The revolutionary years of 1848 and 1989 stand out in modern hi
story as unique and
extraordinary periods in which essentially spontaneous popular disturbances simultaneously
brought down governments. The 1848 revolts were far more widespread than those of 1989,
seriously affecting, if one counts all of the then-separate lands of Germany and Italy, about 50
countries in almost all corners of Europe, while the 1989 revolts were confined to about five
countries in eastern Europe (with major after shocks to follow over the next three years in Albania
and Yugoslavia)
. 1848 was also a far more violent year then 1989, costing (if one includes 1849),
tens of thousands of lives in battles and another several thousand in executions, not to mention
over 100,000 jailed or forced into exile when the reaction came, while in 1989 the loss of life was
confined to at most several thousand in Rumania (followed by several thousands more in
Yugoslavia).
Yet the commonalities in 1848 and 1989 of background and causation, and the similarity
in patterns of development, spont
aneity and contagion, not the least of which was the almost
immediate collapse of seemingly well-entrenched regimes in both years, go far beyond the bare
facts that both years saw widespread upheavals and both witnessed major developments in many
of the same cities, such as Prague, Berlin, Leipzig, Budapest and Bucharest. A combination of
often fundamentally similar political, economic and nationalistic grievances created both
revolutionary years. Anger over long-standing and suffocating forms of pol
itical repression was
the single most important impetus in both years, as demonstrated by the fact that middle class
intellectuals as opposed to starving peasants or urban workers played the key leadership role in
almost all of the affected regions (Poland in 1989 and perhaps Albania in 1990-91 are
quasi-exceptions) in both 1848 and 1989. In the lands most deeply affected in both years, the
regimes were characterized by rigid censorship, bans on political opposition and extensive secret
police networ
ks. Many of these factors are too well known as part of the key background to
1989 to require any extended comment here (it is reported that the German secret police [Stasi]
files weighed 5,000 tons and would have stretched for 100 miles, perhaps giving even American
Federal Bureau of Investigation head J. Edgar Hoover a run for the paranoid sweepstakes), but
the striking similarity to 1848 requires attention. Rudolf Stadelmann, in his Social and
Political History of the German 1848 Revolution<
/CITE>, analysed the background to the 1848
revolts as follows:
The heaviest grievance of the nation remained the suppression of the freedom of
expression. What caused a deep and apparently implacable rage against the police and military
state was constant petty pestering by gendarmes and border officials, the secretaries and the
bureaucrats who harassed individuals. . . what bore down on all citizens without
distinction was the disgrace of constraint. This was called to mind da
ily by the blanked passages
of the censor in the newspaper, by the never-ending measures of conscientious state officials and
teachers. . . In terms of numbers there were actually not so many, a few hundred perhaps who sat
in prisons or were involved in degrading trials. But they were all known and their cause was
taken to everyone's heart [shades of Havel and Walesa, now the presidents of Czechoslovakia and
Poland]. If Austria and Prussia. . . had allowed public opinion free expression, then, fro
m all that
we know, Germans would not have relinquished the path of peaceful reform.
Economic grievances were long-simmering and chronic in eastern Europe during the
pre-1989 period, while the economic background to the 1848 revolts was especially rooted in the
acute crisis of 1845-47. The economic background to 1989 included the combination of far lower
living standards in Eastern Europe as compared to the west; a marked slowdown in economic
growth, as average increases in GNP collapse
d from a respectable 4% or so annually across
Eastern Europe in 1960-1980 to a catastrophic 1% or so after 1980; and the frustrations of daily
economic life caused by this stagnation, combined with the well-known problems associated with
often-incompetent central economic planning and the lack of incentives. In 1848, the economic
crisis resulted from the lingering effects of the unprecedented and massive agricultural failures of
1845-47, which in turn set off a serious industrial-commercial crisis as
high food prices devastated
people's ability to buy anything else. One third of the population of western Germany was on
relief by 1847, over a quarter of a million died of starvation and disease in Prussian Silesia and
Austrian Galicia, and food riots became common in much of Europe by 1846-47. The
nationalistic grievances in 1848 and 1989 were significant but took a back seat to political and
economic travail: in 1848 it was anti-Austrian sentiment in Italy, anti-Habsburg sentiment in
Prague and
Budapest, anti-Russian and anti-Turkish sentiment in Rumania, German-nationalist
sentiment in divided Germany and Polish nationalism in partitioned Poland. In 1989 lingering
resentment over Russian domination clearly played some role in Poland, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, if not much of one in Albania, Bulgaria and Rumania, and German nationalism
again played a key role in a once-more divided Germany.
