In 1988, Freedom House, a group which monitors liberty around the world, estimated that in political terms 36 per cent of the globe’s 167 independent nations were free, 23 per cent partly free and the rest not free at all. In 2008, the figures for the current 195 countries were noticeably better: 46 per cent were free, 32 per cent partly free and just 22 per cent living without freedom. Although this is a crude measure of the larger patterns of history, it is arguable that no single event in our lifetimes contributed as much to this positive shift as the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
The historian Niall Ferguson has written that “the real historic turning point [of this era] was not 9/11 but 11/9” — meaning that for all their terrible consequences, the September 11 attacks on America changed our lives less than the end of the Cold War. For Ferguson, and many others, the fall of the Berlin Wall brought with it the “implication that the United States now had a free hand more or less everywhere” — a freedom the first Bush administration, suitably cloaked with a “coalition of the willing,” quickly used to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the first Gulf War. That conflict was a sign of things to come. As America’s confidence in its new-found dominance began to fade, it became clear that the projection of military power was not enough to manage the world order. After a decisive victory in Kuwait, the US encouraged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, only to lose its nerve and look the other way while the dictator liquidated his opponents. Unfinished business from that war, and the much uglier anti-Soviet war which the US and Saudi Arabia had funded in Afghanistan, eventually played a significant role in shaping the events of September 11. In other words, the much-trumpeted “end of history” which began with the toppling of the Berlin Wall almost immediately set the stage for the return of history with a vengeance.
Twenty years later it is still astonishing that the Cold War ended peacefully, especially since both sides had the capacity to destroy the world several times over. But that does not mean that the West’s victory over Eurocommunism did not come at a terrible price. Today it is easy to forget just how much money and effort were squandered on the arms race, especially on shoring up dictators and fuelling proxy wars around the globe. The loss of human development which this entailed is almost incalculable, but the measurable economic losses are sobering enough. Five years ago Mikhail Gorbachev remarked that “[W]e all lost the Cold War, particularly the Soviet Union. We each lost $10 trillion [on the arms race, and] we only won when the Cold War ended.” Those on the wrong side of history always talk this way, but Gorbachev’s point can’t be dismissed too easily. As the promised “peace dividend” failed to materialize, and as the war in the former Yugoslavia, and much larger conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have demanded enormously expensive military engagements from an increasingly ineffectual “international community” the idea of a clear-cut victory does seem to be less tenable. In 1996, reviewing the current US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates’s book Who Won the Cold War? the reporter Thomas Powers memorably quipped that “the answer to Gates’s question is not the Americans, not the Russians, but the bomb. The bomb won.”
Before September 11, America’s neoconservatives believed that the time had come for the United States to oversee a benign imperium. Leaving aside the cultural arrogance behind their worldview, there were good reasons to believe that something like this might happen. Many of these were forcefully articulated in an influential book published, ironically, in 2002 by the political analyst Philip Bobbitt. In The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, Bobbitt persuasively argued that the events of 1989 had finally settled the Long War of the twentieth century. In his interpretation, the World Wars, the Cold War and the innumerable smaller conflicts had all been facets of a single master conflict which sought to answer the century’s great ideological debate over whether fascism, communism or liberal democracy would determine our collective future. After the World Wars disposed of fascism, and the Cold War exhausted communism, it appeared that some version of liberal democracy would carry the day. Bobbitt also argued that the nation state was an outmoded idea which would soon be replaced by transnational trading blocs and the rise of “market states” with fluid borders, concerned less with territorial integrity than with competition in the brave new world of global commerce. The wars of the new century would be different, asymmetric and bloody, perhaps, but they would never draw on the old ideological hatreds, because the Long War had yielded lasting answers to the most important political questions.
Most of these encouraging trends were arrested by “the day that changed everything” – and eight years of an American president who looked out at the world through neocon lenses. The legacy of the ensuing miscalculations are still with us today, and may soon be ratcheted up by the current president’s decision to chase the illusion of military victory in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the horrors of the Congo War and the looming threat of a nuclear showdown in the Middle East have shown that political theories can rapidly be overtaken by the cunning of history.
Nevertheless, the removal of the Berlin Wall — which fell only after a great deal of pushing, from Eastern Europe’s courageous dissidents and President Reagan’s underestimated diplomacy – remains an enduring symbol of how quickly political changes can occur when tyrants finally exhaust themselves. For that we should all be thankful.
