Talk:Revolutions of 1989

An entry from Revolutions of 1989 appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 3 April, 2006.

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Comments about a premerge Revolutions of 1989 article

Moved from Talk:Revolutions of 1989, now a redirect.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 17:02, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Article needs restructuring

Although a lot of good content has been posted in this article, the structure that seems to be taking shape here is problematic. The current country-by-country list tends to oversimplify matters. It disregards the fact that there is still considerable discussion and debate about the meaning of events in 1989 and to what extent they were interconnected. As the events were going on, the leading participants in these conflicts were outlining a debate that is only now beginning to drawn up in clear categories among historians and scholars in other fields. The leading anticommunist politicians of Europe, including Thatcher, Kohl, Havel, and Walesa, saw the events as clearly interconnected, with Eastern Europeans finally standing up to communism and overthrowing it. Thatcher considered "the fall of communism" a triumph of freedom and capitalism, which became the prevailing view in Britain and the United States. In Russia, however, Gorbachev, among many others, has accused Western leaders of writing a victor's history, triumphalism, and even Bolshevik-style rhetoric owing to a narrow ideology.

In the decade after 1989, accounts of the events in the West have generally reflected the views of the key actors who had participated in them, but a much more nuanced picture is emerging among historians and scholars in other fields. There is debate on who were the major protagonists in these "revolutions." Were they popular or elite revolutions? What should we mean by "revolution?" What gave the "revolutions" their particular character? Or was there even a particular character encompassing all of them? On a broader level, how should we categorize these revolutions and what factors do they share with revolutions of the past?

The consensus among academic Soviet specialists is that as important as the 1989 "revolutions" in Eastern Europe were, the events were linked to a breakdown of Communist rule in the Soviet Union. This breakdown was a much longer, more involved process explained by various factors internal to the Soviet system, relations between the Soviet Union and the East European countries, and the international political and economic context. As another example, specialists on democracy offer a somewhat different account. To them the "revolutions" of 1989 were subsumed under a much larger wave of democratization that started in Southern Europe in the 1970s and then swept through Latin America, and into the Soviet bloc, culminating in the "revolutions" of 1989, which is a thesis most popularly associated with Samuel P. Huntington.

I am not seeking to minimize the importance of any of these events in Eastern Europe or question speaking in terms of this category. But since the term "revolutions of 1989" was a neologism hardly more than a decade ago, with a scholarly literature only beginning to crystallize very recently, there is no way for this article to keep its current structure without inadvertently adopting many assumptions that are still getting sorted out by historians, social scientists, and even the participants in the events themselves. Thus, this article should not be an almanac-style chronology, assuming that any such event was indeed a "revolution" and indeed connected with all the other "revolutions" in 1989 (which brings us into very slippery ground with respect to WP:NOR and WP:NPOV), but rather an article on the discourse and various interpretations of the events of 1989. 172 | Talk 20:03, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Clearly the article needs an overall discussion section and perhaps one detailing the academic controversy. But the governments in question did change, and that's encyclopedic. This article provides a necessary overview to the process, and should cover the factual side. The "meaning" of the revolutions is a social analysis which is separate from documenting the transfer of power. --Dhartung | [[User talk:Dhartung|Talk]] 07:06, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

But the governments in question did change, and that's encyclopedic. Sure. I'd just add to the above that the distinction between the "factual side" and the "social analysis" is not so clear cut. Analysis and editorial judgment always underpin the presentation of all facts. An infinite amount of information can be provided on any subject, but we always make a judgment on what to include or exclude. The way in which we go about 'documenting the transfer of power', as you put it, is implicitly a social analysis of meaning in and of itself. On one hand, if the article is structured along the lines of a country-by-country chronology of the dramatic events unfolding in the Eastern European capitals in 1989, as it is now, the implicit assumption is that the events are clearly interconnected, with the agents of change each time being Eastern Europeans who finally stood up to Communism and overthrew it. On the other hand, if the narrative is a chronology of the shifts in Kremlin policy on Eastern Europe under Gorbachev, the events start to look less like a series of global "revolutions"; instead, they start looking like the dramatic aftershocks of the effects on power relations between the Soviet Union and the East European countries caused by the breakdown of the Communist regime in Moscow, and more explicable by factors internal to the Soviet system. So, we have two plausible organizations for on this topic that leave us dramatically different impressions of what was going on. In this sense the organization of the article is "analysis" in and of itself. Moreover, there is the problem that drafting a country-by-country chronology under the heading of "revolutions" of 1989 means that Wikipedia is explicitly classifying the events as all part of the same "revolution." Of course a series of 'regimes changed' in 1989; but a series of 'regimes change' every year. Nor is any 'change in a regime' necessarily a revolution. In short, since the concept of "revolutions of 1989" is still on the murky side, the most neutral organizational structure possible on this subject is one putting the discourse and perspectives on the events at the center of its focus, while moving the chronology to the various timelines on 1989 and pages related to contemporary Eastern European history. 172 08:16, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Peaceful revolutions?

The Autumn of Nations begun in Poland[3]. and sparked similar peaceful revolutions in Germany), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.

I don't think the Romanian revolution was peaceful. --Candide, or Optimism 01:01, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Good point - added the qualifier 'mostly'.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 01:03, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

The term

Who coined the term Autumn of Nations? --BillC 12:31, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

And how much currency does it have? Seems to me like someone's neolgism that didn't catch (233 Google hits), and hence a poor title for an article. In any case, I've done my best at cleanup, but perhaps this should be merged into Revolutions of 1989? -- Jmabel | Talk 22:42, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Huh, good find. Revolutions of 1989 is certainly more popular (40k for Google, and hundreds of books). But as it was poorly linked from other Wikipedia articles, I must have missed it when I was looking for interwiki for the Polish article - so I translated it using the terms in it (which as you can see are supported by some citations, and on the sidenote the revolutions article is completly unreferenced). I agree we should merge both articles, probably under the 'revolutions' title - although I'd appreciate it if this (or merged?) article could still go for DYK.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 23:29, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Can't really do DYK unless it's new (and you can't get there by writing a second article on the same topic: if I used smilies, I'd put one here). - Jmabel | Talk 04:13, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Citation for Spring of Nations

Can someone come up with a better citation for "Spring of Nations"? Of course the term is common, so it should be easy to find something, but as far as I can tell it is not used at all on the cited page. - Jmabel | Talk 22:42, 1 April 2006 (UTC)