Dear readers, to understand what happened in that 1989, a singular year in which according to many people "History seems to accelerate" and according to others, perhaps too optimistic, "History ends", there is no need to mention John Fitzgerald Kennedy neither John Paul II nor Helmut Kohl: it is enough ... to tell a joke, which circulated already in the seventies. The story goes more or less like this: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was born in the Russian Empire, in this nice little story, meets Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in a summit and asks him in a friendly and Russian way: "Leonid Ilyich, why don't you open the borders of the Soviet Union and allow the Jews to leave the country to move to Israel? "To which, the general secretary of the PCUS responds with a flirtatious tone:" How romantic you are, Golda! You want us and you to stay here alone! ”The truth is that, especially in the Baltic republics and in the socialist states of Eastern Europe, for years, indeed decades before the 1989, no one believes anymore in the tragic and miserable bales of the regimes, to the superiority of the socialist system and to the various and fanciful dangers that those people would have had to face if they had dropped from the mother USSR and / or from the Marxist-Leninist system. The Soviet Union itself, for its part, instead of being the driving force behind the development of the Eastern bloc, punctually ends up absorbing its resources, like an insatiable Pantagruel. In this regard, I report another joke in vogue in those years.
East German leader Honecker is visiting the port of Rostock, where three large merchant ships are sailing and asks the captain of the first: "Where is this cargo headed?"
- "In Cuba!"
- "What do you bring?"
- "Heavy industry machinery"
- "What will you come back with?"
- "With oranges".
The captain of the second ship replies that he will sail to Brazil with a set of optical devices. "And what do you come back with?"
- "With coffee, bananas and other exotic products".
- "Companion of the third ship, where are you headed?"
- "In Leningrad, comrade general secretary"
- "What do you bring?"
- "Oranges, coffee, bananas and other exotic fruits from Cuba and Brazil"
- "And what will you come back with?"
- "As usual: by train".
Remaining on the subject of bitter laughter, I conclude with a little story that, perhaps more than others, explains why millions of people in that glorious 1989 crossed walls and frontiers in search of food, work but above all freedom. And the young computer geeks don't take the word freedom as rhetoric ...
There are three dogs: one Polish, one East German and one Western who meet and tell how they live. The Pole says: "Ah, we are very ill: there is nothing to eat". The East German says: "For the food I can't complain. For the rest, I have nothing to say." The western dog then exclaims: "I, when I bark, receive meat". The Pole, surprised, replies: "What ?! The meat?" And the East German one, scared: "What ?! Barking?"
The ancient reader L. Bendini is the first to make his contribution ...
A brief clarification on the term (hostage of the Soviets): from a geographic and geopolitical point of view it could be argued that it was West Berlin that was held hostage by NATO. In fact, it was a Western enclave in the middle of the Warsaw Pact. I don't make it a question of fans but only of cartographic analysis.
Having said that, I believe that this is the terminal of a deconstruction of the socialist camp begun long before the 1980: in my view the first brick of that destructuring coincides with the Khrushchev relationship and the process of de-Stalinization that was only suspended but not reversed with the Brezhnev era politically defined as stagnation but also economically. And it is with the apparent prolongation of that compromise that Brezhnev represented between two souls (Orthodox and Atlantic integrationists) who created the premises to reach Gorbachev who was the notary of the end of the USSR. It was not a revolution but a collapse promoted precisely by the top positions occupied by the Atlantic integrationist wing and which were the same to speculate and to be enriched by the immense resources during the 90 years.
Has the collapse of the wall improved the political and economic conditions of the former socialist camp? The start of liberal democracy has certainly improved the so-called individual liberties but from an economic point of view things have gone very differently: the inequalities have become bigger and the total economic precariousness (previously almost unknown) has become the rule and only in some cases, after some decades of suffering, some realities (I think the Baltic countries) have enjoyed some improvement.
Moreover, the phenomenon of nostalgia is widespread among the inhabitants of the former GDR to the point that those who lived it in the first person often recite the motto "it was not so bad" compared to today's conditions.
