David Shribman: Why we celebrate
We thought it meant the end of international contention. We thought it meant the nuclear menace was no more. We thought it meant Russia and America, the two powers of the future envisioned by de Tocqueville, could be friends. We thought it meant the end of espionage. We thought it might even be the end of history.
We were wrong, dead wrong, tragically wrong, about all of it, because we did what great powers always do when they are engaged in great contests. We thought that if only we could get through the Cold War (or World War I, or World War II) we would enter the sunlit uplands, where serenity and prosperity reigned, purchased effortlessly by (and this was the phrase that was brandished in the capital and from coast to coast two decades ago) the peace dividend. To paraphrase Churchill: Some peace. Some dividend.
The realists and pragmatists would deny us these reveries, but great struggles require great hopes and they almost always inspire great myths, and if you do not believe me, consider how bright a world was forecast by the abolitionists during the Civil War or by Woodrow Wilson during the Great War, whose sad centenary we are only five years from commemorating. The peace is never as bright as the one we yearn for in the darkness of the storm.
All of this brings us to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which began 20 years ago Monday, and to an unrecognized truth:
Even though things have not turned out as we hoped they might in November 1989 — the eagle has not laid down beside the bear, for example — this is still a world far preferable to the one we occupied at various points in the 20th century, when angry nations seethed at each other across militarized borders separating South and North Korea, and Vietnam, or across the Oder-Neisse Line, the Curzon Line and multiple other lines in Europe’s sand.
Today we face frightful challenges, some involving the economy (the recovery of 2009 still seems elusive) and some involving national security (global terrorism adds a new form of instability to world affairs), but we ought to remember 1989 as one of the great divides in modern history.
It effectively brought to an end a world struggle, beginning with the Russian Revolution in 1917, between two competing economic systems and ideologies whose adherents believed were irreconcilable. This struggle was the leitmotif of almost all of 20th-century history, even if it was repressed between 1941 and 1945. Indeed, from our vantage point in 2009, it is possible to say that all of history between 1917 and 1989— the short 20th century, you might say — was preoccupied with this struggle.
In those decades after Bernard Baruch first used the expression “Cold War” tens of millions of people lived in danger or in fear. The Cold War contaminated the nation’s politics, warped the country’s economy, stifled its artistic life and stunted its cultural growth. Abroad, the Cold War fed the paranoia of one of the great dictatorships of history and gave a bad name to the liberation movements of dozens of colonial nations whose causes Americans might have embraced in a more rational world.
This is by way of saying that the end of the Cold War was truly one of the beautiful moments of history, even if we awoke to a world full of irredentism and post-ideological struggle that took the form of flames rising from Manhattan skyscrapers, a smoldering gash in the Pentagon and a hole in a Pennsylvania farm field.
Memories of episodes like the Berlin blockade, the Berlin airlift and the construction of the Berlin Wall, among many others — we remember these specifics but such memories crowd out the larger triumph, which is far bigger than the victory against Communism. The collapse of the Berlin Wall brought an end to one of the most terrible eras of history, the time of the tyrants. We have more to celebrate than we think.
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