When asked to exhibit at the Musée du quai Branly in 2007, the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare chose the theme of Jardin de l’amour, creating installations that celebrate the French revolution and the revolutions to come. Recently named Member of the British Empire, Shonibare arranged his trademark wax figures in three scenes, inspired by the French rococo painter, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). Like all of Shonibare’s mannequins, the lovers in these installations are headless; they wear the luxurious outfits of eighteenth-century aristocrats, but instead of brocade and lace, their clothes are made of colorful African fabrics. Recreating Fragonard’s scenes of courtship, Shonibare invited his audience to draw a parallel between pre-revolutionary Europe and the twenty-first century, between the conspicuous consumption of the European elites before the revolutions in Paris and Haiti erupted and the “growing resentment on the part of the expanding underclass” outside of contemporary Europe and North America. Shonibare’s installations are warnings: “you can have all this luxury,” Shonibare tells one of his interviewers, “but you will have it at the expense of your head.”[1]

Fragonard’s paintings often depicted dark, threatening clouds forming above his lovers’ heads and black shadows, falling over the lush trees, bushes, and follies, which served as the background to his scenes of decorous love-making. They were meant to signify love’s passions, eruptions of the forces of nature, and served as memento mori, the presence of death in the gardens of the living. With hindsight, we now read Fragonard’s clouds and shadows as signs of the end to come, of the bourgeois and anti-colonial revolutions that shook the foundations of Europe’s metropoles at the end of the eighteenth century. Fragonard’s dramatic cloud formations were part of the visual archive of eighteenth century-painters, who often transposed the Arcadian ruin landscapes of the gulf of Naples with a smoldering Mount Vesuvius in the background to northern European climates. One of the early specialists in these allegorical landscapes was Jan Frans van Bloemen (1662-1749), a Dutch painter much admired by Friedrich Franz von Anhalt-Dessau (1740-1817).[2] The ruler of a small principality known for his enlightened views, the prince had a replica of Mount Vesuvius built in his gardens, located between the city of Dessau and the small town of Wörlitz in Saxony, the industrial heartland of the former GDR. The prince’s visitors watched the toy volcano’s eruptions, simulated by means of fireworks and the firing of cannons, while comfortably seated in small boats (the volcano is located on the so-called Felseninsel Stein).[3] By the time of its completion in 1796, the prince’s quaint volcanic spectacle might have reminded the prince’s guests of rather unpleasant events, like the revolutionary beheadings in Paris and the unseemly demonstrations in the gardens of Versailles.[4] After 1989, the garden empire’s derelict grounds (with their Pantheon, Temple of Venus, replica of Sir William Hamilton’s house at Naples, synagogue, castle, and many other buildings), were restored to their eighteenth-century splendor, and the volcano erupted again in 2005, turning the revolutionary metaphor into pure spectacle, celebrating the return to German “normalcy.” In 1989, no heads were lost. Instead, a state dissolved, while its citizens escaped or poured into the streets discovering themselves as “the people.”

II.

Not surprisingly, the metaphor of volcanic eruptions surfaced after the fall of the wall. In the summer of 1990, three East German punk bands gathered in a club in Berlin; the concert was recorded under the title “The Last Days of Pompeii.”[5] In literary texts, a similar nature metaphor appeared, that of the flood. In Alte Abdeckerei (1990; Old Knackers Yard), Wolfgang Hilbig (1941-2007), the GDR’s working-class-author steeped in T.S. Eliot, Ernst Jünger, and Franz Kafka, lets his text explode in a flood of fragmented sentences and words, killing their meaning and creating a stream of neologisms that dissolve the text’s allegory – the knackers’ yard as Germania I and II, Nazi Germany, and the GDR. Evoking the industrial region bordering on the Dessau-Wörlitz gardens as an apocalyptic landscape of industrial ruins, poisoned rivers, dying trees, and un-dead workers, Hilbig, trained as a stoker, celebrated the end of East German socialism with a mixture of white hot rage and bottomless disappointment about the degradation and betrayal of the working class. The dilapidated Fordist zones of the east constitute the epicenter of his text. Similar to Roberto Bolano, who represented the industrial zones along the American-Mexican border as the rotten center of capitalist globalization in his monumental novel, 2666 (2008), Hilbig’s texts represent the Lusatia region with its derelict steel mills and brutal strip mining the dying heart of state-communism, the graveyard of the socialist project.[6]

This same industrial region, already a central site in the literature of the GDR’s heroic era of reconstruction (i.e., the early texts by socialist realists and later the texts by the GDR’s avant-garde Leninists Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, and Volker Braun), also plays a role in Uwe Twellkamp’s Der Turm (2008; The Tower). Beautifully subtitled Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land (Story from a Vanished Country), the novel revives the power of epic narrative in ways similar to Bolano’s 2666. With its dense descriptive prose that strives to recapture the details of everyday life, the 1000-page novel recreates the lifeworld of a country “devoured” by the West, its architectural traces slowly eliminated, its forty year existence often reduced to a mere interlude in the (semi-)official exhibits about the history of the German nation.[7] Written by an author born and raised in the GDR, Tellkamp’s Turm chronicles the country’s last decade from a perspective hitherto absent in (post-) GDR literature: the perspective of the non-communist intelligentsia, doctors, researchers, and authors, clinging to their dying bourgeois culture in the crumbling villas of Dresden’s residential district. But this is only one strand of this multi-voiced novel. In the vein of the nineteenth-century historical novel, Tellkamp (b. 1968) works with a diverse cast of characters: middle-class doctors, whose distance towards the socialist experiment ends in blackmail and collaboration with the Stasi; ex-exiles, whose thinking is mired in the categories of 1930s Marxism; Christian, one of the novel’s main characters (with strong autobiographical traits), who rebels where his father acquiesces; a fervent young communist and friend of Christian’s, who wants to escape to the Soviet Union, away from the “burned out fires” of East German socialism, or the daughter of a high-level functionary, who joins the Dresden punk scene.

Tellkamp’s Der Turm tells a story of decline not only of a bourgeois family, but an entire “empire.”[8] With its elegiac evocations of ruined houses and crumbling values, the novel repeats Thomas Mann’s story of degeneration in Buddenbrooks (1901). Tellkamp’s imagery of decline and fall is both explicit and quite vivid. Some of the older protagonists fixated on the bombing of Dresden in World War II immerse themselves in the study of Babylon’s ancient ruins, finding comfort in the knowledge that even “our Nineveh” will turn to dust (T871).  Passing two signs in Dresden — one of which announces a new play, ANATOMIE TITUS FALL OF ROME (T877), the other proclaiming: “Socialism is winning” – Christian corrects himself: “Rome: Christian thought. No, Troy. This here is Troy” (T877-78).   Yet while most of the novel’s plots are set in Dresden’s bourgeois suburbs, some of the later chapters take place in the proletarian regions of Lusatia, thus introducing the trope of decay into the history of communism. While serving in the army, one of Der Turm’s five narrators, Christian, is sentenced to work, first in a carbide factory and then in strip-mining. In these chapters, Tellkamp paints the same hellish picture of labor in the dilapidated factories and mines of the second world that we find in Hilbig’s texts and in an even more aestheticized form in Tarkovsky’s films. Tellkamp narrates Christian’s crisis, the moment when he is ready to give up all resistance, as becoming one with the rotten, poisoned territory of the GDR’s “chemical empire” that surrounds him: “Here was his place” (T840), Christian thinks, reduced to the numb existence of Hilbig’s undead proletarians. Following in Hilbig’s footsteps, Tellkamp thus inscribes yet another story onto the territory that once encompassed Franz von Anhalt-Dessau’s idyllic gardens with their eighteenth-century visitors, listening dreamily to the faint echoes of the French revolution and fearing for their heads, and whose factories later came to embody first the victory and then the death of socialism with a German face.

And like Hilbig, Tellkamp then abruptly shifts his text at the end from the story of slow and inevitable decay to the moment when time explodes like a force of nature, depicting the 1989 demonstrations in Dresden (occasioned by the arrival of trains, filled with East German citizens who had gathered in the West German embassy in Prague, passing through the city’s main train station to the West). The celebration of the end of the GDR in Tellkamp’s text is free of the melancholy furor that marks Hilbig’s end-time explosion. Tellkamp’s narrator ecstatically revels in the event, which he describes as the liberation of time, time whose historical course had been arrested for decades: “… but then all of a sudden… the clocks began moving again, striking November 9” (T973; elisions in the original). Portraying the events of 1989 by condensing the texts of the novel’s five narrators into a breathless montage, Tellkamp repeatedly interrupts these pieces of text with the same sentence fragment:  “but then all of a sudden…” (T890).Whereas Hilbig thematized the anxiety that the collapse of the symbolic order might render his words meaningless, Tellkamp stops short of Hilbig’s linguistic work of destruction. Instead, his narrators see the possibility for telling new stories. The text’s last sentence ends with a colon, instead of a period, announcing a sequel to Der Turm, one that Tellkamp has promised to write.

Tellkamp likens the events of 1989 in Dresden to the sudden overflowing of the city’s river, the Elbe. Spilling over its shores, the stream of time is finally breaking free from all attempts to regulate its “incalculable energy, feverish with its power” (T944). Tellkamp creates this allegory of stalled time in the novel’s opening pages, written by Meno Rohde, one of the novel’s narrators and like Christian an autobiographical figure. Meno pictures the family’s world as both different from and similar to the country that surrounds it, as caught in the past and resisting the flow of time. Petrified in their heritage of a “bygone bourgeois world” and infected by a disease he calls “the sweet disease Yesterday” (T11), the family members live in houses, where clocks are ticking but time stands still. In Tellkamp’s GDR, time is frozen – in the well-worn, subdivided villas of Meno’s bourgeois family, in the dusty rooms of state-socialist bureaucrats, on the rusting Fordist production sites, in the elegant salons of its intellectual elite, and in the bare offices of desperate functionaries, who, directors of factories, are hoping against hope that perestroika will take hold in their own country.

Time has come to a standstill – and then it suddenly breaks free. The novel’s opening passage begins with a depiction of the “stream,” the Elbe, winding its way through Dresden at night, “searching” for something — a heavy, slow-moving river, carrying the toxic refuse from the country’s coal mines and state-owned chemical plants. At the end of the novel, Meno then describes this regulated stream as finally spilling over its borders – at the very moment when the demonstrators break through the barriers erected around the train station. Tellkamp invites us to read this trope of the arrested and then liberated river on multiple levels. In a narrowly political sense, the metaphor relates to Gorbachev’s reforms. Tellkamp would probably agree with Boris Groys’ assessment of the breakdown of the communist regimes as the result of a “process of dissolution.” [9] In a 2009 interview, the Russian-German philosopher stated: “The whole thing collapsed because the people’s engagement continuously decreased, because people invested less and less of their energy in the system, worked less and less, and were psychologically more and more alienated, including the leadership.” Tellkamp would also agree with Groys’ statement that the main motive for the demonstrations was the very material desire for freedom of movement and freedom of expression. Finally, I also think that Tellkamp would accept Groys’ assessment of the relative importance of the protest movements. Dismissing the idea that the protest movements caused the breakdown of the communist regimes, Groys maintained that the events of 1989 to 1991 were part of a “revolution from above”: “The process of dissolution was staged by a certain group inside the politburo of the Communist Party which had come to power. All of the other acts of protest were only successful because they were allowed to happen.”[10]

This political reading of Tellkamp’s guiding metaphor of the stalled/liberated course of time contradicts another level of meaning, since the trope also seems to thematize “history” in a Spenglerian, (or Mannian) vein as a cycle of birth and decay.[11] It is the narrator, who introduces the terminology of degeneration, writing about the “tired, body of the Republic” (T867), but it is Meno, who develops this metaphorical register in its most baroque form, reflecting upon the “strange disease” affecting the GDR’s “state-body” (T890). Time itself, instead of advancing, is simply becoming old (“Zeit fiel aus Zeit und alterte”), Meno observes and then writes: “Young people were old … citizens lived in niches, withdrew into the state-body, which, ruled by old men, was lying in a near-death slumber” (T890). Whatever meaning(s) we decide to give Tellkamp’s metaphor, we are following the narrator’s invitation, reading his musings on the river’s “search” as a gesture urging us to reflect on the events of 1989, to re-think the phenomenon experienced by Christian or Meno as rebirth.  In the novel’s last paragraphs, Tellkamp then adds another layer of meaning to the allegory of the de-regulated river of time, depicting the Elbe as an unruly flood washing away paper, pages from official newspapers and “cautious” pages from the archives of censored books, searching for “purity” (T970), for a new, pure language, untainted by censorship and ideology.

