The Berlin wall had to fall, but today's world is no
fairer
Twenty years after that shameful symbol of
division was torn down, ultra-liberal
capitalism needs its own perestroika
by Mikhail Gorbachev
The Guardian (U.K.)
October 30, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/30/1989-capitalism-in-crisis-perestroika
Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin
wall, one of the shameful symbols of the cold war and
the dangerous division of the world into opposing
blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit
the events of those times and take stock of them in a
less emotional and more rational way.
The first optimistic observation to be made is that the
announced "end of history" has not come about, though
many claimed it had. But neither has the world that
many politicians of my generation trusted and sincerely
believed in: one in which, with the end of the cold
war, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of
the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and
sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden
century of collective security, the rational use of
material resources, the end of poverty and inequality,
and restored harmony with nature.
Another important consequence of the end of the cold
war is the realisation of one of the central postulates
of New Thinking: the interdependence of extremely
important elements that go to the very heart of the
existence and development of humankind. This involves
not only processes and events occurring on different
continents but also the organic linkage between changes
in the economic, technological, social, demographic and
cultural conditions that determine the daily existence
of billions of people on our planet. In effect,
humankind has started to transform itself into a single
civilisation.
At the same time, the disappearance of the iron curtain
and barriers and borders, unexpected by many, made
possible connections between countries that until
recently had different political systems, as well as
different civilisations, cultures and traditions.
Naturally, we politicians from the last century can be
proud of the fact that we avoided the danger of a
thermonuclear war. However, for many millions of people
around the globe, the world has not become a safer
place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local
conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appeared
like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating
large numbers of victims.
Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and
irresponsibility of the new generation of politicians
is the fact that defence spending by numerous
countries, large and small alike, is now greater than
during the cold war, and strong-arm tactics are once
again the standard way of dealing with conflicts and
are a common feature of international relations.
Alas, over the last few decades, the world has not
become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and
the poor either remained or increased, not only between
the north and the developing south but also within
developed countries themselves. The social problems in
Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof
that simply abandoning the flawed model of a
centralised economy and bureaucratic planning is not
enough, and guarantees neither a country's global
competitiveness nor respect for the principles of
social justice or a dignified standard of living for
the population.
New challenges can be added to those of the past. One
of these is terrorism. In a context in which world war
is no longer an instrument of deterrence between the
most powerful nations, terrorism has become the "poor
man's atomic bomb", not only figuratively but perhaps
literally as well. The uncontrolled proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction, the competition between
the erstwhile adversaries of the cold war to reach new
technological levels in arms production, and the
presence of the new pretenders to an influential role
in a multipolar world all increase the sensation of
chaos in global politics.
The crisis of ideologies that is threatening to turn
into a crisis of ideals, values and morals marks yet
another loss of social reference points, and
strengthens the atmosphere of political pessimism and
nihilism. The real achievement we can celebrate is the
fact that the 20th century marked the end of
totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that were
based on utopian beliefs.
Yet new ideologies are quickly replacing the old ones,
both in the east and the west. Many now forget that the
fall of the Berlin wall was not the cause of global
changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep,
popular reform movements that started in the east, and
the Soviet Union in particular. After decades of the
Bolshevik experiment and the realisation that this had
led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a
strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the
form of Soviet perestroika, which was also available to
the countries of eastern Europe.
But it was soon very clear that western capitalism,
too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself
the undisputed victor and incarnation of global
progress, is at risk of leading western society and the
rest of the world down another historical blind alley.
Today's global economic crisis was needed to reveal the
organic defects of the present model of western
development that was imposed on the rest of the world
as the only one possible; it also revealed that not
only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal
capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform
Æ’?? their own kind of perestroika.
Today, as we sit among the ruins of the old order, we
can think of ourselves as active participants in the
process of creating a new world. Many truths and
postulates once considered indisputable, in both the
east and the west, have ceased to be so, including the
blind faith in the all-powerful market and, above all,
its democratic nature. There was an ingrained belief
that the western model of democracy could be spread
mechanically to other societies with different
historical experience and cultural traditions. In the
present situation, even a concept like social progress,
which seems to be shared by everyone, needs to be
defined, and examined, more precisely.
[Mikhail Gorbachev was the last president of the Soviet
Union; he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1990]
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