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(Saturday, November 7, 2009)
Twenty years after the Wall

Author: Joschka Fischer

Those who witnessed that night 20 years ago in Berlin, or elsewhere in Germany,
will never forget what happened - the
night the Wall came down.

History in the making is all too often tragic. Only rarely is it capable of
irony. November 9, 1989 was one of those
rare moments when irony reigned, because East Germany's bureaucratic socialism
died as it had lived - with a
bureaucratic snafu.

The Speaker of the Politburo, Günter Schabowski, had simply misunderstood that
body's decision and, by releasing to the
public incorrect information about the lifting of travel restrictions, triggered
the fall of the Wall! Groucho Marx
could not have bettered Schabowski that night. It was Germany's happiest hour.

Twenty years later, many revolutionary consequences of that night lie behind us.
The Soviet Union and its empire quietly
disappeared, and with them the Cold War international order. Germany was
reunited; Eastern Europe and the states on the
Soviet periphery won their independence; South Africa's apartheid regime fell
apart, numerous civil wars in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America ended; Israelis and Palestinians came closer to peace
than at any time since; and a
disintegrating Yugoslavia degenerated into war and ethnic cleansing. In
Afghanistan, war continued under different
circumstances, with serious ramifications for the region and, indeed, the world.

As the victorious heir to the collapsed Cold War order, the United States stood
alone, undisputed, at the peak of its
global power. But, within two decades - following the war in Iraq and financial
and economic crisis - the US had
squandered that special status.

Arrogance of power and blindness about reality were the two main causes for the
decline of the sole remaining
superpower. While most of the blame lies with George W. Bush, numerous negative
trends had preceded him. He merely took
them to the extreme.

After September11, 2001, the US had a second big chance to use its unique power
to reorganise the world. After this
terrible crime, countries - including in the Arab world - were ready to embrace
far-reaching steps. At that moment,
peace between Palestinians and Israelis could have been achieved, and thus a new
beginning made in the Middle East.

Even a radical about-face in US energy policy, with the introduction of energy
taxes, would have been possible under the
banner of national security. The challenge posed by global climate change could
have been addressed more effectively
that way. But that opportunity, too, was thrown away.

Europe - and, within it, Germany - were among the big winners of November 9,
1989. The continent reunited in liberty:
Germany on October 3, 1990; Europe with the great European Union enlargement of
May 1, 2004. The introduction of a
common European currency was successful; political integration by means of a
constitutional treaty a failure. Since
then, the EU has been stagnating, both internally and externally. Europe has
made only insufficient use of its
opportunities since 1989 - and could dramatically lose influence in the emerging
power structure of the twenty-first
century.

In Germany, which largely owes its reunification to its firm roots in the EU and
Nato, Europe-weariness is palpable. The
generation ruling in Berlin today increasingly thinks in national rather than
European terms. This was never more
obvious than in the deciding days and weeks of the global financial crisis.

Russia, the big loser of 1989, remains two decades later mired in a mix of
social and economic depression and political
regression and illusion. Life expectancy continues to decline; investment in
infrastructure, research, and education are
stunted; the economy is barely able to compete internationally; and the social
divide between poor and rich is
deepening.

Economically, Russia has turned into a commodity exporter, dependant on the
imponderables of the global energy market,
while simultaneously dreaming that it can use energy as a tool to revise the
post-Soviet order in its neighbourhood.

Russia's elites still largely think in the power categories of the 19th and 20th
centuries. This constitutes the
illusionary and historically regressive element of current Russian policy.
Russia's desire to reclaim its role as a
powerful global player is understandable and legitimate. But if it turns towards
the past in looking for its future, and
if it believes it can dispense with investments in the future in favour of
shameless personal self-enrichment, it will
continue to lose ground.

November 9, 1989 marked not only the end of the Cold War era but also the
beginning of a new wave of globalisation. The
real winners of this new world order are the large emerging countries, first and
foremost China and India, which
increasingly set the pace of global economic and political development.

The G-8 has been dismissed by history as a club of Western industrial nations;
its place has been taken by the G-20,
which conceals the underlying formula of power distribution within the new world
order: the G-2 (China and the US). All
these changes reflect a dramatic transfer of power from West to East, from
Europe and America to Asia, which within the
next two decades is likely to bring to an end 400 years of Eurocentrism.

The past two decades also have seen the world begin to reach its ecological
limits. The majority of humanity has sought
since November 9, 1989, to achieve Western living standards at all costs,
overstretching our planet's climate and
ecosystems.

The years since the Berlin Wall came down have been rich in dramatic change, but
the real era of upheaval lies ahead.
Global warming is only the tip of the iceberg towards which we are moving,
knowingly, with eyes wide open. What matters
now is that states act globally and in unison. Twenty years after Berlin,
Copenhagen is calling.

Mr Fischer was Germany's Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 to 2005,
and a leader in the German Green Party
for almost 20 years.

© Project Syndicate/Institute of Human Sciences, 2009,
www.project-syndicate.org.

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