9/11/1989 and 9/11/2001

I didn’t want today to pass without some mention of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. This happened on 9 November 1989, or 9/11/89 (Europeans reckon their dates with the day before the month). Timothy Garton Ashe has noted that the two 9/11’s, Europe’s and America’s, have yielded two fundamentally different outlooks on the world – the one, tearing walls down and looking for opportunities to promote international citizenship through diplomacy and tact; the other, throwing walls up and looking for opportunities to promote international democracy at the point of a gun. Ashe asks, what has and will America do with their ascendancy? What relevance and influence does Europe have twenty years after the fall of the wall?

The answer to some of these questions depends on how one chooses to explain why the wall fell. Americans, especially Republicans, are fond of arguing that the wall fell because of Mr. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric, including his Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall address. This explanation justifies Mr. Reagan’s big defense budgets, Star Wars rhetoric, and repeated tax increases. Another explanation, favored by many Europeans and some Americans, is that the wall fell because of diplomacy, propaganda, and the Helsinki Accords.

For my part, I think they’re both right. Reagan’s rhetoric and theatrical powers were critical, but Gorbachev’s role is significantly downplayed. European diplomacy, including efforts by the Catholic Church in Poland and elsewhere, and the general resuscitation of civil society behind the iron curtain was essential. The anti-nuclear efforts of Americans, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, kept the conversation moving and gave credence to peace movements in Eastern bloc countries. The Velvet Revolution and samizdat do not get enough traction in American explanations. Churchill’s prediction in January 1920 that Communism in Russia would fail because it was “fundamentally opposed to the needs and dictates of the human heart, and of human nature itself,” is good evidence in my mind that it wasn’t all Reagan. The system self-destructed in many ways, but Reagan no doubt helped it along.

Just as the causes are multiple and complex, the effects and reverberations often take a long, long time to work themselves out. It’s fair to say that the Second World War ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, but in another sense it didn’t. Osama bin Laden cut his international teeth in Afghanistan during the cold war of the 1980s . . . and Afghanistan and bin Laden are with us yet. Indeed, America’s 9/11 was a logical outgrowth of the Cold War, even if many don't want him to remind us. Leninism married to capitalism is a long way from dead in China – indeed, it presents a new kind of challenge to the heavily leveraged “wealthy nations” of the west. The fall of the Berlin wall was a long reverberation of earlier events; the reverberation of the Berlin wall’s fall is still rippling its way.

That way will be determined in large part by what we think of it, how we talk about it, and how we remember it. It is certainly true that Europeans will have learned different lessons from this momentous event than Americans. It is expectedly and appropriately thus, but the forces that shaped this event and are now shaping world events compel us to continue conversations about their meaning and significance.

(Cross-posted to www.omninerd.com.)