“I don’t know what solidarność means in Persian. But this is what it looks like….”

This is the facebook comment of a Polish friend. Across the globe these days, when looking at the massive protests in Iranian cities, memories come back of Berlin, Budapest, Prague 1989  – in other words, of the peaceful revolution against European communism that ended the Cold War, heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union and meant the demise of state socialism as well as a triumph for market democracy.  Manifestations of mounting anger about a regime suppressing freedom, the global excitement, the regime’s reactions ranging from helplessness to intransigence to violence, its allegations of “foreign interference”, but above all, the feeling that we are seeing one of those rare but momentous points in time when history is made by the people in the street (quite literally): Whoever has lived through those dramatic months at the end of the eighties in Europe, had a clear sense of déjà vu this week about Iran.

So is this ’89? The short answer is no, because a collapse of the mullah regime is not imminent, according to most observers. The long answer is, however, that depending on further developments, this may very well be something like Prague in 1968. And I am less referring to the violence applied by Soviet troops then, although massive violence now seems to follow in Iran. The much more important parallel is that most of the people then, and certainly all of their leaders, did not want to abolish socialism. They wanted “socialism with a human face”, just like the demonstrators in Iranian cities constantly repeat they are not marching for “regime change”, only for their votes to be respected, for reform and more personal freedom. And come to think of it, even Poland’s striking shipyard workers in August 1980 did not dream about a market economy. But they paved the way for its arrival 9 years later, just like it took the Czechs and Slovaks 21 years to make Venceslas Square again reverberate with their protest – and this time, it was for the end of communism, period.  But all that means that in a wider sense, and with all due respect for cultural and historical differences – yes, we may witness some sort of ’89 moment, if not now, then in 1 or 2 or 3 years, not in 10 or 20. (Maybe YouTube and twitter have helped accelerate history, too). After all, it took a whole year from the first massive protests against the Shah in 1978, to the takeover of Ayatollah Khomeini in early 1979.

In other words, regime change cannot be excluded, but will probably happen sometime in the future. After all, the Islamic Republic of Iran is an authoritarian regime whose brutality and disregard for human rights has become abundantly clear in the last 30 years, irrespective of whether “moderates”, “reformers”, “conservatives” or “populists” were President, because these  directly elected politicians are unimportant in comparison to the “Supreme Leader” and the complex system of different councils of guardians and experts that are to guarantee the continuity of the Islamic revolution. These protests are only partly about an election which may or may not have been rigged. They are much more about the growing frustration of a growing number of well educated, internationally connected urban youngsters who reject the discrimination of women, the bullying by the religious police, the economic inefficiency of this regime. In its generational aspect, this protest wave even bears some similarity to May 1968 in Paris and other West European cities. But different from ’68, here a student protest quickly developed into a broad movement encompassing the urban middle class and even parts of the power structure. And even if the system is – as yet – not in question, it fills me with much hope that many thousands of mainly young people are risking their liberty, their health and possibly even their lives in order to send a signal to the powers that be. That is a clear parallel to ’89. It is true that in Iran, the “hardliners”, and Ahmadinejad personally, have a lot of active supporters in the population, especially among rural dwellers and the urban poor. But we often forget that in communist countries before 1989, there were also whole strata of the population that were quite happy with the system, and indifferent to, or even disgusted by the dissidents. East German cities saw mass demonstrations against “Coca Cola imperialism and its lackeys” still in November 1989 – and they were genuine. The fact that the regime has supporters should not eclipse the fact that the opposition is growing.

Much has been made in the Bush years of how the neocons (and, to be fair, a good deal of Clinton Democrats as well, plus a sizeable number of Brits, Poles, Czechs and other Europeans) may have simply overstated the global significance of ’89. In the eyes of liberal critics, their fatal mistake was to assume that in Russia, in the Caucasus, and above all in the Middle East, regimes would collapse and dictatorships tumble, and democracy become stable and sustainable, with the same ease as they did between Tallinn and Tirana in the two years from 1989 to 1991. This “89 assumption” was taken to be one of the root causes for “catastrophe” in Iraq, for the “backslide” in some of the colour revolutions of Ukraine, Georgia, Kirgizstan, for the turnaround in Russia itself, and for the alleged collapse of democratization in the “Greater Middle East”.  By the end of the Bush era, maybe except for places like Radio Liberty, ’89 had ceased to be anything but an isolated European phenomenon without significance for non-European contexts. Today, it is time to think again. One argument of the critics of the “89 assumption” was that it disregards cultural differences, and that Middle Eastern societies are just too different from Western ones (i.e. too tribal, medieval) to be able or willing to adopt Western models. To me, this argument has always smelled of racism. Of course we’re not talking about introducing “Westminster democracy” in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. We are, however, talking about the question whether certain unalienable rights are respected, and whether the people can change their rulers (not just a relatively powerless figure) through free and fair elections. In the end, what would a liberal critic of the global freedom agenda say when facing an Iranian protester? Sorry, my friend, your culture is too different from the West to apply human rights standards? I can’t help you because my respect for your culture is too great?

