The question today is the same as that of twenty years ago: what do we call the events that transformed eastern Europe in 1989? Our improved perspective has not necessarily generated better answers. The most popular term is ‘revolution’, but many observers still hesitate to apply it to largely non-violent change. Can there be a ‘liberal revolution’? Timothy Garton-Ash's evocative neologism ‘refolution’ (meaning ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’) captures well the ambivalence many feel about describing a gradual transition to democracy as ‘revolutionary’. The processes of civil society formation he observed in the 1980s by no means concluded with 1989; in south-eastern Europe in particular the transition to democracy has not been revolutionary but slow and painful. Perhaps ‘democracy’ is not even the right word.

This paper is a frankly subjective effort to return to questions posed about the nature of communist rule and the sudden collapse of communism in the light of the intervening two decades. It asks, first, why feelings of elation about the transformations of 1989 faded relatively quickly, second, why the communist system collapsed so clamorously, and, third, how might we best describe its earlier operation. The paper suggests that there will always be a sense of let-down after intensely hopeful political activity. It endeavours to provide a model of social complexity that communist rule with its Marxist archetypes of social development could not really master. But it also rejects the idea that ‘society’ under communism can be judged autonomously apart from the regime that sustained and structured it. Efforts to do so will trivialise the degrees of repression and surveillance. Finally the paper proposes that the nature of communist rule in the decades after Stalin must be described in terms of a ‘life cycle’ metaphor, such as the idea of ‘late style’ provides for artistic creation. It is fruitless to describe an ideal type of transformative political regime that makes no allowance for change over time. Hence, returning to the first enquiry, the paper argues that efforts to reclaim communal fulfilment will always exist or revive alongside efforts at individual emancipation.

The events of 1989 had world-shattering revolutionary consequences. They brought about a new vision of the political based upon a rediscovery of democratic participation and civic activism. The upheaval in the east, and primarily in the central, European countries, represented a series of political revolutions that led to the decisive and irreversible transformation of the existing order. When explaining 1989, one needs to focus on three major themes: the deep-seated meanings of the collapse of state socialist regimes in east central Europe, the nature of revolutions at the end of the twentieth century, and the role of critical (public) intellectuals in politics. There is no single factor that explains the collapse of Leninism: economics as much as politics, and culture as much as insoluble social tensions converged in making these regimes irretrievably obsolete. The aftermath of 1989 generated a fluidity of political commitments, allegiances and affiliations that signalled a general crisis of values and authority. There is a need for ‘social glue’ and the existing political formations have failed to imagine such ingredients for the consensus needed in order to generate constitutional patriotism. A fundamental source for reinforcing democracy in east central Europe is the synthesis between the history and the memory of communism with the purpose of achieving moral justice.

Political scientists have documented significant variation in political and economic outcomes of the 1989–91 revolutions. Countries bordering on western Europe have become relatively democratic and economically successful, with both democracy and wealth dropping off as one moves east and south. Explanations for this variation and the replication of an older pattern on the Eurasian landmass have moved farther and farther into the past. Yet in moving to the longue durée, more proximate events such as the revolutions of 1989, the demise of communism and even the communist experience itself recede into the background and are themselves accounted for by antecedent conditions. The article discusses how two more proximate factors helped to change older patterns in central and eastern Europe: the impact of communist modernisation and the prospect of European integration.

This article explores communism – including its pre-history and aftermath – as a generational history. The structure is diachronic and largely biographical. Attention is paid to the roles of milieu, the Second World War, generational cleavages and a Hegelian sense of time. Nineteen sixty-eight is a turning point, the moment when Marxism as belief was decoupled from communism as practice. The arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague meant a certain kind of end of European Marxism. It also meant the coming of age of a new generation: those born in the post-war years who were to play a large role in the opposition. The anti-communist opposition was organically connected to Marxism itself: the generation(s) of dissidents active in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood as a further chapter in the generational history of communism. Nineteen eight-nine was another moment of sharp generational rupture. The new post-communist generation, Havel's great hope, possessed the virtue of openness. Openness, however, proved a double-edged sword: as eastern Europe opened to the West, it also opened a Pandora's box. Perhaps today the most poignant generational question brought about by 1989 is not who has the right to claim authorship of the revolution, but rather who was old enough to be held responsible for the choices they made under the communist regime. There remains a division between those who have to account for their actions, and those who do not, between those who proved themselves opportunists, or cowards or heroes – and those who have clean hands by virtue of not having been tested.

This article examines the role of nationalism in the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that nationalism (both in its presence and its absence, and in the various conflicts and disorders that it unleashed) played an important role in structuring the way in which communism collapsed. Two institutions of international and cultural control in particular – the Warsaw Pact and ethnofederalism – played key roles in determining which communist regimes failed and which survived. The article argues that the collapse of communism was not a series of isolated, individual national stories of resistance but a set of interrelated streams of activity in which action in one context profoundly affected action in other contexts – part of a larger tide of assertions of national sovereignty that swept through the Soviet empire during this period.

Western communists reflected two opposing responses to the final crisis of communism that had matured over time. The French communists represented a conservative response increasingly hostile to Gorbachev's perestroika, while the Italians were supporters of a reformist response in tune with his call for change. Thus Gorbachev was the chief reference, positive or negative, against which Western communists measured their own politics and identity. In 1989 the French aligned with the conservative communist leaderships of eastern Europe, and ended up opposing Gorbachev after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Accordingly, the PCF became a residual entity of traditional communism. On the other hand, the Italian communists agreed with all Gorbachev's choices, and to some extent they even inspired his radical evolution. But they also shared Gorbachev's illusions, including the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall would produce a renewal of socialism in Europe. Unlike the PCF, the PCI was able to undertake change in the aftermath of the 1989 revolutions, thus standing as a significant ‘post-communist’ force. However, if conservative communism was destined to become marginal, reform communism also failed in its objective of renewing the Soviet system and the communist political culture

NATO enlargement after the cold war contributed to the democratic transformation of post-communist states. It failed, however, to generate a larger consensus on the shared mission and to provide the requisite military capabilities. Today, notwithstanding the rhetoric of unity after the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO struggles to reconcile the out-of-area experience of the Balkan wars with its post-9/11 tasks and the renewed territorial defense concerns raised by the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. Paradoxically, the more NATO has expanded to foster the military–political security of the new democratic states of eastern and south-eastern Europe, the less it seems capable of dealing with real security threats such as Afghanistan. Facing the possible strategic failure of its ISAF mission, NATO needs to re-evaluate the policy track chosen post-1989.