© REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

When, just months after Germany’s reunification, I arrived in Dresden as a young reporter I suddenly landed in a very different world. A far darker one: the streetlights were dim and few and far between. Shop windows were tiny and dark at night. To find a rare restaurant, you had to know where you were going.

Buildings, unpainted for decades, were a uniform dark grey, their plaster crumbling. Balconies were often barred for fear they might collapse. Smells were different, too, with the sharp aroma of the lignite coal used for heating or the thick scent of the oil burnt in the Trabant two-stroke engines.

Factories were woefully outdated, roads narrow and bumpy, offices stuffy and overheated. I learnt that whoever had a home phone had probably been close to the communist power structures of the German Democratic Republic. Anybody else just dropped in or left notes on the door.

Dresden in 1991 was very different from the cities I already knew in West Germany or elsewhere in Western Europe. But it was also a world apart from East Berlin where after the fall of the Wall the pace of change had been much quicker. I spent nearly two years in Dresden—a time that profoundly shaped me and my views on recent German history.

Influx from the West

It was a heady time. We were part of history happening all around us, and we had the conviction that the world was taking a turn for the better. But even then, not everything was rosy. Many of today’s difficulties have their origins in the post-Wende era. (Wende, meaning turn-around, is the word most Germans use for the peaceful revolution of 1989.)

The biggest issue, I believe, has been the dearth of East German leadership.

In Dresden in the early 1990s, I was one of very few Western reporters who came to live in the city. It was different for public administration and business. Most top positions were soon filled with West Germans from Bavaria or Baden-Wuerttemberg who came to live and work in East Germany for a stint. Many of them were good people, and without them, unification—bringing the West German rule of law with all its sophisticated bureaucratic details to the East—could not have happened so quickly.

Initially, most Dresdners whom I talked to approved. They did not want to deal with yesterday’s communist officials, the representatives of a state they had just gotten rid of, when applying for a building permit or unemployment money. They had more trust in people from the West. Soon enough, however, sentiment turned, and the West Germans were increasingly seen as colonizers imposing their system on East Germans.

Stasi Informers Revealed

At the same time, as the files of the German Democratic Republic were opened, more and more information trickled out about the enormous number of East Germans—nearly 200,000 out of a population of 16.4 million in 1989—who had been secret informers for the Stasi, the infamous East German secret police.

A shocking number of the younger East Germans I met in Dresden—smart, ambitious people, charismatic, with leadership qualities and energy to spare—were revealed to have been informers. Spying on their relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, listening in to conversations, writing down damaging titbits of information about people close to them. Not a crime as such, but rightly considered to disqualify anybody from holding an important office, be it public or private.

And so, one by one, many of young leaders disappeared from the scene—here an energetic deputy in the Saxony state assembly, there a representative of Dresden’s chamber of commerce or a capable civil servant in one of the ministries. That the Stasi had contaminated and spoilt so many of the best, brightest people in East Germany was a tragedy, enormously painful for everybody involved and with very far-reaching consequences.

The Ugly Truth

Few of those informers, incidentally, were blackmailed or pressured by the Stasi into signing up. Many were attracted by the promise of being able to make a difference, of change being possible, if only people in power knew what was really happening. Flattery and material rewards were added bonuses.

One thing I learned from my Dresden friends, however: Do not gloss over the ugly truth of what informing means. If you—as a West German who were lucky enough not to grow up in such a corruptive system—think that anybody might have been sucked in, think again. You are belittling the courage and honesty of those who dared turn down the Stasi’s invitation to become one of theirs.

The erosion of the East German elites continues to this day. Not through Stasi poison, that’s long over. But for nearly 30 years now, a large share of the most talented young people from the East have moved to western Germany or beyond for more opportunities and a better life. It’s estimated that nearly 5 million East Germans have left since 1990; partly replaced by 3 million people who moved from West to East.

Vacuum Filled by the AfD

The most painful blow to those staying behind is the fact that a particularly high share of well-educated young women left. This means that many eastern German regions have been drained of initiative, optimism and leadership—and that too many young men have had to remain single. The East-West migration left a vacuum that is now being successfully exploited by the rightwing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Ironically, many of its leaders are West German in origin.

Yet it didn’t take the AfD to introduce racism, xenophobia, and Nazi ideas to East Germany. In the post-Wende Dresden, even Poles and Czechs from just across the border were regarded with suspicion and dislike. The Vietnamese guest workers who had come to the German Democratic Republic on a state contract were kept isolated in their barracks and deeply despised.

