Transcript 1989: So hard to remember and so easy to forget

1989
So hard to remember and so easy to forget
(credit and apologies to Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart)
Ken Roberts
University of Liverpool
Aims
i. Young people from 1989 to the present
ii. Youth research: achievements and ….
iii. Historical/biographical recollections
Plan
i. South Caucasus 2008
ii. Chronology
iii. 1980s: academic expectations
iv. Eastern Europe in the early-1990s
v. Expectations and outcomes in Eastern Europe, 1989/91
vi. Research: achievements and…
vii. Youth 2009: children of the class of ‘89
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South Caucasus, 2008
32-38 year olds, all aged 15-21 in 1991
What were you doing, what do you remember about 1991?
The year did not ‘click’
Answers in terms of personal lives: finishing school, avoiding army service etc.
The first post-communist cohorts, but they did not regard themselves as different from people who
were older
None recalled being part of historically significant events
Many were not, but
• All the countries were at war
• Sustained demonstrations in Tbilisi and Yerevan
• Fighting between political factions in Azerbaijan until Heydar Aliyev takes control in 1993
History is always created in the present
Biographies are reconstructed in the light of outcomes
Differed over whether their lives had developed as they had hoped and planned
Do we (sociologists) know what young people were doing/thinking/feeling in 1989/91?
For those who experienced 1989/91, difficult to relate:
• Experiences then to what happened in the 1990s, and current situations
• Historical narratives to own biographies and countries’ situations
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Chronology
1961. Berlin Wall built
98 (official) but estimates that over 200 are killed trying to cross
9 November 1989: Fall of the Wall
1980. Solidarity formed in Poland, martial law, leaders interned
1985. Gorbachev: reforming communism; glasnost, perestroika; communist parties must face
competition; the Soviet army will not rescue unpopular regimes
Round table discussions between Solidarity of Polish communists
June 1989. Solidarity wins all but one elected seats in the Sejm
August 23. Hungary opens border with Austria: the Trabant exodus (built between 1957 and
1991, waiting list 15 years, average road life 28 years)
September 4. Street demonstration in Leipzig
October. Hungary
November-December: Civic Forum, Czechoslovakia
December 25. Execution of Ceausescus, Romania
June 1990. Free elections in Bulgaria
December 26 1991. USSR disbanded
March 1992. Albania, defeat of communists in elections
January 1, 1993. Velvet divorce. Czech Republic and Slovakia
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Chronology (continued)
Yugoslavia
June 1991. Slovenia and Croatia declare independence
September 1991. Macedonia
1992. Bosnia and Herzegovina
September 2000. Fall of Milosevic
June 2006. Montenegro
June 2006. Republic of Serbia
February 2008. Kosovo
Continuing the process of creating a Europe of nation states embarked on after World War I, but
in the context of a European Union
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1980s: academic expectations
Alain Touraine, Francois Dubet, Michel Wieviorka and Jan Strzelecki, Solidarity: Analysis of a Social
Movement: Poland 1980-1981, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , 1983.
Communist societies could be changed by protest.
Wage claim to total social movement,
Martial law to destroy not Solidarity but communism itself.
George Kolankiewicz and Paul G Lewis, Poland, Pinter, London, 1988.
Describe a post-Solidarity Poland that will remain a bastion of socialism for the foreseeable future.
The academic orthodoxy: the Second World; an alternative way of becoming and remaining a modern
industrial society.
Experts on communism faced an unexpected choice: become historians or students of post-communism
Solidarity, 1989, expected the outcome of elections to be a partnership with the communists
Self:
Teaching Comparative Industrial Societies: West (Sweden a leader towards social democracy) and East
(the Yugoslav variant, self-management). Taught orthodox view; dissenters were mostly embittered
Russian emigrants.
Youth research: Britain, Germany, Poland
The case for studying young people:
• Most directly affected
• The future adult generation
Inevitably add to knowledge
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Expectations and outcomes in Eastern Europe in 1989/91
Solidarity: a trade union; wanted true socialism – workers control, Poland run by and for Poles
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had hero status simply through being anti-communist
Nationalism in Eastern Europe and the disintegrating Soviet Union
Economic collapse, crisis: the global market economy as the only solution, at a price – big bang,
shock therapy
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Eastern Europe in the early-1990s: an adventure
Visas still required
Communist system at airports and hotels
Hyper-inflation, savings worthless, zloty millionaires
Unemployment
Doing ‘bizness’
Older people: embittered, angry
Young people experience the changes differently. Not youth revolutions (the work of the ‘class of ’68’), but in
1989/91 many young people joined in enthusiastically
Futures snatched away: so much more possible; down to the individual
Pro-west (EU, NATO)
(Conceal western association with research only in Donbass and Uzbekistan)
Exit visas abolished
No visas needed to enter EU from candidate countries
Forget Russian, learn English
Consumer cultures flood in
But throughout the 1990s minorities of young people were continuing to say that the old system was better;
even more widespread support for collectivist economic and social policies
Path dependence: history always matters, but there are critical events
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Privatisation of housing
•
Neo-liberal market reforms and the economic horror: the new economies may not need all potential
members of the labour forces (China, India, Africa, Latin America)
Continuities in youth transition processes and divisions among young people
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Research: achievements and…
1989 preceded:
BHPS, 1991
European Sociological Association, first conference, Vienna 1992
Gosta Esping-Anderson (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
Large number of ad hoc projects
(With hindsight): the value of pan-European sequential cohort panel surveys. This opportunity is still there
Values: Pro-market? Pro-democracy?
Identities: Europeans?
Civic participation
(Largest youth organisations, created by ‘parties of power’: Russia, Georgia)
Young people as active agents
Youth: a transitional life stage: too many snapshots, too little longitudinality
Too little contextualisation
Too few small N, in-depth comparative studies
Failure to operationalise social class
Data collection has still to catch-up with Eastern European realities
Employment and unemployment
Combinations of family and housing circumstances
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Youth 2009: children of the class of ‘89
Differences widen, by country and by region
Small countries adjacent to pre-2004 EU
Capitals versus elsewhere
Inward investment in manufacturing
Economic wastelands
Today’s youth
One dominant aspiration: join the new middle classes
Ideologically invisible (and often numerically diminished) working classes
The route: higher education
Exit: second or third best. Probably as pendulum migrant. Disadvantaged at destination
Plan housing and family careers; gender divisions
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, ‘Global generations and the trap of methodological nationalism for
a cosmopolitan turn in the sociology of youth and generation’, European Sociological Review, 25, 2009, 2536.
Expectation of global equality: if not happening in own countries, will move to find it.
Frustration, anger, but no alternative vision
Class of ’89’: Fall of Milosevic, 2000. Colour revolutions (regime change): Tbilisi (2003), Kiev (2004), Bishkek
(2005). Evidence of disappointment, frustration, but in no case was mass participation sustained
Privatism and investment in the personal: partly due to the absence of a historical narrative that connects the
micro to the macro
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