1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (New Approaches to European History Book 59) (original) (raw)

Decolonizing Eastern Europe: A global perspective on 1989 and the world it made

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2019

The end of the Cold War can be usefully understood as a moment of decolonization, and the post-1989 experience, for many states, as a postcolonial one. But we do not usually think in these terms when it comes to Eastern Europe, even though it has faced similar challenges to countries further South. Among those challenges has been the search for a new national and constitutional identity—a task complicated by a colonized past, yielding not a few identity-builders to resort to what we call constitutional kitsch. But we wonder whether Eastern Europeans have been afforded less space to build their own post-1989 identities, compared to places further South. And we wonder if this has to do with our greater sensitivity to this postcolonial need in places where we find such terms more natural, while Eastern Europe may have been too close to Europe for that need to be taken as seriously.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and nonalignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

1989 Twenty Years On: The End of Communism and the Fate of Eastern Europe

For those in the former Soviet Bloc, 1989 has been called an annus mirabilis—a year of miracles. With astonishing speed, communist rule ended in Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and the nature of Europe was changed entirely. In 2009, those countries, from Germany to Bulgaria to Poland, have all mounted celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of this hope-filled year. Yet, two decades after the collapse of communism, many in those countries found themselves unsure of what, precisely, they were celebrating. Did 1989 really mark a moment of out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new, and how much had really changed in the intervening years? This month historian Theodora Dragostinova explores the impact of 1989 on the region and the legacy of history in today's Eastern Europe.

Decolonizing Eastern Europe: Beyond Internal Critique (2011)

Bogdan Ghiu (ed.), Performing History, IDEA arts + society, Supplement to the Romanian Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2011. Republished: Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, Ksenia Nouril (eds.), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2018. , 2011

The social and cultural history of the "postcommunist transition" has been marked throughout the region by the return of two dominant phenomena of modernity: capitalism and coloniality. The fall of the Iron Curtain meant to a significant degree the re-absorption of the socialist bloc into larger and long-durée structures of world history. In this sense, the "postcommunist transition" has been a process of structural and segmented integration of the former socialist bloc into Western or Western-lead formations of political, economic and military power such as the European Union, World Bank and IMF, and NATO. Accordingly, I proposed elsewhere conceiving the meaning of transition as the top-to-bottom alignment of East European governmentality into the order of Western governmentality, of local economies into the world system of capitalism, and of local knowledges in the global geopolitics of knowledge, at the cost of the general population. If this is the case, then the possibilities of developing a critical theory of postcommunism depend logically on movements and critical reflections on capitalism and coloniality.