End of history, 20 years on.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach.1845

I’ve been reading a lot of the blogging and MSM coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism and most of the theories/tropes seem flawed, or at best simplistic. So here are a couple of thoughts:

• If you’re overthrowing a despotic regime then people power is important. But if the army and state security services are willing to use force against it’s own citizens it doesn’t count for much (see China in ‘89, Iran this year). ‘People power’ was successful in East Germany because there was a lack of political will to suppress dissent. In some cases when shoot to kill orders were issued the Stasi refused to obey them. So, strange as it is to say, I think many of the main heroes in the reunification of Germany were Stasi agents and officials of the Honecker government – although obviously the ultimate hero was Gorbachev, who publically announced that he would not stand in the way of reform in Eastern Europe and privately advised leaders that the Red Army would not protect their regimes.

• Did the regimes fall because of the economic failure/moral bankruptcy of Communism? I don’t think so: if we look at states like Zimbabwe, Cuba, Burma and North Korea we see that totalitarian regimes that are morally and/or economically bankrupt can still endure. Geopolitical events like the collapse of energy prices in the late 1970s and the failed occupation in Afghanistan seem much more significant and they would have damaged the empire whether it was Communist or Capitalist or Tsarist.

• I do think there’s an economic case to be made for the disintegration of the Soviet Empire though; economic factors forced Gorbachev to charge market prices for USSR goods exported to Comecon countries – this crippled the regimes that had all relied on Soviet largesse. But there’s no reason they couldn’t have struggled on as bankrupt, quasi-independent satellites.

• Did western leaders play a significant role? People like to say that politicians they like – usually Thatcher, Reagan or Mitterrand – ‘won the Cold War’. I think this is nonsense; In the early 80s there was a struggle for power between different factions of the Soviet politburo: if some protege of Brezhnev had prevailed instead of Andropov’s man Gorbachev then the Cold War could have endured for decades. If the popular movements in Europe hadn’t been calling for change or had been resisted then there’s no reason Gorbachev wouldn’t have gone down in history as the Russian equivalent of Deng Xiopang, ushering in market reforms while maintaining the party’s stranglehold on power. I do think Pope John Paul II played a significant role in promoting the Polish democracy movement (and much of the funding came from private Catholic donors in the US and western Europe) and the formation of the common market and the European Union had an undeniable impact on intellectuals in Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia, but the impact Western leaders was negligible; Gorbachev has noted that Reagan’s belligerence strengthened the hard-liners in the Kremlin and made his economic reforms more difficult, so if anything there was a negative impact by western leaders at the time.

• Things have worked out pretty well for West Germany, not so great for a lot of the other former communist states: Russia has exchanged socialism for a faux-democratic form of fascism; life expectancy, literacy and other quality of life standards have declined subsequent to adopting the free-market model. There is free speech in theory but the majority of broadcast media is owned by the state. Print journalists who criticise the regime are routinely murdered; the crimes are rarely investigated. The state of the democratic and civil institutions are increasingly farcical; the country is ruled by a small cadre of men who were senior operatives in the state security services of the former Communist regime. So the ‘good triumphed over evil’ message that’s implicit to a lot of the coverage seems pretty silly to me.