Introduction: the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the global 1989

Abstract

One of the central motifs of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) is the ways in which the present works to distort the past and, in particular, how ideologues seek to control the present by manipulating the past. To that end, Kundera tells the story of a photograph taken of two leading Czech communists, Vladimir Clementis and Klement Gottwald, celebrating the takeover of state power by communists in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The picture was later doctored to remove Clementis, following charges brought against him for ‘deviationism’ and ‘bourgeois nationalism’. The erasure of Clementis from the photograph temporarily removed one of the leading architects of the Czech post-war state from the country’s history. Clementis was denounced, put on trial and, eventually, executed. In some ways, of course, the very everydayness of this episode is its most disturbing aspect. The routinisation of coercion within totalitarian states – the use of murder and imprisonment, the control of populations via vast coercive apparatuses, the establishment of insidious networks of corruption – was the norm rather than the exception. As such, the events of 1989 and the disappearance of what Daniel Chirot (1996) calls ‘tyrannies of certitude’ from most parts of Central and Eastern Europe are acts well worth celebrating. Alongside the pronounced celebrations which marked the passing of state socialism in 1989 lies a second widely held view – that 1989 serves the ur-demarcation point in contemporary world politics. Indeed, both academics and policy-makers tend to use 1989 and its surrogate frames (such as Cold War/post-Cold War) as the principal normative, analytical and empirical shorthands for delineating past and present. And as with the celebrations over 1989 and its associated events, such abbreviations are made for often sound reasons. Not only was 1989 a significant event for those people living in the immediate Soviet sphere of influence, it had important ramifications for those inhabiting (now often former) socialist states around the world. Elsewhere, too, the events of 1989 served to disrupt existing patterns: the European Union saw its centre of gravity shift, at least to some extent, from west to east; recent years have seen a rise (or return) of Asian powers which may, in turn, prefigure a shift in the metageography of international politics from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and in the West itself, and in particular its fulcrum – the transatlantic alliance – the loss of the Soviet ‘other’ has engendered an overriding sense of anomie. No longer quite clear what it is against, the transatlantic alliance seems equally unclear about what it is for. Alongside this topographical shake-up can be found important intellectual challenges: how to conceptualise the primary fact of the post-Cold War order – US power; how to employ suitable normative frames for capturing issues of sovereignty, intervention and responsibility in the contemporary world; and how to comprehend a complex security climate signified by novel notions of war, shifting meanings of combatant/non-combatant, and the changing character of terrorism both by and against states. In short, it is nigh-on impossible to imagine a world without 1989 – there are few issues which appear untouched by it.