III.

In a recent essay Volker Braun, the author of one of the GDR’s most censored novels, Unvollendete Geschichte (1977; Unfinished (Hi)story) recalled the “break-down of the GDR”: “The GDR vanished at the very moment when it started to get interesting, and when our readers and spectators became readers and actors.”[12] Braun thus repeats once again the central claim of the GDR’s dissident intelligentsia: that in the east, books mattered, that readers and spectators learned “Gegendenken” (counter-thinking), and ways to imagine “Gegenrealität” (counter-reality). Despite censorship, the “impure” language of the books and plays by Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, Heiner Müller, and other dissident authors, had prepared its readers/spectators to become political actors. It is and was art’s role, Braun wrote, “to cross borders.”[13] As a Brechtian playwright and author of modernist prose, Braun believes that art in the GDR disregarded the boundary between stage and audience and the limits set by the SED’s cultural politics, thus pushing back the limits of what could be said and thought.

There are several characters in Tellkamp’s novel who subscribe to this view of literature as a de facto public sphere — writers, editors, and cultural functionaries, engaged in the endless negotiations over censorship and self-censorship.[14] But Tellkamp ultimately dismisses this position, portraying these intellectuals – dissident and non-dissident Marxists – as belonging to an ossified elite, caught up in ritualized meaningless negotiations that were an integral part of East German cultural politics.[15] The literary voice in Tellkamp’s novel is Meno Rohde who, tired of censorship, writes a “pure” experimental text, a diary, without even thinking about publication. But then the borders open, creating the conditions for his kind of literature.

There is no doubt that the texts by Volker Braun, Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, Heiner Müller, Franz Fühmann, Irmtraut Morgner, et al. contributed to the creation of a public sphere however rudimentary in the GDR. But we need to historicize these claims. Quoting from an early poem by Stefan Hermlin, the master of dissident self-censorship, Braun calls their literary work “labor of disillusionment,” claiming that this disillusionment with real existing socialism set in as soon as the “time of miracles” came to an end.[16] Braun’s “time of miracles” refers to the so-called era of anti-fascist democratic reconstruction, the years before the founding of the East German state, which soon veered toward state-socialism of the familiar Stalinist kind. The short cultural thaw from 1961 to 1965 was followed by a cultural politics that switched back and forth ever more randomly between repression and liberalization. What was left in the 1980s was a dissident literature increasingly seen by many as the GDR’s “official” literature, and a younger generation, which lived in subcultural spaces waiting for the end. At this time, the GDR’s (semi)public literary public sphere acquired a peculiar configuration. East German literature and East German authors, had always moved across the East-West border, but in the 1980s, they began doing this in the most literal sense. Hilbig is a good starting point for a discussion of the peculiarities of this Cold War’s cultural landscape. After the publication of some early poems, Hilbig encountered increasing difficulties and started to publish in West Germany. Like many of his colleagues, he was fined for his first publication a collection of poems entitled Abwesenheit (1979; Absence), with the renowned West German Fischer Verlag. In 1985, Hilbig was given a visa that allowed him to live in the West (the expiration date was 1990), where he accumulated several prestigious literary awards.[17]

Hilbig was loosely associated with the so-called Prenzlauer Berg bohème, a group of poets with roots in the GDR punk scene. As disciples of Foucault and Derrida, they were enthusiastically committed to the de(con)struction of the GDR’s official languages. When the archives of the Stasi opened after 1989, two of the group’s leading members, Rainer Schedlinski and Sascha Anderson, were unmasked as having worked closely with the Stasi. Anderson in particular seems to have built this “underground” network of poets, musicians, and visual artists in the service of the Stasi as much as out of love for his friends. Eager to control this subculture which had emerged in the late 1970s and blossomed in the ’80s, Stasi officers asked Anderson to get involved in West Berlin’s alternative scene, and helped him organize several trips to West Berlin. Putting East and West German sub-cultures in contact (which involved the exchange of books and records as well as the organization of readings and concerts in the semi-public spaces of churches and private apartments), the Stasi thus sanctioned border traffic, hoping to thereby control an ever more active subculture, with its semi-public spaces east and west of the Berlin wall. The cultural landscape of the ’80s, described by Tellkamp in such minute detail was thus characterized by a tension between, on the one hand, exporting troublesome authors to the West or keeping them on a short leash with limited visas, and on the other hand, inventing ever new ways of keeping this peculiar cultural landscape under control. But then this system too dissolved.

FOOTNOTES
1.  On Yinka Shonibare’s Garden of Love, see: http://quaibranly.fr/en/programmation/exhibitions/last-exhibitions/garden-of-love-created-by-yinka-shonibare-mbe.htm; last visited January 2, 2010. See the catalogue to the exhibit, Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Garden of Love, ed. Germaine Viatte (Paris: Flammarion: 2007).↑
2.  See his Campagna at: http://www.wga.hu/art/b/bloemen/jan_frans/campagna.jpg ↑
3.  The island was built to remind the prince of his obligatory grand tour to Italy.↑
4.  On the industrial region’s musealization after 1989, see Kerstin Barndt’s excellent article, “’Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures’: Industrial Ruins in the Post-Industrial Landscapes of Germany.” Forthcoming in Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (Duke UP, February 2010).↑
5.  “Die letzten Tage von Pompeij” (1990), Peking Records; the bands were Ichfunktion, Die Firma, and Freygang.↑
6.  An even more rage-filled settling of accounts is Reinhard Jirgl’s Abschied von den Feinden (1995; Goodbye to the Enemies), an experimental novel, painting East Germany as a ruined, putrifying country, a zone of death. A trained mechanic with a social background similar to Hilbig’s and a protégé of Heiner Müller, Jirgl (b. 1953), like Müller, was influenced by Schmitt, Bataille, and Jünger, but unlike Müller he was never published in the GDR. In his recent books, Jirgl’s apocalyptic imagination now encompasses the capitalist west. See his Die Atlantische Mauer (2000; The Atlantic Wall). The concluding pages, with their stream of maimed sentences and broken words revel in the liberation of language, a liberation bordering on the loss of meaning.↑
7.  Bernard Umbrecht, “Sur les traces estompées de l’Allemagne de l’Est,” Le Monde Diplomatique, Novembre 2009 : 17. Der Turm won several book prizes, culminating in last year’s German Book Prize, turning the award ceremony into yet another commemoration of the fall of the wall.↑
8.  Uwe Tellkamp, Der Turm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008): 969. From now on, I will quote the text using T plus a page number. All translations are mine.↑
9.  Boris Groys, “Postproduktion Berlin: Kulissenkult und gutes Leben im Jurassic Park des realen Sozialismus,” Lettre International 86: 40.↑
10.  Boris Groys, “Postproduktion Berlin: Kulissenkult und gutes Leben im Jurassic Park des realen Sozialismus,” Lettre International 86: 40. While Groys’ take on the situation seems plausible, I would add that the protest movements seem to have developed a momentum of their own; ultimately the SED and its functionaries were confronted with developments in the S.U. and in their own country that left them completely helpless.↑
11.  A third reading would draw on Marx’s famous dictum, “all that is solid melts into air,” i.e., the relentless change at the heart of capitalist modernity.↑
12.  Volker Braun, “Im kuehlen ruhigen deutschen Herbst: Eine Erinnerung an den Zusammenbruch der DDR,” Neue Zuricher Zeitung, October 31, 2009; the article is available online: http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/im_kuehlen_ruhigen_deutschen_herbst_1.3949041.html; last visited January 2, 2010.↑
13.  Braun,  “Im kuehlen ruhigen deutschen Herbst.“↑
14.  Der Turm is a novel about decay, decay that includes East German literature and the GDR’s cultural politics. One of the novel’s artistic protagonists in this roman a clefs is an author easily recognized as Franz Fühmann, whose story is told as the destruction of a literary talent by censors who know less and less what the nature and purpose of their censorship ought to be.↑
15.  As I mentioned above, the novel focuses on the 1980s, i.e., the late GDR characterized by repetition and stagnation. Had he written about the earlier GDR, his take on the function of literature might have looked different.↑
16.  “Die Zeit der Wunder schwand. Die Jahre sind vertan.” Braun, NZZ.↑
17.  Others who regularly crossed the border were Heiner Müller and Monika Maron. The first step in this development was the expulsion of the writer/songwriter Wolf Biermann, who received a visa for a concert in Cologne and was then denied reentry to the GDR.↑

The key ingredients of revolutions, as I have argued, are government weakness, elite divisions, and popular mobilization. It certainly seemed that all three ingredients were present in Iran in June 2009: the government had been financially weakened by collapsing oil prices; the elites were divided with many prominent Ayatollahs and business leaders backing the opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi; and popular mobilization had clearly developed in the campaign running up to the election, and grew for the protests that followed the announcement of the election results.

However, the Iranian government has succeeded, although at a high cost to its popular support, in holding on to power and forcing back the protests. I believe it has been able to do so mainly because of the precise nature of the elite divisions in Iran, which have created more weakness in the opposition than within the ruling regime, and enabled the government to block the mass mobilization that began in June.

In the Philippines, as in Russia following the Yeltsin led anti-communist movement, a large portion of the national military forces defected from the regime, and provided cover and support for the popular mass-mobilization. Without such defection to create space for mass mobilization, the Philippine protest would not have succeeded. In Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine, authorities provided similar space because respected authorities issued orders making use of force against the protestors infeasible. In Czechoslovakia, Gorbachev had already announced that the Russian military would not intervene to support unpopular governments, as it had in that country in 1968. Knowing that their own military would be reluctant to act against their population without Soviet support, Czech leaders took only limited actions against popular protests, allowing the protests to grow and eventually capitulating. In the Ukraine, the Supreme Court ruled that the election results were dubious and mandated a re-vote, thus supporting the protestors. With this public ruling widely announced, the army would not likely act to preserve the ruling party’s authority by using force to suppress the protestors. Thus again space was made for mass mobilization by a higher authority, enabling protests to continue and force capitulation by the regime.

In Iran, no such space opened due to either elite divisions or the actions of higher authorities. If this had happened – say the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had acted like the Supreme Court in Ukraine, and declared that the announced election results appeared false and ruled them invalid – there might have been sufficient divisions in the military (perhaps with the professional military restraining the Revolutionary Guards and Basij, or hesitation within the Guards to support Ahmedinejad’s victory) to keep open the space for protests, which might in turn have spread and grown to the point of forcing Ahmadinejad’s departure from office. However, like the color revolutions in the Ukraine and Philippines, this might well have led only to a divided and dysfunctional, if more democratic, regime, rather than to a decisive change in the composition and policies of the country.

