Kayode Komolafe
11 November 2009
analysis
Lagos — It is tempting to be immersed in reflections on day-to-day problems and lose sight of global currents as they shape those issues with which we are pre-occupied. You may rightly ask: why should a hungry Nigerian bother about whether the cold war ended or did not end on November 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell paving the way for eventual German unification? It could be said, with a good measure of justification, that here we should rather think about what will happen to fuel price in this age of deregulation with all the consequences on the political economy.
In such a reasoning what should be discussed is how to fix the collapsed roads around the country; bring back life to public educational institutions so as to ensure quality education for the children of a majority of the people and revitalise healthcare delivery system so that Nigeria could meet the Millennium Development Goals in reducing infant and maternal mortalities. Some may just put the matter simply like this: we should think about how to ensure steady power supply to the factories and homes and other economic issues would be sorted out logically. Yet others may see the problem as first and foremost as how to ensure that not only are people's votes counted, it must also be ensured that the votes actually count.
What to do about these defining issues of the moment and several other crucial ones would flow from the state of governance or lack of governance as the case may be. The quality of governance itself is partly determined by the organising ideas embraced by those in the saddle.
There is an organic link between the governing ideas and the delivery in governance. The state of governance may also be determined by the sheer poverty of ideas. The global developments subsequent to the breaking down of a wall that divided the German capital of Berlin have since had a profound effect on the governing ideas. It is in the light of this that we should spare a thought and join the rest of humanity in the retrospection into what happened 20 years ago. This week marks the 20th anniversary of the symbolic trigger of the momentous events that promised to shape the international order. In fact, the enthusiasts of those events have described November 9, 1989 as "the day the world changed".
For on that day, to the surprise of even those who had for long dreamt of what happened, the wall erected after World War II to divide the German city of Berlin fell. To the east of the wall was the capital of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the west was the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany. Nothing symbolised the ideological polarisation of the West led by the United States of America and the East led by the defunct Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) more than that wall-erected by the socialist GDR in the heart of the German capital. The fall of the wall became a byword for the chain of events that followed. Even in Germany itself the event was most unexpected. As The Economist remarked:" West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, (who has savoured the glory as the unification leader), was so unready for history that he was out of the country". Twenty years later, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, admitted last week that she was also surprised at the turn of events. The chancellor who was in East Germany said: "we did not see clearly as (others) did".
Indeed some of the events of those days were the stuff that future historians may regard as sheer happenstance. East Germans were protesting the travel restrictions imposed on citizens wishing to exit the country. In panic, government of Egon Krenz granted these basic rights of the people and decided to liberalise travels. When the government's spokesman was asked when the policy would take effect, he responded: "immediately". Some interpreters of the events have described the minister's statement as an act of "miscommunication". But the people of East Germany interpreted it to mean that they should troop to the border because it was time to "tear down this wall" as the late American President, Ronald Reagan, reportedly told the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The "revolutions' soon spread to Czechoslovakia, Romania (where the Head of State, Nicolai Ceausescu, was killed), and Bulgaria. A process of liberalisation was already under way in Poland and Hungary was opening up. The USSR itself broke up barely two years after the Berlin Wall fell. The stage was, of course, set by Gorbachev's twin programmes of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Gorbachev made it clear to leaders of the Warsaw Pact way back in 1985 that each ruling communist party in the eastern bloc should take responsibility for its own affairs.
The collapse of these socialist experiments in the former Soviet Union and its east European allies has been termed the "death of communism" by triumphalist rightwing ideologues. This hopeless hubris has persisted without those on the right even asking themselves if any one has ever attended the funeral of an ideology in history. Experiments may fail; but ideas don't just vanish because some interested persons hate them. The height of this hubris was encapsulated in the famous essay of Professor Francis Fukuyama under the audacious title: The End of History.
This American philosopher and political economist trenchantly proclaimed an 'unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" and that indeed liberal democracy had 'fundamentally transformed the (human) instincts" for aggression and violence. In this gospel by Fukuyama, the so-called victory of capitalism marked " the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human development". The Fukuyama's history that ended in 1989, of course, could not accommodate September 11, 2001. It could not envisage the American misadventure in Afghanistan and Iraq. The gross perversion of the international order under President George Bush and the resultant division as well as "violence and aggression" were not tamed by liberal democracy as Fukuyuma imagined. An indication that the neo-liberal jubilation may have been tempered is contained in a book published earlier this year by Fukuyama's compatriot and Washington Post columnist, Robert Kagan. In a seeming pun on Fukuyama, Kagan entitled his own book as The Return of History and the End of Dreams. According to him, " With the dreams of the post-cold war era dissolving, the democratic world will have to decide how to respond.
In recent years, as the autocracies of Russia and China have risen and the radical Islamists have waged their struggle, the democracies have been divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. They have questioned their purpose and their morality, argued over power and ethics, and pointed to one another's failings. Disunity has weakened and demoralized the democracies at a moment when they can least afford it. History has returned, and the democracies must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them".
History may be returning, but not yet with vengeance. Otherwise Kagan would not still be nursing this illusion that the West is ordained with an historical mandate to shape the world forever as it likes.
Yes, the Berlin Wall has fallen; but 20 years later the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the most potent legacy of the cold war, remains unreconstructed. Making the world nuclear free still remains only a dream. Yet, 23 years ago in Reykjavik, Gorbachev and Reagan contemplated the humanistic idea of 'nuclear zero".
In a remarkably sober piece published in the International Herald Tribune on November 3, 2009, Gorbachev told the West: " Now clear the rubble of the Wall". He chided the West for its continuing arrogance towards Russia. His frustrations with the West's ambivalent attitude to global security were made explicit: "Too many European politicians do not want a level playing field with Russia. They want one side to be the teacher or prosecutor and the other, Russia, to be a student or defendant. Russia will not accept this model. It wants to be understood; simply put, it wants to be treated as an equal partner". So, who says history is about to end?
It was also a tragic coincidence that the casino capitalism that emerged from the post 1989 neo-liberal exuberance in economic management also collapsed on the eve of this 20th anniversary. And this is no thanks to the smart financial speculators and the other scoundrels of the capitalist order. The economic crisis has spawned joblessness and exacerbated poverty. It has been adjudged by experts as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The full import is yet to sink. But the meltdown has brought to the fore the consequences of untamed market and the cold fact that when the chips are down, the same old and much-maligned state comes to the rescue to save society from the perfidy of the market. It is a chilling reminder that you need even a more effective regulation in a deregulated order. It has proved that the socio-political costs of policies must not be discounted.
As we look back to 1989 and the subsequent developments lessons could be drawn to guide the search for ideas about how society should be organised. The most potent of the lessons is that the challenges facing mankind - mass poverty, insecurity, threat to the environment, danger to human freedom etc. require a fresh thinking process rather than the neo-liberal prescriptions offered in the last 20 years in a triumphalist mood. There are simply no market solutions to the big issues of our time.
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