Ten Years After 1989
Berman, Marshall
IN 1989, my life was coming apart, and there wasn't a thing I could do. It was hard to get through the day, and even harder to make it through the night. That year I really loved my TV set. I...
...Hegel agreed that it was a pleasure to feel identity with a Volk, and it should be a right, especially in a cosmopolitan world economy, but he said citizenship should be based on territory and behavior, not on blood...
...In some ways it was the same trouble...
...Socialists have to distinguish our visions of community from the Volkstaat...
...THE HORRORS of ethnic cleansing in recent Eastern Europe have increased my admiration for the USA, but also, ironically, for the USSR...
...I could imagine that someday maybe I'd get a chance to act human, too...
...No state, in the West or anywhere else, has resolved the dangerous ambiguities of 1789...
...And in 1989 they were doing plenty...
...The universalism of John Lennon and 1960s rock-and-roll found a new lease on life in 1989...
...but they have succeeded so well only because the idea itself, with its inherent potential for genocide, turns out to be pretty typical of the post-Soviet political mainstream...
...News television in 1989, especially on cable, suddenly found itself with blocks of air time to fill...
...but in 1990, so it seemed, a host of xenophobic metal bands—like Guns N' Roses, famous for its slashes against "niggers and immigrants" —kicked the sixties out of the flat...
...I could see the people of both sides of Berlin tear down their Wall...
...Modern mass media played a crucial role in 1989: the people who were making history saw each other on television, and felt subliminal but real worldwide support...
...The media made it clear, too, how 1960s countercultural visions and sounds of freedom, so often pronounced dead, were alive and well around the world: Lou Reed and Frank Zappa as honored guests in Prague, Pink Floyd urged to play "The Wall" as the Wall came down, Bob Dylan's and John Lennon's songs sung in Beijing by kids who knew any day they could die...
...Imagine . . ." That's my spirit of '89...
...Neo-Fiihrers like Milosevic and DISSENT / Fall 1999 7 Tudjman have been brilliant in mobilizing men with guns to fulfill their visions of "ethnic cleansing...
...I could turn it on at any weird hour—CNN, just come on line, felt specially made for me—and see what people around the world were doing...
...The crowd that tore down the Wall and danced on it came from everywhere in the world...
...The great French declaration of 1789 sanctifies various "inalienable rights of l'homme," but also says that all power emanates from "la nation...
...Of course there was trouble soon, just as there was trouble after the people of Paris tore down the Bastille...
...But, with a few exceptions, these movements metamorphosed as soon as they attained power: their language of human rights pretty much disappeared, and visions of ethnic purity defined their new horizons...
...What made 1989 so great is that it gave that chance to so many...
...it sought out "faces in the crowd...
...I could see Prague's Velvet Revolution as it dawned...
...In response to a widespread outcry, the Popular Front offered ethnic Russians a reprieve: if they passed exams in Lithuanian, they could stay...
...But it was a thrill to be able to see all those people, including so many who felt like kindred spirits, out in the sunlight...
...That's where I want to live...
...Not to me: all year I was trapped in my cave...
...Thus," said Karl Marx, "Locke replaced Habakkuk...
...Before the end of the 1790s, it was clear that the idea of human rights had become a screen for French imperial ambitions and interests...
...I could see the great modern dream of the Social Contract—of oppressed and alienated people coming together to create a new society—coming true in real places in real time...
...The great popular movements of 1989 grew and thrived and brought people into the streets in the name of human rights, against communist regimes that travestied or simply crushed them...
...However, "we" shouldn't be so quick to blame "them": the ethnically pure Volkstaat has an all-too-solid place in the political theory and practice of the West...
...WHEN THE Popular Front of Lithuania split its nation off from the USSR, one of its very first decrees proposed to expel from citizenship the 45 percent of the country that was ethnically Russian, and thus to deprive them of jobs, housing, and pensions, which were available only to citizens...
...but plenty of people said they got it perfectly, it was only cosmopolitan liberals like me who hadn't a clue...
...I think Hegel got it right in the 1820s, when he said citizenship should derive from residence in a territory and obedience to its laws, and that was all...
...My first thought was that the Lithuanians didn't "get it," the spirit of '89...
...I could see the Bucharest crowd, assembled by the state to back the Ceauescus, call instead for their downfall, and I could actually see the dictator on his balcony shake—CNN replayed that moment again and again...
...Because he didn't believe in the Volkstaat, and didn't want Germany to become one, Hegel was long considered "reactionary...
...without looking very hard, it found a multitude of ordinary people who had been out in the streets for days or weeks, who were sometimes silly but often smart and complex, ragged and drained but radiant, amazed that history was giving them a chance to act like human beings...
...And of course for Tito's Yugoslavia...
...MARSHALL BERMAN teaches political theory and urbanism at the City University of New York and is the author of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air and Adventures in Marxism...
...I could see students in Beijing, playing guitars, singing freedom songs, and marching around with their Statue of Liberty...
...We need to make it clear, to ourselves as much as the world, that we want to bring people together, but we don't want them all to be one people...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
