04 September 2009

A Contested Future

Czech protestors surround a Soviet tank during the Prague Spring of 1968. Protests were violently suppressed.

This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall:  20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.53 MB).

By:  Robert J. Lieber

Momentous events take on a life of their own. The American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and the end of World War II in 1945 all continue to stand as watersheds, marking the boundaries of old and new eras, and as the subjects of continuing debate as to their political, cultural, and historical significance. The opening of the Berlin Wall rightfully merits inclusion in this list, and two decades later the event still reverberates in terms of its meaning and consequences.  The joyous throng of East Berliners pouring into West Berlin on the night of November 9, 1989, represents not only an indelible memory for people of that city, but it symbolizes a more profound transformation: the peaceful reunification of Germany; a Europe whole and free; the end of a worldwide Cold War that had threatened to plunge the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies into a catastrophic conflict; and — arguably most important of all — compelling evidence for the proposition that given the opportunity to choose, people will demand political freedom.

Almost anyone who lived through the Cold War, and not just in Germany, will still remember key moments: the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949; the Korean War (1950-1953); Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin; the Soviets’ launching of Sputnik — the first space satellite — in 1957; erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961; the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962; the Vietnam War; the Soviet-led invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968); and the transformation of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev beginning in 1985.

As a young graduate student, I vividly recall a trip on foot through Checkpoint Charlie on a cold, dreary late December day just a few years after the Wall had been built. The barriers, warning signs (“Achtung, Sie verlassen den Amerikanischen Sektor”), and taciturn and wary East German border guards and volkspolitzei created an atmosphere worthy of a John LeCarre novel. (Indeed, LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold captures the temper of those times.) I recall, too, meeting East German students while visiting the eastern half of the city, including an ambitious, talented young physics student who believed in the ideals of his system but yearned for socialism with a human face. Less than two years later, he and his friends would be arrested and imprisoned after they sought to protest East German troops’ participation in crushing the Prague Spring, and I would not see him or his family again until more than two decades later after the Wall had miraculously opened.

The Wall came down for reasons large and small, though none of these diminish the surprise, even shock that this could happen so suddenly and peacefully. At one level, people had voted with their feet. Ever since the creation of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the eastern sector of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War, large numbers of people seized the opportunity to move from East to West (as another friend of mine and his family did by riding the S-Bahn in a not-yet divided Berlin). After August 1961, those who fled did so under dangerous and sometimes deadly conditions. They left homes and friends in search of a better life, the material attractions of the West, and personal freedom on the other side of the Wall. In the final months, as Czechoslovakia and Hungary liberalized, East Germans fled by the tens of thousands through those neighboring countries, in a flood the GDR authorities were incapable of stopping without bloodshed and that the 400,000 troops of the Red Army stationed in East Germany would not stop, not in 1989, and not to save a tottering regime.

In reality, the opening of the Wall represented just one of four historic transformations compressed into a remarkably short time: the end of a divided Germany and a divided Europe; the end of the Cold War, a conflict that had begun in Europe; the collapse of Soviet communism and almost all of its imitators; and the dissolution of the USSR into its 15 constituent republics. These extraordinary transformations stimulated enormous enthusiasm and optimism. 

An “End of History”?

The post-Berlin Wall events marked the start of dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as Latin America and Africa. Transitions to democracy and away from state-controlled economies took place in the former Warsaw Pact countries, most notably Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, but also throughout the region. The Russian Federation and many of its 14 former republics also adopted democratic forms of governance and economic transformation, though many with disappointing results.  Elsewhere in the world, a flood tide of political opening and economic reform seemed to portend a bright future. This optimism is captured in a widely cited essay and book, The End of History, by the political theorist Francis Fukuyama. He argued that in view of these epic changes, it had become evident that liberal democracy and a market-oriented economic order were the only viable options for modern societies.

Unfortunately, the predominance of these political and economic models proved more contingent than seemed to be the case in the initial heady days and months of the post-Berlin Wall era. For some, the creation and stabilization of these new systems became far more problematic than expected. Many of the countries of Eastern Europe as well as the Baltic states successfully implemented wrenching political and economic transitions, though the process itself was at times long and arduous. But in the Balkans, as well as parts of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and also Africa, the process was fraught with difficulty. Ethnic conflicts erupted, driven by appeals to extreme nationalism, and elections sometimes brought the veneer of democracy without the substance.

A rural Romanian family expresses its political allegiances.

In Russia itself, the initial forms of democracy under Presidents Gorbachev (1985-1991) and Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) were burdened by a chaotic transition and economic collapse. From 1999 onward, the country’s institutions became more stabilized but increasingly took on a semi-authoritarian form in which, despite the appearance of democracy, President Vladimir Putin (1999-2008; prime minister, 2008-present) and his colleagues presided over what the Economist magazine termed one of the most “criminalized, corrupt, and bureaucratized countries in the world.”  Currently, the Russian people possess much more autonomy in their daily lives than they had under Soviet communism, but they do so within a system that stifles independent political parties and the rule of law, lacks an independent judiciary, gives its cronies control of leading companies, and dominates television and the major media.

