Berlin Wall's fall has turned into paragon of frustrated hopes

Richard Wolin specializes in "Europe and the world" and the global history of ideas, with a focus on dictatorships and political movements of the far right and far left. He writes on 20th Century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School. Among his books are Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, 2003) and The Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, 2006).

Below is ILNA's interview with this distinguished figure on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall:

ILNA: The Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago, but an invisible barrier still divides Germany. How do you think this fall has affected Germany and the world itself?

Initially, the fall of the Berlin Wall was widely viewed as a unilaterally positive development. But, unfortunately, in retrospect, it has turned into a paragon of frustrated hopes and dashed expectations. The hopes that were raised at the time for European integration, as well as a global “third wave of democratization” (this was Samuel Huntington‘s thesis, prior to his controversial notion of a “clash of civilizations“), have been rudely disappointed. 

It is safe to say that the primary responsibility for these failures lies with the architects of neoliberalism. In retrospect, it is clear that they had little interest in the values associated with genuine democratization: sovereignty, equality before the law, and so forth. Instead, they managed to ensure that the new rules of the game systematically favored the enrichment of financial and corporate elites at the expense of the average citizen. Thereby, they oversaw the degeneration of popular sovereignty and democratic equality into a predatory and crude plutocracy.  Increasingly, we have realized how difficult it is to reverse this situation once it has become firmly entrenched.

ILNA: According to some surveys, eastern states of Germany are still more impoverished comparing to the western states. This division is translated into the rise of far-right parties (AfD for instance) in the eastern parts of the country. Do you think we will see a further divide between the eastern and western states? Can the rise of far-right in Germany be considered part of the Berlin Wall aftershocks?

As your question correctly suggests, the integration of former East Germany within the expanded Federal Republic of Germany was handled very poorly; and this failure has been one of the leading causes of the rise of the far-right AFD party. It is also responsible for the dangerous and pervasive spread of right-wing extremism: neo-Nazism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. (Between 2001 and 2009, the National Socialist Underground murdered nine citizens of Turkish dissent while the German police, essentially, looked the other way).

Many German citizens living in the East are filled with resentment over the broken promises that were made at the time of reunification in 1990. Remarkably, today, 30 years after the wall’s collapse, those living in Western Germany still regard East Germans with hostility and condescension, an expression of enmity vis-à-vis those who are “culturally difference.”

The xenophobia that emerged in Germany – but also, in other parts of Europe – following the 2015 Middle East refugee crisis shows how superficial the process of democratization has been since the end of World War II and the defeat hose Hitler’s dictatorship. It shows that too much emphasis was placed on the so-called Wirtschaftswunder or “economic miracle,” as opposed to cultivating the values of civic equality and cosmopolitan citizenship. The result, broadly speaking, has been an attitude of political narcissism: economic protectionism on the part of many Germans who feared, irrationally, that the migration crisis would adversely impact their economic well-being.

ILNA: Mainly, the fall of the Berlin Wall is considered as an endpoint for the course of history. Does this logic still hold any truth in it, especially in the “age of extremes” that we live in?

Your question is an important one. In many ways, you have provided the correct answer by alluding to the fact that we still live an “age of extremes.”

Clearly, the thesis of the “end of history” was a misstatement and a gross exaggeration. What we have seen increasingly over the course of the last 10 years – above all, since the Western financial crisis of 2008 – has been the rise of authoritarian democracies, whose existence embodies a reaction against the fragmentation and dislocations of unchecked globalization. In the West – but also in many other cultural contexts – average citizens have realized that democratic elites are unwilling to protect their interests and well-being; and, consequently, new forms of protectionism –civic and economic – are necessary to redress the skyrocketing growth of economic inequality.

What is so dangerous and regressive about these movements is that they represent a qualitative revision – a “devolution” – of the classic notion of democratic citizenship.  They have abandoned the ideals of “equal citizenship”  and “democratic equality“ and have replaced it with an understanding of citizenship based on the prejudicial concepts of ethnicity and race.

Between the two World Wars, the world witnessed the rise of authoritarian national populism across Europe: in fascist Italy, in Admiral Horthy’s Hungary, in Pilsudski’s Poland, in Germany, even in Stalin’s Russia. These developments did not end well! Today, all over the world, twenty-first-century politics is skating on the same thin ice, so to speak.

Interview by: Kamran Baradaran