(Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Republic)
kopecek@usd.cas.cz

1989 and Ideas of Revolution in (Post-)Dissent

One of the most intriguing questions in contemporary historical research involves the nature of the negotiated revolutions of 1989 in East-Central Europe and of subsequent political interpretations of these revolutions. To put it crudely, what enabled the swift turn, at the beginning of the 1990s, from a generally democratic revolution with high hopes for the establishment of a self-organizing society characterized by civic activism and civic empowerment, towards liberal hegemony stressing representative democracy, privatization and a capitalist “market without adjectives”?

Today, the most influential research field conceptualizing the continuities between late socialism and post-socialism, subsumed under the notion of a neoliberal hegemony thesis, focuses predominantly on the importing  of Western and global neoliberal governance and the convergence of expert cultures and technocracies East and West prior to 1989. This paper, in contrast, intends to take up the question from the point of view of one of the most influential groups – both practically and ideologically – involved in the revolutions in the region: dissidents and opposition activists. How “liberal” did they feel in 1989? Did they engage in any serious reflection on local liberal political traditions and liberalism as a modern political ideology in samizdat  publications before 1989? How did they think about revolution as a political concept and a historical phenomenon? How did revolutions almost entirely lacking in liberal ideologues become, in the course of a few months, “liberal revolutions”?

One of the central claims of this paper relates to the concept of the “rule of law.” We need to focus on this as-yet little theoretically discussed practice of dissident legalism and its underlying ideology of human rights and the rule of law or Rechtsstaat, as opposed to state socialist legalism based on the theory of “socialist legality” and the socialist Gesetzesstaat. Metaphorically speaking, it was not that most of the (ex)-dissidents were attracted to the concept of rule of law and lawful revolution because they were liberals, but the other way round: they became (often involuntary) liberals because they insisted on the concept of rule of law and the lawful revolution.