The legacy of momentous historical events is not immune to the universal laws of the aging process. More importantly, this does not merely mean that with the passing of time they come to be seen in a different light, leading to retrospective shifts of emphases and reframings. Just as noteworthy, one could argue, are their spatial—geopolitical, geoeconomic, geocultural—connectivities that gradually come to be better understood from a comparative historical perspective. It is this preoccupation with the broader spatio-temporal contexts of 1989 that these two books fundamentally share. Interestingly, however, although they were published in the same year, The Long 1989: Decades of Global Revolution, in fact, grew out of an earlier conference occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of 1989. 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (henceforth cited as The Global 1989), by contrast, was purposefully planned for the thirtieth anniversary of the events captured by its title. Given the ominous changes over the course of those ten years between 2009 and 2019, the underlying message of the two books about the multifaceted legacy of 1989 became timelier than ever before.

During the decade between these two anniversaries, Europe and the world changed dramatically. The story of Central European University, which hosts the publishing house of The Long 1989—the largest English-language academic press in the region—is emblematic of the transformations that have taken place in the region. CEU, established in 1991 as a beacon of top quality but accessible US-style education, was by all accounts on track for further consolidation and growth at the time of the twentieth anniversary of 1989. However, during the run-up to the thirtieth anniversary, the university had unexpectedly been declared the enemy of the Hungarian state and subjected to thinly veiled persecution under the pretext of unfair legislation passed overnight.

The all too familiar, if somewhat naïve, narrative of post-socialist democratization and liberalization in (central and) eastern Europe has apparently suffered a rude jolt with the emergence of democratically elected authoritarian regimes in Poland and Hungary, while Russia abandoned the vestiges of democratic decorum. Perhaps the best trope that captures the open challenge to, as well as departure from, the legacy of 1989 is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's famous dictum that his 2010 electoral victory represented nothing short of a “revolution in the voting booth,” amounting almost to a regime change.Footnote ¹ The anti-liberal shift was not confined to eastern Europe, of course. The second decade of the twenty-first century saw right-wing “populist” politics come to power in a host of countries from Brazil to the Philippines, and even the United States, leading to a revived interest worldwide in eastern Europe as a forerunner of the authoritarian turn.

Few scholars’ reception has suffered a worse fate than Francis Fukuyama's, whose thesis about the end of history has all too often been subjected to critique (including his own recent self-critical reflections), even though some of its mainstream readings did not pay enough attention to its Hegelian origins beyond Alexandre Kojève's interpretation. Still, while this particular teleological vision of liberal democracy as the only finalist on the ideological battleground following the collapse of east European state socialism may have been pronounced dead repeatedly before, it never looked quite as dead as on the thirtieth anniversary of 1989. It is precisely this glaring difference between the bygone optimism epitomized by Fukuyama's antiquated prophecy and the sordid reality of the world thirty years later that inspired both books. In this sense, these books may be seen as contributing to the increasingly urgent search for a thoroughgoing socio-historical explanation of this difference prompted by the critical reexamination of the legacy of 1989. As the euphoria of epochal change settled, the path dependent nature of this change demanded more analytical attention, and the study of the salient illiberal traits of contemporary democracies went through a more explicitly historical turn, focusing on the origins of these phenomena. The question was not whether Fukuyama was right, nor even whether he considered the possibility of tensions between liberalism and democracy, but whether we could trace the genealogy of our current predicaments back to the historical assemblage of “1989.”

It is no surprise, therefore, that historians have recently laid claim to a field usually populated by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists.Footnote ² Both volumes illustrate this trend quite well. The Long 1989 was edited by two historians and the majority of the contributors hail from the same profession. The Global 1989 too was written by four historians, who drew on their complementary fields of regional expertise while at the same time also extending beyond the region and thus “provincializing” the narrower experience of eastern Europe within a global historical perspective. It is indeed the perspective—the extension of 1989 both in space and time—that lends a note of freshness to these two books. The story they tell is not the familiar one of epochal change in 1989, nor do they present a linear narrative of democratization and liberation confined strictly to eastern Europe. Tellingly, The Global 1989 came out in a Cambridge textbook series entitled “New Approaches to European History,” where “a particular effort is made to consider the wider international implications of the subject” (ii), following dozens of intriguing titles published since 1994. The book certainly delivers on these promises; it offers a novel, comprehensive, and thoughtful analysis of an era in a fairly accessible language. It is also a testimony to the fruitfulness of collaborative work among academics with different regional expertise and a shared intellectual agenda—one could say it is a successful recipe for how to write global history collectively.

