Twenty years ago today, I was a seventh grader at the American Community School in Surrey, England. My family had lived in the U.K. for two years (we’d stay for two more) because my father was the European sales manager for an American chemical company.
Even at such a young age, I liked to think that I was seeing the Cold War from the “front lines.” I was riveted the first time our family crossed into West Germany, and I felt pride when my middle school cross-country and baseball teams would compete on British-American military bases. I was particularly fascinated at the Moscow Music Peace Festival, though I’m sure as much for the appearances by Motley Crue and Skid Row as for its rather striking implications about freedom, openness, and globalization.
In truth, I led an obnoxiously comfortable life in a quite English town. But the broader experience of living abroad during a time of such sweeping change fueled my budding consciousness with an interest in geo-politics and foreign policy, and, of course, rock and roll.
Conservatives will crow today about Ronald Reagan’s role in the entire affair, drawing a straight line between the Gipper’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and the crumbling of 70 years of Communism. Of course, the Soviet Union’s demise was far more complex. George Packer’s column in The New Yorker sums it up far better than I could ever hope to:
The wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but because on the evening of November 9th, at a televised press conference in East Berlin, a Party hack named Günter Schabowski flubbed a question about the regime’s new, liberalized travel regulations. Asked when they took effect, Schabowski shrugged, scratched his head, checked some papers, and said, “Immediately,” sending thousands of East Berliners to the wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control. Soldiers and Stasi agents didn’t shoot into the crowd, but things could easily have gone otherwise.
The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by a multiplicity of conditions: the courage of East Bloc dissidents and the hundreds of thousands of fellow-citizens who finally joined them; American support for the dissident movements and containment of the Soviet Union; the disastrous economies of the Communist countries; the loss of confidence among ruling-party élites; the crucial forbearance of Mikhail Gorbachev. For Europe’s Communist regimes to disappear so suddenly and bloodlessly (Romania was a different story), everything had to fall into place, above and below, within and without. Such circumstances are improbably rare, and they can’t be mechanically replicated by the laws of history or by divine design or by universal human aspiration. A false lesson drawn from 1989 involves a kind of shallow eschatology of totalitarianism: this is how it always happens—the people rise up, the regime withers and dies, peace and democracy reign. The chaos that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was in part a consequence of this thinking. In planning the postwar period in Iraq, George W. Bush and some of his advisers had 1989 in mind—“like Eastern Europe with Arabs,” as one official put it.