Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

Nagy’s reburial catalysed strong anti-Soviet, anti-communist nationalism at the grass roots – rather like the papal visit to Poland, but in this case through memory politics instead of religious fervour. Both of these political transformations were largely shaped by specific national experiences, and were also contained within national boundaries. Yet they occurred at much the same time and each fed on and into the other. What was happening in both Poland and Hungary represented extrication from dictatorship through the creation of new institutional structures for new regimes. In addition, there was also a wider diffusion of revolutionary ideas,[33] even beyond Eastern Europe. Indeed it is telling that the conservative hardliners in Beijing likened this to a contagion emanating from Poland and Hungary.[34] In due course the ‘disease’ of economic reform combined with political democratisation[35] would spread as the year went on, infecting the bloc from Estonia on the Baltic coast to Bulgaria on the shores of the Black Sea.

But contagion affecting a plethora of communist states was not the only dynamic of 1989. In one of these countries, Hungary, reform had the power to act as a solvent for the whole Soviet bloc and indeed for Cold War Europe itself.

*

This became clear on 27 June 1989, in a graphic image that rapidly made its way around the globe: two men, smartly dressed in business suits but standing in open country, wielded bolt cutters to nip holes in a rusty barbed-wire fence. The duo – Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock had travelled specially to the Austria–Hungary border to send a deliberate signal. Side by side, cutting through the wire fence, they seemed to be conveying the good news that the division of post-war Europe was coming to an end.

Horn and Mock cut the Iron Curtain

It was, of course, something of a public-relations stunt. When Horn proposed the fence-cutting ceremony, Németh jokingly replied: ‘Gyula, do it, but hurry up – there isn’t much barbed wire left.’[36] In reality, the two governments had started to remove the border installations, including watchtowers and alarm system, on 2 May and the actual decision to do so dated back to the end of 1988 when Németh, as part of his package of reforms, had scrapped the budget for the maintenance of the whole decrepit system. The alarm was still going off – around 4,000 times a year, but mostly caused by rabbits, deer, pheasants and the occasional drunk. The bankrupt government did not have the money to repair it and, in any case, earlier that year travel restrictions for Hungarians had been lifted entirely: twelve months on, by the end of 1988 6 million Hungarian tourists had travelled abroad, mostly to the West.[37]

Németh checked his decision to take down the iron fencing around his country with Gorbachev when visiting Moscow on 3 March and the Soviet leader raised no objection: ‘We have a strict regime on our borders, but we are also becoming more open.’ But, as Németh admitted to Gorbachev, the situation was more complex for Budapest, because the only remaining purpose of the fence was to catch citizens from East Germany who were trying to escape illegally to the West via Hungary. ‘Of course,’ he therefore added, ‘we will have to talk to the comrades from the GDR.’[38]

The East German regime, led by Erich Honecker since 1971, received the news of the border opening with a mixture of anger and anxiety. Anger, because the Hungarians had done it alone – with Gorbachev’s blessing but without consulting the rest of the Warsaw Pact allies. And real anxiety because any East German with valid travel documents to Hungary could conceivably escape the bloc into Austria and then on to automatic citizenship in West Germany. In other words, Hungary would become a fatal loophole in the Iron Curtain that the GDR had struggled so long to preserve in order to maintain its political existence.

Nevertheless, when Hungary began the removal in early May the East German defence minister General Heinz Kessler appears to have still been relatively unstressed. He told Honecker that his Hungarian counterpart General Ferenc Kárpáti had assured him that the dismantling was being done ‘entirely for financial reasons’ and that Hungary would obviously continue to secure the border through more watchtowers and ‘intensified patrols’ with sniffer dogs. Kárpáti, of course, was following instructions from Németh who had told him to play for time and keep things vague with East Berlin. ‘If we start to explain the full situation we’ll give ourselves away and get into even worse trouble.’ Crucially, Kessler took Kárpáti at his word and dutifully reported to Honecker that the dismantling of the 260-kilometre border fence was intended as a gradual process that would last until the end of 1990, at a rate of about four kilometres a week, and starting in the vicinity of four of the eight border crossings. Hungary, he explained, was undertaking this ‘cosmetic venture’ in a timely manner to advance good neighbourly relations with Austria and as part of a general relaxation of tensions in Europe.[39]

With barbed wire disappearing every day, however, East Berlin remained on edge. Honecker sent his foreign minister Oskar Fischer to Moscow to complain, only to be told by Shevardnadze that the GDR had to resolve this matter directly with Hungary.[40] And so East Germany found itself alone, without any support from Moscow – sandwiched between a reforming Poland in the East, its capitalist German rival in the West and an ever more liberal and open Hungary further south.