Let me first turn, however, to The Long 1989, which joins a number of similar works that take a longer-term approach to significant events, and rather than simply focusing on the annus mirabilis itself, analyze it as the culmination of a long process of change and, just as importantly, consider its aftermath too.Footnote ³ 1989 may stand for regime change in eastern Europe in our historical imaginations, but it is viewed here as a dense web of processes, or a shorthand for a series of events which took place in several places and had their independent, though partially connected, trajectories. It is common knowledge that the events in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, or Berlin influenced each other, but the current volume reaches beyond these familiar links: it is primarily “about the slow, uneven spread of ‘nineteen eighty nine’ across the world” (2), the process through which it became a complex message that resonated beyond Europe for several years later as well. The “circulation of people, practices, and concepts” and the “mutation, adaptation, and appropriation” (2) of these concepts plays a central role in the mapping of the “long 1989.” 1989 influenced the rise of political Islam in central Asia, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the Arab Spring, where activists explicitly modeled their movement on 1989 as a peaceful democratic transition, or the events of Tiananmen Square, which then had implications on how change subsequently unfolded in some of the east European countries, serving in turn as a model of learning for the Chinese government on how to contain the flow of revolutionary change. We learn that 1989 reverberated in Ukraine's Euromaidan in 2014, continuing its more radical promises, while the Serbian anti-Milošević activists of Otpor became mentors on non-violent political tactics with western financial support, exporting know-how and logo to Egypt and Tunisia as well as to the colored revolutions across the former Soviet Union.

The structure of the book largely follows the paradigmatic template of transnational history, focusing on circulation and adaptation. Part One, Politics and Policies, traces the flow of people and practices between eastern Europe and South Africa, the Middle East, and China, and shows both how governments learned from each other, and how activists did the same thing. Part Two, Ideas and Ideologies, turns to how ideas traveled and some of the conceptual staples of 1989 emerged in intellectual exchanges and borrowings. Adam Michnik learnt from Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of dialogue, while the study of the French Revolution tempered the radical politics of east European intellectuals and raised some reservations about social experimentation, since the regime change was profoundly marked by the fear of revolutionary justice potentially leading to terror. The chapters here focus mainly on dialogue, human rights, and the rule of law, which all gained currency in 1989. Part Three, Myths and Mythmaking, examines how 1989 became a political slogan promoting the force of popular mobilization, civil society, the myth of negotiated transition, and the “end of history.”

The discussion of the human rights discourse, which became the trademark of 1989, is emblematic of the tensions that inevitably arise from the attempt to reconcile eventful histories relying on local actors and sources with a global structural historical reading of events. István Rév, for instance, thus takes issue with the role in which Samuel Moyn casts eastern Europe in his long-durée history of human rights.Footnote ⁴ The east European dissident critique of socialism tended to align the human rights movements with a narrow conception of political liberties, which Moyn claims “gave Eastern Europe its primary significance in the global history of how human rights moved from an idiom of national social justice to a powerless companion of global neoliberalism” (142). While there is a widely noted general shift in the international debate on human rights from its earlier focus on economic and social justice to the struggle for civil-political rights, Moyn's conclusion is nevertheless too reductive insofar as it suggests that this shift could be blamed directly, inter alia, for the rise of global neoliberalism. Although Rév agrees that the discovery of “human rights helped east Europeans in their journey to liberalism” (144), he rightly points out that liberalism, especially the social liberal agenda advocated by many dissident thinkers, can simply not be equated with neoliberalism. Consequently, the putative role of east European intellectuals in the eventual triumph of neoliberalism worldwide requires a far more nuanced and historically more attentive analysis than Moyn's. Rév does concede, however, that from the perspective of these dissidents democracy could not have been achieved without embracing the free market, which reveals their peculiar understanding of state redistribution as a defining, key element of authoritarian socialism. The volume does not quite resolve these underlying tensions between sweeping macrostructural interpretations such as Moyn's and the detailed, locally specific insights into the situated political imaginaries of east European dissidents, some of whom even went so far as to ground their argument in support of market economy and political pluralism in a humanist reading of Karl Marx (143), although this rapidly waned with the wholesale repudiation of Marxism.

