The Fourteenth Corbishley Memorial Lecture - 7 June 1990
The Spirit of 1989: Europe on the Threshold of a New Era?
Professor Frans A. M. Alting von Geusau, Professor of Law at the Catholic University of Brabant and the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, Vice-President of the European Cultural Foundation

Europe on the Threshold of a New Era?

‘The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and the carrots, the slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Why does he do it?... the greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of hearing, that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality. by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on’ for it to exist in the first place... He has come to terms with living within the lie... let us now imagine that one day our greengrocer stops putting up the slogan... He begins to say what he really thinks... he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands hen support... the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie... he rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game... His revolt is an attempt to live within tile truth. The bill is not long in coming... he will be relieved of his post... his pay will be reduced... his children’s access to education will be threatened.. he will be harassed.. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such.. he has shattered the world of appearances. the fundamental pillar of the system.. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real. base foundations of power... He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain... he has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.. There are no terms whatsoever in which living within the lie can co~exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies the system in principle and threatens it in its entirety" (Vaclav Havel or Living in Truth edited by Jan Vladislav, Faber and Faber, London-Boston 1986. Excerpts from his essay The Power of the powerless pp.41-56)

From 1968 to 1989, more and more people in Eastern and Central Europe decided to step out of line... in the year 1989 something snapped in society as a whole. 1989 became "the year communism in Eastern Europe died. 1949-1989 R.I.P.

(Timothy Garton Ash - We The People: The Revolution of ‘89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. - Cambridge-1990. p.131.)

1989 has been called a turning point in history. the year of the revolution, the year of the collapse of the totalitarian system, the year in which the cold war ended and the Yalta order disappeared. But it had none of the images associated with European revolutions of the past. No armies were moved across Europe; no decisive battles were fought; we saw no charging units or crowds storming palaces or prisons; no military victories could be reported...

The images we all bear in our memories, were entirely different. Our TV screens showed us moving pictures of children placing small candles at the feet of soldiers and policemen. We saw the feast of German "wiedersehen" through the once forbidding Berlin Wall. And, on Moscow’s Red Square, a silent crowd looked up at the towers of the Basilius Church, from which the bells chimed for the first time since 1917...

Indeed, 1989 was ‘THE YEAR OF TRIUMPH". No other words better give expression to the Spirit of 1989. This time, another poster on a Prague shop window said it all: "’89" is" ‘68" written upside down. ‘68 was the year of the lie. It was the year in which the troops of the Warsaw Pact crushed the Prague Spring and the experiment of "socialism with a human face", and they called it "fraternal assistance" to save socialism. It was the year in which the Polish communist regime launched the anti-Semitic campaign. It was the year also of a "student revolt" in Western Europe that brought little intellectual renewal, but growing respectability of what came to be called "really existing socialism". While Marxist ideology ceased to be an intellectual issue in the East, it came to be taught as the "progressive" ideology in Western universities.

The year 1989 reversed it all. It was the year of the citizen, the year of civil society. the year of the power of the powerless, the year of the victory of those who had decided to live within the truth. So widespread and universal had become the rejection of the system that not even a revolutionary vanguard was needed to remove the once all-powerful regimes in a matter of weeks.

The year 1989 marked the success of civil resistance against repressive power. It was not the product of reform from above. or of a "new thinking" announced by the new leader in the Kremlin.

The events in the fall of 1989 were not the outcome of a political conspiracy or a political revolution in which one utopia was being replaced by another. They were a true catharsis in modern European history... the outcome of a moral and spiritual effort to replace the lie - violence - concealment - and corruption, by truth - non-violence - openness - and solidarity. And the truth prevailed. It was this "Spirit of 1989" that announced the beginning - at least potentially - of a new era in European history.

Many eyes were opened by the Spirit of 1989, as the darkness was lifted in the East and its shadows disappeared in the surprised Western part of Europe. Those in the West, who had refused to accept appearances - the "official truth" of the regimes, and tried to grasp realities - by reading so-called "dissident" literature - knew that active remembering had paved the road to the Spirit of 1989. Active remembering helps to revive the necessary sense of history, and to that historical perspective, we must now briefly turn.