Initially, as Kárpáti had promised, Hungarian border guards did detain East German ‘fugitives’ at those first de-fenced sections near border checkpoints. The Iron Curtain seemed to be holding. But, as news got out and especially after seeing the images of Horn and Mock on 27 June, people felt increasingly emboldened. And so, as the weeks wore on, the so-called ‘green border’ (the dismantled sections farther away from the crossings and therefore less thoroughly patrolled) offered better opportunities for escapees. By August some 1,600 East Germans had successfully taken this route to reach the West.[41]

The Honecker regime did its level best to keep all this out of the papers and off the TV. But it was too late. East Germans had got the message: Hungary was their gateway to freedom.

*

Hungary’s simmering international crisis was also the top item on the agenda when Gorbachev met Kohl in Bonn on 12 June 1989 for his first state visit to the FRG since he took office.[42] ‘We are watching the developments in Hungary with great interest,’ the chancellor declared. ‘I told Bush that as far as Hungary is concerned, we are acting on the basis of an old German proverb: let the church remain in the village. It means that the Hungarians should decide themselves what they want, but nobody should interfere in their affairs.’ Gorbachev agreed: ‘We have a similar proverb: you do not go to somebody’s monastery with your charter.’ They both laughed. ‘Beautiful folk wisdom,’ exclaimed Kohl.

Then the Soviet leader became more sombre. ‘I am telling you honestly – there are serious shifts under way in the socialist countries. Their direction originates from concrete situations in each country. The West should not be concerned about it. Everything moves in the direction of a strengthening of the democratic basis.’ Here was Gorbachev’s endorsement of socialist renewal on a national level. But he also issued a guarded warning to Kohl, mindful of pressures on the chancellor to offer financial support to opposition groups in the Soviet bloc. ‘Every country decides on its own how it does it. It is their internal affair. I think you would agree with me that you should not stick a pole into an anthill. The consequences of such an act could be absolutely unpredictable.’

Rather than get into that argument, Kohl simply said that there was ‘a common opinion’ in the USSR, the USA and the FRG that ‘we should not interfere with anybody’s development’. But Gorbachev wanted to underline his point. If anyone tried to destabilise the situation, he said, ‘it would disrupt the process of building trust between the West and the East, and destroy everything that has been achieved so far.’[43] Next day, 13 June, he and Kohl signed no less than eleven agreements expanding economic, technological and cultural ties and a joint declaration affirming the right of peoples and states to self-determination – a significant step, especially from the German perspective.[44]

Yet the ‘Bonn Declaration’ was much more. It was the centrepiece of a state visit whose primary importance for the West Germans was the symbolic reconciliation of two nations whose brutal struggle had left Germany and Europe divided. It defined what both deemed to be a new and more promising phase in Soviet–West German relations. This was reflected in the conclusion expressing ‘the deep, long-cherished yearning’ of the two peoples ‘to heal the wounds of the past through understanding and reconciliation and to build jointly a better future’.[45]

Gorbachev and Kohl: A toast to peace and understanding

Buoyed up by the achievement and the atmosphere, the two men really bonded over the course of three days. They talked in private on a total of three separate occasions. And in contrast to the usually stilted meetings between a Western leader and a communist, they developed the confidence to exchange very candid assessments of their ‘mutual friends’. Both of them respected Jaruzelski; both were keen to support Poland’s transformation under his leadership and also Hungary’s reform course, as long as the latter was not spinning out of control. Each of them had problems with the diehard socialist regime of Erich Honecker, and neither could stand Nicolae Ceaușescu. In Kohl’s opinion the old dictator had plunged his country into ‘darkness and stagnation’; Gorbachev called Romania ‘a primitive phenomenon’, akin to North Korea, ‘in the centre of civilised Europe’.[46]

