A Europe Whole and Free

Richard K. Cross is Professor of English at the University of Maryland.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989

edited by Jeffrey A. Engel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe by Mary Elise Sarotte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall

of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer (New York: Scribner, 2009)

Allow me to begin on a personal note. Nine months after the Berlin Wall had been breached, my wife and I found ourselves living in Göttingen, an hour’s drive from the newly opened border between the two German states. In a scene I recounted in these pages (“Climbing the Brocken,” Summer 1994),

families strolled beside the border fortifications, the children clambering up watchtowers, their windows smashed, that had been abandoned months before the frontier between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic officially disappeared. One father was standing atop a van alongside the fence, its twelve-foot-high concrete piers webbed with heavy steel mesh, unbolting sections of the latter and handing them down to his sons… Everybody was trying, one sensed, to convince himself that the changes, swift and sweeping, of what had for so long seemed immutable were indeed real.

That the Soviet imperium had warped the nations of the East into shapes remote from their natural bent was plain to anyone with eyes to see, but not many people realized just how brittle the satellite regimes were, and nobody anticipated the manner or timing of communism’s demise. As that quintessential insider Robert Gates put it, “I know of no one in or outside of government who predicted early in 1989 that before the next presidential election Eastern Europe would be free, Germany united in NATO, and the Soviet Union an artifact of history.” ¹

Now, twenty years later, we have a slew of studies to help us understand the events of 1989. For readers who are, like myself, laymen in this area, I would recommend, in addition to the books under review, the on-the-ground dispatches of Timothy Garton Ash—a “historian of the present,” as he aptly styles himself—especially those gathered in The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990), as well as Tony Judt’s masterful Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), which situates the revolutions within their pan-European matrix.

Those looking for a concise treatment encompassing a range of perspectives would do well to turn to Jeffrey Engel’s collection, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, drawn from papers given at a January 2009 conference at Texas A&M. Its focus is on great power politics and the grand strategists rather than on the crowd scenes one remembers from the news. The mass demonstrations mattered, to be sure, but the decisive move had taken place earlier when, as Engel relates, “Gorbachev told his socialist counterparts that the Kremlin would never again crush Eastern European reformers with force.” The Brezhnev doctrine? Revoked! Just how different the course of events in Central and Eastern Europe might have been had there been no Gorbachev one can infer from the May 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. The enormous irony here is that the Chinese communist state endured, while the Soviet Union, despite—or perhaps in part because of—its leader’s readiness to bend, did not.

In the chapter he contributes to the Engel volume, on the role the European Community played in transforming the eastern moiety of the continent, James J. Sheehan recounts Gorbachev’s developing interest in the West, especially the varieties of democratic socialism represented by such figures as Willy Brandt and Olof Palme. Sheehan notes also Gorbachev’s affinity with Margaret Thatcher, who in turn facilitated his relationship with Ronald Reagan. At the heart of the Soviet leader’s reform agenda was his rejection of war as a political instrument and his belief in the gradual transformation of social and political life through economic growth. The end of this process was to be his country’s finding its place in a “common European home” stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. This was an aspiration not shared by Western leaders, some of whom were suspicious of Gorbachev’s motives, and virtually all of whom doubted his staying power. “There was indeed a common European home,” concludes Sheehan, “but there was no room in it for the Soviet Union.”

In their essay, William Taubman and Svetlana Savranskaya stress the distance Gorbachev traveled between 1985 and 1989: from détente to ending the Cold War, from attempts to repair a broken system to a push to transform the Soviet Union into a modern democratic society. On November 10, 1989, the day after the Wall fell, Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, wrote in his diary: “This is the end of Yalta… [Gorbachev] has indeed turned out to be a great leader. He has sensed the pace of history and helped history find a natural channel.” While many people in the West might be inclined to second Chernyaev’s judgment, many Russians would not. For them 1989 was, as Taubman and Savranskaya point out, “the time when the Soviet Union ‘lost’ Eastern Europe, along with other fruits of the Great Patriotic War, without getting anything in return—no massive economic package, no ‘Marshall Plan,’ no integration with Western Europe.”

