Ideas - The Hinge Years: 1989 | Uprisings and Downfalls

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Our series exploring five years in the 20th century that shaped the world ends with the year 1989. The Berlin Wall comes tumbling down. There are democratic uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary. A riot in Tiananmen Square in Beijing is met with a fierce crackdown. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 26, 2024.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. It's the year 1989. The Berlin Wall comes tumbling down. People from both sides of the border scale the wall. And you can still hear the sound of people with hammers and chisels chipping away at the wall.

Protesters take to the streets in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary and demand a new future. This is free-form democracy. And with each hour, the confidence of the protesters grows stronger. In Beijing, student protesters gather in Tiananmen Square and face a brutal crackdown. The People's Liberation Army stormed Tiananmen Square last night, smashing through barricades and firing machine guns at anything that moved. This is the fifth and final installment of a series we recorded at the Stratford Festival about pivotal years in the 20th century.

It's inspired by an essay by Salman Rushdie, who writes about hinge moments in history, times when, quote, it becomes essential to admit that the old forms will not do, the old ideas will not do, because all must be remade. All with our best efforts must be rethought, reimagined, and rewritten. We recorded the series in July 2023, and since then, questions about the history of violence, extremism, human rights,

and imperialism have only become more urgent as we grapple with our own era of profound change. Our panelists for today's program are Maglena Todorova, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, who researches politics and the lives of women in former socialist societies. Sanjay Ruparelia, the Jaroslawski Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, who studies the politics of democracy, equality, and development in the post-colonial world, and Arne Kislenko, a professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, who studies diplomatic history, U.S. foreign policy, and modern Southeast Asia. This is the year 1989, uprisings and downfalls.

Thank you. Thank you so much, and welcome to all of you to the fifth and final of our series this week. So the question that remains with us, of course, and perhaps one for you to consider at the end of these conversations is how do we rethink and reimagine and rewrite all that concerns our lives today? And how do we ensure that this hinge moment, because I think we agree we are living in one, doesn't just become a cautionary tale

that's the subject of another panel in the future? So perhaps some of the answer to that question will emerge from this final conversation. So let's get right to it. When you, each of you, I'd love to ask, and beginning with you, Magdalena, when you think about the year 1989 and the era that it represents, is there a story, a picture, a photograph that you can, that takes us back there, that takes you back there, you can describe to us to start off? Yes, there is. In 1989, I was a young woman working in a factory. I was born and raised in communist Bulgaria in the 1960s,

and I was just a worker from a very common family. But 1989 changed everything for me and for the world, I guess. What I remember the most are streets full of people and us younger people sensing that something is tremendously shifting, but fear of what this means, but also incredible desire for something new and different, as if we felt like we are suffocating, we need to break out and break off. And I remember hundreds of thousands of people flooding the streets and we would march and younger people like myself, we would wear blue jeans and t-shirts. The blue jeans, blue was the color of the oppositional parties in Bulgaria

against the communist government. And so we were all in blue jeans. There was no notion that we were necessarily protesting against communism or socialism. It was just this extraordinary desire for something new. So my picture is fear, desire, and lots of people. A sense of revolution, but not really. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Arne. Well, I grew up here. Like many Canadians, I watched 1989 unfold, particularly in the iconic moment of the Berlin Wall coming down, which is obviously something we'll talk

about. And I was with my friends having just recently graduated university, and it was a sort of typical night where there was too much drinking and not enough attention to the world. Not by me, of course. I'm a scholar. And I just remember the TV coming on, and we watched Tom Brokaw. And you could see in tom's eyes this sense of oh my god something is really big is happening here and my my cast of clowns that were my friends we all sat watching it and we all had this sense that this was a really fundamental changes i'm sure most people in this audience not to date you probably remember 1989 and we watched it and it was astonishing and now as a nerdydy historian, I can look back and say,

well, it was a year of global change, of revolutions, some unfulfilled, but something that we're still trying to process in more ways than we can probably account for today. Sanjay? I think my memory is in some ways in between. What I remember is the, of course, images from Tiananmen Square that summer. And I was just getting ready to move to Wales to an international boarding school where there were

students from over 70 countries. So those images that Arne was talking about of this extraordinary movement in Eastern Europe and in Russia, I was watching it on TV, but with students who were all 16, 17 years old who were from these countries, from Hungary, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, but then also students from elsewhere too. So the other one was that there were students from China, and they were watching what was happening. They had just come from Tiananmen. And the other image I remember, because it was incredibly moving, was Walter Sisulu from the ANC being released, and we were watching it on the BBC. And the African students, you know, sort of burst into song. So it was very moving to see that because it was mediated through these very real experiences. Incredible. Most of us would have had some experience of the monumental events of that year

but magnana you lived it you were in bulgaria and you lived the period prior to 1989 and that's where i'd like to start is that leading up to 1989 before you saw the people in the streets and blue jeans what were some of the signs that socialism was in trouble. The first signs. Socialism promised not only equality, but fulfillment and a different kind of human experience. My parents firmly believed in it. My mother donated hundreds of hours of volunteer labor to build the streets of Bulgaria, to build factories, to modernize, to have electricity.

