7

1989 AND BEYOND

Joachim von Puttkamer

Ottomanization rather than Finlandization – since 1986, this was Timothy Garton Ash’s prospect
for the Soviet bloc in the light of a re-emerging idea of Central Europe.1 He imagined an empire
crumbling away and nation states gradually claiming full independence rather than a geopo-
litical rearrangement of hegemonic spheres. His remark was meant to make the Western reader
aware of intellectual revival in the region, of the erosion of the communist regimes in the face
of increasingly self-assertive populations, and of the potential changes that Mikhail Gorbachev’s
rise to power held in store. Historical analogy served this purpose, awkward as the comparison
might seem. The Soviet Union was much different from the late Ottoman Empire, both in terms
of military power and in terms of its almost omnipresent bureaucracy. It had signed the CSCE
agreements on its own accord, and surely it was not going to yield to outward pressure. Finland’s
guided parliamentary democracy, modelled on the Scandinavian welfare state, seemed much
closer to the aspirations of Central European intellectuals than the inefficient state building of the
post-Ottoman nation states in the Balkans. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union still seemed like it
would last forever, so that implementing a fair degree of autonomy within its hegemonic sphere
along Finnish lines seemed the best option available for its constituent states. Yet the alternative
notion of Ottomanization used by Garton Ash hinted at the fact that there was more at stake than
Soviet hegemony. It evoked spectres of political instability, national conflict and authoritarian
rule that had risen out of the debris of demolished empires, not only in the Balkans, but in all of
interwar Central Europe. Restoring Central Europe would be as much about state building and
national emancipation, rebuilding economies in rapid decline, establishing trust and tackling cor-
ruption, promoting democracy and resisting populist temptations, and last but not least, would be
a test of Western commitment to its brethren further to the East.

Promises of democracy: dissident concepts and the 1989 revolutions

Dissidents themselves had seldom explicitly named Finland as a model for Central Europe,
but it did figure in their political conceptions. In November 1976, Jacek Kuroń had found
‘Finlandization’ to be a worthy goal, sufficiently moderate to appear attainable, ambitious

1 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Does Central Europe Exist?’ in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of
Central Europe, ed. Timothy Garton Ash (New York: Random House, 1989), 179–213, here 209 [first
published 1986]; Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Reform or Revolution?’ in Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity,
242–303, here 252–5.

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enough to motivate social movements in Poland to organize and enter into dialogue with the
communist government. With the Brezhnev Doctrine in mind, he claimed that parliamentary
democracy within the Soviet sphere would have to safeguard the individual against the totali-
tarian ambitions of the state. It was the utmost political aim, he wrote, beyond which further
aspirations could only be irresponsible dreams. Just a few weeks earlier, Adam Michnik had
outlined a ‘New Evolutionism’ along similar lines.2 These two essays marked a departure from
Marxist revisionism and with it a departure from the hope that socialism could be reformed
from within the party. Since the Soviet Union would not allow socialism to take on a human
face, Michnik wrote, society would have to defend itself against dictatorship and force the party
state to soften repression and allow space for independent political activity. Evolutionism was
a formula that called for patience while Soviet power was still in place. From then on, politi-
cal opposition became a moral stance, and the public defence of human rights became its most
visible expression.
In hindsight, this break with revisionism and the concomitant desire to supplant the old,
Marxist utopia with the new and much more practicable utopia of human rights marked a
major step towards the rise of Western democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, even if it
could not yet be fully spelled out at the time. But this development was hardly straightforward
or inevitable. Until 1989, oppositional thought bore many revisionist traces, and when the
communist regimes came down in the autumn of 1989, the notion of taking socialist democ-
racy seriously no longer offered a viable alternative. Western democracy, long banned from
political thought, now seemed within reach, and within the next decade, it mostly won out
against populist temptations of a more authoritarian nature. These developments can be traced
back to dissident thought, but they had not been clearly staked out prior to 1989.
Criticizing alleged distortions of the communist party state had been at the very core of
revisionist thinking since its beginnings in the 1950s. Throughout the region, intellectuals as
much as the party rank and file had been horrified at the dimensions of violence that were
disclosed after Joseph Stalin’s death and in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in
March 1956.3 Most disturbing for them was the fact that party members themselves had fallen
victim to fabricated charges made by a security apparatus that seemed to have spun out of con-
trol. Such discontent among party members had triggered the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Throughout the Soviet bloc, leftist intellectuals, mostly party members themselves, argued that
socialism, once triumphant, should be able to afford a retreat from violence and avoid the mis-
takes of the past. Such calls echoed the arguments of the late 1940s that each country should
develop its own path towards socialism and avoid the horrors of protracted civil war along the
Soviet model. Legal scholars then condensed these notions into theories of socialist legality.

2 Jacek Kuroń, ‘Myśli o programie działania’, in Jacek Kuroń, Zasady ideowe (Paris: Instytut Literacki),
11–33, in English: idem and Krystyna Aytoun, ‘Document on Contemporary Poland: Reflections on a
Program of Action’, The Polish Review 22, no. 3 (1977): 51–69, www.jstor.org/stable/25777499; Jacek
Kuroń, ‘Zasady ideowe’ [Ideological principles], in Kuroń, Zasady ideowe, 45–81; Adam Michnik, ‘Le
nouvel évolutionnisme’, in 1956 Varsovie-Budapest: La deuxième révolution d’Octobre, eds Pierre Kende
and Krzysztof Pomian (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 201–14 [Polish translation in Adam Michnik, Szanse polskiej
demokracji (London: Aneks 1984), 77–87].
3 Michal Kopeček, Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední
Evropě 1953–1960 (Prague: Argo, 2009), 293–304, forthcoming in English: Quest for the Revolution’s
Lost Meaning: The Origins of Marxist Revisionism in East Central Europe 1953–1960 (Leiden: Brill Aca-
demic Publishers); George Schöpflin, Politics in Eastern Europe: 1945–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
104–26.

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In Czechoslovakia, ideas of a non-antagonistic, creative socialism had sparked the reformist

movement, which culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968 and had been utterly disappointed.4
Violent repression against strikers and demonstrators blatantly contradicted the party state’s
claim that it enjoyed overwhelming popular support.
So when opposition circles started to monitor the violation of human rights and summoned
the state to adhere to its own legal principles, they tapped into widespread disquietude and
transformed it into an effective political strategy. By taking recourse to the newly emerging
international language of human rights, dissidents parted with Marxism while retaining a uto-
pian element that transcended bloc confrontation. Yet the idea of the rule of law – held high
by the founders of the KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników/Workers’ Defence Committee),
Charter 77 and the contributors to the journal Beszélő, by opposition groups in the GDR and
Soviet dissenters (inakomysljashchie) – firmly pointed towards the West. In the 1975 Helsinki
Accords, dissidents found the public support that secured their moral standing at home and,
often enough, protected them against arrest and incarceration.5 Publishing abroad, as dissidents
had practised it since the 1950s, generally supported the development of an alternative public
sphere far beyond the human rights discourse.6 For the small number of Romanian dissident
intellectuals who were unable to build stable networks within their home country, Western
attention was crucial for being heard at all.7
But there was more to this shift away from Marxist revisionism and towards a seemingly non-
ideological political strategy supported by new transnational networks that reached out across
the Iron Curtain and connected the various dissident groups with one another. In calling for
outspoken resistance against the totalitarian ambitions of the party state, dissidents backed down
from the utopian transformation of society and rather aimed for its emancipation. Emancipation
was not just an empty slogan. Curbing political violence implied opening up spaces of civic
responsibility. By drawing attention to human rights violations, underground publications –
‘samizdat’, ‘tamizdat’ (in exile) or ‘drugi obieg’ – formed an alternative public sphere. These
activities demanded courage, civic engagement and creativity, and were the most effective way
of maintaining links with fellow activists in exile. Anti-politics, as promoted by the Hungarian
writer György Konrád and the Czech playwright Václav Havel, and Václav Benda’s notion of a
‘parallel polis’ substantiated this claim and served to defend civic activism against the ideological
charge of promoting bourgeois capitalism or a ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and socialism.
The state should care for its own affairs and leave society to itself; György Konrád defined the
essence of anti-political opposition: ‘its essential activity is to work for destatification’.8 This
disclaimer, however, did not make the question of what a future political order would look like

4 Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–28;Vladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring:
The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971).
5 Robert Brier, ed., Entangled Protest: Transnational Approaches to the History of Dissent in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2013); Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov, eds, Samiz-
dat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books,
2013).
6 Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Cur-
tain (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014).
7 Cristina Petrescu, From Robin Hood to Don Quixote: Resistance and Dissent in Communist Romania
(Bucureşti: Ed. Enciclopedică, 2013).
8 György Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 229.

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go away. In Poland in December of 1975, Edward Lipiński, Jacek Kuroń and other signatories
of the ‘Letter of the 59’ demanded free elections and the separation of powers as a consequence
flowing directly from those civil rights that had been guaranteed in the Helsinki agreement.
In contrast, the Václav Havel of 1978 saw traditional parliamentary democracy as a transitory
means for recovering the self-esteem of society at best, but certainly not as a long-term solution
to the deep crisis of global technological civilization.9
Havel, Michnik and other prominent dissidents were soon to be credited with having rein-
troduced the idea of civil society into European political thought. But after 1989, they were
equally reproached for having allegedly overburdened the new democracies with unattainable
moral standards.10 In truth, these are two sides of the same coin, and both concern the afterlife
of a concept that had its origins in a specific historical situation. Originally, the idea of anti-
politics or ‘living in truth’ had offered a moral stance that claimed to transcend ideological
confrontations. The idea’s proponents sought to translate it into social activity without risk-
ing violence and bloodshed. When it became clear in the summer of 1989 that the Brezhnev
Doctrine was coming to an end, anti-politics lost its validity. But it had indeed helped pave the
way for political pluralism and for the politics of consensus and compromise. And for the pivotal
moment of 1989, it had imbued its authors with moral credibility, which the old regime utterly
lacked. In this respect, it had served its purpose well.
In economic and social thought, revisionist concepts were more persistent and less prone
to conform to the shifts that had taken place in political thought. Notions of market socialism
had been widespread among reformist economists throughout Eastern Europe since the de-
Stalinization of the late 1950s and generally followed the arguments Oskar Lange had already
made before the Second World War. Coordinating state-owned enterprises via the market
combined the anti-totalitarian impetus of decentralization with the prospect of true worker
control over the means of production. In these debates, however, ideological and theoretical
elements outweighed the rather disenchanting results that different forms of market socialism
had achieved – in Hungary after 1968, the somewhat cosmetic gains in Wojciech Jaruzelski’s
Poland, and the particularly disappointing fiasco of workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia.11
It has been argued that the neoclassical background of the debates on market socialism ulti-
mately paved the way for the breakthrough to radical market capitalism and neo-liberal ‘shock
therapy’ after 1989/90, which was imposed most radically on Poland and Czechoslovakia.12

9 Andrzej Friszke, Czas KOR-u. Jacek Kuroń a geneza Solidarności [The time of KOR: Jacek Kuroń and
the origins of Solidarity] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 83–9; Václav Havel, The Power of the
Powerless, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), 89–92 [first published as Moc bezmocných
(London: Londýnské listy, 1978)].
10 Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher
Kings (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003), 313–64; Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political
Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 1992), 31–6; Milan Znoj, ‘Václav Havel, His Idea of Civil Society,
and the Czech Liberal Tradition’, in Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts,
and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989, eds Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik (Buda-
pest: CEU Press, 2015), 109–37.
11 Iván T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 96–8, 146–52, 162–238 and 263–4; Christoph Boyer, ed.,
Zur Physiognomie sozialistischer Wirtschaftsreformen. Die Sowjetunion, Polen, die Tschechoslowakei, Ungarn,
die DDR und Jugoslawien im Vergleich (Frankfurt a.M.:Vittorio Klostermann, 2007).
12 Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

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Until the autumn of 1989, the ideal of workers’ self-management remained prominent even
in Poland, and a return to capitalism via privatization was almost anathema. In Poland, as in
Hungary and Gorbachev’s Russia, private entrepreneurship remained confined to small firms
primarily working in trade and service. Full-scale privatization within an authoritarian frame-
work following the Latin American model, as advocated by the Polish liberal thinker Mirosław
Dzielski, remained a marginal position.13 Again, the political corset of state socialism defined
the limits of oppositionist thought, and when this corset had been cast off, the now victorious
opposition had to sail in largely uncharted waters.
The one element of revisionist thinking that held sway from the 1950s all the way through
the revolutions of 1989 was the biting critique of the bureaucratic usurpation of power by the
nomenklatura. Ever since Milovan Djilas’ New Class was published in 1954, turning incisive
class analysis against the ruling party itself had been a recurrent motive of oppositionist thought,
its most prominent practitioners being Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski in Poland and Konrád
and Iván Szelényi in Hungary.14 Throughout these decades, communist party elites had done
little to counter the appearance of clientelism, privilege, corruption and arbitrariness, and had
forfeited all credibility.15 The urge now to actually oust the nomenklatura might be regarded
as the most powerful legacy of revisionist thought. It gave a voice to widespread discontent
with the existing order, and when the moment came, it left behind its reformist origins and
helped unite masses of demonstrators out on the streets behind previously marginal intellectual
oppositionist groups. But it held no guiding principle in itself that would have been capable of
creating a new political order. Drawing on strong moral overtones, in the long run it came to
feed populist anti-elitism and resentment.
Set on challenging the totalitarian aspirations of the communist party state, on peacefully
wringing power from the communists and on overcoming the bloc divide without provoking
another Soviet military intervention, the vaguely defined blend of human rights, pluralism, market
economy and anti-nomenklatura sentiments within dissident political thought could not provide a
blueprint for politics and society in a post-communist world. New dividing lines began to unfold,
with positions on national sovereignty being the most important. According to staunchly anti-
communist groups like Fidesz in Hungary or the Confederation of Independent Poland (KPN),
national freedom could only be achieved through the restoration of full sovereignty. For them,
overcoming the global division of the Cold War was equivalent to breaking free from Soviet
military domination. In his memoirs, Jacek Kuroń recalls how Leszek Moczulski sharply attacked
him for not having called for full national independence in the ‘Letter of the 59’.16 Oppositionist
circles engaged in vivid debates on the nation’s past and future, and while these debates certainly

13 Mirosław Dzielski, Bóg, wolność, własność [God, liberty, property], ed. Miłowit Kuniński (Kraków:
Księgarnia Akademicka, 2001); Joachim von Puttkamer, ‘Der schwere Abschied vom Volkseigentum.
Privatisierungsdebatten in Polen und Ostmitteleuropa in den 1980er Jahren’, in Privatisierung. Idee und
Praxis seit den 1970er Jahren, eds Norbert Frei and Dietmar Süß (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012),
158–83.
14 Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957); Jacek
Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, An Open Letter to the Party: A Revolutionary Socialist Manifesto Written in
a Polish Prison (London: International Socialism, 1965); György Konrád and Iván Szelényi, The Intel-
lectuals on the Road to Class Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1979).
15 Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power: Anti-Corruption Campaigns and Legitimation Crisis (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 1993).
16 Jacek Kuroń, Autobiografia, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: Wydawn. Krytyki Politycznej, 2011), 384–5 [from Jacek
Kuroń, Gwiezdny Czas (London: Aneks, 1991)].

