Post Wall, Post Square. Kristina Spohr
German unification, two key alliances of the West during the Cold War – NATO and the European Community – were conserved, modified and eventually enlarged to encompass the states of Central and Eastern Europe.[20]
The measures adopted to stabilise post-Wall Europe were thus essentially conservative in character, in the sense that they made use of pre-existing, Western institutions and structures, rather than custom-designing new ones to meet the exigencies of a new era. Despite the efforts of some European statesmen – notably Genscher, Gorbachev and Mitterrand – in 1989–91, no new pan-European architecture was created to embrace the two halves of the continent and incorporate Russia into a shared security structure. The Helsinki 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) possessed the potential to become such a structure, but it was never converted into an operative security organisation. The post-Wall political reality – with America set to remain a ‘European power’ – conspired against such pan-European paths. And the attractions of a Europe reunified under the aegis of an ever-closer European Union and secured by a reinvented NATO were simply too strong.[21]
Consequently, the West–East asymmetry increased over time, as the jumbled fragments of what had been the Cold War order were re-formed within an ever-larger Western-dominated framework. The resulting imbalance would become intolerable for Gorbachev’s successors, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. A marginalised – though still powerful and status-conscious Russian rump state – was left to lick its wounds on the periphery of the new Europe. We are still grappling with the consequences.[22]
This rereading of the period 1989–92 draws on archival material in various languages from both sides of the former Iron Curtain. Post Wall, Post Square relies heavily on recently declassified or neglected documents – ranging from memoranda to memcons, from personal letters to intelligence reports – in the national, presidential and Foreign Ministry archives of the United States, the Soviet Union (Russia), Germany, Britain, France and Estonia. Other important resources include the National Security Archive, the Woodrow Wilson Center Digital Archive and the associated Cold War International History Project in Washington DC – with their abundance of electronic briefing books and published documentary collections from the West, Eastern Europe, Russia and China (including party and Politburo materials). Further primary sources include diaries and private papers by the leaders and their advisers and numerous memoirs by the major actors.[23]
Post Wall, Post Square combines the granular reconstruction of key episodes with the synoptic study of macro-historical change. To comprehend properly this era of transitions requires us to adopt an artificial vantage point ‘above’ the confusion of events. But a successful analysis must also find space for the narratives with which leading protagonists made sense of their world and justified their actions. After all, the story of what happened in those years was ‘co-written’ by the chief actors. They were never just players in someone else’s tale, but powerful, if flawed, makers of history in their own right.
In 1995 German president Roman Herzog characterised his era as ‘a time that as yet has no name’.[24] Twenty-five years later, his aphorism has lost little of its poignancy, because the distinguishing features of the post-Cold War era remain difficult to discern or understand. Some may say, as 1989 recedes into the past, that the overarching narrative must be economic – taking us from the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system in the 1970s to the financial crash of 2008.[25] But I argue that a deeper analysis of these crucial ‘hinge years’ of 1989–92 helps to make sense of the underlying geopolitical order in which the upheavals of global capitalism take their place. And it is this order that is now under threat.
The achievements of the conservative managers were impressive: above all, they stabilised Central Europe during a period of rapid geopolitical change. But the (mainly American) confidence that the world would henceforth converge towards US values in an increasingly Washington-centred global order has not stood the test of time. The notion that an aggrieved but resurgent Russia[26] or the People’s Republic of China – always following its own compass[27] – would accept subordinate status in a unipolar world now appears hopelessly naive.[28] And the Europe of the Maastricht Treaty failed to generate the vision and energy to create a continent that was whole, free and dynamic. It was cramped by its adherence to dogmas forged after 1945 and hobbled by its chronic lack of independent political and military power.
This new European Union of 1992 co-opted the logic of the West German state’s post-war trajectory. The Federal Republic had long renounced Germany’s historical pretensions as a military power. European integration was conceived in the 1950s as a German–French peace project built around economic prosperity and social welfare. As the EU sought to reap the post-Cold War peace dividend in the 1990s, it saw itself in German mode as a beacon of ‘civilian power’[29] – not of military might.
This represented a linear reading of the post-Wall future, extrapolating the peaceful unification of Germany onto the European plane. But the plausibility of this eirenic dream has been called into question by the rise in the 2010s of populism, nationalism and illiberalism – with ‘Brexit’ shaking the core belief that the European integration project is irreversible and US President Donald Trump undermining the presumed indestructibility of the transatlantic alliance. The American vision of a ‘global community of nations’[30] – an order based on international law, liberal values, the limited use of force and a legitimate international arbitrating authority – now looks utopian.[31] The old great power rivalry is back with a vengeance and the traditional Western verities of democracy and free trade are being challenged around the world – especially by Russia and China, but also by America itself.
The deficiencies of the international settlement that ended the Cold War are now obvious. Frozen conflicts, the unravelling of arms-control agreements, the sclerosis of international institutions, the emergence of powerful authoritarian regimes and the proliferating threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – these are just some of the unforeseen consequences of design flaws in the new order improvised with such haste and ingenuity by the shapers of world affairs in 1989–92.[32] That is why – now more than ever – we need to understand its origins and troubled birth.
Reinventing Communism: Russia and China
The 7th of December 1988. Manhattan was abuzz that evening. Thousands of New Yorkers and tourists lined the streets, cheering, waving and giving thumbs-up signs behind the police barricades as Mikhail Gorbachev rode down Broadway in a forty-seven-car motorcade.
Gorbymania in Manhattan
Suddenly, in front of the Winter Garden Theater where the musical Cats was playing, Gorbachev ordered his stretch limo to halt. Smiling, he and his wife Raisa jumped out and had their pictures taken. The Soviet leader was photographed beneath a huge neon Coca-Cola sign, raising his clenched fists in triumph – like Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa.
Gorbachev was really soaking up American adulation. A block south, in the middle of Times Square – the Mecca of world capitalism – the electronic billboard was flashing a red hammer and sickle with the message ‘Welcome, General Secretary Gorbachev’. He might still have been a communist at heart and the leader of America’s rival superpower, but that night in New York, ‘Gorby’ was a superstar, hailed above all as a peacemaker. Indeed most of his time in Manhattan the Soviet leader was mixing with celebs, billionaires and high society, rather than rubbing shoulders with the American proletariat.[1]
One of the visits tentatively scheduled was to Trump Tower. Real-estate developer Donald Trump could not wait to take Mrs Gorbachev around the glitzy shops in his tower’s marble atrium. He was also dying to show off to the Gorbachevs a suite on the sixtieth floor with a swimming pool that he claimed was ‘virtually regulation size, within the confines of an apartment’ and, of course, his own opulent $19 million domicile on the sixty-eighth floor.