But then she died in total disappointment. She wouldn't vote for anything. Part of that lack of fulfillment of socialism is, I think a Polish sociologist said it once, socialism tried to function as a factory, as a belt that was producing this kind of modern changes without taking care of the human soul. It is the human soul that did not prosper. What I was lacking was ability to talk about things that were important to me as a person. Frankly, there are even little things. I grew up with one pair of shoes. So between grade one and grade five, I had one pair of brown shoes.

I was sick of the damn shoes. I wanted white shoes. I wanted something that expresses me. But because economy, politics, social life was so bland, it was like, you know, a line of production. They wouldn't even produce or market shoes to fulfill all of these kind of desires. And so socialism catered to the economy and also failed to fulfill the promise of equity, especially for women. And I could see it not only in my family, but also the women I encountered on the factory floor, in the agricultural fields, my mother, we, and even I, we were working three jobs. Women were

taking care of families, but now they were also working in the factories. And so that triple burden on women, yet the patriarchal kind of values that permeated and anchored socialism persisted. Socialism was good for particular people, not for all people. Not to mention the life of minorities. And we had a huge Roma, so-called also gypsy minority. You didn't want to be Muslim or a gypsy in places like communist Poland or communist Bulgaria or Serbia. So socialism failed and we knew it. Even as young people. Even as young people. Arne, if you can pick up from there, within Europe at large, the entire continent, what are some of the forces of change that we're seeing in the period leading up to 89

that maybe echo some of the things that Maglano was talking about? Yeah, I think it's really important. I'm guilty of this. We teach grand narratives, and of course that usually starts with the big players. So you're looking at the Soviet Union and profound changes, particularly beginning in 1985 with Mikhail Gorbachev, who's pretty much know, pretty much

the most important person at the end of the Cold War in a lot of ways. But I think that that kind of belies the fact that there are a long train of reforms that go all the way back to the post-Stalin era. So really, you have to sort of unpack everything since the mid-1950s. And then really critical is that it's not a Soviet and Russian narrative. It's a narrative in every single country. Most of the reforms that lead to things like the wall coming down start in Lithuania and in Hungary and in Bulgaria. And they're carried out by average everyday people who, as Maglena said, weren't even really aware of the full scale that they're doing. And Sanjay, this is a great segue to your next part because it is hard to get it all into one sentence or one comment, but there is unrest absolutely everywhere. I mean, and you nodded to this at the beginning of your comments.

Could you speak to what was going on outside of Europe? Where was the unrest, do you think, where was it most consequential on the global stage? Wow. Or however you want to. I'm going to need an escape hatch. In Latin America, you have what's called the third wave of democracy. It begins in Europe and Southern Europe,

Greece and Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, which become democratic. And then it accelerates through Latin America. In the 1980s, Brazil, Argentina, Chile. Actually, in 1989, all three countries have very important, crucial elections. In some cases, the first elections for decades. In the case of Brazil, for instance, you have Taiwan and South Korea becoming democratic in the late 1980s. You have enormous changes in China.

And I think that's where the contrast is very interesting. Tiananmen, we remember, is a tragic moment, and it was. But in China in the 1980s, this was an era called reform and opening. And Deng Xiaoping introduced, again, with wasn't just one person, wasn't a great man of history, but he was incredibly consequential

of reforming China in lots of ways. And I think sort of two different ways we could talk about. One is politically, suffered enormously from the Cultural Revolution, feared mass mobilization of that type again, and the concentration of power in a dictator. And so there was a lot of liberalization, the political system, power sharing, a lot of reforms that took place. The party began to retreat from people's everyday lives. So that was on the political side. And there was also a rehabilitation of many who had suffered in the Cultural Revolution, particularly the intelligentsia, technocrats, and so on. And then in the economy, very, very different from

what happens in Russia in particular. But it was a very famous phrase of we shall cross the river by feeling the stones. So it was this very hybrid, incremental, experimental way of reforming the economy, first in agriculture, then in the cities. And it avoided some of the cataclysm that we saw in Russia in the 1990s. But there were also problems, and that's what was the prelude to Tiananmen, that there were four modernizations, agriculture, industry, defense, and science. But the students, beginning in 1985,

wanted a fifth modernization, which was democracy. And what's interesting is in 1989, along with this, a lot of people looking at China says, well, they're And what's interesting is in 1989, I'll end with this, a lot of people looking at China says, well, they're watching what's happening in Eastern Europe, which they were. And they're watching what's, of course, happening closer to home, South Korea, Taiwan. But it was the seventh anniversary of the May 4th movement, 1919, which was a student movement as well, which was championing science and democracy. And two great liberalizers, one died just before in April 1989, which is why the students mobilized in Tiananmen Square. And it struck fear into the party. It is, again, broad strokes, but this entire period leading up to 89,