As human beings they also developed a real closeness, sharing childhood memories and reflecting on their families’ wartime sufferings: ‘There is not a single family’ in either country, said Kohl quietly, ‘whom the war did not touch’.[47] He told Gorbachev that his government saw the visit as marking nothing less than ‘the end of hostilities between Russians and Germans, as the beginning of a period of genuinely friendly, good neighbourly relations’. He added that ‘these are words supported by the will of all the people, by the will of the people who greet you in the streets and squares’. Without doubt, this was another striking feature of the visit. Gorbachev had been welcomed ecstatically in West Germany – the little Rhineland towns, as much as the Ruhr steelworks he visited, were all mobbed with people shouting ‘Gorby, Gorby.’ The conversation between the leaders became increasingly intimate. ‘I like your policy, and I like you as a person,’ confessed Kohl; ‘let’s communicate more often, let’s call each other on the phone. I think we could accomplish many things ourselves without delegating to the bureaucracies.’ Gorbachev agreed: he felt that mutual trust was growing ‘with every meeting’.[48]

On their last evening, after a long and relaxed dinner in the Chancellery bungalow, Kohl and Gorbachev, with only a translator in tow, wandered into the park and down the steps to the Rhine. There they sat on a low wall, chatting occasionally to passers-by, and gazing at the Siebengebirge hills beyond. Kohl never forgot this moment. The two men imagined a comprehensive reordering of Soviet–German relations to be codified in a ‘Grand Treaty’[49] that would open new perspectives for the future. But Kohl warned that it was impossible as long as Germany remained divided. Gorbachev was unmoved: ‘The division is the result of a logical historical development.’ Kohl did not let go. On that balmy night, in a haze of wine and goodwill, he sensed a not-to-be-missed opportunity. Pointing to the broad, steadily flowing Rhine, the chancellor mused: ‘The river symbolises history. It’s nothing static. Technically you can build a dam … But then the river will overflow and find another way to the sea. Thus it is with German unity. You can try to prevent unification, in which case we won’t experience this in our lifetimes. But as certainly as the Rhine flows towards the sea, as certainly German unity will come – and also European unity.’

Gorbachev listened and this time he did not demur. That evening on the bank of the Rhine, so Kohl thought looking back, was truly a turning point in Gorbachev’s thinking and also in their whole relationship. As they parted the two men hugged each other. An unlikely combination, perhaps: the stocky Kremlin leader and the massive, six-foot four, 250-pound chancellor. But the feeling was real: a political friendship had been born.What’s more, for Gorbachev West Germany had become what he called Moscow’s ‘major foreign partner’ – after the United States – and was therefore playing nothing less than a ‘global role’.[50]

Kohl could now bask in the glow of hugely successful state visits in quick succession from each of the superpower leaders – Bush and Gorbachev. He told the press exultantly: ‘within three weeks the two most powerful men from two different systems visited Germany. This new era brings new responsibilities to Germany’, and also, he added, ‘for peace’.[51]

Gorbachev’s evaluation of the summit was also warm and positive. ‘I think we have come out of a period of Cold War, even if there are still some chills and drafts,’ he announced before leaving. ‘We are simply bound to a new stage of relations, one I would call the peaceful period in the development of international relations.’ He even suggested that the Berlin Wall could ‘disappear when those conditions that created it fall away. I don’t see a major problem here.’ This was a scarcely veiled snub to the Honecker regime. And, alluding to the division of Germany itself, he stated ‘we hope that time will resolve this’. But while speculating about the end of one great geopolitical barrier, Gorbachev also aired his fears of a new, ‘impenetrable wall across Europe’ – referring to the European Community’s plans for a totally integrated single market by 1992. ‘So far we have not heard the economic or political arguments convincing enough to dispell such apprehensions.’ Here is a reminder that in June 1989 the process of ‘European integration’ seemed like a way of deepening the division between the two halves of the continent, rather than a unifying force of the sort that Gorbachev envisaged when he spoke of a ‘Common European Home’ stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.[52]

For Gorbachev, Bonn was part of a series of visits around Europe in mid-1989 during which – like Bush with his speaking tour in the spring – the Soviet leader presented his evolving ideas about the new Eastern Europe that was emerging through his programme of political and economic restructuring.

