8 ★ FT Weekend 19 October/20 October 2019
L
ike 1776, 1789 and 1917, the
year 1989 was one of those
rare moments that mark a
decisive turning point in
human history. So, at least, it
seemed at the time, especially to those
of us who spent 1989 in the thick of the
pro-democracy revolutions of commu-
nist central and eastern Europe.
It seemed little short of a miracle that
the region’s oppressive one-party sys-
tems crumbled ith hardly a drop ofw
blood shed — except in Romania — and
without intervention from the Soviet
Union, the region’s lord and master
since the end of the second world war.
Now, at last, Czechs, Hungarians and
Poles could be reunited with Britons,
French and Germans in a Europe whole
and free.
There was, of course, a darker side to- On June 4, the day when Poland’s
patriotic trade union movement Soli-
darity swept to an overwhelming vic-
tory over the Communist party in semi-
free elections, the Chinese armed forces
massacred crowds of student protesters
on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
China’s ruling Communists have
never expressed remorse for the slaugh-
ter. Even with regard to China, however,
the optimistic expectation of many
western leaders and opinion-makers
was that the nation’s single-minded pur-
suit of partly market-based modernis-
ation would eventually bring so much
social and economic progress that
authoritarianism would yield to some
form of democracy.
Thirty years on, 1989 appears in less
rosy colours. China’s modernisation has
done nothing to soften the state’s
authoritarian features. Russia, which
appeared on a promising path to free-
dom in the Soviet Union’s final years, is
an autocratic kleptocracy. Most coun-
tries in central and eastern Europe have
been integrated into the EU and Nato,
but the region abounds in nationalists,
nativists and populists who have few
values in common with the enlightened
liberal revolutionaries of 1989.
Perhaps most alarmingly, the west
itself seems to be in deep trouble. Presi-
dent Donald Trump is turning the US
against its own democratic idealism and
internationalist outlook. The EU strug-
gles to control events within, on and
beyond its borders.
What’s more, the western financial
and economic system is no longer deliv-
ering on its promises to millions of citi-
zens. In August Mark Carney, governor
of the Bank of England, warned at a
gathering of central bank chiefs in Jack-
son Hole, Wyoming, that the present
system “is not only making it harder to
achieve price and financial stability, but
it is also encouraging protectionist and
populist policies... Past instances of
very low [interest] rates have tended to
coincide with high-risk events such as
wars, financial crises and breaks in the
monetary regime.”
The four books under review, each of
which I strongly recommend, range
from Norman Naimark’s expertly
detailed analysis ofStalin’s postwar pol-
icies in Europe to Simon Reid-Henry’s
formidably ambitious attempt to paint
a thematic portrait of the world’s
democracies from the early 1970s to the
present day. Kristina Spohr beautifully
reconstructs the events of the 1989-92
era, reminding us of the importance of
intelligent, responsible political leader-
ship at critical moments of history,
while Ivan Krastev and Stephen Hol-
mes give an unflinchingly honest exp-
lanation of what has gone wrong in
the west — and the east — since 1989.
Krastev, a Bulgarian-born scholar at
the Institute of Human Sciences in
Vienna, and Holmes, a professor at New
York University School of Law, contend
inThe Light that Failed hat western lib-t
eralism became soaked in complacency
and arrogance after 1989, generating a
backlash in the east’s new democracies
and in the west itself. “Liberalism ended
up the victim of its heralded success in
the cold war... Liberalism fell in love
with itself and lost its way,” they write.
The authors construct a powerful case
by focusing on four areas: central and
eastern Europe, Russia, the US and
China. By the mid-2010s, the states of
central and eastern Europe were
undoubtedly wealthier and the capital-
ist future promised in 1989 had arrived
— “but its benefits and burdens were
unevenly, even crassly distributed”,
they write. The region’s severe depopu-
lation over the past 30 years exacerbates
the problem as the emigration of young,
well-educated people makes it harder
for liberal parties to win elections.
The authors are no admirers of Viktor
Orban, Hungary’s illiberal prime minis-
ter — “he has shielded from public scru-
tiny both his electoral manipulation and
epic levels of insider corruption” — but
they warn that there is “scant reason for
confidence that he is destined to fail”.
