Ten years ago the Berlin wall fell. This was a revolution in world affairs-as great a revolution as the French revolution. We who were lucky enough to have lived through 1989 can now perhaps believe that the struggles of the 20th century had a meaning. The consequences are still working themselves out. The most obvious consequences are direct and local: Berlin is again the capital of a reunified Germany; Poland, the Czech Republic and other ex-communist countries have democratic governments and pluralistic politics; border fences have moved to the east. I want to look at how some of these results fit into the wider pattern of an evolving world order.
the victory of liberalism. We live in a world driven by ideas and the victory of one idea over another is a significant moment. The year 1989 closed the bracket that opened in 1789. The French revolution proposed three competing ideals: liberty, equality and fraternity; that is to say, liberalism, socialism and nationalism. Translated into the extremes of the 20th century, the latter two became communism and fascism. The battle against fascism was won in the second world war. The battle against communism finished in 1989 with the fall of the wall.
The victory of freedom is the victory of free markets. Private property and private enterprise are at the heart of liberalism. Democracy is important, too, but the protection of private property against the state is one of the foundations of liberty. The question of forms of ownership was more central to the division between the west and the Soviet bloc than the question of democracy-to which communist countries paid at least lip service. The division of Europe began with the Deutschmark's foundation and ended with the monetary reunification of Germany. The division of the world was about economic systems. The end of that division, therefore, has economic consequences. The era of a divided world is followed by an era of globalisation: not just one world, but one global market. (Real globalisation is what comes next-wait until China, India and Brazil are really part of the world economy.) The victory of liberalism in the war of ideas is not the only cause of globalisation, but it is an important pre-condition for it.
The victory of free markets has had consequences in domestic politics, too. Countries with socialist and communist parties have seen them, for the most part, shift away from state ownership. New Labour is a striking example, but the same phenomenon can be seen in France, Italy, Greece and Japan. At the same time, the 1990s have seen two important less-developed countries-India and China-take decisive steps away from state control.
The right has also been affected. The end of the communist threat has delegitimised the right in a number of countries. In Italy, many took the attitude "we held our noses and voted Christian Democrat to keep the communists out." Today this is no longer necessary; instead, it has become possible to put Christian Democrats in prison. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party's monopoly has been broken. And in a number of countries the extreme right and the military have lost part of their legitimacy because they can no longer present themselves as the last defence against communism. Perhaps this has played a part in the loss of influence by the military in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, and in Latin America.
In South Africa, one of the (spurious) arguments legitimising apartheid was the imperative of defending South Africa against communism. There were many other reasons why apartheid collapsed, but its gradual loss of legitimacy, as the threat from communism became less and less plausible, played a part. It is not a coincidence of timing that Nelson Mandela was released only four months after the wall came down.
The failure of socialism and the collapse of communism are also linked to the rise of Islam. When countries in the middle east decolonised, it was natural to turn to socialism: this promised prosperity and modernity, as well as a way of rejecting the colonial past. Now that socialism has failed, Islam is the obvious alternative for those who want to attack the west. It is difficult for governments to oppose Islamic movements. They can stop political organisations but they cannot stop people going to the mosque. Islam may not be modernising but it provides an alternative basis for radical movements as well as a way of attacking the west. Radical Islam, because its language is so different from that of western liberalism, may prove more difficult to deal with than radical socialism.
the end of empire in europe. Most of the conflicts in European history have been about the birth and death of empires. This century began with the Ottoman empire in its death throes. It ends with the last struggles of what remains of the Russian empire. In the meantime, since the fall of the wall, we have seen the end of the Soviet Union's external empire, the collapse of its internal empire and the break-up of that strange anomaly: the Yugoslav empire.
Empires are held together by an idea and an army. The idea is more important. The people who order armies to fight must in the long run believe in what they are fighting for. As the belief in communism died, so did the willingness to defend its empire. As Timothy Garton Ash has pointed out, each successive intervention by the Soviet Union to put down rebellions in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland took place less quickly and less confidently. Once Soviet forces had been prepared to fire immediately and directly on East German workers; by the time of the Solidarity movement in Poland they were reduced to persuading the Polish army to do their intervening for them. And making up their minds to go this far was a process which took months. It may have been-as many allege-that in 1989 the television pictures of Tiananmen Square had an impact on the Soviet leadership: it was brought home to them that this was something they were not prepared to do. An army is no use without an idea.
