No doubt the media will soon be making a lot of noise about how the Berlin Wall and the barbed wire which separated the then G.D.R., Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Romania from Western Europe were torn down and celebration 20 years of “freedom” for the citizens of the above places.
The Thatchers of this world will no doubt want to milk as much credit as possible for having won the cold war. The truth of course lies somewhere else. The changes were bought about by and large by Revolution, a mixture of reform from above and revolution from below.
The term joint venture had existed for some time before, Fiat in particular were keen to manufacture some of their cars in Poland where the wages were considerably lower than in Italy and any workers thinking of striking could be intimidated much more openly there. This is just one example there are many more.
Western Capitalists saw half a continent where they could profitably unload their shoddy trinkets and Eastern State Capitalists saw the chance to make them selves even richer. Guarding and maintaining their intimidating borders to prevent Eastern Europeans fleeing one corrupt system to “escape” to another was an expensive matter and when the World Bank made it a condition of helping out Hungary that all citizens should have access to a passport and foreign travel it was logical that barbed wire borders were no longer needed. Capitalists to the last they even cut vast sections of the wire into small strips and sold them off as souvenirs from the cold war.
After East Germans flocked to Hungary for their holidays to take advantage of this loop hole metaphorically and literally the end was in sight. What frightened the East German ruling classes most was not the mass exodus, (after all those too old or ill to work had always been pushed sometimes unwillingly through the door to the west) but the demonstrators who bore placards “wir bleiben hier” – We are staying here. Finally the changes came so quickly that even the multinationals of the planet like Coca Cola were not quick enough to grab advertising time between the announcement of the opening of the Berlin Wall and the gates being opened.
It would be unkind to ignore the role the Polish workforce played, organising itself into the Trade Union Solidarity and standing defiant to opposition and intimidation they showed the way.
It would be churlish to say that in reality there are no changes; even the so called “freedom” of the Eastern Europeans to holiday on crowded Spanish beaches instead of crowded Bulgarian ones was progress for them. Even the dropping of the world Socialism from the full names of their countries has to be seen as progress from our point of view, e.g. the true name should have been Union of State Capitalist Republics in the case of USSR.
The bosses, except for the despicable Ceaucescu in Romania stayed the same and just wore a different hat – no where was this more apparent than in former Czechoslovakia where in theory everyone received shares in the organisation where they worked only to find in a very short time 10 percent of the population owner all the shares again. In reality they have swapped a maximum security jail for the relative freedom of an “open prison” where to a certain extent they can chose who exploits them.
The transitions came so smoothly precisely because the two so-called diametrically opposed systems were for all intents and purposes the same. The ruling classes had the embarrassing task of explaining how the same soldiers of the Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian etc armies who were our mortal enemies during the cold war were now our best friends when they joined NATO. In some cases not even the uniforms changed. Those non-believers like myself who enjoyed Bob Dylan’s song “With God on our side” could be excused a wry chuckle.
We should stand solid with our brothers and sisters from the East, even learn a little from them how to organise and throw off their chains, what we should not do is stop when we have changed one set of owners for another. There is a whole planet which should be the common property of us all, don’t stop until we get it.
JFB
1 comment:
"The Thatchers of this world will no doubt want to milk as much credit as possible for having won the cold war."
Perhaps but lets not have a little thng such as democracy stand between the UK and national self interest .
Papers published by the Foreign Office reveal the extent of Margaret Thatcher's opposition to German unification. she had an ally in French President Francois Mitterrand.Thatcher feared that by joining East and West Germany, a greater German state would be created which would be too powerful.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8251211.stm
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