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From Brezhnev to Brussels: Transformations of sovereignty in Eastern Europe

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Abstract

The year 1989 is widely fêted as a turning point in the history of Eastern Europe: nation-states were liberated from the tyranny of Soviet rule and regained their sovereign independence. This article challenges the conventional wisdom by arguing that the ‘limited sovereignty’ of the pre-1989 period, formally declared by Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, has been replaced by a new form of domination, this time from Brussels. However, while Eastern European states still face constraints on their political autonomy and self-government, the nature of this domination is different. Specifically, it coincides with the post-Cold War revision of the concept of sovereignty itself, where the attachment to the formal rights of sovereign independence and equality is lost. Eastern European states have found that continued limitations upon their sovereignty are today celebrated as the realization of the essence of sovereignty itself.

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Notes

  1. Judt (1994) usefully differentiates between Western and Eastern European illusions about 1989 and its aftermath.

  2. See, for instance, Marx and Engels’ lament on Poland's retreat from its own strength and vitality in the course of the eighteenth century (1953, p. 102).

  3. In 1526, at the battle of Mohacs, then in 1541 with the occupation of Pecs, Hungary was overrun by the Ottomans and Transylvania became a vassal of the Sultan.

  4. A poem by Polish poet, Rózewicz, on post-1989 transition. Cited in Davies (2001, p. 430).

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  1. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Chris J Bickerton

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Bickerton, C. From Brezhnev to Brussels: Transformations of sovereignty in Eastern Europe. Int Polit 46, 732–752 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2009.20

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