The downfall of communism in Europe and “The Balanced Refolutions of 1989”

• The Fall of The Berlin Wall
  
  
  
  In 1961 Communists built a barrier through Berlin that we call the Berlin Wall. This well known monument was destroyed in 1989, uniting the East and West Germans.
  1940-1945
  Allies split the country into four separate parts.
  1945
  The Yalta Conference confirmed that Great Britain, The US, and France occupied the west part of Germany, and the Soviets the east .
  1946
  Berlin held its first real election since 1933.
  1948
  The Soviet Union cut off all rail water, and highway routes to West Germany.
  1949
  The west became known as West Berlin, and East Berlin became known as The Soviet Sector.
  1950's
  West Germany expanded and modernized rapidly.
  1955
  West Germany joined NATO.
  1958
  The Soviets demanded that West Berlin become a "Free City."
  1969
  Willy Brandt became West Germany's first Social Democratic chancellor.
  1970's
  Standard living in East Germany had now improved and was catching up with West Germany.
  1976
  The 12 members of NATO pledged military support to one another in case of attack.
  1982
  Coalition government collapsed.
  1983
  Christian Democrat returns to power, Helmut Kohl.
  1989
  The Berlin Wall opens, allowing East and West Germans to unite.
  1990
  Germany reunited, Unification Peace Treaty signed, and Berlin was named the capitol.
  1991
  Soviet Government officially grant independance.
  1997
  A red line was painted, marking the place where the Berlin Wall stood.
  
  
• “The Magic Lantern” is a book which uses the apt metaphor of a magic lantern show, the forerunner of the movie, for an eyewitness account of the revolutions in Europe in 1989. This unique eyewitness account is told by an expert. Timothy Garton Ash is a fellow of Saint Anthony’s College at the University of Oxford who is well known for his books which have charted the “present history” of Europe. Through the author’s eyes, we see glass slides of the revolutionary movements in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, waiting for scenes of violence that never appear. Therefore Ash calls them refolutions instead of Revolutions. Ash projects his interpretation of the events for us, writing each account as a drama displayed in the light of his “Magic Lantern.”
  As our slide show begins, we are introduced to the main characters in Warsaw, Poland, Lech Walesa and General Jaruzelski.[i] They represent the two opposing regimes of the Solidarity and the old Soviet Guard parties who meet at a round table where an agreement forced all of its parties onto the same side. To Solidarity’s credit, they were willing to swallow their pride and elect Jaruzelski in the “free elections” a short term “loss” which would allow for Walesa’s election in 1995. These concessions could only be accomplished because the Soviets desired the conditional economic stability the IMF offered and the political passivism that would be produced by Pope John Paul’s support.
• 
  Our next scene is June 14th, 1989 at the funeral of Imry Nagy in Budapest. Nagy was a 1956 dissident against the Soviet regime who was re-interred on the same day that his persecutor, Janus Kadar, died. He is also one of my distant relavies. This side-by-side picture of exhumation and interment scenes is filled with the symbolism and emotion of a Hungarian Republic ripe for change. The round “triangular” table of Hungarian negotiation that follows is attended by not two, but three groups brought together under an umbrella organization. [ii] The opposition party and the Soviet guard were joined by a third group, comprised of a synthesis “quangos”, quasi non-party organizations. The irony of this picture is that the death of the state controlled government’s ideals had honored the exhumation and internment of new coalition government parties which they would previously have persecuted. As in our first vignette, the economic realties of an impoverished Eastern Europe contributed to change.
  Next, the projector shook out a next slide of the ruptured Berlin wall. For Germany, the closure of conflict from WWII was not complete until the wall was broken. Massive peaceful demonstrations are also shown which served as a catalyst for change. The truth is that the wall had been leaking for years. Gorbachev had dropped subtle hints that Honecker’s state-controlled government would not continue to be supported by the muscle of Moscow. Gorbachev’s effectual policies were strongest in East Germany because it was more strongly oriented towards and dependant on the Soviet Union.[iii] Guards at the wall had already covertly begun deporting people into West Berlin. The Hungarian opening of the frontier with Austria had become a way for East Germans to escape through Hungary. The example of the students in Tiananmen Square had fueled mass demonstrations in all four countries.
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  The next slide shows the letters “GDR”. The word democratic is crossed out and replaced with Deutschmark which would be a single currency that would unite East Germany with the West.[iv] In 1999 this currency is replaced by the Euro. The projectionist in the concluding slide of the German reunification offers hope that the idealistic remnant remaining in East Germany and the throngs of those who wanted West Germany’s improved living standard will compromise and accomplish unification.
• 
  Our final set of slides takes place on November 17th 1989 in Prague. The screen shows Prime Minister Adamec, Gustav Husak and Milos Jakes, old party leaders of the Soviet regime. In the first action student demonstrators are beaten back with truncheons (nightsticks), and Havel calls for a general strike. Havel has surrounded himself with a brain trust of students, professionals and workers who devise a solution to the emerging crisis. Havel’s brain trust meets in a theater called “The Magic Lantern.” They decide to create a “Civic Forum” which makes demands that are reinforced through peaceful demonstrations. Jan Skoda, a Soviet conformist, lends his strategically located balcony on Wenceslas Square to the forum’s cause. [v] From there, Radim Palous, a banned priest Vaclav, Maly, and Havel address the crowd that has now increased to hundreds of thousands.
• 
  Of this scene, Ash states, “In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: Perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days.” [vi] The next slide of Prague shows day five of the ten day prediction by Ash. We see that the forum itself was hardly democratic; the members were self appointed experts in their field. With the addition of Alexander Dubček, a Slovak politician who attempted to reform Communism in 1968-69,[vii] they were able to stir up a ground swell of support and rekindle desires for truth and freedom. When Brezhnev’s politburo resigned, the state-controlled government lost its muscle. The forum has become a bridge from Soviet Socialism to a self-determined government. As with the other countries, economic solutions are proposed to bridge the gap between revisionist, social democrats, and Trotskyists forming a rainbow coalition.[viii] So in twenty four days the Magic Lantern show in Prague ended with “improvisation and merriment” because the violent expectations of revolutionary change never came. Instead Vaclav and his forum members had reasoned a government from the ashes of the Soviet State through collaboration and semantic argument.
  