In the concluding chapter of the Engel collection, Melvyn P. Leffler explores the implications of 1989 for American foreign policy. For the first nine months of the year, while the administration of George H. W. Bush sought to find its footing, the U.S. had relatively little influence on events in Central and Eastern Europe, although the new president did welcome, in an address in Mainz that May, the prospect of “a Europe whole and free.” Once the revolutionary tide had crested, the Americans had to determine how best to engage the new geopolitical reality. Toward what ends should the U.S. as the sole remaining superpower—a phrase repeated endlessly in those days—exercise its hegemony? Bush, in ordinary circumstances a capable manager, was famously not master of what he called “the vision thing.” He spoke of a “new world order” but offered little in the way of specifics. The administration was understandably wary of becoming ensnared in intractable situations. Even its most notable intervention, taking Kuwait back from Saddam Hussein, testified to that. “We are not going to Baghdad,” declared Defense Secretary Cheney in April 1991. “Our military objectives [do] not include changing the Iraqi government.” Obviously the Dick Cheney of a dozen years later had altered his opinion. How much of that shift, Leffler asks, emanated from “rhetorical tropes and manufactured memories that associated the end of the Cold War with Berliners traversing the Wall—dancing for joy, dancing for history”—from the assumption, that is, that all dictatorships are at their core hollow, just waiting for the push that will send their people into the streets, ready to greet their liberators with roses?

Mary Elise Sarotte argues in 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe that, although the Cold War order was clearly on the verge of breakdown by the late 1980s, the manner in which the collapse occurred and the developments that flowed from it were far from inevitable. She is not a born storyteller—her prose is at best workmanlike—but she has an extraordinary narrative to relate and a superb command of the facts. Sarotte had access not only to an immense body of archival material but also to many high-level players—Baker, Scowcroft, Hurd, and Genscher among them. Her focus is squarely on Germany. The protagonist of her story is Helmut Kohl, an uncharismatic politician persistently underestimated by allies and foes alike, who nonetheless proved himself a bold and shrewd strategist. As Sarotte points out, Kohl’s signal insight was to grasp before anyone else that his compatriots in the East, the subjects of two grand political experiments stretching over fifty-seven years, were in no frame of mind to undertake yet another. Most of the dissident groups behind the demonstrations that brought the Honecker regime to its knees wished to pursue a third way between Western-style consumer capitalism and socialism of the Soviet model. But the great mass of people in the German Democratic Republic wanted no part of any third way. Given the possibility of swift incorporation into the Federal Republic, an overwhelming majority of them were ready to adopt that course. Sarotte demonstrates in brilliant detail the ways in which Kohl outmaneuvered Gorbachev, other European heads of government (the Germanophobic Thatcher in particular), and political opponents in both halves of his country to make sure the Easterners got what they, and of course the chancellor himself, desired.

The Western partners accomplished a great deal in the course of a year. In addition to unifying Germany, they extended the EC and NATO to the east, laying the groundwork for the eventual enlargement of those institutions to the very borders of Russia, and in the process assured the all but universal dominance of market economics. The price they paid was letting slip a “chance to foster enduring cooperation with an unusually willing … Russian leadership”—a chance that, as Sarotte wistfully observes, “will not reappear soon.”

Of the three books under review, the most accessible is The Year That Changed the World by Michael Meyer, Newsweek’s bureau chief for Germany and Eastern Europe during the period of tumult. His account is loosely chronological, with separate chapters devoted to each of the countries involved. Meyer seeks to demolish what he regards as two misconceptions: that Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Gorbachev effectively blew the Wall down, and that the upheavals in the East were spontaneous popular uprisings. These suppositions are perhaps current in some quarters, but they have little support among historians. Nor has the “untold story” Meyer promises in his subtitle gone without telling elsewhere, although it may be new to many of the readers he appears to have in mind.

