The year 1989 was, as proclaimed in the American mass media, a banner year for democracy. Across Eastern Europe, Soviet backed Communist regimes crumbled, peacefully for the most part. A "velvet revolution" rose to power in Czechoslovakia. The Berlin wall crumbled. Solidarity took charge in Poland. In the independent but repressive Communist country of Romania, the "democratic" revolution triumphed a harder way, with the rising against and bloody fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. In the Soviet Union itself, Mikhail Gorbachev aligned himself solidly with the liberal elements in Soviet society, and the country moved rapidly towards a more open political order. Only in China, with the massacre in and around Tienanmen Square, did the tide towards democracy seem to be momentarily arrested in 1989. But the enthusiasm about democracy's progress was, for a time, heady. People spoke even of an "end of history," an end, that is, to the ideological strife between Western style democracy and other ideologies. Democracy had won the day, and had only a few pockets of poverty and ethnic strife to mop up before the final triumph.
By early 1991, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be slowly fading, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In Poland, nasty squabbles broke out within Solidarity's leadership. Czechoslovakia and Hungary seemed stalled. The new, post Ceausescu Romania looks all too similar to the old Romania.1Gorbachev has drifted into alignment with the neo authoritarian Right in Soviet politics; while public political debate remains open and frank, calls for "discipline" are increasingly widespread. People are concerned about bread, not about freedom of speech. Throughout the region, ethnic tensions have emerged, coming at times to the forefront; "democracy" and "self determination" seem all to often to be taken as meaning the right of majority populations to harshly repress minorities of all sorts.2
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