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

caused some division, they helped to further the development of an alternative public sphere.17
The fear of a re-emerging National Democracy began to haunt the left opposition in Poland. In
Hungary, populist voices within the opposition had taken the lead over liberal intellectuals by
addressing the dire conditions of Magyar minorities in Romania and Slovakia. In 1985, István
Csurka called the spiritual renewal of the Magyar nation a most noble task that entitled Hungary
to take a leading role in the Carpathian Basin.18 Adam Michnik and Jan-Józef Lipski, Jan Patočka,
Petr Pithart and János Kis and others responded early on to the revival of national thought along
interwar lines by calling for truthful reflection on national history.19 Critical voices such as Ján
Mlynárik even called for a reassessment of the expulsion of the German population.20 In a similar
vein, intellectuals throughout the region conceived of Central Europe as a space of heterogeneity,
hybridity and ambivalence rather than of homogeneous nations. In this, they offered an Eastern
contribution to the Western debate on post-modernity as much as an implicit argument against
right-wing nationalism at home. The controversial debates on national sovereignty, character and
identity accounted in part for the relative weakness of dissent in Romania, where the opposition
could barely play the national card against a communist regime that had based its own propaganda
on asserting a certain degree of national autonomy.
In 1979, Czech dissident Milan Šimečka argued that the communist dictatorship had already
lost all means of reforming itself, so that any bold reform would only come after its inevitable
collapse. For Šimečka, the only possible outcome of ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia would
be a democratic system that restored legitimate authority and workers’ control.21 One year later,
Solidarity (Solidarność) opted for workers’ control as the primary goal and the first step towards
the long-term prospect of pluralist democracy. The focus on self-government in all spheres of
society preserved utopian features of revisionism. The formula of the ‘self-limiting revolution’
hinted at the difficulties activists faced in spelling out a coherent platform that might reconcile
socialism with pluralist democracy while still working within the Soviet sphere of influence.22
For many months, evolutionism as propagated by Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń served as
a safeguard against the temptations of premature radicalism, and it would do so again after the
suspension of military law. In this respect, evolutionism might actually be seen as the major dis-
sident achievement, no less important than challenging dictatorship itself. Keeping in mind the
experience of military crackdown in December 1970 and military law in December 1981, the
recourse to evolutionism in Poland restrained public discontent as long as the communist regime
was still able to crush the opposition physically, backed by Soviet military might as it was. It
would do so again during the Round Table Talks in Poland and Hungary in 1989. Later on, the
notion that building democracy demanded patience instilled intellectual elites throughout the
region with confidence in the face of disinterest and apathy among the population and provided

17 Gregor Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft. Oppositionelles Denken zur Nation im ostmit-
teleuropäischen Samizdat 1976–1992 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015).
18 István Csurka, ‘Uj magyar önépités’ [New Hungarian self-development], in A Monori Tanácskozás 1985
június 14–16, ed. János M. Rainer (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2005), 28–42.
19 Michal Kopeček, ‘Human Rights Facing a National Past: Dissident ‘Civic Patriotism’ and the Return
of History in East Central Europe, 1968–1989’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 573–602.
20 Ján Mlynárik, Thesen zur Aussiedlung der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei 1945–1947 (Waldkraiburg:
Danubius, 1985).
21 Milan Šimečka, The Restoration of Order: The Normalization of Czechoslovakia, 1969–1976 (London:
Verso, 1984), 146–52 [first published as Obnovení pořádku. Příspěvek k typologii reálného socialismu (Köln:
Index, 1979)].
22 Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, ed. Jan T. Gross (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1984).
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them with an argument against populist urgings. To develop the values and institutions of an
open society was not to be achieved with a single liberating stroke. Once the communists had
been brought down, the far-sightedness of the intellectuals for more than a decade helped safe-
guard the democratic process against disappointment and the menaces of apathy and populism.23
The legacy of dissident thought for the emerging democracies was manifold.24 The general
consensus about key goals of implementing civil rights and safeguarding pluralism provided
political guidelines for negotiating transitions to parliamentary democracy. Economic reforms,
an exchange of elites and a reassertion of national sovereignty had been defined as the most
pressing issues, though open debate on how to take them on had only just begun in 1989. The
revolutions of 1989 would be guided as much by immediate necessities as they were by political
ideas. Revolutions can hardly be planned in advance. The revolutionary situation itself would
bring about revolutionary mentalities, the spontaneity of which would quickly transcend earlier
concepts. And yet, Czech dissident Jiřína Šiklová soon sparked awareness that it might not even
be these former dissidents who would shape the new democracies, but rather professionals who
had hitherto remained in a somewhat amorphous ‘gray zone’.25

The revolutions of 1989

In 1989, Central Europe’s communist regimes collapsed one by one in rapid succession.26 The
domino theory by which Eisenhower had characterized communist takeovers in Southeast Asia
in 1954 now played out in the opposite direction. Though many arguments have been made in
an attempt to identify specific causes and trajectories in each country, the events of 1989 were
closely intertwined. Poland’s Round Table Talks immediately turned into a model for negotia-
tions in Hungary.27 The Hungarian transformation caused mass flight from the GDR and the
downfall of the Berlin Wall. This, in turn, sparked mass demonstrations in Czechoslovakia, vio-
lent unrest in Romania and the less spectacular surrender of the Bulgarian communist regime.
Gorbachev’s perestroika had encouraged the opposition and dispelled fears of a revived Brezhnev
Doctrine. Events in Eastern Europe soon played out on the Soviet periphery itself, most notably
in the Baltic Republics and the Caucasus.
It has been argued that the domino theory overstresses the importance of mass mobiliza-
tion and obscures the diversity of the 1989 revolutions.28 Yet viewing the course of events as

23 Katarzyna Chimiak, ROAD: Polityka czasu przełomu. Ruch Obywatelski – Akcja Demokratyczna,
­1990–1991 [ROAD: politics in the time of transition – the Citizens’ Action, 1990–1991] (Płock:
Fundacja Lorga, 2010), 33–8.
24 Kopeček and Wciślik, Thinking Through Transition; András Bozóki, ed., Intellectuals and Politics in Central
Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 1999).
25 Jiřina Šiklová, ‘The “Gray Zone” and the Future of the Dissidents in Czechoslovakia’, Social Research 57,
no. 2 (1990): 348–63.
26 Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993); Petr Blažek and Jaroslav Pažout, Dominový efekt. Opozicní hnutí v
zemích strední Evropy a pád komunistických rezimu v roce 1989 [The domino effect: opposition move-
ments in the countries of Central Europe and the fall of the Communist regimes in 1989] (Prague:
Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2013); Dragoş Petrescu, Entangled Revolutions: The Breakdown of the
Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Bucureşti: Editura Enciclopedică, 2014).
27 András Bozóki, ed., The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy: Analysis and
Documents (Budapest: CEU Press, 2002).
28 Krishan Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2001), 26 and 31–70; Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2016), 54–6.
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 Joachim von Puttkamer

a chain-reaction might also serve to highlight their similarities and entanglements. The com-
promises struck first by the exhausted Polish communists and then by their reform-minded
Hungarian comrades sparked more radical action in the neighbouring countries. In the GDR
and Czechoslovakia, mass protest on the streets forced the more obstinate communist regimes
to surrender. After the Berlin Wall fell and a communist parliament elected Václav Havel presi-
dent of Czechoslovakia, both regimes embarked on round table negotiations that sealed their
fates. The round tables, to quote Jerzy Holzer, turned into a universal instrument.29 They shaped
non-violent, peaceful transitions and gave communists the faint hope that they might preserve
a share in power or at least be credited for having surrendered of their own accord. At first
sight, developments in Southeastern Europe looked somewhat different. Within Yugoslavia,
the reform-minded Croatian and Slovenian Communist Parties announced in early December
1989 that free parliamentary elections would be held the following spring with the aim of tak-
ing advantage of massive opposition sentiment and countering the centralizing pressure exerted
by Slobodan Milošević and the Serbian political leadership. Influenced by mass demonstrations,
the newly installed Bulgarian party leader Petŭr Mladenov also announced multi-party elections
in mid-December. In Romania, the regime was toppled in an outburst of violence, some of
which was carefully staged so as to secure power to a reformist group within the state apparatus.
In turn, these events throughout the Soviet sphere reflected back on developments in Poland
and Hungary, where the remaining strongholds of communist power rapidly melted away. In
the end, most transitions were negotiated. Once the ruling party had taken a seat at the round
table, the question was simply how to determine the role that their socialist successors would
be allowed to play in the ensuing decade. Romania and Bulgaria were exceptional only in the
sense that the opposition was far too weak to force the communist regime into outright nego-
tiations but allowed it to define the conditions of transformation largely by themselves. Serbia
was exceptional in that it took another decade to force the communists to step down in 2000,
after the first demonstrations had failed in 1997.
Events in Romania aptly demonstrated that massive police violence or an outright military
crackdown following the model of the ‘Chinese solution’, though seriously considered by both
Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceauşescu, was no longer a viable option in Central Europe.30
Armed clashes in the streets of Timişoara and elsewhere created a power vacuum which the
quickly-formed National Salvation Front (Frontul Salvării Naţionale) had to fill for lack of an
established opposition with which to negotiate a peaceful transition.31 In Bulgaria, Mladenov
resigned after only seven months in office due to allegations that he had seriously considered
sending tanks against demonstrators in December.32 Throughout the Soviet bloc, events of
the previous two decades had amply demonstrated that communist regimes might be upheld
by the use of brute force against the vast majority of the population, but that they could no
longer solve internal problems with the use of violence. An additional aspect should be kept

29 Jerzy Holzer, ‘Der Runde Tisch. Internationale Geschichte eines politischen Möbels’, in Das Revo-
lutionsjahr 1989. Die demokratische Revolution in Osteuropa als transnationale Zäsur, ed. Bernd Florath
(Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 226–32.
30 Ther, Europe since 1989, 71–3; Martin Sabrow, ed., 1989 und die Rolle der Gewalt (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2012).
31 Peter Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005); Dragoş Petrescu, Explaining the Romanian Revolution of 1989: Culture, Structure, and Contingency
(Bucureşti: Editura Enciclopedică, 2010).
32 Richard J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
219.

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 1989 and beyond

in mind. In most countries of the region, the territory of the state was not contested during or
immediately after the revolutions. Yugoslavia as well as the Baltic and Caucasian fringes of the
Soviet Union were the obvious exceptions, and it is in these places that the struggle for power
and territory turned violent. Only Estonia, which seemed largely irrelevant in political and
economic terms, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union peacefully. Federations were vulner-
able, but their constituent republics equally served the purpose of providing a stable institutional
framework. In general, territorial stability made it possible to channel revolutionary change into
free parliamentary elections, which could in turn quickly legitimize the new order or, as in the
case of the GDR, substantiate the claims for unification with West Germany. It was the basic
precondition for legal continuity that allowed for transitions without rupture, and in most cases
the brief power vacuum was quickly filled.
The general consensus on how to instil the state with new political legitimacy was easily
defined and quickly exhausted. Round table talks, at whatever stage of the process they took
place, generally agreed on a similar set of measures. Civil rights were to be reasserted, police
violence to be curbed and political pluralism allowed to develop freely. Elections to parlia-
ment were to restore the body politic. Communists’ attempts to preserve their self-respect and
to safeguard a smooth transition by securing the office of the head of state were successful in
Poland, where the Sejm had elected General Jaruzelski to the newly-created office of President
in July 1989 with the tacit support of the victorious Solidarity opposition. This compromise
lasted little more than a year and quickly turned into a liability for the new democracy. The
Hungarian communists tried to strike a similar agreement in vain, only to deepen the emerg-
ing split between moderate populists and radical anti-communists within the opposition. In
Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, the Communist Party had given in to popular demands for
Václav Havel to preside over revolutionary transition while the government was formally still
headed by a Communist Party member. In contrast, Romania’s Ion Iliescu, Bulgaria’s Petŭr
Mladenov, Slovenia’s Milan Kučan and, most of all, Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević demonstrated
that the presidency could indeed help former communists hold on to political power.
The carnivalesque subversion of the existing order and the rapid spread of spontaneous
self-organization were indispensable preconditions for peaceful transition. But in the long run,
they also became a liability. The 4 June elections in Poland and the reburial of Imre Nagy
in Hungary, the fall of the Berlin Wall half a year later and the subsequent general strike in
Czechoslovakia each marked the rapid expansion of public spheres and an explosion of political
expression.33 Everything suddenly seemed possible and within reach. The creation of a revolu-
tionary community with a romantic ethos of harmony, most visible in Czechoslovakia, took an
iconoclastic turn and raised popular expectations for a moral purge. More sober natures warned
against the witch-hunts they believed were imminent. But even without such warnings it was
obvious that disillusionment was soon to follow when merry public happenings would have to
give way to formal, legalistic procedures.
Once power had been wrested from the communists, pressure rose to oust them at all
levels, from government administration and the judiciary all the way down to the workplace
and educational institutions. This process was not easy to control and sometimes became
chaotic. In Poland, throughout the winter of 1989/90, radical demonstrators frequently belea-
guered militia and state security offices, though without being able to secure their files as civic

