Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 09, 2014 Editorial
A quarter of a century ago this weekend, the map of a continent began to be redrawn. Against expectation, the change was not ushered in by one of those terrible confrontations between states that are also being commemorated this Remembrance weekend, and which had defined both Europe’s borders and the 20th century up until then.
Rather than guns or bombs, it was hammers swung by civilians that set the stage for both a new Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union – hammers that chipped away at the huge slabs of concrete that had for decades seared the heart of Berlin, a seemingly indestructible symbol of oppression and of Europe’s division in two blocs.
As Europe struggles with what often seems like a new cold war with Russia, it is timely to reflect on the lessons of 1989. One is that stability – first and foremost, that of authoritarian regimes – is never a permanent certainty. The young Hong Kong demonstrators who have been demanding democratic freedom in recent months no doubt have this in mind.
Another is how far the planet was interconnected, long before the advent of the global internet. The peaceful revolutions of 1989 were made possible because Mikhail Gorbachev rejected the use of force, because he feared the international opprobrium brought down on the Chinese leadership as it crushed the Tiananmen uprising a few months earlier.
But many in the Soviet apparatus were struck by a shuddering humiliation – watching in bewilderment as, throughout that summer and autumn, thousands of east Europeans pushed the gaping holes that had appeared in the iron curtain. A then unknown KGB lieutenant called Vladimir Putin followed it all in despair from his base in Dresden.
Mr Putin would later recall in his memoir, First Person, how he waited in vain with his other colleagues in the KGB offices for “the Centre” (Moscow) to react. It is this trauma of seeing a supposedly all-powerful Soviet order being swamped by people power that would lead Mr Putin to describe the sequence of 1989-91 as “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
Whether or not the west mismanaged its relations with Russia over the following two decades, the psychological impact on the man who has done more than any other to recreate east-west tensions on the European continent is stark.
The worldview of Mr Putin still reverberates with the aftershock of 1989. In many ways, the European aspirations of Ukrainian citizens, demonstrated again in the results of the election of a new Kiev parliament last month, are the continuation of the spirit that carried east European nations 25 five years ago. This is a parallel that is seen by Mr Putin not only as an irritant but as a threat. The recent dispatch of Russian bombers (some of them nuclear-capable) over the western European skies as far away as Portugal reveals that old attitudes die hard.
It is hard to exaggerate how miraculous it was that these dictatorships crumbled so peacefully in 1989. Our continent was in the 20th century ravaged by the two world wars. It is from this devastation that came the bedrock for a common European project of peace and prosperity, an accomplishment that – for all its current problems – remains the best insurance policy that we have against a repetition.
Easily knocked today, the European ideal helped countries transform for the better. Less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany had joined the community, reunited with the west. And indeed, in the years that followed, Europe spearheaded an enlargement that brought in many more countries, in 2004, 2007 and 2013, having inspired reform and democratisation.
The revisionist nationalism emanating from Russia today aims to prevent European values and institutions spreading further east. At the heart of the European space, a new line of division is in the making. The violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty by Russian arms and the annexation of Crimea are testimony to a European order yet unsettled. Fragments of the Wall are souvenirs today, but the struggles that led to its fall carry an enduring echo.
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