Europe 1989 - Revolution or reform?

EUROPE 1989 – REVOLUTION OR REFORM?


The transition from communist rule to multi-party democracy in Eastern Europe and the USSR is one which has confounded contemporary political scientists, evading traditional parameters of both reform and revolution. By studying the events of 1989 in a sequential and comparative manner, we find that the process followed a third strategy – one of ‘negotiated’ or ‘co-ordinated’ transition, in which existing regimes, accepting the inevitability of change, engaged previously illegitimate oppositional movements in an attempt to preserve political continuity. This process produced radically different power arrangements which were indeed revolutionary in character, but falls short of constituting a ‘revolution’ in its own right.


In the countries of what used to be the ‘Soviet world system’, dramatic and fundamental changes took place in 1989, sweeping aside the existing socialist regimes, introducing multi-party elections, an...