33 Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002); James Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslo-
vakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

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c­ ommittees had done in East Germany. In the first months of 1990, the newly emerging police
trade unions in Poland fervently purged the regional militia leadership. Elections to the newly-
created institutions of local self-government were precipitated so as to sweep away the nomen-
klatura and bring new people to power. At the same time, the new minister of justice actually
had to urge the judiciary to elect new judges as presidents of the voivodeship courts rather
than stick to the old guard. Similar developments could be observed in Czechoslovakia and
Hungary. In all three countries, the question of how harshly the new state should deal with
the protagonists of the old regime became a major dividing line within the emerging political
spectrum, if not a major rift. The ‘Dunagate scandal’ in Hungary in January 1990 uncovered
the continued activities of the secret police and poisoned the ongoing electoral campaign.34
In Czechoslovakia, the new democratic elite feared that old secret-police networks might
corrupt the political process by blackmailing former informants. In East Germany, the charge
of having informally cooperated with state security services first brought down the leader of
the conservatives, then the head of the Social Democratic Party.35 This issue would last for
decades, and it would poison political competition. The dissolution of the former communist
parties (with the exception of Czechoslovakia) and their reorganization into a socialist left only
fuelled suspicions that the old nomenklatura was planning to hold on to its position. Romania
and Bulgaria, where the democratic opposition had been too weak to wrest power from the
communists and where the latter had effected the transformation largely by themselves, fared
even worse in this respect.
In Yugoslavia, events took a different turn. With hindsight, developments have often
been described as taking the precipitous path towards disintegration and ethnic war, pre-
ceded by national mobilization in the constituent republics since the late 1970s.36 Though
the picture is much more complex, and the institutional weaknesses of socialist Yugoslavia,
the social dynamics and the external factors have to be taken into account, ethnic national-
ism was indeed a powerful element which shaped the transition to multi-party systems in the
constituent republics. In response to the rise of the communist-turned-nationalist Slobodan
Milošević and his ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ in Serbia, Slovenia’s reform-minded com-
munists took a national turn themselves, whereas their Croat and Bosnian counterparts gave
way to staunch oppositionists like Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović. In this course
of events, one feature sticks out as exceptional. Unlike in Central Europe, the rhetoric of
national unity in disintegrating Yugoslavia served to curb anti-communist sentiment rather
than to fuel it. As Armina Galijaš has demonstrated for Banja Luka, national unity was not
just a trope used to incite fear of one’s neighbour, but an appeal to overcome previous
cleavages between communists and their former opponents which dated back to the Second
World War. Such an appeal for national reconciliation, inconceivable as it was to nationalists
in countries further to the north, reflected the soft nature of Yugoslav communism, which

34 Rudolf L. Tőkés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change and Political Succession,
1957–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 378.
35 Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face, 153–84; Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret
Police, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 201–2.
36 Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918–2005 (Washington, DC:
Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), 285–379; Jasna Dragović-Soso, ‘Why did Yugoslavia Disinte-
grate? An Overview of Contending Explanations’, in State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Per-
spectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration, eds Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragović-Soso (West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University Press, 2008), 1–39; Florian Bieber, Armina Galijaš and Rory Archer, eds, Debating
the End of Yugoslavia (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

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had not been built on Soviet occupation and where mass repression had largely receded into
distant memory.37 Josip Broz Tito’s towering figure was beginning to be demystified, but he
could hardly be demonized. The reinterpretations of the Second World War allowed Serbian
Chetniks, Bosnian Young Muslims and even Croatian Ustashe to reassume their place in
national memory without ousting their former communist opponents. Since the mid-1980s,
Serbian nationalists had directed their charge of genocide against the Serbian nation towards
the Jasenovac concentration camp and its Croatian masters. In return, memorializing the
post-war massacres of Croatian fighters at Bleiburg served more to underline their presumed
innocence in an apologetic reassessment of the Ustasha state than to charge communist par-
tisans with genocide.38 As a result, the re-emergence of a public sphere founded in free
parliamentary and presidential elections in disintegrating Yugoslavia did not deepen political
cleavages as it did elsewhere, but rather brought about an upsurge of national mobilization
along ethnic lines that had hitherto seemed almost unthinkable.
Newly installed democratic governments were soon faced with a challenge that many suc-
cessful revolutionaries in history have had to face: namely, how to reassert and secure public
order responsibly without taking recourse to violence themselves and thus betraying their ideals.
Throughout the region, one of the key public demands was to curb police repression. Special
units like the ZOMO in Poland were quickly dismantled. Indeed, the legal foundations of the
police in Poland had already been changed in the wake of the Round Table negotiations. Yet
such measures did not suffice to restore the authority of the police once the opposition had taken
control. In Poland, it took a series of prison revolts to persuade the Mazowiecki government in
November 1989 that it could not restore its monopoly on violence simply by negotiating with
the rioting inmates. Police also began taking action against street blockades in early 1990. Since
the government party had itself emerged out of a trade union that had been outlawed for more
than seven years, it risked its authority and reputation when it turned against ongoing strikes.
In the Romanian city of Târgu Mureş, a weakened police failed to intervene on time in the
ethnic clashes between Romanians and Hungarian Széklers in March 1990, which ultimately
led to several deaths and briefly evoked the spectre of ethnic war in the region. Three months
later, newly elected president Ion Iliescu called in miners from the Jiu Valley to put down anti-
communist demonstrations in Bucharest. The ensuing eruption of violence did considerable
damage to the credibility of the new parliamentary elites.39 In Sofia, protest ran high throughout
the summer after the former communists had secured victory at the polls, and in late August,
demonstrators set the former party headquarters on fire.40 In Budapest, a massive blockade by
taxi drivers in October 1990 tested the ability of the Antall government to secure public order
without resorting to violence. Restoring a minimum of acceptance for police activity which
had long been considered deeply immoral, became possible only after revolutionary fervour
began to die down. It was, no doubt, part of the disillusionment that came with the return to

37 Armina Galijaš, Eine bosnische Stadt im Zeichen des Krieges. Ethnopolitik und Alltag in Banja Luka
­(1990–1995) (München: Oldenbourg, 2015); Stevo Đurašković, The Politics of History in Croatia and
Slovakia in the 1990s (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2016).
38 Liljana Radonic, Krieg um die Erinnerung. Kroatische Vergangenheitspolitik zwischen Revisionismus und eu-
ropäischen Standards (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2010).
39 Henry F. Carey, ed., Romania since 1989: Politics, Economics, and Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2004).
40 Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 219; Stefan Troebst, ‘Bulgarien 1989: Gewaltarmer Regime-
wandel in gewaltträchtigem Umfeld’, in Sabrow, 1989 und die Rolle der Gewalt, 357–83, here 380–1.

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normality. By the end of 1990, government authority throughout the region was again uncon-
tested, with the fateful exception of the Serbian-populated areas in Croatia’s Knin region.
It soon became obvious that throughout Central Europe, the largely peaceful transitions
had caused divisions among the winners. Observers from both inside and outside had predicted
early on the inevitability of their separation into rival political groups. Yet the rift ran deeper.
Diverging ideological visions and political agendas were underpinned by harsh disputes over the
very nature of the outcome of the revolutions, of what exactly had been achieved. Privatization
ultimately settled the ambiguity as to whether the commitment to freedom, political participa-
tion, justice and humanity would remove the obstacles to true socialism with a human face,
or whether socialism had finally been discarded. Nevertheless, this dispute left behind a legacy
of vagueness as to the true aims of the revolutions, which fed disappointment as much as the
charge of undue compromise with the old elites. In Hungary, this rift had already become vis-
ible during the Round Table Talks in the fall of 1989. While the populist MDF pled for a more
compromising stance towards the receding communist party, the more radical Free Democrats
and even more so the Fidesz used explicitly anti-communist positions to mobilize their con-
stituencies. In Poland, the first hints at a rift within the former Solidarity camp became visible
in the autumn of 1989 and developed into a full-scale ‘war at the top’ with Lech Wałęsa’s
presidential campaign in the fall of 1990.
A similar constellation emerged roughly one year later in Czechoslovakia, when Václav
Klaus’ rise to power split the Czech Civic Forum and Vladimír Mečiar left its Slovak coun-
terpart. There was more at stake in these rifts than the transition to competitive pluralism.
Throughout the region, power politicians challenged the crumbling hegemony of dissident
intellectuals, whom they suspected of maintaining leftist leanings. In political terms, an emerg-
ing populist right, while trying to preserve the idea of moral purity within a revolutionary com-
munity turned national, began to challenge the institutional order which it had helped shape in
1989/90. The effects of this were to be felt only much later.
For most of the countries concerned, the events of 1989 were quickly condensed into a
series of iconic images which help underscore the features shared by all of the revolutions and
can help us better understand their long-term impact. The images of mass demonstrations, as in
the reburial of Imre Nagy in Budapest or the protests that brought Václav Havel to power, show
nations that were taking their fate into their own hands and shaking off unwanted regimes. The
contemporary perception of ‘peaceful revolution’ has its origin in Prague where the notion of a
‘Velvet Revolution’ originally served to link the events of 1989 to the thwarted attempt of the
Prague Spring and its fight for ‘socialism with a human face’, and also with the Masarykian tra-
dition of a presumably specific Czech mission towards humanism and democracy.41 The peace-
ful character of the revolution was equally underlined by the image of the round table which
would come to epitomize the Polish transition. Neither image could keep at bay the notion of
a revolution that was presumably hijacked by a radical minority, exemplified so clearly in the
image of the Romanian dictator fleeing from his own people in a helicopter, only to be tried
and executed within four days by an improvised and shady military tribunal.42 But in Poland,

41 James Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia,
­1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jiří Suk, Labyrintem revoluce: Aktéři, zápletky a
křižovatky jedné politické krize (od listopadu 1989 do června 1990) [Through the labyrinth of revolution:
the actors, storylines and crossroads of a political crisis (from November 1989 to June 1990)] (Prague:
Prostor, 2003).
42 Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989, 134–43.

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Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the course of events left notions of a civic obligation towards
the common good, whereas in Romania and Bulgaria, they tended to deepen long-standing
popular distrust not only in the political elites, but in the state itself.
In a far-sighted essay, Timothy Garton Ash captured the revolutionary nature of evolution-
ary reforms in Poland and Hungary with his famously coined term, ‘refolutions’.43 In the long
run, these evolutionary beginnings did not have a direct impact on specific institutional out-
comes. Yet they are crucial for understanding the onset of the events of 1989 as much as they
are for grasping the impact that the ensuing polemics had on their outcome. Negotiated revolu-
tions, the argument runs, came at the price of being unduly regulated and therefore limited.44
In a reformist scenario, it is much easier to argue that the revolution remained ‘unfinished’ and
to lament the allegedly smooth transition of the old elites into the new order.45 Once peaceful
transition had been safely secured, the evolutionary approach became a liability and a burden.
Yet debates of this nature were not at all limited to these two countries.
The debate on the character of the 1989 revolutions is relevant here only insofar as it helps
to demarcate different regional patterns. In the countries of Central Europe, the much longed-
for triumph of civil society and the sudden collapse of uncivil society, as Stephen Kotkin has
argued, were actually two sides of the same coin.46 But further to the south and further to the
east, the old elites did not collapse; if anything, they simply retreated. Unchallenged by dissident
movements, they managed to mobilize nationalist sentiments against the notions of hardship,
decline and marginalization that were associated with capitalism and Western-style democracy.
Here, national independence did not promise a rapprochement to the West, but rather to
keep a safe distance. The fault-line ran straight through Yugoslavia, where top institutions had
nearly withered away since Tito’s death in 1980 and the People’s Army quickly began pursu-
ing a Serbian nationalist agenda in the name of Yugoslav political unity. This rift became the
major cause for the national secessions and ensuing ethnic warfare, which other countries in
the region had happily avoided. Federations proved vulnerable. Alongside the Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia was the only country in the region where the existing state itself would be chal-
lenged in competing acts of national emancipation from a weak central government that had
almost entirely dissolved. Elsewhere, the nation states remained surprisingly unchallenged. But
to expect that civil society could effect a smooth takeover of state institutions in successive acts
of self-liberation was naïve.

Political democratization
In 2003, when the first balance sheets of transformation were being set up, Grzegorz Ekiert
argued that it would be a mistake to believe that communism left behind a strong and efficient
state. The Leviathan had turned out to be feeble, since despotic capacity did not translate into
infrastructural power. In the words of Ralf Dahrendorf’s famous ‘Letter on the Revolution in

43 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Refolution’, in Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity, 276–88.
44 Tőkés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution; Zoltán Ripp, Rendszerváltás Magyarországon 1987–1990
­[System change in Hungary 1987–1989] (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2006); Antoni Dudek, Reglamen-
towana Rewolucja. Rozkład dyktatury komunistycznej w Polsce 1988–1990 [A regulated revolution: the
dissolution of the communist dictatorship in Poland 1988–1990] (Kraków: Arcana, 2004).
45 James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central Eastern Europe
(New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2010).
46 Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York:
Modern Library, 2009).