The anti-Orban opposition won local
elections in Budapest and other cities
last weekend, but Poland’s ruling Law
and Justice party was comfortably re-
elected to power in national parliamen-
tary elections. The larger point is that
after 1989, many central and eastern
Europeans came to resent being told to
copy western practices and values as if
they were mere pupils in a class.
Perceptively, the authors argue that
the nationalist reaction came about not
only because the western liberal model
discredited itself in the 2008 financial
crisis, but because it was never plausible
that central and eastern Europeanswould adopt the “radical disavowing of
ethno-nationalism” embraced by West
Germany after 1945. As for Russia,
Krastev and Holmes write in one
memorable sentence that the post-com-
munist political elite in Moscow “found
faking democracy perfectly natural,
since they had been faking communism
for at least two decades before 1991”.
US and eastern European populisms
are similar in expressing contempt for
establishment elites as well as hatred
and fear of immigrants. Trump, how-
ever, is different from Orban and other
European populists in that he is “anti-
intellectual to the point of illiteracy”,
Krastev and Holmes write. The Ameri-
can public’s enthusiasm for remaking
the world in its image after 1989 was
bound to fade as US global dominance
gave way to the rise of China and a more
multipolar world. Nonetheless, Trump
is “the first president in American his-
tory to scrap the conviction that Amer-
ica stands for a teachable idea”.
The authors take pains not to end on a
gloomy note. They reject the idea that
“reactionary authoritarianism and
nativism will inherit the earth”, and sug-
gest that a “chastised liberalism, having
recovered from its unrealistic and self-
defeating aspirations to global hegem-
ony, remains the political idea most at
home in the 21st century”. Still, it will
take much hard work and self-criticism
to correct the errors of the past 30 years.
InPost Wall, Post Square, Spohr echoes
Krastev and Holmes in arguing that
western policymakers took it virtually
for granted in 1989-92 that liberal
democracy was the wave of the future
and the world was converging on Ameri-
can values. A history professor at the
London School of Economics and Johns
Hopkins University, Spohr uses recently
declassified material in the British,
French, German, Russian and US
archives to describe how political lead-
ers grappled with the revolutionary
waves of change surging around them.“In retrospect, the whole Soviet bloc
seems like a house of cards,” she writes.
Yet at the start of 1989 very few people
predicted that it would all come down
by the year’s end. Crucial to the outcome
was the restraint of Mikhail Gorbachev,
the reformist Soviet leader. If only we
had known at the time that he called
Erich Honecker, East Germany’s react-
ionary communist leader, a “scumbag”,
and that he dismissed Nicolae Ceaus-
escu’s Romanian dictatorship as a
“primitive phenomenon”.
Spohr pays deserved tribute also to
the “people power” of central and east-ern Europe. She mentions not only
those who filled the streets of East Berlin
and Prague in peaceful demonstrations,
but also brave individuals such as Lech
Walesa, the earthy, politically astute
electrician from Gdansk, who symbol-
ised Poland’s non-violent move to
democracy. However, if there are three
heroes of Spohr’s book, they are Gor-
bachev, former US President George
HW Bush and former German chancel-
lor Helmut Kohl. Negotiating the end of
the cold war, German reunification and
the Soviet Union’s demise required
statesmanship of a high order, and this
trio provided it.
One theme of Spohr’s book — that
western leaders viewed it as essential to
root the east’s new democracies in free-
market economics — forms a core argu-
ment of Reid-Henry’sEmpire of Democ-
racy. The origins of this faith in eco-
nomic liberalism lie in the methods that
western governments chose to over-
come the multiple rises besetting theirc
countries in the late 1960s and early
1970s, Reid-Henry writes.
In short, the west fought inflation,
currency volatility and lost productiv-
ity growth by opening up their econo-
mies to market forces in a way that
increasedwealth but also dramatically
transformed the social contract
between governments, capital and
labour that had defined the major
democracies since 1945. “In the heady
blur that was communism’s demise it
was taken for granted that capitalism
was ticking along nicely in the West and
carrying democracy with it,” Reid-
Henry observes.
