Global Issues
GERMANY: The Berlin Wall Came Down, Others Went Up
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, circumstances leading to that landmark event and what really happened behind the scenes remain a subject of debate. Equally controversial is what the fall of the wall brought in its wake.
How far only the people of Berlin were responsible for bringing down the wall is more than a semantic issue. It was certainly not torn down in response to U.S. President Ronald Reagan's historic speech of Jun. 12, 1987. But the address Reagan delivered that day on the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Berlin is considered by many to have affirmed the beginning of the end of the Cold War, and the fall of communism.
Speaking to the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin wall, Reagan said: 'We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.'
He added: 'General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'
Those words were heard also on the eastern, communist-controlled side of the wall.
Mikhail Gorbachev took over as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 and became head of the state three years later. As de facto ruler of the Soviet Union, he tried to reform the stagnating party and the state economy by introducing glasnost ('openness'), perestroika ('restructuring'), demokratizatsiya ('democratisation'), and uskoreniye ('acceleration' of economic development). These were launched at the 27th Congress of the party in February 1985.
How Gorbachev, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, looks back at those policies - that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union - and the past 20 years, could not be ascertained definitively at an international conference Oct. 9-10 convened by the World Political Forum (WPF) presided by the former Soviet leader. But in several newspaper interviews Gorbachev has said he had no regrets about what he did - for world peace and for the welfare of the people in Russia.
Participants at the WPF conference, titled 'Twenty Years after: The World(s) beyond the Wall', agreed that the issue was rather complicated. The conference was held in the Italian town Bosco Marengo in the Piedmont region, where the WPF was set up in 2003. The participants included academics, diplomats, former heads of government, senior officials and civil society representatives from Europe, the U.S., Latin America, Asia and Africa.
The WPF was initiated by Gorbachev - who could not attend the conference for 'personal reasons' - with a view to fostering contacts between politicians, scientists and leaders in cultural and religious life around the world. The WPF aims to suggest solutions to the problems of the governance of globalisation and the crucial problems that affect humankind today.
One issue that came up at Basco Marengo was what led to the coming down of the Berlin wall, that had been erected in 1961. There was general agreement among participants that it was a combination of a popular movement in East Germany and the annulment of a standing order to 500,000 Soviet troops in East Germany to crush all opposition to the communist regime in East Berlin.
But the meeting considered also other walls that have come up.
'It's just one wall that fell. There are many visible (between the U.S. and Mexico) and invisible walls - ideological, economic and racial,' said French writer and peace activist Marek Halter. Halter was born within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto, the largest of the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, in occupied Poland during World War II (1939-1945).
The walls, he said, are not just a restriction. They are also revealing - revealing the narrow-mindedness and perversion of those who erect them.
Aminata Traoré, a Malian author, politician, and political activist, spoke of 'GDP walls' erected along the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of countries, that serve to isolate groups of countries on the basis of their economic performance and the market value of their goods and services.
The erection of GDP walls has been accompanied to some extent by open market borders. This has benefited multinational companies, but resulted in unemployment, illiteracy and poverty. The number of deaths has never been higher in Africa.
'The World Bank should be called to account,' said Traoré who served as minister for culture and tourism of Mali from 1997 to 2000 and is a former coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme.
Looking at the world beyond the Wall, Eric Hobsbawm, who lives in London and this year completes 50 years of incisive writing on history, was of the view that 'socialism has failed, capitalism is bankrupt.' And that raises the question what comes next.
'We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these - capitalism and socialism - in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy.
'While the centrally state-planned economy of the Soviet type broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it, the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s,' said Hobsbawm.
Hobsbawm, a member of the British Academy of Sciences, says that in some ways this is a bigger crisis than in the 1930s, because globalisation of the economy was not then as far advanced as it is today, and the crisis then did not affect the planned economy of the Soviet Union.
'We don't yet know how grave and lasting the consequences of the present world crisis will be, but they certainly mark the end of the sort of free-market capitalism that captured the world and its governments in the years since Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan.' Hobsbawm's most recent publication is 'On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy'.
Jianmin Wu, vice-chairman of the China Institute of Strategy and Management, and also chairman of the Shanghai Centre for International Studies, did not share this 'rather pessimistic' scenario. Asia in general and China in particular were making considerable economic advances and sharing the fruits of their accomplishments with Europe and the U.S., said Jianmin.
'Thirty years ago, you couldn't find anything in American supermarkets made in China. Now, when an American friend shops for a gift, he can't find one not made in China,' Jianmin said.
Jianmin does not share the widely held view that the 21st century will be the 'Asian century' - in contrast to 20th century being the U.S. century and the 19th century the European century. He expects it to be a 'century of humankind'.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service