I vividly remember one day in 1991 when I was doing an interview at the headquarters of the Dresden police. As we were talking, we heard shouts of “Heil Hitler!” I went to the window and watched. A group of skinheads were marching across the courtyard doing the Nazi salute while police officers looked on and did nothing.

Neo-Nazi Riots

Those officers weren’t neo-Nazi sympathizers. They were caught in transition from one set of government to an entirely different one, unfamiliar with the new rules they were supposed to apply, and completely overwhelmed by the situation. A few years earlier, neo-Nazis would have been manhandled into prison; a few years later, they would have been facing criminal proceedings. Just then, however, they were allowed to walk about in triumph.

This vacuum helped neo-Nazis spread their ideas, as did boredom and the growing fear of losing out, of having been left behind. In September of 1991, I covered the riots in the small eastern city of Hoyerswerda, the first massive attack on foreigners. For days, neo-Nazi skinheads threw stones and firebombs at a hostel for Vietnamese workers. When those workers were eventually evacuated, the neo-Nazis switched their attacks to a refugee home a few streets away.

I will always remember Hoyerswerda, not just because the police were unwilling and unable to stop the riots. The most bizarre aspect was the attitude of the local crowd that had come to watch the attacks. It was like a festival: people took photos, applauded and commented. There were a lot of old people, but parents had also brought their small kids, some of them sitting on their fathers’ shoulders in order to have a better view.

What a break from small-town boredom—and what a disastrous signal to the right-wing groups then forming. Over the next several years, those riots were followed by attacks on foreigners all over Germany, but particularly in the East. Often enough, West German Nazis helped with money and expertise, but the biggest factor for being able to establish lasting structures was the weakness of the police and the judiciary.

Benefit of Hindsight

Today, the streets of Dresden are well-lit and filled with modern, shiny cars. In many towns around Saxony and beyond, the old centers have been beautifully restored. Industry is thin on the ground, but where it does exist, it is modern and competitive. The road signs for “Industrie-Nebel” (industrial fog) that warned drivers about the deep yellow smog in the coal-mining region south of Leipzig have disappeared for good.

No doubt, some, or even many, aspects of unification could have been handled better—with hindsight and without the frantic pace forced by events at the time.  Nearly 30 years on, two of the biggest problems that became so clearly visible after the Wende still shape East Germany’s landscape: the lack of a dynamic, indigenous leadership, and the spread of an illiberal, racist ideology. Both are related, I strongly believe, and it will take the rebuilding of local elites to create a better future for the whole of Germany.

Still we need to be aware that not everything that happened in the 30 years since the Wende is negative, despite the problems German unification brought to the region. Overall, in terms of democracy, personal freedom, prosperity, health, rule of law, or even environmental protection, it continues to be a fantastic success.

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© REUTERS/Stringer

These days, many are celebrating 1989. The problem is that we in the US and Western Europe remember it wrong. This is at least in part because we were wrong about 1989, or at least guilty of severe oversimplification. There was not one 1989 story; there were four. And the legacies of all four are visible in the world we find ourselves in 30 years later, a world where the fate of liberal democracy globally, and even within Western societies, seems a lot less certain than it once did.

1989 of the West

What happened in Eastern Europe in 1989-90 was not about a wall falling, it was about peaceful political revolution on a mass scale. A revolution that supplanted authoritarian, vassal-state Communist rule with national democracy. In our shorthand version, the authors of the story have been replaced by the events of the finale.

The other thing we get wrong about even this version of 1989 was that it was not, as the US National Security Strategy of 2002 put it, a “decisive victory.” The West did not defeat Communism—it withstood, outshone, and outlasted it. Communism was not vanquished by a president in Washington DC; it crumbled because it failed. It failed to deliver peace and well-being to its people. As our Western societies struggle with growing inequality and social discontent and are unable to address the most pressing issues of our time, including migration and climate change, we would do well to adjust our memory of how the Cold War was “won.”

Beijing’s 1989 

There were many pro-democracy protests in 1989, but not all of them ended peacefully. Just hours before the first round of Poland’s (and Soviet-Europe’s) first free election, tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to brutally quash student-led demonstrations there, the last and largest of months of widespread protests challenging Chinese Communist Party legitimacy. The world watched as thousands were wounded and at least several hundred killed on June 4. At the time, the images of students facing off against tanks were as iconic as the images of revelers on the Berlin wall. It was in the years afterward that the more optimistic story of 1989 prevailed and colored the West’s expectations for China.