Yet not only did the Supreme Leader vociferously support the election results, the anti-Western clergy and the Revolutionary Guards and Basij were mobilized throughout the country to support Ahmadinejad and act against protestors. Media and communications were shut down (even Twitter, after the initial outpourings), prominent supporters of the opposition were increasingly denied public voice, and massive arrests and harsh detention were designed to break the spirit of the mobilization. The Revolutionary Guards have tightened their control over the government and military, oil revenues have turned sharply upwards again, and many leading figures who had previously been at odds with Ahmadinejad, such as Ali Larijani, the head of the parliament, have sided with the government in condemning the protestors.

The most visible leaders of the opposition, meanwhile, such as Ayatollah Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Khatami, and Mousavi himself, seem undecided on what do to. While asking for leniency against protestors, they have not called for Ahmadinejad to be cast out of office, their direct criticism of the Supreme Leader has been muted, and their support for continued protest has often seemed tepid. Only Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, a long-standing opponent of the regime based in Qom, has been direct and uncompromising in his attacks on the regime.

The problem is that Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Mousavi have no natural popular base. They are not union leaders, they are wary of raising their student supporters, and the mosque and bazaar networks – which supported the mobilization against the Shah – are now dominated by the Islamic regime. Indeed, the opposition leaders’ influence exists mainly because of their past role in the government of the Islamic Republic, and they seem reluctant to now attack it. Hemmed in by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, who have violently suppressed protest, they seem unable to push back by risking a major mass mobilization campaign. Moreover, much of Iran’s economic power now lies in the hands of government-supported companies, or industries run by the Revolutionary Guard. The economic elites of the country thus seem inclined to side with the government, rather than to support protests against it.

In short, the Iranian regime has succeeded in maintaining control of the military, and using it to close off space for mass mobilization, and in largely neutralizing those elements of the elite who oppose the regime. As long as this situation continues, protests in Iran will continue to have a mainly existential character, showing the regime that opposition still exists and considers it illegitimate, but not capable at present of mounting the mobilization that would force it to cede power. At the same time, the regime is storing up a reserve of resentment and rejection, such that should the time come when its military capacity falters, this will likely unleash an even more revolutionary movement than the one it suppressed in the days following the June elections.

Here I lay out a further, two-part argument regarding the public responsibilities of modern scholars that is particularly but not exclusively pertinent to political science. The first part of the argument contends that—whether we focus on what I will term, partly following Burawoy, “professional” political science or “critical” political science—we must recognize that political scientists request societies to support us in research that when, done well, often seems either to have little immediate broader benefit, or to be potentially subversive. That is why it is not altogether surprising that Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn recently tried, unsuccessfully, to eliminate National Science Foundation funding for political science research.[3]

The second part of my argument is that rather than retreat from either “professional” or “critical” political science, which are both enterprises necessary for the discipline to be intellectually defensible and humanly valuable, we scholars of politics should emphasize and seek to strengthen another contribution we make to public life: teaching people knowledge and skills useful for understanding and participating in politics, as well as for doing much more. I believe that increasingly, we in political science and perhaps other social sciences may not be able to persuade modern societies to support our most important forms of research based on the results of our research alone, whether cast in more purely academic or more public idioms. To sustain such support, we need to show that social scientists, especially those at leading universities, are doing better at teaching—something that, I fear, we are in danger of doing less and worse. The public’s sense that we are fostering the development of valuable knowledge and skills may be the contribution that will maintain for political scientists the material foundations needed for both “professional” and “critical” work. And however deflating it may seem, such teaching just may be on balance our greatest contribution to the public realm.

In regard to the first argument, let me note that as one would expect, political science displays all the variants that Burawoy depicted in sociology. There are political scientists who provoke debates among mainstream publics, like Francis Fukuyama and Robert Putnam, and ones closely tied to “counter-publics,” like my colleague Adolph Reed, long deeply engaged in left-labor politics. There are almost innumerable “policy” political scientists offering governments expertise on countless issues, including two of the last four Secretaries of State (one of each party). But the great bulk of political scientists at research universities are “professional” political scientists, concerned to accumulate well-theorized and tested scientific knowledge about politics. I wish to focus on this group and also on those I will term “critical” political scientists—but I mean by that designation something broader than what Burawoy defined in 2004 as “critical sociology.” By “critical” political science, I mean scholarship that takes as its task critical interrogation of not just, or even primarily, the assumptions of “professional” political science. Rather, the main targets of its critiques are the empirical and normative beliefs that reflect and contribute to the existing political institutions, policies, practices, leadership, and structures of power within every political society and across the globe.

The intellectual ancestor of “critical” political science is Socrates, who examined the beliefs about justice, the good, civic obligations, the structuring of political power, and other politically salient topics in ancient Athens. His questioning and sometimes debunking of conventional views on those topics eventually led to his conviction for corrupting the youth, though he was immortalized in the writings of some of the youths he influenced, especially Plato and Xenophon. The intellectual ancestor of “professional” political science might be said to be Aristotle, Plato’s student, who wrote what is probably the seminal systematic treatise on politics in the Western scholarly tradition. But since Aristotle, many intellectual figures have claimed to “found” a new, more scientific science of politics, from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Hume to Publius to Bentham to a series of figures who actually held American professorships in political science, including John W. Burgess and other comparative institutionalists in the late 19^th century, Charles Merriam and other early advocates of “behavioralism” in the 1920s and 30s, the various proponents of “pluralist” group theories in the late 1940s and 1950s, and William S. Riker and other “rational choice” scholars in the 1960s and 1970s.[4]

Today, even though the statistical and formal modeling skills of many political scientists still tend to be regarded with condescension by many mathematicians and economists, “professional” political science is clearly more technically sophisticated than ever before. But much of the scholarship that many “professional” political scientist value most highly is written using specialized terminology, equations and data sets that render the work impenetrable to many non-quantitative political scientists, much less to the general public. Many “professional” political scientists acknowledge, moreover, that, though they seek to address very large issues of politics, the sorts of reliable data they can obtain and the kinds of experiments they can conduct generally mean that they are trying to pin down answers to only relatively narrow aspects of those large issues. It is too much to try to answer definitively what spurs political participation generally; what we can learn from, for example, randomized field experiments is how much more effective door-to-door canvassing is in turning out voters than phoning or sending mail, as my erstwhile colleagues Donald Green and Alan Gerber have shown.[5]

Or, perhaps, it is too soon to try to answer many political questions definitively. One highly accomplished “professional” political scientist has argued to me that it took centuries to get from Newton to the achievements of modern physics. Since in his view truly scientific political science began in roughly the 1950s, we cannot expect really substantial, reliable knowledge to accumulate for many years to come. Another has suggested that, for similar reasons, it is in fact too early to theorize broadly about politics. We need to spend decades or more performing rigorous experimental tests of fairly narrow, specific political hypotheses before we will know enough to attempt to knit those hypotheses together into anything grander.

They may be right; and in any case, this commitment to cumulative progress through a long series of small steps does not mean that the results of contemporary “professional” political science are all currently inconsequential. The research by Green and Gerber has affected how American campaigns are conducted; and other products of “professional” research legitimately enable many political scientists to be able “policy” political scientists. Yet it remains true that a great deal of “professional” political science now asks questions whose terminology has to be translated if they are to be comprehensible to more general publics; whose significance has to be elaborated if they are to appear more generally interesting; and whose answers often still seem disappointingly limited. We ask the public to support what seems to many to be arcane and trivial work on the faith that many years from now, we will produce more immediately substantial results. Senator Coburn is not alone in lacking that faith. The Perestroika protest in political science was motivated in part by widespread concerns that the discipline was investing too much in work that sought to do too little.[6]

Even so, proponents of “critical” political science, among whom I count myself, generally are not nearly so faithless as Senator Coburn. Many of us believe that “professional” political science is making cumulative progress, even if we are not sure how far that progress can extend, and even though we regard it as part of our task to critique the often debatable assumptions that structure otherwise rigorous quantitative and formal scholarship. But most of us also focus on what we see as other tasks appropriate for political science. Like Socrates, we believe it is part of the mission of our profession to question the prevailing empirical and normative beliefs that help structure actual political institutions, policies, and practices. And we believe scholarship makes a contribution if it collects and develops the best evidence and arguments available to decide whether one politically potent empirical characterization or normative claim is on balance more defensible than another, even if it is not possible to conduct randomized experiments or to collect extensive quantitative data sets to aid those analyses. So we often address larger questions than “professional” political scientists, in at least somewhat more accessible terms (for many years my own central question was whether, despite popular and academic views to the contrary, racial conceptions of American identity had historically been serious candidates for political predominance in the U.S. Using evidence from citizenship laws, I answered yes).[7] Many “professional” political scientists acknowledge that “critical” work helps them to form better questions, based on more defensible premises. But understandably, much “critical” political science is seen as making at best indirect contributions to the efforts to accumulate scientific knowledge that are central to “professional” political science—and sometimes it is seen as a barrier.

“Critical” political science is also understandably regarded with suspicion by many political leaders like Senator Coburn—because the purpose of such political science is in large part to interrogate the arguments used by political leaders to justify the policies they enact, the institutions they head, and the power they wield. As was sometimes true for Socrates, the questions “critical” political science advances are meant to explore whether the claims of the powerful about whom their actions benefit and harm, and even about what count as benefits and harms, are empirically false or logically incoherent. Socrates described himself as a “gadfly” on the body politic, and there are few bodies or heads of bodies that enjoy being repeatedly stung by gadflies. Mainstream political leaders, and many in the general public, may therefore regard what can seem likely relentlessly critical work as useless or even subversive, and they will not always be wrong. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates makes the case that this “gadfly” role is nonetheless beneficial. But unless one imagines him embarking on new inquiries concerning the afterlife, he was not then rewarded with a research grant.

So it may seem that “professional” political science is too rarefied, and “critical” political science too rebellious, to prompt public support. In fact, the “public relations” problems of the discipline are even worse than that—for the subject matter of political science, of whatever variety, is always politics. Senator Coburn’s examples when he sought to end NSF funding for political science were all drawn not from the writings of “critical” but “professional” political scientists. He derided the value of the University of Michigan’s venerated American National Election Studies, as well as research on “why white working-class voters voted Republican in recent national elections.”[8] It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Senator Coburn did not like the suggestion that there was anything at all questionable about white working-class voters voting Republican, and that he was wary of the explanations other political scientists might give for conduct of his electoral supporters.

And he was probably not wrong to fear that some of these studies might reach conclusions he would find unpalatable and would wish not to have publicized, such as evidence of self-interested racial and religious motives. But this was very mainstream political science research—the point being, it is inherent in the very nature of all political science to explore questions about politics that might be disturbing to powers that be or want to be. That is true to some degree, no doubt, of many disciplines, but it is centrally true of political science. Any political science, “professional” or “critical,” “policy” or “public,” that failed ever to raise challenging questions about prevailing patterns of politics would be an impoverished, inadequate, bad political science. You can’t make good political science omelets without breaking some political … eggs.

That is why I think the tension between doing good political science research and sustaining broad public support for such research is ineradicable. It only gets worse in economic hard times. To be sure, there will always be some, perhaps a lot, of political science research that many leaders and members of mass publics will see as harmless, even useful. And there will always be even more research that is particularly congenial to certain leaders and groups. But if political science research is worthy of both its names—if it is really about politics as well scientific—then it not only can’t please all of the people all of the time. A good deal of scholarship will annoy some of the people some of the time, and some scholarship may even outrage virtually all of them.

