It is useless asking why we all seem focused on our small world to the exclusion of anything happening beyond our shores. That is our insularity coming to the fore, again and again. Twenty-five years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. There have been articles and commemorations everywhere, except here. I even doubt there will be anybody that it will soon be the 25th anniversary of the historic summit that brought the Cold War to an end.
Many of the commentaries I read focused on blowby-blow accounts of how the mighty Soviet Empire crumbled without a shot being fired. The minutiae of what happened makes riveting reading, how governments in the East suddenly found themselves spineless and without the all-important Soviet backing once Gorbachev made it clear he would not send the tanks in. Then the East German government simply folded, a government aide used the wrong words and a local East German commander ordered the frontier post to be opened and turned away and cried.
Beyond these small, not inconsequential, acts or omissions, a huge gear change was taking place in the world. Essentially, the Soviet Union collapsed because it just could not keep up with the spending and arms build-up engineered by Ronald Reagan and, having lost this battle, ended up losing everything.
The Soviet Union entered a fissiparous phase and what used to be one big bloc suddenly became a myriad of countries each with its own identity. Today, many of these countries are, together with us members of the European Union. They left one bloc and became members of another.
Essentially, what President Putin is doing in Ukraine is a desperate attempt to try and stop Ukraine, which used to form part of the Soviet Union, from joining the West, EU and maybe Nato, as the Baltic States have done. The way Putin did it was by encouraging Ukraine to have its own fissiparous moment by splitting the Russianspeaking East Ukraine from the more Western-focused west Ukraine.
The jury is still out on what is going to happen in that corner of the world, and Putin certainly risks repeating the collapse of 1989 because of the impacts and effects of the Western sanctions. On the other hand, Putin and Russia turned to a very worrying sabre-rattling yesterday with an incursion by a Russian armed column and trucks reported in Eastern Ukraine, as well as multiple cases of overflying by Russian planes.
If the Soviet Union had its fissiparous phase in 1989, maybe continuing today in Ukraine, the West, specifically the European Union, is dangerously beginning to show signs of having its own too.
Great Britain narrowly escaped splitting up with Scotland seeking independence in the referendum held a few weeks ago. That result will not be without consequences. It seems clear, for instance, that the Labour Party in Scotland has taken such a knock as a result of the referendum that it is handing over the next general election to the Conservatives.
In turn, David Cameron, feeling the heat of the UKIP defectors more than any threats by Labour, is slipping and sliding towards a confrontation with the EU that might end with a Brexit – the exit of Britain from the EU.
Scotland is not the only case. Today, there will be an unofficial and even illegal referendum in Catalonia, struck down by the Spanish High Court but going ahead nevertheless, just as the Russians did in Eastern Ukraine. The grievances and independentistic spirit of the Catalans is well known, as is their anger at forking out so much money to the central government in Madrid. This is still a work in progress, but then, even in Scotland the issue of Scottish independence has not been buried by the result of the referendum.
And so it goes on. With the death of Marshall Tito, Yugoslavia split up into the component republics and the terrible Bosnian war took place. Today, two of the former Yugoslav components are already in the EU and the others are pushing hard to enter as well. The pendulum is swinging the other way.
There are, of course, independentistic trends also in Italy, especially in the North with Lega Nord, and strangely less in the South, though that would make more sense if the former Bourbon kingdom of Naples and Sicily were to shake off the stranglehold of Rome and the power of the Mafia.
It is clear, and today is the day we may be allowed to make this reflection, that the only country that has benefited from this fissiparous trend in Europe has been Germany. Today, Germany is far stronger than it was before the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. It has been a hard slog; there has been an enormous transfer of resources, and maybe there are still gaps, but the two sides, the West and the East, have now come together and are almost equal, and feel very strongly that they are part of the same country.
The countries of the East who have joined the EU have not benefited all that much from EU membership, except Poland, and are still fighting their own individual demons, especially Hungary and to some extent the Czech Republic. The Baltic countries are fiery upholders of their independence, boosted as well by their fear of Russia.
The two islands on the periphery of Europe – Malta and Cyprus – are too far away from the mainstream of European life and have their own problems to tackle, Cyprus especially after the near meltdown of its economic and financial system. Cyprus too is split between the Turkish part and the Greek Cypriot part.
But on a much wider level, Europe is indeed coming together. It took the United States 200 long and difficult years, and a civil war, to become one state with no threat of secession or splitting up. Europe is not there yet, not by a long chalk. It had to be the huge financial crisis of 2008 that made the member states come together and set up the building blocks with which to strengthen further financial integration.
We are not there yet and these fissiparous threats and tendencies remind us what a long stretch of road lies ahead of us.
In the long march of nations, the glacier-like movements may seem stable to the naked eye, but the events of 1989 show us that sometimes history can surprise us with the rapidity of its evolution.