Mark , James Iacob , Bogdan C. Rupprecht , Tobias Spaskovska , Ljubica 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 591 achieves its aim of showing the importance and creative potential of centring the material at the heart of human experience. UCL SSEES Diane P. Koenker Mark, James; Iacob, Bogdan C.; Rupprecht, Tobias and Spaskovska, Ljubica. 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe. New Approaches to European History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2019. viii + 372 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £18.99 (paperback). The front cover of this new volume, jointly written by four academics in the HistoryDepartmentattheUniversityofExeter,featuresaTrabantcarsmashing through the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to reach (or perhaps recover) freedom in the West, an image taken from the city’s post-unification ‘East Side Gallery’ street art memorial. Yet it is precisely this ‘Western-curated script of global democratic revolution’ (p. 246) that the authors set out to challenge in their account of 1989. In particular they cast the essentialist supposition that political liberalism and open markets could also foster cultural unity, human rights and socio-economic inclusion as a self-serving ‘East-West’ narrative not shared by states in the ‘Global South’. Here the end of Communism met with more mixed reactions, not least as the neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ of the 1990s and beyond often advanced at ‘the expense of [post-decolonization] North-South links’ established in the 1960s (p. 127). Two further points flow from this. First, the authors show how dependent Eastern Europe’s turn to the West was on unexpected, quasi-accidental developments in the late 1980s. Before they embraced Western-style democracy, Communist elites in the Soviet bloc had already — for a decade or so before 1985 — begun to show an interest in capitalism, albeit of the authoritarian rather thanliberalkind.Themodelsforeconomictransitiontheylookedtointhe1970s and early 1980s were varied, including China, South Korea and Chile, as well as Spain post-Franco and even Iran after 1979. Above all, Eastern Europe’s leaders were interested in the question of national sovereignty, making them resistant to any idea that growing indebtedness to the West or membership of the IMF might impinge on their ability to act as autonomous agents in global affairs. It was they and the Soviet Union, rather than the NATO countries, that were the driving force behind the Helsinki process which, when it began in 1973–75, emphasized the security and inviolability of existing borders in Europe, and social, economic and national rights alongside individual-civic ones. By the late 1980s, the exclusionary elements within this new discourse of sovereignty had helped foster an upsurge in Islamophobia, especially in Bulgaria which persecuted its Turkish minority and expelled 350,000 in 1989, and Yugoslavia, SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 592 where suspicions towards Bosnian and Kosovan Muslims fed into assertions of Greater Serb and Croat nationalism, territorial aggrandizement and acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Secondly, even after reform Communists in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to espouse the ‘Washington consensus’ wholeheartedly, as did a new generation of Serb leaders after 1999/2000, the over-blown expectations of national reclamation did not expire, and were revived in less Western-friendly forms after the financial crash of 2008. Sensing an opportunity, nationalconservative movements in Eastern Europe began to stress once again the ‘global in-betweenness’ of their region (p. 308), to flirt with authoritarian regimes in China, Russia and Turkey, and — especially in the wake of the refugee and migration crisis of 2015 and Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016 — to use the phrase ‘Fortress Europe’ as a means of asserting the supposed superior commitment of the East to ‘white’ Christian civilization over the ‘decadent West’ (p. 267). In Hungary and Poland, such ideas are combined with sustained government attacks on women’s reproductive rights, ‘gender studies’ and the LGBTQ+ community. Notably, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is no longer spoken of, as he once was, as ‘Europe’s last dictator’, a relic of the pre-1989 age; rather he is now simply at the extreme end of a growing ‘neo-authoritarianism across the region’ (p. 121). In sum, the authors offer a pessimistic view which rejects the possibility of any universalist interpretation of contemporary world history. To their credit, they do not lose sight of the need to explain...