Much of the appeal of Meyer’s book consists in the anecdotes with which he peppers his narrative. He has a reporter’s gift for cultivating sources. Meyer seems to have enjoyed particular access to the reform premier of Hungary, Miklos Nemeth, who had been brought into the government by old-line party bosses with an eye toward making him the fall guy if the shaky economy collapsed. Nemeth, and a “small band of pirates” around him, sought to modernize the economy, make the rights Hungarians had on paper actual, open the border with Austria, exit the Warsaw Pact, and ultimately “join Europe.” “The cunning and courage with which they executed their intricate plan was,” declares Meyer, “one of the great subterfuges in the annals of diplomatic history.” He is in fact on to a riveting story—captivating enough in itself that a less effusive prose might have conveyed it more effectively. (In fairness, his style does grow more restrained over the course of the book.)  

Meyer sees Poland, too, as an instance of change from the top. The Round Table, aimed at giving opposition groups a role in governing the country, was called into being by Wojciech Jaruzelski, the general who had declared martial law in 1981 and suppressed Solidarity. As in Hungary, rising economic and social tensions were the engine of reform. Jaruzelski is a markedly more interesting figure than the apparatchiks who typically ran things in the satellites. “A study in ambiguity,” Meyer calls him:

Was he motivated chiefly by expedience, once again doing what needed to be done to preserve socialism and the party’s prerogatives … ? Or was it something deeper … , a banishing of ghosts, whereby Jaruzelski, ashamed of his choice nearly eight years earlier, was now determined to make amends, to act justly and accept the consequences … ? The answer may be too buried within Jaruzelski’s psyche for even him to know.

Along with Gorbachev and Nemeth, Jaruzelski did not survive the changes he set in motion. “The most dangerous time for a bad government,” remarks Tocqueville in L’Ancien Régime, “is when it starts to reform itself.”

The revolution one delights to recall is that staged by Vaclav Havel in Prague. “This gentle revolution,” as Meyer fittingly characterizes it, “was sheer theater, … as masterfully choreographed as the playwright’s own absurdist comedies. It unfolded in vignettes, scenes and acts, with cameo appearances by famous faces from the past. Alexander Dubcek. Joan Baez… The stage was the Magic Lantern, the underground theater that served as Havel’s headquarters.” The Velvet Revolution ended in late December with Havel’s becoming president of Czechoslovakia, the sort of leader who comes to the fore only, it would seem, when a nation is being founded, or founded anew.

In 1972 Richard Nixon is reputed to have asked Chou En-lai about the historic impact of the French Revolution of 1789. The Chinese premier is said to have replied: “It is too early to tell.” Is it too soon to appraise the revolutions of 1989? That year represented the end of an era whose passing few people would be disposed to mourn. On the other hand, history affords no clean breaks and there remain the effects of a half century of communism, preceded by a dozen years of fascism, and several derelict empires before that. The events of 1989 made possible an expansion of the European Union from the twelve members that composed it then to its current total of twenty-seven. Problems of political and economic integration continue to dog the continent, the leading issue as I write being the lack of adequate coordination in the eurozone between fiscal and monetary policy.

A shorthand way of answering the question of what we should make of 1989 might be to take a stroll through Berlin Mitte, the epicenter of the Cold War and the place that more than any other figured forth its close. If one walks westward along Unter den Linden in what used to be East Berlin, past the statue of Frederick the Great, the Deutsche Staatsoper, and the buildings of Humboldt University, one comes to the Brandenburg Gate. Two decades ago the Wall, with its guard towers and death strip, rose just beyond the Gate. On November 9, 1989, the Brandenburg Gate, for so many years the arch-emblem of impasse and division, became—literally overnight—the symbol of openness and reconciliation. The intervening decades have seen this part of Berlin transformed from a no-man’s-land into the pivot of a world city. A little to the north is the splendidly refurbished Reichstag building, once again the parliamentary seat of a united Germany after a lapse of sixty-six years, while to its south is the striking new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, dedicated precisely sixty years after the end of World War II. How many capitals have a penitential site at their heart? Where then do matters stand twenty years on? There are of course problems enough to go around, but also ample grounds for satisfaction and hope.  

NOTES

1. Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Residents adn how They Won the Cold War (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 449.