Magdalena, it was a time of tremendous technological and cultural change, which probably fueled a lot of what we're talking about. Can you talk about to what extent that actually did contribute to the way 89 unfolded? You know, when I was doing research, because I also wrote a book and many other things regarding this period, I uncovered documents that the Bulgarian state was scared of the VCR. There was a special policy and special panels to discuss the VCR. The technology originates in the United States and is connected to, you know, satellite and the Cold War and how we will conquer space. But the video technology became enemy number one for socialist ideology in the sense that socialism was trying to control so much the mind and the soul

that it couldn't, however, control the new technologies. So through a vast black market of movies, Western music, even the student movements in Canada, probably you were campaigning at that time in the 1960s, in the United States, all over in Europe, all of these were penetrating our cultural landscape through VCR and illegal videocassettes. So one of the past time for younger people in Bulgaria was to get together in a darkened room with an illegal videocassette player and then with, you know, action movie, Hollywood movies and National Geographic and all of that stuff. So technology was actually key to the ways in which it was the beginning of globalization and the collapse of a bipolar world, West versus East, communism versus socialism, Cold War, and we are divided. The technology made possible communication

that the state could not control. And this was such a big deal that I uncovered archival documents that they were persecuting young people and people who owned VCRs. And they tried to also regulate the black market of culture. So cultural production was key. What it did above all, and always fascinates me, is also promoted a kind of masculinity. So young Bulgarian men, and I have my spouse here for 35 years, he grew up in that. They would watch all of these action movies,

but it gave them a different sense of being a man. They were the first actually to hit the streets. So Western culture is key to what was happening to us. But Ronald Reagan was also wrong. Socialism did not collapse because what he called serious catalogs bombarded us. It collapsed because this cultural content was fueling our imagination. And we wanted to find life that we participate and make decisions in both our present, but also for our future. And the socialist state would not allow that. Sanjay, just picking up on that, is there any sense in which Western culture played a part in some of the other movements that you talked about,

even Tiananmen, I guess politically or culturally? Yeah, I think in the case of Tiananmen, there was an opening. They didn't have a term like glasnost, but there was an opening to experience. I mean, what was very interesting in China from what I've read is Deng Xiaoping sent a lot of people from the party out to India,

to Europe and so on to see how do they structure their societies, how do they govern, how do their economies work. There was a real openness, which was quite striking. There were very powerful liberal movements in place. China had a real openness, which is quite striking. There were very powerful liberal movements took place. China had a new constitution in 1982, which really, again, tried to ground how

the party governed in law. So I think that's important. I think you see that also happening in India. There's some very important reforms that are happening in the 1980s in the economy as well. There's a rise of movements, of women's movements, environmental movement, lower caste movements. So there's this general liberalization which happens, which is really important. But I'll say one more thing, which is we talked about Reagan, Margaret Thatcher. In Canada, this is the rise of in the mid-1980s of the Conservative Party. There is what comes to be called the Washington Consensus that our society should be governed by liberalizing our markets, deregulating, privatizing. And that becomes the common wisdom, that this is how we should govern our societies.

We should let the market reign. And that produces terrible distress in places like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. It's called a lost decade. Growth basically stagnated. We talked today about another lost decade post-COVID and the poly-crisis. It's referring back to the 1980s. Before we get to the actual 1989, Arna, I just wanted to, if you don't mind, speak about whether the end of the war in Vietnam had any influence on, if it's something you're able to speak to, any of you actually, whether that would have had any effect on what was going on in Europe and elsewhere? Sure. Can I just say, I was also afraid of the VCR. I couldn't get that timer going.