So long as people believed in communism, the communist party apparatus and the Soviet government had some kind of legitimacy. With communism gone, an alternative legitimacy had to be found. What else was there but democracy-pre-communist legitimacy had been religious but God was now dead. Democracy, however, requires a demos-that is to say, a nation: hence the break-up of the Soviet Union into nations. Some of these, such as Estonia and Lithuania, are of ancient identity; others, such as Belarus, have a more shadowy existence. All of them have problems of minorities. Battles of empire are still being fought in Chechnya and elsewhere, but by historical standards the break-up of the Soviet empire has been a strikingly peaceful event. This was because the centre simply let go. Battles to hold empires together are rarely successful in the long run.
Yugoslavia is a different case. It was held together, as empires are, by an authoritarian government, but the legitimacy of this government rested only partly on the communist idea. There were two other sources of legitimacy. One of these was Yugoslav nationalism: this had been present in larger measure at the time of its foundation. Over the years it weakened, but some elements of it remained, especially in Bosnia. Second, the government of Yugoslavia was legitimised by the external situation. For Yugoslavia to have become democratic would have meant joining the west. If it had become a mainstream communist country it would have been absorbed into the Soviet empire. Either of these outcomes could have precipitated a war. Thus the dissident communist stance of the Yugoslav government was necessary to keep it from becoming a battleground and provided a certain precarious legitimacy for the regime.
For war game planners there used to be two scenarios for the start of the third world war. One was a Berlin crisis, the other was a Yugoslav crisis; the two points where the fault lines of the cold war lay closest to the surface. Cold war stability required that Germany had to be divided and that Yugoslavia kept together. And as the end of the cold war brought unification to Germany, it brought the disintegration of Yugoslavia. (After 1989 Milosevic tried to recreate Yugoslavia as a Serb empire. This is largely what the struggles since 1991 have been about.)
The end of empire does not translate into the triumph of the nation state-although the empires have been broken up in the name of national democratic legitimacy. Freed from the limited sovereignty of the Brezhnev doctrine, the countries of central and eastern Europe are rushing to achieve the limited (or at least redefined) sovereignty of the EU. For states, as well as individuals, freedom requires restraint.
the end of grand strategy. The fall of the wall ended a geopolitical contest between the west and the Soviet bloc. The cold war was fought in almost every continent except Europe. It was fought on the Korean peninsula, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in the Horn of Africa and in Nicaragua. In the middle east the cold war ran through many episodes of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In all of these areas the end of the cold war has brought big changes.
China, which for a while operated an alliance of convenience with the US against a threatening Soviet Union, has once again become a free agent. Its relations with Russia (too weak to be threatening now) have improved and it is free to pursue its long-term objectives vis-à-vis Taiwan, as it was not free when close relations with the US were a strategic imperative.
Asean, which in the 1970s and 1980s was an anti-communist coalition, has enlarged to take in former enemies-the pattern is similar to that of Nato or the EU. It is now positioning itself as an association of medium-sized states in an area which otherwise threatens to be dominated by great powers.
India and Pakistan are to some degree orphans of the cold war. Up until 1989, a simple chessboard pattern prevailed, loosely following the strategic principle that you ally yourself with the next-but-one country. Although both were officially non-aligned, India was more closely associated with the Soviet Union, Pakistan with the US. China, which in the 1960s had fought India, had a close relationship with Pakistan. And following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became a base for operations against Soviet forces there. With the end of the cold war this pattern is changing. The US cut off arms sales to Pakistan. India may now be wondering how much its relationship with Russia is worth. China remains close to Pakistan, but is nervous about the mujahidin from Afghanistan becoming involved in its northern Muslim areas. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998 can also be viewed in the light of the post-cold war world: the closer relationships of the cold war brought both reassurance and constraints. The nuclear tests showed India and Pakistan breaking free of these constraints.
In the middle east the same absence of superpower restraint was one of the factors behind the Gulf war. During the cold war, an attack by Iraq (a Soviet client) on Kuwait would have brought with it a risk of superpower confrontation. (The Gulf war achieved US/Soviet cooperation for a time. This was where the idea of a new world order was born-in some sense an old world order, because the hope was that the UN might now function as originally intended, had not the cold war intervened.)
