The Global 1989

Last night at IDEAS, a roundtable of leading academics debated a new edited volume: The Global 1989. Here one of the editors, George Lawson, explores the ways in which the central dynamics of contemporary world politics have been shaped, for better or worse, by the social forces unleashed in Central and Eastern Europe some twenty years ago. 

One of the central motifs of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the ways in which the present works to distort the past. To that end, Kundera tells the story of a photograph taken of two leading Czech communists, Vladimír Clementis and Klement Gottwald, celebrating the takeover of state power by communists in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The picture was later doctored to remove Clementis, following charges brought against him for ‘deviationism’ and ‘bourgeois nationalism’.  

The erasure of Clementis from the photograph sought to remove one of the leading architects of the Czech post-war state from the country’s history. Clementis was denounced, put on trial and, eventually, executed. In some ways, of course, the very everydayness of this episode is its most disturbing aspect. The routinisation of coercion within totalitarian states – the use of murder and imprisonment, the control of populations via vast coercive apparatuses, the establishment of insidious networks of corruption – was the norm rather than the exception. As such, the events of 1989 and the disappearance of ‘tyrannies of certitude’ from most parts of Central and Eastern Europe are acts well worth celebrating. 

Alongside the pronounced celebrations that marked the passing of state socialism in 1989 lies a second widely held view – that 1989 serves the ur -demarcation point in contemporary world politics. Indeed, both academics and policy-makers tend to use 1989 and its surrogate frames (such as Cold War/post-Cold War) as the principal normative, analytical and empirical shorthands for delineating past and present. And as with the celebrations over 1989 and its associated events, such abbreviations are made for often sound reasons. Not only was 1989 a significant event for those people living in the immediate Soviet sphere of influence, it had important ramifications for those inhabiting (now often former) socialist states around the world. 

In The Global 1989, my colleagues and I used these two assumptions as the starting point for our discussions. But the book also seeks to go further, questioning three issues which lie behind, or perhaps lurk beneath, their easy acceptance. First, although the events of 1989 are, to be sure, acts worthy of celebration, they have also engendered some unintended, yet important, consequences, perhaps most notable amongst them exposure of the chronic weaknesses contained in a hyperventilated form of liberal capitalism. One of the core wagers of the Global 1989 is that the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War have produced mixed, paradoxical, even contradictory outcomes. Although the political, economic and cultural orders generated after the fall of communism have, for the most part, been an improvement on what was in place before, this has not always been clear-cut. Substantively, 1989 has bequeathed an ambivalent legacy. 

Second, although 1989 can serve as a useful barometer between old and new, we should be cautious about the general utility of this shorthand – there have been considerable continuities between the pre- and post-1989 eras, whether this is seen in the maintenance of power by a post-totalitarian nomenklatura in Russia and China, or in the ways in which post-Cold War capitalist expansion serves as a return to long-established exploitative practices, albeit on novel scales. In this way, a complex picture emerges in terms of the temporality of 1989, one which embraces important continuities alongside, and to some extent instead of, simple notions of ‘all change’. 

Third, although the principal events and effects of 1989 took place in Europe, going beyond 1989’s immediate zone of impact reveals the many spaces of the ‘global 1989’. The failures of Western capitalism, political institutions and cultural mores since 1989 have fostered new forms of opposition to Western order: political Islam, freed from its focus on the communist enemy; Latin American populism, no longer subject to Western concerns over ‘extended deterrence’; and renewed forms of authoritarian rule in China and elsewhere, even if these now appear more as forms of political coercion than as alternative means of economic or ideological competition. In this sense, although the end of the Cold War has been felt mostly strongly in Europe, trends elsewhere have been unanticipated. We have been here before, of course. But this time, relative Western decline may be for real. 