And what about global reactions now? Again, ’89 can be of value. Or, to be more precise, the decades before ’89: It would be an understatement to say that the West has not always been enthusiastic about protest and opposition in the Iron Curtain countries. They were often embarrassing to Western leaders, or to (mostly leftist) political parties, with their insistence on political idealism, and on the obligation of democrats in power to help democrats in repressive regimes. For adherents or realpolitik of all political colours, opposition movements in dictatorships were simply a nuisance -  meaningless at best, and a provocation to the hardliners at worst. On the other hand, those dissidents were, for many decades, sometimes afraid of too much open support from foreign powers whose agents they were supposed to be in the narrative of the regime. In that sense, so far President Obama has been right in his cautious approach, criticising the Iranian regime only indirectly at first, then more overtly as the violence increased. He has a point saying that overt support from the US government is, at this point in time, probably neither wished for by Iran’s new mass opposition, nor would it help. But that means that other governments, and the European Union, should step in. And especially, political parties, NGOs and fuman rights organisations should raise their voices. The facebook/YouTube/twitter solidarity is impressive, but it needs to be followed up with at least moral support from all democratic governments and organisations worldwide.

Having said this, I harbour no illusion that a victory for the opposition would mean a quick change in the substance of Iranian international behaviour: above all, the efforts to develop nuclear weapons, the support for terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, or the imperial claims in the region. Moussavi himself began the nuclear research program when he was Prime Minister in the 1980s. And whoever emerges victorious from this crisis, it will be a lot harder, at least for some time, to use the “carrot and stick” tactics applied by the West against the Iranian nuclear programme so far. On the other hand, one of the things the protesters seem to really mind is the international isolation into which Ahmadinejad has led Iran with his policies and rhetoric.  Maybe in the long run, if the system should change, we might one day see a more fundamental change in Iran’s international behaviour, too.

Russia’s reaction, by the way, is as predictable as it is further proof that all this indeed has something to do with 1989: The congratulatory tone by President Medvedev for his friend Ahmadinejad 3 days after the disputed election, when protests were already in full swing and the first casualties of police violence had occurred, speaks for itself. Of course Ahmadinejad is a good client for Russian weapons and nuclear technology. And of course his anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric go down rather well in Moscow these days. But the real, and most telling, reason for the Putin regime’s reaction to Iran is that today’s Russia doesn’t give a damn about democratic principles and human rights, anywhere in the world. It actually defines them as a threat, as we have seen in recent years. And just like China, it will prevent the United Nations from taking any meaningful action to help the cause of human rights in Iran, under the well-known formula of “internal affairs” not to be meddled in.

But the probably most important reference point to ’89 is that what is happening in Iran today is a solid confirmation that the West as a value system is not in decline. Ever since 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of Hezbollah and Hamas, the growing importance of political Islam, there has been a n ominous claim from Islamists worldwide, and a sneaking suspicion in Western societies: that maybe our societal model has outlived itself, and is – at least in other parts of the world – being replaced by other models, more authoritarian, collectivist, religious. The British author and former MI6 agent-turned- apologist for Islamism, Alastair Crooke, who is in Brussels this week to speak to Commission officials, has written a book with this idea as a central thesis: That Islamism is in the ascendant, and modern Western civilisation is doomed because of its “excessive individualism”. The book’s title is “Resistance – the Essence of the Islamic Revolution”. Well, what we see in the cities of Iran in these very hours, is massive resistance against Islamism, and in favour of a little bit more freedom of the individual. True, this is not the case for some Middle Eastern countries like Eqypt or Morocco where authoritarian regimes allied to the West are facing the considerable frustration of youngsters sometimes fascinated by political Islam. But the narrative of forever rising Islamism has been broken in a key country of the region – and this is bound to affect the rest. Another important fact is that Islamism is proven to have a gender problem:  The determination of young Iranian women in these protests is exceeding that of men. That is no minor thing. It is true that one of the new and imaginative forms of protest practised by Iranians, is standing on the roofs of city houses and shouting “Allahu akhbar!” – but we all know this is a smart way of outmanoeuvring the police and paramilitaries. On the other hand, one of the first images I saw from Tehran in this crisis was a group of youngsters simply chanting “We want freedom!” – in English. That is no resistance against the West. But it sounds very familiar to anyone who has seen ’89 and the years that led up to it.