Peter Jones: Mental barriers prevail over political ideologies

Published on Tuesday 10 November 2009 21:14

TWENTY years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lesson we should learn is that while concrete barriers may crumble, the barriers of the mind are much more enduring and, ultimately, more dangerous.

While we can all celebrate those mad, joyous days of 1989 as Berliners from east and west swarmed over the wall that for three decades had threatened death to anyone who approached it, we should also take a moment to reflect that many mental barriers are still there and, indeed, that we are suffering in their shadow.

The power of those invisible walls was brought home to me on a visit to Berlin a few months after the wall had fallen. I went for an early morning walk to the Brandenburg Tor, the great triumphal gate at the heart of the city originally built, rather absurdly, as a customs post. From it, you can see the evidence of over a century of extremely bloody European history.

To the west, there is the Victory column, commemorating the three wars that, as a German friend acidly reminded me, that Germany won, the last being the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. This was so galling to the French that in 1945, they took away the decorations referring to that conflict. A petty gesture (which the French, to their credit, put right in 1987), but a reminder of the enduring nature of national memories.

There is the gate itself, through which Hitler dragged the railway coach in which the 1918 Armistice had been signed, an equally petty gesture designed to show that with the Nazi conquest of France in 1940, that the German humiliation after the First World War had been expunged.

Hard by is the Reichstag building. For me, the most vivid memory of it in 1989 was not the evidence of its burning in 1933 which led to Hitler cementing his rise to power, nor the still evident bullet holes silently marking the final battles of 1945, but a row of white wooden crosses round the back on the banks of the River Spree.

Each bore a name of the last people to be shot and killed for trying to cross to the west over the Berlin wall. The latest was the death, a few months previously, of an east Berlin teenager, a waiter who just wanted to taste the bright lights of west Berlin. How, I wondered, from the devastation of the Second World War, could have emerged two sets of people, both determined that it should never happen again, but who became locked in such deadly enmity? The answer, of course, was the real barrier of the mind between the ideologies of totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism.

Once the concrete wall had fallen, and I too have my souvenir of it, we tended to assume that the ideological divide had gone too. Francis Fukuyama, an American thinker, wrote a now infamous book The End of History in which he postulated that from then on there would only be one political model to be followed, with slight variations, around the world.

But two decades on, and it is possible to see that not only is history, bloody history, all too vibrantly alive, but also to argue that the triumphalism in the western world post-1989 had led to some dreadful mistakes. Yes, the idea of communism had been exposed as a complete and dreadful failure, but some of the deeper divides in human thinking still remained.

The argument I am making here is analogous to the well established historical concept of imperial over-stretch. This says that successful imperial powers, from the Romans to the British, tend to stretch their geopolitical conquests beyond the point at which their empires can be sustained and consequentially they then collapse.

In the same vein, the West is now experiencing the results of ideological over-stretch. The evident success in defeating communism fuelled the rise of the neo-conservative political movement in the United States as well as pulling rightwards the parties of the Left in Britain and elsewhere. It led to a mistaken belief that the default norm of political life was liberal democratic capitalism, so that once totalitarian structures had been demolished, this norm would naturally and easily assert itself.

This blinded western powers to the rise of militant Islamism, which had different roots but which was also sustained by deeper beliefs among Muslims that injustices had been perpetrated against them by the Christian world and it was time to take revenge.

In the aftermath of that revenge, horribly taken in 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan to expel the Taleban and al-Qaeda. But we, more especially the American neo-cons, somehow forgot to engage in the physical and political reconstruction necessary to win Afghan hearts and minds, half-believing that mere removal of aberrant and abhorrent ideologists was enough. The bodies of the soldiers brought home yesterday are part of the price we are paying for that mistake.

In Iraq too, liberal democracy mysteriously was not warmly embraced by the people, who instead concentrated on older Sunni versus Shiite feuds and local warlordism, with American and British servicemen paying for that error with their blood.

This argument, I believe, can be extended to economic life. I don't think it is a coincidence that the post-Wall hubris extended to believing that de-regulated capitalism is the way forward. As our banks have come crashing down to earth, we now know that it isn't and the higher taxes and national debts are part of the price we are all paying.

This is certainly not to argue that liberal democratic capitalism is a bad system. It is still a better way of organising social and political life than pretty much anything else that has been tried. The mistake after 1989 was to imagine that it was close to perfection, or indeed that it is universally applicable, when all the evidence says that it was anything but.

Magnanimity and humility in any victory is always the right course. After the victory we in the west savoured on 9 November, 1989, we forgot that. It is a barrier in our minds that has proven costly.