Whether we pursue “professional” or “critical” political science, there is no defensible way out of that bind. Political scientists can and should nonetheless champion the value of all their different forms of research, highlighting those works that make contributions according to conventional notions of public benefit and seeking to clarify the value of those works that do not. These efforts have in the past been sufficient to gain a small but meaningful measure of public support. According to Senator Coburn, the NSF has given political scientists about $112 million over the last decade, or a little over $11 million a year, which is 1/3 the cost of one Army cargo helicopter.[9] Foundations provide additional support. But the basic support system for political science research accompanies employment in public and private universities and colleges. And virtually all those institutions depend on tuition dollars. They expect political scientists not only to provide the world with the benefits of their research, but also to teach.

Institution of higher education do so, moreover, despite the fact that in their classrooms as in their research, political scientists raise sharp, probing questions about prevailing understandings and norms of political conduct and governmental policies. At least, they do when they teach well. This teaching does sometimes spur public criticism, particularly when critique turns into advocacy and even indoctrination—though I believe most political scientists understand that crossing that line is a betrayal of good teaching and they strive to stop short of it. But there is ample evidence that students and most of the broader public, in the U.S. and in many modern societies, nonetheless value university and college teaching about politics, rather highly. Students enroll in classes, parents pay tuition, voters support the establishment of public universities that they know will distribute their tax dollars to, among others, political scientists. Of course students, parents, and voters do so in part because they know that a college degree is a pre-requisite for many well paying jobs and a step on the way to further professional credentials, which many political science students expect to be a law degree. But they also do so because students, parents, and voters believe that it is beneficial for lots of people to learn more about politics, and to learn to think critically and write and argue about politics, even if that means being confronted with sometimes disturbing questions and rival points of view. Many may believe such knowledge and skills enhance economic productivity, directly or indirectly, not implausibly. But probably many also believe they are worthwhile in themselves. It is a mark of how much many societies in the modern world differ from ancient Athens—not wholly but still substantially—that they characteristically are far more willing to devote public resources to teaching and learning about politics, despite the inherently subversive or “gadfly” features of such activities, than were the otherwise civic-minded Athenians.

Consequently, when I think of the relationship of political science to the public realm today, I share the desires of scholars like Burawoy, Gans and Calhoun to establish more generative places in the discipline for “public” political science that speaks compellingly to important political issues in accessible ways. But because I think all forms of political science must often ask unwanted questions if they are to be good forms of political science, I believe political science as a profession must rest its case for public support more heavily on the more widely valued contributions of our teaching. This is, I know, not a conclusion that many readers will readily embrace. Adherents of “critical” political science generally want to “speak truth to power” in dramatic and perhaps even effective ways. Proponents of “professional” political science want to devote most of their time to adding as many well-crafted bricks to the slowly growing edifice of scientific knowledge of politics as possible. Because the latter group predominates in the modern American discipline, the trend is for political scientists, following as closely on the heels of the economists as they can, to seek permanently reduced teaching loads, even in what are predominantly teaching institutions.

To be sure, the political science profession can honestly boast of many marvelous teachers, including spellbinders who fill huge auditoriums like Michael Sandel of Harvard and Theodore Lowi of Cornell, and also many superb advisers of individual student researchers, both graduate and undergraduate. Still, it remains true that prestige in the profession goes overwhelmingly with influential scholarship, so that many of us grumble when we have to take time away to teach, or to prepare to teach, or worst of all, to grade. Consequently, most political scientists with ladder faculty positions disparage but do not resist the undeniable national trends to have more and more teaching done, in political science as in other fields, by low-paid gypsy adjunct instructors, rather than by “real” scholars. Many of these adjuncts are in fact superb teachers. But government officials overseeing public institutions of higher learning; many donors to private institutions; and many parents and students are aware nonetheless that the people with the most privileged academic positions are doing less than they once did of what these suppliers of our resources value most.

Are they wrong to value our teaching most? Even though the U.S. is currently engaged in a frenzy of educational assessment, the truth is that establishing the impact of teaching, especially over time, remains enormously difficult if not impossible. All we really know is popularity. We cannot say with confidence that any stimulating and improving of young minds we do through our work in the classroom contributes to a better world, as much or more than the impact of our scholarship, whether “professional” or “critical”—even if we are fairly modest or even cynical about those impacts. But not knowing is not knowing. Our ignorance means we cannot say with any certainty that we are doing less when we help students become more accurately and fully informed and to think and write more clearly about politics than they did before they came to us. The one thing we can be sure of, I believe, is that more people judge our teaching to be worth their support than judge our scholarship to be worth their support, for reasons that are inherent in the nature of what political scientists do—if we are doing our work well.

The implication is surely clear. It is probably less stirring to think of the relationship of political science and other disciplines to the public realm in terms of the contributions of our teaching than it is to picture ourselves as great public intellectuals, changing the course of mighty streams of political discourse and public policies through the sheer force of our works, able to prompt the building of new institutions with a single tome. Even many those who see themselves only as contributing their mites to the centuries-long building of cathedrals of scientific knowledge picture that endeavor as more majestic than their efforts to keep eighteen year olds awake and, sometimes, intellectually engaged. I imagine that, a number of paragraphs back, many readers experienced a sense of disappointment when they realized that these remarks would point to the importance of teaching; and many may have themselves already disengaged, not finding this the sort of thing they want to think about. But if we are serious about the question of the contributions of political science to the public realm, and of many other disciplines as well, I believe we have to give more serious attention than we are currently doing to our teaching contributions. If we do, we may well gain greater appreciation for this part of our professional work and we may find ways to contribute even more. If we do not, I fear we may find in the decades ahead that we have many fewer resources and opportunities for any kind of contribution at all.

FOOTNOTES
1.  Burawoy, Michael. 2004. “Presidential Address: For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70: 7, 9-10.↑
2.  Ibid., 23-24.↑
3.  “Senate Defeats Amendment to Eliminate Political Science from National Science Foundation Funding” at http://www.apsanet.org/content_67297.cfm, accessed December 6^th, 2009.↑
4.  For a still usefully provocative history of the American discipline, see the late Raymond Seidelman’s Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884-1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).↑
5.  Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2004).↑
6.  For an overview see Kristen R. Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press).↑
7.  Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).↑
8.  “Coburn Amendment 2631,” accessed December 10, 2009 at http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=e2be0ca5-df06-4e82-868e-cc097aeb83e0.”↑
9.  “C-H 47 Improved Cargo Helicopter,” accessed December 10, 2009 at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/ch-47f-ich.htm.↑

Despite the Obama administration’s attempts to ban lobbies and lobbyists from the White House, they have long been and remain part and parcel of government, and as President Obama knows better than anyone, the lobbies speaking for the major Wall Street, corporate and other business interests are as powerful as ever. They cotinue to be particularly powerful in the Congress, thanks to their campaign contributions to so many members of both Houses as well as their informational and other supports to elected officials while they are in office.

In fact, America has long been a lobby democracy, but a one-sided one, in which unorganized America and its rank-and-file citizens have been poorly represented. They badly need more of their own lobbies to speak for them. Otherwise, America has no chance of becoming a truly representative democracy.

A modest number of citizen lobbies already exist; AARP, which lobbies for retired and other older people, is currently the biggest. Other citizen lobbies also look out for seniors, including war veterans. Unions still do a great deal of lobbying, even though they now enroll barely 10 percent of all workers. A number of citizen lobbies have grown out of the social movements of the last half century, for civil rights and gender equality, for example. Yet others speak for non-voters, especially environmental ones that represent a green planet and the future generations that will benefit from them. It organizes citizen mobilization from the top down, but true representative democracy requires bottoms-up mobilization as well.

Single issue organizations – think of all those named for the major diseases – represent  citizens along with others concerned about their issues. Perhaps the most visible citizen representatives are the pollsters, but they only report popular opinions and do not lobby for them.

In comparison to business lobbies, most citizen lobbies are small in staff size and budget. AARP was the only citizen lobby to make the Center for Responsive Politics’ list of 20 top spending Washington lobby clients in 2008. (The other 19 were major corporations, trade associations and other business or professional organizations.)

Admittedly, the line between organizational and citizen lobbies is sometimes fuzzy. The executives of giant corporations are also citizens, corporate and trade association lobbies occasionally speak for their workers, and customers and professional association lobbies sometimes represent clients and patients. But they do so irregularly. The ordinary people for whom they may lobby have no say, and the lobbyists are not accountable to them.

When all is said and done, lobbies that speak for the routine and everyday concerns of ordinary citizens are few and far between. Although well funded lobbies work in behalf of doctors, hospitals and HMOs, none represent patients per se. The “military-industrial complex” takes care of its corporate members, but there are few lobbies for soldiers other than veterans. School officials from superintendents on down can call on supporting organizations; parents of students and students themselves have almost no one. The automobile companies could always get to the politicians even before they got into financial troubles, the car buyers who wind up with “lemons” or all those who buy used cars cannot.

If the needed citizen lobbies existed right now, those of the jobless, foreclosed homeowners and maxed out credit card holders would be defending their clients. Employee lobbies would be trying to protect the jobs of non-union workers.

Some relief may be in sight now that citizens can become “members” of political web based organizations like MoveOn. Whether the names in these organizations will represent themselves or will be spoken for by the data base’s political managers remains to be seen. Most likely, they will become important citizens’ lobbies, representing large numbers of their members when, like AARP today, these have reasonably common interests. As such, they could also be potent allies when smaller citizen lobbies need them. Still, many other citizen lobbies will be required to compete with and counter the business lobbies that speak for the myriad of interests that want money, less regulation or lower taxes from the government.

Bringing citizen lobbies into being and making enough citizens participate in them is a long term project; it will require organizational energy and political change, as well as monies that are not now available. In some respects, lobby democracy is also a second best solution, but the best one, the elimination of all lobbies, will never happen.

Even if hundreds of citizen lobbies should bloom, they are never likely to obtain the power of the corporate and other well funded ones. Most will be unlikely to make significant campaign contributions, and nor should they. Their main purpose is to represent their members, to provide information about them and the issues that concern them to elected officials, and when necessary to offer other ideas and advice in behalf of their members.

If election campaign funding ever becomes totally public, citizen lobbies will of course become more influential, but even then they will not be able to compete with corporate lobbies in sending campaign-related media and other messages to the electorate. Financial power almost always trumps citizen power.

Lobby democracy is certainly not pretty and it will not fulfill the romance of town meeting democracy even when many more citizen lobbies have been organized. (Perhaps for that reason, lobbies have never been perceived as part of civil society.) Like all other lobbies, citizen lobbies will need to be run by tough minded professionals. They will also need charismatic leaders and skilful organizers, capable of mobilizing enough members and supporters when their lobbies need to show their political muscle. Like the mutual benefit associations of the past, citizen lobbies will also have to provide services so that they can enroll, mobilize and hold on to their members.

A democracy in which many people are at one or another time  represented by a citizen lobby requires new political rules. Adding many more lobbies to the already sizeable number would complicate the political process, significantly increasing the number of alternative policies and viewpoints that have to be considered. Congressional and White House decision-making would grow more difficult and compromises will be harder to fashion and reach. Congressional staffs would have to expand, and eventually at least the Congress might have to be enlarged.

But isn’t America supposed to be a democracy that aims to represent everybody?

Yet Bush’s wish to skirt the filter pointed to something profound in the desire for the political. He wanted to transmit not the message, but the noise. He wanted the public to feel the funk, the live intensities and desires that make messages affectively immediate, seductive, and binding. In his head a public’s binding to the political is best achieved neither by policy nor ideology but the affect of feeling political together, in the absence of which, as we have recently seen in the health care town hall meetings, great dramas of betrayal are felt and staged. The desire for the political that relies on noise confirms to the mass cultural listening audience that it already shares an affective environment; its senses have already provided an experience of a better world that exists right here, right now, in a fold more intimate and secure and just as real as the world made by the media’s distortions.

