How The Wall Fell
Claudia Rosett, 11.03.09, 7:17 PM ET
When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, it did not fall from sheer wear and tear of tyranny. People actively chose to destroy it. They tore down that iconic wall not only with pickaxes, hammers and bare hands, but as a culminating act of decades of sacrifice, courage, determination and a complex, globally contested war of ideas.
Many of the vital battles were fought by people living far from Berlin. They were fought by people who persisted in the face of everything from ridicule to misguided Utopianism to violence, imprisonment and the hot wars that flared along the front lines of the Cold War.
The wall itself, built in 1961, stood for 28 years, and was just a small part of the massive iron curtain with which the Soviet empire penned in the people of Eastern Europe. But the wall became a symbol of the far larger divide that split the world for much of the 20th century, partitioning great swathes of the globe into spheres of influence in which the basic trajectories were free vs. unfree, capitalist democracy vs. command-and-control Communism.
A generation later, that may all sound very simple and old-fashioned. It is easy to assume that our world today is more complex, more flexible, more multicultural in the doing and multipolar in the making--and that the Cold War has little to teach.
Perhaps this helps explain why President Barack Obama, who dropped by Berlin to deliver a campaign speech last year, cannot find time to attend the 20th anniversary of the wall's fall, Nov. 9, in Berlin. That is a terrible mistake.
The threats besetting the world today involve essentially the same old conflict: freedom vs. tyranny. Today's variations on the Berlin Wall can be discerned in places where women face the coerced wearing of the veil; in the prison camps and firewalls of China; in the gulag and murderous border patrols of North Korea; in the rising police state in Russia; the missionary thuggery of Venezuela's Chavista "revolution"; the global tentacles of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and al-Qaida; the security forces that murdered protesters this spring in the streets of Tehran.
Today's Wall looms in such ventures as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, both involving not only the potential use of monstrous weapons by murderous regimes, but nuclear extortionist leverage--which these regimes are already using to bring free nations to heel.
In the matter of facing down such threats, the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, has plenty to teach--especially to a free world with current leaders too much given to disparaging capitalism and downplaying freedom.
This attitude is not new. The Cold War entailed its own considerable muddles and moral murk within the councils of the West. Among the Western policy elite, there were some who saw Communism as a promising experiment, and many who believed Moscow was best dealt with as a force to be appeased, or even catered to. From the 1945 signing away of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta, to the pressures of the Brezhnev doctrine--articulated in the 1960s as Moscow's policy that no country engulfed by Soviet expansionism would be let go--Communism appeared to be entrenched as far ahead as the eye could see.
During the 1970s, the scene grew increasingly grim. South Vietnam fell to the North, and the Soviets set up shop in Southeast Asia at the former U.S. bases of Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, made inroads into Latin America, cozied up to such "nonaligned" countries as India, and tutored such Middle Eastern players as the Palestine Liberation Organization in terrorist tactics.
A befuddled Jimmy Carter served out the final, humiliating months of his one-term presidency lamenting that the Russians had lied to him about their aims in Afghanistan, and daunted by the taking of American hostages in the newborn Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1983, French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel published a book with a title that sums up the growing gloom of the time: How Democracies Perish.
But instead of perishing, democracy revived, with newfound backbone. The 1980s became the decade of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who declined to appease and apologize. Instead, they championed the interwoven systems of free markets and democracy, under the over-arching cause of individual freedom. They have since been widely honored. But at the time, their efforts were beset even in the West with protests, ridicule and accusations that they were war-mongering oafs, dangerously oblivious to the nuances of diplomacy and détente.
The fortitude of a Reagan or a Thatcher requires an ability to navigate the maze of mirrors and, yes, moral as well as strategic judgments that are history in the making. Policy choices that look simple in retrospect are rarely as clear at the time. Despots tend to clothe themselves in fictions and distortions, shaping official "realities" and shifting the terms of debate to suit their needs. These same fictions wend their way into the debates of democracies, and require a lot of hard work to debunk.
East German President Erich Honecker referred to the Berlin Wall as the "anti-fascist wall," implying that it was there not to keep East Germans penned in under communist rule, but to keep the West German and American "fascists" out. The Soviets and their satraps hijacked wholesale the lexicon of "liberation."
American TV viewers of the 1980s were treated to endless discussions in which guest apologists for the Soviet system shrugged off the gulag to deplore homelessness in America, while peace groups militated for U.S. nuclear disarmament, in hope the Soviets would follow suit.
Reagan and Thatcher stuck to their guns, missiles and missile defense ambitions. Reagan threw one lifeline after another to dissidents of the Soviet "evil empire," including his demand in a speech before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
What followed the newly recovered pride and courage of the democratic world was a wave of genuine liberation around the globe. This first announced itself in Asia, with the success of democratic movements in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan. There were also unsuccessful attempts: Burma's 1988 protests and China's 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising--both stopped by tyrannies opening fire on their own people.
But the fuses of revolt had been lit in both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. In March of 1989, Hungary broke the communist monopoly on power with a multi-party election, and in May began dismantling the security fence that had stopped Hungarians escaping into Austria. This opened the way for an exodus of East Germans fleeing via Czechoslovakia and Hungary into Austria and on to West Germany.
The Czechs and Poles were shaking loose, led respectively by such courageous men as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. In the Baltics, more than two million people joined hands to form a human chain protesting Soviet control. Inside the Soviet Union itself, there had already been protests, in places such as Armenia, Georgia and Moldova.
All this helped pave the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ultimately, the Soviets had no more stomach to stand up to this growing movement for freedom. As Russia expert Richard Pipes sums it up, Moscow "refused to send military forces to help the East German government reassert its authority."
And so, the wall came down.
The West has by now traveled a long road--from Reagan, who demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," to Obama, who in Berlin last year recast this piece of history as one big group hug: "A wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."
Unfortunately, it is not the world standing "as one" that brings down such walls. There has always been good and evil. The attempt to straddle such divides, as Washington is now doing with Tehran, is an invitation to be torn apart. The Berlin Wall fell because brave people--on both sides of it--took a clear stand against tyrants and for freedom. That's still how the world works, and America's own fortunes still depend on whether our leaders live up to the principles that brought down the Berlin Wall, or sideline them as yesterday's news.
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
