Remember the Iron Curtain? 30 years later, Central Europe is still adjusting
If there is bliss in this cynical world, it lived in that revolutionary autumn of 1989 when, one after another, the countries of Eastern Europe threw off Soviet rule and their own Communist overlords. Thirty years on, the countries remain free and independent. The bliss itself is long gone.
We call it Central Europe now, that great swath of blood-soaked geography from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The revolutions moved north to south, from Poland through East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and into Romania and Bulgaria. Yugoslavia and its wars came later.
Most of the news from the region now is grim — far-right nationalism in the eastern part of a now united Germany, authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary, corruption in the Czech Republic, weak economies and a brain drain in Romania and Bulgaria. The Iron Curtain has been replaced by an invisible East-West barrier: The former Communist countries, for all their economic gains, still lag the West.
So the question must be asked: Was it worth it? What has been gained? Was the bliss no more than a chimera? And has the revolution failed?
The clear answer to that last question is no, the revolution hasn’t failed.
The bliss may have been foolish: Central Europe is too wounded to be perfect. But the gains are real. The headlines may be bad, but the changes between then and now are deep and may be permanent.
Central Europe lies in a bad neighborhood, between Germany and Russia. It’s a place where empires collide and wars start. Through centuries, it has served as a buffer, a breakwater where waves of Eastern invaders, from Ottoman sultans to Russians czars and commissars, threw their forces and were repelled or absorbed, leaving the Europeans to the west safe to develop their remarkable civilizations. It’s a region of strong coffees and vengeful memories, too much history and too much blood.
These countries never were going to be model democracies, but those of us who were there will never forget the euphoria of that magic autumn of 1989. Forty years of servitude ended almost overnight and, except for Romania, peacefully. What we heard in each country was, “We want to rejoin Europe.” Not “join” Europe — they felt they were as much European as the French or Dutch — but rejoin a continent and culture from which they had been artificially divided by the Cold War.
Over the next two decades, this happened, as the Central Europeans joined NATO and the European Union. Everyone hoped these two institutions would do for the easterners what they had done for the West Europeans after World War II, to give them a multinational framework within which to rebuild their shattered political, economic and social lives.
NATO and the EU set a high price for membership — that these countries adopt democracy, a free press, market economies, rule of law. The EU codified all this in 80,000 pages, no less, of rules and regulations. Take it or leave it, they told the ex-Communist countries. They took it.
The results are real. If the Central Europeans still lag the west, they are by all measures better off economically than before. They travel abroad freely and speak freely. Polls show some nostalgia for the Communist days but not much.\
Despite the authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary, opposition parties exist and sometimes thrive: An anti-corruption activist was just elected president of Slovakia. Opposition parties in Hungary recently swept local elections, including in Budapest.
If they are sometimes awkward members of NATO and the EU, they remain solidly within both blocs. The main threat to these institutions comes not from the new Central European members but from the Trump administration’s “America First” policies.
In short, it’s a mixed report card. We should have expected this. History doesn’t change that fast. The East European countries have experienced too much — conquests, shifting frontiers, endemic anti-Semitism, corruption — to emerge undamaged. Under communism, they had the trappings of democratic states — courts, parliaments, media, elections. But all had become tools of the communist regimes and, suddenly, had to learn how to become instruments of democracy. It hasn’t been easy.
But it’s not as bad as it was nor as bad as it could have been, and so that’s good.
Richard C. Longworth, a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, covered the 1989 revolutions for the Chicago Tribune.