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

Europe’: ‘Nomenklatura socialism has left the state weakened and corrupted.’47 Reforming the
state thus became crucial for successful transformation, and indeed, the response to this chal-
lenge was quite diverse.48
The Central European revolutions of 1989 were quickly said to have been quite unim-
aginative in their political aims, they were ‘rectifying revolution(s)’, in the words of Jürgen
Habermas, which failed to offer any grand alternative and plainly sought to catch up with the
capitalist, bourgeois West, mopping up the revolutionary tradition of 1789 rather than adding
another chapter to it.49 They were indeed guided less by utopian visions and more by a transi-
tion consensus that was based on a broad commitment to non-violence, to the rule of law and
the separation of powers, to pluralism and broad participation, and to a vague notion of morality
and humanity. In this respect, long-standing dissident debates did have a major impact in shap-
ing the mentality of the revolutions more than any neatly defined goals.50 Nevertheless, these
notions were translated directly into far-reaching political change. The solemn declaration of
December 1989 that Poland was now governed by the democratic rule of law (demokratycznym
państwem prawnym) was the least controversial of constitutional amendments. It not only linked
up to dissident demands, but also to an ongoing reformist debate on how to strengthen socialist
legality, the nature of which was increasingly blurred. Simply dropping the moniker ‘socialist’
was an easy way out of this vagueness, but it had major consequences. Safeguarding the law
became the overriding obligation of all state institutions in Poland. The constitutional tribunal,
which had already been set up in 1985, became the supreme arbiter in constitutional matters.51
Aside from Poland, only Yugoslavia had known a constitutional court before 1989. Elsewhere
in the region, constitutional courts were quickly installed in the transition to democracy, with
only Ukraine, Latvia and Bosnia-Herzegovina lagging somewhat behind. They soon shared
the same problems faced by Western democracies, namely whether a strong judicial review of
political decisions actually tends to undermine rather than to strengthen the acceptance of the
parliamentary system.52
Pluralism, though it could not directly be derived from the notion of anti-politics, had long
been on the dissident agenda. The idea of a multi-party system, as Hungary had experienced it
for a few days in late October 1956, and which was again sketched by Kuroń and Modzelewski
in their 1964 ‘Open Letter’ had been a focal point of oppositional thought throughout Central
Europe. It remained central even if contested or, as Kuroń himself suggested in 1981, even if
its implementation had to be postponed for strategic considerations. The commitment to civil

47 Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentle-
man in Warsaw (New Brunswick:Transaction Publishers, 2005), from the postscript to this edition, 170.
48 Grzegorz Ekiert, ‘The State after State-Socialism? Poland in Comparative Perspective’, in The Nation-
State in Question, eds T.V. Paul, G. John Ikenberry, and John A. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 291–320.
49 Jürgen Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for
New Thinking on the Left’, New Left Review 183 (1990): 3–21, here 5; Dahrendorf, Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe, 27 (quoting François Furet).
50 Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals; Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face, 74–110; Jiří Přibáň
and James Young, eds, The Rule of Law in Central Europe: The Reconstruction of Legality, Constitutionalism
and Civil Society in the Post-Communist Countries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
51 Ustawa z dnia 29 grudnia 1989 r. o zmianie Konstytucji Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej (Dz. U.
1989, Nr. 75, Poz. 444) [Act of 29 December 1989 on the Amendments to the Constitution of the
Polish People’s Republic].
52 Wojciech Sadurski, Rights before Courts: A Study of Constitutional Courts in Postcommunist States of Central
and Eastern Europe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).

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rights was equally strong and their institutional reaffirmation was facilitated by the fact that they
had had some sort of formal position within the socialist constitutions all along. They simply
needed to be ascertained, and the old idea that restricting or even violating them in the name of
protecting socialism needed to be abolished; and so did the leading role of the communist party.
Thus, the first step to be taken in the institutional transition was to eliminate the political
limits placed on constitutional law under socialism and to reinstall it as the normative frame-
work of party politics. Poland and Hungary, where the transitions had begun, at first accom-
modated institutional changes by amending the existing constitutions. The newly independent
Baltic countries, the Czech and Slovak republics, Slovenia and Croatia, and even Romania and
Bulgaria wrote new constitutions. Poland followed suit in 1997.
The institutional order which was thus established largely remained within the framework
of parliamentary republics. In Hungary, Prime Minister József Antall and opposition leader
Péter Tölgyessy explicitly referred to the West German model of Kanzlerdemokratie when in
May 1991, they strengthened the role of the prime minister at the expense of parliament and
the state president. Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania were less successful in assigning
clearly defined powers to the head of state. Leaning somewhat more towards the French model
and picking up on traditions from the interwar period, the role of the head of state could be
interpreted by ambitious figures such as Lech Wałęsa and Lech Kaczyński, or Václav Havel and
later Václav Klaus, in a more ambitious way. Conflicts with parliament and the cabinet became
inevitable in periods of co-habitation. As a result, the heads of state remained within the frame-
work of party competition rather than establishing themselves as moral figures detached from
party politics (with the possible exception of Václav Havel). But even though Central Europe
came to be haunted by some of the spectres of the interwar period, fears of a shift towards some
form of authoritarian rule mostly proved to be groundless for the time being. Despite symbolic
revivals in military uniforms and political naming, in institutional terms the interwar period was
assigned to history much more quickly than hesitant observers had feared. Though it received
some popular support, the restoration of monarchy in Southeastern Europe, contemplated as a
means to accommodate authoritarian leanings and to ease the transition to democracy along the
Spanish model, was never seriously considered. The experience of Tsar Simeon II, who served
as Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 2001 to 2005, demonstrated both the popular expectations
invested in such figures as well as their almost inevitable disappointment. In the end, Bulgaria’s
abortive experiment in reviving monarchic traditions only enhanced the distrust in the new and
not-so-new political elites that it was meant to disperse.
Croatia and Serbia were again the conspicuous outliers in this overall picture of emerg-
ing liberal democracy. Slobodan Milošević, who had thwarted the transition to parliamentary
democracy in Serbia by marginalizing the regional elites in the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’
of 1987–89, installed himself as a national leader who would staunchly defend Serbian interests
during Yugoslavia’s imminent disintegration. The presidential regime which he established in
1990 was characterized as an ‘ethnic semi-democracy’ that allowed for some elements of politi-
cal pluralism, but on a strictly nationalist basis.53 Croatia experienced a somewhat similar devel-
opment during the 1990s when war rallied the majority of the population behind the nationalist
Croatian Democratic Union HDZ (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica). Limited pluralism was cor-
rupted by President Franjo Tuđman’s authoritarian leanings as the military president of a nation
at war. Tuđman managed to model himself as a successor to Tito while playing on the traditions

53 Florian Bieber, Nationalismus in Serbien vom Tode Titos bis zum Ende der Ära Milosevic (Vienna: LIT,
2005); Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, 341–62.

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of the fascist Ustasha state of the Second World War.54 Looking back at his presidency in early
2000, the Zagreb weekly Nacional pointedly termed Croatia a ‘gangster state’.55
The genocidal collapse of Yugoslavia was in part driven by tendencies towards authoritarian
rule, which were in turn strengthened by the collapse itself. Within a Yugoslav context, it has
been convincingly argued that the weak institutions of a multi-ethnic state were being destroyed
by nationalist elites who were willing and prepared to wage war over the future status of the
Serbian population in Eastern Slavonia, Krajina, Bosnia, and finally, Kosovo. Slovenia, which
lacked a substantial Serbian population, narrowly escaped a protracted war and embarked on the
trajectory towards EU membership. Elsewhere, the effects of war and ethno-national mobiliza-
tion overshadowed the development of democratic institutions and fed massive corruption.56
The return to parliamentary systems in the region paved the arduous path towards democratiza-
tion, which was supported by the negotiations for EU membership. Since 2000, Croatia has seen
several democratic changes of government and serious, though not entirely successful, attempts
to push back against corruption.57 In Belgrade, the downfall of Slobodan Milošević in October
2000 opened the prospect for Serbia (in its increasingly fragile federation with Montenegro) to
shift towards a parliamentary democracy as well. But democratic mobilization collapsed into res-
ignation and apathy when Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Ðinđić was murdered in 2003. Since
then, the legacy of illiberal nationalism and its potential to undermine the institutions of liberal
democracy has remained strong.58 Elsewhere throughout the Balkans, the power of European
institutions to support democratic institution-building has been equally put into question, par-
ticularly in Bosnia and Macedonia. The Dayton Agreement of 1995 and the Ohrid Framework
Agreement of 2001 curtailed ethnic warfare, but at the price of fracturing the states involved into
national entities and turning them over to corrupt elites. In 2006, Sabrina P. Ramet remarked that
the Dayton Peace Accords had so far ‘failed to generate fully legitimate sovereign institutions’.59
Macedonia fared somewhat better, but any stabilizing developments have been massively impeded
by the ongoing Greek blockade of Macedonian integration into NATO and the EU.60
The peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, often favourably contrasted with that of
Yugoslavia, aptly demonstrated that ethnic war and a political blockade were not inevita-
ble. The difference lay in the relative weakness of Slovak nationalism. The Czech and Slovak
republics parted ways in 1993 when prime ministers Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar ­realized
that they could only actualize contrasting political ideas by separating the two diverging e­ ntities.
Slovak nationalism supported Mečiar’s populist authoritarianism. Once it became obvious
that this development isolated the country and threatened to jeopardize its accession to the

54 Sabrina P. Ramet, Konrad Clewing and Renéo Lukić, eds, Croatia since Independence:War, Politics, Society,
Foreign Relations (München: Oldenbourg, 2008); Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘Politics in Croatia since 1990’, in
Central and Southeast European Politics since 1989, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 258–85.
55 Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, 587.
56 Holm Sundhaussen, Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943–2011: Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des
Gewöhnlichen (Köln: Böhlau, 2012), 511–4.
57 Ramet, ‘Politics in Croatia’, 266–72.
58 Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, 517–35; Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘Serbia and Montenegro since 1989’, in
Ramet, Central and Southeast European Politics, 286–310.
59 Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias, 494; David Chandler, ed., Peace without Politics? Ten Years of International
State-Building in Bosnia (London: Routledge, 2005); Florian Bieber, ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina since
1990’, in Ramet, Central and Southeast European Politics, 311–27.
60 Zachary T. Irwin, ‘Macedonia since 1989’, in Ramet, Central and Southeast European Politics, 328–57.

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European Union, his successor Mikuláš Dzurinda, picking up on the liberal traditions within
Slovak nationalism, radically changed course and for several years turned Slovakia into a model
of pro-market democratic reforms.61
The reintroduction of local self-government played a key role in the formation of new
democratic states in Central Europe. Most of the countries in the region had known noble and
municipal, or even peasant, self-government for centuries. In former Habsburg lands such as the
Czech lands or Slovenia, the tradition of efficient and self-assertive local self-government went
back to the revolutions of 1848, and in the Baltic region and the former Tsarist Empire it could
be traced to the 1860s. Centralization and authoritarian rule had subordinated local administra-
tion to the central government in many countries during the interwar period, especially in the
Balkans. But the states of Central Europe were only able to wrest power from established local
elites with the introduction of communist rule. Poland was the first post-communist country
to rush towards the democratization of local administration, namely in May 1990. The primary
motives were to conquer one of the strongholds of the old elites with democratic elections and
to invest the protagonists of the civic committees with official responsibility for local affairs.62
One- or two-tiered self-government was to provide the link between civil society and the state.
Other countries quickly followed suit, and their degree of success was measured by their ability
to draw on common Central European traditions.63 As members of the Council of Europe, all
countries of the region (with the exception of Belarus) have subscribed to the principles that
were laid down in the European Charter of Local Self-Government.
Organizing free elections was one thing, defining vested powers and providing for appropriate
funding was another. In most countries, local self-government was made responsible for things
like housing, medical and social services, education, and in some countries such as Poland, the
local police. Slovenia was one of the few countries that implemented taxes to specifically fund
local administrations. From 1998 onward, local self-government in Poland has received about half
of the country’s overall tax revenue.64 In countries like Latvia, income from local taxes amounted
to 25 per cent of the local budget at most; in these places, local self-government has remained
largely dependent on central funding.65 Government remittances were and still are rarely suf-
ficient to sustain local services, let alone to secure necessary investments. A 1999 investigation in
Bulgaria revealed that more than half of Bulgarian municipalities spent their limited resources on
construction and renovations rather than on social and medical services. The city of Ruse was
only able to provide its schools with electricity and heating for just about half of the year. Some 80
smaller municipalities failed to pay wages for several months.66 Electoral turnout throughout the
region has generally been much lower than in national elections and barely exceeded 50 per cent

61 Erika Harris, ‘Slovakia since 1989’, in Ramet, Central and Southeast European Politics, 182–203.
62 ‘Czas wielkiej próby. Diskusja redakcyjna’, Więź 11–12 (373–374), November/December 1989, 7–32;
Klaus Ziemer and Claudia-Yvette Matthes, ‘Das politische System Polens’, in Die politischen Systeme
Osteuropas, ed.Wolfgang Ismayr, 3rd ed. (Wiesbaden:Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 2010), 209–73, here
265–7.
63 Armin Stolz, ‘Die Verwaltungsorganisation im Vergleich’, in Vergleichendes Verwaltungsrecht in Ostmit-
teleuropa. Grundriss der Verwaltungsordnungen Polens,Tschechiens, der Slowakei und Ungarns, eds Bernd Wieser
and Armin Stolz (Vienna, Berlin:Verlag Österreich; BWV Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004), 159–95.
64 Ekiert, ‘The State after State-Socialism?’, 307.
65 Thomas Schmidt, ‘Das politische System Lettlands’, in Ismayr, Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas,
­123–70, here 165.
66 Sabine Riedel, ‘Das politische System Bulgariens’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas, 677–728, here
720–2.

