after 1989. He writes that ‘construing recent developments in central Europe as simply an anti-1989 backlash does not get us very far, not least because the unrest of 1989 carried within it the seeds of illiberalism as well’.2 Well, it certainly carried within it the seeds of the neo-liberalism advancing in both West and East in the 1980s and 1990s, and Betts acknowledges how that development has been documented by Philipp Ther’s recent book Europe since 1989.3 But he further asserts that the current nationalism and populism is more than a revolt against the intervening neo-liberalism. With our ever-growing chronological distance, we can now perceive that potentially xenophobic tendencies tainted the transformations of 1989 from the outset.