What exactly is the problem with “the filter”? 24-7, the contemporary filtered or mediated political sphere in the U.S. transmits news from a new ordinary created by crisis, in which life seems reduced to discussions about tactics for survival and who’s to blame. The filter tells you that the public has entered a historical situation whose contours it does not know. It impresses itself upon mass consciousness as an epochal crisis but without a name, unfolding like a disaster film made up of human-interest stories and stories about institutions that have lost their way. It is a moment on the verge of a post-normative phase, in which phantasmatic clarities about the conditions for enduring collectivity, historical continuity, and infrastructural stability have melted away, along with predictable relations between event and effect. Living amidst war and environmental disaster, people are shown constantly being surprised at what does and does not seem to have a transformative impact. Living amidst economic crisis, people are shown constantly being surprised at the amount, location, and enormity of moral and affective irregulation that comes from fading rules of accountability and recognition. What will govern the terms and relations of reliable reciprocity amongst governments, intimates, workers, owners, churches, citizens, political parties, or strangers? Nobody knows. The news about the recent past and pressures of the near future demand constant emergency clean-up and hyperspeculation about what it means to live in the ongoing present amongst piles of cases where things didn’t work out or seem to make sense, at least not yet. There are vigils; there is witnessing, and testimony: but there is not yet a consensual rubric on offer that would shape these matters into an event. The affective structure of the situation is therefore anxious and the political emotions attached to it veer wildly away from recognition of the enigma that is clearly there toward explanations that make sense, the kind of satisfying sense that enables optimism for enduring.

This uncertainty was the filter that Bush wished to bracket. His yearning for a politics of ambient noise, prepropositional transmission, and intuitive reciprocity sought  to displace the filtered story of instability and contradiction from the center of US sociality. It also wishfully banished self-reflexive, cultivated opinion and judgment from their central public-sphere function. In short, his wishful feeling was to separate the political from politics as such. In so doing he would cast the ongoing activity of social antagonism to the realm of the epiphenomenal, in contrast to which the affective feedback loop of the political would make stronger the true soul-to-soul continuity between politicians and their public, a much stronger binding than “representation.”

These are not politically tendentious observations. Desiring to ground a sociality above the filter links many in the body politic: the ones who prefer political meetings in town halls, caucuses, demonstrations, and other intimate assemblies to the pleasure of disembodied migratory identification that constitutes mass publics. The non-dominant classes have long produced intimate publics that provide the feeling of immediacy and solidarity by establishing in the public sphere an affective register of belonging to inhabit when there are few adequate normative institutions to fall back on, rest in, or return to. Public spheres are always affect worlds, worlds to which people are bound, when they are, by affective projections of a constantly negotiated common interestedness. But an intimate public is more specific. In an intimate public you encounter stories of survival tactics and of what it has meant to survive, or not. It promises the sense of being loosely held in a social world. You don’t have to do anything to belong, once you show up and listen. You can be passive and lurk in an intimate public, deciding when to appear and disappear, and you can consider the delegation of political attention and emotion the exercise of your sovereign freedom. For in liberal societies, freedom includes freedom from the obligation to be political—that is, to be politically conscious or politically active. For many this means that politics is usually something overheard, encountered indirectly and unsystematically, through a kind of communication more akin to gossip than to cultivated rationality. But there is nothing fundamentally passive or superficial in overhearing the political. What hits a person encountering the dissemination of news about power has nothing to do with how thorough or cultivated their knowledge is or how they integrate the impact into living. Amidst all of the chaos, crisis, and injustice in front of us, the desire for alternative filters that produce the sense—if not the scene—of a more livable and intimate sociality is another name for the desire for the political.

What does it mean want to be with the noise of the political, rather than the speech of it? What does it mean to think of the political as something overheard? What does it mean when, as in silent protest, people enter the public sphere in order to withhold from it the very material—speech oriented toward opinion—that animates its world-making and world-building effectivity? The longer version of this talk rethinks publicness by looking at some cases in which the body politic in the politically depressive position tries not to reenter the normative public sphere organized by reflective opinion while seeking a way, nonetheless, to maintain its desire for the political. It will argue that the new crisis ordinary is engendering peculiar forms of something like “ambient citizenship.” In ambient sound we dissolve into an ongoing present whose ongoingness is neither necessarily comfortable nor uncomfortable, avant-garde nor Muzak, but, most formally, a space of abeyance. Ambient citizenship is a style appropriate to the impasse of the present that can only be encountered as degenerating, excitable, and delivered by chaotic external forces, without being, exactly, open. It characterizes a mode of being that moves around recursively in an environment gathering things up, changing the relation between what the senses collect and the constitution of political imaginaries and practices. It opens up a different somatic domain for encountering the political and its subjects.

[This essay is based on a talk delivered at the mini-plenary "Keywords:The Public Sphere, Public Culture and Reasoned Public Choice" of the 59th Annual ICA Conference in Chicago, May 22, 2009. The piece comes from the author's forthcoming book Cruel Optimism.---ed.]

• The system of civic rights changed from bourgeois centering of equality rights around property into a comprehensive system of anti-discrimination norms (see F. D. Roosevelt’s ‘Second Bill of Rights’ from January 1944: even if in the beginning ‘affirmative action was white,’ it soon became, black, gay etc.), and Eastern Europe now is confronted with its effects, and not only on Christopher Street Day.
• Legal programs changed from conditional to final programming, including administrative planning law (tried and tested during the World Wars) and a new and dense system of regulative family, socialization, and conduct law, nicely called by Niklas Luhmann Personenänderungsrecht, or what Foucault has called bio-power (which in the former Soviet Empire was already introduced, and in a much more authoritarian version).
• Everywhere, the national legal order came under pressure from internationally introduced human rights norms and democratic claims for self-determination (since the General Declaration 1948 and the European Convention of Human Rights 1950), which were step by step implemented since the Human Rights Treaties of the 1960s. The demise of the Soviet Empire since the 1970s would not have been possible without the internalization of the pressure of human rights movements and politics that finally led to the OSCE-process. Although often overlooked, the (also already global) rights-movements of the 1960s and 1970s preceded the global human and civic rights movement of the 1980s.
• The national legitimization principle of the “exclusion of inequalities” (Rudolf Stichweh) was universalized, and constitutes now an emerging world citizenship, including an individualization of international law that was claimed by Hans Kelsen and Georges Scelle already in the 1920s, and which turned out to be deeply ambivalent (see the listing of terrorists by the United Nations Security Council). This principle,
• Together with the revolutionary step from the old international law of coexistence to the new international law of cooperation (Art 1 II and III UN – this was the most revolutionary invention of the UN-system), and
• The foundation of a new and lasting network of inter- trans- and supranational organizations that became ever denser (and at once ever more complex and fragmented) enabled, first, the decolonization of the world (since the 1950s) and then the desovietization of the world (since the 1980s).  The consequence was an internationally organized replacement of all modern Empires by a global system of nation states and international organizations. The last square meter of the global continents (except the arctic region) now has become state territory, and failed states and state-building immediately went to the top of the agenda of the international community. One of the most amazing effects of 1989 is that nobody can any longer seal themselves completely off from the access of the international community to the internal affairs of a world region, including Iran, Russia and China. Nobody any longer can insist (as foreign minister Gromyko did so brilliantly and brutally) on the old international law of “peaceful coexistence” and “non-interference.” Furthermore, the fall of the Wall led
• To a material globalization of the already formally existing global public sphere that has crossed all regional and statist borders, again including Iran and China, and
• The Western centered global civil society now has been de-centered completely and spread its system of free associations (Tocqueville), now called NGOs and INGOs, all over the entire world. Last but not least,
• The fall of the Wall has enabled the unrestricted globalization of all functionally differentiated social systems, in particular of the market economy and its organizations (global capitalism), together with all major spheres of value (Max Weber), and in particular of religious world views and organizations.

(2)  The highly dramatic effect of globalization should not be underestimated, particularly with respect to the functional system of modern capitalism and the value sphere of religious self-organization.

• The globalization of capitalism immediately led to a first “great transformation” (Polanyi) of state-embedded markets of regional late capitalism into market-embedded states of global Turbo-capitalism. The negative effect of economic globalization on our rights is that the freedom of markets explodes globally and again (as with the earlier and primarily European great transformation described by Polanyi and Marx) at the cost of equal freedom from the negative externalities of disembedded markets, and again with the highly increased risk of global economic crisis and its escalation of inequality (as we are still experiencing). Surprisingly enough, but in accordance with some theses of Max Weber, what is true for capitalism also is true for the religious sphere of values.
• The globalization of religion has transformed state-embedded religions into religion-embedded states, which is the second great transformation we have to face. Since the 1970s, religious communities have crossed borders and have been able to escape from state control, with a final push after 1989. Again the negative effect of this on our rights is that the freedom of religions explodes whereas the freedom from religion comes under pressure. As in the age of the Reformation, the uncontrollable spread of religious fundamentalism expresses a deep crisis of motivation (or, as it is mostly called, “identity,” collective and individual) and has led to a now global desocialization of the individual human being. Whether the newly unleashed fundamentalist energy, concentrated again in de-centered sect- and network religions (Islam, Protestantism) and the Catholic Church (with its 1000 year old experience in cosmopolitan state-building), can again be transformed into a new kind of individualized religious work ethic (Weber), and a re-institutionalization of individualism (Parsons), and an embodiment of a newly reconstructed legal system (Berman), is completely open but seems not very probable now.

(3) In particular in Europe (and that may matter), the new world order has been described as a process of emerging juridification and constitutionalization of world society, and I guess rightly so. Juridification and constitutionalization of world society, still based on the administrative power of the system of states, is far from getting back control over global capitalism and global religions. Moreover, the process of constitutionalization is not at all democratic. This is at best a European illusion, and in particular an illusion of German lawyers and political theorists who identify democracy with the so called Rechtsstaat that binds the law to the state and not to the people. And to be sure, illusions matter.

There is only one way to democracy through law (that is the name and device of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe: European Commission for Democracy through Law) that is not an illusion, but hard to find is the way that leads to law through democracy. Juridification and constitutionalization therefore are not the solution to the problem of democratization, but part of the problem. The very point here is that juridification and constitutionalization, on the one hand, are evolutionary advances or (as Parsons would say) evolutionary universals that can be renounced only at the price of nationalist and fascist regression. But, on the other hand, the societal function of all law, including constitutional law, is the stabilization of expectations, and that includes the expectations internal to an existing structure of social and political power, of oppression, exploitation and class rule. The deep division of the contemporary world into two classes of people – that is, into people with good passports and people with bad passports – is mirrored by the constitutional structure of world society. All post-national constitutional regimes are characterized by a disproportion between legal declarations and claims of egalitarian rights and democracy and its legal implementation by the international constitutional law of checks and balances (or procedural law, in German in an etatistic variation: Staatsorganisationsrecht).

This must not be confused with a nearly meaningless contradiction between pure normative ideals and dirty facts because it is already a contradiction within the dirty facts, within the always impure facticity of existing world law. Therefore the contradiction internal to world law can be used from both sides, from the point of view of the still dominant powers, and in particular has been used by the executive powers of the states who have learned to “act in concert” (Arendt) and to use their loosely coupled and mostly informal organizations (e. g., Basel Bank Committee, European Council, Bologna-Process, G8 and G20, but maybe in future also G2: USA-China) to create a new kind of soft law regime that has directly binding effects and is implemented by submissive state powers, and bypassing parliamentary control and judicial review. This already has led to a third great transformation of state-embedded power into (soft) power embedded states. The always more flexible second branch of power vis-à-vis the first and third one (again as in the times of constitutional “absolutism”) jeopardizes the achievements of the modern constitutional state. The effect of this is an accelerating process of a global original accumulation of power beyond national and representative government. Instead of global democratic government, we now are approaching some kind of directorial global Bonapartist governance: that is, soft Bonapartist governance for us in the North West, and hard Bonapartist governance for them in the South East, the failed and outlaw states and regions of the globe.