It was like 12 o'clock perpetually. You know, the end of the Vietnam War is, I mean, from an American perspective, and here it comes, right? The end of the Vietnam War is 1975. For all intents and purposes, the fall of Saigon. That is not the narrative for everybody in Southeast Asia. So relevant to 1989 is that this is the year in which Vietnam withdraws after a 10-year occupation of Cambodia, which might not mean much for most people here in North America and elsewhere, but it really did signal a fundamental shift that was premised on a reconciliation of sorts between the People's Republic of China and the United States, who ended up through the 1980s in the most bizarre, incestuous relationship, two fundamental former

foes supporting the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as an oppositional government against Vietnam. And it also meant that Vietnam had spent the better part of a decade in profound isolation internationally. So when they withdraw, it signals both the success of a PRC-US reconciliation. It really represents the end of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union also withdraws its support of Vietnam. And Vietnam begins a long process of reconciliation of its own, you know, rehabilitation of the global community. So the Vietnam War really does come to an end with the closure of the third Indo-Chinese War,

which is 1989 for all intents and purposes. And that starts this era of so-called dragons in Southeast Asia. Big countries like Thailand, which I study, and Laos, Cambodia, they all go through this really arduous process. So it's not on par, pardon me, with the revolutions that you see in Eastern Europe or Tiananmen, but if you're Southeast Asian, it's a really huge year too, globally. So then we get to 1989 very quickly.

And of course, as you all pointed out, the biggest feature is the fall of the Berlin Wall. And I could already hear, even in our earlier conversations, you know, different interpretations of what that moment meant for us personally, but also for the societies that we live in. So I actually wouldn't mind hearing from all of you kind of where you situate that event. You know, on its face, a hopeful, you know, monumental moment.

But I want to dig beneath that if possible. Can we start with you, Sanjay, and then go to Meglena and Arne? Well, I think it's an extraordinary moment because the key term that gets coined for the 1980s is civil society. I think there's sort of two the 1980s is civil society. I think there's sort of two senses. One is that society organizes itself. I mean, McGlynn was talking about that, that, you know,

in the Soviet space it was about, well, the party represents all. But that's not true, right? Society is made of plurality. And so civil society captures that idea that it's people organizing themselves into associations, this rich associational life that can take charge of its own destiny. But it's also the idea of it being civil. I think nonviolence was very important in quite a few of these movements. And so I think that in that sense, the wall falling down is quite extraordinary.

I think I'll probably leave it there. I mean, I think it's a moment of saying that there's power, there's social power in the civil society. And I think it's this moment of hope. But then what you see happening in the 1990s, we'll talk about, is that, in a sense, that power is then recovered by states, by parties, and so on. And so you get what's called a demobilization.

But in the 1980s, Taiwan,orea china india latin america east europe i mean it's extraordinary moment of movements of ngos of citizens you know forming into associations and becoming political actors yeah mcglennon that moment for me that moment stays in my mind as the time when an American style of capitalism went global. After socialist states collapsed, they were reincorporated in European and global economies in a way in which we didn't have much choice to reinvent or to build something that was totally new or different. So the rules of the market, the rules of global politics, geopolitics, the hegemonic relations of power within the world positioned us for a particular kind of incorporation in a new world order where capitalism has engulfed all spheres of human life, from culture to the home to even the bedroom.

Everything is about consumption, lack of regulation and prosperity, but rooted in material aspirations. But also for me, this is the moment when the utopian kind of thinking about what socialism could do for us died. And I think we continue to struggle with that. We haven't invented anything to replace that and to give us a sense of a future and what else could we do besides what we have now. And for that, 1989 is a big moment in human history. It's like the end of a big utopia, but also hope. Yeah. Arne? I lived and worked and taught in Berlin, and it really was unscripted, the fall of the wall. We really do forget that.

It's a consequence of a lot of different actions. You know, now we look back and we see it, but there was really no plan, even so much as we know famously that Gunter Schabowski, who was the guy responsible for delivering the latest policy on visas in East Germany, you know, he made a mistake. Maybe it was calculated, but he said, yeah, I think the policy is changing. Some journalist asked him when, and he said, as far as I know,

shuffling these imaginary papers onto the side. He said, effective immediately. And people went, what? Effective immediately? That means that there's no wall anymore. But you've got to go backwards. The wall really comes down starting with Hungary. In May earlier that year, the Hungarians dismantled their border with Austria. That sends the signal. So for us here in the West, it was a massive moment, even more so in Eastern Europe, but totally unscripted. Yeah, totally. But you know,

the wall is not the symbolic actually for every one of us. In places like Bulgaria, the Berlin Wall didn't mean anything to me. It's something far away. It's just a monument that stands for the Cold War. And the divide actually and the threat came from the East, from the Soviet Union. So we were grateful that the Soviet Union didn't invade because we expected that they would invade. So for all of the reforms and even today, we are looking at the former Soviet Union as this absolutely ungovernable, unleashed power that at any moment could spill and absolutely kill us. And we see it in Ukraine. So it's not the wall that picks my attention. It's actually the East and who is coming from there. And this was a Russian empire. I mean,

at the end of the day, we can call it whatever you like. Soviet empire, socialist empire, right? And so today a lot of decolonization is going on in Canada, but nobody talks about decolonization of peoples in the former Soviet Union. For all of the indigeneity and everything we do to reconcile, who is going to narrate that history of the millions who died under socialism because they were indigenous? Talk about the death of utopia. And that goes back to 1917. Exactly. It's an empire. Exactly. It's an empire. On Ideas, you're listening to the year 1989, uprisings and downfalls.

