The New Dark Age

6 November, 2009 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Russian President D. Medvedev will visit Germany on the invitation of A. Merkel on November 9, 2009 to attend the international celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall demolition. In the presence of the Cold-War epoch leaders new era politicians will proudly state that division lines no longer exist in Europe.

The Wall built almost momentarily in 1961 on the order of the DDR leadership along the border between the western and eastern sectors of Berlin severed completely the communication between the two parts of the town partitioned by the allies in 1948. It became perhaps the starkest image of the iron curtain times marked with a conflict between the two worlds, each sustaining a way of life of its own.

The Berlin Wall existed for over 26 years. Almost as much time elapsed since its demolition and the subsequent fall of the iron curtain. Enormous geopolitical shifts — the first change of the borders of European countries since World War II, the German unification, and the disintegration of the USSR and several other countries — altogether fit within a period of roughly 18 months. Liberal regimes rose in most East European countries, and the development made possible the formation of a totally new international architecture.

The fall of the Berlin Wall signified the dawn of a new epoch, in which there is no place for many of the old barriers. Two decades ago, Berlin, Germany, and basically the whole world rejoiced in anticipation of the end of the Cold War. M. Rostropovich was playing by the Wall, and 118 artists from various parts of the world painted it with graffiti, thus turning a segment of it into an open-air gallery. A fragment of the graffiti depicting old L. Brezhnev and E. Honecker kissing became world-famous as a symbol of the past that was irreversibly left behind.

The whole picture, however, does not look so cloudlessly optimistic two decades after the event. It became a prologue to the violation of the global balance of forces and the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the XX century — the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world. The loss of one of its pillars made the world unstable.

The demise of the Berlin Wall bred not only great hopes, but also great disillusionments. The approach to the historical responsibility for the partition of Europe into blocs was a priori unfair. Since it was assumed that the USSR was the guilty side (and no objections to the idea were risen by the Soviet leadership), Moscow was expected to make concessions. Not surprisingly, the biased view translated into improvements for some nations largely at the expense of others. For Russia the German unification, the establishment of democratic regimes in East Europe via velvet revolutions, and «the new thinking» translated into the loss of its geopolitical positions, a rushed withdrawal of its forces, the uncompensated loss of assets worth billions of dollars abandoned in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and the escalations of social tensions in the domestic life.

The West — as in many other cases — resorted to the politics of double standards, the sin with which it traditionally charged the USSR. The US, Great Britain, Germany, and NATO promised a number of times that no NATO expansion would follow after the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. In his April, 2009 interview to Bild former USSR President M. Gorbachev claimed that Germany fulfilled all its promises to Russia but nevertheless admitted that – though H. Kohl, US Secretary of State J. Baker, and others assured him NATO would never expand east — the US did not fulfill the promise and Germans demonstrated indifference, perhaps feeling delighted that Russians had been cheated.

In breach of the obligations (which were never even recorded on paper) NATO started to broaden its membership and build up its military potential by integrating East European countries, including the post-Soviet republics. Its efforts to achieve superiority in technology and weapons over its former rival and to move closer to Russia’s borders are undermining trust in the international relations. While borders are erased in the EU, the process is paralleled by the creation of a new barrier along Russia’s western frontier.

Even M. Gorbachev, a politician who has capitalized heavily on «the new thinking» says: «Europe faces no threat of new walls 20 years after the demolition of the Berlin Wall, but there still exist division lines in it». Strangely, he does not feel personally responsible for the result, but Russia’s current leadership must realize that it needs stern realism in dealing with its partners.

At least two conclusions stem from the experience of the past two decades.

First, Russia’s leaders should not be as careless in assessing the trustworthiness of their negotiating partners as the leadership of the USSR in the country’s twilight era used to. In politics it is impossible to rely on words or goodwill, and personal friendship with leaders of other countries does not abolish the need to promote one’s own interests.

Secondly, international security is indivisible. Recently, the theme was regularly invoked by the Russian President. He said at the UN General Assembly: «We all hope that the Cold War is a matter of the past, but today’s world has not become safer than it used to be. What we need currently are not declarations and demagoguery, but modern solutions and well-defined legal frameworks for the already existing political obligations, including those related to the international law principle not to ensure one’s own security at the expense of others».

The two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall showed clearly that any attempts to achieve security at the expense of others are likely to revive old conflicts. The temptation to build new walls is bred by such attempts.