After the wall.

Byline: Mahir Ali

THE fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago this week provided cause for celebration, and not just in Europe. The structure was the most potent physical manifestation of the Cold War, symbolising what Winston Churchill had described (years before it was built) as the Iron Curtain.

Its sudden demolition was remarkable. 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall,' Ronald Reagan had declared in 1987. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev evidently complied.

The message from Moscow that autumn was clear: the Eastern European regimes propped up by the USSR were on their own. The Soviet troops based in countries such as East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia would not interfere in the event of popular mobilisation or unrest.

This was a monumental shift from the mindset that had led Moscow to take the initiative in crushing protests and reformist efforts in East Germany, Poland and, notably, Hungary in the 1950s - and, most egregiously, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Perhaps the biggest irony is that the impulses for change associated with Imre Nagy in Hungary in 1956 and Alexander Dubcek in CzechoAslovakia a dozen years later were primarily quests for a less repressive and more representative path within the socialist context.

Many members of the Eastern Bloc have drifted to the far right.

That was no longer the case in 1989, even though there is some evidence that many East Germans at that juncture were keen to showcase a Stasi-free socialist alternative to West Germany. That was not to be. Egon Krenz, the last leader of East Germany, still resents what he sees as Gorbachev's betrayal, when Moscow went back on a pledge that it would hold out against a rapid reunification of Germany.

Gorbachev, too, has the right to feel betrayed. The last Soviet leader's dilemmas are a crucial part of the picture that came into focus in 1989. His reformist initiatives were applauded in the West, and initially in the Soviet Union, but when he sought the resources to implement them, his Western friends baulked at the idea of sufficient loans or credits. Perhaps they began to realise that without such resistance the Soviet Union would crumble. And it obediently came up to their expectations.

Right across Eastern Europe, meanwhile, liberation from Moscow's hold entailed the kind of 'liberalisation' that presaged political democratisation alongside obeisance to the deities of neoliberal capitalism. Lech Walesa, who led Poland's Solidarity movement, which...