The year 1989 as the year of truth and catharsis cannot be looked at only as a turning point in the post-war history of Eastern Europe or the post-war division of Europe.

It was a turning point after a period of darkness and cruelty, that in fact extended from 1914 - the outbreak of the First World War - to 1989 - the year in which the last remaining totalitarian design for Europe died. The dominating features of the era from 1914 to 1989, were total war and totalitarian repression. Both were the product of the folly of the First World War. That war degenerated from a traditional to a total war, in which the objective of victory at all costs "destroyed a generation even when they escaped its shells" (as Remarque wrote in his well-known novel "Im Westen Nichts Neues"). The peace treaties following the war were instruments of revenge and prolongation of the war, Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism and Fascism were descendants from the war and its moral and intellectual confusion. Fascism in Italy and Nazism were destroyed by the Second - total - War. Soviet totalitarianism allied itself with the West and survived. The Cold War thereafter became a period of planning for total, nuclear war; the objective on the Western side being to contain Soviet expansion by a strategy of nuclear deterrence.

Total war and totalitarian repression posed a twofold threat to Europe, if not to humanity at large. In total (nuclear) war human physical existence is at stake; in totalitarian repression human existence worth living (lebenswertiges Dasein) is at stake The two threats can only be dealt with together by a profoundly moral, human answer (Karl Jaspers. Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, 1961). In fact governments and societies in Europe tried to deal with the two threats separately and merely by political means. During the inter-war years, it was tried to avoid another war, by appeasing the one or the other totalitarian threat, and the Second World War was the inescapable result. During the Second World War, the Western powers allied themselves with Stalin to defeat Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, and the post-war division of Europe was the outcome. After the Second World War, the American and Western policy of containment effectively resisted further Soviet expansion. The nuclear arms race and the threat of nuclear war induced the West to gradually seek accommodation with the Soviet Union and to accept the division of Europe as a lasting condition. Recurrent pacifist movements went even further in their willingness to accept Soviet predominance as a way, allegedly, to avoid war.

Total war and totalitarian repression fostered the twentieth century trend towards the growth of all-embracing, anonymous state-power, and resulted in the politicisation of society. In the totalitarian states the politicisation of society was the intended outcome of the totalitarian design. The objective to impose the "new man" and the new society by force engaged the regime in continuous and total warfare against the citizens as its internal enemy, and third states and societies as its external enemy.

The efforts of the democracies to cope with the two threats of total war and totalitarian expansion separately were based on the erroneous assumption that they were political threats to be dealt with by political means. The efforts to cope with the two threats by political means required the growth of state power also in Western societies.

Seen in this historical perspective, the year 1989 proved to be a historic turning point for both East and West in Europe. The successful resistance of East and Central European civil society against totalitarian repression was the outcome of a spiritual and moral effort to repair the broken balance between autonomous civil society and state power. As such it challenged the politicisation of society in Europe as a whole. For the first time in Europe’s history since 1914, we are capable of reducing both the threat of totalitarian repression and that of total war. The collapse of totalitarianism without war, now opens the road to a retreat from total war. After the Year of Truth in which we saw the absurdity of the Berlin Wall, we are beginning to see the absurdity of being in possession of huge nuclear stockpiles, deployed to assure a strategy of deterrence or a forward defence, which no longer serves any political or military objective.

The Legacy to Cope with Europe also bears the burden of a legacy of cruelty, violence and darkness. standing on the threshold of a new historical era, we can now see more clearly what man has afflicted on man and how much need there is to heal and to repair. Both the cycles of violence and the rule of the lie must be broken. As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote in "One Word of Truth": "Violence does not exist alone and cannot survive in isolation. It is inevitably bound up with the lie. Between them there is the most intimate, most natural, fundamental link:

Family life, community spirit and the churches have been destroyed in order to mould an atomised society that could be manipulated by the party. In brief the difference between democracy, legality and culture; and socialist democracy, legality and culture had become the same as the difference between a chair and the Electric Chair.

