The revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of state socialism in Europe. While some declared the “end of history” and capitalist liberal-democracy’s triumph, events in Central Europe were also seen as the pivot of a global “democratic moment” shaped by images of crowded city squares and hopes for democratic renewal.

In Central Europe, the “end of history” did not simply signal the collapse of progress for left and liberal intellectuals but rather the end of the age of totalitarianism that would be replaced by a liberal democratic order founded on memory of the past. This panel examines the emergence of the post-Cold War order by asking how Central Europeans themselves made sense of the period. How did their political and moral visions shape the new order? What was the historical significance of these efforts?

Since the Helsinki Accords and Charter 77, the language of “human rights” and older interest in democratization increasingly united concerns of intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The panel examines how 1989 emerged as a moment which suggested the possibility of continental moral and political re-foundation on such terms. We show how narratives that centered on overcoming totalitarianism became central to legitimizing a vision of a “new” unified Europe between 1989 and the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht. Where simultaneous concerns about “globalization” suggested the timeliness of theories of “cosmopolitanism,” fears of return to Europe’s past also entailed the embrace of a liberal internationalism that underemphasized such idealism’s imbrication in structures of global power. Building on recent scholarship (Siegelberg, Wheatley, Bartel, Stanley-Becker) that has emphasised Central Europe’s place in the transformation of international order, we explore the work of Central European individuals in interpreting the meaning of the post-Cold War era. The panel is intended for an audience of scholars of Central Europe, the Cold War, the history of liberal internationalism, and European intellectual history.

Our papers approach these questions, events, and historiography through studies of the place of migration in the history of 1989; of anxieties over reunified Germany’s new place in the world during the Gulf War; and of Central European intellectuals’s search for post-totalitarian normative foundations and their transformation amid the contingencies of the Cold War’s end. Each is concerned with the definition of 1989 as both an “end” and a “beginning”, and with how such efforts defined the significance of Europe’s place in the new international order.

In revisiting the “end of history” through attention to Central Europe we consider how narratives both from, and of, Central Europe influenced the formation of Eurocentric views of the “totalitarian” past that would become central to visions of Europe’s post-Cold War global role. Visions of Central Europe sat at the heart of imagined returns to the pre-WW1 agenda of a democratic constitutional “Europe of Nations”. These were also ideas which, as Stuart Hall has suggested, simultaneously became a way of “evading the past,” obscuring how Europe’s history was always shaped by its relation to the “'non-European.”