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04 September 2009
New Opportunities, New Challenges
This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.5 MB).
By: Jeremi Suri
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of an era — a 50-year period of continuous superpower confrontation, rigid global alliances, threatening nuclear arms races, and the brutal repression of dissenting ideologies. The Cold War was a time when the dominant international states grew more powerful and exerted leverage over distant societies on an unprecedented scale. The break-up of traditional colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East only increased the influence of the U.S., Soviet, and Chinese governments in those regions. The strongest states dominated the global landscape from the last dying days of the Second World War through the heady hours of November 9, 1989, when the world opened to a new kind of popular politics.
Communist power crumbled in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union because citizens no longer believed in their leaders’ professed ideals. Citizens also ceased to fear the consequences of repression by government forces that were visibly uncertain about what they believed and what kinds of violence they could legitimately deploy. Communists ruled until 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union, but they lost real political authority years earlier.
The fall of the Berlin Wall testified to the shift in political momentum from communist rulers to educated, articulate, and newly empowered citizens. Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa, and Boris Yeltsin emerged as public heroes. These figures attracted support from people who craved authentic leaders, climbing to power through independence, rather than careerism. They also commanded a broad international following through the global circulation of their words and images. The Cold War began in an era of intimidating radio speeches from aging men; it ended with the youthful energy of attractive figures on television.
The new politics of television, and soon the Internet, were fragmented and impatient. Groups of people organized across societies — former political prisoners, religious dissidents, and labor unionists, among others — to challenge the grand narratives of authoritarian communist and liberal capitalist societies. They demanded that the state serve their specific interests. Groups of consumers, investors, and students, in particular, also rejected collective sacrifices and opted for instant gratification. They demanded political presentism rather than calls for a future utopia. The political was now the personal.
In this context, the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed a proliferation of dreams for better living conditions, but these remained small dreams. They promised freedom from lies and repression. They did not, however, offer a clear path to a new world. Talk of an “end to history” masked an inability to think about what might come next. The liberation that accompanied the end of the Cold War often produced a dangerous intoxication. Forward thinking grew more difficult with each passing day.
November 9, 1989, opened new opportunities for personal freedom and organization. It also created new challenges for managing international relations. Making the freedoms that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall serve the needs of a more complex world — that is the political calling of the first global post-Cold War generation.
[Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, the director of the European Union Center of Excellence, and the director of the Grand Strategy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of three major books, most recently Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Professor Suri frequently writes for scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, and various Web blogs, including his own: http://jeremisuri.net.]