In the Western part of Europe, complicity and stagnation of our thinking also belong to the legacy of the recent past. For years, many scholars and politicians embraced the concept of the acceleration of history. As a consequence of developments in science and technology, we were told, Europe is experiencing an era of rapid change. The ‘Year of Truth" now tells us, that the acceleration of history was another of the appearances of the recent past. The reality was intellectual stagnation, because of our willingness to live with the absurdity of a Europe divided by walls and fences: because of our willingness to live within the lie of two so-called opposing socio-political systems; and because of our willingness to accept the moral equivalence of socialism and capitalism. The stagnation in our thinking reflected a certain, Western comfort with the stability of a bipolar world, and the fear of upsetting the process of detente by too much attention for the human realities of life under totalitarian rule. As a consequence, Western Europe (as Gyorgy Konrad remarked) lacks a political philosophy to give meaning to its post-war enterprise.

The Spirit of 1989, finally. offers a new opportunity for spiritual clarification. As Zoya lrrakhmalnikova wrote (Tatiana Coricheva, Cry of the SpiriL Christian Testimonies from the Soviet Union - Fount Paperbacks .1989): "In Russia all three temptations of the devil have been discredited, and the whole world has witnessed this edifying spectacle. There are no wonders any more, nor are stones turned into bread (indeed bread can be totally lacking), nor is there power over souls, only power over the belly. The mystical significance and consequences of this failure are now laid bare to the world, as is also the meaning of the freedom to renounce God. Know the truth and the truth will set you free. said the Lord. The first atheist state in history has shown the world that atheism is slavery."

Living within the lie cannot co-exist with living within the truth, as the opening story taken from Vaclav Havel) told us. The events of 1989 therefore did not represent a confrontation between two ideologies, but "a clash between an anonymous, soulless. immobile and paralysing (entropic) power and life, humanity. being and its mystery." (Vaclav Havel, "Six Asides about Culture" in the book referred to). It was a clash between officialdom or the nomenclature - and - civil society having constituted its own public domain and its own autonomous culture. It was a clash, also inside every citizen between living within the lie and - living within the truth. Humanity, civil society and truthfulness prevailed, and the totalitarian system of power and repression collapsed.

It is important to emphasise that the outcome of the clashes differs fundamentally from the intended outcome of the "reformers from above". The latter intended to save "socialism" by condemning and eventually superseding so-called Stalinist aberrations. Brezhnev stagnation and the "command economy". as it was euphemistically called. Those in the West, who looked at 1989 as the outcome of Gorbachev’s "new thinking" or his reform from above. are still like the greengrocer in the first part of our opening story: they accept appearances as reality. It was not Gorbachev, who "did wonders". it was the citizens who exposed the crazy nature of the enterprise called the building of communism, and therewith caused its precipitate collapse.

The West, largely, stood by in surprise. The view that 1989 represented the victory of capitalism over socialism, or a Western victory in the Cold War, is another example of accepting appearances as reality.

How then did 1989 come about?

The year of the invasion of Czechoslovakia - 1968 - the big lie of fraternal assistance, may be said to mark the beginning of the era of disbelief. Against the regime’s practice of presenting the rule of the lie as the official truth, people ended up no longer believing in the truth of anything. In this depth of spiritual humiliation, living in truth or living as if one were free, became the source of survival and resistance and the force behind the effort to shape an autonomous culture in an independent civil society. People did not conspire to overthrow the regimes, nor did they organise a political opposition - such efforts would have been crushed by the all-powerful party. They decided to turn away from it. They began to help each other. as their conscience told them, rather than spy on each other, as the party ordered them. They commemorated together what the party would like to erase from their memories - the system of "organised forgetting" as Milan Kundera called it.

In Poland the flying university began alternative teaching, and KOR, the organisation for defence of the workers, was founded. The breakthrough in the organisation of civil society came with the first visit to Poland of Pope John-Paul II in 1979. It has been called Poland’s "Second Baptism". As Adam Michnik wrote on this visit: "Indeed something odd did happen. Those very people who are ordinarily frustrated and aggressive in the shop lines were metamorphosed into a cheerful and happy collectivity, a people filled with dignity. The police vanished from the main streets of Warsaw and exemplary order reigned everywhere. The people who had been repressed for so long suddenly regained an ability to determine their own fate." (Letters from Prison and other Essays - University of California Press, 1985). The Pope’s visit restored the dignity and self-confidence of the Polish people.