Yogi Berra, the famous American baseball player and pundit, once said that ‘it is tough to make predictions, especially about the future’. 1989 is no exception to his maxim. Some twenty years after the fall, it is difficult to recall the sense of surprise and excitement which emerged from the removal of the Soviet empire, first in Eastern and Central Europe and, some two years later, from its own backyard. As the international media moved from city to city, and increasing numbers of Europeans came onto the streets in order to chase away the old order and to welcome in the new, there was a sense of the world shifting beneath people’s feet. 

But although there have been, and there remain, claims to the exceptional in 1989, a fundamental rupture in world order does not appear to have taken place. Rather, much akin to the bionic man, the post-1989 era is quicker, stronger, faster but not, alas, more peaceful. What is clear is that we should neither laugh (in triumphalism) about the events of 1989, nor forget (in an attempt to control the past) the lessons of the post-1989 era. After all, as Kundera notes, ‘the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Remembering the complexities, contradictions and paradoxes of the post-1989 remains an urgent task. 

George Lawson is Lecturer in International Relations at LSE

From Ideas to Policies: Greek Analysis on the Cold War and the Balkans, 1943-1989

The presentation focused on the four main strategies, or schools of thought, that emerged in Greek foreign policy-making during the Cold War. The speaker tried to sketch the intellectual preconditions of Greece’s Cold War policies: the ways in which policy-makers in Athens understood the world and tried to adjust to it.


The first strategy was an early concept of a post-war antagonism between the Soviet East and the West. It was put forward in July 1943 by Georgios Papandreou, the leader of the Democratic Socialist Party. Papandreou stressed that Germany’s defeat would entail the expansion of Soviet control in Eastern Europe. He noted that the Soviet Union was radically different compared to older European Great Powers with hegemonic ambitions: firstly, the Soviet Union was a colossal power, which united two expansionist ideals, Panslavism and Communism; secondly, Communism gave Moscow a worldwide moral and political appeal. Papandreou believed that this formidable power should be resisted by a defence organization, which would unite ‘Liberal Anglosaxonism’, Nationalist China and a ‘Socialist Paneuropa’, ‘so that Russia will remain a material threat and not a moral force, a menace, not a hope’. Papandreou became the Prime Minister of the Greek government-in-exile in April 1944; in December 1944 he led the pro-western forces in the battle of Athens against the Greek Communist Party, a conflict which determined the retention of Greece in the West.


The second strategy was an effort to respond to the dramatic emergency of the civil war. It was projected by Ambassador Panayiotis Pipinelis, the Permanent Under-secretary of the Foreign Ministry in 1947-9; it involved an emphasis on crude realism, and aimed to resist the climate of panic which prevailed in the country during the last phase of the Greek civil war. According to Pipinelis, technology and economic growth ensured that the large states would become more powerful and the smaller states would be left increasingly behind; ideology, which had provided for hope during the war, proved to be an instrument of power politics and of national policy, rather than anything else. In this context, Greece had become a frontline state, which had to accept its dependence on the larger Western powers.

The end of the civil war, thus, did not solve the problem of devising a convincing long-term strategy for the post-war era. This emerged in the mid-1950s and became dominant, with the parenthesis of the 1967-74 military dictatorship, until the late 1970s. The new strategy was implemented mainly by the leaders of the Greek Centre-right, such as Constantinos Karamanlis and Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza, but was also shared by the Centre governments in 1963-67. It focused on geographical realities, mostly on the prime problem of Greece’s physical distance from the hard cores of the Western world. Exactly because of this problem of geographical separation, the search for security involved the employment of various means, military, political and diplomatic, in order to create a system of credible deterrence. However, the most important manifestation of the new policy was the emphasis to European institutions, as a means to ensure Greece’s full integration in the West. Greece became the first country to attain associate membership of the EEC in 1961, and in 1979 the Treaty of its Accession to the European Communities was signed.