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Unimaginable scenes last night in which people from both East and West Berlin clambered over the Berlin Wall. Dozens of East Germans have lost their lives trying to climb over it since 1961. At 3 o'clock this morning, they were chipping away at it with hammers and chisels. A wall comes down, and the people rise up, from Bulgaria to Beijing. This is the year 1989. U uprisings and downfalls. Meglena Todorova, Sanjay Ruparelya, and Arne Kislenko in conversation at the Stratford Festival about a hinge moment in history, a year whose aftershocks still shape our world today. our world today.

Could you address the gender aspect of it, of the uprisings that were going on in 1989? And there's also a generational aspect that was different. Women were the backbone of a kind of quiet resistance, but also quiet questioning as to what are we doing? Is this working for all of us, for all citizens? Is this what my mother was giving her, you know, labor and life for? No, it wasn't. And what I learned on the factory floor, we smoked lots of cigarettes. There was no drugs, nothing like that. But we would start smoking early. And so during the lunch breaks with other women, older women, I would hear these incredible stories. That stories were alternative imaginations. Those were critical understandings of the

socialist system and even our unprotected labor. And this was transplanted from woman to woman and generational as well. And so that history, however, is yet to be told. Sandro, did you want to add something? I'd say two different things. So one would be the experience of socialism in Bulgaria or Eastern Europe is quite different from the experience of socialism in communism in China,

where actually there was a remarkable equalization, not fully, between men and women. China's very poor when Mao dies, but it's remarkably equal. And that equality in education and health and work is quite transformative for that society. That's one thing. The second thing I would say is, you said, you know, here's the socialism, we say it in the singular. I think that's something that's why a post-colonial perspective is so important because there isn't a single socialism yes just like there's not a single democracy the varieties of capitalism the varieties of democracy rise socialism so i think it was previous family i was 73 right so this was what happens chile in Chile in 70, Allende says we can have a different kind of democratic socialism or social democracy. But guys, there's a view in crucial because, yes, we want to, in South Africa's case, dismantle apartheid.

But we don't want to simply recreate a Western society. It's a post-colonial society. And they're trying to create something new. And that's where the socialist ideas are very important in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, in the South African Constitution of 1994. And in India, it's remarkable, the Supreme Court begins to reinterpret the Constitution to see social and economic rights as fundamental. They're trying to reinterpret the Constitution.

So I think that plurality you talk about is really important. And to see that, as you say, to de-center Europe and to have a global history is really important. Arne, did you want to add something here? Sure. I mean, there is a Soviet empire, right, that we're talking about. There's also a Russian empire. So if you're in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and so on,

it's a very different relationship altogether than most of what we now call the Istans, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and so on, where it's a very traditional Russian empire. So, yeah, there's a very traditional Russian empire. So, yeah, there's a plurality that really needs to be addressed. Okay. Maglena, back to you. If we look at the ripple effects of 1989, in the early 90s, of course, Yugoslavia collapsed. There's a brutal war in what was Yugoslavia.

What seeds of that conflict were already present in 1989? So the Balkans emerged after the Ottoman Empire collapses with Russia coming to dominate the region heavily, but also borders that are leaving so many ethnic minorities outside of their natural homeland. their natural homeland. That created so much ethnic rivalry, but also socialism didn't do much to deal with that. The tensions had always been there for a whole century. When socialism collapsed, Yugoslavia was, however, non-committed, right? And they would not commit either to a West or an East. a west or an east but uh the serbs emerged as victorious and then the war erupted one thing however that happened after 1999 and the 1990s is the europeanization of the balkans and former socialist countries all of a sudden we are a european union, as we were not even considered European. And so there is a great deal now of conversation. What does this mean even for a European Union?

When these countries joined, what are we doing then in the Union? Are we protecting the Union as we saw it with Syrian refugees, with the refugees right from Africa and stuff? Are we to protect the real West? What is the purpose of the Balkans in that? And how come people who were not European are not now European? So these are not only cultural notions, they organize and govern global politics and how things are negotiated today. Yeah. And certainly, again, as we've said many times this week, the subject of another great panel at some stage. It's a whole other very important aspect of all of this.

I wonder if we could zoom out just slightly and we'll go back to you, Sanjay, and just talk about the few years after 1989, Francis Fukuyama, as you mentioned, proposed that it was declared that it was the end of history. And I know you've spoken to him recently on your series on the front lines of democracy. Could you talk about just, you know, what we understood from the statement was that democracy prevailed or liberal democracy prevailed and that's it, it's the end of history.

