Meet the new war, same as the old war

In November 1989 I travelled to Berlin.  The Wall had just been breached.  Where else was there to be?

I quit my job and spent a week at the Brandenburg Gate with thousands of others.  We laughed in noisy disbelief, staring in wonderment at the world and trying to talk with the heavily-armed 19 year old East German soldiers still on duty and standing on the Wall.

With my fingers and a stone I chipped off some flakes from the Wall.  The western side had been decorated with graffiti, so the flakes were vividly coloured.  On the eastern side, anyone attempting to paint the Wall would have been shot, so the flakes were plain grey.

My dad found me a display box.  I carefully cut up the map I’d bought of the city and used it to line the display box, then I placed the little pieces of Wall in the compartments.  In the photo you can see the white and yellow bits of Wall from the west side and the grey bits from the east.

The West had won – how fantastic was that?!

The visiting and bewildered East Germans wandered through the breaches in the Wall and were each given 10 Deutsche Marks (which, for younger readers, was the currency in West Germany at the time) when they entered West Berlin.  It was a sort of ‘Hello, it’s been ages since we saw you, we know your money isn’t worth very much, here, have a little something to fund your visit’.  It would be another year or more before re-unification and the miracle of the one-to-one conversion took place.

In the meantime, and with the Soviet Union still intact and the hawkers already lining the main boulevards of Berlin, the Ossies spent their 10 Deutsche Marks on…  bananas.

Bananas?  It was how the west had won.  In the end, it was all about living standards and supply chains.  In East Berlin, you couldn’t get fresh fruit: in West Berlin, it was abundant and cheap.  (One thing was invariant: everyone put the skin in the bin.)

And then?  The West behaved just as it had in 1919.  Once the Soviet Union collapsed we made Russia suffer for ever having had the affront to be our enemy.  We sent in our besuited consultants, our rapacious corporations, we indulged their money-hungry power-players, we even indulged an alcoholic President because it suited our strategic aims.  Virtually no effort was made to enable some sort of indigenous recovery.

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, life expectancy in Russia actually went down, and a network of thugs – men, of course – took control of the country’s natural resources.  It was exploitative, eviscerating and humiliating.  It was as though the lessons from the second time around – when Germany and Japan were properly helped to re-build – had simply been forgotten.

***

I railed against the whole approach at the time; but I had no power, no authority, no platform.  My employers jumped on the bandwagon, launching a product that aimed to provide western investors with information about the new and exciting markets emerging in Eastern Europe (read: where are the opportunities to exploit these poor saps?).  I was told I had to work on it, so I christened it the Bulletin of East European Statistics, and thus BEEST, and pursued a strategy of plausibly deniable sabotage.  I don’t think my approach was entirely responsible for its failure; but it certainly didn’t help.

What was I supposed to do?

I suppose, looking back, this 57 year old contemplating that 25 year old, that I would say: you should have been louder.  You should have been more confident.  You should have told anyone who would listen that you thought this was already going wrong.

But I’m also sympathetic to that young man.  The most extraordinarily fantastic thing had happened – the Wall had come down, the ‘evil’ Soviet Union had collapsed, western Enlightenment had won! – and there was an all-consuming air of optimism.  Hell, there was Fukuyama’s ‘the end of history’ to label the zeitgeist.  Who was I to challenge all that?

***

So welcome to this re-run of the 1930s.  Take a once great nation, beat them, then make them suffer for their defeat.  Foster anger and resentment.  Repeat.

Summon an economic calamity, the 2008 crash, then inflict years of financial oppression on a bewildered middle class.

Watch as populist leaders and oligarchs around the world offer simplistic solutions via prejudicial sound bites.

Marvel, as those self-same populist leaders focus on their own narrow and internal power bases to the detriment of the care and maintenance of the international order.  (“International?  That means ‘foreign’ doesn’t it?”)

Be not surprised when a confederacy of dunces – far distant from the statesmen and women we truly need – permits an angry, autocratic and heavily-armed leader to capture the hearts and minds of an angry, confused and impoverished people.

In the thirty years since the end of the Cold War, Chinese GDP has gone from about 2% of the world’s total to more than 10%.  Russia’s, which was about the same as China’s in 1990, has gone down.

In desperation, the Russian President has done something really, really stupid.

Putin may be at the wheel; but we built the road.