refolution

Origin of the concept

Refolution was coined by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash to describe the political changes unfolding in Poland and Hungary in the spring of 1989. In 1988 he had posed the question of political change in those two countries as a historic choice between "reform or revolution?" A year later he conceded that the question itself had been badly framed. Writing on June 15, 1989, he described what was happening as a "singular mixture of both reform and revolution", something one might call a "revorm", or perhaps a "refolution". In a follow-up piece two months later he returned to the expression, explaining that the changes were not yet "revolutionary" in the sense of the storming of the Bastille, but continued to be "half-reform, half-revolution".

Why 'pure' categories fail

Garton Ash needed the portmanteau because his object of study fitted neither of the existing categories. Reform from above was real, but its agents were an enlightened minority inside the still ruling Communist parties. Pressure from below was real too, but it did not take the form of seizing power by force. What he stressed above all was the conduct of the incumbents: their advance, in his phrase, consisted of an unprecedented retreat. They undertook to share power, and even floated the idea of giving it up altogether if they lost an election.

Critical reception on the left

Refolution was not simply absorbed into the dominant post-Cold War narrative. Catherine Samary judged the neologism worth supporting and developing against the label of "pure" revolution. On her account, the popular movements that erupted before 1989 were opposed to the ruling nomenklatura but were not supporters of the socio-economic transformation introduced after 1989; there was a break between the demands of the movements and the outcome, which carried substantial counter-revolutionary content. The problem was not only one of vocabulary. Cold War concepts equated popular democratic rejection of the old regimes with "the end of communism", lumping every opponent of those regimes together as anti-communist.

Later extension

Some three decades later the word became the etymological source of "coupvolution", a neologism for regime change in which a coup d'état is carried out in support of a mass mobilisation. Garton Ash's coinage for a mixture of reform and revolution thus fed into a broader set of questions about how institutional transitions and popular mobilisation become entangled.