It hasn't quite worked out that way. What went wrong? Small question. Small question. So he has this famous statement, Prattser Gamma, right? That the end of the Cold War doesn't just signify the end of this rivalry

between the Soviet Union and the United States, but that it signifies the end of a conflict or a battle between ideas of how to govern society. And so liberal capitalist democracy is what's victorious. And he's often misinterpreted, I think. When I had met him, he said, you know, I think it must be his met him. He said, you know,

I think it must be his great exasperation. People don't read the book. They just hear the tagline. And he said he never thought that history ended. There would be conflict. But he didn't think that there would be a search, as you said, for another organizing principle. Our societies would be liberal, capitalist, and democracy. Democratic in different ways, but that would be the template. And I think you've already mentioned some of the events. What happens in the 90s, nationalism returns with a vengeance. So it returns, of course, in Yugoslavia. You have genocide in Rwanda. You have in India, the rise of Hindu nationalism. It's contained in that period, but you have the worst communal violence since partition in 1992. So what you see is this upsurge of nationalism in the 1990s at the same time that you see the creation of the World Trade Organization. So it's interesting what's happening here.

It's a sort of dynamic. On the one hand, you get the construction of international institutions which are trying to set rules for the whole world. This is how your economy should be structured. This is how you're supposed to govern your societies through these elections. This is what democracy looks like. And it's a bit of a straitjacket. And so you have these forces that are erupting in various societies and have some very long-term deep roots to say, well, actually, we want to govern our society slightly differently. We have a different image.

So those battle of ideas of ideology are still very potent. And I think that's something that when you're sitting in the West, and particularly if you adopt that triumphalist narrative, you don't see comings. People say, where did nationalism come from? Well, it was always there, fueled through the Cold War. Well, can we pick up on that, Arne, the whole idea of a triumphalist U.S. post-89, and the adventures, as we say, in Afghanistan and the Middle East. What does that do to the U.S. as a world power?

Yeah, I think you have a kind of orphaning process. And by that I mean with the logic, the raison d'etre of the Cold War now having gone with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States kind of quickly washed its hands of a lot of places in the world and led directly or indirectly to major crises, right, in places like Somalia and other parts of the world. And then I always, it's mine, I copyrighted this, so you can't use it. I haven't covered it. The United States seeks a more arity. I think innately a great power needs a kind of foil, right? We've seen that throughout history. And the United States now without the Soviet Union, with China emergence not yet clearly its logical foe, the United States ends up being the world policeman and very quickly finds itself in places like Iraq, which is the obvious place.

I mean, it's less than a year from 1989, where the United States now gets involved after Saddam's invasion in 1990. And then in 1991, they go in militarily at the head of a coalition. But that happens elsewhere. It happens in Panama. We often forget, right? But George Bush goes in and hunts down Manuel Noriega with really bad music out front of them,

blaring away at the Panamanian government. They go into the Philippines to protect Corazon Aquino's government. So you see this kind of reaction in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet state. So really zooming out, Sanjay, and looking at the machinations of of the political order the world's political order post 1989 you know China was a pariah sort of leading up to that but you know now we look at China as a major power and kind of this balancing power to the United States what's the line that you would draw from 89 to that to? Again, in a subject of a lecture probably, but in a few words. So in the 90s, there are two major developments.

One is that it's opening up to the world in terms of exports and investment and trading. That's the beginning of the rise of the trading nation of China, so that within two decades it is the biggest trading partner of most most countries in the world, eclipses the United States. And the U.S. welcomes that and actually encourages that. And they want them to join the WTO in the early 2000s because they think some that if you are going to become a more capitalist society, you're more likely to democratize. Get that one wrong. In the 1990s, also, though, in China, what you see is quite remarkable. You

see an expansion of personal freedoms, and you see the expansion of the rule of law. And again, the party is encouraging that in many cases, but it begins to shift and reverse around 2003, 2004. And I think what you see there is that, you know, the party in Beijing is, as they're also learning lessons from what happened in 1990s. Shock therapy was imposed on Russia. They see that society implode. They say, we're not going to do that. So as Deng Xiaoping very puts it, you know, you hide your power and you bide your time. And China begins to grow incredibly rapidly.

It transforms. It's the biggest economic transformation in the history of the world in that speed. And I think in a sense, I think most long-term view is that it was inevitable that it would happen. And I think it reaches that certain pinnacle in 2008 when they host the Olympics. China's arrived on the world stage in a different way. And the hardest thing to understand is what would it look like to live in a world that is not governed by the West, which it had for two centuries and shaped by that? It's not to say that all these other countries, of course, world history is shaped by many, but it's the West that dominates it. And suddenly you can see it's happening in capitalism in the West.

