20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall

Special Feature: Public Sphere Formation

In this special feature on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall on November 9, 2009, Andrew Arato investigates the fate of the principal agents in the formation of political public spheres in Central Europe, arguing that the once-revolutionaries historically quite generally tend to turn into external vanguards for revolutionary regime change elsewhere, as it had been the case with Central European intellectuals turning into cheerleaders and enablers on the road to the Iraq war. Mark Beissinger shows how the formation of the public sphere in the Soviet Union under glasnost’ dramatically altered the epistemic boundaries of the possible and the thinkable, creating a space in which events took on a momentum of their own, transforming the seemingly impossible and unimaginable into the seemingly inevitable. Hauke Brunkhorst, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Jack Goldstone, Julia Hell, Konrad Jarausch, Michael Kennedy, Elzbieta Matynia, Steven Pfaff, and others, present additional unique vantage points on this historic transformation.

Table of Contents

External Links: Web Resources on the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall

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