A year thereafter saw the strikes and the founding of the independent Trade Union, Solidarnosc, in the Gdansk shipyards. Within weeks 10 million workers joined the Union, and thus exposed the lie of the socialist state as the ideal state for workers and farmers. The earthquake, this event sent through the system, went well beyond the borders of Poland. For several months, Soviet military intervention to crush the Union was seriously reckoned with. In December 1981, General Jaruszelski proclaimed the "state of war" and declared the Union illegal. Many leaders were interned, others went underground. In 1983, in the depth of this crisis, the Pope paid his second visit to Poland, and he called upon the people to persevere. The state of war achieved the opposite of what the Polish regime had hoped for. Instead of crushing the forces of civil society, it acted as their catalyser. Autonomous civil society - protected by the Catholic Church - kept growing, and society began to respond less and less to the party’s commands. The acceptance by the party to hold round table talks with Solidarnosc’s leaders early in 1989, and the partially free elections in June. were no less than Its admission of total defeat.

The external consequences of Solidarnosc in Poland were twofold. The leaders in Moscow began to abandon their images of utopia, and - in 1985 - they brought the reform-minded Mikhael Gorbachev to power. While he tried to stay abreast of pressure from below, by announcing reforms from above, the forces of civil society in Eastern Europe began to link up across the (forbidding) borders between their countries.

In Hungary party-rule had become more lenient since 1968 and economic reforms had created a more relaxed political climate than in other East European countries. The end of communist rule in Hungary came otherwise than in Poland. It was not so much pressure from below that undermined the power of the party, but disintegration from within. The small intellectual opposition did not so much confront the power of the party; it helped the party-consensus around Kadar to fall apart. Political opposition developed within the party and set the stage for a return to political pluralism.

In the German Democratic Republic the party had stepped up repression especially since 1975 and no organised opposition or civil society could emerge until the fall of 1989. Intellectuals had either withdrawn into "internal emigration" from the system, or had been forced to emigrate to the other Germany. The principal threat to the East German regime resided in the growing contacts with West Germany and the exodus of its people.

In Czechoslovakia the regime, since the early 1970s. had stepped up its efforts to destroy intellectual, national cultural life and religion. While less than mediocre party apparatshiks ruled the country, former political and intellectual leaders were internally exiled to menial jobs or were repeatedly imprisoned. Civil society went underground. Charter ‘77 became the visible top and the symbol of a growing, secret and underground network of activities There was a lively underground culture, there was underground university teaching (assisted by organisations such as the Jan Hus Foundation in Britain). and there was a widespread underground church. Its strength was manifested by the Appeal from independent Czechoslovak initiatives published in June 1989. Many citizens signed the Appeal, called ‘A Few Words". It wrote that "The spirit of freedom, trust, tolerance and pluralism must be restored". The appeal would be heeded in the months to come.

The month of June 1989 may well have marked the moment the dynamics of totalitarianism went into reverse.

Before, the dynamics of totalitarianism followed the sequence of: imposition of the totalitarian design - submission to one-party rule - repression of society - scattered resistance - more repression.

After that moment it rapidly went into reverse: the decision to secede from the system and to live in truth becomes widespread - the regime responds with repression and promises of reform - resistance in society broadens - the regime responds with repression and begins making concessions - resistance escalates to popular revolt - the system begins to disintegrate.

In Poland, the partially free elections in June 1989 were the turning point. They were followed by the formation of a new government, dominated by Solidarnosc and with a catholic Prime Minister in September. When it became clear, that Moscow accepted the first non-communist government and did no longer envisage military intervention to uphold "socialism" or one-party rule, the other regimes’ days were numbered.