Like, what does it look like to live in a world where we welcome the rise of these countries, India, China, but they may not actually see the world the same way we do, and they may not want these institutions to be governed that way. We may want to create our own institutions. It's a very contentious period. And I think that's something that everyone is still grappling with. Yeah. I mean, I'll speak for myself that living the last 20, 30 years of life, you are taught to understand that we are still living in the world

that was created in 1989. I know that's definitely changed now. I wonder if you could, maybe each of you speak to how different it is now to what was created as a world order in 89 and 90. Arne. Oh, I knew she was going to see me first. You know, in some ways, it's not that different. I mean, it depends on one's perspective, right? Certainly, in some ways, it's not that different. I mean, it depends on one's perspective, right? Certainly in China's case, it's a vastly different world. If you're speaking from Moscow's perspective, it's different, but not in all the right ways. And there's a real lament, I suppose, at least in Putin and his inner circle, to sort of romanticize what they had and to reimagine it. And I think what we're living through now in the war in Ukraine is to a large degree exactly that,

his reimagining of both the very old Russian Empire as well as his own learned experience. He was there. And so I think from his perspective, having seen how the people took charge of their own fates and led to protest, he cannot tolerate that both within Russia and in the case of Ukraine. Ukraine represents to him an existential threat in a very big way. And he's reimagined it in the most horrific fashion, in a brutal, totally unjustifiable world. So I still think you see the legacy of 89. And from an American perspective, I'd say the same thing. Americans are still grappling with their global power. They now have to share the stage, as Sanjay said, with China.

And that's troubling for a lot of Americans. And of course, we can go to guys like Trump. In part, Trump's success has been this reimagining, however bizarre it may be for some, of American greatness, which has been lost on the global stage. I think it's premature to count the United States dead in any global sense, but its power has been greatly diminished. Its reputation, its credibility has been greatly diminished by virtue of its own consequences. Long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really indicated how futile their efforts had been and how arrogant that worldview of triumph in 1989 quickly fell apart. Maglena, what are we still living in that remains from that world order that was created in 89?

Two things, a big change, and I'll pick up on my colleague's point, how much also didn't change. Speaking from within the Balkans and building upon Sanjay's point, whether it's a Chinese power, American power, or a Soviet power, for us in the Balkans, it's power. They'll come dominate you. And where power dominates, it suffocates any sense of humanity, any sense of self-determination. And that is not conducive to either democracy or a world order where we also participate as equal in political decisions, in economic decisions, and so on. So one of the greatest threats in places like the Balkans is the presence of China and Chinese companies that are buying infrastructural things in Albania, like airports, roads in Serbia, fueling all of this money. But then again, they're coming telling you what to do. So what exactly is changing?

Little. That's true in Africa and in Southeast Asia too. Yes, and there are now horrendous stories about how horrible they are as employers even in Africa. They abuse African workers. They're as racist, you know, as other societies. And so is this the kind of power we want in the Balkans? Uh-uh. And what hasn't changed also today is that we see again, you know,

the skyrocketing of violence against women in all societies around the world. So what is changing for a woman then is the question across the 20th century. I will leave it to you to answer. What has changed for a woman then is the question across the 20th century. I will leave it to you to answer. What has changed for women? Honestly, another panel. So I think what's interesting about what seems to have not so much not changed, but sort of redoxes, it's openly talked about, are we in a new Cold War? Both is it happening and do we want it?

And you certainly see it in the United States, and I think you see it in Canada too, with China seen as a threat. So I think, again, if you're sitting here in Canada or the US or in Europe, you say, well, we, I think those who fought the Cold War and thought that was a good fight, say now we have a new Cold War

and we have to fight China now. But if you're in the south they had a different cold war and they do not want to pick sides because in many cases china is they see it of course as a threat in some ways but in some ways not some ways china came and did things that the western powers wouldn't do in sub-saharan africa and latin america in india even india which has just fought its first border war again, not a war, but conflict in 2020. It's the worst relations with China since the 1960s. And yet trade is increasing.

So in the South, if you're New Delhi or Johannesburg or Brasilia, they are afraid of a new Cold War. And that's something I think if we're living in the West, we have to be really cognizant of. There are cynical reasons for that, but there are also principled reasons because they realize that that Cold War was ruinous for many countries in the global South, which is why a term that India uses, I think many countries in the South have it. They want to maximize their strategic autonomy. They do not want to be a subordinate ally of the United States or Europe or the West because they paid a heavy price.

Okay. We have a few questions, so maybe a bit of a lightning round. Since 1989, wages have stagnated in the Western world. The gap between the rich and poor has grown. Is the narrative shifting to, quote, capitalism as a failed experiment? If not, should it? Here is what I've been thinking. Please.

