The Making of '89: Nationalism and the Dissolution of Communist Eastern Europe

Abstract

Abstract. Designed and delivered as a ‘think‐paper’ at the first conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism in 1991, this contribution has been revised in the light of subsequent developments but retains the essential flavour and format of the original. The primary objective of the article is to identify the most typical and authoritative stimuli promoting and sustaining the rising tide of nationalism over the five years preceding the collapse of communist Eastern Europe in 1989/91, concentrating on environmental threat, demographic flux, the media revolution and the bankruptcy of supra‐national authority. The secondary objective is to reflect on how differing evaluations of these stimuli have influenced rival interpretations of the phenomenon of modern nationalism. Experiencing both a ‘resurgence’ and a ‘regeneration’ (but not a ‘revolution') over the last ten years, nationalism is expected to remain a dominant force across greater Eastern Europe for the foreseeable future.

Ethnic processes in post-communist Europe during the 1990s

“…in the second case, the majority of the titular nation was jeopardized by massive immigration (the latvians and estonians in their republics) . expansion of nationalism at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s is also connected with anti-russian attitudes (Pearson 1995) . eastern european nations were under soviet political, economic and cultural domination .…”

“…this idea was seized by ethnic elites in order to get electoral support in the first democratic elections (Dostál 1998) . Pearson (1995) argues that the expansion of nationalism before 1989 was influenced, not only by the economic situation and ill-treatment of minorities, but also by the transformation of the geopolitical climate in some eastern european countries . in the first case, the original majorities became minorities in parts of their territory due to the high birth rate of another nation (the serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina) .…”

“…the local nations were reminded of subjugation by the soviet Union and understood communism as an imported, alien ideology . the newest phase of expansion of nationalism began in connection with the fall of the communist regimes (Hroch 1996;Pearson 1995) . According to Fukuyama (2002), Huntington (2001) and yamskov (1999) the expansion of nationalism in the 1990s resulted from the rejection of marxist ideology .…”

Nationalism in post‐communist societies

“…Viewed in this way, 1989 signifies not only a victory of anti-communism, but also a victory of small nations over an imperial, overarching power. 25 But like all struggles for national independence, this specifically Eastern European struggle was not free from extreme ethnocentricity, xenophobia and expressions of cultural superiority and sometimes blatant racism. It is a complex picture, sometimes obscured by the fact that the enemy-who was also the common enemy of the West-was a particularly nasty form of tyranny, i.e.…”