What were the revolutions of 1989? Timothy Garton Ash has a review article in the NYRB on a large clutch of accounts of that year, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Cold War. We know what they did – they led to the end of the Soviet Union and its bloc. He asks two related questions that have great relevance for today. What was it that united the movements of that exceptional year, including the movement that was crushed in China? And what was motivating the people in the crowds?
As Tim was in amongst the crowds, the latter might seem a strange question. But he has raised something of great interest. His questions are not only about our recent history, they are also about what comes next. The peaceful revolutions of 1989 were not only an ending; the full stop, as it were, of Europe’s civil war 1914 to 1989, to borrow from Arno Meyer. They were also the opening of the new period we are now living through, and they set the stage for change in tomorrow’s world. They were the beginning of the new.
The reason why Garton Ash can ask his questions is surely this: The stereotype of the revolutionary crowd we believe we are familiar with is that of the dammed of the earth (if egged on by educated but marginalised trouble-makers) driven by rage and despair, willing to hurl themselves at the old order, putting up barricades, taking up arms when they can get them, in short the uprising of the people as an insurrection, the crowd as a revolutionary force precipitating what Fred Halliday recently nailed in openDemocracy as the myth of ‘The Revolution’
But the crowds of 1989 were not like this. They were peaceful, often middle class, pouring into a political opening when they felt they had the permission to insist on their views – much as the East Berliners poured through the Berlin Wall as it was dismantled after the East German guards put down their guns. They wanted freedom. But they did not at all want a ‘revolution’ of the traditional kind, on the contrary they were mobilising against that myth. Yet nor were they reactionary, motivated by pinched, superstitious credulity. They were not a black mob.
Undoubtedly these movements of peoples around the world were a driver for change. Without it the Cold War would not have ended. So they were not mere protest movements or demonstrations. Yet they were not classic revolutionary uprisings or (a linked phenomenon) national liberation movements, with networks of organisers willing to fight and die for their cause. When some were killed, as in Tiananmen Square, they became civilian martyrs who confirmed the spontaneous, largely leaderless nature of the mass outpouring, political innocents not ‘ringleaders’. We can see the parallel today in the shooting of 27 year old Neda Agha-Soltan in Tehran (filmed as it happened thanks to the current ubiquity of video on mobile phones). The uprisings of 1989 produced representative figures, spokesmen and women who were exceptionally brave. But they were not the Jacobin organisers of the upsurge, while those who attempted to adopt this role afterwards have slipped into obscurity.
So Garton Ash’s questions are linked. By wanting a synthetic description of what happened to the world that year, “the best of years”, and by wanting to know what the crowds who took the streets and, in Europe at least, toppled tyrants were dreaming of, he is asking what defined the moment, why was it different in its parts and in its sum?
I have a single answer to this double question. The crowds of 1989 were driven by a desire to be normal. This is what linked together the movements of 1989 across the world where they occurred (large parts of the world, such as Latin America, had different political bio-rhythm) and this is what those in the crowds wanted individually and as a shared desire.
The crowds had a revolutionary wisdom, two words that have not usually been linked together. They saw further than the leaders of their regimes. They reversed the traditional terms of trade, that the governed are foolish and self-interested and their rulers far-sighted and aware of what is best.