Western policy makers were so wrapped up in the certain march of democracy heralded by Poland’s 1989 that they failed to see that Beijing’s 1989 had left very different deep and lasting marks. As Gideon Rachman notes in the FT, “It was Tiananmen that secured the Chinese Communist party’s grip on power, thus ensuring that the rising power of the 21st century would be an autocracy not a democracy.” Furthermore, as China watcher Janka Oertel argues, the “Tiananmen shock” has shaped how the CCP’s holds its power ever since, preventing new challenges by delivering economic prosperity and strictly prohibiting public dissent.

The reason the Beijing 1989 is so important to our world today is that China succeeded where it should have failed, and because it succeeded so exceptionally.

Economic reform without political reform was supposed to be impossible. A succession of US Presidents and other Western leaders assumed that an open economy would necessarily lead to an open society. As George W. Bush argued in 2000 on the issue of WTO membership: “[T]rade with China will promote freedom. Freedom is not easily contained. Once a measure of economic freedom is permitted, a measure of political freedom will follow.” But it turns out that political freedom in China did not follow. And even the information age did not change this. Instead, Beijing now boasts an impressive AI-empowered surveillance state.

To make matters worse, economic reform did not materialize either. 19 years later, Chinese WTO membership has not made the Chinese economy or society significantly more open; instead China’s non-market, Party-driven economy has thrived in a way no one would have imagined. The Chinese economy is now so big and so successful that it is more likely to kill the system than be reformed by it.

Thus, the Tiananmen 1989 has proven lasting and successful, and as China’s influence in the world grows, so does the meaning of this alternative story of protests.

Internet 1989

And in the early years of what would soon to be known as the World Wide Web, “techno-utopianism,” to quote Karen Kornbluh, around a new technology was equal to bright-eyed optimism about democracy’s “new era.”

Originally started in the 1960s as a military project to enable communication during a nuclear blackout, around 1989 a different future for the decentralized digital communication network was beginning. In this year the first commercial dial-up access connected users to the Internet, ending the early phases of the Internet as first a military and then an academic network. (ARPANET, the military precursor network, was officially decommissioned in 1990.) The architects of early Internet policy were a small niche group in 1990, but thirty years later the web and social media have become central to our lives and even, as we’ve more recently learned, our elections and democracies.

Because of its decentralized structure, the Internet was envisioned as an open, democratic, and power-equalizing force. And in its first decades, it arguably was. People connected directly with each other through email and chat and created their own sites and blogs.

But the Internet grew more centralized and more central to our lives. More and more of life is lived online, and this online life is dominated by a few very large companies who control a user’s experience. Algorithms meant to keep us online longer determine what we see in our search feeds and our timelines. Even news is increasingly fed to us (and filtered for us) by these platforms, while at the same time the Internet has savaged the revenue model of democracy’s fourth pillar. Thus instead of the bottom-up, citizen-driven supplement to established media that the early Internet promised, we now contend with struggling serious media and mass-scale, bot-supported propaganda. As Karen Kornbluh writes, “Propagandists and extremists wishing to conceal their identities fund targeted ads and create armies of social media bots to push misleading or outright false content, robbing citizens of a basic understanding of reality.”

Not only for citizens of democracies has the Internet proven not to be an unambiguous force for freedom. In 2011, we were still celebrating the Arab Spring as a social media revolution and heralding technology’s power to undermine dictators. A few short years later, as GMF’s Laura Rosenberger observes, authoritarian powers have learned to harness technology “for control and manipulation, developing tools to constrain, surveil, and insidiously shape the views of their populations using information and technology, bolstering their power.“ China, in particular, has managed to create a national censored Internet and platforms and apps that allow the Party to track users online activities—with AI-enabled surveillance tracking them offline. And Beijing is increasingly exporting the “techno-authoritarian systems of surveillance and control” that it has developed and employed domestically to other countries.

Thus thirty years after the modern Internet began to take shape, there is an unforeseen contest over its future. What we can foresee is that a rosy future is not automatic: the Internet and other new technologies will only be as friendly to democracy as we can make them be.