Furthermore, this debate highlights not only the tensions between global thinking and local histories, but also bigger questions that are somewhat scantily addressed by both sides: is centralized redistribution inextricably connected to authoritarianism? Can pluralism and democracy not function without “the market”? How can we ultimately understand (global) capitalism and (state) socialism relationally within a historical dynamic? The misconstrued east/west divide in terms of the market economy (capitalism) vs. central redistribution (socialism) dichotomy has long worked against a more adequate systemic analysis of state socialism in the region, not to mention the negative policy consequences this has had on the post-transition rolling back of the welfare state. The luxury of a poor but comprehensive welfare state was indeed a staple, taken-for-granted feature of east European regimes, which made it easier in a way to bracket social and economic rights and to focus instead more selectively on political liberties. In a similar manner, as Martin Krygier's analysis shows, the global career of the rule of law concept was a “subaltern attendant to” that of human rights in Moyn's account (170): not only did it rhyme with the increasing legalization of human rights discourse, but it also shared the latter's antipolitics, modest aspirations, ecumenical language (170), and distaste for revolutionary experiments. With the recent onslaught against liberal democracy, the uninspiring formalistic language of the rule of law may have become ever more important, but there is also increasing awareness about the need to scrutinize and historicize the content of the abstract concepts of law and of democracy.

As I observed earlier, through the extension of 1989 in both space and time, the two volumes seek to map its global ramifications. It is this tacitly shared minimalist understanding of “the global” that makes them complement each other nicely. The actual status of the global, however, is different in the two works. While The Long 1989 largely limits itself to the global consequences of 1989 per se, The Global 1989 “explore[s] the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order” (i): a process commonly referred to as globalization, resting on the two main pillars of neoliberal economics and liberal democracy. The shift in temporal and spatial perspective helps transcend both the parochialism of the regional story and the limited focus on 1989 as a punctuated event, thereby turning the democratization of eastern Europe into “an exception that calls for an explanation” (74).

It goes against received wisdom about 1989 to argue that it represented, in fact, the culmination of a long process, which had already started in the 1960s, and, by closing off the alternative of socialist democracy and authoritarian modernization, it merely finalized the specific form of globalization in the region. The authors argue convincingly, though, that these alternatives were suppressed only to return more recently with a vengeance, at least the authoritarian models, more so than the socialist ones. In doing so, they complicate the conventional grand narrative about the transition by giving due consideration to contingency as well as to once viable alternatives, no matter how quickly some of the latter were forgotten. The possibility of some kind of “Formula Pinochet” (market reforms by authoritarian methods), for instance, was considered by some as better fitting the region with its authoritarian traditions. The idea of direct democracy also circulated for a while, and workers’ self-management had currency in the region, too. The book questions the inevitability of the triumph of liberal democracy as the hegemonic ideology driving regime change and demonstrates that it was not always the only game in town; the region was pregnant with alternative visions that lost out in the end.

Shifting the analytical focus to the global scale, and thereby highlighting analogous political trajectories outside Europe can help redefine some of the core debates about the significance of 1989: the all too familiar theme of democratization can thus be complemented by a deeper engagement with the questions of globalization, Europeanization, and self-determination. The unsettling conclusion the book derives from these four debates is that the temporary convergence of marketization, democratization, self-determination, and westernization was rather short-lived and extraordinary, and was eventually followed by the disintegration of this exceptional constellation and by the resurfacing of suppressed alternatives.

The section on globalization provides a welcome corrective to the residual myth of two separate worlds and the isolation of the socialist bloc. It maps instead a set of global economic ties driven by transnational political agendas, often reminiscent of the logic of aid rather than that of the market, though not completely devoid of price considerations and the pursuit of economic benefits. The reader may note the somewhat surprising absence of a parallel discussion of similar ties in the spheres of cultural production and reception, which made sense within the logic of socialist internationalism. After all, the Global 1989 tries to evoke a bygone world of alternative globalization, in the restricted mobility of which high-ranking officials expanded their horizon on official trips to Brazil while humming the tunes of bossa nova, and young entrepreneurs quickly realized that Cuban beaches were the only affordable version of Caribbean sand advertised in western travel magazines. Or, one could also take more explicitly cultural examples, such as early translations of Franz Fanon, the popularity of Satyajit Ray movies, or the wide circulation of euro-communist cinema (such as The Battle of Algiers). The book does not elaborate on these or similar examples but people who have memories of this period can recall these amalgamations of east European fantasies and life strategies immediately against the backdrop of the world the book describes.