The fourth strategy was put forward in the 1970s and 1980s by Andreas Papandreou, the head of the new Socialist party. For Papandreou, the Cold War was not the most important element of post-war international affairs. He accepted the view that there was a different dominant cleavage, between the capitalist ‘metropole’, which exploited the ‘periphery’ to which Greece itself belonged. Thus, for Andreas the major aim was to restore national independence; without this, the American neo-colonialist capitalist metropolis would never allow the country to move to real democracy. Andreas Papandreou came to power in 1981, riding on a wave of anti-Americanism and nationalism. However, by the early 1980s he accepted Greece’s western orientation, thus leading to the emergence of a new consensus in Greek foreign policy. The pivotal moment for this process was the summer of 1983, when the Papandreou government definitely accepted the country’s membership to the European Communities and also signed a new agreement for the retention of US bases on Greek soil.

Dr Evanthis Hatzivassiliou is an assistant professor of contemporary history at the History Department of the University of Athens and editor of the Modern and Contemporary History series of Patakis Publications

Anglo-French Union, Again?

An Anglo-French military treaty, due to be signed today, has been greeted with dismay in some quarters while indicating to others that the Anglo-American 'special relationship' may well be slipping away. Is this a turning point? I'm not sure. If it is, is it an unalloyed advance? Is Britain less likely to try and police the world, just behind the American behemoth, if the French are close to hand, whispering restraint in Britain's ear? Would an Ango-French military alliance have opposed the Iraq War or would it have forced France to support it (or would the matter have split apart such a union)?

The historical precedents are there to consider: in June 1940, when France was on the verge of signing an armistice with Nazi Germany, Britain offered to France the prospect of an Anglo-French Union - one nation with a common currency, passports, and the like. But the French cabinet rejected it, much to PM Winston Churchill's relief (he hadn't been too keen in the first place), and the French headed to a kind of European union headed by Adolf Hitler, against which many Frenchmen and women fought valiantly, a valuable aid to Anglo-American efforts. Britain, of course, went on to forge an Anglo-American alliance that holds to this day.

In 1956, the-then French prime minister, Guy Mollet, proposed a union of France and Britain as they cunningly manoeuvered in the Suez 'crisis'. Egypt's President Nasser, you will recall, had had the temerity to take control of the Suez Canal, which was on his sovereign territory, much to the chagrin of Britain and France - who still entertained ideas about gunboat diplomacy to 'sort out' such people and put them in their place. Clearly, their ideas about de-colonisation did not fundamentally impoverish their imperial mentalities.


Prime Minister Anthony Eden, perhaps sensing that the Suez adventure was about to go awry, declined the French offer. He also wanted to ensure that Britain, whose ambitions remained global in scope, would not get too tied down in Europe. France, which was very keen to unify Europe as a way of controlling Germany, then signed the Treaty of Rome and, a decade or so later, withdrew from NATO's military command structure (which it re-entered only last year). France then blocked Britain's attempts to enter the European Community for almost twenty years, declaring the Anglo-Saxons to be bent on global domination, especially in the Vietnam War era, when said Anglo-Saxons were fighting a war in a former French colony.


Is a post-Iraq War, post-Blair-Brown, Britain ready to embrace Europe, tame its global mentality, eschew further American adventures, and stop punching above its weight in world affairs? Will PM David Cameron, current leader of Churchill's party, sign the death warrant of British imperial mentalities? 


The severe financial crisis, which is driving the current phase of national security policy suggests that this is no permanent retreat from imperial thinking, merely a practical, pragmatic response to a crisis.


American power continues to align with every cultural, imperial and ethno-racial instinct of Cameron's party, never mind the political influence of Tory Euro-sceptics. But times are hard. You have to 'make do' with what you can.
Even within these parameters, however, there remains the notion of a certain degree of freedom within an Anglo-French alliance - room for manoeuvre, should a tempting offer from across the Atlantic come Britain's way. The other point is that the new treaty is being sold as an opportunity for joint Anglo-French military intervention in Africa, where they share 'common interests'.


Their forms might change, but imperial mentalities do not die easily.


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester, Vice Chair of the British International Studies Association and an Associate of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.  This post first appeared at his excellent US Blog