The Springtime of Nations
Article Summary and Author Biography
"1989 has been an 'annus mirabilis': a truly wonderful year", yet some might fear that its instabilities could lead to the disasters that followed those of 1789. "The lesson of 1789 and 1848 is not that events repeat themselves in some Thucydidean fashion. It is that during long periods of peace, such as those which Europe enjoyed from 1763 to 1789, 1815 to 1848, and 1945 to 1989, economic and social development engenders a political dynamic of its own. If governments are not responsive to that force they will sooner or later be swept away. Paradoxically, the man who discerned and explained this process most clearly was Karl Marx himself -- a great European philosopher whose works appear to have been as little studied in the Soviet Union as they are in the United States... Gorbachev was thus no fortuitous 'deus ex machina'... Unless they imitate Gorbachev's courage in embracing the future, the Chinese leaders will be faced, sooner or later, with other Tienanmen Squares... Even to chronicle the events of 1989 leaves one breathless". In Europe, the pace and confidence of German moves towards re-unification swept all expectations aside. President Bush, despite unfortunate tendencies of his officials at the outset of his administration, and despite absurdly archaic cries for US 'leadership' from Congress and the media, displayed "prudence, caution, concern for allied susceptibilities and a thorough understanding of the issues... as appropriate to the new conditions in Europe as President Truman's rugged courage had been forty years earlier". Although the end of East-West ideological confrontation will reveal the vast dimensions of residual problems, notably the disparity of wealth between North and South, it may well bring an end to proxy wars and unwise interventions. On balance, it is unlikely that the events of 1989 will produce the same instabilities and catastrophes as followed those of 1789. Professor of naval and military history at Yale University, and president of the IISS.
Michael Howard, formerly Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, is now Robert A. Lovett Professor of Naval and Military History at Yale University. He is President of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
In 1989, while the nations of Western Europe celebrated the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the nations of Eastern Europe reenacted it.
The similarities were striking. In every major country east of the Iron Curtain, anciens régimes that had lost all ideological credibility had been brought by corrupt and incompetent leadership to the point of economic collapse. As in eighteenth-century France, economic crisis precipitated mass popular discontent, led by intellectuals who had long been harassed by a censorship severe enough to infuriate but not sufficiently brutal to crush them. In some cases-the Soviet Union and Poland-the governments themselves took the initiative (as had the ministers of Louis XVI of France in summoning the Estates General) by opening consultations with opposition elements they had long tried to ignore or destroy. In others-East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania-the regimes simply crumbled (like the French monarchy between 1789 and 1791) before repeated and implacable mass demonstrations.
The process reached a climax on the afternoon of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression at least as gruesome as the Bastille, was pierced by crowds who poured into West Berlin, dancing, singing and weeping for joy. Unlike the events of 1789 all this happened, Romania alone excepted, without the loss of a single life.
We can well understand the feelings of William Wordsworth when he wrote:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very Heaven!
The parallel is not altogether a comfortable one. Wordsworth lived to regret his youthful enthusiasm. The fall of the Bastille in 1789 was followed by events so terrible that many Frenchmen still wonder whether the revolution deserves to be celebrated at all.
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