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

of the electorate. In Slovakia, turnout dropped to a record-breaking low of less than 20 per cent
in the regional elections in November 2005.67 Against this background, it is not surprising that in
some countries, corruption seems to be strongest in local administration, especially where it is still
dominated by the old guard. At the same time, strong mayors such as Lech Kaczyński in Warsaw,
Gábor Demszky in Budapest and Edi Rama in Tirana managed to gain substantial political reputa-
tions for themselves and exert considerable influence in national politics. In spite of its shortcom-
ings, local self-government in Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and even Moldova enjoyed a relatively
high rate of public trust according to opinion polls conducted throughout the 1990s and 2000s.68
In hindsight, the constitutional setup, which had been established during the revolutionary
months of 1989/90, displayed an inherent tendency towards parliamentary democracy of the
continental Western European type. For some, this harboured a potential for disappointment,
but it did not come as much of a surprise. For years to come, the institutional order that was
established throughout Central and Southeastern Europe during the 1990s provided a fairly
stable framework for not so stable party systems. Party competition on the other hand supported
institution-building, since mutual monitoring could put a brake on patronage and corruption.69
Yet, the nature of this stability came to be disputed in the light of later developments. The
broad transition consensus did not compel major political forces to commit to upholding its
pluralistic, democratic principles. Rather than providing a generally accepted framework of
parliamentary democracy, the constitutions of Central Europe remained controversial, and the
rule of law, corrupted as it had been before 1989, did not take firm roots evenly throughout
the region. Structural features inherited from communism, such as the firm hold of clientele
networks on weak institutions, seem to be tenaciously persistent in some places, particularly in
large parts of Southeastern Europe. In a more optimistic, if not slightly euphemistic vein, one
might maintain that Eastern Europe came to display a broad range of different understandings of
democracy, which cannot be reduced to its liberal interpretation.70 As it has been argued in the
case of Hungary, the lack of confidence in a strong state curbed populist demagogy throughout
the 1990s, while distrust in formal institutions grew and fed the longing for quick and simple
solutions to complicated problems. The failure to vote on the principles of a new constitution in
1996/97 marked the erosion of consensual politics and began the path towards eventual break-
down. Henceforth, only the weakness of rivalling political camps has ensured the persistence of
the constitutional order in an increasingly conflictual understanding of politics.71 Once Fidesz

67 Rüdiger Kipke, ‘Das politische System der Slowakei’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas, 317–56,
here 349.
68 Joachim Tauber, ‘Das politische System Litauens’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas, 171–208, here
204; Ziemer and Matthes, ‘Das politische System Polens’, 259; András Körösényi, Gábor G. Fodor
and Jürgen Dieringer, ‘Das politische System Ungarns’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas, 357–418,
here 403; Klemens Büscher, ‘Das politische System Moldovas’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas,
583–627, here 610.
69 Anna Maria Grzymała-Busse, Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-
Communist Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
70 Paul Blokker, Multiple Democracies in Europe: Political Culture in New Member States (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2010).
71 András Bozóki, ‘The Illusion of Inclusion: Configurations of Populism in Hungary’, in Kopeček and
Wciślik, Thinking through Transition, 275–311; Zoltán Gábor Szűcs, ‘The Abortion of a “Conserva-
tive” Constitution-Making: A Discourse Analysis of the 1994–1998 Failed Hungarian Constitution-
Making Enterprise’, in Kopeček and Wciślik, Thinking through Transition, 237–55; Ellen Bos, Verfas-
sungsgebung und Systemwechsel. Die Institutionalisierung von Demokratie im postsozialistischen Osteuropa
(Wiesbaden:Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004), 277–8.

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finally scored a sweeping victory at the polls in 2008, the state that had been built over more
than a decade fell prey to the party’s authoritarian leanings.
In part, this development had to do with the high-running expectations to which the revo-
lutions had given rise. But it also had to do with inevitable disappointment in the way the new
democracies performed their basic functions. Unlike Hungary, Poland introduced a new con-
stitution in 1997, but the notion that democratic revolution had remained unfinished continued
to persist there as well. Even where democracy was successful, the painful task of catching up
with European standards did not guarantee political stability.
In 2003, Grzegorz Ekiert came to the conclusion that the Polish state ‘seems to possess more
“infrastructural power” than its communist predecessor ever had’.72 This was debatable, and it
was certainly not true throughout the region. Soon afterwards, Ralf Dahrendorf admitted that
he had ‘underestimated the difficulty of setting up effective public institutions. … The new
political class operated in a kind of vacuum.’73 State institutions and political values were closely
intertwined, but they hardly overlapped.

From post-communist to anti-communist democracy

Liberalism in Poland and Eastern Europe, sociologist Jerzy Szacki argued in 1993, faced two fun-
damental challenges: either it would be reduced to a cold, technocratic economic doctrine, or it
would be crowded out by appeals to the state to take sides in conflicts over morality. In either case,
the state would become merely instrumental in the service of higher aims. His outlook was gloomy.
He believed that pleas to refrain from debates on the presumed need for morality, instead of discuss-
ing the possibilities and limits of politics in a pluralistic society, would most likely go unheard. For
Szacki, political liberalism remained an alien Western doctrine that would lose out against those tra-
ditions of political thought that were much more deeply rooted in the traditions of Eastern Europe.74
Szacki wrote his highly acclaimed, far-sighted book in the summer of 1993 under the impact
of the electoral campaign in Poland, which saw the scattered and estranged parties of the once
mighty Solidarity camp come in third place, losing out against the re-emerging post-communist
left. Cold doctrines vs. hot morals – born out of the disappointment with the prospects of liber-
alism, his analysis outlined the basic conflicts over the nature of politics and the state that would
shape the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe in the decades to come.

Capitalism and the state

When the Polish Sejm commissioned the Catholic oppositionist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form
a government in August 1989, it was clear that radical economic reform would be its most
urgent task. Within less than four months, the new minister of finance Leszek Balcerowicz, an
advocate of monetarism in a market economy, outlined a set of measures unheard of in social-
ism. The laws adopted by the Sejm on 31 December 1989 forbade deficit spending, radically
cut back state influence on the banking sector and opened the path for state-owned enter-
prises to either go bankrupt or be privatized.75 The state’s abrupt withdrawal from steering

72 Ekiert, ‘The State after State-Socialism?’, 309.

73 Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, 170–1.
74 Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism after Communism (Budapest: CEU Press, 1995), 194–205.
75 Jeffrey Sachs, Poland’s Jump to the Market Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 35–78; Leszek
Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism,Transformation (Budapest: CEU Press, 1995), 290–7.

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

the e­ conomy, soon labelled ‘shock therapy’, drew strong criticism not only because it caused
a massive increase in poverty and social inequality, but also because it was guided by a neo-
liberal ideology that mistook market economy for capitalism and treated the latter as the
natural successor to communism. ‘If capitalism is a system, then it needs to be fought as hard
as communism had to be fought’, Ralf Dahrendorf wrote, warning against the return of the
minimal state which would restrain itself to guarding ‘certain rules of the game discovered by a
mysterious sect of economic advisers’.76 Along the lines of classical liberal thought, Dahrendorf
tried to reintroduce the distinction between constitutional politics, which is supposed to set
the general rules of an open society and parliamentary democracy, and the broad range of
economic and social policies that are open to political debate and democratic contestation.
This distinction could not obscure the fact that in Western countries, the century-long devel-
opment of capitalist market-economies could be seen as a condition that had brought about
political democracy, whereas the opposite was now true in the former socialist dictatorships:
democratic governments were needed to re-establish the legal and institutional framework of
market economies.77
Historical research on the return of capitalism to Eastern Europe has primarily focused on
the diverse strategies of privatization in different countries and on its economic balance-sheet.
‘Shock therapy’ as in Poland and Czechoslovakia has been contrasted with the more gradual
approaches taken in Hungary and Southeastern Europe, the strictly market-based sale of shares
and entire firms to private bidders in Poland, Hungary and East Germany, and voucher pri-
vatization implemented in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Romania and most notably, Russia.
Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits summarized the different approaches in a typology that
distinguished between neo-liberal-capitalist transformation in the Baltic states, embedded
neo-liberalism that sought to balance market transformation with social cohesion in the four
Visegrád countries, and neo-corporatism in Slovenia, while weak state institutions in Romania
and Bulgaria failed to secure any sort of macroeconomic stability.78 Philipp Ther has added a
fourth type to the model: the oligarchic-neo-liberal approach taken in Romania, Ukraine,
Belarus and Moldova.79 Though Ther is far from telling a straightforward success story, his find-
ings generally support the notion that large-scale privatization played a key role in restructuring
and increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of the economies of Central Europe and, to
a lesser extent, those of Southeastern Europe.
As previously mentioned, scholars throughout Central and Eastern Europe had been debat-
ing the prospects of competitive market relations in socialist economies since the 1950s.80 It
was only a small step from deregulating centralized economies to the restoration of pri-
vate business ownership. The last communist government of Poland had been encouraging

76 Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, 41.

77 Klaus von Beyme, ‘Ansätze zu einer Theorie der Transformation der ex-sozialistischen Länder
Osteuropas’, in Systemwechsel 1:Theorien, Ansätze und Konzeptionen, ed. Wolfgang Merkel (Opladen:
Leske und Budrich, 1994), 141–71, here 155–8; Klaus von Beyme, Transition to Democracy in Eastern
Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
78 Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits, Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2012); William L. Megginson and Jeffrey M. Netter, ‘From State to Market: A Survey
of Empirical Studies on Privatization’, Journal of Economic Literature 39, no. 2 (2001): 321–89.
79 Ther, Europe since 1989, 27–8.
80 Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism; Paul Dragos Aligica and Anthony J. Evans, The Neoliberal
Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in the Transition from Communism (Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar, 2009), 13–79.

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i­ndividual entrepreneurs as early as 1988 by drawing on Catholic discourse on the social

responsibilities of entrepreneurs.81 But privatizing existing state-owned companies involved
moral questions of a different sort. How could the population benefit from the sale of com-
panies that had been propagated for decades as the property of the people? How could for-
eign investment be attracted without raising fears of a national sell-out? How to allow for
the bankruptcy of entire industrial sectors, accommodate massive structural change and keep
unemployment low all at the same time? Debates on the strategies of how best to buffer
against economic crisis and achieve economic prosperity were highly controversial through-
out the region. Employee ownership was mostly dismissed, since it smacked too much of
market socialism and a ‘Third Way’. But regardless of how these issues were being addressed
in detail and codified in legislation, success depended on strong government institutions with
strong regulatory power in a reform process that was similar in scope to the emancipation
of the peasantry more than a century earlier. The existing state institutions were both ill-
prepared and ill-equipped for this task.
If entrepreneurial agency and functioning markets could only be restored on the basis of
clearly defined property rights, as the neo-liberal wisdom of the 1990 Washington Consensus
stipulated, a strong state was needed to define and protect these property rights.82 In Poland,
the quick and fairly successful reform of state institutions became one of the pillars of long-term
economic success. Political delays allowed Poland to avoid the mistakes of rash voucher privati-
zation as practised in the Czech Republic.83 Hungary and Romania followed the German model
in outsourcing the entire procedure of privatization to national property agencies that had been
established solely for this purpose (e.g. Állami Vagyonügynökség, Fondul Proprietăţii de Stat).84
Most countries made a distinction between ‘small’ privatization involving the ­auctioning-off
of local enterprises, real estate and assets, and the ‘big’ privatization of major industrial firms.
The efficiency of local self-government played an important role in this process. At the same
time, the reformed local institutions claimed to gain control of public utilities as much as of
profitable enterprises on their territory, but the distinctions between the two were not always
easy to draw. Whether the bodies of local self-government should be allowed to engage in
economic activity, e.g. by taking over touristic enterprises for which they were responsible
under socialism, was hotly debated in the Polish Sejm. The issue was finally decided in favour
of local self-government.85 At the other end of the spectrum, local institutions in Bulgaria had
to sell off communal enterprises during the 1990s in order to cover expenses in education and
health services.86
We still know little about the practical implementation of the various forms of privatization.
The task of the authorities in assessing the value of real estate and business property, setting
minimum prices, inviting bidders and overseeing public auctions must have been enormous.
New businesses had to be properly registered, as well as property claims and restitution of
property to its previous owner. Mistrust was rife where inexperienced and ill-equipped local

81 Puttkamer, ‘Der schwere Abschied vom Volkseigentum’, 158–83.

82 Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism, 171–2.
83 Ekiert, ‘The State after State-Socialism?’, 305; Ther, Europe since 1989, 79–95.
84 Árpád von Klimó, Ungarn seit 1945 (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 219.
85 Archiwum Sejmu [Sejm Archives]. Sejm PRL/RP – X Kadencja (1989–1991). Protokóły Komisji
Sejmowych. Komisja Nadzwyczajna do rozpatrzenia projektów ustaw dotyczących samorządu tery-
torialnego. Nr. 1–6. 25.I. 1990–3.III.1990. Tom I. Protokół 4 posiedzenia Komisji Nadzwyczajnej do
rozpatrzenia projektów ustaw dotyczących samorządu terytorialnego, 1. marca 1990, 161–2.
86 Riedel, ‘Das politische System Bulgariens’, 721.

