“The best year in European history”?
Throughout the 1980′s the best reporting on events and movements in Eastern Europe was done by Timothy Garton Ash in the pages of The New York Review of Books. In the same journal’s latest issue (not yet available on-line), he reviews a number of books on the revolutionary events of 1989. His elegiac penultimate paragraph reads:
The year 1989 was one of the best in European history. Indeed, I am hard pressed to think of a better one. It was also a year in which the world looked to Europe–specifically to Central Europe, and, at the pivotal moment, to Berlin. World history–using the term in a quasi-Hegelian sense–was made in the heart of the old continent, just down the road from Hegel’s old university, now called the Humboldt University. Twenty years later, I am tempted to speculate (while continuing to work with other Europeans in an endeavor to prove this hunch wrong) that this may also have been the last occasion–at least for a very long time–when world history was made in Europe. Today world history is being made elsewhere. There is now a Café Weltgeist at the Humboldt University, but the Weltgeist has moved on. Of Europe’s long, starring role on the world stage, future generations may yet say: nothing became her like the leaving of it.
Better than 1945 or 1918??
He obviously thinks so, but why do you think he might be wrong?
Most of us have been subject to a truncated education because we were reared in Euro-centricity. There is/was a fantastic world outside of Europe and we were the worst for not learning and knowing more about it. The Vatican cannot control itself celebrating Charles Martel and all that liberation. We have to get over it. Especially, Joseph Ratzinger who is a sorry European Christian/Nationalist.
This kind of historical comparisons is a bit silly of course, but how can the taking down of the Berlin wall compare to the ending of World War II and putting an end to the Shoah? Here is an extract from Pope John Paul II’s speech at Auschwitz:
In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to try to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah.
My own personal memories are of all that happened when the Nazis occupied Poland during the war. I remember my Jewish friends and neighbours, some of whom perished, while others survived. I have come to Yad Vashem to pay homage to the millions of Jewish people who, stripped of everything, especially of human dignity, were murdered in the Holocaust. More than half a century has passed, but the memories remain.
Here, as at Auschwitz and many other places in Europe, we are overcome by the echo of the heart-rending laments of so many. Men, women and children, cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale.
“One of the best years,” Ash calls it, not “the best year” (though he does add that he himself is hard put to find a better one). I think 1918 is out of the running partly because we know now what happened afterwards (Hitler, Stalin, failure of the League of Nations, Great Depression, and all that), partly because, while the appalling bloodshed of 1914-18 came to an end, by the time the guns fell quiet, the damage had already been done in Europe and to Europe by Europeans, and it has never been undone.
1945 certainly would have to be in the running, particularly when looked at from a western European standpoint (forgetting for the moment the great tectonic shifts taking place in other parts of the world, particularly Asia). But if one takes off the western blinkers, 1945 might look a bit questionable. Certainly Naziism was defeated, the guns fell silent (more or less, but those eastern Europeans — particularly, but not exclusively, Poles — who saw themselves as exchanging one form of tyranny for another, might be excused for seeing 1989 as the fulfillment of a promise that had been made in 1945, but never quite realized.
(And if one goes beyond Europe, which is not Ash’s point, you then get into the whole question of colonial liberation in India, Pakistan, Burma and the rest of S.E. Asia, and, of course, the great Chinese civil war, about which judgments may honestly be mixed.)
As we discussed in an earlier thread, 1989 does not mean only, nor even principally, the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the liberation of many of the peoples of Eastern Europe from Soviet hegemony, and led, almost inexorably, to the dismantling of the Soviet Empire, and, it still seems, the end of the Cold War, and the great diminishment of nuclear holocaust. If not greater than they, this surely ranks in importance with the ends of the two World Wars.
Garton Ash makes the point that both of the superpowers contributed to this moment mainly by their inaction, the USA by caution as evebts unfolded and then by deliberate restraint (not “dancing on the Wall”), the USSR by Gorbachev’s decision “to accept changes happening at the periphery of the Soviet Union’s outer empire, rather than attempting to slow down or reverse them.” Garton Ash’s wry comment:
“It is perhaps a characteristic of super-powers that they think they make history. Big events must surely be made by big powers. Yet in the nine months that gave birth to a new world, from February to November 1989, the United States and the Soviet Union were largely passive midwives. They made history by what they did not do. And both giants stood back partly because they underestimated the significance of things being done by little people in little countries.”
1989 was the year myself and my immediate family left (Western) Europe for the USA. A bad year for the USA certainly, but definitely good for Europe. (Just kidding of course – or partly, at least).
Anyway, seriously, being a Stoic, let me put my vote in for any year in the period “from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus” as Europe’s best years. Depends on how one is using the quite ambiguous word “best” though certainly. Seems like the author is using it synonously with “historic” or “newsworthy” and the like. My vote is mose based on a definition encompassing the condition of the human person in Europe at the time.
In 1989 I was a freshman at the University of Bologna (Political Science) and with some friends I spent some time between July 1989 and January 1990 in France and then Eastern Europe. I think Garton Ash is right: just three years after the nuclear incident in Chernobyl the Fall 1989 meant hope, a solution to the painful “German question” – and the best way to celebrate 200 years from the French Revolution.