Mueller, Wolfgang; Gehler, Michael and Suppan, Arnold (eds) The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 376 “representative” of Poland on the whole, it offers a very poignant concentration of events, processes, and experiences that have shaped the nation […] since the end of World War II’ (p. 11). As her book successfully illustrates, these are not just repression, resistance and inefficiency. Nowa Huta is also ‘emblematic of post-war rebuilding, successful urban planning, stable and guaranteed work, strong community ties and social institutions, and collective action’ (p. 189). UCL SSEES Anne White Mueller, Wolfgang; Gehler, Michael and Suppan, Arnold (eds). The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook. Internationale Geschichte/International History, 2. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 2015. ix + 705 pp. Notes. Tables. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. €75.00. The purpose of this compendium is to synthesize twenty-five years of research and reflection on the end of Communist power in Central Europe in 1989. It is primarily a tour of the literature on the political history, and a geographically very broad one at that; the collection’s originality lies in the connections it allows the reader to make between developments in many different areas of the world. In fact, the least surprising part is the opening section on 1989 in the narrow sense of the revolutions in the line of states from Poland to Bulgaria, which are ably summarized by country experts and shown to have been massively over-determined. There is little scope for scholarly controversy when discussing the end of regimes that depended on Soviet force for their survival, and were a poor fit with the educated, urbanized societies they brought about. Once the Soviet balustrade was removed — as early as July 1986, according to Andrei Grachev’s chapter on Gorbachev — it was just a matter of finding a way to let political gravity work. With most of the countries of Central Europe, the only competitor to the standard account of events is a conspiracy theory, especially regarding the negotiations between the Communist authorities and representatives of the emerging opposition that ensured peaceful transitions to free elections and constitutional change. The authors of the country chapters address and largely demolish those often wildly speculative claims of secret deals and bad faith. Only in the case of Romania, where the Soviet hold was weakest and the Ceaușescu regime had pursued a sultanistic path, is there a genuine dispute over how best to explain the violent events. On the superpower level, it turns out that it is American conduct, not the Soviet, that is now the greater subject of disagreement. Norman Naimark, in the book’s liveliest chapter, presents a devastating case for seeing the administration of George H. W. Bush as passive and timid at this crucial time REVIEWS 377 in history. Even when moving fairly quickly to endorse German unification, a topic that receives very thorough attention in this book, the Bush White House was still reacting to someone else’s initiative (Helmut Kohl’s) and was not all that far ahead of the trend (Georges Saunier’s subtle chapter on France shows that by 3 November 1989, a week before the Berlin Wall opened, François Mitterrand was already anticipating the merger of the two Germanies). Philip Zelikow, at the time director for European security affairs on the White House National Security Council, offers a more positive account, crediting President Bush with foresight and boldness, although he is convincing only with regard to the Conventional Forces in Europe talks. One of the book’s strengths is that it factors in other countries under some form of Communist rule that were in crisis but did not experience a change of government in 1989. Péter Vámos’s chapter on China’s Tianamen Square protests is an excellent account of the events and of their importance not just for that country, but also for anxious Central European leaders who lacked the appetite for such a brutal crackdown. The chapters on Yugoslavia and the Baltic states wander too far from 1989 itself and how the fall of nearby Communist regimes was perceived (or, at least, how it was reported in their media) into general accounts of the resurgence of national identities, the politicization of history and crumbling of...