Table Of ContentTHE BREAK-UP OF COMMUNISM IN EAST
GERMANY AND EASTERN EUROPE
Also by Feiwel Kupferberg
CREATIVE CHAOS IN PROJECT WORK
THE PATERNALISTIC SPIRIT
The Break-up of
Communism in
East Germany and
Eastern Europe
Feiwel Kupferberg
Associate Professor of Sociology
Aalborg University
Denmark
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG2l 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-27090-3 ISBN 978-1-349-27088-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27088-0
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21512-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kupferberg, Feiwel, 1946-
The break-up of Communism in East Germany and Eastern Europe I
Feiwel Kupferberg.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21512-5(cloth)
l. Europe, Eastern-Politics and government-1989- 2. Germany
(East)-Politics and government-1989-1990. 3. Post-communism
-Europe, Eastern. I. Title.
DJK5l.K86 1998
947'.0009'049-dc21 98-14174
CIP
© Feiwel Kupferberg 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999
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10987654321
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
For Angela, Camilla,
Daniel and Jacob
Contents
Acknowledgements Vlll
1 Introduction 1
2 Rethinking the East European Revolutions 18
3 The Collapse of Communism 40
4 From Information Control to Creative Chaos 49
5 A Hotbed of Hatred 69
6 Coping with Ethnic Conflicts in Eastern Europe 98
7 In the Company of Bulgarians 118
8 East Germany as a 'Model Case' for Transformation
Theory 129
9 Managing an Unmasterable Past 149
10 Transformation, Modernity and the East German
'Sonderweg' 170
Bibliography 187
Index 201
vii
Acknowledgements
Support for the writing of this book was provided by the Danish Social
Science Research Council and the Department of Development and
Planning, Aalborg University.
A Danish version of Chapter 2 was originally published in Dansk
Sociologi, Vol. 4, Nr. 2, 1993, pp. 24-43.
Chapters 3 and 4 are revised versions of the chapter 'From
"Information Control" to "Creative Chaos"'. The Role of Information
in the Process of Transformation in Heinrich Best, Ulrike Becker and
Arnaud Marks ( ed.) Social Sciences in Transition. Social Science
Information Needs and Provisions in a Changing Europe, Information
szentrum Sozialwissenschaften, Bonn, 1996.
Chapter 5 is a revised version of the article 'The Hotbed of Hatred:
Ethnic Conflicts in Eastern Europe', Sociological Papers, Vol. 3, No.1,
pp. 1-33, 1994.
Chapter 6 is a slightly revised version of the chapter Crisis
Management as Learning: Coping With Ethnic Conflicts in Eastern
Europe in Judith Balasz and Hakan Wiberg (ed.) Changes, Chances
and Challenges. Europe 2000. Budapest: Akademiai Kiad6, 1995.
Chapter 7 is a slightly revised version of the article 'In the Company
of Bulgarians', Society, Vol. 31, No.4, May/June, 1994, pp. 74-80.
Chapter 8 is a slightly revised version of the article 'Strategic Learning.
East Germany as a "Model Case" for Transformation Theory',
International Sociology, Vol.11, No.4, December 1996, pp. 457-479.
Chapter 9 is a slightly revised version of the article 'Managing an
Unmasterable Past', Society, Vol. 33, No.2, Jan./Feb. 1996, p. 69-79.