Yugoslavia’s 1989

Unlike in Central Europe, there was no Soviet yoke on Yugoslavia, and Titoist Communism provided greater freedoms. What’s more, by 1989 political reforms had been underway for a decade. But other forces were also rising within the multinational state. Slobodan Milošević was elected president of Serbia in May 1989 and shortly afterward delivered his (in)famous Serbian ethno-nationalist speech by the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo. Milošević was not alone, indeed, as Paul Hockenos writes, “[m]ost Yugoslavs welcomed the new spaces and ideas that sprouted from the cracking façade of socialism, including the liberty to identify more openly with one’s ethnicity, be it as a Serb, Croat, Muslim, Slovenian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, or Kosovo Albanian.” We all know what happened next: Slovenia and Croatia opposed Milosevic’s centralist policies, and in 1991 declared independence, starting the first in a series of territorial wars and ethnic conflicts that would last a decade, destroy Yugoslavia, and cost around 130,000 lives.

The ethno-nationalism that turned violent in Yugoslavia was a bigger feature of 1989 than our simpler story acknowledges. Branko Milanovic, a Serbian-American economist, has argued that the revolutions of 1989 should be “seen as revolutions of national emancipation, simply as a latest unfolding of centuries-long struggle for freedom, and not as democratic revolutions per se.” In Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia the revolutions of 1989 “it was easy to fuse” nationalism and democracy: “Even hard-core nationalists liked to talk the language of democracy because it gave them greater credibility internationally as they appeared to be fighting for an ideal rather than for narrow ethnic interests.”

In Yugoslavia, ethno-nationalism quelled any hints of democracy as events unfolded very differently than they did for Central Europeans. As a result, in our narrative of 1989 Yugoslavia was an anomaly, a regional side-note. But by 2019 the ringing of the nationalist side note has become impossible to miss, from Viktor Orban’s Hungary to the Brexiteers called for British self-determination, and Donald Trump proposing to “take the country back.”

The Intricate Story of 1989

The truly remarkable and inspiring story of the Polish revolution, the fall of the wall, the peaceful collapse of Soviet rule in Europe should be celebrated on its 30^th anniversary, certainly. But this story has never been the truth. It was as Damir Murasic, executive editor at The American Interest, notes, a “successful narrative” that “captured important truths about the time it sought to describe. And like all good stories well told, it chose to focus on some things in lieu of others.”

However, those events left out of our original 1989 narrative also hold important truths that can help us better understand the challenges we face today—for a start by making us both humbler and less hopeless. For the victory of democracy and freedom in 1989 was not as unequivocal or robust as our original narrative had us believe, nor the future so certain. But now that we find ourselves in a more difficult future we should not succumb to the temptations of cultural pessimism, as also the GMF’s Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff argues in his book, Die Welt Braucht den Westen. Like the Internet, the world is not, as it turns out, an automatically democratizing place. Tribalism continues to be a powerful force, even in wealthy democracies. Freer markets do not have to lead to freer people; capitalism and technology are as compatible with authoritarianism as with democracy.

And yet, democracy remains a powerful idea that even today, and even in China, drives people to the streets. Yes, democracies, too, can fail if they fail to deliver enough. But they need not. If we want freedom and democracy to have a future, we will have to work to ensure that new technologies reflect and support these values. And we will have to work to sustain freedom and democracy within our own societies. As we should have learned from Poland in 1989, a better future is possible—it’s just neither easy nor guaranteed.

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© Agencja Gazeta/Slawomir Kaminski via REUTERS

Mr. Schwarzenberg, how do you see the situation of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe today? Let’s start with the Czech Republic. I’m not very happy with the situation in my country. The economic situation is very good, the country develops very well economically. People are much richer than a few years ago. But the political situation is deplorable.

Is it comparable to the situation in Hungary and Poland? In Hungary, an authoritarian government has successfully eliminated every meaningful opposition, including all opposition media. And, one must admit, the top echelons of the regime have become much richer over the last years. The situation in Poland is different: There’s an active opposition and an active media. Even the worst critics of Jaroslaw Kaczynski [the leader of the Law and Justice party, which has been governing Poland since 2015] don’t suspect him of taking any money; in fact, he lives very modestly in Warsaw with two cats. So, there is a huge difference between Hungary and Poland. Of course, the Germans are not very happy with Mr. Kaczynski, and that’s understandable! He is a traditional Polish nationalist, but he is a decent man.