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

administrations had to improvise, and the door to outright corruption was wide-open. Former
directors of state enterprises cannibalized erstwhile firms by transforming profitable departments
into their own private businesses.87 Foreign investors plotted with managers and local officials
in similar schemes. Where voucher privatization came into play, wily investors could make a
fortune by buying up large numbers of shares from ignorant citizens. In Prague, privatization
threatened to come to a halt when vice-minister Jaroslav Muroň failed to report an attempted
bribery.88 Scandals fed the popular image that there was something fishy about privatization.
Hungarian sociologist Elemér Hankiss was one of the first to argue that leaving the old elites
a chance to gain a socio-economic foothold in the new democratic order might be the price
that would have to be paid for a smooth transition.89 To Jarosław Kaczyński, this was a serious
political concern made known in his criticism of the results of the Round Table Talks.90 But
considerations of this sort did not translate directly into government policies, quite the contrary.
In Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, one of the main motives in pushing for privatization,
aside from economic concerns, had been to curb so-called spontaneous privatization – chaotic
sell-outs that mostly benefited the nomenklatura. In Hungary, where company law had been
reformed in 1988, some 10 per cent of all firms had already passed into private hands before
1990.91 But even in those countries where newly elected democratic governments quickly
managed to actively control the privatization process, the old nomenklatura seemed to have
got the best of it. Former Czech Prime Minister Petr Pithart lamented in hindsight that rapid
privatization in the Czech Republic had been intended to prevent ‘agony’, but it ultimately
resulted in disillusionment – the Washington Consensus had simply underestimated the power
of informal practices.92 In 2004, the year of its accession to the EU, the Czech Republic, along
with El Salvador, ranked 51st in the Corruption Perception Index, just behind Greece but
slightly better than Bulgaria, Slovakia and Latvia.93 Paradoxically, while the point of rapid pri-
vatization was to wrest the people’s property from the nomenklatura, the old elites ended up
profiting the most due to their positions, networks and knowledge.94
In the privatization of land, the aspect of restitution to former owners whose property
had been expropriated under communist rule raised further issues. In rural areas, traditional
notions of land ownership and inheritance still prevailed or were revived after the end of com-
munism. Land registers and cadastres, which were traditionally weak in Southeastern Europe

87 Jan Szomburg, ‘The Political Constraints on Polish Privatization’, in Monitoring Economic Transition:The
Polish Case, eds George Blazyca and Janusz M. Dąbrowski (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), 75–85.
88 Petr Husák, Budování kapitalismu v Čechách. Rozhovory s Tomášem Ježkem [Building capitalism in the
Czech Lands: interviews with Tomáš Jeżek] (Prague:Volvox Globator, 1997), 171–4.
89 Elemér Hankiss, East European Alternatives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 233.
90 Jacek Tittenbrun, The Collapse of Real Socialism in Poland (London: Janus, 1993), 210–11.
91 Károly Kiss, ‘Privatisation in Hungary’, Communist Economies and Economic Transformation 3, no. 3
(1991): 305–25, here 310; Tittenbrun, The Collapse of Real Socialism in Poland, 176–98.
92 Petr Pithart, ‘1969–1989: Fehlt ein Begriff oder eher der Wille zu verstehen?’ Bohemia 49, no. 2 (2009):
399–411, here 405–7.
93 Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2004, www.transparency.org/research/
cpi/cpi_2004/0/#results (accessed 14 February 2016). Among the new EU member states, Estonia
and Slovenia ranked highest (31), followed by Hungary (42), Lithuania (44), Latvia and Slovakia (57),
and Poland (67). Among South European countries Bulgaria ranked highest (54), followed by Croatia
(67), Bosnia (82), Romania (87), Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro (97), Albania (108) and Moldova
(114). 146 countries worldwide were ranked.
94 Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor R. Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation
and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London:Verso, 2000).

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and had been curtailed or even discontinued under communist rule, were largely restored as
credible legal evidence of property ownership and mortgages.95 In economic terms, grant-
ing members of cooperatives or their heirs the right to reclaim their former land as private
property raised the prospect of the re-emergence of peasant agriculture in those countries
where smallholdings had been largely eliminated by collectivization. But would it also imply a
return to agrarian politics? In Romania, as Daniel Barbu lamented, the wholescale restitution
of farmland paradoxically fostered the exclusion of the new owners from the body politic,
since they got what they wanted without obligation and therefore without responsibility.96 In
Hungary, the historical Smallholders Party returned to the scene to focus on this issue, and in
1990 it joined the first democratic coalition government. In the end, Hungarian legislation
favoured partial compensation over restitution so as to avoid the return of large noble estates,
and it only allowed compensation claims to be made on property that had not been given up
or expropriated before June 1948. Only the churches were to be restored part of their former
landholdings so as to enable them to resume their traditional social, educational and monastic
activities.97 The Catholic Church in Poland reclaimed about one fourth of its previous land-
holdings.98 In Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, restitution also raised the question
as to what extent German landholders who had been forced out of the country at the end
of the Second World War might have a claim to their former property. This fear touched
directly on the issue of national sovereignty, even more so since in Germany, the Federation of
Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen) fuelled the issue. For a brief moment, the accession of the
Czech Republic to the European Union seemed to hinge on this question. In the end, while
membership of the EU implied granting the expellees the right to move freely and settle in
their former regions of origin, they were excluded from restitution and compensation. A for-
mal declaration by Czech president Václav Klaus that deplored the historical ‘events’ as both
unalterable and unacceptable was drafted with cautious vagueness.99 This approach caused
bitterness among some organized expellees, but it ultimately proved a pragmatic compromise
and largely settled the issue.
Ten years after the revolutions of 1989, the reshaping of property relations had been largely
accomplished in most countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the institutions of market
economy were largely in place. Serbia and Montenegro lagged somewhat behind, only begin-
ning full-on, ‘unblocked’, privatization in 2001.100 Immediate economic results were mixed and
the social costs were high. Most countries exacted massive cuts in social services and benefits,
reduced state support for basic needs and referred issues such as unemployment, senior care,

95 Hannes Siegrist and Dietmar Müller, eds, Property in East Central Europe: Notions, Institutions, and Prac-
tices of Landownership in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).
96 Daniel Barbu, Die abwesende Republik (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009), 263–68 [published originally as
Republica absentă. Politică şi societate în România postcomunistă (Bucharest: ARLD, 1999)].
97 Kiss, ‘Privatisation in Hungary’, 312; Ignác Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest:
­Corvina, 1999), 446–50; Tomislav Borić, Eigentum und Privatisierung in Kroatien und Ungarn: Wandel
des Eigentumsrechtssystems und Entwicklung der Privatisierungsgesetzgebung (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1996),
224–5.
98 Frances Millard, Polish Politics and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 129.
99 Christian Domnitz, Die Beneš-Dekrete in parlamentarischer Debatte: Kontroversen im Europäischen Parla-
ment und im tschechischen Abgeordnetenhaus vor dem EU-Beitritt der Tschechischen Republik (Berlin: Lit
Verlag, 2007), 75 and 108.
100 Mladen Lazić and Jelena Pešić, Making and Unmaking State-Centered Capitalism in Serbia ­(Belgrade: Čigoja
Štampa, 2012), 55–74.

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child care and other forms of poverty back to the individual or the family. Privatized enterprises
were equally quick to cut back social support and relinquish the pivotal role of their state-
owned predecessors in providing social security to their employees. Yet both social democratic
as well as conservative welfare regimes proved deeply entrenched, and the anticipated neo-
liberal-style dismantling of social security largely failed to materialize.101
Little attention has been given to the fact that a historical process of reshaping notions of
property in society to conform to the requirements of market economies was now coming to
a close. If popular support for and the political legitimacy of large-scale privatization had been
weak in the first place, its implementation did considerable damage to the approval of parlia-
mentary democracy, regardless of economic performance.

Civil society and national sovereignty

In February 1990, Timothy Garton Ash remarked that 1989 was ‘a springtime of nations, but
not necessarily of nationalism; of societies aspiring to be civil; and above all, of citizens’.102 The
enthusiastic embrace of civil society took the nation state as its natural framework for granted,
and rather vaguely identified nationalism as its major threat. It turned out that the two were
closely intertwined, and sometimes, just two sides of the same coin.
As had been visible early on in dissident discourse, national sovereignty became a key issue in
the revolutions of 1989. At the reburial of Imre Nagy in June 1989, Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán
provokingly called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. To him, as to other anti-communists
throughout the region, every political arrangement that did not immediately satisfy this demand
smacked of rotten compromise. This was indeed the testing ground by which the achieve-
ments of democracy were to be measured, and it was one of the main arguments in support
of the rapid and radical dismantling of the totalitarian system. Once achieved, the notion that
the democratic revolution was yet unfinished inspired other kinds of action, mostly lustration
(see below).
The issue of national sovereignty re-emerged with many countries’ accession to NATO and
the European Union. As early as 1991, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary
formed the Visegrád group to harmonize their efforts to closely cooperate with European insti-
tutions and develop a coordinated approach.103 The prospect of becoming part of the Western
Alliance, of erecting military defences against potential Russian aggression and participating
in NATO’s intervention in neighbouring former Yugoslavia played out in different ways on
the issue of NATO membership, and the process of accession was far from uniform. For most
countries of the region, NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program turned out to be only a tran-
sitory stage. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were formally invited to join NATO

101 Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 211–305; Ther, Europe since 1989, 115–20; Béla Tomka, A Social History of Twentieth-
Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2013), 190–1. See the contribution by Béla Tomka to the volume
Challenges of Modernity in this series.
102 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Eastern Europe: The Year of Truth’, in The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89
Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990), 131–56, here 149
[first published in The New York Review of Books, 15 February 1990].
103 Declaration on Cooperation between the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, the Republic of
­Poland and the Republic of Hungary in Striving for European Integration (Visegrád Declaration):
web.archive.org/web/20140419203940/www.visegradgroup.eu/documents/visegrad-declarations/
visegrad-declaration-110412 [accessed 3 March 2017].

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 1989 and beyond

at the Madrid summit in 1997, while Slovakia and Romania were turned down for the time
being. Whereas Slovak support for NATO-membership had been rather lukewarm, disap-
pointment ran high in Romania, where the rejection was perceived as a violation of national
dignity.104 The admission of both states in 2004 together with Bulgaria, Slovenia and the Baltic
states dispelled, at least for the time being, the prospect of a ‘dependent intermediate zone of
weak states’.105 The re-emergence of Zwischeneuropa, which Garton Ash had feared in 1990, was
replaced by hopes for a ‘New Europe’ whose members rushed to prove themselves particularly
reliable partners.
Accession to the European Union had an even greater impact on national sovereignty. The
Copenhagen criteria of 1993 committed the new member states to the principles of democ-
racy, market economy and the protection of national minorities. But adopting the acquis com-
munautaire with its 3,000 directives left little room for national peculiarities. It had an enormous
impact on streamlining state institutions and administration throughout the region, rendering
them more effective and evening out diverse historical roots and trajectories. Whether merely
formal adherence to European norms and practices will prevail over committed and reliable
implementation in individual countries remains to be seen.106 Romania and Bulgaria, which
were admitted in 2007 under the provision of conditionality, still have to undergo regular
reports on their measures against corruption. The effects remain to be seen. In general, turning
over substantial elements of national sovereignty to Brussels was largely accepted throughout
the countries of the region. The ‘yes’ votes in the referendums ranged between almost 94 per
cent in Slovakia to 67 per cent in Estonia and Latvia and 66 per cent in Croatia.
Nevertheless, turnout to accession referendums was low, and in hindsight, it seems that
this might have been an early sign of insidious exhaustion with the idea of a unified Europe,
the merits of parliamentary democracy in general and the emancipatory idea of civil society in
particular. When dissidents stressed the concept of civil society, they were aiming to erode the
communist regime rather than provide a blueprint for future democratic transition.107 Václav
Havel and Adam Michnik’s repeated pleas for civil society and the virtues of civic responsibility
were an emphatic attempt to preserve the legacy of dissidence and turn it into the moral foun-
dation of the new democracies. But it can equally be seen as the defence of a middle ground
between the cold technicality of the neo-liberal state and the mobilizing simplifications of
national populism, be it of a rightist or leftist hue.108
Scholars throughout the region soon realized that in spite of such efforts to instil open soci-
ety with civic moral values, the nation remained the relevant community. In Hungary, where
dissidence had been fairly weak, liberal intellectuals had early on voiced the concern that politi-
cal democracy might not survive the shocks brought along by social problems and the loss of

104 Zoltan D. Barany, The Future of NATO Expansion: Four Case Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 61–7 and 144–51; Alexandra Gheciu, NATO in the ‘New Europe’: The Politics of
International Socialization after the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 75.
105 Garton Ash, ‘Eastern Europe: The Year of Truth’, 155.
106 Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, eds, The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Geoffrey Pridham, Designing Democracy: EU Enlargement
and Regime Change in Post-Communist Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
107 von Beyme, ‘Ansätze zu einer Theorie der Transformation’, 149.
108 Václav Havel, Summer Meditations (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1992); Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom:
Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives, ed. Irena Grudzińska-Gross (Berkeley, CA: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1998).

