"But Who the Hell Is Organizing It...?": Revolutions and the conspiration theories in Eastern Europe
Abstrakt
How misunderstandings give rise to conspiracy theories about spontaneity, self-organisation and performativity of the East-European democratic and nationalist movements after 1989? In 1989 mass democratic and later nationalist movements rose up against governments in Eastern Europe and all communist regimes fell like overripe pears. The very speed and ease of this collapse immediately gave rise to speculations and conspiracy theories in the general public, and among those who had taken part in the movements.
The "staging" of the democratic revolutions (Central Europe) and their subsequent national ethnic conflicts (Yugoslavia, post-Soviet Caucasus), was blamed on diverse causes: the dark political forces of the Western powers (USA, EU, Germany), the hidden forces of international capital, power-hungry politicians, the dormant ethnic enemies of the bloody past, the secret police, and so forth... In this article I wish to record my own experience, as a student activist during the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution, as a researcher for several years during the ethnic wars in Yugoslavia and in the Post-Soviet Caucasus.
I address the main reasons that prevented understanding the post-communist mass movements. I create a model of the actor and of the whole movement and present an efficient perspective on: 1. the internal transformation of the actor-activist, 2. spontaneity and self-organization, 3. tendencies to political theatre.
Exploring question marks and speculations about the key moments of these mass movements contributes to their understanding.