Some Lessons of 1989's East European Revolutions:
Reflections of a U.S. Peace Activist

Share Joanne Landy   May 25, 2012

This article will appear in the forthcoming summer
2012 print issue of New Politics. <http://www.newpol.org/node/632

[Introduction: In the 1980s, the U.S.-based Campaign
for Peace and Democracy/East and West was deeply
involved in the struggle for détente from below.CPD/EW
collaborated with the European Nuclear Disarmament
network to build solidarity and mutual support between,
on the one hand, peace groups and progressive trade
unionists in the West and, on the other hand, the
democratic movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. As CPD/EW co-director I traveled frequently to
East-bloc countries, Western Europe, and Latin America
to promote grassroots solidarity across Cold War
boundaries. Now, more than two decades later, I would
like to look back at our experience and explore
critically the role of activists, East and West, in the
years leading up to 1989.

I will try to answer the question of why the outcome of
the 1989 upheavals, despite their undoubted benefit of
consigning the old Communist regimes to the dustbin of
history, was in many ways disappointing, and why they
failed to realize the hopes of millions for a new era
of peace, social justice, economic betterment, and
meaningful democracy. I will also discuss some
implications of the 1989 revolutions for the historic
movements of the last few years, from the 2009 Iranian
mass demonstrations to the Arab Spring, to popular
protests in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and the rest of
Europe  and to our own Occupy movement.]


In the 1980s, the U.S.-based Campaign for Peace and
Democracy/East and West was deeply involved in the
struggle for "detente from below." CPD/EW collaborated
with the European Nuclear Disarmament network to build
solidarity and mutual support between, on the one hand,
peace groups and progressive trade unionists in the
West and, on the other hand, the democratic movements
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As CPD/EW
co-director I traveled frequently to East-bloc
countries, Western Europe, and Latin America to promote
grassroots solidarity across Cold War boundaries. Now,
more than two decades later, I would like to look back
at our experience and explore critically the role of
activists, East and West, in the years leading up to
1989.

I will try to answer the question of why the outcome of
the 1989 upheavals, despite their undoubted benefit of
consigning the old Communist regimes to the dustbin of
history, was in many ways disappointing, and why they
failed to realize the hopes of millions for a new era
of peace, social justice, economic betterment, and
meaningful democracy. I will also discuss some
implications of the 1989 revolutions for the historic
movements of the last few years, from the 2009 Iranian
mass demonstrations to the Arab Spring, to popular
protests in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and the rest of
Europe--and to our own Occupy movement.

In the 1980s here in the United States CPD/EW succeeded
in enlisting leaders of many peace groups--including the
War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation,
American Friends Service Committee, and Sojourners--in
defense of Polish Solidarnosc trade union leaders,
Charter 77 members in Czechoslovakia, and independent
peace activists throughout the Soviet bloc. This
defense of East-bloc activists transcended the
crippling binaries of Cold War thinking that could be
summed up in the unfortunate slogan "The enemy of my
enemy is my friend." One example of such CPD/EW work
was a 1983 New York Times ad entitled "U.S. Peace and
Labor Activists Support Polish Solidarity Leaders on
Trial" signed by 78 individuals, including Ed Asner,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg,
Allen Ginsberg, Maggie Kuhn, Manning Marable, David
McReynolds, Robert Meeropol, Holly Near, I.F. Stone,
and Cornel West.

Moreover, CPD/EW argued that solidarity wasn't a
one-way street, and in addition to organizing
initiatives like the one described above it also
succeeded in promoting solidarity in the other
direction by engaging East-bloc activists in campaigns
to oppose anti-democratic U.S. policies in countries
like Chile and Nicaragua. In that vein, the Campaign in
1986 took out another New York Times ad entitled
"Independent Voices, East and West, Speak Out Against
Reagan's Nicaragua Policy" with dozens of Western
signers and a large number of signatures from
dissidents and independent activists in Czechoslovakia,
East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the USSR, and
Yugoslavia.

Though I wish we had been even more successful in our
efforts, I am very proud of that record. Today we at
the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (the name was
shortened by dropping the "East and West" after the
Cold War ended) continue to oppose war threats and
imperial sanctions by our own government, while
supporting the fight for democracy and social justice
everywhere, whether it occurs in countries within the
U.S. orbit like Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia, or in
countries to which the U.S. is hostile, like Iran.

