How the Dominoes Fell
STOKES, GALE
How the Dominoes Fell Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel By Vladimir Tismaneanu Free Press. 312 pp. $24.95. After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central...
...Jeffrey Goldfarb takes up the matter from there...
...Thus, with the possible exception of Poland, the commotion in 1989 was moral and political, not social...
...As Tismaneanu himself reminds us, though, reform of the Leninist system could never have come to much...
...As Goldfarb correctly sees it, though, civil society must include structures for ensuring that pluralism does not degenerate into impasse or violence...
...Solidarity and Civic Forum have long since collapsed as national movements...
...No doubt that experience was inspirational throughout the region, but a good argument can be made that the spark of revolution elsewhere was the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria, which led to the collapse of the East German regime and brought the dominoes crashing down...
...To be sure, social change took place in Hungary during the 1980s—bour-geoisification, it has been called...
...A look at Poland is telling, for if civil society brought about its revolution, and is the foundation of democracy, why is the nation so politically unstable...
...25.00...
...Local government (particularly strong in Poland), elementary education (the once unitary Budapest school district now has 24 subdistricts), universities (a private one in Varna, Bulgaria, has attracted thousands of enrollees), civic associations (the Rotary Club is back in Poland), a vigorous independent press (24 Chasa in Sofia, Cotideanul in Bucharest, Obserwator in Warsaw), the emergence of myriad small businesses—all of the developments in these sectors indicate that something to the good is evolving under our noses...
...Tismaneanu's use of the concept as the chief explanation of events in the whole of Eastern Europe, however, is questionable...
...It is in the interest of democrats everywhere to assist such fledgling initiatives...
...Today it means finding a way to accommodate a new and—to those accustomed to the relative quiet of one-party rule—frightening array of voices in a free nation, while avoiding fragmentation or a return to coercion...
...Until the summer of 1989, when Trabants carrying East Germans to the West German Embassy in Prague started to clog the roads, Vaclav Havel and his small band of Charter 77 colleagues had evoked remarkably little response in Czechoslovakian society at large...
...Had Communism been able to create a viable economy, it might well have survived...
...Under Communism, civil society meant encouraging cultural, intellectual and religious initiatives to counter a false regime...
...Indeed, Solidarity's success in 1989 testifies to the political effect of a civil society...
...The revolution was negotiated among elites with very tenuous claims to be representing universal popular forces...
...In the remaining nations, the theory of civil society is even less useful...
...Consequently, by the late 1980s both progressive Communists and democratic opponents concluded that political changes had to precede economic ones...
...Even the participants in the great 1989 Budapest rallies were primarily students, intellectuals and white-collar workers...
...Antipolitics effectively called a lie a lie...
...The antipolitical strategy and the old functions of civil society were noble and inspiring...
...Reviewed by Gale Stokes Professor of History, Rice University The dominant explanation for the 1989 upheavals in Eastern Europe is the emergence of "civil society...
...The belated appearance and precipitous demise of the New Forum in East Germany suggests, too, its failure to widely resonate there...
...Near the end, it also introduced an income tax, permitted private firms employing up to 500 workers, and allowed foreign companies to withdraw profits...
...Fortunately, a pluralism that is not based on an intellectual elite is growing organically in Eastern Europe...
...In After the Fall, a much more chatty book of personal reflections, he argues that the most serious problem the nascent politics faces today is a Manichean viewpoint carried over from the preceding period...
...In his passionate yet disciplined account of Eastern Europe's four-decade experience with Communism, Tismaneanu maintains that autonomous societies arose from the ruling regimes' complete lack of legitimacy...
...Only the Poles fostered a mode of civic activity clearly associated with an independent opposition...
...The term has a long history, but in the context of postwar Communism it denotes a realm of independent and voluntary human actions, whether social, political or economic, as opposed to the sphere of activity controlled by the State...
...Later, despite martial law, Solidarity managed to encourage loosely structured groups outside the purview of the State...
...Hungary's Alliance of Free Democrats is in disarray...
...The formation of the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) spurred the beginnings of an independent formation there as early as 1976...
...As Slobodan Milosevic proved in Serbia, they can go either way...
...During the 1989 revolutions, Tismaneanu believes, a false principle of authority was overthrown in favor of these countersocieties, thus creating the conditions for "reinventing politics" in Eastern Europe...
...But it was the Communist regime that split up the huge State trusts, joined the IMF and the World Bank, reformed the banking system, granted alternative forms of property...
...But using the term civil society to describe them, rather than the more neutral pluralism, risks diverting attention from the rise of diversity and minimizing the need for structures to accommodate it...
...Although a democratic movement helped push the Hungarian Communists toward reform, it did not penetrate society deeply...
...And prior to '89, of course, nothing so much as approximating an independent society could be found in Bulgaria, Romania or Albania...
...But save for a few at the very top (Havel and Bulgarian President Zhelyu Zhelev, for instance, both of whom are teetering), the intellectuals who propagated antipolitics have largely disappeared from the scene...
...Having rejected Communism, some East Europeans want to reject all of the Left's goals and to deny the State any active role...
...At present, what is vital are institutions that can, in Goldfarb's words, "civilize the articulation of political difference...
...Tismaneanu argues that antipolitics and the new evolutionism had "a real social impact," implying that Eastern Europeans were galvanized into establishing a variety of autonomous organizations...
...Certainly the idea of civil society has, to some extent, been fruitful in analyzing the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc, especially in Poland...
...By behaving as if they were free under monolithic Communist administrations, independent thinkers and cultural pluralists throughout Eastern Europe fundamentally challenged the Leninist premise that the Party was the sole legitimate social force...
...In fact, whatever impact there was took the form of ideas and opinions rather than social structures...
...Naturally, economic hardships played a critical role in forcing the upheavals, and they are difficult to separate from civil influences...
...Antipolitics was, in this respect, profoundly political, as was most evident in the case of Solidarity...
...Not until 1989 did Eastern Europe's social transformation begin in earnest...
...Its self-limiting character and ethical basis notwithstanding, a union of 10 million members could not avoid confronting the State over the issue of power...
...The author hopes East Europeans will temper their distaste for social intervention and muddle through to sustainable democracies...
...267 pp...
...In reinventing politics, it seems, the East Europeans are reinventing politicians, too...
...Specifically, the hand of government is necessary to prevent the oppression of minorities, counteract monopoly and maintain forums of discourse...
...Now Vladimir Tismaneanu has presented what is likely to become the standard version of how the growth of civil society produced a wave of democratic revolution...
...In Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, antipolitical writers and the nonorganizational Charter 77 movement began to carve out their own space for alternative public activity...
...Besides, mass demonstrations do not necessarily indicate a separate civil society...
...Yet even in describing this period speaking of civil society is troublesome, except perhaps as an alternative to general terms like pluralism or democracy...
...After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe By Jeffrey Goldfarb Basic...
...The undermining of the whole notion of a Communist ideology opened a hole that the antipoliticals' engaging ethics fit perfectly...
...When new social forces represented by the "antipoliticals"—thinkers such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik who urged an ethics utterly distinct from the State ideology?engaged the political, economic and moral crises of the region, they "resulted in the development of civil societies in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia...
...and in Bulgaria almost all the original opposition members have quit the leadership of the United Democratic Forum...
...it did not by itself create civil society...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