Yet, existing world law can also be used from the other side, from the dominated, marginalized, manipulated or repressed public power of the people: it can be used as a medium of emancipation and for the building of “counter-hegemonic power” (Sonja Buckel). Because world law despite all its faults still is “law, and not philanthropy” (Kant), it can “strike back” (Friedrich Muller), even if it is far from sure that global constitutionalism is already in a shape to enable the legal fight for law within the law. But this is the only hope left in a time of global crisis and no social movement in sight that could take the opportunity of the crisis and change the world as the last great social movement of world history could do and did: the workers movement that withered away at the threshold of the 21st century and was replaced by a Multitude which has no longer any meaning for the reproduction of modern global capitalism, and no chance to establish a global emancipation movement.

Although the Soviet bloc was already beginning to unravel and substantial reforms were already underway in Poland and Hungary, the very rapid and nearly bloodless collapse of the GDR astounded observers and confounded the expectations of many experts. East Germany had been widely regarded as a relatively successful Marxist-Leninist society. It seemed to have little of the organized popular opposition to Communism found in other states. It appeared to be a quintessentially “strong” state with a fairly robust economy and a powerful and daunting security apparatus. Quite simply, the GDR was not the sort of state that scholars of revolution had deemed prone to popular rebellion, much less outright collapse.

As inevitable as the rapid, peaceful end of Soviet socialism in Eastern Europe might now appear, things could have gone differently. As the first regime to suffer outright collapse in the fall of 1989, East Germany demonstrated the unexpected brittleness of Leninist regimes and signaled the possibility of peaceful change to the dissidents and citizens of other countries. Moreover, events in the GDR showed that the Soviet Union was willing to let a satellite regime be overturned by popular demand and, ultimately, stood by while the state was dissolved and then merged with capitalist West Germany.

In my book, Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany, I identify three distinct phases in the collapse of East Germany. The first phase was the erosion of the state socialist system in the late 1980s and the emergence of loosely organized opposition. Because both exit and voice as means of redress of political and economic grievances in the GDR were blocked, there was a progressive neutralization of the communist regime under Erich Honecker. By the late 1980s even the ruling party was suffering disaffection within its ranks in the late 1980s. Yet, despite moves toward liberalization with the advent of Gorbachev in the USSR and the beginnings of reform in other socialist countries, the GDR’s system of coercive surveillance anchored by the feared State Security apparatus, or Stasi, prevented political change. Trapped in a deteriorating society and economy that prevented them from leaving, informal opposition to the regime spread. Meanwhile, a handful of citizens exploited gaps in the system of control to nurture dissident political identities and networks under the umbrella of Protestant Church involvement. Despite repressive pressures in Leipzig, dissidents operating out of the local Lutheran Church managed to establish the Monday Peace Prayers as a political ritual of dissent. The unforeseen result was that this ritual provided a focal point around which mass protest as an unlikely – and provisional – alliance of dissidents and would-be exiters crystallized in the early autumn of 1989.

The “exiting crisis” and the revolutionary autumn of 1989 that it initiated was the second phase of the collapse of the GDR. As new holes in the Iron Curtain became available in the summer and early fall of 1989, flight from East Germany triggered mass protest in cities such as Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin as would-be exiters made common-cause (temporarily) with would-be reformers. Even though the opposition movement was but embryonic in the early fall of 1989, the crisis made possible the development of a largely unstructured, spontaneous protest movement. Even though the East German authorities had threatened a “Chinese solution” to unrest in the GDR, there was no Tiananmen-style massacre. Both the absence of clear Soviet support for the beleaguered regime and the failure of local elites to carry out East Berlin’s orders to crush the protest movement reflected both the incapacity of hardliners to inspire their own agents to crush the challenge and the creeping demoralization that crippled the regime.

The third phase of the East German revolution was the opening of the Berlin Wall and the resulting “national turn” in politics that doomed the reform process in the GDR and ultimately resulted in rapid German unification. From November 1989 onward, the leaders of the GDR made ever more desperate concessions, hoping to mollify popular discontent. Instead, they widened the rebellion. The slogan Wir sind das Volk! chanted by hundreds of thousands of people across the towns and cities of the GDR was a unmistakable repudiation of the “dictatorship of the workers and peasants” – and, ultimately, of the division of Germany itself. For their part, the opposition groups and the new civic movement could not adapt to radically changed political realities and became alienated from ordinary protesters that embraced nationalism as a solution to their desperate circumstances and highly uncertain future.

In early December 1989 – just as the party’s “leading role” was stricken from the GDR constitution – more than forty parties, social movement organizations, and other political associations were registered with the Ministry of the Interior. They were joined by some one-hundred-and-fifty interest groups promoting occupational, religious, scientific, cultural and educational issues. Seemingly overnight, the one-party state had been pluralized. Meanwhile,civic movement leaders continued to advocate an informal, participatory democracy long after other political actors with firmer models and effective organizations were drawing support.

In the March 1990 elections for the East German parliament, a coalition of parties in the “Alliance for Germany” advocated rapid unification on the basis of existing provisions of the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz). It won resounding victory over the Alliance 90 electoral coalition of civic movement groups and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the reconstituted Communist party. During the few weeks of the electoral campaign West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl offered consoling promises that “things will be much better for most, and worse for no one” and that the blasted East German economy would soon be a “blossoming landscape” thanks to Western capital and expertise. Many West German intellectuals and leftist politicians were either critical of reunification or ambivalent toward the prospect.

The election served as a virtual referendum on reunification on the terms Kohl proposed, with the “Alliance for Germany” bloc winning just under half of the total GDR vote. When combined with the vote for the liberal Free Democrats, the other party in Kohl’s ruling coalition, parties allied with West Germany’s government won fifty-three percent of votes. The Social Democrats suffered a surprising defeat, winning just over a fifth of the vote in a part of the old German Reich that had once been a bastion of social democracy. Rescued from oblivion by leader Gregor Gysi and his reform team, the PDS ensured its survival with sixteen percent of the parliamentary vote. The combined vote for the various organizations of the civic movement – including the Alliance 90 – was just seven percent of the total votes cast.

The March elections inaugurated a dramatic post-communist political realignment that would shape politics in reunified Germany through the election of 1998. Nearly sixty percent of working-class voters choose the Christian Democrat-led Alliance for Germany. The educated and privileged classes of GDR society, including intellectuals, state and party functionaries and socialist professionals, voted for chiefly the left, dividing their support between the PDS, the Social Democrats and the civic movement or Greens. In the same regions where mass exit had triggered the protest wave that had toppled Honecker in early October there was the strongest support for German unification. This support was especially evident in decaying industrial regions where the vote heavily favored pro-unification parties. The regional pattern of support for the Alliance for Germany reveals that the industrial south was the main locus of support for rapid unification.

The vote for Kohl and his allies was interpreted as a vote for rapid unification. More broadly, it was a vote that expressed the demand that East Germans be allowed collectively to “exit” socialism once and for all by joining the West Germany. In the months leading up the March elections many protesters in Leizpig and other cities had reinforced their demands with the threat of exit. “If the D-mark doesn’t come to us, we will go to it”, became a rallying cry at Leipzig’s Monday demonstrations in the winter of 1990. Kohl and his allies recognized the implications clearly, promising, in effect, to bring the East Germans into the West German system as quickly as possible. The Alliance platform thus managed to encapsulate the basic aim of the electorate, particularly in the industrial heartland of the GDR.

The March elections made German reunification a certainty – what needed to be determined were the terms under which it would happen. Article 146 of the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) stated that in the case of reunification a constitutional assembly should frame a new constitution to be ratified by the entire German people. However, the option favored by Kolh’s government was reunification under Article 23 which provided for the accession of German Länder (states or provinces) to the existing Federal Republic. Under Article 23, the sovereign GDR would disappear, its territorial districts recombined into the provinces dissolved in 1952, and then be admitted as federal states to West Germany.

Advocates of Article 146 were convinced that a public dialogue would motivate ordinary citizens in both states to consider the benefits and drawbacks of unification and allow them to forge a new all-German civic identity. The civic movement wanted a new constitution to have significant provisions for popular rule, including the right to referenda on many issues, and a deepening and widening of the German welfare state. The West German Greens endorsed this position. A broadly-based “Democratic Initiative 90″ interest group sponsored a petition drive demanding that the CDU-led government of the GDR not “capitulate” to Bonn by accepting unification on the basis of Article 23. The campaign gathered wide attention, but only assembled about thirty thousand signatures for a petition against Kohl’s route to unification. The Alliance for Germany government went ahead with a state treaty with the FRG providing for reunification under Article 23. It passed the Volkskammer with a two thirds majority. With the “Economic and Social Union” that began in the summer of 1990, which included the introduction of the West German mark as the new currency, the GDR as a sovereign state was disappearing even before the official date of unification.

The unification treaty was bitterly denounced by both the civic movement and the PDS as a “capitulation” to Bonn. Yet, by the time voters endorsed German unification there was precious little of the GDR in terms of its institutional legitimacy, economy or state capacities that could have been saved. Pledging to continue the fight, Alliance 90 and the West German Greens developed a common program calling for a new constitution and a popular referendum on German unity as the central plank in their platform for the December 1990 all-German Bundestag elections. The initiative drew wide support among intellectuals in both East and West Germany, with forty prominent West German social scientists and legal experts endorsing the call for “extending representative democracy” and “ending the spectator democracy” in the Federal Republic. As the East German economy dissolved, eventually to be into effective receivership by the Kohl government through its Treuhandanstalt, the PDS remade itself as a potent protest party decrying against Western colonization and “monopoly rule” by big corporations.

On October 3^rd, 1990 the GDR was abolished and replaced by five reconstituted provinces (Länder) which then joined the FRG under Article 23. However bitterly denounced by the left, the national political turn was confirmed in the state elections in the new Länder in the summer of 1990 and again ratified by the clear victory of Kohl’s center-right coalition in the all-German federal elections in December 1990. In spite of both the best efforts of the civic movement to reform socialism and the PDS to obstruct the process, German unity was achieved under the terms Kohl – and, one might argue, the Volk of 1989 favored. The injuries of that divided path to reunification were still evident in the great social and political divisions that have burdened the new Germany in the last two decades.

Throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union popular mobilization empowered dissidents, pushed hardliners out of power, and gave liberal reformists considerable bargaining power in negotiations with the old regime. However, in East Germany, once the prospect of unification became possible, the predominant tone in the protest movement was not anti-regime but anti-state protest. With the survival of the state in question, the reform-minded dissidents became divided from the mass of protesters in the streets and lost their bargaining power. Meanwhile, representatives of the old order reorganized in hopes of securing the most favorable post-communist future for their party or faction. In doing this, they quickly displaced the civic movement which never managed to harness the populism of the peaceful revolution.

Reunification on Kohl’s terms ensured that East Germany’s post-communist transition to capitalism would be as a dependency of a formerly rival state. Despite the GDR’s seemingly advantageous path to democracy and market through unification with the Federal Republic, the years since 1989 have been very difficult ones for former East Germans. Unemployment rates have been durably high. Radical street protest mounted by both leftwing and rightwing groups has been distressing. And in spite of the enormous efforts and expenditures made by the German government, the institutional legacies of communism proved to be just as profound and enduring in the former GDR as in other post-communist states. In terms of its economic weakness, ongoing problems of out-migration, aging population and dependence on central government assistance, the territory of the former GDR has become a kind of German mezzogiorno. Though there is much to celebrate about East Germany’s peaceful revolution, the last two decades demonstrated how difficult it is to merge two societies with profoundly different economic, social and political institutions even when they share the same language and a common culture.

