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HINDSIGHT
& PERSPECTIVES:
The World(s)
Beyond The Wall
BY
RAMESH JAURA (IDN)
TURIN,
Italy (IDN) – Some fifty knowledgeable persons from around the world
are seated around a large horizontal table reflecting on Soviet,
Chinese and European experiences in the twenty years after the
historic Fall of the Berlin Wall, when Andrei Grachev announces that
the Nobel Prize Committee has decided to bestow the Nobel Peace Prize
2009 on President Barack Obama who has been barely nine months in
office.
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Grachev is the Chairman of the Scientific Committee of The World Political
Forum (WPF) founded in May 2003 by Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev. The
Forum is purported to foster contacts between politicians, scientists and high
level personalities in the cultural and religious life of different
continents, faiths, languages and cultures.
The objective is to analyse the issue of interdependence, but above all to
suggest solutions for the problems of the governance of globalization and the
crucial problems that affect humankind today.
The Nobel Peace Prize announcement comes as a surprise to participants in the
conference convened by WPF presided by Gorbachev. Though Obama has undertaken
“extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation
between peoples”, he has yet to accomplish all that he has put on his plate.
This is in stark contrast to circumstances under which Gorbachev was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
Gorbachev took over as the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in
1985 and became the head of the state three years later. As de facto ruler of
the Soviet Union, he tried to reform the stagnating Party and the state
economy by introducing glasnost ("openness"), perestroika
("restructuring"), demokratizatsiya ("democratization"),
and uskoreniye ("acceleration" of economic development), which were
launched at the 27th Congress of the Party in February 1985.
Grachev, who was Gorbachev’s spokesman when the Soviet Union was dissolved
in 1991, explains in his latest book ‘Gorbachev’s Gamble’ that the
radically transformed Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev years was an
integral part of an ambitious project of internal democratic reform and of the
historic opening of Soviet society to the outside world.
This was recognized by the West in general, though the prevalent view was that
all this did not suffice.
Speaking to the people of West Berlin at the base of the Brandenburg Gate,
near the Berlin wall, Reagan said: "We welcome change and openness; for
we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human
liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the
Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically
the cause of freedom and peace."
He added: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek
prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek
liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'"
Those words could also be heard on the eastern, communist-controlled side of
the wall.
Whether the wall fell or was torn down by the people of Berlin on Nov. 9, 1989
is more than a semantic issue. The fact is that it did not fall by itself. Nor
was it torn down in response to U.S. President Ronald Reagan's landmark speech
on June 12, 1987.
But the address Reagan delivered that day on the 750th anniversary of the
founding of the city of Berlin is considered by many to have affirmed the
beginning of the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism.
How Gorbachev looks back at those policies -- that resulted in the dissolution
of the Soviet Union -- and the past twenty years, cannot be ascertained at the
international conference because he is not attending for “personal
reasons”.
But in several newspaper interviews, he has said he had no regrets about what
he did -- for world peace and for the welfare of the people in Russia.
Participants in the WPF conference on 'Twenty Years after: The World(s) beyond
the Wall' agreed that the issue was rather complicated. The conference was
held in the Italian town of Bosco Marengo, seat of the WPF. The participants
included academics, diplomats, former heads of government and senior
officials, and civil society representatives from Europe, USA, Latin America,
Asia and Africa.
Bosco Marengo is a town and comune (municipality) in the Province of
Alessandria in the Italian region Piedmont, located about 80 km southeast of
Turin and about 12 km southeast of Alessandria.
An important issue the conference discussed was: What led to the coming down
of the Berlin wall erected in 1961?
There was a general agreement among participants that it was a mix of popular
movement in East Germany – the first since the Protestant Reformation that
was triggered by Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, as the then
Italian ambassador to the now defunct East Germany, Alberto Indelicato, put it
-- and the annulment of a standing order to 500,000 Soviet troops in East
Germany to crush all opposition to the communist regime in East Berlin.
The Wall included guard towers lining large concrete walls circumscribing a
wide area (later known as the "death strip") containing anti-vehicle
trenches, "fakir beds" and other defenses. In addition,
And what now that the Berlin Wall is no longer there?
"It's just one wall that fell. But there are many visible (between USA
and Mexico) and invisible walls – ideological, economic and racial,"
said French writer and peace activist Marek Halter who was born behind the
walls of the Warsaw ghetto, the largest of the ghettos in Nazi-occupied
Europe, located in the territory of General Government in occupied Poland
during World War II (1939-1945).
The walls, he said, are not a restriction. They are something revealing,
revealing the narrow-mindedness and perversion of those who erect walls.
Aminata Traoré, a Malian author, politician, and political activist, spoke of
"GDP walls" erected on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross
Domestic Income (GDI) of countries that serve to isolate a groups of countries
on the basis of their economic performance and the market value of all final
goods and services made within the borders of a country in a year.
The GDP walls have been accompanied by the mandatory structural modification
programmes of budget cuts and privatisation of public works, open market
borders, and the removal of agricultural subsidies. All this has benefitted
the multinational companies, but resulted in unemployment, illiteracy and
numbers of deaths that have never been higher in Africa.
"The World Bank should be called to account," said Traoré who
served as the Minister of Culture and Tourism of Mali from 1997 to 2000 and is
a former coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme.
Looking at the world beyond the Wall, Eric Hobsbawm who lives in London and
this year completes 50 years of writing books on history, is of the view that
socialism has failed, capitalism is bankrupt" and wonders what comes
next.
"We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these --
capitalism and socialism -- in their pure form: the centrally state-planned
economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled
free-market capitalist economy.
While the centrally state-planned economy of the Soviet type broke down in the
1980s, and the European communist political systems with it, the totally
unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy is breaking down
before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s,
says Eric Hobsbawm whose most recent publication is 'On Empire: America, War,
and Global Supremacy'.
Habsbawm, a member of the British Academy of Sciences, opines that in some
ways it is a greater crisis than in the 1930s, because the globalisation of
the economy was not then as far advanced as it is today, and the crisis did
not affect the planned economy of the Soviet Union.
"We don't yet know how grave and lasting the consequences of the present
world crisis will be, but they certainly mark the end of the sort of
free-market capitalism that captured the world and its governments in the
years since Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan."
Jianmin Wu, vice chairman of the China Institute of Strategy and Management
and chairman of the Shanghai Centre for International Studies, did not share
this "rather pessimistic" scenario. Asia in general and China in
particular were making considerable economic advances and sharing the fruits
of their accomplishments with Europe and USA, said Wu who is also a member of
the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of the Chinese Foreign Ministry,.
"Thirty years ago, you couldn’t find anything in American supermarkets
made in China. Now, when an American friend shops for a gift, he can’t find
one not made in China," Wu recalled his admiration for American
supermarkets when he first came to the U.S. in 1971. He had been accustomed to
government ration coupons for textiles, rice and most other goods.
Wu does not share the widely held view that 21st century will be the 'Asian
century' -- in contrast to 20th century being the American century and the
19th century the European century. He expects it to be a 'century of
humankind'.
Looked at from far away Cuba, but marked by its proximity to the U.S, the
post-war world looks different. To Aurelio Alonso, an eminent sociologist, the
Cuban reality has been marked not only by the permanent hostility of the U.S.
administrations "that have hampered the normal development of changes
within" but also by the alternatives open to the island by the processes
taking place in Latin America.
________________________
Ramesh
Jaura is chief editor of the Globalom Media
group, president of Euforic-Europe's
Forum on International Cooperation in Maastricht (The Netherlands) and
Director of IPS-Inter
Press Service Europe in Berlin.
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