Even where liberal democracy and the market economy have taken root, initial enthusiasms and boundless optimism have waned. In some places, for example Bulgaria and Romania, the problems have been those of corruption and of inadequate state capacity to carry out successfully the functions for which it is responsible. The ardent desire of Eastern European countries to gain entry to NATO and the European Union helped significantly in the early post-Cold War years to keep democratic and economic transitions on track. Requirements for rule of law, civilian control of the military, minority rights, political freedoms, and accountability proved to be real assets during these transition periods and when applicant states found themselves buffeted by competing priorities and claimants at home and abroad.

Here it is important to understand the differences between liberal and illiberal democracy. Liberal democracy requires not just elections and some of the formal institutions of democracy (parliament, president, courts), but a free press, rule of law, independent judiciary, minority rights, freedoms of speech and assembly, the ability of parties and individuals to seek office peacefully through competitive elections, and the functioning of civil society institutions in which people’s livelihoods and way of life do not depend exclusively on the government. Illiberal democracy (a term coined by the prominent journalist, editor, and scholar Fareed Zakaria) denotes a system in which elections take place, but in which civil liberties, civil rights, and the multiple dimensions of a genuinely democratic society are severely limited or altogether absent. Societies emerging from dictatorship and affected by deep ethnic and sectarian divisions have been especially vulnerable to these internal conflicts.

Even where corruption and government performance have not been major factors, lingering doubts can remain. A recent opinion poll in the former East Germany revealed that a shocking 57 percent of respondents defended the former GDR, with even those acknowledging its bad sides now claiming that “life was good there.” Certainly there is misplaced nostalgia, driven by the predictable frustrations of daily life, especially at a time of recession and high unemployment. Attitudes and history matter too. Explaining this kind of apology for dictatorship requires an empathetic understanding of attitudes and historical experience. The population of East Germany had been unaccustomed to the challenges, the risks, and the opportunities of life in a free society. They had lived for 56 years under dictatorships: from 1933 to 1945 under the Nazis and then until 1989 under a Soviet-imposed communist regime. Adapting to life in a liberal democracy and market economy may thus require generational change as well.

We like to think that all good things go together: liberty, popular sovereignty, equal opportunity, equality of condition. But as Professor Michael Mandelbaum has noted in

Democracy’s Good Name, the idea of democracy itself has historically combined two related but sometimes competing notions: liberty, i.e., freedom of the individual, and popular sovereignty. These notions can and do come into conflict, for example if majorities favor policies that restrict individual freedom or even repress or limit the rights of some members of society. Stable liberal democracies resolve this contradiction through constitutionally mandated rights protected from majoritarian restriction and through maintaining an independent judiciary to which individuals can appeal.

More broadly, the combination of liberal democracy and a market economy also embodies a certain inbuilt tension. A market economy helps to preserve individual liberty, but it also can give rise to substantial economic disparities.  This inequality, in turn, can conflict with notions of popular equality and social solidarity.

Challenges come from external sources as well.  As the political scientist Azar Gat has described in a provocative and widely cited Foreign Affairs essay, the rise of authoritarian capitalist powers poses a renewed threat to the predominance of liberal democracy. They represent an alternate path to modernity, and just as the defeat of their 20th-century precursors, Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, depended on the United States’ coming to the aid of the European democracies, so too the future requires active and sustained American engagement on behalf of liberal democracies and societies.

In this competition, differences of outlook among the democracies remain an ongoing problem. They often disagree among themselves on important policy choices, such as democracy promotion, international economic policies, and how best to respond to threats from proliferation, failed states, ethnic conflict, and human rights abuses. Despite calls for a League of Democracies to offset the weaknesses of the United Nations, the European Union, and other international institutions in confronting common world problems, the criteria for where to draw the line between liberal and illiberal democracies remain problematic, and few countries are willing to prioritize such a new grouping above their existing commitments to regional bodies, other institutions, or more narrowly defined national interests.

In short, two decades after the opening of the Berlin Wall, rather than the end of history and a foreordained triumph of liberal democracy and the market economy, the future remains contested. Despite this, there are reasons for optimism. To some extent, the the past but also the future, not only the fall of the Wall itself, but the collapse of Soviet communism, the end of the Cold War, the success of velvet revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, the halting but nonetheless real progress of democratization in many parts of the world, and massive demonstrations for freedom by the Iranian people suggest there is something deep-seated, profound, and fundamental in the desire for political freedom. Its success is not inevitable, but as presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have proclaimed, the aspiration for liberty and democracy is an intrinsic human longing.

The challenge for the world’s democracies today is foreshadowed in a remark by one of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, after the historic Constitutional

Convention of 1787. When asked by a passerby if the new United States would be a republic or a monarchy, he replied, “A republic if you can keep it.” Much the same might be said about the global future for free societies and market economies. Their prevalence may not be foreordained, but with effort and commitment, the likelihood of sustaining and extending them remains promising.

Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University and the author or editor of fifteen books on international relations and U.S. foreign policy. He publishes and lectures widely and has appeared on U.S. and foreign television and radio networks.