For these and other states in the region, what have been, and continue to be, the biggest challenges—authoritarianism, weak institutions, and corruption, external actors like Russia or China? There has been corruption in all our countries; it’s been worst in Romania. In fact, the further southeastwards to get, the worse the problem becomes. But in Western Europe, there has been corruption, too. In Central and Eastern Europe, it is slowly getting better.

How persistent are the aftereffects of communist rule? The consequences of the dictatorships are grave, of course–and you have to remember, often there were the Nazis first, then came the communists; taken together that’s up to 60 years of totalitarian rule. In Austria, the Nazis were in power for seven years only, but the country still grappled with the consequences in the 1970s. So of course remnants of that deplorable totalitarian mentality take a long time to disappear.

Do you think EU enlargement was a success? How would you assess the role Germany and the Western Europeans have played? The Western European countries, including Germany, were first of all interested in their own opportunities, and they had enormous economic success. Just look at the export numbers of Germany or Austria! For Western European countries, enlargement was an enormously successful business. The political impact was different, it was somewhat less of a success.

Are the Eastern Europeans being given their fair share of involvement in the European project? Well, if you ask the people, it differs, but basically, they are not that interested in the European project. However, they are interested in the economic success that started with membership of the European Union. They all know very well that they need the EU for their own economic gain and prosperity. But they are not really interested in the project as such. And then there are some demagogues like Viktor Orbán and others, including here in the Czech Republic, who do their utmost to denigrate Europe for their own populist interests.

What was the biggest failure of the German foreign policy in Central and Eastern Europe? German policy has always had this dilemma: the relationship with Russia. The Germans have been prioritizing Russia over its immediate neighbors for over two centuries now. That’s nothing to do with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking very good German. You can go back as far as the early 19^th century, or just remember the illicit cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army in the 1920s and 1930s. It always leads to disappointment in Central and Eastern Europe.

Current German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has spoken of redefining the term Ostpolitik as to no longer referring to Russia, but rather to Germany’s eastern neighbors… That would be nice if it would happen. But I’m afraid deeds are stronger than words. And of course, Germany should not abandon Russia in its foreign policy, but rather consider the interests of the other states, too. If you think of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, where Angela Merkel has been mediating—after five years, some Germans still seem to have difficulties spelling out precisely who the aggressor is and the German industry is arguing for the lifting of sanctions.

How could the present divide between Western and Eastern Europe be overcome? Scrapping that famous project of the second gas pipeline [Nord Stream 2] across the Baltic Sea would be a start. It runs against the interests of Ukraine and other countries. Or speaking clearly about the situation in Hungary. Of course, the votes of Orbán’s Fidesz party were needed to make the European People’s Party the biggest political group in the European Parliament. But my impression is that German conservative politicians simply close their eyes to whatever Orbán does at home.

So we need more honesty? More honesty would be a wonderful idea.

The interview was conducted by Henning Hoff. Assistance: Matthias Hempert.

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© REUTERS/Radovan Stoklasa

The year 2019 marks a double-anniversary of two interconnected historic events: 30 years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and 15 years of EU eastern enlargement.

In 1989, democratic revolutions from East Berlin to Bucharest toppled local communist regimes and buried the Cold War international order. For the societies in Central and Eastern Europe, the annus mirabilis, the miraculous year of 1989, generated many hopes and expectation; it also led to many disappointments and brought a lot of pain.

Fifteen years later came the accession to the EU. It gave the Central and Eastern European countries a special boost, including financial support in the form of Cohesion Fund inflows, as well as a political anchor. The economic development that followed is remarkable. It’s worth recalling that with the exception of the Czech Republic and Slovenia as well as the western parts of Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, the region used to be long-term economic underachievers. Disadvantaged by frequent political disruptions, border changes, and social upheavals, they were stacked at Europe’s periphery. Poland’s per capita GDP, for instance, from the 17th century until recently was almost always below 50 percent of Western Europe’s average level. Now it’s only 25 percent below the EU average, and the gap keeps narrowing.

Former World Bank economist Marcin Piatkowski in his ground-breaking book Poland’s New Golden Age showed that after 1995, the country became the fastest growing economy in the world among larger countries at similar levels of development, beating even South Korea and Taiwan. Next to South-East Asia, there is hardly any other region that has benefited so much from globalization as the new EU members in Central and Eastern Europe, at least in statistical terms.

