Central European University Press The Long 1989: Decades of Global Revolution

The fall of communism in Europe is now the frame of reference for any mass mobilization, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to Brexit. Even thirty years on, 1989 still figures as a guide and motivation for political change. It is now a platitude to call 1989 a "world event," but the chapters in this volume show how it actually became one. The authors of these nine essays consider how revolutionary events in Europe resonated years later and thousands of miles away: in China and South Africa, Chile and Afghanistan, Turkey and the USA. They trace the circulation of people, practices, and concepts that linked these countries, turning local developments into a global phenomenon. At the same time, they examine the many shifts that revolution underwent in transit. All nine chapters detail the process of mutation, adaptation, and appropriation through which foreign affairs found new meanings on the ground. They interrogate the uses and understandings of 1989 in particular national contexts, often many years after the fact. Taken together, this volume asks how the fall of communism in Europe became the basis for revolutionary action around the world, proposing a paradigm shift in global thinking about revolution and protest. Review The collective volume aims to analyse the events of 1989 in a broader perspective. On the one hand, it interrogates the impact of the 1989 revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe in the world at that particular moment, and, on the other, it argues that the revolution which started in 1989 goes on while inspiring mass mobilisation in other areas and in recent years, as was the case with the 'Arab spring', or the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement in the USA, to name but a few. Inspired by the idea of Joseph de Maistre, who wrote about the French Revolution of 1789 that 'for a long time we did not fully understand the revolution of which we were witnesses; for a long time, we took it to be an event. We were mistaken; it was an epoch', the editors and the authors look at how the events of 1989 and their aftermath 'resonated years later and thousands of miles away'. The nine chapters deal with various topics such as Poland and the apartheid in South Africa, Soviet Central Asia, Tiananmen, the American Culture Wars, the Iraq war and the Middle East, the uprisings of 2011 in Northern Africa and the Occupy movement, the Euromaidan, etc.--Claudia-Florentina Dobre, MemoScapes: Romanian Journal of Memory and Identity Studies By elevating the 1989 revolutions from an event to an epoch, the authors want to place it on an equal footing with other historical epochs--neither the culmination nor a stage of a process of global liberalization, nor a mythical Year Zero that closes the postwar period and sets it apart from our own, still nameless post-Cold War time. Instead, in the editors' words, the 1989 revolutions were a 'signpost of gradual change.' The contradictions, discrepancies, and implicit polemics present in various chapters are in themselves a sign of the complexity of the topics tackled by the volume. The Long 1989 will remain a valuable contribution especially in the field of intellectual history.--Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, H-Net Reviews Ultimately both The Global 1989 and The Long 1989 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. https