In the author’s view, dangerous ten-
sions were building up. On the one hand,
citizens were coming to feel discon-
nected from their democratic systems
because of rising economic inequality,
especially in the US, a pro-market politi-cal consensus that seemed to rule out
genuine change and the growth of unac-
countable, quasi-governmental agen-
cies. Large-scale immigration came to
be conflated after the 9/11 attacks on the
US with terrorism, Islamism and unwin-
nable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
On the other hand, “the financial sec-
tor was allowed to grow beyond almost
all limits, while the state progressively
unburdened itself of the regulatory
tools that would be needed if such a
casino economy was ever to run into
trouble”. The result was the 2008 melt-
down. As Mark Carney pointed out, the
recovery from that shock has by no
means stabilised the system.
There is much to admire in Reid-
Henry’s book, but one must ask who fact-
checked it, for unfortunately its 800-
plus pages of text are littered with basic
errors. Among them: Gorbachev’s birth-
place (southern Russia, not Ukraine);
Kohl’s departure from the chancellor-
ship (1998, not 1997); the 1992 referen-
dum vote against the EU’s Maastricht
treaty (in Denmark, not the Nether-
lands); and the founder of Italy’s North-
ern League (Umberto Bossi, not Ossi).
Naimark has few peers as a scholar of
Stalinism, the Soviet Union and 20th-
century Europe, and his latest workSta-
lin and the Fate of Europe s one of his mosti
original and interesting. He selects seven
case studies to illustrate the complexity
of Stalin’s aims in Europe. These involve
the Danish island of Bornholm (briefly
occupied by Soviet forces in 1945-46),
Albania, Finland, the Italian elections of
1948, the Soviet blockade of Berlin,
Poland up to 1949 and Austria.
In each case Naimark reaches a con-
clusion that surprises but convinces:
despite the shadow of Stalinism advanc-
ing across eastern Europe, “the agency
of Europeans mattered and mattered a
lot”. Strong social democratic parties in
western Europe and courageous politi-
cians such as Finland’s Juho Paasikivi,
West Berlin’s Ernst Reuter and Austria’s
Karl Renner succeeded in keeping com-
munism at bay. But even hardline com-
munists such as Albania’s Enver Hoxha
and Poland’s Wladyslaw Gomulka
strove to preserve as much sovereignty
for their countries as possible.
Stalin was never intent on fomenting
revolution in western Europe, Naimark
says. But the cold war for which he bears
much responsibility has etched its lega-
cies in the institutional cultures of
Washington and Moscow to this day.
Combine this with the political frag-
mentation of European democracies,
the shortcomings of the EU, the weak-
nesses of the eurozone and Brexit, and it
is not difficult to see why Europe, so far
from being the beacon of promise that it
imagined itself in 1989, may once
again generate much instability in years
to come.Tony Barber is the FT’s Europe
commentatorMoscow’s political elite
‘found faking democracy
perfectly natural, sincethey had been faking
communism for at leasttwo decades before 1991’
The Light that Failed:
A Reckoning
by Ivan Krastev
and Stephen Holmes
Allen Lane £20, 256 pagesPost Wall, Post Square:
Rebuilding the World
after 1989
by Kristina Spohr
William Collins £30, 768 pagesEmpire of Democracy:
The Remaking of
the West since the
Cold War, 1971-2017
by Simon Reid-Henry
John Murray £30/Simon &
Schuster $35, 880 pagesStalin and the Fate of
Europe: The Postwar
Struggle for Sovereignty
by Norman M Naimark
Belknap Press £23.95, 368 pagesEssay The promise of democracy that swept central and eastern Europe with the 1989 revolutions|
hasgiven way to nationalism and kleptocracy 30 years on.Tony Barber xamines what went wronge
East German soldiers on
the east side of the Berlin
Wall as West Germans
gather on their side in
November 1989. On the
night of November 9, East
Germans were allowed to
cross to West Berlin
EyevineLook back in sorrow
Pro-democracy protesters
march towards Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square in June
1989 bearing the ‘Goddess
of Democracy’, modelled
on the Statue of Liberty.
A few days later troops
brutally suppressed the
demonstrations
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