November 9 marked 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a potent symbol of the Cold War. Of course the build-up to that event had been underway since the summer of 1989, when, ironically, it was the brutal evicting of students from Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on June 3 that triggered brewing resentment against their Communist masters and Soviet tutelage in Warsaw Pact nations. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, visiting China on May 15 in the middle of the student protest, only brought the drama more attention on television in East Euro-pean homes. Starting with Poland, a wave of popular resentment forced totalitarian governments to collapse like a house of cards, except in Romania where the transition was violent.
US President George H. Bush during a European trip said in Mainz on May 31, 1989 that the US and Federal Republic of Germany were “partners in leadership”, adding that “just as barriers are coming down in Hungary so they must fall throughout all of Eastern Europe. Let Berlin be next”. He elaborated passionately that the “Wall stands as a monument to the failure of communism. It must come down.” A couple of years earlier, his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had implored Gorbachev in a speech near the iconic Brandenburg Gate, seen from West Germany though falling behind the Wall, to pull the Wall down.
Thus, while the Warsaw Pact dissolved like the Cheshire cat, though without a smile, Germany was a different case. The possible collapse of the Berlin Wall raised questions about German reunification, over which principal European powers had serious reservations. A re-united Germany, at the heart of Europe, raised fears as a potential security challenge. Chancellor H. Kohl precipitated the issue by proposing on November 28, nineteen days after the fall of the wall, a 10-point plan for German unity. The Soviets reacted cautiously, with Gorbachev saying on the eve of his Malta summit with the US President on December 2 that while German re-unification should not be ruled out for the long term, it is “not of urgent international importance... Let’s not push or force the issue. History itself will decide the question.”
The US, unlike France and the UK, was less sceptical about German re-unification, although it wanted self-determination to guide it and Nato as an alliance to continue with Germany as a member, even though the Warsaw Pact was dissolving. The last point may appear obvious today, but in the face of Soviet and some West European concerns there was talk of German neutrality as a pre-condition to re-unification.
In A World Transformed, written jointly by former US President George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, it is noted that the US secretary of state H. Baker asked Gorbachev whether the Soviets would rather have a Germany independent and outside Nato or one tied to the alliance, with assurances “that there would be no extension of Nato’s current jurisdiction eastward.” While Gorbachev reserved his judgement, he was against the enlargement of Nato. Thus at stake was the very future of the European security architecture, which was not satisfactorily resolved then or later. Over the following decade, the West pressed its advantage, taking its alliance and influence to the very borders of Russia.
Vladimir Putin’s rise and confrontation with the West, dubbed a second Cold War, stems from this failure to accommodate Russia in a new security order. Many in the West fallaciously concluded that with the end of Cold War, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, it was the “end of history” and thus victory for Western values.
In the post-9/11 world, the US fight against radical Islam, the rise of an assertive China and its convergence with Russia and the disunity at times in the Atlantic alliance are all symptoms of how wrong was the West’s reading of the Berlin Wall’s collapse.
The new frontier for contestation with Russia now runs across Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
While momentous drama was underway in Europe in 1989, India was preoccupied with a critical Parliament election. A resuscitated Janata Dal under V.P. Singh’s leadership swept to power at the end of November. A distracted Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, shaken by the Bofors scandal and rebellion by erstwhile colleagues, was more ill-prepared than most global leaders for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. The Indian embassy in Moscow, under ambassador Alfred Gonsalves and cheer-leading Sovietologists of the Indian Foreign Service, were way behind the curve on the fast-moving developments that eventually led to the Soviet collapse.
Ironically, in the V.P. Singh government that assumed office on December 2, the external affairs minister was I.K. Gujral, a former envoy to Moscow and thus liable to approach new developments with sentimental bias. Although some walls remain even today, i.e. between North and South Korea with a demilitarised zone at the 38th parallel, the real challenge is from the ethnic and religious walls that are causing turbulence in the entire Islamic world, from Pakistan in the east to Morocco in the west, as well as Africa in the south to Turkey in the north. Like the Indian government in 1989, which viewed the collapsing European order through the Cold War prism, the BJP-led government approaches the ferment in the Islamic world from its ingested north Indian experience of Islamic intrusion, periodically violent and intolerant. Hopefully Modi the pragmatist will stump Modi the ideologue and not wait, as Gorbachev wanted, for history to decide the question, and re-position India for a pro-active role as again a new security order is being shaped, this time in Asia.
K.C. Singh is a former
secretary in the external affairs ministry. He tweets at @ambkcsingh
