A WALL FALLS DOWN, THE WORLD IS CHANGED
This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall “fell,” as the epochal event of Nov. 9, 1989, is commonly, if inaccurately, described. In fact, the wall was knocked down when two-million people, trapped for four decades on the Communist side of Berlin, flocked to the wall that weekend, with pickaxes and hammers, and went about the work of joyful destruction.
It was the weekend that German reunification was set in motion. It spelled the end of the European polizeistaaten, the police states of the Warsaw Pact. Within two years, the Soviet Union was gone. Communism was chucked into history’s dustbin. The Cold War that had divided the democratic and capitalist west from the Soviet-dominated,
communist east, and the dozens of bloody proxy wars that division had set in motion throughout what we used to call the Third World, was over.
The new era allowed a flowering of democracy around the world. Several new and revived independent states took up their places at the United Nations. For all these reasons, Nov. 9, 1989, was a very big deal, but there’s something else to notice about that day that makes it immediately relevant to upheavals underway around the world at the moment, from Baghdad to Santiago and from Hong Kong to Beirut.
Nobody saw it coming.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was taken completely by surprise. For all the credit lavished upon U.S. President Ronald Reagan for the historic triumph of free-market capitalism over command-and-control communism, the great unravelling was orchestrated at random, organically, by tens of thousands of ordinary and extraordinary people taking to the streets of one decrepit Soviet client-state after another.
The reason the Soviet-backed German communists built the wall in the first place was to prevent people from escaping East Germany’s soul-crushing tyranny. In the five years following 1945, when Nazi Germany was divided between Josef Stalin’s Russia and the Allied powers of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, more than four million East Germans fled to West Germany, mostly using Berlin as a way out. The wall went up in 1961.
By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was on its last legs. In Moscow, the Communist Party reformer Mikhail Gorbachev was loosening the Kremlin’s stranglehold on Russian society. Popular unrest was making the politburos of the Warsaw Pact regimes extremely skittish. In 1989, a Soviet-approved edict making it easier for East Germans to visit family or attend weddings and funerals in West Germany came into effect on Nov. 9.
The new visa rules were announced that afternoon by Guenter Schabowski, a halfwitted apparatchik who hadn’t been paying attention at the meeting where the relaxed visa rules were approved. At a press conference, asked when the new arrangement would come into effect, Schabowski fiddled with his notes, stammered, and said, “immediately, without delay,” leaving the impression that anyone could cross over into the west, anytime they wanted.
Within hours, thousands of
East Berliners were crowding the checkpoints along the wall, and border guards had no instructions on what to do. Huge crowds had gathered, demanding to be let out, and at 11:30 p.m., at the Bornholmer Street checkpoint, the gates were flung open. Border guards at the other checkpoints followed suit. By the following morning, hundreds of thousands of East Germans were already pouring into the city to help tear down the wall. The regime lost control, and never got it back, and the course of world history was changed utterly.
Those were heady days. In Poland, after several years of militant trade-union agitation, a partially free election resulted in the ouster of the Communist Party and the rise of Solidarity, a liberal, union-based political party. Through the spring of
1989, mass movements demanding democracy were erupting in cities and towns right across China. That summer, in a seminal essay that would go on to become a wildly popular book, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History? appeared in the American journal, The National Interest.
Fukuyama’s big idea was that the age of the polizeistaaten was over, and liberal democracy had triumphed over all its enemies. Everybody knows now that Fukuyama had spoken too soon, but it wasn’t evident then, even after the Chinese Communist Party ordered the People’s Liberation Army to roll its tanks into Tiananmen Square on June 4 to slaughter the pro-democracy students holding their protests there.
Democracy’s global advance continued through the 1990s, in fits and starts, until halfway through the first decade of this century. Democracy has been in retreat ever since. The Chinese Communist Party has been tightening its grip on Chinese society, and accelerating its pursuit of global hegemony through economic intimidation, technological subversion and a variety of sordid “soft power” methods, ever since. And Russia has reverted to a gangland kleptocracy, a sham democracy run by Vladimir Putin, formerly a ranking officer with the hated Soviet-era secret police, the KGB.
Last weekend, an extensive YouGov poll commissioned by George Soros’s Open Societies Institute showed that the people of the former Warsaw Pact states are increasingly pessimistic about democracy, the rule of law and freedom of speech. In Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, roughly 60 per cent of the YouGov poll respondents said democracy was under threat in their countries. Nearly eight in 10 respondents said their elections were “not free and fair.”
Still, there is optimism among the young. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 37 were confident in their abilities to mobilize and effect positive change, and around the world, millions of people are marching in the streets in an upheaval unlike anything since 1989. In Hong Kong, Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, Bolivia, Spain, Pakistan — across generations, religious sects and classes — something is happening.
It defies the easy categories of the Cold War days. But something is happening, and like the events of Nov. 9, 1989, nobody saw it coming. There is no “end of history,” and no one knows what comes next.
Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.
Nobody saw it coming. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was taken completely by surprise.