It was a victory of ideas. Timothy Garton Ash writes about ruling elites in The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague:
Yet none of this would have stopped them if they had still been convinced of their right to rule. The third, and perhaps ultimately decisive factor [in the overthrow of communism] is that characteristic of revolutionary situations described by Alexis de Tocqueville more than a century ago: the ruling elite’s loss of belief in its own right to rule. A few kids went on the streets and threw a few words. The police beat them. The kids said: You have no right to beat us! And the rulers, the high and mighty, replied, in effect: Yes, we have no right to beat you. We have no right to preserve our rule by force. The end no longer justifies the means!
In fact the ruling elites, and their armed servants, distinguished themselves by their comprehensive unreadiness to stand up in any way for the things in which they had so long claimed to believe, and their almost indecent haste to embrace the things they had so long denounced as ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’.
Ideas have power. Ideas drive change, perception, life as we know it. Without a framework with which to view the world, stimuli would overwhelm us in a chaotic rush of sensation. Concepts. Paradigms. Models. They can be false, they can be proved misguided and wrong, and yet their power persists with some. Francis Fukuyama wrote soon after the fall of communism that it heralded the “end of history” since liberal democracy was the only viable system of government. Sadly, the events of September 11, 2001 proved him wrong – Islamic fundamentalism has raised the banner of challenge to all Western civilization.
Yet it seems right to pause for a moment and remember the giddy joy of November 9, 1989, even if Ash describes it as a resumption of normal life:
Everyone has seen the joyful celebration in West Berlin, the vast crowds stopping the traffic on the Kurfurstendamm, Sekt corks popping, strangers tearfully embracing—the greatest street-party in the world. Yes, it was like that. But it was not only like that. Most of the estimated two million East Germans who flooded into West Berlin over the weekend simply walked the streets in quiet family groups, often with toddlers in pushchairs. They queued up at a bank to collect the 100 Deutschmarks ‘greeting money’ … offered to visiting East Germans by the West German Government, and they went, very cautiously, shopping. Generally they bought one or two small items, perhaps some fresh fruit, a Western newspaper, and toys for the children. Then, clasping their carrier-bags, they walked quietly back through the Wall, through the grey, deserted streets of East Berlin, home.
It is very difficult to describe the quality of this experience because what they actually did was so stunningly ordinary. … Berliners walked the streets of Berlin. What could be more normal? And yet, what could be more fantastic! ‘Twenty-eight years and ninety-one days,’ says one man in his late thirties strolling back up Friedrichstrasse. Twenty-eight years and ninety-one days since the building of the Wall. On that day, in August 1961, his parents had wanted to go to a late-night Western in a West Berlin cinema, but their eleven year old son had been too tired. In the early hours they woke to the sound of tanks. He had never been to West Berlin from that day to this. A taxi-driver asks me, with a sly smile: ‘How much is the ferry to England?’ The day before yesterday his question would have been unthinkable.
… Everyone looks the same as they make their way home—except for the tell-tale Western carrier-bag. But everyone is inwardly changed, changed utterly. ‘Now people are standing up straight,’ says a hotel porter. ‘They are speaking their minds. Even work is more fun. I think the sick will get up from their hospital beds.’ And it was in East rather than West Berlin that this weekend had the magic, pentecostal quality which I last experienced in Poland in autumn 1980. Ordinary men and women find their voice and their courage--Lebensmut, as the porter puts it. These are moments when you feel that somewhere an angel has opened his wings.
The point about Poland in 1980 is well taken. When I was at George Washington University, studying for my M.A., I had the privilege of speaking with a former CIA official. He spoke off the record about investments the United States government to fight communism throughout the 1980s. Millions spent on arms for the Contras in Nicaragua, or for the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Yet the best investment, he said, was spending $100,000 to buy printing presses for Solidarity. Printing presses, that classic means of spreading ideas. It took a decade for those ideas to percolate, and required new leadership in the Soviet Union that would not send in tanks at the first sign of discontent, but how vast a change was wrought by logic and thinking?
People younger than I have no conception of life during the Cold War. They hear tales of massive defense arsenals, of spies lurking in the shadows, and can’t understand why. I was born almost a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I can’t claim to have experienced the scariest times when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Yet the 1980s were fraught with their own fears and Eastern Europe had been ground under the Soviet heel three times when they tried to rebel before (Hungary 1956 – the Soviets. Czechoslovakia 1968 – Warsaw Pact. Poland 1980 – martial law). Communism fall? I might believe in it as a matter of faith, but then it happened, a miracle of the highest order.
The years since have had challenges of their own. Integrating formerly command economies into a system where private industry rules supreme. The hardship of depressions, of incipient absolutism in some cases. Yet by 2000 three former members of the Warsaw Pact had joined NATO. Other countries had been accepted for membership in the European Union. One day in 1993 I browsed through the fine china section at a department store. I saw some beautiful goblets and picked them up to find the price. And there was a sticker saying “made in Poland” – the first time I’d seen anything from the former Warsaw Pact offered for sale.
The world has changed. We should remember how much.
[transferred from a now-defunct location]
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