From one angle the Arab/Israeli disputes (which have many angles) were a middle east edition of the cold war, with each side supporting its clients. The end of the cold war has brought some greater fluidity to the region and some progress towards peace. Syria and the Palestinians found themselves in a weaker position; at the same time American leverage on Israel probably lessened, making the peace process possible, but at the same time more difficult to manage.
The most important strategic withdrawal has been from Africa. Mobutu of Za?, once seen as a cold war ally, was quickly dropped. Both sides in the cold war lost interest in the Horn of Africa, previously an area of confrontation. And more generally, aid-givers ceased to be interested in who African countries supported and started asking, instead, how they were governed. At first sight Africa is one of the main losers from the end of the cold war. It is questionable whether chaos in the Horn of Africa or the genocide in central Africa would have been allowed to happen before 1989. One side or another would have persuaded itself that it had a strategic reason for stepping in and taking control. On the other hand, cold war clientism, while convenient for governments, did little for ordinary people. In the long run Africa will be better off without it.
the reunification of europe. The Berlin wall was a vivid symbol of a divided Europe. The divided city with its divided families brought home the tragedy of a divided continent. But ending the division of Europe is not the same thing as reuniting Europe. That process is taking place, above all, through the enlargement of the EU and of Nato. This is a slow process; but that should be no surprise. Reconstruction is always slow. The Europe which is being reunified is quite different from the Europe which was divided by the revolution in 1917. That Europe was united only in the minimal sense that its nations and empires all subscribed to the basic rules of the European game as it then was: that all states had a right to continued existence whatever their religion or political structures. The corollary of this was that one state should not interfere in another's internal affairs.
The rules of the new European game are far from minimal. The new rules are written in a thousand directives dealing with the noise made by lawn mowers, the qualifications required to be a hairdresser and almost anything else you care to think of. The most important rule is the unwritten one: thou shalt make deals. The system of cooperation, in both Nato and the EU, works only because all of the member states know that compromises have to be reached in the end.
This is quite different from the rules of the old Europe which said, rather, that ultimately, if you could not reach agreement, you had to be prepared to fight. The balance of power system put sovereignty and independence at its centre. These exist in the new system too, but they are subtly different. Just as freedom requires the rule of law, independence is better preserved under a regime of cooperation. And sovereignty no longer means the absolute monopoly on everything that happens within your borders. Today, in practice, sovereignty means a seat at the table. That is what makes Luxembourg different from Bavaria. Sovereignty has been redefined as decision-making power within your borders on most things, and a seat at the table and a voice in the cooperative decision-making process on the rest.
The taboo on interference in internal affairs first began to weaken with the division of Europe itself. Subversion through the Comintern was one part of the story. So, on the other side, was western intervention in the civil war which followed the Russian Revolution. Both were nails in the Westphalian coffin.
The fall of the wall is an apt symbol for the new Europe in another way. With it there has come to an end the security of walls and divisions, where each side had its own space and could do what it liked in it-something we recognised when we failed to intervene in East Germany in 1953 or in Hungary in 1956. In spite of the outrage voiced by all western countries, the building of the wall stabilised the situation in Berlin and permitted the development of Ostpolitik. For all that we deplored the wall and called for its removal, we would never have achieved a reunited Europe without the stability that it created. Good walls make good neighbours? In the west, borders had to be defined before they could be abolished. Something of the same was true, too, of the cold war divide. But the reunited Europe is one where security depends on open borders and cooperation-not on walls or mutual threats.
Europe today is different from any of its predecessors. First, all those who worried about a united Germany have been proved wrong: Margaret Thatcher, Fran?s Mitterrand, Ruud Lubbers and Giulio Andreotti for a start. Helmut Kohl was right to argue that a united Germany and a united Europe were two sides of the same coin. It was the context of a cooperative and open Europe which permitted German unification and made the fears of the Thatcher generation anachronistic. This is not because Germany has been "bound in" but because none of the states of Europe, or the European state system itself, in any way resembles the pre-1914 status quo. On her own terms, Thatcher was perhaps right to worry about Germany. Had we still been living in a world of realpolitik, of sovereign nation states, then German unification would be something to worry about. The past ten years have shown that this is not so.
