First Published: Frontline, Vol. 7, No. 10, November 27, 1989.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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One hundred years ago this year, Marxists the world over were looking to Berlin, where the Social Democratic Party was the leading force in the new Second International they had just organized. Today, the eyes of the left – indeed, the whole world – are once again riveted on Berlin to give us a glimpse of the future.
The Berlin Wall, the West’s favorite cold war bogeyman, has come tumbling down. And with it, the impassable barrier once thought to exist between the capitalist and socialist worlds has been struck a decisive blow. The people of East and West Germany are mingling and celebrating together. It’s as exciting as history gets. And it’s also extremely overwhelming, how fast events are outstripping theory.
The surge of the popular movement in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) put enormous pressure on the governing Socialist Unity Party (SED) for socialist renewal. In rapid succession, the SED accepted opposition demands for a complete turn-around by retiring the general secretary, a majority of the party’s Politburo, the prime minister and the entire cabinet.
Most dramatic of all was granting essentially free right of travel to the West. The surprise announcement November 9 that all travel restrictions would be lifted led to thousands of East Germans going to the Wall and breaching that previously fatal frontier. Succeeding days witnessed human migration on a historic scale as curious East Germans met their West German counterparts on top of and across the border.
With East Germans shopping in the streets of West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as well as marching in the streets of the GDR, the world is a different place. People all over the world are awestruck by these historic events – not only by their speed and their scale, but also by their unpredictability.
Who would have thought even a short time ago that the “iron curtain” border would be first breached by the socialist government of Hungary? And with no role by the U.S. at all? Who would have guessed the Berlin Wall would be opened by the government of the GDR, which only a few months ago expressed approval of the Chinese government’s repression of that country’s pro-democracy movement? And again, with no role by the FRG or the occupying powers of Berlin? Or that the first people to cross the Wall would defuse tensions rather than inflame new ones between the capitalist and socialist might arrayed along this, one of the most heavily militarized borders on this overarmed planet? Who would have thought just five years ago that the ultimate inspiration for these developments would be the secretary of the Soviet Communist Party itself?
Now it is easier to tear down some of the walls in our own minds that block us from imagining even more stunning scenarios. Everything in the GDR that used to seem utterly predictable is now up for grabs – the official line of the media; the steady upward grind of the economy; the leading role of the SED; the hard-line dogmatism of its leadership; the lack of real voting choices, freedom of speech, ability to travel West, and popular mass mobilization. And with it comes a new perspective on what we used to take for granted in the world outside the GDR.
The SED, in alliance with a few small, totally compliant parties, has governed the GDR since its founding in 1950. Now it should drop the official legal sanction of its leading role, according to the party’s parliamentary leader. In practice, that role has meant the SED’s total domination not only of government, but of every facet of life. The new government formed November 7, headed by SED reformer Hans Modrow, with a member of the Democratic Peasants Party as speaker of the People’s Chamber, is a real coalition since it is no longer clear which side the “allied forces” will take.
The SED’s party congress has just been moved up several months to December 15 to consider the Action Program of radical economic and democratic reform just approved by the SED Central Committee. The congress will elect a new Central Committee, in the process getting rid of the culprits responsible for the mess the GDR is in. It will select new members who will then be eligible to elect a new Politburo from among their ranks. The party is more democratic than ever, rank and file SED member Ingo Schwarz told Frontline. The party base is engaged in a far-ranging discussion that he expects to greatly exceed the Central Committee’s Action Program in order to include democratic questions, such as how to forge alliances, and economic questions, such as how to move toward a successful “market-oriented planned economy.”
The newly opened border with the West creates novel problems with the GDR economy because of the non-convertibility of GDR money in the FRG. This could lead to a large capital outflow as East Germans try to get more and more West German goods at inflated black market rates. There might be an outflow of basic staples heavily subsidized by the socialist government in the GDR and exchanged at market rates in the FRG. And the freedom to leave may cause more loss of skilled labor from the GDR, as those who have received a state-subsidized, high-quality education seek higher standards of living in the West.
The SED Politburo seemed to be taking a gamble that by letting out all who wanted to leave, those who remain behind in the GDR will be committed to make it a better place. “As soon as you go to the West, you are in euphoria,” explained Schwarz. “When you get back home, you think about the future, all that must still be done. Now that we can compare East and West, we are more aware of our socialist achievements – no unemployment, stable prices, new housing starts – in place of a little consumerism.”
Such current GDR benefits do not satisfy the principal opposition groups. The opposition mustered half a million people in weekly protests on the first Monday night after the borders were opened. New Forum, the principal opposition group, still demands separation of party and state by the SED, free elections with more than one candidate on the ballot, education reform, control of administration, etc. The SED Central Committee Action Program addresses what New Forum demanded, but New Forum supporter Michael Hamburger in East Berlin told Frontline his organization now wants the SED to turn their words into practice. So far, of these broad reforms, only freer travel policies are in effect. Hamburger went on to explain that New Forum’s objective is a new, reformed socialism, not capitalism. But New Forum has a great diversity of opinion within a very broad program. New Forum is drawing up rules and hopes to be officially legalized later this year.