In Paris three weeks later, he developed the line taken with Kohl on Poland and Hungary, insisting that communist countries ‘now in transition’ would ‘find a new quality of life within a socialist system, a socialist democracy’ as the ‘process of democratisation’ ultimately transformed all of Eastern Europe. In other words, what was going on within the Soviet bloc was reconstruction not deconstruction. Yet, pointing to the historical connections between 1789 and 1917, he declared that perestroika was also a ‘revolution’. Speaking to a packed and eager audience of professors, writers and students in the Sorbonne – a venue he had specially requested – Gorbachev felt like the intellectual that he yearned to be. He philosophised about the fundamentally ‘new global problems facing mankind at the end of the twentieth century’ to which his ‘new thinking’ provided answers. He warned the West not to expect Eastern Europe’s ‘return to the capitalist fold’ or to cherish ‘the illusion that only bourgeois society represents eternal values’.[53]

Lurking beneath these comments was Gorbachev’s real irritation with those addresses Bush had delivered in April and May. He did not see any ‘realism’ or a ‘constructive line’ in those statements and in fact found them ‘quite unpleasant’, he told Kohl in Bonn. ‘Frankly speaking, those statements reminded us of Reagan’s statements about the “crusade” against socialism.’ Like Reagan, Bush ‘appealed to the forces of freedom, called for the end to the “status quo”, and for “pushing socialism back”. And all this’, Gorbachev fumed, ‘at a time when we are calling for the de-ideologisation of relations. Unwillingly, questions come to mind – where is Bush genuine, and where is Bush rhetorical?’[54]

When the topic came up between Mitterrand and Gorbachev on 5 July in the Elysée Palace, the French president did not mince words about his own quite different views. ‘George Bush would conduct a very moderate policy even without congressional constraint because he is conservative.’ In fact, he added, Bush ‘has a very big drawback – he lacks original thinking altogether’. Mitterrand’s frustration about his own lack of influence and France’s diminished status in global affairs was palpable. He also felt sidelined by the active European diplomacy of Bush and Kohl – a theme to which I will return in chapters four and five. Conversely, the Soviet leader must have relished the Frenchman’s dig at the foot-dragging US president as much as he appreciated Mitterrand’s profession of ‘faith in the success of perestroika’.[55]

Nevertheless, determined to take the initiative from the ‘crusading’ Bush and regain the moral high ground, the Soviet leader pulled out the stops when speaking to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Declaring that ‘the post-war period and the Cold War are becoming a thing of the past’, Gorbachev offered an eye-catching disarmament package, proposing cuts in Soviet short-range nuclear missiles ‘without delay’ if NATO agreed, and the ultimate goal of eliminating all these weapons. Mindful of recent Alliance arguments over the ‘third zero’, he mischievously claimed that the USSR was holding fast to its ‘non-nuclear ideals’, while the West was clinging on to its dated concept of ‘minimum deterrence’.

The Soviet leader also elaborated on his vision of a Common European Home. This ruled out ‘the very possibility of the use or threat of force’ and postulated ‘a doctrine of restraint to replace the doctrine of deterrence’. He envisaged, as the Soviet Union moved towards a ‘more open economy’, the eventual ‘emergence of a vast economic space’ right across the continent in which the ‘eastern and western parts would be strongly interlocked’. He continued to believe in the ‘competition between different types of society’ and saw these kinds of tensions as ‘creating better material and spiritual conditions of life for people’. But he was looking forward to the day when ‘the only battlefield would be markets open for trade and minds open to ideas’.