In Hungary, the funeral in June of Imre Nagy - leader of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, who had been executed by Kadar -marked the turning point. Thereafter, Hungary opened its section of the "Iron Curtain" and permitted the East Germans, "’vacationing" in its territory, to leave through it for Western Germany. While Erich Honecker presided over the last manifestation of his "official truth" - the 40th anniversary celebration of the GDR - the departure of his citizens through Hungary swelled to a mass exodus. Under the pressure of growing demonstration in the cities of the GDR, the Monday evening ones in Leipzig in particular, Honecker was forced to resign. His successor, Krenz, will primarily be remembered by his decision on November 8. to open the Berlin Wall the next day. It would be the beginning of the end of the GDR: and of the unification of Germany. In Leipzig, the slogan "Wir sind das Volk" was made into the slogan’Wir sind ein Volk". A week thereafter, the "velvet revolution" in Czechoslovakia began and was completed before the month was over.

In the Year of Truth, communism died in Central Europe. For a few weeks at the end of December, It appeared as if the violent overthrow of the Ceaucescu dictatorship also signalled the end of communism in Romania. As the events in the following months made clear, the Romania;n revolution proved to be a stolen revolution: stolen from the people by a conspiracy of communists, who for years had served the dictator they now organised to overthrow. For Romania, the year of truth and freedom is still to come, but come it will.

Which were the principal causes of the precipitous collapse of communism in Central Europe ? It surely was not Gorbachev who had done these wonders. He appeared to be as perplexed as the West by the events. Nor was it the end of the Cold War between its principal players, the United States and the Soviet Union. The announcement of the end of the Cold War by President Bush and Gorbachev (done at the end of their informal summit at Malta in December 1989), will appear to be no more than a footnote to the history of 1989. The principal causes were the following ones:-

First - the pressure from below caused by the resistance and self-organisation of civil society in the countries of Central Europe:

Second - the economic crisis. Decades of centrally planned mismanagement, corruption and neglect had brought the economy to breaking point:

Third - probably unintended, Glasnost Openness is the worst enemy of secrecy and concealment, the regimes needed to rule. Openness exposed the "shortcomings". the crimes and the failures of the rulers. It exposed the fact that their legitimacy had no other basis than Soviet military or secret-police power. This single remaining basis of their legitimacy vanished as soon as it became clear, that Moscow no longer envisaged military intervention to uphold the regimes. Further openness will hopefully make clear, what role Moscow has played in stealing the Romanian revolution:

Fourth - a related cause can be found in the impact of TV and our modern information society. No longer did It prove possible to conceal the truth by isolating East and Central European countries from each other and from the rest of Europe. The system of the lie collapsed by being exposed "on the hour" to whoever cared to watch or follow the news;

Fifth - a final cause can be traced to a fundamental error of judgment which Brezhnev made, when signing the Final Act of Helsinki in 1975. The Final Act, everywhere in the Soviet Bloc, ‘vas published and presented as a victory of the Soviet Union over the West. The citizens of the East, however, read it very differently. They took the Act as an obligation upon their rulers to observe human rights at home. The resulting demands thus helped to transform opposition against the regime into a movement for basic and universally recognised human rights. It also helped Western societies to monitor human rights violations on a permanent basis through the instrument of the Helsinki Follow-Up Conferences. The Helsinki process offered a framework for co-operation and contacts between the forces of civil societies across national and East-West borders.

Living in truth can be said to have been the Spirit of 1989. And the truth set them free! The greatest challenge to Europe now is to keep the Spirit of 1989 alive. Vaclav Havel, who first coined this expression. was fully aware of the Christian roots of his choice. Man can only live in truth, if he accepts that he pursues a destiny transcending this world and the political powers that be. Living in truth is not so much a concept to define as a way to go; it is not a future one can construct or predict but a way of life that must grow.

Civil resistance in Eastern and Central Europe was a response to totalitarianism as an extreme manifestation of the trend towards impersonal power. The trend itself, however, has been manifest everywhere in the twentieth century. This trend -to which I referred as the politicisation of society - is the outcome of an effort to unite the world "under the reign of impersonal, material forces, so that the individual counts for nothing and religion is viewed as an illusion of the individual consciousness or a perversion of the individual craving for satisfaction", (Christopher Dawson - The Historic Reality of Christian Culture -Harper, New York. 1960).

Quite significantly, the revival of Faith and the Christian Churches played a crucial role in the organisation of civil society and civil resistance.

