A triumphalist West? Since 1989, the West has overestimated the strength of its system, overlooked its own flaws and patronised the ‘East’. Edward Lucas (European Voice) Anniversaries are marvellous excuses for lazy journalism. Instead of the difficult business of reporting real news, editors can simply ask some reliable old buffers to dust off their notebooks, polish their anecdotes, and relive their glory days. The 25th anniversary of the collapse of communism in Europe has prompted much such writing. In past years I have produced a fair amount of it myself. I was lucky enough to spend the late 1980s studying in Poland, covering Yugoslavia, reporting from Berlin, and as the only Western newspaperman living in communist Prague. My memories include courage and fairy-tale changes of fortune, as well as arrests, beatings and betrayals. Very little, whether sweet or sour, can be said now which was not said already on previous anniversaries. The mysteries (especially the role of the KGB, and the disappearance of the Communist slush funds) remain mysteries. Some good new books have come out – notably a detailed and evocative biography of Václav Havel, by Michael Žantovský (once his close aide, now Czech ambassador to London). But as the events of 1989 recede into history, they become Hollywood versions of the real thing. The fear and muddle of the time are overshadowed by the ubiquitous glow of the happy ending, when the bad guys lose power, a playwright becomes president and Europe is whole and free. Except that the ending is now looking cloudy. Europe is weak, resentful and divided; the United States is increasingly absent. The values of 1989 look fragile, not permanent. So the anniversary is a good time not to revel in sentiment, but to ponder what has gone wrong, and why. Perhaps the gravest accusation – newly made by Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin – is that the West was triumphalist. I agree with that, though not in the way that the last Soviet leader meant it. We were right, not wrong, to expand the European Union and NATO, taking in countries that desperately wanted to be part of the West, and feared (rightly) that their eastern neighbour would one day turn nasty again. A real failing was to overestimate our own system’s strength, and to overlook its flaws. Political competition and welfare capitalism did indeed work better than the one-party state and the planned economy. But once competition from the east was gone, victory was a flimsy basis for the future. Money proved the Achilles heel of Western politics, just as state-subsidised financial recklessness has been the great weakness of our economies. Another big mistake after 1989 was to patronise the ‘easterners’. Snooty Westerners mocked their clothes (scruffy or tarty), teeth (crooked and yellow), English (halting and insistent), diets (stodgy and greasy), roads (bumpy and dangerous), housing (cramped and crumbling), and politics (eccentric and anti-Semitic). Few in the rich world understood the nightmares that the peoples of the captive nations had endured. They treated them as odd, backward outsiders, rather than family members who had been kidnapped. That slowed things down. It still does. ‘East European’ is used pejoratively, by those who would cry racism if anyone used ‘African’ as a derogatory term. The belittling and sidelining of Ukrainians amid the gravest European security crisis for 30 years is particularly shocking. But the biggest error involved the Kremlin. To be bewitched by gratitude and optimism amid Gorbachev’s peaceful retreat from Stalin’s conquests was understandable – but in retrospect it sowed the seeds of the problems we are facing now. Russia dumped its empire, but not its imperialist mind-set. It did not uproot the KGB, or come to terms with the crimes of communism. We are all paying for that now – whether we realise it or not. Edward Lucas writes for The Economist.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 14:08:29 +0000
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