Admitting that he had ‘no finished blueprint’ in his pocket for the Common European Home, he reminded his listeners of the work of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), when thirty-five nations had agreed common principles and values. It was now time, he declared, for the present generations of leaders in Europe and North America ‘to discuss, in addition to the most immediate issues, how they contemplate future stages of progress towards a European Community of the twenty-first century’. At the cornerstone of Helsinki 1975 were the two superpowers and, Gorbachev believed, that situation had not changed. ‘The realities of today and the prospects for the foreseeable future are obvious: the Soviet Union and the United States are a natural part of the European international and political structure. Their involvement in its evolution is not only justified, but also historically conditioned. No other approach is acceptable.’[56]

Gorbachev returned home via Romania, where he led a Warsaw Pact meeting that formally and publicly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine – in other words cementing his statements in New York and more recently Strasbourg that force would not be used to control the development of individual socialist states. Combined with Gorbachev’s PR offensive of drastic, unilateral Soviet force reductions in Eastern Europe and his express desire for the Warsaw Pact states to make progress with NATO countries on producing a conventional arms accord by 1992,[57] this was another deeply worrying moment for Honecker and the other hardliners in the bloc – Ceaușescu and Miloš Jakeš of Czechoslovakia – especially considering that they had used the summit to lobby vehemently for Warsaw Pact military intervention in Hungary. Champions of repression and intransigence, they must have felt that the Kremlin was abandoning them.[58] Gorbachev certainly left his fellow communist leaders in no doubt what he thought about the dinosaurs among them. He stressed that ‘new changes in the party and in the economy are needed … Even V. I. Lenin said that new policies need new people. And this does not depend on subjective wishes any more. The very process of democratisation demands it.’[59]

The Soviet leader left Bucharest on 9 July, just as the president of the United States was arriving in Warsaw. Each superpower was putting down markers on a Europe in turmoil.

*

Bush had been alarmed by the Soviet leader’s peace offensive around Europe, not least because America’s NATO allies appeared to be in the grip of some kind of ‘Gorbymania’ which made them susceptible to Soviet blandishments about arms reduction. His own European tour – to Poland and Hungary ahead of the G7 meeting in France – had been planned in May but it was now all the more imperative, in order to ‘offset the appeal’ of Gorbachev’s message.[60]

Indeed, before even setting off for Europe, Bush made a point of quickly and strongly rebuffing Gorbachev’s Paris proposals: ‘I see no reason to stand here and try to change a collective decision taken by NATO,’ he declared, and reiterated that there would be no talks on SNFs until agreement had been reached in Vienna on reducing conventional forces in Europe, an area in which the USSR was vastly superior. He wrote sarcastically in his memoirs about Gorbachev’s attempt to persuade the West that it ‘need not wait for concrete actions by the Soviet Union before lowering its guard and military preparedness’.[61]

That said, Bush did not want his European trip to be about scoring points off Gorbachev. The president had already laid down his own ideological principles in the spring and, far from wishing to mount a ‘crusade’, he was sensitive both to the volatile situation in Eastern Europe and to Gorbachev’s delicate political position at home. He did not intend to ‘back off’ from his own values of freedom and democracy but was acutely conscious that ‘hot rhetoric would needlessly antagonise the militant elements within the Soviet Union and the Pact’. He even worried about the impact of his own presence, regardless of what he said. While wanting to be what he called a ‘responsible catalyst, where possible, for democratic change in Eastern Europe’, he did not want to be a stimulus for unrest: ‘If massive crowds gathered, intent on showing their opposition to Soviet dominance, things could get out of control. An enthusiastic reception could erupt into a violent riot.’ Although he and Gorbachev were jockeying for position, the two leaders agreed on the importance of stability within a bloc that was in flux.[62]

Bush and his entourage arrived at Warsaw’s military airport around 10 p.m. on 9 July. It was a humid summer evening as they descended from Air Force One to be greeted by a large official welcoming party. Jaruzelski was in the forefront but, for the first time ever during a state visit, representatives of Solidarity were also present. No spectators were allowed near the plane, but en route from the airport to the government guest house in the city centre, where George and Barbara Bush would be staying, thousands of people lined the streets, three or four deep, waving flags and giving the Solidarity ‘V’ for victory symbol. Others leant from the balconies of their apartments, throwing down flowers onto the passing motorcade. The mood, contrary to Bush’s fears, was that of a friendly welcome, not a political demonstration.[63] In fact, this was typical of the whole trip. There were no massed throngs cheering in adulation – nothing like Pope John Paul II in 1979 or Kennedy in Berlin in 1963. The public mood seemed uncertain, characterised by what American journalist Maureen Dowd called a mixture of ‘urgency and tentativeness’ as Poles contemplated a strange future in which the ‘jailors’ and those they had jailed would now have to try to govern together.[64]