Conclusion: Protest Politics, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Conflict

Abstract

The late 1980s witnessed a mobilization of ordinary people across Eastern Europe that played an important part in the conflicts that triggered the fall of communism. The levels of mobilization in the eastern part of socialist Yugoslavia exceeded those in most other parts of the region, and their immediate consequences were no less dramatic. And yet, images from popular and scholarly writing associated with this wave of mobilization stand out for different reasons. The generally accepted image of protest politics that unfolded across Eastern Europe is that of people power employed to bring about democratization of communist party-states. By contrast, the literature that touches on the antibureaucratic revolution and the episodes of mobilization that surrounded it conveys exclusively images of top-down, authoritarian mobilization and virulent, chauvinistic nationalism. The evidence I presented in this book suggests that most published accounts provide a misleading interpretation of this wave of mobilization. Below I sharpen my argument about the mobiliza-tional wave in the light of this evidence, and show how it sheds light on the fall of Yugoslav communism and the rise of a new populist authoritarianism, as well as on the break-up of Yugoslavia and the contemporary Serb—Albanian nationalist conflict in and over Kosovo.