From a global point of view, that collapse certainly did not lead to an era of peace: paradoxically, the conflicts were minor during the "cold" confrontation between the two blocks that we touch with our hands after today.
Does this have to make us regret that period? For us Italians, yes: that comparison brought the country a constant improvement of the nation if we think of the conditions of Italy of 1945 to those of 1991. After relocation and globalization it has produced the present desert.
But for a Bulgarian born in the 1991 or a Romanian or a Czechoslovakian (both Czech and Slovak) born in the same year, perhaps the current world offers more opportunities and certainly would struggle today to adapt to that reality which, like so many of its predecessors of age in the age, they did not share.
Certainly the current phase of partial international multilateralism is the result of an imbalance due to the relative decline in the USA: and, until a bipolar or tripolar equilibrium is re-established, the fluidity of the geopolitical situation will produce the inability to resolve the global crisis by overproduction.
The real problem is the way drama will come to create a new duo or tripolar balance: it is usually a global war.
Giorgio Resca Cacciari distinguishes between the 1989 of chancelleries and that of ordinary people.
The fall of the Wall and specifically its timing and methods produced two opposite reactions, that of the common people who were of genuine enthusiasm, experienced as the end of a nightmare, that of the 'day after': the reaction of the various chancelleries was different in particularly those of France, Italy and Great Britain, which for decades criticized the Wall and then were literally frightened by the now no longer avoidable reunification of the only resurrected Germany.
If the Fall of the Wall marked the beginning of the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, it clearly showed that the end of the Second World War had not in the least affected the European distrust of Germany. The 1989 will be remembered not only for the Wall but also for Tiananmen Square, two facts that symbolically marked a passing of baton between two empires, one falling, the USSR and the other renaissance, China. The facts of Berlin were so brilliant as to obscure those of Beijing and this blinded the West to the future which was to be the advent of the Chinese century.
I don't know what historians will write in two hundred years on the 1989, we who lived those days as spectators, now we know, after thirty years that more than a wall to fall was the opening of a vase, that of Pandora.
Michele Carrera sees with horror a new German hegemony on Europe.
What if the Russians were right? The wall was built with the bricks of the Soviet dictatorship and the cement of western hypocrisy. For many years the wall, deep down, did not displease anyone; westerners and especially Europeans were afraid of the great reunified Germany, the Russians the same but at least they had the courage to admit it, first of all to themselves ...
Thirty years after the fall of the wall, the many predictions that have been made have turned out to be extremely groundless: the Soviet bear has returned to sprawl, China has not fallen into the trap of globalization and has maintained its independence, disarmament is a distant memory, peace is always a dream and Germany despite the bombastic rhetoric is back to being that nation that wants to conquer Europe (with a good chance of making it, I would dare to say). Of course, this time he left panzer and stuka at home and took the mark, pardon the euro, to invade Europe, what's worse is that this time the US won't bail us out of trouble first because we were the architects of the defeat and then because the United States has something else to think about.
Samuele Rigo analyzes the negative effects of the fall of the wall.
The most disastrous consequence of the fall of the wall is the return of a new reich, and for the sake of irony, if we have shied away for thirty years, it has been thanks to our archenemy. Perhaps many do not know it but in the fiery 1989 summer, many opinion leaders changed their minds about the stability that the Cold War gave to Europe. Although the iron curtain reminded everyone of the possibility that the "PLAN A"1 if it were real and possible, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper admonished:
"Perhaps, if the controls were abolished, communism in East Germany would be screwed on itself as a spiral. But this would not cause a revolution, a destabilization of Europe, which for 44 years lived in a climate of balanced peace? ... The only questions to ask are: do Germans really want it? And if so, how is it possible to achieve it without destroying the delicate balance of Europe based on division? "2.
The premier Thatcher was of the same opinion that if in 1988 she declared in exultation "we are no longer in the Cold War"3 he was still icy at the idea of a reunified Germany, which could turn the road to nationalism and totalitarianism, of the same hope was Gorbachev. The voice outside the choir was the Bush that preferred a more unity Germany under Western values and remained outside the Moscow orbits.