An equally striking demonstration of how the world has changed is the survival and success of Nato. A decade ago we all knew that the EU was going to prosper but few of us were sure that Nato would still be here in 1999. In fact in many respects Nato has been more active in those ten years than in any previous decade. It was already historically unprecedented for an alliance to survive in peacetime; but the cold war peace was only half a peace. Today we have an even stranger phenomenon: a successful alliance without an enemy. If anyone needed proof that Europe was something new, there you have it. Europe is now defined by the membership of different clubs. Today, you are what you belong to. We are no longer governed by history or geography, but by institutions.
the return of values. Each of the four consequences I have outlined contributes to the fifth consequence: the return of values. Values have always played a part in foreign policy, from attempts to ban the crossbow-which threatened the superiority of knights-through Britain's campaign to abolish the slave trade-one of our main objectives at the Congress of Vienna. But if values have always played a role, it has usually been a secondary role. At times of threat the imperative is survival and security. Before it can think about projecting its values, a society must first safeguard its existence.
Under the balance of power system, states developed a self-denying ordinance about interference in each other's internal affairs (by no means always applied, but often cited). Britain, for example, did not seek to abolish slavery, only the slave trade. This doctrine has two origins. First, the balance of power system meant that countries could not be too choosy about their allies. Republican France had a long standing association with Tsarist Russia. The grand alliance of the second world war brought together capitalist America and communist Soviet Union. Second, for 400 years up to 1989, Europe has been divided fundamentally on values: protestantism versus catholicism; republics versus monarchies; capitalists versus communists. Wars of interest permit negotiations and peace settlements. Wars of values do not. The wars of religion and the Thirty Years War of the 17th century left Europe in ruins. It was partly in order to avoid repeating this experience that states stuck to the Westphalian doctrines of sovereignty and non-interference.
The 20th century brought a return of wars of values-together with the devastation which accompanies them. Given the nature of its regime, only unconditional surrender was acceptable in the conflict with Nazi Germany. The cold war was also a war of values: a conflict between two systems of politics; two empires, one of which was voluntary; and two concepts of what was morally right. It also ended with something like unconditional surrender.
This leaves Europe, and perhaps the west more generally, in a new position. With the fall of the wall both the threat to survival and the conflict of values ended. Now, there is no need to make alliances of convenience, or any reason to fear the uncontrollable consequences of war values. The cold war logic of "he may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch" no longer applies. Values now take a leading role in determining policy. Allies of convenience, such as Mobutu and Ceausescu, are dropped. Accountable government (democracy) becomes a condition of aid programmes. The Commonwealth adopts the Harare principles-which include inter alia democratic government; the EU makes clear that only democracies need apply. Nato demands that the military must be under civilian control in any applicant state. A number of western countries now make the promotion of democracy and human rights an explicit part of their foreign policy. Historically, this is unprecedented.
So is the Kosovo campaign. This, like western intervention in Bosnia generally, was about values not about survival or conquest. It demonstrated the extent to which, even in a controversial and difficult campaign, the views of European governments now coincide.
The reunification of Europe is also a reunification of ideas. We have returned to the state of affairs before the break-up of Christendom-except that the values around which Europe unites are no longer religious and hierarchical. They are those of liberalism: free markets and democracy. The two great struggles of the 20th century ended with the victory of the individual over the collective: first, the victory of the individual over the race as Nazism was defeated; then the victory of the individual over the state as communism was defeated. Two imperial ideas were defeated and, with them, the sun set on the last European empire. The emphasis we now see on human rights-which are about individuals-reflects this. Support for human rights was one of the weapons which the west used against the communist bloc during the cold war. We should not be surprised that, now that the west has won, human rights have become so important in foreign policy.
The doctrine of the amoral state is fading. Pinochet and Milosevic are now held liable for acts of state. The establishment of an International Criminal Court gives this approach institutional shape. States-or at least statesmen-are now to be held accountable for their actions. This, too, is a victory for liberalism, the individual, and the rule of international law.
the year 1989 divides the past from the future almost as clearly as the Berlin wall divided east from west. Few parts of the world are untouched by the events of 1989, but Europe above all has changed dramatically. It is unlikely that the world will now settle down into a steady state of affairs. The cold war was, in this respect, an exceptional period: liberalism's battles always have to be refought against protectionism, nationalism and other forms of the irrational.
It is in the nature of things that foreign policy analysis is abstract. But all of the changes I have described are embodied in real changes in the lives of real people. For some, the end of empire in particular has brought personal tragedy. For others, the reunification of Europe or the victory of liberalism has brought real joy and opportunities to lead better, happier and more fulfilled lives. As always, destruction is swift and dramatic. Reconstitution is slower. But with the new freedom brought by the fall of the wall, the results are already visible.
