Hannah Arendt and The Dream of the 1990s: Part I

In her 1960 essay, “What is Freedom?”, Hannah Arendt defines freedom as “the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source of production of all great and beautiful things.” This freedom often seems absent from the political realm, “when political life has become petrified and political action impotent to interrupt automatic processes.” But regardless of the restraints imposed by our historical circumstances, we still witness glimpses of freedom in important moments that Arendt calls “miracles:” her term for “interruptions of some natural series of events, of some automatic process, in whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected.” For Arendt, these kinds of miracles are very much “within the range of human faculties.” This is encouraging: despite whatever “automatic process[es]” seem to restrain us, there is still hope of enacting “wholly unexpected” breaks from our historical inertia.

For those who can also remember the 1990s, that decade can demonstrate the existence and possibility of the very kind of “miracles” that Arendt encourages us to expect and initiate. According to the comedy show Portlandia, “the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.” Perhaps it ought also to be alive in our hearts.

It is not that the 1990s was an entirely happy decade for our country. The 90s had their share of tragedy and discouraging moments. Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 arguably gave us a false confidence about our ability to intervene in Mesopotamia, which cost us and them dearly in the next decade. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots in response to the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal of the police indicated our country’s ongoing issues with race and policing. The 1994–1995 baseball strike disillusioned millions about the processes underlying “America’s game.” The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing was a brazen attack on the federal government. The 1999 shooting at Columbine began the trend we cannot seem to address or escape.

And yet, if you lived through the 90s, you also saw or heard about some incredible things. This was a decade far enough removed that we might forget now the sense of disbelief that accompanied its miracles; but we ought not.

The 1990s had an auspicious start. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. It was a largely unexpected event that not only signaled the decline of the Soviet Union but helped usher in a new decade. The Soviet satellite states spun off into freedom. Germany reunified in 1990–1991. At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union ended. Hannah Arendt writes that “it is the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an ‘infinite improbability.’” A rapid end of the Cold War seemed very unlikely to most of the world at the beginning of 1989, but by the end of 1991, the Soviet system that began with Lenin and ran through Stalin, Khruschev, and Gorbachev was over. Experts did not see it coming, but it happened and was experienced all the same.

In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. In 1991, South Africa repealed apartheid legislation. In 1994, South Africa held its first multiracial elections. South Africa had been a racially stratified society since European arrival in the seventeenth century. Other countries had imposed sanctions, but had refused to intervene more directly to end the oppression there. There were many reasons to believe that Mandela would never be released or that it would require violent overthrow to end apartheid. As Arendt notes, “our political life…despite its being in the realm of action, takes place in the midst of processes which we call historical and which tend to become as automatic as natural or cosmic processes, although they were started by men.” Automatism is everywhere. But interruptions can and do occur.

In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to “The Troubles”—violence that had plagued Northern Ireland since the 1960s. The Troubles were decades of conflict and internal division during which thousands of people were killed. There were many reasons for people not to hope and not believe that peace was possible. There were open wounds and opposing sides and legitimate grievances. But 71% of Northern Ireland voted in favor of the agreement. It was controversial to release political prisoners, including paramilitary and those responsible for the deaths of others. But, by and large, the Agreement has worked. Despite instances of violence since, Northern Ireland is no longer a war zone. In 2005, the IRA abandoned arms. It was impossible, until it wasn’t.

Hannah Arendt, 1958 (CC 4.0, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, Archiv Barbara Niggl Radloff)

We might consider many of the events of the 1990s to be miracles—interruptions in processes that had long held sway. Longstanding oppressive regimes fell. Ongoing religious and ethnic violence went into decline. People who could not agree on the nature of their country found new ways to coexist. The unexpected occurred. Yet we seem to have forgotten some of these moments.

It can be easy to fail to see the miracles around us, much less remember them. Negative events loom large in our historical memory, as they often should. Especially if an event seems later to be part of an ongoing problem, it can be easy to let a negative event achieve special significance in our narrative about the relationship between the past and the present.

In the second part of this essay, I will reflect on issues of memory and the role of human initiative in Arendt’s miracles.

Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University.  She has a book about World War I, Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War, and she has written for various publications, including Front Porch Republic, Comment, and Inside Higher Ed. She is editor-in-chief of Orange Blossom Ordinary.