"1989" and the Path Towards It

Historians tend to "explain" the failure of State Socialism by recounting the history of its ultimate crisis; social scientists in contrast are mostly interested in the long-term structural reasons of "1989". Both approaches are not in themselves wrong, but they are one-sided. The essay develops an interpretative framework connecting events and structure, actors and system, long-term and short-term developments, process logic and contingency. The incurable structural deficiencies of State Socialism do not offer a sufficient explanation for "1989". Only when faced with the new global historical constellation of circumstances which developed at the beginning of the 1970s with the electronic revolution and globalisation did the State Socialist countries prove to be definitely defeated in the competition of the economic systems. The death sentence was already pronounced over the State Socialist systems at the beginning of the 1970s, but the paths towards execution were long and different, as becomes clear with regard to the GDR, Czechoslovakia as well as Poland and Hungary.