First step towards a stable Europe

At a moment in our public life when the cradle-to-grave perspective and the kind of vibrant, looking-ahead imagination that brought the impressive Web Summit to Dublin seems in short enough supply tomorrow’s 25th anniversary of the removal of the Berlin Wall offers an opportunity to indulge in that almost penitential process that has, on occasion, saved many of us from delusion — mature reflection.

The Wall stood for 28 years and was a neat metaphor, almost Hollywood shorthand, for the dividing line between good and evil— the affluent West and, as Ronald Reagan described it, The Evil Empire. Of course the reality was much more nuanced; neither adversary had a monopoly on good or evil, neither presided over Valhalla, each had its own social problems. It made little or no difference to the poor or the abandoned whether they lived under Stalin in Murmansk, under de Gaulle in Toulouse or under Nixon in Detroit, hardship is politically neutral and indifferent to its victims.

Nevertheless, the Wall did stand between two philosophies, dividing one of Europe’s great capitals in a stark, uncompromising way marking the great fault line in post-war Europe. It, in the West at least, symbolised the Cold War and the freedoms denied to those trapped behind the Iron Curtain. In today’s world only North Korea persists with an exclusion policy as robust as that imposed by the totalitarian Soviet Union. That is unsurprising as the same issue is in play— the dictators’ realisation that they could not control the states’ citizens if they knew what the outside world was really like. Perestroika and glasnost introduced Soviet citizens to an alternative way of life and the world changed, the citizens of North Korea await that liberation.

The reunification of Germany facilitated by the collapse of the Wall may not have made as big an impact on the world as the collapse of the Soviet Union but in European terms it was every bit as important. In European Community terms even more so. It represented the first faltering steps towards today’s reunified Germany, the economic dynamo of the EU. Despite that Germany’s greatest contribution to Europe may not even be economic or material. It may well be the realisation, having endured the lunacies of the extreme left and the horrors of the insane right, that stability and security are the cornerstones of stability and peace and are worth defending. Last weekend’s rebuke to British prime minister David Cameron from chancellor Angela Merkel, when she stated that elements of the EU’s social contract are not negotiable may have been the latest skirmish in the war to protect European solidarity.

There are lessons too for an island like this, especially as the old hatreds still hold such sway in the North. West and East Germans had many reasons to distrust each other yet they reunited their country, without a shot being fired, in less than a year. Two decades later Germany is the dominant force in Europe. This achievement puts our difficulties over water charges in a shaming perspective. Maybe it’s time everyone involved, protesters and Government advocates, agent provocateurs too, took time for some mature reflection.