The First Challenge now confronting Europeans in (the former) East and West, is to reverse the trend towards politicisation of society and to find a new balance between the forces shaping civil society and the power of the states. Our moral and religious convictions must be brought to bear on the principles underlying such new balance.

The peaceful end to the partition of Europe enables the countries of East and Central Europe - and maybe Russia in a more distant future - to participate in the process towards European unification.

The Second Challenge is our accepting and promoting their participation. In a Europe that can become "whole" again, appropriate principles and procedures must be devised by which Europeans can live together in an open and transnational civil society. Such a society requires a pluralist, political order in which power is diffused and subject to the rule of law: a Europe in which borders between states are becoming less important. The making of such a Europe needs more imagination and creativity than is shown today by the thoughtless repetition of such slogans as Gorbachev’s "common European house". Gorbachev’s house is presented as a continuation of the Europe of the Final Act of Helsinki: a Europe maintaining rather than overcoming its past divisions. The house, moreover, is the kind of political structure we should try to remove. It needs a house-master, walls, doors and locks and politicians in possession of the keys.

It would be better to replace his slogan by the concept of a EUROPEAN CITY Our future European City can be conceived as an area in which people live and communicate with each other: in which they build roads and construct bridges to reach each other: in which there is mobility and variety; and in which there is place for in any dwellings, churches, playgrounds, theaters, bookshops and parks for people to meet and exchange ideas.

The totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century were the products of the philosophies of progress from the nineteenth century. As such they taught us two important lessons. The dream of paradise on earth - the utopia of a new man and a new society - has created hell on earth (as Milan Kundera remarked). The effort of those "vanguard forces", who said they knew the road to utopia and consequently decided to impose their will by force, unavoidably ended up in death and concentration camps for many.

Our Third Challenge therefore is to search for sensible methods to cope with the human reality of good and evil in politics. Pluralist democracy is neither utopia nor ideology. It is the continuous search for methods to control power by countervailing power and so restrain the abuse of power over man. It is in our hands to extend that search to the future Europe as a whole.

Totalitarianism has stirred up evil in man. It has interrupted history. It has ruptured the lives of countless citizens. Its sudden release unavoidably confronts Europe with pent-up problems of strife, nationalism, ethnic conflicts, anti-Semitism or revenge.

Our Fourth Challenge therefore is to find ways to cope with these problems. Europe, to this end, needs a spirit of reconciliation and remembering. Reconciliation is required to prevent revenge. it is not meant to avoid Justice. As France and West Germany showed after the Second World War, reconciliation is not a way to forget the past, but an effort to build a common future by learning from the past. Joint remembering is such a way to learn from the past. A European society willing to live in truth must practice Joint remembering - not the celebration of national victories, but the commemoration of shared suffering. The many places and dates, where man has afflicted unspeakable suffering on fellow human beings, must be converted into European signposts of warning. Only in such a way can the places of darkness and evil become sources of purification.

The Year of Truth brought Europe on the threshold of a new era. It was no more than a new beginning. Its spirit must grow. The Spirit of 1989 does not offer Europe a new, predictable future; but it carries many promises.

Finally, the Iron Curtain was not only a physical reality on the map of Europe, and running through the heart of Germany. Whether by fear. indifference, complicity or egoism, an Iron curtain between living in the lie and living in truth, ran through each of us and must also be lifted. We are all, in East and West, faced with a debased moral environment. "We had all become used to the totalitarian system. We accepted the system (and the partition of Europe) as unchangeable, thus helping to perpetuate W’. (Vaclav Havel). We also accepted fragments of the "progressive ideology". We accepted and practised Marxist concepts of law, thus undermining the rule of law in our free Western societies. The SpIrit of 1989 challenges all Europeans to lift their own iron curtains and to muster their strength and their courage to live in truth without compromise.

When in 1980, the workers of Gdansk shipyard built their monument to the victims of violent repression - the Cross in concrete - Czeslaw Milosz sent them the following text, from Psalm 29, for inscription:-

"May the Lord give strength to His people

May the Lord bless His people with peace."

It is addressed to all Europeans. It is in our hands to make the Spirit of 1989, the spirit of Europe in the coming era.

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