by Catherine Samary

December 2009

Outline

Twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Timothy Garton Ash wrote that « in 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of non-violent, velvet revolution”. Some years before, instead, he used an interesting neologism -“refolution” – to describe the kind of systemic changes that had occurred, combining features of revolutions and of reforms from above.

I want here to support and radicalise the neologism against the « pure » epithet, as more accurate in order to analyse the very ambiguities of the historical transformations that put an end to the “bipolar world”. I will argue, that the deepest democratic movements which occurred in and before 1989 were both against the ruling nomenklatura and not in favour of the main socio-economic transformations introduced since 1989. Going behind etiquettes and ideological discourses is needed to take in full account the role of “bipolar” international “deals” still at work in 1989, but also the role taken by leading figures of the former single party in opaque forms of privatisations : all that means the lack of any real democratic procedure of decision making about the main reforms which have had lot of a counter-revolutionary substance… Popular aspirations expressed massively in revolutionary upsurges against the single party and Soviet domination like in Solidarnosc in 1980-1981. And this movement was closer to the Prague’s autumn of workers councils in 1968 against the Soviet occupation than to 1989 liberal shock therapies : those embryonic revolutions towards a kind of 3rd way were repressed and dismantled by the bipolar world’s dominant forces through different episodes, because they were an alternative to such order or to its kind of “end” -by the victory of one of its pole- occurring in 1989 : a reality hidden by cold war concepts.

III- Democratic revolutions or opaque refolutions?
Let us deal here with all the factors which prevented real social “revolutions” to occur and even more which contradict the “democratic” nature of the changes..

A first group could be expressed and in certain context accepted in a capitalist society ; but they indicate a very high level of social expectations of the population : that would be and has been quite conflicting with the dominant liberal trends in the post 1989 kind of capitalism :  wages protected from inflation and full payment of the days of strike, reduction in the retirement age (50 for women !) ; pensions to reflect working life; good universal healthcare; an increase in the number of school and nursery places for the children of working mothers; three year’s paid maternity leave ; increased support for those forced to travel far to work…