Critical Solidarity

As we move forward, we need to think more about HOW we
build international solidarity. Does solidarity mean
automatic agreement with everything the leadership of a
democratic movement says? A rubber stamp? I don't think
so. There is a need for what Danny Postel, quoting Fred
Halliday, called "critical solidarity" in his Summer
2010 New Politics article, ""Revolutionary
Prefigurations: The Green Movement, Critical Solidarity
and the Struggle for Iran's Future."

In retrospect, I think we in CPD/EW could have been
more critical in our solidarity work with East-bloc
movements. While we did discuss and debate with East
European activists about issues of peace and
disarmament, and never concealed our own
anti-capitalist perspective, we didn't talk as much as
we should have about our view of what kind of society
should replace Communism, nor did we discuss in any
depth the disastrous consequences we believed would
follow if their countries were to adopt the neoliberal
prescriptions of privatization and slashing the social
safety net. In thinking back, I believe one major
explanation for this shortcoming was that while we were
supporting struggling movements for democratic change
in the Soviet bloc and on one level strongly believed
in the possibility of their victory, it was nonetheless
hard for many of us to really absorb the idea that
East-bloc repressive governments, seemingly so
invulnerable, would actually collapse within a very few
years. Therefore it didn't seem so urgent to discuss
future visions.

When the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell, the
new governments, virtually without exception, did not
question the need for wholesale integration into the
capitalist world economy and to one degree or another
accepted the legitimacy of demands from the West that
they undergo "shock therapy" to speedily achieve that
integration. The result of that acquiescence has been
that millions of people have suffered from
unemployment, insecurity, and loss of social services
that were provided by the old Communist governments.
Moreover, many East European economies are further
threatened by today's global economic and ecological
crises.

Within movements for democratic change in authoritarian
societies there is powerful pressure not to pursue
discussions of differences of opinion about long-term
goals, given the imperative of fighting to end the rule
of a terrible, repressive regime. But sidestepping
those discussions comes at a high price--not only
internally, within opposition circles, but more broadly
because it means that ordinary people can't be aware of
the debates, participate in them, and begin to think
about and propose future alternatives themselves.
Different political currents of course do need to unite
in a broad movement against authoritarian
governments--but there is also the need to explore and
expose differences about agendas for the future.

Why was it that East-bloc dissidents, mostly leftists
in the 1960s and 1970s, failed to pose a left
alternative by the time the system was coming apart in
the 1980s? I am unsure of the answer to this question,
but I will make a stab at an explanation.

First of all, the decline of the global left was an
important element in weakening the left in Eastern
Europe. Despite the "Iron Curtain" there was
historically a general awareness in the Soviet bloc of
the existence of socialist ideas and movements
elsewhere. Their appeal, however, was limited to the
extent that the very idea of socialism was associated
with pro-Communist elements of the left. For a time, in
the 60s and 70s, the new Western independent left,
especially the student movement, exerted an influence
in the East. But as these left movements declined they
had less standing in Soviet-bloc countries. Moreover,
the failure, with some honorable exceptions, of what
global left there was to actively and energetically
support democratic movements in the East bloc tended to
alienate people suffering from Communist repression.
Finally, the advance of globalization made it even more
difficult to mount a successful anti-capitalist
struggle in a single country than it had been before,
and this doubtless contributed to the feeling that
trying to forge a socialist or left alternative would
be doomed to defeat.

I don't mean to argue that a better outcome would have
been easy, much less automatic, had the dissident
community maintained its leftwing politics into the
years of Communist collapse. However, it's important to
remember the great international moral and political
power of the democratic upsurge of 1989. What if the
democratic movements and new governments had made
egalitarian demands on the world's political and
economic leaders, rather than acquiescing with no
programmatic resistance to the logic of capitalism and
the nostrums of the IMF and the World Bank? Even if
they had been forced to make concessions to the power
of capitalism, if the new governments had resisted and
challenged capitalism's legitimacy instead of embracing
it they could likely have won at least some interim
concessions for themselves while moving the terms of
global debate to the left. This was a great opportunity
lost.