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traditional values.109 North of Yugoslavia, Hungary was the first among the new democracies of
Eastern Europe to face the emergence of right-wing nationalism as a political force, and was also
one of the first to engage in serious debates about it. In 1992, the writer and politician István
Csurka condensed the vague idea of an unfinished democratic transformation into a programme
of ethnic mobilization that questioned the 1920 Treaty of Trianon while not shying away
from anti-Semitic rhetoric and fascist notions of national recovery and renewal.110 In Romania,
Corneliu Vadim Tudor and his Greater Romania Party (Partidul România Mare) followed suit.
At the time, such ideas were vehemently rejected. The prospect of accession to the European
Union committed all future member states to respect minority rights and pass minority leg-
islation along the principles that had been laid down in the Framework Convention for the
Protection of National Minorities and in the European Charter for Regional or Minority
Languages. In 1995, Hungary signed a treaty of good neighbourhood and friendly cooperation
with Slovakia and in the following year signed a similar treaty with Romania. But the genie of
Hungarian nationalism was out of the bottle. The notion of a Hungarian trans-border national
community, a ‘unitary Hungarian nation’, underpinned the so-called status law of 2001, which
conferred citizenship rights to ethnic Hungarians in the neighbouring states.111
Dual citizenship became a critical issue in a number of states, mostly with Croats in Bosnia
and Romanians in Moldova. In the Baltic states, the collapse of the Soviet Union left a large
Russian population stateless, with highly restricted access to Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian
citizenship and to respective minority rights. Bosnia’s Dayton Agreement of 1995 stressed the
importance of minority rights while breaking sharply with the international sanctioning of
forced migration and ethnic cleansing. As mentioned above, the Bosnian government’s treat-
ment of minorities since 1995 equally demonstrates that turning over the state to uncontested
ethnic elites cannot support the construction of efficient institutions and instead simply paves
the way for patronage and clientelism.112
Finally, the Central European states’ accession to the European Union brought the
­situation of the Roma population back onto the political agenda, since it at once raised
Western European fears of Roma migration and heightened public awareness of discrimina-
tion and ­violence within the region. In the Czech Republic, Slovak-born Roma had been
denied citizenship and faced expulsion throughout the 1990s, regardless of whether they had

109 István Eörsi, ‘Der Schock der Freiheit’, in Der Schock der Freiheit: Ungarn auf dem Weg in die Demokratie,
eds József Bayer and Rainer Deppe (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp), 67–76 [first published as ‘A szabadság
sokkja’, Népszabadság, October 19, 1991]; Attila Ágh, ‘Citizenship and Civil Society in Eastern Europe’,
in The Condition of Citizenship, ed. Bart van Steenbergen (London: SAGE Publications, 1994), 108–26.
110 István Csurka, ‘A Few Thoughts’, in From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Eu-
rope since 1945, ed. Gale Stokes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 265–9. For the full
text see ‘Nehány Gondolat a rendszerváltás két esztendeje és az MDF új programja kapcsán’, Magyar
Fórum, 20 August 1992, web.archive.org/web/20021114113758/www.miep.hu/csiforum/gondolat1.
htm (accessed 16 February 16 2016).
111 Zoltán Kántor, Balázs Majtényi, Osamu Ieda, Balázs Vizi and Iván Halász, eds, The Hungarian Status
Law: Nation Building and/or Minority Protection (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University,
2004), x.
112 Joseph Marko, ‘Ethnopolitics and Constitutional Reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in Bosnia-­
Herzegovina since Dayton: Civic and Uncivic Values, eds Ola Listhaug and Sabrina P. Ramet (Ravenna:
Longo editore, 2013), 49–80; Boris Divjak and Michael Pugh, ‘The Political Economy of Corruption
in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in Listhaug and Ramet, Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton, 80–97; Sofía
Sebastián-Aparicio, Post-War Statebuilding and Constitutional Reform in Divided Societies: Beyond Dayton
in Bosnia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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 1989 and beyond

held long-term residency.113 Human rights activists’ continued lobbying finally secured their
legal status, but it did not put an end to discrimination. When the local authorities of Ustí
nad Labem built a wall to separate Roma communal flats from Czech family houses in 1999,
European media was rife with indignation. The tension between a society of citizens and
ethnic exclusiveness tended to become more visible, but it remained unresolved.

Debates on abortion in Romania and Poland

General expectations that people would try to redefine the state as a moral institution in order
to remedy the distortions of communism came out most clearly in debates on abortion and
gender equality.114 Throughout Eastern Europe, the issue of abortion had largely been set-
tled by the communist regimes. Ranging from more liberal approaches, such as in Poland or
Czechoslovakia, or moderately restrictive ones, such as in Hungary or Bulgaria, most social
states had allowed access to abortion and promoted contraception as the primary instrument of
family planning.115 Only socialist Romania stuck out with its radical 1966 ban on abortion.116
The consequences of this extreme pro-natalism and the pressure that it exerted on women were
dramatic. Illegal abortions skyrocketed, infant mortality in the 1980s was nearly twice as high
as in neighbouring Hungary and Bulgaria and maternal mortality was the highest in Europe.117
The living conditions in orphanages, let alone of abandoned street children, were miserable,
and once they became public, they caused shock and indignation throughout Europe. One of
the very first measures that the newly formed government took on 26 December 1989, the very
day after Ceauşescu was executed, was to lift the ban on abortion. Repressive pro-natalism was
considered a shame, unworthy of any civilized European country, and radical change a pledge
for democracy, on the same level as free elections and minority rights.
Poland, on the contrary, had followed a fairly liberal abortion policy when compared with
the other socialist countries. Among Catholic oppositionists, abortion had been an issue early
on, though initially it was a rather marginal one. Non-partisan Catholic deputies had already
submitted draft legislation to the Sejm in 1988.118 In the 1989 electoral campaign, individual
candidates made vague pledges to remedy the social and economic causes for abortions.119
Conflict arose in December 1989 when 37 senators introduced a motion that would permit

113 Oksana Shevel, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), 210–11.
114 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
115 See the chapter by Claudia Kraft and Ulf Brunnbauer in this volume.
116 Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceaușescu’s Romania (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1998); Corina Doboş, Luciana M. Jinga and Florin S. Soare, eds, Politica
pronatalistă a regimului Ceauşescu. O perspectivă comparativă [The pro-natalist policy of the Ceauşescu
regime: a comparative perspective] (Bucharest: Polirom, 2010).
117 Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity, 206–21.
118 Polski Związek Katolicko-Społeczny [The Polish Catholic Association], www.pzks.org.pl/(accessed
13 February 2016); Małgorzata Fuszara, ‘Abortion and the Formation of the Public Sphere in Poland’,
in Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, eds
Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (London: Routledge, 1993), 241–52; Eleonora Zielińska, ‘Between
Ideology, Politics, and Common Sense:The Discourse of Reproductive Rights in Poland’, in Reproduc-
ing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, eds Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 23–57.
119 Gazeta Wyborcza 1 (8 May 1989): 3, particularly, candidate Marek Rusakiewicz.

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abortion only if the life and health of the mother were in danger or if the pregnancy had been
the result of a criminal offence.120 This was the first political issue that seriously divided the
former Solidarity opposition, and it came at the very moment when it had scored its greatest
victory and the Sejm had voted through Balcerowicz’s package of economic liberalization. The
debate on abortion tended to divide Catholicism rather than reassert it, as Kazimierz Wóycicki
wrote in early 1990.121 This remark proved to be prophetic. Whereas the motion won a major-
ity in the senate, it was rejected by the Sejm after months of controversial debate and mass dem-
onstrations. The parliament’s rejection of the motion by a margin of nearly 60 per cent reflected
opinion polls.122 On the issue of abortion, the fear of the conservatives that their former fellow
oppositionists would side with the post-communist left came true.
Debates on abortion dominated political life in Poland for a number of years. In January
1993, a conservative majority in the Sejm voted to ban abortion except for cases in which it was
medically necessary. The Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej), headed
by social democrats, tried to return to a more permissive approach in 1996, but its legislation
was overturned by the constitutional court, which argued that the state had a moral obliga-
tion to protect human life. But even this court ruling only settled the issue for a short time. In
2002, one hundred prominent Polish women, among them actress Krystyna Janda, film director
Agnieszka Holland, art historian Anda Rottenberg and Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska,
sent an open letter to the European Parliament demanding an open and democratic debate on
abortion. For its part, the government sided with the Catholic clergy in order to secure its sup-
port for Poland’s accession to the European Union.123 Appealing to a European audience and
European values did not bring any direct results, but it did show to what extent the Polish state
deviated from the general European stance on the issue.
Both the Romanian and the Polish legislation on abortion were telling as to the role of the
church in society and its influence on politics and the state. While their stances were at oppo-
site ends of the spectrum, debates in both countries were deeply grounded in moral arguments.
Born out of the desire to return to a normal state of things after the deformations caused by the
communist regimes, abortion legislation in both countries was meant to prove the new states’
moral superiority over defeated communism.124 But while the Romanian state sought to cast
off the most visible burden of Stalinism’s continued grip on the individual and society in order
to join in with European modernity, the Polish legislation was driven by the reassertion of pre-
sumed national values that had to be defended against the kinds of modern liberalism and moral
relativism they associated with Europe and the West. The Hungarian case, finally, is particularly
telling. Hungarian politicians argued that even if the substance of old legislation on abortion
should remain unchanged, it should be codified in a new law so as to assert its democratic char-
acter and dispel the notion that the state was still patronizing its population on matters of birth

120 Antoni Dudek, Historia polityczna Polski 1989–2012 [The political history of Poland 1989–2012]
(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2013), 171–2.
121 Kaziemierz Wóycicki, ‘Polskość jest zmęczona’ [Polishness is wearied], in Spór o Polskę. Wybór tekstów
prasowych, ed. Paweł Śpiewak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000), 45–47, here 47 (origi-
nally published in Więź 1 (1990)).
122 Dudek, Historia polityczna Polski 1989–2012, 172.
123 Women’s Alliance March 8, ‘Letter from One Hundred Women’, www.zgapa.pl/zgapedia/List_Stu_
Kobiet.html (accessed 4 March 2017).
124 Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 30–31; Joanna Mishtal, The Politics of Morality: The Church, the
State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015).

318
 1989 and beyond

control. The abortion debate became a site where broader political arguments were rehearsed
and different moral visions propagated. It was not only about abortion, ‘but also an argument in
absentia with communism’.125 Similar debates took place in other countries. Political authority,
as Susan Gal and Gail Kligman argued in an influential essay, was partially being ‘reconstituted
through arguments about reproduction’.126
Within a broader framework, debates on abortion gave expression to conflicting claims
on how to reshape gender relations in general after the end of communism. Since the 1990s,
a large body of literature has demonstrated how state institutions and government politics
actively propagated or facilitated a reversal towards more traditional roles.127 In many cases, this
was the direct result of attempts to break with communist-inspired forms of female emancipa-
tion, as in the 1996 Hungarian debate on parental leave.128 But even without overt political
action, it is a simple fact that women were more likely than men to slip into unemployment
and suffer the effects of the erosion of social security in crumbling economies. Seemingly
unrestrained capitalism and illiberal nationalism equally worsened gender inequalities, and in
the light of their effects, the oft lamented failure of communist female emancipation to fulfil its
promises actually seems less critical. In this highly-contested field, the shadow of communism
still looms large.

Lustration and decommunization

‘Is democracy a process or an outcome?’ asked New York journalist Tina Rosenberg in 1995.
What she had in mind was a radical approach to lustration in former Czechoslovakia, in Poland
and East Germany, the urge to purify the new democracies of all those individuals who at
some stage in their lives had cooperated with the secret police, a stain that would remain for-
ever, regardless of the complexities of life. Too much justice might be injustice, she warned.129
Unlike Latin America, Eastern Europe did not need trials to break the cycle of dictatorship
and impunity; rather, she claimed, it needed a society-wide examination of how communist
regimes had maintained their power for more than four decades.130
Rosenberg’s question reflected the debates on the nature of an open society and whether
capitalism could simply be implemented with the stroke of a pen. She feared that the advo-
cates of lustration viewed democracy as the simple negation of communism in a worldview
that knew only black and white. And the course that things took proved her right. Various
approaches to deal with the legacy of communist dictatorship and its crimes might have been
inevitable and even politically productive, but they all left behind a nasty aftertaste: none of
them fulfilled the expectation that blatant crimes would finally be punished and that members

125 Susan Gal, ‘Gender in the Post-Socialist Transition: The Abortion Debate in Hungary’, East European
Politics and Societies 8, no. 2 (1994): 256–87, here 260; Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citi-
zenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (London:Verso, 1993), 74–112.
126 Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender, 15.
127 Gal and Kligman, Reproducing Gender; Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak, eds,
Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-Communist Countries in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (Köln: Böhlau, 2006), 31–288.
128 Joanna Goven, ‘New Parliament, Old Discourse? The Parental Leave Debate in Hungary’, in Gal and
Kligman, Reproducing Gender, 286–306.
129 Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism (New York:Vintage Books,
1995), 6 and xix.
130 Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, 404–5.

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

of the nomenklatura would be forever prevented from gaining a foothold in the new demo-
cratic order. The expectation that moral purity could be achieved was itself flawed. In the long
run, it became a heavy burden.131
Parliaments rather than governments took the lead in establishing institutions which would
shed light on the legacies of communist dictatorship. In Poland, it only took Solidarity depu-
ties of the newly elected contract Sejm a few weeks to set up a commission to investigate more
than 100 alleged political murders. Within two years, the commission had initiated 78 criminal
investigations against some 100-state security and police (Citizen’s Militia) officers. More than
70 state prosecutors were dismissed for having covered up crimes involving the security forces.132
But what might have been a success was squandered. Sifting through the procurators’ files was a
tedious task. ‘We want to hold accountable all those officials who have abused their powers’, the
commission’s chairman Jan Rokita declared in March 1990.133 In many cases, such abuses, though
highly probable, could no longer be proven in court. The rule of law that had been so hard to
win imposed unexpected restrictions. Impatience grew, first with anti-communist extremists and
later with Rokita himself. The blame for the commission’s failures was all too easily placed on the
shoulders of those former communist deputies who had quickly lost interest in this work.
A similar fate, though on a much broader scale, befell the parliamentary commission that
had been established in Czechoslovakia after the elections of June 1990 to investigate the
events of 17 November 1989, when violent police action against peaceful demonstrators had
sparked the ‘Velvet Revolution’. The commission, chaired by the former dissident journalist
Jiří Ruml, also took up the task of investigating the moral credentials of the newly elected
fellow deputies.134 The categories which it developed to establish the guilt of those who had
cooperated with the state security apparatus in one way or another were driven by the same
all-encompassing urge for moral purity that motivated their colleagues in Poland. And, indeed,
the commission was flawed by the same assumption that it would be easy to make judgments
about individual guilt and innocence. ‘I thought it was possible to tell who was a collabora-
tor’, parliamentary deputy and student activist Jiři Dienstbier, Jr. recalled. ‘We found out that
it was not so straightforward.’135 Yet the moral urge gained the upper hand. Even more, the
lustration law of October 1991 extended the procedures that had been developed to screen
parliamentary deputies to a broad range of public officials. Within a year, more than one out
of four judges in Czechoslovakia had lost their position, to give the most striking example of

131 Monika Nalepa, Skeletons in the Closet:Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010); Katherine Verdery, ‘Postsocialist Cleansing in Eastern Europe: Purity
and Danger in Transitional Justice’, in Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged: Eastern Europe and
China, 1989–2009, eds Nina Bandelj and Dorothy J. Solinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 63–82.
132 Antoni Dudek, ed., Raport Rokity. Sprawozdanie Sejmowej Komisji Nadzwyczajnej do Zbadania Działalności
MSW [Rokita’s report: report of the extraordinary commission for the investigation of the activities of
the Ministry of the Interior] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo ARCANA, 2005), 33–34.
133 Archiwum Sejmu. Sejm PRL/RP – X Kadencja (1989–1991). Protokóły Komisji Sejmowych.
Komisja Nadzwyczajna do rozpatrzenia projektów ustaw dotyczących samorządu terytorialnego. Nr.
1–6. 25.I. 1990–3.III.1990. Tom I. Protokół 5 posiedzenia Komisji Nadzwyczajnej do rozpatrzenia
projektów ustaw dotyczących samorządu terytorialnego, 13. marca 1990, 130.
134 Závěrečná zpráva vyšetřovací komise Federálního shromáždění pro objasnění událostí 17. listopadu
1989 [Final Report of the Federal Assembly’s Commission to investigate the events of 17 November
1989] (Praha: Futura, 1992).
135 Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, 85.

