The East German Communist authorities officially referred to it as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall”. Built in 1961, it was torn down on 9 November 1989. Twenty years down the line, hindsight affords a good vantage point to consider some of the political consequences following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The post-1945 “Russia”
factor
For decades, the “Russia” factor had occupied centre stage in Eastern European politics. But in the first years after 1945 it assumed determining proportions. Through the annexation of the Baltic States and vast swathes of land in Poland, the advance of Soviet frontiers created a new geopolitical configuration in the area. The formation of a Hungarian-Soviet frontier, causing the territorial separation of Romania on the one side and of Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other, and the moving westward of Polish borders at the expense of Germany, also impacted the region.
Despite Russian influence, these countries resisted Sovietification.
They experimented with “People’s Democracy” – a term coined by Yugoslavia’s Tito (1892-1980) – in which a large majority of people would be involved in government: workers, farmers, artisans, and intellectuals, and there would be no dictatorship (of the proletariat). Since People’s Democracy did not eliminate the right to own the means of production, it was considered as the most evolved form of bourgeois democracy.
Then again, the Soviet Union viewed proletariat democracy (equivalent to “dictatorship of the proletariat”) as being one step ahead, and treated these countries as inferiors, thereby laying the foundations for the ideological subordination of the future Eastern European Communist regimes.
As a transitory phase, People’s Democracy was expected to overcome the diversities and specificities of differing nationalities, enabling the emergence of unicity within the Soviet bloc. It was characterized by coalition governments composed of anti-Fascist political forces, and by a mixed economy made up of private, public, and cooperative sectors.
With its East-West axis of tension, the Cold War – sparked mainly by the Soviet Unions attaining superpower status – sounded the death knell for People’s Democracy, triggering its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat formula.
A divided Germany
The Cold War spread across the entire world. Yet, the partition of both Germany (into two States: the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic) and Berlin represented a portentous political and symbolical factor, epitomized by the erection of the Wall and, later, its demolition. Berlin became a point of contact between two opposed worlds with opposed political, social and economic realities, and world attention frequently focused on it.
The successes of the Federal Republic were compared with those of the Democratic Republic, the Communist world’s feather in the cap.
The Wall did not symbolize only division but also the weaknesses inherent in Eastern European societies. These were afflicted by constant difficulties, as attested by the workers’ revolts in East Germany (1953) and in Poznañ (1956), the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring Revolution of 1968, and the foundation of Solidarnoœæ in 1980. The Wall was meant to keep people from leaving the East to seek a better life in the West.
Similarities with the
19th-century
By the time the Berlin Conference was held in 1878, Central and Eastern Europe was divided between four contiguous, supranational empires: Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and German. The latter two engulfed nearly all of present-day Poland; the remaining countries depended on either Vienna or Constantinople. Each country has been deeply influenced by the empire to which it belonged: Poland was de-nationalized, while the nations subject to Ottoman power have had to trail behind because of economic and cultural backwardness; the populations under Habsburg rule have been the luckiest. In the aftermath of World War I, the nascent Eastern European nation states replaced the now shattered empires that previously dominated them.
Thanks both to the European Union and the further fragmentation of certain states (such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia), the present situation, reminiscent of the time when supranational empires held sway, has seen the assuaging of the problem of national minorities in nation states.
Post-Berlin Wall Europe
The fall of the Wall closed the historical and political chapter of “real socialism”. Each Eastern European country regained its national history, rejoining the Old Continent as a fully-fledged member.
A common thread now leads different countries along the same transition path towards democracy and a market economy, highlighting two intertwined but contrasting processes. On the one hand, every country is going through a process of political democratisation and economic liberalization, accentuated by the necessity to integrate in Western economic and security frameworks.
On the other hand, the transition to a market economy and liberal democracy based on multi-party parliamentarianism exposes significant sectors of public opinion to populist and nationalist movements on the lookout for inter-ethnic confrontations as vote-catching means.
Strikingly, all of these circumstances are characterized by the evocation of historical situations and national passions that came to the fore in the aftermath of World War I and developed during the stabilization imposed by the 1919 Versailles Treaty.
A process of singular combinations of conceptual and political categories is going on in Eastern Europe. Then again, such irrationalities are also produced in the much more democratically and economically advanced West European countries. However, identity – understood as belonging to a particular civilization or national, religious or ideological community – is a historical factor that can either lead to extreme nationalism and xenophobia or serve as the basis for unity among different actors.
In this latter sense, national identity can form part of a European and supranational identity.
These were the problems faced during the long transition that began after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has led former Communist countries to join Europe. They were compounded by the necessity to rebuild parliamentary mechanisms and to convert planned economies into market economies. Not all of these problems have subsided, and whereas the fall of the Berlin Wall kindled hopes of a better life for many, it has also ushered in new challenges, vulnerabilities and risks.
Mark A. Sammut, LL.D., M.Jur, M.A.