Finally, one must mention the parallel roles played by changes in political leadership. Th
e
encouraging role played by Mikhail Gorbachev for democratic movements in eastern Europe was
extremely important, not only for his reform example in the Soviet Union, but for his increasingly
clear hands-off east Europe policy. In the pre-1848 period, the reforms of Pope Pius IX in Rome
following his election in 1846, which included an amnesty for political prisoners and an easing of
censorship, had a truly catalytic effect in encouraging democratic movement throughout Italy, not
to mention creating
true despair among conservatives, like Metternich, who lamented, "A liberal
pope! That's really something new." Other seemingly more liberal rulers who came to power in
several countries as the result of royal deaths in the early 1840s also played a role, especially in
Prussia, where the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840 spurred enormous and ultimately
futile hopes for reform.
The actual outbreaks and spreads of the 1848 and 1989 revolutions were strikingly similar,
marked in both case
s by mass demonstrations which spread as if by contagion in 1848 from
France and in 1989 from East Germany. Although there were quite serious clashes and significant
loss of life in 1848 in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and, above all, in Milan, before regimes capitulated,
while in 1989 serious fighting occurred only in Romania, what is striking in both years is how
quickly almost all governments gave in, without really using anything like the force they had at
their disposal. It is clear that the vast majo
rity of the regimes quite simply lost their nerve, having
suffered a collapse in confidence that they could, and often one suspects, that they even should,
prevail. The first demands and the first concessions almost everywhere in 1848 and 1989 were
the granting of various political freedoms, including expansion of the suffrage and the granting of
constitutions in 1848, the introduction of multi-party politics and free elections in 1989, and the
abolition of censorship and liberation of political priso
ners in both years. The results in both cases
was an immediate explosion of newspapers and political organizations and a carnival atmosphere
celebrating the new liberties. [See article on Civil Liberties and the 1848 Revolution.]. By
January, 1990, for example, fifty one political parties had registered in Czechoslovakia; in
Hungary the number of private book publishers increased from two or three underground
organizations in 1988 to three hundred open publishers in mid-1990; in Poland an estimated
six
hundred new publications emerged within five months; and even in Romania the number of
periodicals quadrupled within one year. One reporter noted in April 1990 that Polish writers were
keeping practically every printing press, mimeograph machine and photocopier in Poland working
round the clock.
While truly astonishing political progress has been made in post-1989 eastern Europe and
marked Europe in 1848, in both cases difficulties quickly arose in the areas of economics and
nationalit
y conflicts, spawning strikes and other forms of disorder, which collectively soon created
a considerable sense of disillusionment and sometimes encouraged or created serious internal
division within the new governments. In both 1849 and 1989 the revolutions led to enormous
economic uncertainty, with resultant adverse consequences for business confidence and
investment, increases in unemployment, rising crime rates (in the first half of 1990 crime rose an
estimated 40% in Hungary and 70% in Poland) an
d strikes unprecedented in numbers and
magnitude. In 1848, the demands for alleviation of the economic grievances of the working class
led to the bloody suppression of a working class uprising in Paris in June, with thousands killed,
and of labor protests in Berlin and Vienna; such developments led almost everywhere to growing
unease among middle class members of the revolutionary coalition, and ultimately to class-based
splits within the new reform governments which paved the way for the subsequent r
eactions. In
the wake of 1989, internal divisions among reform elements have also been serious, especially in
Romania, Albania, Poland and Bulgaria (leading to the collapse or electoral ouster of
governments all four cases), but except for a few instances in Romania and the tragedy in
Yugoslavia they have not been nearly as bloody as in 1848 and have been generally based on
potentially compromisable political\ideological differences rather than deep and largely
unbridgeable call cleavages.
Nonetheless, clearly the post-1989 East European economic crisis poses the greatest
threat to the new regimes; surely it is symbolic that in East Berlin the former secret police
headquarters in now and unemployment office. In 1990, according to the best if admittedly not
entirely reliable statistics, partly because they are based on comparisons to highly dubious
pre-1990 statistics, there was an average decline in GNP 15% across eastern Europe, and 1991
witnessed a further decline of about 10%. Wit
h the end of government subsidies of basic
commodities, inflation rates averaged about 20% across eastern Europe in 1990, and reached
about 40% in 1991. With the closing of inefficient factories and unneeded offices, unemployment
rates, in societies which previously guaranteed work and basic social services for all, reached
perhaps 10-15% across eastern Europe in 1991 and probably 40% in what used to be East
Germany (from which about 10,000 people continued moving west in the following months).