Despite all the hype in the bourgeois media about German reunification, the GDR does not seem ready to pass off the stage of history, swallowed up by the FRG. Neither the GDR government nor New Forum favors reunification with the FRG; they want to solve their own problems themselves. Even the conservative Kohl government of the FRG has had to reassure allies and neighboring countries that the FRG has no desire for reunification, even though the West German constitution and members of the FRG chancellor’s own party still call for the territory of not only the GDR, but also some of Polish Silesia, where Kohl was showing the flag this month.
Given convergent interests, the two Germanys may still eventually decide to form some sort of confederation, with different social, political and economic systems at some future point. Right now that is impossible, principally because both are armed to the teeth by their own and their allies’ troops and arsenals. If Washington were willing to go along with Soviet, Czech and GDR proposals to withdraw nuclear and chemical weapons and conventional forces – “turning Central Europe into a nuclear free park,” in the sneering terms of the Wall Street Journal – only then could closer ties be possible. Instead, NATO is still trying to deploy even more new short-range missiles in the FRG aimed at the GDR, which Bonn has just declared simply out of the question. But dearly some relationship has to be struck so that the FRG, already pressed for jobs, housing and services for all its own citizens, and the GDR, faced with currency, goods and labor flight, can normalize their border.
All of Eastern Europe is in flux. Now that the GDR, previously the most powerful hard-line government in the region, has followed the lead of the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary, the pressure on Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria is irresistible. Mass oppositions in both countries are beginning to mobilize, with thousands out in demonstrations. In the sharpest example of socialist renewal in Bulgaria yet, Todor Zhivkov, longest serving European leader of a socialist country, was apparently forced into retirement this month after 35 years as general secretary. At Frontline’s presstime, further changes in Bulgarian politics are becoming apparent by the hour, with former dissidents reinstated in the party, the media publishing frank criticisms of the regime, etc. Meanwhile, the Soviets have reportedly advised the Czech party to initiate genuine renewal before the situation deteriorates further in that country.
Simultaneously, the changes underway in Poland and Hungary have attracted intense interest from the FRG, the largest capitalist investor and trader with the socialist bloc already. The FRG government has taken the Soviet Union’s perestroika more seriously than other capitalist countries, and wants to use ties with its fellow Germans in the GDR to act as a springboard into the Eastern European market. This is particularly significant in that the FRG is not only part of the European Community’s internal market slated for completion by 1992, it is the Common Market’s economic engine, pulling Western Europe along behind. The FRG is forging an even higher level political, military and social union with France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. So the FRG is in a unique position to bridge the integration of Western Europe through the GDR to the socialist countries to its east. This would be part of the economic basis for the common European home called for by the Soviets.
Coincidentally, the removal of border controls between the GDR and FRG unleashed this East-West breakthrough just as FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl was concluding aid agreements in Warsaw. Kohl reassured the Poles his intense interest in seeing the Wall come down did not mean the FRG was any less committed to Poland and Hungary. Even though all major FRG parties have a common consensus on economic ties with the socialist as well as capitalist countries, it will make a difference which party leads the charge. The wave of euphoria momentarily sweeping the FRG might temporarily lift the spirits of Kohl and the right, who are expected to lose more elections leading up to the FRG national elections in 1991. But once the long-term contradictions ripen from all the new arrivals, the Kohl government will catch the blame for inadequate social services, housing and jobs. The “red-green coalition” running West Berlin hopes to finesse its example of dealing with its socialist neighbors into a winning example for the federal level.
France has been attempting to forge closer military, economic and political ties with the FRG precisely to prevent it from drifting toward neutrality or the socialist bloc. French President Francois Mitterand, current president of the European Community’s (EC) Council of Ministers, called an emergency summit meeting of the EC to make sure the EC becomes “the pole of attraction of this new greater Europe that is being born.“ But now that the FRG, a financial empire compared to France, is in motion to its east, it will probably just pull Mitterand along with it through the Franco-German agreements.
Altogether, the map of the world as it has existed since the end of World War II is being redrawn. Barriers are breaking down in Europe that will completely rearrange the relationship between the continent’s capitalist and socialist countries, with the potential for strengthening both. West European capital, simultaneously, receives a giant boost in its contention with the U.S. and Japan – reordering the power relations between the world’s three giant capitalist centers. The U.S. has been pushed to the sidelines, as the West European powers, the FRG in particular, are central players in these dramatic political and economic shifts. Another decisive blow has been struck against what remains of the Cold War.
Taking any bets on what the 1990s are going to bring?