The transition from socialist internationalism to capitalist globalization—a leitmotif of The Global 1989 according to the authors—has also brought a marked geographical restructuring of external ties from the east-south nexus to east-west. The agenda of EU accession as part of a general Europeanization only reinforced this shift. The third world could easily feel abandoned in what east Europeans celebrated as the “normalization” of their geographical orientation. In this regard, the inclusion of non-European views on 1989 is a salutary gesture by the authors of this volume insofar as this can effectively temper the celebratory, one-sided narrative of Europeanization. Seen from outside Europe, solidarities forged with anti-imperialist struggles faded, east Europeans pulled back from the global left, and their (post-)colonial imaginaries came to be largely limited to the Soviet Empire. The example of the South African connection, which both works mention, is quite telling in this regard. East European opposition groups gradually distanced themselves from the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s and recalibrated their project as a struggle against authoritarianism while altogether losing political interest in the south. The quick reorientation of eastern Europe to the west, the book argues, followed from the region's “in-betweenness”—its identity defined both as part of and opposed to the west—and is part of a much longer history of shifting symbolic geography. This in-betweenness, as the authors point out, accounts for the continuity of ties with the west even during the period of restricted mobility (the Cold War), but the latent tensions it gave rise to did not dissolve after 1989 either, fueling instead some of the recent anti-EU rhetoric or the politics of Eastern Opening in certain countries.

The book insists—in my view, correctly—that the region was an integral part of the world economy even during the heydays of the Cold War. What this entails, in turn, is that we cannot regard the quick, widespread acceptance of the market economy as the mere result of western imposition: “Rather than being the sudden importation of entirely foreign concepts, the decision to adopt market capitalism and western-facing globalization was the culmination of many ongoing changes in expert cultures and thinking as part of an exchange with a wider world during late socialism” (29). While I am quite sympathetic to approaches that do not treat east European state socialism as a self-contained, isolated unit of analysis, I cannot help raising further questions about the apparently liberating methodological emphasis on experts, expert knowledge, exchanges, and other links. More specifically, how important were experts among other actors and social forces in bringing about social change? What was the strength of ties and their structure? Does the link created by a bilateral trade agreement, say, between Algeria and Czechoslovakia amount to the same as the dependence of Zambia on transnational mining companies and the world market price of copper? Is it sufficient to focus on the existence of empirical links, or do we need to come up with a more sophisticated theoretical framework to account for the actual historical processes and effects resulting from these connections? One cannot help feeling that the volume does not quite address these issues, even though some recent works in global history or sociology provide a good model for such an undertaking.

It is precisely a greater attention to such questions that would make The Global 1989 a truly global history. Given the collective nature of the authors’ intellectual project, this book may be more seamlessly unified than the heterogeneous The Long 1989, but ultimately both works are best viewed as studies in transnational history, or more precisely, transregional history, simply because their very theme, 1989, is regionally defined. Both works transcend any narrowly defined regional perspective and overcome purely internalist explanations, but ultimately still fail to reckon with the global as a theoretically construed totality, and thus privilege the connective aspects of the global history of 1989 at the expense of partly neglecting the integrative ones. None of this distracts from the fact that The Global 1989 is probably the best transregional history of 1989 one can read today, and The Long 1989 is the best in-depth companion to it on select topics.

The Long 1989 and The Global 1989 have performed an important service for the study of the region by irrevocably re-embedding east European state socialism and its dissolution in a larger socio-historical, geopolitical, and economic context. There is no excuse for regional parochialism any longer. The Global 1989, especially, has laid the groundwork for the much-needed further theorization of the nature of (state) socialism as part of global capitalism and its historical transformations. It is precisely such a critical reconfiguration of our approach to the recent past that may ultimately enable us to move decisively beyond the fallacy of having once mistaken 1989 for the end of history.