Fall of Berlin Wall remains region’s best chance to heal wounds-经管之家官网！

Fall of Berlin Wall remains region’s best chance to heal wounds
Tony Barber, FT European edition editor, November 5, 2014
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In his new book The Trouble with History, Adam Michnik, a courageous Polish dissident intellectual under communism, writes: “In Budapest in October 1956, officers of the communist apparatus were hanged on lampposts. In Poland [in 1989], not a single window was broken, and the dictatorship was overthrown by the ballot.”
(Budapest in 1956: Hungarians rebelled against soviet control, Soviet Union army later put it down, killing thousands.)
Even at 25 years’ distance from that world-changing event, the fall of the Berlin Wall, what inspires admiration is the civilised manner in which the people of Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia – with varying degrees of help from reformers inside the power apparatus – dismantled communist regimes that had oppressed them since the late 1940s.
The peaceful change that underpinned the rebirth of Poland and Hungary, the unification of East and West Germany in 1990 and Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce” in 1993 into separate Czech and Slovak states was a precondition for each country’s success. Where violence accompanied the end of communism, as in the former Yugoslavia, progress has been more uneven.
The collective term “eastern Europe” made little sense in the communist era, given the conspicuous differences in each country’s history, economy, ethnic composition, one-party system and relationship with Moscow. It makes even less sense today – except insofar as all identify security and prosperity with Nato and the EU, of which they are members or partners.
As David Lipton, the International Monetary Fund’s first deputy managing director, says in 25 Years of Transition, an IMF report: “After years of isolation from the western economic system, and after the distortions and deprivations of the communist system, most citizens just wanted to live in a normal country with a normal economy and, given their history and geography, that vision was captured in the allure of integrating with western Europe.”
Not everything is “normal” in the region. Per capita gross domestic product in Poland, which in some respects is the star economic performer, is slightly more than half that of Germany. This is a big improvement from 1989, when it was about a third, but there remains much catching up to do.
Hungary used to practise a moderate form of “goulash communism” that augured well for the post-1989 democratic era. Now the government of Viktor Orban, prime minister, stands accused even by Hungary’s allies, including the US, of authoritarian tendencies. Elsewhere, post-communist governments struggle with corruption, organised crime and political interference with judiciaries.
Across the region, especially in Poland and the Baltic states, concerns are deepening over Russia’s foreign and military policy – in contrast to 1989. For that year’s revolutions would never have occurred without bloodshed had not Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Kremlin leader, declined to use force – beyond Soviet borders, at least – to retain the European empire conquered in the second world war.
Two other factors were important. Opposition leaders such as Václav Havel, the Czech philosopher-playwright, and Lech Walesa, the Polish shipyard electrician and Solidarity leader, were profoundly committed to non-violence – as were pro-democracy activists in East Germany, who learnt much from West Germany’s peace movement in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, forced population transfers after 1945 had removed millions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland, ensuring that democracy came with a sense of reborn identity embraced by homogenous populations. By contrast, former Yugoslavia – and to a lesser extent Bulgaria, with its Turkish minority – simmered with ethnic rivalries that were manipulated by threatened communist elites playing nationalist cards.
Yugoslavia broke up in a decade-long bloodbath, reminiscent of the 1940s, involving Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians. Slovenia was fortunate, avoiding the fate of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo largely because it contained few Serbs.
Outside Yugoslavia the end of communism was not wholly peaceful. Hundreds were killed in the December 1989 revolution that overthrew Nicolae Ceausescu, who, with his wife Elena, had misruled Romania for half the communist era like some megalomaniac Byzantine emperor. Deadly clashes erupted in January 1991 in Latvia and Lithuania as Soviet forces attacked pro-independence Baltic patriots.
Violence and foreign overlordship streak the region’s history like awful scars. But the 1989 revolutions were, and remain, its best chance to heal these wounds once and for all.