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 1989 and beyond

the law’s effects.136 This margin was only surpassed in the former GDR. For Jiřina Šiklová,
lustration as she came to know it in the Czech Republic was simply a tragicomic farce.137 The
issue of former secret informers haunted the entire region for more than a decade. Impatient
anti-communists pressed for the proverbial witch-hunts. Where legal investigations and the
rule of law failed to bring the desired results, they suspected conspiracy. Some of them could
not resist the temptation to publish lists that named tens, even hundreds of thousands of
names of people who were allegedly implicated with the detested security services, the most
infamous case being the lists published by Petr Cibulka in 1993 in the Czech Republic, and
by Bronisław Wildstein in Poland in 2000.138 In Hungary, which had been quite reluctant to
embark on broad-scale lustration, the newly elected Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy nearly
had to step down in June 2002 after his work for communist counter-espionage became pub-
lic. The scandal briefly brought lustration back onto the agenda.139
By that time, Poland had already passed a lustration law of its own. It was less severe and more
balanced than its Czech predecessor, since it asked former informers and agents to come out
on their own. Poland also established its Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci
Narodowej – IPN), a special archive to hold and research the vast shadow empire of state secu-
rity files and, next to the former GDR, the first of its kind in the region. Unlike its East German
model, the Polish IPN was invested with far-reaching judicial powers to investigate and pros-
ecute crimes of the former communist regime.140 Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic
established similar institutions between 2002 and 2007, though with less investigative powers.
Political scientists have grappled with the broad range of legislation on lustration through-
out Central and Eastern Europe, grouping them according to the severity of their approaches,
whether legislation came early or late, whether they used incentive- or evidence-based pro-
cedures and whether they worked with principles of endogenous or exogenous retroactive
justice.141 Political competition and outright power struggles accounted for much of the precise
shape which legal provisions took in individual countries. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery
has rightfully pointed out that the urge for purification also tended to transcend the political
sphere and reached into various fields of society.142

136 Ibid., 100.

137 Jiřina Šiklová, ‘Lustration or the Czech Way of Screening’, East European Constitutional Review 5, no. 1
(1996): 57–62; David Kosař, ‘Lustration and Lapse of Time’, European Constitutional Law Review 4, no.
3 (2008): 460–87.
138 Saygun Gökariksel, ‘In the Free Market of Names: Polish Secret Service Files and Authoritarian Pop-
ulism’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 31, no. 2 (2013): 30–45.
139 Csilla Kiss, ‘The Misuses of Manipulation: The Failure of Transitional Justice in Post-Communist
Hungary’, Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 6 (2006): 925–40.
140 Antoni Dudek, Instytut. Osobista historia IPN [The Institute: A personal history of the IPN] (Warszawa:
Czerwone i Czarne, 2011), 12–65.
141 Marek M. Kaminski and Monika Nalepa, ‘Judging Transitional Justice: A New Criterion for Evalu-
ating Truth Revelation Procedures’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 3 (2006): 383–408; Nalepa,
Skeletons in the Closet; Lavinia Stan, ed., Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union:
Reckoning with the Communist Past (London: Routledge, 2009); Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, eds,
Post-Communist Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
142 Katherine Verdery, ‘Postsocialist Cleansing in Eastern Europe: Purity and Danger in Transitional Jus-
tice’, in Bandelj and Solinger, Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged, 63–82; Kieran Williams, Brigid
Fowler, and Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: A “Post-Communist-Politics”
Approach’, Democratization 12, no. 1 (2005): 22–43.

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

Putting lustration on firm legal footing, encouraging nuanced judgments and allowing for
appeals did much to build trust in new government institutions and establish the rule of law
as their highest principle. At the same time, by their mere existence, these institutions became
the strongholds of the anti-totalitarian urge to oust the nomenklatura and to purify the state.
At times, they became almost obsessive. They fuelled the perception that far too much still
remained to be done in this respect, even more so since they had no means to prevent high-
ranking communists and their networks from taking hold outside the public sector, mostly in
the media or the economy.
Adverse approaches to lustration tended to produce similar effects in Southeastern Europe.
Rabid anti-communists were few in Romania and nearly non-existent in Bulgaria, Serbia and
Albania. In Romania, it took the National Council for the Study of Securitate Files (CNSAS)
six years to achieve the transfer of the bulk of the files, which it did in 2005, only to see its lus-
tration powers redefined and partly curtailed three years later.143 Lustration was late to come in
Romania, and even more so among its Balkan neighbours. The Bulgarian files were made fully
accessible only with accession to the EU in 2007.144 In countries where trust in the state and
its institutions were traditionally weak, the nomenklatura’s nearly unhampered hold on power
for more than a decade after 1989 tended to spur resignation rather than anti-communist fury.
Broad-scale lustration was a corollary to the manifold attempts to put top-ranking com-
munists on trial for their deeds. The court martial against Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu in
December 1989 was intended to be shocking and sensational, a symbolic break with the crum-
bling communist regime, not an attempt to reinstall justice. A gross violation of judicial proce-
dures seemed necessary to bring about a quick and harsh verdict. In this respect, the Ceauşescu
trial anticipated future disappointments. Nowhere in Central and Eastern Europe did criminal
procedures against former top communist officials produce the results that their supporters had
hoped for. Among the communist leaders, only Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov was sentenced to jail,
and even he was only sentenced for corruption. The sentence was later reduced to house arrest
and was finally suspended. In Poland, Wojciech Jaruzelski and some of his generals faced trial
because of the bloodshed in Gdańsk in December 1970 and for having declared martial law in
1981. After a whole series of trials on these and other matters, including a renewed trial against
the superiors of the murderers of priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, only three mid-ranking officers were
actually convicted. All the others, including former first secretary Jaruzelski, never received a
final verdict or were legally acquitted, and if they were convicted of something like former
Minister of the Interior Czesław Kiszczak, they were spared having to serve the sentence. They
were simply too old.145 Only in the Baltic states were communist parties actually outlawed.

143 Dragoş Petrescu, ‘The Resistance that Wasn’t: Romanian Intellectuals, the Securitate, and “Resistance
through Culture”’, in Die Securitate in Siebenbürgen, eds Joachim von Puttkamer, Stefan Sienerth, and
Ulrich A. Wien (Köln: Böhlau, 2014), 11–35; Bogdan Iancu, ‘Post-Accession Constitutionalism with
a Human Face: Judicial Reform and Lustration in Romania’, in European Constitutional Law Review 6,
no. 1 (2010): 28–58.
144 Jordan Baev and Kostadin Grozev, ‘Bulgaria’, in A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East
Central Europe, 1944–1989, eds Krzysztof Persak and Łukasz Kamiński (Warsaw: Institute of National
Remembrance, 2005), 37–86; Björn Opfer-Klinger, ‘Die bulgarische Staatssicherheit vom Kalten
Krieg bis zur gescheiterten Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte,
Literatur und Politik 22, no. 1 (2010): 90–111, here 109–10.
145 Joachim von Puttkamer, ‘Enttäuschte Erwartungen: Die strafrechtliche Aufarbeitung kommunistischer
Diktatur in Polen’, in Recht und Gerechtigkeit. Die strafrechtliche Aufarbeitung von Diktaturen in Europa, ed.
Jörg Ganzenmüller (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 173–94; Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern
Europe’s Democratic Transitions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 93–132.

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According to Jerzy Turowicz, decommunization in all its dimensions, in the political system,
the economy and the restoration of social bonds, should serve the return to normal life and
ultimately to reconciliation. It was supposed to be an instrument of justice, not of revenge. But
this call largely went unheard.146 In Poland and elsewhere, even after ritual purges, the notion
that the state had been and still was in the hands of the wrong people did not simply vanish.

Conclusion
In 2004, Leszek Miller, Vladimír Špidla and Péter Medgyessy resigned from their posts as prime
ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. They had all guided their countries into
the European Union and they all belonged to a social democratic left. To be sure, accession to
the EU had not been solely a social democratic, let alone post-communist project. The trium-
phant enlargement of the European Union by eight former communist countries continued in
2007 with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria and in 2013 with the accession of Croatia.
This triumphant enlargement can be seen as the fortunate result of dissident thought and activ-
ity, an outcome that would have hardly been foreseeable three decades earlier. In hindsight, it
was the end of an epoch in the development of state institutions and political systems through-
out the region. In an optimistic reading, parliamentary democracy was firmly in place through-
out the region by the beginning of the twenty-first century and its institutional form largely
fell in line with general developments throughout Europe.147 Though persistent corruption in
parts of the region tainted the overall picture of efficient administrative institution-building, the
general course seemed set.
But viewed from the vantage point of 2016, these years also marked the end of an epoch that
had been shaped by the notion that democratic, social and national emancipation should go hand
in hand and that the state would provide the institutions that would help them along. With the
decline of emancipatory ideas, the polarization which Jerzy Szacki had predicted in 1993 seemed
to have come true. The liberal idea of civil society, responsibility and the peaceful resolution of
conflicts of interest as the foundations of parliamentary democracy began to lose out against the
enemy camps of technocratic realism and national populism of either leftist or rightist origins.
Opinion polls in the Czech Republic during the first years of the new century showed that
democracy was accepted in principle, but that its practical functioning was perceived to be
massively flawed by corruption and a lack of opportunity for civic participation.148 Elsewhere,
investigations into political expectations offered a similar picture. In countries as different as
Poland and Serbia, the president and the church met with the highest confidence among the
population, whereas the reputation of parliament and the judiciary was abominably low.149 This
in part reflects the legacy of dissident thought, which had paired moral rigour with an anti-elitist
rejection of the nomenklatura. Once transferred from civil society onto the state, the dissident

146 Jerzy Turowicz, ‘Dekomunizacja, ale jaka?’ [Which decommunization?], Tygodnik Powszechny, 21 Feb-
ruary 1993; Magdalena Zolkos, ‘The Conceptual Nexus of Human Rights and Democracy in the
Polish Lustration Debates 1989–97’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 22, no. 2 (2006):
228–48.
147 Andreas Wirsching, Der Preis der Freiheit: Geschichte Europas in unserer Zeit (München: C.H. Beck,
2012), 78–152.
148 Karel Vodička, ‘Das politische System Tschechiens’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas, 275–316, here
300–1.
149 Ziemer and Matthes, ‘Das politische System Polens’, 259; Irena Ristić, ‘Das politische System Serbi-
ens’, in Die politischen Systeme Osteuropas, 897–940, here 932.

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 Joachim von Puttkamer

notion of a moral polity was almost inevitably disappointed, even more so since achievements in
building parliamentary democracy, efficient state-institutions, market economies and European
integration were generally ascribed to technocratic elites who were perceived as being insensi-
tive towards the social needs of the great majority. Legislation on gender equality might be seen
as a case in point. It was the prospect of EU membership that forced even right-wing parties,
as in Poland, to subscribe to anti-discrimination laws and equal opportunity programmes. But
once membership had been achieved, the EU lost much of its coercive powers. It was now
mostly up to domestic social pressure to achieve anything more than superficial enforcement
of the new laws. Only a few countries such as Lithuania and Slovenia sustained a strong social
commitment to gender equality beyond 2004.150
In 1995, Gale Stokes argued that the communist regimes’ moral hollowness had brought
them down. The dissidents had gained the moral high ground over the Marxists, who had
occupied it for such a long time, and they had assumed the role of moral leadership for them-
selves.151 But tensions between national and liberal thought within the opposition that had
become visible in the 1970s remained unresolved. This turned out to be a double-edged sword.
Euphoria for the advent of parliamentary democracy, civil society and the rule of law began
to fade in the course of the 1990s and left the field to nationalism, which has been on the rise
since the 2000s. Under the conditions of the twenty-first century, the state might turn out to
be equally ill-equipped to serve as the embodiment of national identity and its main safeguard.
But the picture might not be all that bleak. Though hopes for general prosperity have remained
unfulfilled, state institutions throughout Eastern Europe – with all their flaws – have demon-
strated a remarkable capacity to moderate and stabilize the transition to market economies. This
comes out clearly if we compare developments in Eastern Europe since 1989 with the out-
comes of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010. It is as yet unclear whether we are today witnessing a long
decline of liberal democracy, which had celebrated its late and unexpected triumph in Eastern
Europe in 1989. But as parliamentary democracy has since then come under pressure in various
countries throughout the so-called Western world, the state seems more relevant than ever for
ensuring relative prosperity, social stability and, hopefully, the rule of law.

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