Of course, this development also greatly benefited Germany, and Europe as a whole. Incorporating new markets of more than 100 million people and their fast-growing open economies into international value chains helped Western European companies to expand, reduce costs, and stay competitive globally.

Can this continue?

Root Causes and Limits

Even if the pace of catching-up with Western Europe has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008, some basic factors of the economic success will not change, such as geographic proximity. The combined trade volume of the four Visegrád countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) with Germany last year was €290 billion, far ahead of China (€199 billion) or the Netherlands (€189 billion). Poland alone is set to overtake the United Kingdom and Italy and will likely become one of Germany’s top trading partners this year or next. The volume of German-Hungarian trade is larger than German-Russian trade, and German trade with Slovakia, the smallest of the Visegrád countries (and a member of the eurozone) is twice as large as what Germany trades with G7 member Canada.

The German automobile industry, in particular, has turned the country’s eastern neighbors into a manufacturing hub. The knock-on effect was felt in December 2018 when a strike in an engine factory in Györ, Hungary (supported, by the way, by the German trade union IG Metall) forced Audi to shut down production at its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, for several days. Interestingly, Audi’s Hungarian employees demanded a wage raise to put them on a par with workers at other Volkswagen/Audi facilities in Central Europe, not with what their German colleagues earn.

This illustrates several things: There is successful economic convergence, but the benefits may not be evenly distributed. Wage convergence in particular has not been as strong as that of GDP per capita levels, reflecting that much of the profits generated in CEE markets are taken out by foreign companies.

Yet political convergence, or that of democratic institutions, has been much slower. In some parts of the region, notably in Hungary, it has even gone into reverse. The EU institutions have proved ill-equipped for combatting such backsliding. Furthermore, they haven’t managed to limit creeping state capture or corruption. Political tensions between EU institutions or Western EU members and the newer eastern members will therefore remain high, but this is unlikely to harm their economic development.

At the same time, given the level of interconnectedness, isolationist policies in Central and Eastern Europe will not work anymore.  Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán always knew this; his Polish counter-part Jarosław Kaczynski in recent years had to learn it the hard way. What is missing, however, is greater interest and a willingness to engage by the other side: with the exception of those two trouble-makers, Poland and Hungary, the rest of the countries are still largely taken for granted by Germany’s political class.

What Next?

Looking ahead, as the saying goes, the future is no longer what it used to be. There are six key determinants in particular that will likely shape Central and Eastern Europe’s future course.

First, there is the future of globalization. After 1989, the region greatly benefited from the liberal world order and the expansion of free trade. Current winds are blowing in the opposite direction. Conflicts over trade and technology between the United States and China fuel a broader process of de-globalization. Europe is caught in the middle, defending multilateralism and depending on both giants. The small, export-oriented economies of Central and Eastern Europe with their heavy reliance on manufacturing are especially vulnerable to a recession in Germany or a global slowdown. So far, the countries have not been tested by a prolonged downturn.

Second, there is the question of whether the countries are capable of upgrading their business model, as the old one is coming under huge pressure. Instead of high unemployment and cheap labor in abundance, there are now acute labor shortages. At the same time, as research by the Vienna Institute for International Economy (WIIW) shows, a large part of production ranges at the bottom of the value and supply chain, and this is limiting the region’s potential to further catch up with Western Europe. Morphing into a more automated and digital economy will likely add to the problem, unless it is offset by more diverse growth and higher levels of public investment in research and education.

Third, and related, the impact of technological transformation on key industrial sectors, including the switch to electric cars and artificial intelligence, will be huge. There is also the transition to cleaner, low carbon energy. German industry and energy companies have already started this process, and it is not clear what consequences it will have for their suppliers and partners in Central and Eastern Europe.

Fourth, the countries have to manage demographic decline. EU accession has opened the doors to a dramatic emigration from the region. Many countries have already lost a large share of their population of productive age to Western Europe. Many Central and Eastern European societies are aging rapidly, while the workforce is shrinking, as young and skilled people continue to leave. Last year, Germany’s population reached a record high of more than 83 million people, with net immigration of some 400,000; more than half of the new arrivals came from Central and Eastern Europe (Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland topping the list of countries of origin). As a consequence, the countries themselves will need to become more open for migration. In spite of the current government’s anti-migration rhetoric, Poland has quietly become a global leader in accepting seasonal workers (some two million from Ukraine, and also an increasing number of Asians). However, there is little policy planning for those who decide to stay after their permit expires, while Poland’s labor market is projected to be short of an additional 1.5 million people by 2030.

