History in the Hands of the Politicians: Lustration, Civil Society, and Unfinished Revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: History in the Hands of the Politicians: Lustration, Civil Society, and Unfinished Revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech RepublicThe year 1989 held both great hope and disappointment for advocates of civil society.Only three years previously, people power had been responsible for the ouster the of the Marcos regime in the Philippines.Intellectuals such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovokia had for at least a decade conceived of a civil society that would challenge, and perhaps replace the Communists regimes (Kopecky and Barnfield 1999).Solidarity had survived the 1981 martial law and become a mass movement.Charter 77 in Czechoslovokia, while heavily repressed by the regime, was still influential.The hopes of many seemed to be realized in 1989 as the Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe fell rapidly that year.Yet the limits of people power were illustrated in a bloody counterpoint in June of the same year with the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square.While less dramatic, the limits of the civil society that had emerged during the last years of the regimes quickly began to become apparent as those states transitioned to and began to consolidate their democracies.During the last twenty years, the role that civil society played in the ousting of the communist regimes has been well-documented (Arato 1992, Kopecky andBarnfield 1999).In Poland the 1981 crackdown had neutralized the Solidarity movement for a number of years, yet the regime was unwilling or unable to use a strategy of repression indefinitely.By 1989 mass strikes and popular mobilization organized by Solidarity, coupled with a severe economic crisis brought the regime to a breaking point.With the threat of Soviet intervention unlikely, it began to negotiate directly with Solidarity in what came to be known as the Roundtable Agreements, intending to gain support for economic reforms from Western countries as well as from Solidarity (Elster 1996).As part of the agreement, the communist regime allowed semi-free
Authors: David Merryman, Heather L. Tafel
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2166547422