Thes
e developments have been compounded by worldwide developments such as the recession,
the diversion of western interest and money by the Persian Gulf war, less German interest in the
rest of eastern Europe because of the economic needs of East Germany, the massive foreign debts
owed by some of the east European countries ($40 billion in Poland alone), the needs to virtually
overnight rebuild long-mismanaged and decrepit industries to compete in world markets and to
earn hard currency due to the loss of
former bartering arrangements and guaranteed Soviet and
east European markets, and the enormous confusion over laws affecting property ownership
investment, taxation and virtually everything else critical for a free market economy.
In both 1848 and 1989, economic turmoil was compounded by rising nationality conflicts.
In 1848, the stability of the revolutionary regimes was severely undermined by conflicts which
pitted Hungarians against Austrians, Slovaks and Rumanians, Poles versus Germans, and
Austrians versus Italians, Czechs and Hungarian. After 1989, Yugoslavia was blown apart by
nationality conflicts and Czechs and Slovaks split up the Czechoslovak state; less serious
flare-ups have occurred in Polish-German, Hungarian-Rumanian and Hungarian-Slovakian
relations.
In 1848, the combined effect of the economic, social class and nationalities conflicts,
together with the continued power of reaction in Russia, the failure of the new regimes to gain
control of their own armies and
bureaucracies (or even to oust, in Austria and the German states,
the old monarchies) and the continued strength of monarchical-aristocratic-clerical ideologies in
large segments of the population, especially in rural areas, led to the downfalls of the regimes and
a new period of harsh reaction by 1849. A similar return to the status quo ante seems
inconceivable, however, in contemporary eastern Europe, even though the regimes created in
1989 and afterwards in Romania and Albania (and to a markedly l
esser extent in Bulgaria are
clearly frail), Yugoslavia has blown apart and it is hard to not see Pilsudski-type tendencies in
Poland, particularly given the uncertainty caused by the political splintering reflected in the Polish
elections. (On the brighter side, the situation in East Germany is clearly irreversible, the strength
of democratic elements in the Czech Republic and Hungary makes a return to authoritarian rule
seem unthinkable there also.) Even if democracy breaks down in the more fragile
regimes of
Albania, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland (and authoritarian regimes remain in power in states of
former Yugoslavia) a widespread return to the prior forms of communist totalitarianism is most
unlikely. Communism in eastern Europe, which was generally a largely foreign-imposed ideology
bolstered and festooned with place holders, corruption and secret police, has been far more
discredited in 1989 and the forces for change are correspondingly far stronger than was the case
with the pre-1848 reg
imes, which were not only based on an ideology cemented with
place-holders, corruption and secret police, but were also genuinely rooted in hundreds of years
of tradition and gradual historical development. While the bulwarks of the old regime remained
largely intact after the 1848 revolutions, communist parties have largely disintegrated in Poland,
Hungary and the Czech and Slovak Republics and have been rendered either toothless or appear
to have become genuinely transformed in the former East Germa
ny, Bulgaria, and the
non-Serbian\Montenegrin remnants of Yugoslavia (the situation in Romania and Albania is
admittedly still murky in the first years following the turn). The survival of a reactionary Russian
Empire ready, able and willing to suppress the 1848 revolts compared to the disintegration of the
Soviet Empire and triumph of reform forces in Russian after 1989 is another absolutely critical
difference, and even a successful right-wing putschist regime in Russia would probably have its
hand
s full domestically and be unable to seriously entertain thoughts of east European hegemony.
Another major difference between 1848 and 1989 is the existence of an ideologically friendly (if
financially stingy) west in 1989, compared to a disinterested Britain and France and an essentially
inward-turned United States in 1848. In short, while only a true optimist would expect a stable,
peaceful transition to an entirely democratic and prosperous eastern Europe during the last decade
of the twentieth ce
ntury, a reactionary restoration a la 1848 is just as certainly not in the cards.
History may repeat itself in striking bits and pieces but eastern Europe is not about to enter a time
warp.
Robert Justin Goldstein
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JGC revised this file (http://www .cats.ohiou.edu/~chastain/dh/eurorev.htm) on February 24, 1999.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to chastain@www.cats.ohiou.edu
© 1999 James Chastain.