Implications for the Future

What are the implications of the 1989 experience for
the upheavals and revolutions of our time? It is clear
that international solidarity is needed now more than
ever, not only to defend labor, dissidents, student,
ecological and women's rights activists, and religious,
ethnic, and sexual minorities against state repression,
but also, while respecting the rights of people within
a country to determine their own destiny, to strengthen
through grassroots solidarity left and liberatory
currents such as socialists, greens, and feminists
within broad anti-repression movements. Moreover,
critical solidarity today ought not to be a one-way
street. So, for example, democratic activists in Egypt
or Iran should be encouraged to speak out against
repression and inequality in the United States (as the
Egyptians so wonderfully did when they sent pizzas to
the protestors in Madison, Wisconsin) and also to
express their views about debates within Occupy and
other U.S. protest movements.

There is ample reason to expect that the new
governments in the Middle East will be under pressure
from below to resist neoliberal prescriptions for their
economic and social ills. An important contribution
solidarity activists can offer to this resistance is to
make it difficult, through public protests and
campaigns, for wealthy countries and international
financial institutions to impose their retrograde
solutions.

A major challenge grassroots movements everywhere face
today is the absence of political parties that can
champion their cause and offer progressive solutions to
the larger society. In countries emerging from decades
of authoritarianism one reason for the lack of left
wing political parties is that they were illegal under
the old governments, so left activists often have to
start building parties almost from nothing. But the
problem goes beyond this legacy. In the past year we
have seen an explosion of protest in countries with
more democratic liberties like Greece, Spain, and
Portugal, as well as here in the United States with our
Occupy movement--and these protests also have no
electoral expression. All too often the consequence is
that after massive demonstrations and inspiring
protests the new governments that come to power are far
to the right of the popular upsurge that propelled them
to power, while the left remains politically
disorganized.

Notwithstanding technical obstacles to forming new
parties, there is another, deeper explanation for why
the contemporary left generally doesn't have parties of
its own or the intention to form them, and that is the
"anti-politics" sentiment of many of today's
protestors--an outlook that incidentally was also shared
by many of the East-bloc dissidents of the 1980s. This
outlook is understandable given the terrible failure of
existing parties to represent and defend popular
aspirations, but it leaves protest movements at a
political dead end. To paraphrase the old Greyhound bus
ad, it "leaves the driving to them."

We are entering an age of tremendous turmoil because of
the failure of global capitalism to fulfill the
economic, social and personal needs of ordinary people
around the world, and because millions have asserted
their claims to dignity and security and are inspiring
millions more to do the same. We need to shake off the
old Cold War "the enemy of my enemy must be my friend"
way of thinking and build a truly international left
that can honestly fight for the rights of people
everywhere and connect their struggles--not in a
sectarian way that counterposes the left to mass
democratic movements, but as integral, independent
participants in these movements. Those of us who are
socialists face the challenge of rescuing the image of
socialism from the bureaucratic authoritarianism of
societies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that
assumed the name, but this rescue effort is worthwhile
because its success will help people to see a way out,
to see that, despite Margaret Thatcher's deadening
assertion to the contrary, there is a democratic,
radical, and egalitarian alternative to the grim
realities of contemporary capitalism.--April 19, 2012

Notes

This essay is adapted from a talk given at the Campaign
for Peace and Democracy panel on the lessons of 1989 on
March 17, 2012 at the Left Forum in New York City.

The Campaign for Peace and Democracy's papers are
available at New York University's Tamiment Library and
its current activities are posted on its website,
www.cpdweb.org. For more on the "detente from below"
perspective of European Nuclear Disarmament see E.P.
Thompson's Beyond the Cold War: A New Approach to the
Arms Race and Nuclear Annihilation, Merlin Press, 1982
and The Heavy Dancers, Merlin Press, 1985. For a
similar post-Cold War view, see the incisive essay,
"Solidarity and Its Discontents," from Raha Iranian
Feminist Collective, Jadaliyya, Feb. 19, 2011 and visit
the website of the new group Havaar: Iranian Initiative
Against War, Sanctions and State Repression.

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