  Nineteen eighty-nine was a year when reason prevailed over the violence of revolution because people took the time to think about alternatives that would accommodate all stakeholders in their self-determined governments, thereby resisting violence, embracing compromise and experiencing ironic circumstances resulting in refolution instead of revolution. In refolution a constitution establishes the rules and more importantly principles on which an organization is governed. Sandra Day O'Connor has said that the size of the US Constitution is the reason for its power. A document the size of the US Constituion can bring peaceful operations within a sovereign state then it must be based on principles shared by its population. I can and do carry a copy of the entire US Consitution in my wallot. The most important principle of developing constitutionalism is a limiting government. So the virtue of the constitutional refulutions of 1989 is balance. Constitutionalism balances the officials who exercise governmental powers with the limitations of a higher law. It simply is a combination of past common sense with the present and future ideals of the population of the organization. When government officials get in the way of these ideals they must be limited because these ideas form the basis of their power.
  
  [i-x] Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (First Vintage books Edition, September 1993), 37
  
  PREAMBLE of the US ConstitutionWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
  
  From the Dictionary of Historical Ideas http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv1-61
  
  The concept of constitutionalism was spelled outfrom a different angle of vision by Justice Jackson inthe Flag Salute Case of 1943, West Virginia State Boardof Education v. Barnette (319 U.S. 624, 638), wherehe wrote:
  
  The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certainsubjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, toplace them beyond the reach of majorities and officials andto establish them as legal principles to be applied by thecourts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to freespeech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, andother fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote;they depend on the outcome of no elections.
  
  This statement goes to the very heart of the Americanconcept of constitutionalism, that the constitution isa fundamental written law superior in obligation toall other forms of law. Indeed, there is a standard formeasuring the justness of governmental acts which isnot only binding upon all agents of the government,but which is independent even of the will of the currentpopular majority. While the American system is com-mitted to majority rule as being preferable to rule byelites or by divine right, it is also committed to theproposition that government must be righteous andjust, in spite of majority rule. These objectives aresought through a variety of devices, including judicialreview by an independent judiciary, an enforceable Billof Rights, the guaranty of equality before the law, thediffusion of governmental power through territorialfederalism and functional separation of powers, checksand balances, and the subordination of military to civilauthority. The government is obliged to observe thefundamental law, and the Constitution cannot bechanged except in some special way.
  
  American constitutionalism has been remarkablysuccessful, if success is measured by such criteria aslongevity and consensus. The American Constitutionis the oldest written national constitution in servicetoday, and mere survival is a benchmark of success inthe difficult, complex world of government. Further-more, age alone confers respectability, although theveneration of the United States Constitution is attrib-utable to many other sources. Derived from the solidauthority of “We the People,” it was drafted by aconvention which included many of the nation's mostrevered national heroes. It was not imposed upon thepeople by outside authority, but was, rather, an actof free will. In an age which believed that only a socialcontract created legitimate government, the Consti-tution, as a written document, was regarded from itsinception as the very model of what a soundly con-ceived social contract should say.
  
  The success of the American economy has been tiedin with the success of the Constitution, the one inter-acting with the other. Above all, American consti-tutionalism has succeeded because it has been sup-ported by a general popular consensus. This does notmean that the people have been in agreement oneverything, since such agreement has never existedanywhere. But it does mean that there has been generalacceptance of basic institutions and procedures thatmatter most, and that have the potentiality of becom-ing the sort of issues that men fight about. As a bareminimum, consensus as the underpinning of consti-tutionalism is possible only if there is very wide agree-ment on such vital matters as the regime itself, theform of government, the basic methods for making andunmaking policy decisions, and the fundamental goalsof the society.