I would like to highlight certain aspects of the evolution that led to 1989, ones that I feel may not be fully appreciated in the west. The first one was the incremental crafting of an Arendtian space of appearance, the reconstruction of public space through the gradual repossession and expansion of sites where people could speak and act. One should remember that along with the economy, land, and infrastructure that became the property of the state in the satellite countries of the Soviet Union, so did the realm of “the public.” The dialogical public sphere, as I argue elsewhere, had been fully eradicated and replaced by a monological “official” one, and any public-spirited civic longings had to seek substitute sites or would more likely end up in the opaque zone of the private. This relocation of the public into the private resulted in the peculiar zone of a privatized public realm – where classes of the Flying University took place, where student theaters could pose serious questions to tiny audiences, where poetry could be typed on thin tissue paper (12 copies at a time!) and then circulated (given that copy machines were locked inside state offices), and where students could collect money for imprisoned workers. This privatized public realm was already in the early 1970s a nascent public sphere.

I would also like to highlight the role of the arts, especially theater, the most social of all art forms, where two groups of people, actors and audience, meet face to face in one place. In the context of a dictatorship, theater allows people safely to enter hypothetical worlds, to interact, imagine, speculate, re-enact. In Eastern Europe a young theater movement offered a dialogical intermission in an otherwise monological world, and thus created the conditions – even if initially limited – for the emergence of public discourse and the opening up of the public sphere. That budding sphere had been auspiciously empowered by the Helsinki Agreements signed in 1975 by the entire Soviet Bloc, especially by the declaration of a respect for “human rights and fundamental freedoms,” including “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.”  The privatized public realm, which was an objectified, embryonic, discursive sphere open to a very limited public, was gradually expanded, and it was in this context, protected by various international human rights watch groups, that the first openly pro-democratic institutions and initiatives emerged, like KOR (Committee for Workers’ Defense) in Poland (1976), Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia (1977), or Beszelo, the first clandestinely published periodical in Hungary (1981).

A major education in matters public and a true civic competence were acquired during the extraordinary 16-month period of Solidarity, with its symbolic space of appearance, the Gdansk Shipyard, and its leading actor, Lech Walesa, who spoke and thought so refreshingly “otherwise.” This indigenously inspired en-acting of democracy by citizens, practicing publicness, dialogue, and compromise – something I call performative democracy, with all its humanity, its drama, its brilliant inspiring moments, its spirit of improvisation, and its imaginative solutions – spearheaded the peaceful transformation of an autocratic environment into a democratic one in Central Europe. Deeply rooted in distinct and diverse socio-cultural sites, performative democracy is neither a theoretical model, a political ideal, nor a tested system of governance. It assumes an array of forms and is expressed through various idioms, but when it occurs under the conditions of authoritarian rule, it usually reflects its actors’ basic sense of democratic ideals, and their belief that there are indeed places – “normal countries” – where civil rights are observed, and where democracy is actually implemented and practiced. And one should not dismiss the power for such people of the image of a normal country.

Among the new political idioms of 1989, which dramatically speeded up the end of communism in Eastern Europe, were the Roundtable Talks conducted in Warsaw between the Communist government on one side, and its recent political prisoners on the other: workers, dissident intellectuals, leaders of underground Solidarity.  The talks took six weeks and were concluded in April 1989, establishing the grounds for a peaceful dismantling of the system. With its eye on publicness, dialogue, and compromise, the Roundtable generated a culture in which insular groups that exploited fear could not feel comfortable. A few months later, in the summer of 1989, similar roundtable talks took place in Budapest, initiating a transformation in Hungary.

There were striking similarities between the Roundtable Talks in Poland and those conducted a few years later in South Africa, which suggests that the formula of dialogue at a round table, with no privileged seats for any party, and with the idea that this might achieve fundamental change peacefully, may be one of the most positive political inventions of an otherwise dark 20^th century.  Not only is the roundtable — like the ones that ended the Franco regime in Spain, Communism in Poland, and apartheid in South Africa — a well-tested instrument of political change, but it is also a powerful instrument for individual growth, learning, and the self-transformation of participants on both sides.  The outcome of the roundtable – the dialogue-produced word — is a compelling consensual word, and it carries with it undeniable obligations that are key for the early stages of democratization.

The very theatrics of the negotiated settlement in Poland had been surprisingly analogous to those in 1993 that led to the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. In both cases the peaceful transformation was accomplished by providing a space of appearance (a huge piece of furniture around which the talks were conducted and reported to an anxious public), by authorizing and legitimizing the actors, by requiring the drafting of a script, by establishing the rules of negotiation, and by foreseeing the need for a contingency infrastructure in which any lack of agreement could be dealt with. In such a situation the agreement expected to be produced at the roundtable represents far more than what it actually states. Hence the roundtable itself, as a conventional act, becomes a political genre, an idiom of political compromise, which is both a site of, and a powerful instrument for, the release of performativity.  Performativity is the domain of the political — it can arise either where there is no democracy, or where democracy has become complacent and weakened. In both places, Poland and South Africa, it established the grounds for a new order, and marked the beginning of the long, tedious and less thrilling process of building institutions and nurturing the culture of democracy.

The legacy of performative democracy includes various lessons, but I would like to focus on two of them, as I believe they ought to be given serious consideration by policy-makers trying to address an increasingly violent world that endangers the lives of citizens and communities. The lessons I have in mind are a lesson in civil society and a lesson in revolution.

The emergence — however slowly — of a public space, or initially even a semi-public space, is the foundation for a civil society — a foundation of sites where private citizens learn to act on behalf of the public good. In non-democratic systems these launch a process of learning, forming opinions, reasoning, appreciating the value of compromise; and this process is indeed transformative for those who take part.

This micro-political facet of modern politics, especially critical for the birth of democracy but also important for an established democracy to thrive, should not be ignored by political thinkers or policy makers, whether domestically or in their foreign agendas. And more importantly – especially when one looks at the post-9/11 world menaced by Bushism — the transition to a meaningful and enduring democracy, never an easy project, has the best chance to succeed if it is initiated and owned by local people, and takes into account their voices, imbued as they are with their respective histories, cultures, and economies. I would like to think that this is not only a real alternative to tanks and bullets, but also a kind of force that can help recover the lost dignity of people and their identity as citizens.

And one word about a lesson in Revolution. As the first decade of the new century is coming to an end, the politics of hope and any developments that raise political hope are of great interest to very many people around the globe.  We all search for alternatives to violent solutions and despair. And in this context the question whether revolutions — as many past and present thinkers suggest, could be still “proxies” for hope — returns again and again.

I like to think that in 1989 a whole new kind of revolution emerged, delivering hope without bloodshed. So bloodless were these revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, which nevertheless led to the dismantling of authoritarian regimes, that they would have seemed “unradical” in the eyes of 19^th-century revolutionaries and thinkers, for whom the French Revolution of 1789 had served as a model. Yet 200 years later it was this very kind of revolution that captured people’s imagination and led to fundamental systemic change. “Velvet” or otherwise unradical, this kind of revolution has become a site of tangible hope, a site in which words have power, in which language has performative power, where speech is action, and where words act.

The revolutions of 1989 replaced violence with acts of speech, or speech action, through which the human condition regained its full dignity, and realized its agency through other instruments than weapons. So here’s a lesson — and it’s not an oxymoron but a new political invention: To bring about fundamental change, negotiate a revolution!

Drawing on and together with others, I have argued that civil society as vehicle, vision and space was central to 1980s transformative praxis. It was critical because it could suture independent trade unions, critical intellectuals, religious, nationalist and other social movements, entrepreneurs of the second economy, and the underground press into a common sense dedicated to pluralism, legality, and publicity. But perhaps the greatest transformative praxis was less public.

The symbol of 1989’s breakthrough should be roundtable negotiations, not the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latter appeals because it symbolized the exhaustion of communist rule and the reintegration of Europe, but it also was an effect, not an ignition or inspiration, of social conflict and systemic change. It also was not so complex as roundtable negotiations.

Roundtables were both public and secret, conflictual and collaborative, legitimate and traitorous, a democratic negotiation to produce compromise democracy, all the while validating civil society and diminishing it too. For the region’s first roundtables, Poland’s represented, and transcended, these antinomies. Much more needs to be researched and written about these negotiations between February and April, 1989, not only for Polish history, but for understanding the conditions of negotiated revolution.

I have contributed some to this effort, and continue to work on this theme. But let me take that example to consider further some of the themes of this occasion.

There are without question heroes of the democratic movement, those who risked lives, family, and well-being, for democratic principles and justice. There are without question bastards who have tortured, killed, and destroyed. The former deserve recognition, the latter punishment. Principles sustain civil courage before criminals in power, and the dream of justice cannot be denied when conditions allow. But peaceful change also means finding ways to bring some who associated with tyranny to democratic futures. And those associated with illegitimate authorities need to find ways to that future.

By 1989, many Communist authorities knew they had limited legitimacy and certainly no monopoly on truth or effective rule. Very few of them realized how little support they truly had. That was fortunate for democracy’s prospects, for those authorities had to believe, if they were to compromise, that they had a place in the future public and commercial order.

Consider the status of those visions, vehicles, and spaces of the authorities’ transformation. They are not at all public. For those who see the roundtables as red-pinko sellouts, those secret compromises are the foundations of a corrupt system insufficiently purified. But one need not take this conspiratorial view to recognize the hidden spaces within which the old authorities found new futures. And they were not alone.

As Havel’s greengrocer made famous, communist rule forced compromise onto most, given the contradictory lives ambition demanded, where intellectual aspiration, organizational responsibility, and political or military leadership involved not only intra-psychic conflict, but some of the greatest pains and losses among family and friends riven by the disgusts of illegitimate compromise. These communist-made contradictions of the private sphere, productively channeled by roundtable negotiations into a public good, were critical to the peaceful changes of those early months of 1989.

Of course it was the character of public discourse that framed and channeled those private sphere contradictions into the roundtables’ transformative praxis.

The common awareness of the Poles’ precarious geopolitical existence made the priority of national belonging an anchor that would make self-limiting revolution and democratic institutional compromises not only understandable but responsible praxis. The spirit of democracy, variably inhaled, gave everyone a way to see how they might move together away from the precipice that would not only save Poland from Soviet invasion, but from perhaps the greater crime where Poles would once again kill Poles. But the bigger question for me remains – how did the value of negotiated compromise among jailors and jailed take priority over simply formulated interests and over the pressure for justice or domination fueled by corresponding publics?

Whatever the answer to the last question, the condition for success is clearly the authority of the leaders themselves within their own publics. For negotiations to have succeeded, the communist authorities compromising had to have credibility among these less pliable, and the opposition had to have enough scars of struggle not to have their own dedication to the cause questioned.  And it certainly helped that in those negotiations, Catholic clergy leant not only their personal integrity but also a plausible claim to privileged access to a transcendent truth beyond public and private. But it wasn’t enough to have authority among these various reference groups. It required a change in disposition, away from mobilizing on behalf of clearly constituted publics, toward the making of a newly unified public through reasoned dialogue among erstwhile enemies. How did they turn battle into contest?

That transformation is critical for addressing not only the foundational questions of modes of governance, but also how to address the crises before us today.