Chapter 10 is a slightly revised version of the chapter 'The Passing
of Socialism: Transformation, Modernity and the East German
'Sonderweg" in P. Karasz, J. Plichtova, V. Krivy. Economics & Politics,
Vth Bratislava Symposion, Proceedings. Bratislava, Slovak Committee
of the European Cultural Foundation, 1994.
viii
1 Introduction
Two kinds of political myths are presently surrounding the break-up of
communist hegemony in Eastern Europe. According to one point of
view, communism never asserted that kind of grip over the hearts and
minds of the populations in Eastern Europe which its seemingly total
control over society seemed to suggest. Totalitarianism was more of a
Utopia than a reality. With totalitarianism gone, these societies were
free to pursue their 'natural' freedom of choice and authenticity. But
this return to native, previously suppressed identities also revealed
some ugly features from the past which had lain buried under the
'artificial' ideological construction imposed by the communists upon
unwilling and hostile populations. With no political and ideological
barriers left, the Eastern Europeans returned to their history of ancient
quarrels and ethnic hatreds, transforming the hopes of a democratic
and prosperous future into the 'post-communist nightmare'.
We can call this the 'libertarian' interpretation of contemporary
Eastern European history. Like all libertarian thinking it tends to go
through two phases. In the optimistic phase, it falls back upon a type
of thinking which we tend to associate with Rousseau's brilliant
condemnation of civilization as a mere artificial taming of natural
instincts. If left to themselves, indigenous populations which are left
untouched by intruding cultures will in the end produce a far superior
culture, due to the lack of artificiality presumed to characterize any
native culture.
Inevitably this leads to a phase of deep disillusion and second
thoughts among the libertarians. Confronted with the new evil pro
duced by the recently liberated natives, an ad hoc explanation has to
be produced as to why things turned out so badly. Since the artificial
civilization cannot be blamed, the fault must be found in the tribal
history of the natives themselves. Thus the moral play is refocused to
the ancient past.
Not only do the natives have to carry the full moral burden for the
unhappy turn of events, the very diagnosis deprives them of any prag
matic means to help them get out of the mess which they are stuck in
down to their feet. Since the nastiness is of a natural kind, not much
can be done about it. The poor bastards are what they are, God help
them!
1
2 The Break-up of Communism in Eastern Europe
According to the opposite, 'paternalistic' myth, the East Europeans
actually lived quite happily under communist dictatorship. Although
not fully aware of it at the time, they got what they needed owing to
the presence of wise rulers. It was only because the former were
fooled into confusing their true needs with the unlimited, anomy
producing wants of a decadent, morally corrupt and socially disorgan
ized society (Western capitalism) that they were led to abandon a social
model which, although not a perfect one, at least gave them a basic
security and a stable planning horizon for their personal lives.
What is interesting is that this latter myth, which originates in
Platonic and Aristotelian political philosophy, is by far the most
popular in the Eastern European countries in the post-communist era.
From the Urals to East Germany, one finds the same kind of nostalgic
longing for a past which everyone knows will never return. Precisely
the irreversibility of the historical landslide in Eastern Europe, depriv
ing the communist parties of their previous hegemony in this part of
the world, makes it irresistible for the only recently liberated popu
lations to play the 'communist card'.
This doesn't mean they want the communists back, but they do feel
the loss of a certain dimension of their lives which is inevitably gone
with the communist era. This suggests that the break-up of communist
hegemony in Eastern Europe is somewhat more complicated than
usually assumed.
The 'libertarian' misreading of events has followed its own cycle of
liberal utopianism and disillusion. As most of the ethnic conflicts fol
lowing in the wake of the break-up of communist hegemony find a
new stability, the diagnosis of 'ancient hatreds' will probably lose popu
larity until the whole issue is forgotten. The problem raised initially
(how do we account for the outburst of hatred in some areas and what
can be learned from the way outside forces tried to cope with the
problem?) will remain unsolved.
In the history of scholarship one finds, surprisingly, that this is often
more the rule then the exception. Some bad feelings due to too rash
conclusions and fatal misreadings will probably remain, indicating the
need to rethink how this, as it turned out, largely false interpretation
came to dominate both mass media and scholarly debates in the
Western world.
With this intellectual competitor gone, the paternalistic interpreta
tion of what actually happened in Eastern Europe as communist hege
mony surprisingly disappeared almost overnight stands a good chance
of reasserting itself. Although equally false, it at least takes account of
