Many of the factors which led to the collapse of Eastern Europe have reappeared in the West, writes TONY KINSELLA
1989 WAS filled with momentous and sometimes magical historic shifts on our continent. Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell – transforming the history of our continent.
The 1989 revolutions can be said to have stretched from March 11th, 1985, to November 3rd, 2009. They began with the election of a dedicated communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and ended with the erratic neo-conservative and Eurosceptic president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, putting the final signature to the Treaty of Lisbon last Tuesday.
If they began and ended in former royal fortresses, the Kremlin and Prague Castle, they overwhelmingly took place on the streets, squares and fields of myriad European countries. Their leading actors were ordinary people who courageously and incisively demonstrated an amazing, even revolutionary, degree of political acumen.
The fact that the most radical transformation of Europe since 1945 was in most cases achieved without a single shot being fired is a fitting monument to the patience, perseverance and perspicacity of millions of Europeans.
Gorbachev’s revocation of the Brezhnev doctrine, under which Moscow claimed the right to intervene militarily in allied countries, changed the politics of central and eastern Europe. Its replacement was what Soviet spokesmen would later call the Sinatra doctrine – Warsaw Pact nations would now “do it their way”. Political challenges to Soviet power had been repressed bloodily on the streets of Berlin in 1953, of Budapest in 1956, and of Prague in 1968, but Soviet forces would no longer be deployed to crush internal dissent. Such questions would now have to be resolved between peoples and their national leaderships.
It can be argued that Gorbachev formalised existing Soviet practice. The Politburo had effectively rescinded the Brezhnev doctrine by not deploying Soviet units stationed in Poland against Solidarity during the early 1980s.
Strikes spread across Poland through the summer of 1988 in response to hefty increases in the prices of some basic foods. In late August the Warsaw government announced its willingness to negotiate with the now-tolerated Solidarity.These negotiations began in January 1989 and soon expanded to cover the political future of Poland. Relatively free elections were held in June and by August Tadeusz Mazowiecki emerged as the country’s first non-communist prime minister.
In neighbouring Hungary, the Communist government agreed to a multi-party system in February 1989 and in May Budapest began to dismantle its Iron Curtain frontier with Austria along which a “pan-European picnic” was organised in August. This involved opening a rural crossing point.
A 43-year-old lieutenant colonel, Arpad Bella, was in command of the Hungarian border guards as several hundred East German tourists rushed the frontier. He remembers that he “ . . . took the decision that I thought was best for Hungary and for my own conscience” and ordered his men to turn a blind eye rather than shoot.
Less than four months later another 43-year-old lieutenant colonel at another border post, faced a similar, though more pivotal, dilemma.
Harald Jäger had just come on duty in the early evening of November 9th at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing point between East and West Berlin. He watched in outraged amazement as East German politburo member Günter Schabowski told an international press conference that travel restrictions would be lifted “sofort, unverzüglich” [immediately]. While Jäger had growing doubts about his country’s political system, he remained a convinced communist and a serving officer.
Twenty years ago lieut col Jäger had to choose between opening fire or opening the barriers as thousands massed before his post. In a conflict between duty and pragmatic humanity, humanity won and the Berlin Wall collapsed. Just over two years’ later the USSR would follow suit. 1989 was a year of creeping, incremental but cumulatively radical changes. As the Polish activist Adam Michnik (now editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza) would later write: “What was not possible in January became reality in February, and in March one could demand even more.”.
Many of those who campaigned for reform sought more to improve their systems than to topple them. In the GDR the popular slogan “We are the people” was used to contest the Communist Party’s claim to speak for the people. It would later mutate into “We are one people” as the question of German reunification took centre stage.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl moved to address the unease felt in many European capitals about German reunification by outlining a “German house under a common European roof”.
This meant expanding the EU and, therefore, reforming its institutions. The painstakingly slow gestation of what is now the Treaty of Lisbon is Europe’s careful, not to say hesitant, response to the new realities of our continent.
The revolutions of 1989 flowed from the failure of an economic and political system to ensure the material well-being of its citizens, which denied the environmental consequences of its economic policies, and replaced income with massive foreign borrowings while the leadership of its (Soviet) superpower spent years focusing on a pointless Afghan war.
Alarmingly familiar factors which helped shatter an apparently immutable colossus in less than a decade – 20 years ago.