Opinion Scattered bricks

Russia has been struggling to find its strategic identity ever since. But most importantly,the fall marked the symbolic collapse of that most astonishing of 20th century utopian projects: communism. The character of communism as an ideology and reality can be debated. But there is little doubt that its collapse was seen,rightly,as a form of emancipation. The fall of the Berlin Wall was an episode in the history of freedom. But with the collapse of communism the central axis around which world conflicts were organised also disappeared. The Cold War,a singular fact that impinged upon every nation,ended. Even more radically after the fall of the Berlin wall,Francis Fukumaya pronounced the end of history itself. There appeared to be finality to the ideological triumph of liberal democracy.

The event itself was extraordinary. The Wall was itself the best example of what Orwell had correctly prophesised as the inversion of language communism would produce. It was described by East German rulers who built it as “an anti-fascist protective rampart”. The sight of citizens tearing down the wall that had been built by oppressive rulers was a moment of great euphoria. The chain of events that led to destruction of the Wall had long been in the making. The proximate cause was the fact that several East European countries were already beginning to allow East Germans to escape to the West. In the first week of November,tens of thousands of people began their protests.

But for all the heroism of civil society under communism,this was not a revolution in a conventional sense. It has to be said,in retrospect,that this was not a revolution engineered by the people. It was more a product of a rarity in world history. The governing classes that held together the Soviet empire simply lost the will to hold and to power and to rule. Quite why this happened is a complex story. But the singularity of the moment was not simply that change occurred. It was that leaders in power like Gorbachev decided they could not or did not want to stand in the way. This ensured that this most momentous of transitions took place with relatively little bloodshed.

What exactly triumphed in 1989 is still a matter for debate. Was it the idea of freedom? Was it the allure of prosperity? Was it simply the fact that military dimensions of the Cold War took their toll? And the verdict on the aftermath is also debated. Certainly there should be no doubt about just what a disfiguring experience communism was to most people who survived it. It is not only that the promise of utopia was never redeemed. The sense of self and society that communism created only exacerbated the triple alienation it had promised to overcome. The alienation of human beings from one another is nowhere more starkly on display than in society of fear that files of communist states bear witness to; the alienation of human beings from their work was nowhere personified better than in the drudgery of work under communism; and the dualism of man and nature was rendered even starker in the drive to mastery that communism unleashed. Instead of the ecstasy of self-creation,communism came to represent the abridgment of human possibilities.

East Germany was rapidly integrated,and Berlin itself has now become one of the most interesting cities in Europe. The rest of Eastern Europe joined the post-historical utopia known as the EU. Russia itself is still coming to terms with immense loss. It experienced a precipitous decline on so many measures of power. But even the form of capitalism and democracy it has spawned stands in the same relation to market society that Soviet communism did to Marxism: as a kind of odd perversion. Being in the ideological vanguard of a global movement was its identity; and after that dissipated what is left is a sense of the old tragic,and somewhat cynical,Slavic exceptionalism,a sense of being beleaguered,buttressed by the bravado of energy revenues. Russia is still to find itself.

Fukuyama’s critics were quick to blast his characterisation of 1989 as the “end of history”. After all,did not the eruption of irredentist nationalism,religious fundamentalism,new forms of imperialism and the crisis of capitalism itself prove him wrong? Nor was the march of democracy as seamless as many had thought. And Communist China has improvised its own form of social existence not captured by either the terms communism or liberal democracy. There is some truth to this. But it can be exaggerated. Nationalism remains a powerful force,but is by no means an alternative to liberal capitalism. Religious fundamentalism exists,but already profoundly marked by the secular context it seeks to overturn. Capitalism has serious problems,but these are very far from being system threatening. Fukuyama’s point was not that there will not be conflicts or crises. It was deeper. It was that the horizons within which we now view human possibility and the yardsticks of progress are broadly defined by liberal capitalism. What died in 1989 was bondage and unfreedom. And that was a good thing. But what also died was the legitimacy of any more expansive conception of freedom beyond that offered by liberal capitalism. But it is hard to deny the fact that underlying euphoria of the fall of the Berlin wall,there was as much wistfulness as there was triumphalism. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of a politics of illusion,one that was profoundly destructive. But it has also left us a question we are still struggling with: can there be a critique without some yearning for utopia?

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi

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