A Call for Good Governance

Fifth, the countries need to keep their societies inclusive. A large part of Central and Eastern Europeans are living in the countryside. Fewer than 60 percent of Poles, Croats, Romanians, Slovaks and Slovenes are citydwellers (the EU average is around 75 percent), which gives political strength to rural voters. In the post-1989 period, large cities were usually the breeding grounds of economic development, while the countryside felt more disconnected and abandoned. The urban-rural divide deepened after the financial crisis of 2008, as rural areas became strongholds of populist leaders. Government policies and public investment into infrastructure and social policy programs will determine to what extent these aging and changing societies can be kept open and inclusive. This applies also to ethnic minorities and the Roma population, which is projected to rise to 20 percent of the populations of Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria by 2050.

The sixth and crucial factor is quality of governance and the future behavior of political elites. As the challenges become more complex and multifaceted, policy responses formulated in capitals from Prague to Sofia will require more engagement on all levels of the state administration, economy, and society. The alternative model is the top-down approach pushed by authoritarian leaders in Budapest and Warsaw. However, quality, transparency, and inclusiveness of policy-making are likely to improve with younger generations. Over the next decade, we are likely to witness a more diverse region emerging.

Time to Reengage

A new generation is now coming to power in Central and Eastern Europe. Many of them are too young to remember 1989, but they will nevertheless reconnect with the ideas and political legacy of its proponents. They lack experience and EU networks, but are largely guided by a strong sense of EU togetherness and co-ownership.

This is also a chance for Berlin to reengage with this neighboring region. What is still lacking 30 years after is a stronger political partnership, based on permanent dialogue platforms between Berlin and Central and Eastern European capitals (preferably outside of closed diplomatic channels) that would structurally connect political and economic aspects of their bilateral relationship. It would be a great achievement if the upcoming celebrations of these anniversaries would generate a new purpose of working together for a more cohesive EU.

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© Krzysztof Miller/Agencja Gazeta/via REUTERS

In 12:08 East of Bucharest, a 2006 film directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, an alcoholic professor and a pensioner go on a local television show to debate whether or not there was a revolution in their city, Vasliu, in eastern Romania, in 1989. Over the course of the show, it turns out that history is rarely straightforward. The film’s original title in Romanian, “A fost sau n-a fost?”—roughly translated as “Was There or Wasn’t There?”—reflects a broader point about the memory of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. Thirty years on, there are still competing narratives about the events that brought down communism in the region. Today’s political disputes have been projected onto the anniversary, making it less about the past than about competing visions of the future.

This is very much the case in Poland. These days, there is little that Poles agree on, from gay rights to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, who served as Poland’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014. 1989 is one of these things, as this year’s milestone anniversary shows. From an outside perspective, this might seem surprising, given Poland’s role in the collapse of communism and its trajectory since then. For years, the country’s peaceful transition to democracy and reintegration with the West, culminating in joining the European Union in 2004, was regarded as a success story. Poland was held up as a model for countries further east, such as Ukraine. Yet rather than unite Poles, the 30th anniversary of 1989 has been subsumed in the political conflict between the ruling, right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) and the centrist opposition led by the Civic Platform (PO), Tusk’s former party. Ahead of parliamentary elections this autumn, both sides have used the anniversary to attack their opponents and promote their vision of Poland.

This split was visible this summer on the 30th anniversary of the first partially free elections in Poland, held on June 4th 1989, which resulted in a government led by the Solidarity trade union. The opposition marked the date with celebrations in the northern city of Gdańsk, the home of Solidarity. In his speech there, Tusk, who was visiting from Brussels, drew parallels between the political struggles of the 1980s and those of today’s anti-PiS opposition. “You cannot let yourself be outplayed, even if you have lost the first match,” he said, alluding to the approaching elections in Poland. The government was not present; instead, it held its own muted ceremony in the parliament. A long-anticipated cabinet reshuffle was held that day, which some commentators interpreted as an attempt draw attention away from the opposition’s celebrations in Gdańsk.

Anti-Communist Roots

To be clear, neither side regrets the fall of communism; indeed, both PiS and PO have their roots in the anti-communist opposition of the 1980s. Rather, the dispute over 1989 has three dimensions: personalities, historical narratives, and worldviews.