And the Germans? Be ... The German citizens with the fading memories of the Second World War also forgot the ideas of a "Über Alles" Germany warned above all by the division. In a more real paradox that imagined grew more and more the inevitable idea of a more democratic and united Germany. It was therefore the transformation of a democratic Germany through the post-war period and the historical failure of fascism and communism to make it today a strong European nation based on federalism and the social market.
The collapse of the USSR therefore cannot be limited to a revolution in the Gdansk steelworks in the 1980 or an administrative error by Schwabowski in front of a journalist but as it was for the collapse of Greece or the SPQR a set of many more factors .
To Sergio Pession, veteran of this column, the honor and the burden of concluding ...
West Berlin, in the weary US-USS chess game, was a white pawn to a couple of houses from the promotion, surrounded yes, but far from defenseless. In short, a headache not just for the Soviet bloc and an essential fulcrum for NATO.
The Wall was erected by the will of the East, but with the interval of the West. Not letting an unassailable pedestrian proceed for the USSR was the only viable strategy, and let's face it, the US was comfortable with a block that nailed the Soviet machine.
The game is known as it is over, with the black (or red) pieces gradually eaten or isolated and at the end, with the black King out of the square, the white pedestrian has had the coveted promotion to Regina. Around that pedestrian, there have been many moves that have decreed its fate; the black standard bearer, Poland, was the first to get on the white one, the Pope Karol Wojtyla and the strikes of the beginning of the 80 and culminated in the 1990.
Then the black tower, Hungary with the Danube dam ever built, was taken in the 1988 with consequent bypassing of the borders and of the wall itself.
The pounding black horse Ceausescu is little served, now cut off from its own citizens. On a flat road, the pedestrian was promoted to queen, and the black queen, Gorbaciev, badly exchanged, decreed the closure of a game, perhaps, lost at the start.
But who was the white player? The USA? I don't think so, but Kohl's West Germany, with its French and Italian presence. The will for German reunification, culminating in Kohl's unilateral decision which, without negotiations, leads Germany (West) once and for all to walk without being held by the hand (or on a leash?) By anyone. Hence the European will of a united Germany, a strong Marco and a launching ground for the single currency.
The process of European integration, cautious, methodical and systematic, after the Wall becomes fast and overwhelming and barely slowed down by the dramas of the former Yugoslavia.
The economic blitzkrieg has given great results in a short time, but as history teaches, not all the army remains at the pace and now we find ourselves with a Germany and a France projected forward, but without the reinforcements of the slower countries, first among all, Italy. If this is not a challenge ...
Ultimately, reviewing the photos of the party kids on that miserable concrete monster, thinking back to who, on his fifth birthday lost his life to go through it and listen to the music of those times, still moves me today and as I write ... I think ... that ... as much as we want to do the cold analysts or the fiery dreamers, the human being is destined to be both simultaneously. Yes, I also like to think that one thing does not exclude the other and there was also great glory in those days. A glory that only partially compensates for the lives ruined by the Iron Curtain and political games, but to dismiss it altogether would give it to those who moved the pieces, calculating their losses at every move on the back of the German people and not just that.
1 A. Glaser, gives "PLAN A", Science & Global security. The Lab, Plan A, 6 September 2019, https://sgs.princeton.edu/the-lab/plan-a, last access 3 November 2019.
2 "On the unification of Germany", in "Independent", 17 June 1989, cit. in G.-J. Glaessner, "German unification and the West", in Glaessner and I. Wallace (ed.), The German Revolution of 1989: Causes and Consequences, Oxford, 1992, pp. 208-9, cit. in M. Mazower, "Reunified Germany", in The Shadows of Europe: Democracy and Totalitarianism in the 20th Century, Garzanti, Milan, 2018, pp. 381.
3 M. Mazower, "Reunified Germany", in The shadows of Europe: Democracy and totalitarianism in the 20th century, Garzanti, Milan, 2018, pp. 379.
