THE LEGACY OF 1989 WAS WESTERN COMPLACENCY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

The legacy of 1989 was western complacency

As it shed its communist past, the east was told to embrace a flawed model

Tony Barber




Two months before the Berlin Wall fell on November 9 1989, East Germany’s Stasi secret police prepared a memorandum for the state’s communist leaders explaining why thousands upon thousands of citizens were fleeing to the west. The report dispensed with the usual claptrap blaming everything on western imperialism. Instead, the Stasi diagnosed East Germany’s problems as shortages of consumer goods and services, poor healthcare, travel restrictions, bad workplace conditions, oppressive bureaucracy and unfree media.

Anyone with personal memories of East Germany and the rest of the Soviet-led communist bloc knows that this analysis hit the nail on the head. Conditions varied across the region — Hungary was more open, Romania was a nasty dictatorship — but the essential point about the people’s hunger for western-style freedoms and living standards was completely correct.

Thirty years after the largely peaceful revolutions that dismantled communism, it is common to hear the view, in and outside central and eastern Europe, that something in the region has gone wrong. The demand for national independence, better economic conditions and democratic institutions has been met — albeit less convincingly in some countries than in others. Yet the view persists that 1989 has not quite turned out to be the irreversible turning point for the better that was hoped for.

Without doubt liberal democracy is on the defensive — although people in the glasshouses of Austria, Italy, the UK and US might want to think twice before throwing stones to the east. Democracy and the rule of law have been bent out of shape in Hungary and, to a lesser extent, in Poland and Romania. Rightwing populists form part of Estonia’s coalition government. Corruption in political and business circles is widespread across the region.

Still, it is not a picture of unrelieved gloom. EU and Nato membership has brought relative prosperity and security — a big improvement on the diplomatic, military and economic vulnerability that undermined them from 1918 to 1939. The fear to which Václav Havel, the late Czechoslovak playwright-president, gave voice in 1990 — that his region risked slipping into a post-cold war vacuum that would breed instability — has not become reality.

Nor is it correct that illiberalism and chauvinism reign supreme in central and eastern Europe. From Gdansk to Bucharest, from Bratislava to Skopje, there is much public and political resistance to these malignant phenomena. Compared with Brazil, China, the Philippines, Russia and Turkey (not to mention some western democracies) conditions in most of central and eastern Europe do not look exceptionally bad.

Nevertheless all is not well in the region. Why? One reason lies in the model that western governments in the 1990s prescribed for the east’s transition to free-market democracy. As it shed its communist past, the east was told to embrace not just liberal democracy but globalisation, open borders and the lightly regulated financial capitalism that the west viewed as the touchstone of its own economic success.

This model’s flaws were exposed in the 2008 financial crisis and the European refugee and migrant emergency of 2015-16. As in western societies, the doors opened in central and eastern Europe to nationalists, anti-immigrant nativists and anti-establishment populists. They found a receptive audience in voters in less prosperous, less internationalised towns and rural areas, who had long felt excluded from a meaningful say over how their countries reinvented themselves after 1989.

To be clear, the region’s leading pro-democracy reformers in 1989 were in no doubt about the desirability of following the western model. Nor were they necessarily wrong. Poland’s shock therapy programme — harsh in its initial impact and still uneven in some of its consequences — nonetheless modernised the economy in ways that no rulers, Polish or foreign, had achieved in centuries.

EU membership, too, has brought more pluses than minuses. Access to the single market, regional aid and, from ordinary people’s viewpoint, Europe-wide freedom of movement are cherished gains. Against that, a certain discontent with western Europe built up as central and eastern Europeans formed the impression that, to paraphrase George Orwell, all Europeans are equal but some are more equal than others.

This resentment has much to do with the western model grafted on to the east. In 1989, as during Europe’s 1848 revolutions, the people wanted civic freedoms and, in many cases, liberation from foreign overlords and their first independent states of modern times. But after 1989 the adoption of the western model — complete with EU membership, global capitalism and a liberal political philosophy — created tensions between liberalism allied to internationalism and the assertion of a newly acquired national sovereignty.

A similar battle between nationalists and liberals divided the German revolutionaries of 1848.

It paved the way to Germany’s unification under Otto von Bismarck on the principle of conservative nationalism, not liberalism. Now central and eastern Europe is experiencing its own contest between populist nationalism and liberal democracy. It would be brave to forecast a winner when some western societies are caught up in much the same struggle.