It should not be difficult to recognize the crises today that most resemble those in 1989 – where public and peaceful protest demand authorities to respect the rule of law and the dignity of the individual, where religious figures might invoke divine inspiration to find the higher truth that affirms the value of the nation, and the lives of its people, and where authorities are, if their eyes are open, aware of the profound contradictions of their system and the injustices committed in its name.  But the lessons of the roundtable, and its relationship to private and public spheres, are also instructive for other crises facing not only particular nations, but those facing the entire world.

Consider the negotiations over the long-term environmental crisis. Like the roundtable negotiations, these are both public and private conversations, with leaders struggling to transcend personal interests in the name of longer term goals. Except in these 2009 negotiations, negotiating authorities represent no obvious publics, nor stand for any solidarity beyond a sociological fiction based on planetary futures. Nations are not the meaningful imagined communities for these or other world systemic crises, even though some places suffer more than others depending on financial and geographic contours. Movements are not obvious either; the contradictions are too many. But two lessons from 1989 inspire.

First, although there were clear constituencies roundtable negotiators represented, the sense of public that these roundtable negotiations anticipated was one that transcended opposing sides, and was dedicated to principles of higher public goods that might be won through reasoned dialogue among those differently identified. Perhaps like those working to assure planetary survival, those Poles in 1989 recognized that it was less important to seek redress for past sins, and was rather more important to build an order for the well being of their children and grandchildren. That constituency of future generations can be the only pressure group that moves some issues, like global warming, to the front of an agenda so filled with other crises. But to get it there, we need something more than good heart and good vision about future public goods.

While the roundtable negotiators may have had a vague sense of common futures, the critical vehicle to moving success was a common awareness of the value of non-reformist reforms that built trust over time, keeping changes moving in the right direction. For that first third of 1989, it was built on the anticipation of a partially free election in June, 1989. When those election results were upheld, despite the reasoned expectation that communists, given poor showing, might wish to annul them, another incremental step toward that common public was found. And step by step, a more complete democracy was built.  All before the Berlin Wall fell. And because of those steps, the Berlin Wall could fall in peace and joy.

It is hard to imagine any equivalent wall fall for the environmental crisis before us. But it is possible to imagine those gradual non-reformist reforming steps, as in the development of nationally appropriate mitigation actions instead of unremitting negotiations over which emission reduction targets are right for which nations. It is, rather, movement in the right direction that might just accelerate under the right conditions. But what might be those right conditions? Two more implications from 1989 appear.
First, during 1989, changes in one country inspired greater changes in another, and so on. While it is true that each nation, at the time, had its own national public sphere pressuring change, Hungarians were quite aware of what Poles were doing, as Germans were aware of Hungarian actions, and Czech and Slovak actors aware of what took place elsewhere. Overlapping publics, inspired by other nations’ prior roundtable negotiations, built on the successes of others to create a cascade of ever greater democratic transformations. How might a similar cascade of nationally appropriate mitigating actions take place?

That, then, is the second implication of 1989. Activists and movements were directly aware of one another, working hard not only to build interpersonal ties and common visions, but struggling very hard to imagine what solidarity meant for various civil societies in the struggle against communist rule. This could not be quite public, for too much publicity led to repression. Private meetings among activists in the Tatra mountains come to mind, but it was on those foundations that the communicative mechanisms underlying the cascade were made.

It is appropriate and important to recall the public spheres, private lives, and transformative praxis of 1989 in order to do justice to the emancipations reasoned dialogues can produce. But to do that year proper justice, we should work harder to think about how the values of communicative rationality can be embedded in the most critical challenges of our time.

Causes

In trying to explain surprising caesuras, historians tend to distinguish between long-range underlying causes and short-range events, triggering actual changes. Among the former, a key reason was the stagnation of the planned economy that made the Soviet bloc fall behind in the production of consumer goods and therefore inspired Gorbachev to push for reforms in Russia. Another important element was the improvement of the international climate that ended the second Cold War and promoted détente, because the lessening of hostility allowed Moscow to repeal of the Brezhnev doctrine. The greater latitude thereby permitted to the satellite states encouraged the revival of civil society and the formation of a domestic opposition pushing for the recovery of human rights. Often overlooked is finally the loss of utopian belief and of ideological self-confidence among the ruling Communist parties, which made some younger leaders break with the older incorrigibles and experiment with pragmatic reforms.

But this structural erosion of Communist power only turned into an acute crisis through a combination of extraordinary events during the summer and fall 1989. The first open challenge came from the independent Polish trade union Solidarnosc which even the proclamation of martial law could not contain permanently. The second step was the liberalization of the Hungarian leadership which decided to open the Iron Curtain symbolically, triggering an exodus of vacationing East Germans to the West which turned into a mass flight that discredited the Honecker regime and led to his fall. The third step was the rapid growth of public protests in cities like Leipzig and later also in Prague that spread from a few hundred intrepid dissidents to hundreds of thousands and could therefore not be suppressed by force after the agreement of October 9th. Confronted with such unheard of civil resistance, the communist parties themselves began to dissolve, losing members as well as their will to fight.

Social scientists who have analyzed the process of mobilization stress that during the democratic awakening of 1989 exit and voice tended to reinforce each other rather than serving as alterna­tives. No doubt the contagion started with the dissidents themselves who had elaborated a human rights critique of Communism like the IFM in the GDR or Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia. Crucial for spreading the message was also the reporting by West German TV, which served as alter­na­tive information source in East Germany, and by Radio Free Europe which broadcast news to other East European countries. Decisive was, however, the demonstration experience itself, because the feeling of solidarity in a crowd of likeminded protesters broke through the grip of fear which had held people in check for so long. Less visible but highly debilitating was finally the seepage of doubt among the party members who had to decide whether to follow the Chinese example of bloody repression or Gorbachev’s perestroika course. The combination of structural problems and dramatic events made civil resistance unstoppable during the memorable fall of 1989.

Processes

Instead of being merely seen as a collapse of Communism, the Wende of 1989 ought to be interpreted as a contestation which began as a movement to reform socialism and ended up in a veritable revolution by overthrowing it altogether. Communism did not just crumble from above but was rather overthrown by mass pressure from below. The early stages of the confrontation between the dissidents, restive population and Communist cadres followed the traditional script of mounting unrest in which a broad spectrum of regime critics tried to recapture public space in order to express its frustration more freely. The recovery of an increasing measure of human rights then allowed opposition groups to organize openly and to mount a public challenge. Be­tween September and November 1989 the chanted slogans and written demands escalated in a predictable pattern from calls for free speech to criticism of specific policies to the replacement of the regime as such. The Communist rulers did not abandon their power, but sought to preserve it by authorizing a public dialogue that eventually escaped their control.

The democratic awakening of 1989 deviated from the established pattern of revolutionary bloodshed, however, by remaining nonviolent and ultimately transferring power through negotiations in a process that resembled a pacted transition. Though the protests teetered on the brink of violence initially, the massive security forces did not shoot (except in Romania) since the protesting citizens followed the call of religious leaders to remain non-violent. Because the weakening regime made reluctant concessions such as the opening of the Wall on November 9, the opposition negotiated with the ruling party in a series of Round Tables that maintained public order by opening a channel for the demands for change. Even the emotional confrontations over the dissolution of the secret service, called Stasi in the GDR, remained peaceful, since citizen committees succeeded in occupying its headquarters and sealing the remaining files. Ultimately it was the agreement on free elections which each side could hope to win that allowed the question of power to be decided by the ballot box rather than by violence on the streets.

Another major difference from many prior revolutions was the national impetus which dissolved the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, but also led to German unification. In the former case, the long suppressed desires for ethno-national independence led to the break-up of the Russian Empire as well as the dissolution of two important Versailles states, thereby largely restoring the map of Brest-Litowsk. In the latter instance, unification provided the most rapid form of transformation into a post-Communist mold, characterized by democratic politics, market-style economics, a Western welfare state and cultural pluralism. The overwhelming vote of East German citizens in March 1990 for rapid unity compelled the last GDR government to sign the unification treaty and to join the Federal Republic in the form of five new states. The two-plus-four negotiations led to international approval for this reordering of Central Europe by getting the Red Army to leave and the Germans to accept the Potsdam frontiers. While the gradual nature of the transition in Poland and Hungary has been called a “refolution,” the quicker protest driven changes in the GDR and Czechoslovakia ought to be considered a real revolution, through the Bulgarian and Rumanian transitions rather resembled palace coups.

Results

Proof of the revolutionary nature of the upheaval is also the thoroughness of the post-Com­mu­nist transformation that left hardly any sphere of life, be it public or private, untouched. The domestic transition from dictatorship to democracy was complicated by the lack of popular experience with parlia­mentary government, the involvement of former Communist cadres and the impor­tation of a functioning democratic system from the FRG in East Germany. The introduction of a market economy turned out to be even more traumatic, since the concurrent adjustment to global competition destroyed much moribund industry and thereby created massive unemployment. Also the social reorientation from state-subsidized egalitarianism and group solidarity to individual responsibility and competitive restratification was not easy. In contrast, intellectuals and the public welcomed the return of cultural pluralism because it increased creative freedom and offered more interesting popular entertainment.

On the whole the international repercussions of the dissolution of the Soviet bloc were less contentious for Eastern Europe, since the various peoples regained a measure of self-determi­nation. The end of the Cold War hastened the departure of the Russian troops, a precondition for independence, and efforts at disarmament reduced the fear of nuclear annihilation. The massive costs of unification also kept the Germans from becoming an openly hegemonic power, forcing them instead to concentrate on the task of rehabilitating the five new member states and the new old capital of Berlin. No doubt, the nationalism which reemerged from under the cover of social­ist internationalism also lead to ugly confrontations, but the civil war in the former Yugoslavia remained an exception, predicated upon an earlier history of deep-seated Balkan enmities. The lifting of the Iron Curtain allowed the East Central Europeans to reconnect with Western Europe by joining NATO and the EU, thereby reuniting the Old Continent and stabilizing the new post-Communist governments.

The price of freedom has been a wrenching adjustment that was underestimated during the heady days of 1989 and has led to resentment among displaced elites and disappointment among former dissidents. Western-style democracy has turned out to be a distant and cumbersome process, not at all similar to the excitement of direct participation during the revolutionary months. Moreover, coping with economic competition, dealing with unemploy­ment and facing insecurity was hard for many people, accustomed to the safety-net of socialist control. Western financial transfers and investments had strings of outside control attached and the staggering amount needed, 1.5 trillion Euros in the German case alone, was never enough in order to create “flouri­shing land­scapes” over night. At the same time the psychological adjustment that was required by the new circumstances proved difficult for a population which had gotten used to suppressing its feelings, but now had to express them in public in order to gain attention. The depth of the domestic trans­formation, international restructuring and personal adaptation indicates that this was, indeed, a revolutionary change.

The concept that comes closest to describing the exhilarating events of 1989 is the notion of a new kind of revolution, stemming from “people power.” In contrast to earlier caesuras of the 20^th century, the fall of the Wall was neither the product of a world war nor of a dictatorship.  Instead the democratic awakening can be seen as the last instance of attempts to liberalize Communism, but unlike in 1953, 1956, 1968 or 1981 it succeeded because it was not stopped by force. Hence it might be interpreted as a result of civil resistance which initially sought to democratize socia­lism but ultimately overthrew it altogether. Both the process and the result were revolutionary because they were driven by popular demands for a fundamental political, economic, social and cultural transformation of Eastern Europe. But this revolution was different from many prior contestations because it was successful, peaceful and in some cases also national. By toppling Communism the dissidents and people of Eastern Europe created a new model of negotiated transition, successfully imitated in the Ukraine and Serbia. Even if the repression in China and Iran shows that it cannot be repeated everywhere, is this not reason enough to celebrate?