I suppose that all of us who have been teaching have the reaction that our students are growing younger as we age. I still have to remind myself that my current students had not yet been born at the time that the “recent” events I am teaching about took place.

Initially it was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, then the Korean War, then the assassination of JFK, then the Vietnam War that they could not recall. Today it is the fall of the Wall in Berlin in 1989, exactly 20 years ago. For those of us who were adults at that time, the impact of those soft revolutions was tremendous, seeming to bring the cold war to an end. For undergraduates born in that year, of course, 1989 is simply another date in ancient history.

But the year is both close at hand and far away for me, personally. I was in Shanghai, bound for Beijing on CSCPRC business, during Tiananmen; it was a frightening and disorienting experience for me, but of course much worse for my Chinese colleagues. I had worked on academic exchanges for IREX in Eastern Europe since 1986, and thus have spent a good deal of time behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1990s. Later I worked in the region on the development of democratic constitutionalism, the teaching of civics in the schools, and the reestablishment of higher education (through the Civic Education Project). These were and are places and people I care deeply about.

Happily, one of our best graduate students, Piotr Kosicki, had the wit, commitment, and energy to organize a conference here at Princeton a few weeks ago to commemorate the anniversary. He convened a group of interested faculty members two years ago, and in the interim managed to pull together a remarkable group of people from all over the world to discuss 1989 as a global phenomenon -- behind the Iron Curtain, but also in South Africa, Latin America, and the People’s Republic of China.

The problematic of the conference was how much the rebellions against the many authoritarianisms of the late 20th century had in common. Some of the participants were weathered protagonists of the actual events of 1989 -- Adam Michnik was probably the best-known. Others were senior academics who have been studying these regions for a long time. But most of the presenters were current graduate students, mainly from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union -- it was particularly interesting to hear the reflections of those who were very young when the Wall came down. 

The session on Poland was perhaps the most intense of the conference, but the panel on the Tiananmen Square events in China was also fascinating. The question there was how we should think of China in relationship to the successful revolts in Europe. The final session included three senior figures who commented on the whole of the conference -- Adrian Guelke from Queen’s Belfast (who had lived in South Africa during much of this period), Istvan Rev of the Central European University in Budpest, and Martin Krygier of the University of New South Wales (with strong ties to Poland). The panel brilliantly ruminated on the analytical and methodological problems of understanding what had happened in 1989.

I suppose the net impact of the conference was to make me less sure that I understand what happened to world politics twenty years ago, but more sure that something truly important had occurred.

Categories: Books