Aren't we arrested in this dichotomy of socialism versus capitalism? What else do we have out there? So I share this profound doubt in the capacity of both capitalism and socialism to support the kinds of society that I want to see. A genuinely democratic society defined by equality, defined by precisely these rights also of normal people to have equally good lives and not only a few to benefit from the prosperity of the global economies that we also celebrate. So both for me, capitalism and socialism have failed. But the bigger question is, do we have anything else? For me today, this particular historical moment is defined by crisis of imagination. We keep continuing and insisting and debating,

should we go here to the left or should we go to the right? The collapse of socialist countries in 1989 was the most profound opening in human history to envision something different, something novel, something radical. But we couldn't. And we couldn't because there were other forces. And, you know, all of a sudden we became European. All of a sudden, right, we are looking now for other people to come and govern us. radical imagination at the moment. Therefore, I think that 1999 should stand as a manifestation of doubt and that doubt is common where I come from, in absolutely the capacity of both capitalism and socialism to give us the societies that we crave. This brings the question of education. What are we doing and how are we educating young people for these kinds of imaginations to

transcend the arrest? Are we teaching them for that? I'm in an educational faculty. I'll say I'm doubtful about that too, because I'm the only person who teaches anything about the history of socialism. Okay, 73% of young people want socialism. Do they know anything about it? None. So how do we position ourselves for radical imagination? Last question, and we really do need to keep it very short. From each of you, a statement. If you look back to 89, what have we learned from that year about how change happens in history? And Sanjay, I'd like to start with you, then Arne, then Maglena. I think like Arne said, it's the numerous acts of individuals deciding not to shoot, deciding not to fear a soldier.

And they say institutions collapse because suddenly somebody doesn't believe they exist anymore, right? At the same time, I do think that the decisions of leaders, without subscribing to any great man theory of history, great woman theory of history, think about Thatcher and others, they are, it's enormously consequential. And I think what I take from 89 that I bring to the present is that there are these sort of tectonic plates of history that can collide and produce like this revolutionary kind of year.

And I think we're living through that now. We're in this moment of great uncertainty and ambivalence because we have to create a new order. Because the old institutions don't. And I think I'll just end on that. That what you said is absolutely right. We have a crisis of imagination it's easier for us to think about a technological solution to climate change than to changing our institutions whether it's our democratic institutions or our economic systems that's a real crisis of imagination okay yeah for me it's it's

just how really precarious uh history. I mean, how things change instantly. We were still producing what were called Sovietologists in 1989. They were graduating with degrees at the same time that the whole damn thing was falling apart. And then last but not least is, yeah, socialism, you know, has been, I think, widely invalidated by these experiences. Although to some people it's making a comeback. I have colleagues at the university who call themselves Marxists or neo-Marxists. And I'm always like, really? And I think the reason I get a little upset about that is because it denies the long era of

tremendous suffering that people have endured. Not that capitalism's been a panacea for everybody, suffering that people have endured. Not that capitalism's been a panacea for everybody, but you know, where can you find a Marxist regime that was nice? Let's be honest, right? And that, I think, we need to explore a lot more honestly, right? Exactly. Honestly. Meglena, you were both a scholar and someone who lived, you know, who saw 89 on the ground, where the ground zero of 89. Can you speak to what you think, how you think change happens when it does? I've always thought that we think of revolutions as hitting the street and violence and some clashes and this kind of tremendous struggle between forces of power. But revolution starts at the dinner table. It starts in one's heart, in the conversations that we have with each other,

and in asking each other critically, do we like the world where we live in? And above all, how can we get where we want to go? I've also learned, I think, that structural changes, you know, the economy and all of these things, socialism proved that they're not, panacea, also for good social life. It is not enough to change the economy. Bringing economic prosperity for everyone didn't alleviate racism, ethnic inequalities, gender inequalities, sexuality inequalities. It didn't end it.

So the economy is not going to solve it. However, values, shifting cultural imaginations will. And that's why I go back to education and that conversation at the dinner table and asking, what else is out there and how can we get there? We'll never think of dinner the same way. Thank you. Sanjay, Miglena, and Arne, thank you so much. Wonderful. Wonderful discussion. Thank you.

Thank you. On Ideas, you've been listening to the year 1989, uprisings and Downfalls. It's the fifth and last in our series about Ingears in the 20th Century, a collaboration with the Stratford Festival in Ontario. On today's program, our panelists were Meglena Todorova, Sanjay Ruparelya, and Arne Kislenko.

This series was produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth, with production assistance from Annie Bender. We recorded this series in July 2023. At the Stratford Festival, special thanks to Julie Miles, Gregory McLaughlin, Vern Good, Renata Hansen, Mira Henderson, and James Hyatt. Bern Good, Renata Hansen, Mira Henderson, and James Hyatt. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.