The Berlin and other walls

Issue No. 231/232 (Nov/Dec 2009)

The absence of real rejoicing by its supposed beneficiaries put a damper on celebrations by the West to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jeremy Seabrook explains why the end of Communism is being greeted two decades on with a coolness that Western leaders find somewhat disconcerting.

THE celebrations in Europe in November 2009 on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall were a self-congratulatory festival, the principal effect of which was to demonstrate to the world the essential parochialism of the great pan-continental project represented by the European Union. It was re-enacted as the revolution without bloodshed, the crumbling of Communism, that heretical sect of industrialism that had tyrannised its captive peoples, delivered on that historic date to the merciful embrace of universal capital.

In 1989, rejoicing over the end to divisions of the continent was real and spontaneous; but it is not true that the practice of what was then still called 'actually existing socialism' had brought scanty benefits by comparison with the overflowing cornucopia of the West. In the mid-1990s, Der Spiegel magazine conducted a survey among former East Germans, asking which aspects of life in the East had been better than in a reunified Germany. A majority said the East had enjoyed better personal security, health care and education - those intangibles that have so little to do with Western 'living standards', the iconography of luxury which was the true victor of 1989, and incidentally the generator of many of the present anxieties about the fate of the planet.

It goes without saying that the role of Gorbachev's perestroika in the Soviet Union was also excised from the version of 1989 which was celebrated with such eclat this November. The crashing into extinction of the Berlin Wall - assisted by pickaxes, hammers and the bare hands of a people separated - was swiftly followed by the construction of new walls, the more potent for being invisible, not made of bricks, masonry and concrete. For the end of European Communism was accompanied by the instant erection of a defensive wall around the sole system that remained in the world, which assumed a semi-mystical aura, as though capitalism did indeed represent the finest flowering of human civilisation, a kind of last stage of 'development'.

The gathering in Berlin was an exercise in instant nostalgia; an effort to recapture the moment of triumph when, it seemed, the only ideological competitor to capitalism had finally bitten the dust. In 1989 the triumph of the West reached a point from which things could - and duly did - only decline. And with astonishing rapidity.

What the demise of socialism showed to the world was that any system unchallenged soon becomes insolent and domineering, since it can get away with errors, misjudgments and crimes unthinkable in a world that is truly multi-polar.

The most chilling aspect of the tamasha in Berlin was its impenitence. No one, observing the event, could have imagined that in the two decades since the wall fell, virtually the whole world had been coerced into assenting to the globalising impulse; that the developmental model would have engendered the nightmare of an overheated climate, the possible drowning of Bangladesh and Pacific islands and the desiccation of large tracts of sub-Saharan Africa, that at least two disastrous conflicts would have convulsed the world, that wars on abstractions - on terror, poverty, addictions - would prove ineffectual and that the very financial system, the 'triumph' of which was being recaptured in 2009, had itself been brought to the brink of ruin by its most adept practitioners.

The eclipse of Communism led not only to economic insecurity and chaos in Russia and Eastern Europe as shock-therapy - a vengeful visitation by the West on the deviancy of which those countries were held guilty; it also indirectly gave rise to other-worldly ideologies, which pose threats no less grave than the frozen fear of mutually assured destruction of a 'Cold War', the coolness of which was in any case exaggerated, as the burned corpses piled up in South-East Asia testified.

The end of Communism appeared to mark the end of secular opposition to capitalism. It was often noted by critics and observers that Communism itself took on many attributes of religious faith - its revelations, its appeal to 'History' as its ally in 'ultimate' victory. A considerable amount of literature, both good and bad, was inspired by the disillusionment with Communism.

Its death, however, exposed the empty heart of many Western 'values'. An obscurantist version of the ideology of the free market, the so-called Washington Consensus, seized the imagination of the movers and shakers of the Western world. There is no alternative, sang Margaret Thatcher in anticipation of the collapse of the rival to capitalism, and although she was ridiculed at the time for saying it, the world behaved as though this were the revelation of the hour. You can't buck the markets, was another of her fateful declarations, and this prefigured subsequent attempts to naturalise capitalism; that is to make it the equivalent of, and a synonym for, the human condition.

It may be that the greatest contribution of socialism in the world was to hold in check the excesses of capitalist ideology. Indeed, the threat of popular revulsion against the asperities of capitalism over two centuries led to conspicuous reforms. But it should not be thought that 'progress' evolved out of the tender heart of capitalism: it arose out of the anger and organisation of the working class which compelled the 'free world' to see reason in retreat from the ideology of laissez-faire.

These were renewed only when the system had become emboldened, not only by the dissolution of its principal opponent, but also by the transformation its own reforms had wrought, for it had elevated a majority of its former working class to the ranks of a global bourgeoisie. It is significant that the achievement in the 'developing' world of a middle class is usually lauded as evidence of progress. Why this should be is no mystery: such a class will do anything to sustain the precarious advantages it enjoys, and can be relied upon to do whatever is necessary to police the global poor. This all helps to account for the exuberance that burst forth in the years immediately after 1989. The ideology took on the allure of a Second Coming. And whatever freedoms it bestowed upon people, the freedom to choose another way of answering human need was no longer to be one of them.

But this was the declaration of a wounded system, weakened principally by self-inflicted harm. While continuing to echo the liberties which they do not see as contradicting in any way the necessities of globalism, the declarations of a 'united Europe' in 2009 were belied by events: the regrets of many in the East at the haste with which annexation took place, the occlusion of the merits of the socialist system that went down without a struggle - emblematically played out in Berlin in the collapse of a kilometre-long wall of dominoes (an ironic echo of dark prophecies of the 'domino theory', which had earlier stated that if Vietnam fell, other countries of South-East Asia would succumb to socialism). Within days of the commemoration of 1989, Europe duly reverted to acknowledging the hegemony of the nation-state, in the appointment of its pallid 'president' and 'high representative'.

The pompous carnival in Berlin betrayed a faulty perception that there is no organised resistance to the revival of the savage ideology of laissez-faire. It is true that the locus of struggle has shifted, from the working class in the so-called 'developed' countries to the poor of the 'developing'. (A first casualty of the collapse of laissez-faire ought to be the tendentious division of the world into developed and developing: the first implies a stasis that does not exist in human affairs, and the second suggests that the rest of the world has only to follow a pathway already laid down by those who have preceded them.) It is not simply that socialism is being rediscovered in the countries of South America, nor that Maoists pose what Manmohan Singh called the 'greatest internal threat to India'; it is that hundreds of millions of people in the world have been awakened from a serene expectation that they were to be delivered from poverty by the healing power of capitalism.

The lineaments of another globalism are visible beneath the threadbare jubilation of a Europe which can neither resuscitate the nation-state nor submerge its differences in a common purpose, and a United States which can change the colour of its President but not of its politics. If the joy of 1989 was premature, its thin re-enactment in 2009 is too late: the ever-expanding universe of capitalism cannot be contained within the finite fragility of the planet.

Perhaps the most cynical and audacious gesture in the Berlin spectacular was the appearance of Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi pioneer of microcredit. He also spoke of a new wall, the wall between rich and poor, and he offers up microcredit as the resolution of poverty, when its principal function is to lead the poor of the world into the labyrinth of institutionalised indebtedness - the very cause of the present crisis. That capitalism loves the poor in a world of widening inequalities is, perhaps, the most eloquent expression of the state of denial in which this mythic Europe exists.                                                      

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 231/232, November-December 2009, pp 48-49