First, the split is about the heroes of 1989. The central figure in this dispute is Lech Wałęsa, the legendary leader of Solidarity, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and went on to serve as president from 1990 to 1995. These days, the 75-year-old Wałęsa is a contested figure in Polish politics, amid allegations that he was a paid informant for the communist secret police in the early 1970s. For part of the population, he remains a hero; for others, he embodies what (in their view) went wrong in Poland’s transition from communism. Meanwhile, Wałęsa has positioned himself as a strong critic of the PiS government.

Second, the two camps have different narratives about Poland’s transition from communism. For years, PO has presented it as a success story: Poland went from Soviet satellite state to a democracy, a market economy and a member of NATO and the EU. However, PiS has challenged this narrative. Instead, it claims that the transition was stolen by former communists and crooks. In the past, PiS’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński has called for the Third Polish Republic established in 1989 to be replaced with a new, “fourth” one, which would represent the country’s political, moral and spiritual renewal.

The party has successfully appealed to Poles who feel excluded from the country’s spectacular growth since 1989, including the elderly and people outside the big cities—groups that felt neglected by the PO government. According to a poll after the European elections in May, almost three-quarters of voters with only a primary education voted for PiS. Among voters with a university degree, the PO-led opposition coalition was well ahead of PiS. Geographically, PiS’s support base is in the country’s more rural, traditional east, which is less connected with western Europe. “If it could, Warsaw would fill it with forest,” a trade-union activist in Lublin told me shortly before the 2015 elections, referring to the PO government’s attitude to eastern Poland. This kind of resentment among parts of the population, rooted in a sense of social injustice, propelled PiS to power that autumn.

No End to History

This also explains PiS politicians’ dismissive attitude toward 1989. On June 4 last year, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted that the 1989 elections were “boycotted by many Poles, only partly free, with rules changed during them to save the national list and Communist Party candidates.” In a second tweet that day, he added that “the road to freedom was long and winding, so let’s appreciate the fact that today we can enjoy life in a democratic and safe country.” This echoes the party’s narrative that Poland owes its position and growing prosperity to PiS rule, rather than decisions made by successive governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Third, the split over 1989 reflects a deeper difference in worldview. Even though PO and PiS both have their roots in the anti-communist movements of the 1980s, today they represent different visions of Poland and Europe. Since coming to power in 2015, PiS has countered the mild, pro-European liberalism of the previous, PO-led government with a populist nativism, which echoes that of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. At home, it has presented refugees from the Middle East and gay people as a “threat.” Internationally, it has emphasized “sovereignty,” which has been visible in its more confrontational attitude to Brussels and Berlin. Speaking on stage together in 2016, PiS chairman Kaczyński and Orbán pledged to wage a “cultural counter-revolution” to reform the EU after Brexit.

More fundamentally, PiS has challenged the idea of 1989 as “the end of history.” In his famous article published that year, Francis Fukuyama suggested that the end of the Cold War means “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In Poland, PiS has rejected this vision of Western liberal democracy as the end-point. Instead, it has been rebuilding the political system on its own terms, which includes a tighter grip on the public media and judges. Economically, PiS has sought to counter the more market-led policies of previous governments with a more statist approach, including an emphasis on social justice. This includes new welfare policies; its flagship program offers families 500 złoty (€120) per child per month. Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister (and a former bank CEO), has described his government’s vision as “a social capitalism, pro-social but also creating good living conditions for entrepreneurs and companies.” According to PiS’s supporters, “liberal-leftists” are to blame for Poland’s and Europe’s problems. Shortly after PiS won the elections in 2015, a government minister told me: “I grew up in a socialist democracy, then we had liberal democracy. Now I just want democracy without adjectives.”

As the trajectories of Poland, Hungary and Russia show, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy is not the only game in town. The elections in Poland this autumn will be between its supporters and opponents.

Despite the fraught political situation, limited agreement between Poles about specific events in 1989 may be possible. Almost two-thirds of Poles consider the elections of June 4,1989 a success, according to a recent poll (one-quarter of respondents see them as a failure). Even among PiS voters, the figure is 40 percent, with 40 percent holding the opposite view. Yet as long as there are elections to win, politicians in Poland and beyond will continue to talk past each other and use history for their own purposes—much like the characters in Porumboiu’s film.

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