November 9, 1999
The Wall
Ten years ago this day the Berlin Wall, an ugly metaphor for the bankruptcy of communism, finally came down. But it is incorrect to speak of its "fall." The Berlin Wall was pulled down.
On this day in 1989 the world watched as the German people whom the Wall had divided for more than a generation attacked it with hammers, ropes and their bare hands. What the cameras could not capture was that the physical breaching of the Wall would not have been possible without the sustained moral pounding that had softened the foundation upon which it stood. It was a force most literally expressed by Ronald Wilson Reagan two years earlier when he came to Berlin to present his own challenge to the Soviet leader: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." At the time, even many of Mr. Reagan's closest sympathizers regarded it as mere boilerplate.
Mr. Reagan knew better. For his was not an optimism grounded in denying unpleasant facts, as his critics like to think. To the contrary, his was an optimism built on a faith in freedom. Freedom, moreover, was not some distant Platonic ideal, but a practical workaday answer. Thus Mr. Reagan could at once acknowledge the threat posed by the Soviet Union while refusing to be intimidated by it. As he went on to say in his now-famous Berlin speech, "In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food."
In other words, for all its strength and brutality, communism was not the invincible monolith it was so often assumed to be by foes and sympathizers alike. Others shared this vision. In Rome a Pole sat on the chair of St. Peter, a man who had opened his own papacy with the declaration, "Be not afraid." As Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi noted in their biography, his own experience with Polish communism had taught the Pope that "the refusal to lie was the most powerful means of provoking a crisis in any totalitarian state." This too Mr. Reagan understood implicitly, hence his characterization of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire.
In proportion to the ridicule this generated in the West, his willingness to call the U.S.S.R. by its rightful name made Mr. Reagan popular behind the Iron Curtain. For the force that would culminate in the breaching of the Wall 10 years ago today had any number of fronts, from the activists of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, the workers in the free-trade union Solidarity to the unsung martyrs of the Afghan resistance--the first to prove that there was nothing inevitable about the Brezhnev Doctrine. In the West these actions were matched by the political courage of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Helmut Kohl in Germany and even Francois Mitterrand in France, who supported the crucial deployment of American missiles on European soil.
The temptation today is to regard these developments as inevitable. But it could easily have gone another way.
In 1977 at Notre Dame, Jimmy Carter declared that U.S. foreign policy would henceforth be unburdened of the "inordinate fear of communism" that he thought had previously characterized it. By the time Mr. Reagan took office Afghanistan had been invaded, pro-accommodation "peace movements" were engulfing Europe and Communist insurgencies were breaking out all over Central America. Yet in his own speech at Notre Dame in 1981, given only a few weeks after he had been shot by a would-be assassin, Mr. Reagan calmly declared communism to be a "sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
Indeed, in looking back to the heady days of the early 1980s perhaps the most striking thing is how persistently Mr. Reagan predicted communism's fall--and how most everyone simply ignored him. Even among his fellow Cold Warriors the Gipper's optimism set him apart. In 1985 at a National Review banquet, Mr. Reagan cited Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy who had believed that in renouncing the Communist cause for the West he was signing up with the losing side. "I can think of no better way to pay tribute to his memory--and frankly nothing he would have liked better than to say: We can affirm here tonight that Whittaker Chambers was wrong. That civilization will triumph. That freedom is the winning side."
Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War single-handedly. The contradictions of communism had been building, pushed by brave leaders like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Clearly too Mikhail Gorbachev played his part, not least in his refusal to use troops to keep the Wall up. Ten years after the Wall came down, Kosovo and Chechnya remind us that we have challenges we could not even have imagined then. But surely the lesson of 1989 is that human beings are born to be free, that a confidence in this proposition is infectious, and that--as Mr. Reagan would no doubt have reminded us--we would do best by our future to look at the pulling down of the Berlin Wall as a beginning, not an end.
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