At the height of the European revolutions of 1989, the Soviet Foreign Affairs spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, in an allusion to US President Ronald Reagan’s old friend, enunciated the Sinatra Doctrine. Eastern European states were to “do it their way,” without hindrance from the Soviet Union, and, if anything, with a bit of a Soviet helping hand. Those revolutions, which saw Communist regimes peacefully overthrown in five major states, are the towering achievement of nonviolent struggle of our time. The Cold War was brought to an end, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the Iron Curtain vanished, and the constant threat of global nuclear annihilation evaporated. There was a new world order. But in his new book, Waging Nonviolent Struggle, Gene Sharp, who for more than 30 years has been a leading theorizer of nonviolent struggle, does not have too much time for this achievement. Rather, his colleague Joshua Paulson provides half a dozen pages of narrative on Poland and another half-dozen on Czechoslovakia, but that is it. In a book running about 600 pages, it just is not enough.

Paulson provides a more engaging contribution to the book with a short summary (again much too short, only five pages this time) of the remarkable 18 days in February 1986 in the Philippines when Corazon Aquino’s people power mobilized over a million people on the streets of Manila. First, the Defense Minister and Vice Chief of Staff resigned from the government and, along with about 300 rebel troops, pledged their allegiance to Aquino as the legitimate winner of the February 7 election. Next, the deliciously named leader of Manila’s Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Sin, intervened, calling on the people to go to the rebel base to provide protection and prevent bloodshed. The people formed a massive human blockade, physically preventing troops loyal to President Ferdinand Marcos from attacking the rebels. Just three days later, Marcos fled the country, and Aquino was sworn in as President of the Philippines.

This first manifestation of people power anticipated the form and themes of the European Revolutions, not least because they were both about democracy. In the Philippines and in Europe information was a weapon and the politics of legitimacy were exploited to create a bandwagon effect. But there is no evidence that the European leaders consciously modeled their approach on Aquino. So how did the European revolutions actually come about?

It certainly was not Western pressure as most Western leaders, with the notable exception of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, reacted with visible surprise to the events of 1989. Indeed only a few months before it actually happened British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went so far as to claim Germany would not be reunited in her lifetime.

Only one external factor can be held even partly responsible for the revolutions of 1989—the influence of the Soviet Union. The reform process set under way in 1985 soon demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev dismantle his Soviet empire. Evidence which subsequently emerged out of the debris of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe offers compelling support for this view. Petar Mladenov was in Moscow only days before he and his allies in the Bulgarian Communist Party ousted the hardliner Todor Zhivkov and began the process which led to elections in June 1990. Zhivkov himself had been tentatively pursuing preustroistvo, a Bulgarian version of Gorbachev’s perestroika, which involved limited economic liberalizations and hints of political reform.

Once demonstrations had begun in East Germany, Communist Party leader Erich Honecker was certain that the Soviet Union would not intervene to support him if he tried to clamp down on the protesters. In Czechoslovakia, the KGB used its presence in Prague to hasten the departure of the Communist leadership. The decision of the Soviet Union not to send tanks into Poland during the Solidarity Movement can be seen as the first sign of this new attitude towards Eastern Europe. Sharp’s colleague Paulson, however, takes a different view of these events. He cites Sharp’s earlier book Making Europe Unconquerable and claims that the possibility of Soviet military intervention at that moment was reduced by disciplinary problems among reservists in the Carpathian Military District in August to December of 1980. I prefer the broader explanation: a political decision was taken at the top level in Moscow not to intervene.

Above all, the European revolutions were domestically inspired. The combination of economic failure and the power of television, which meant that everyone in Eastern Europe knew how much more prosperous their Western cousins were, led to a total collapse in the credibility and legitimacy of the Communist regimes. Frequently these bloodless revolutions had a bizarre and rather surreal quality. I remember, as a member of a left-wing tour group from London, having dinner in a Warsaw Pact officer’s club in early 1990. The officers, with shining leather boots, were dancing with their wives, in 1950s frocks, to a 1950s gramophone, redolent of an age that I had thought was long gone—well, soon it was.

Sharp’s new book is an idiosyncratic construct of 39 chapters, comprised of 23 chapters of straight narrative about individual nonviolent struggles. Many of these chapters have gems in them. They include a nonviolent Muslim campaign for a Caliphate on the Northwest frontier, which is now part of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the early 20th century—a fascinating antecedent to the Al Qaeda phenomenon. There is also a breathtaking story which tells of the successful struggle of women in Berlin in 1943 to save their Jewish husbands from the Holocaust by confronting SS guards in a street protest and culminates with Joseph Goebbels ordering the release of all intermarried Jews and their half-Jewish children. These narratives are sandwiched between a discussion of the nature and practice of nonviolent struggle, much of which has the character of a “how-to” manual for aspiring revolutionaries. Sharp has identified 198 different “methods” of nonviolent action, categorized into 3 general classes of action and 49 subclasses. All of this really does seem extraordinarily arbitrary: humorous skits, pranks, and performance of plays, along with music and singing are three subclasses, but, for instance, shouting and reciting poetry are not.