Two great anniversaries
Forty years ago, two computers were for the first time connected via specially designed electric cables. The connection crashed before the second word was exchanged; nevertheless, the Internet was born.
Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall went down. I remember my delighted feeling - a sense between disbelief and inevitability. The Eastern bloc had been visibly falling apart for months, and though the possibility remained of a violent fit of Soviet repression, the person and career of Gorbachev guaranteed to most of us that the possibility would remain theoretical. When the Wall came down, a number of tyrants - those of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Mongolia, and the two differently tragic cases of Yugoslavia and China - were still in charge; but their destiny now seemed as clear as the fall of a row of dominoes.
One thing that people on the other side of the Atlantic may not remember so clearly is that the end of tyranny in Eastern Europe came as the climax of a process that had not affected the East alone. And for this we must give credit to two American Presidents whom I do not often place together or praise, Carter and Reagan. These men put an end to a bad, decades-old American political tradition of finding their default allies in the third world among the military and the most repressive forces. It was Carter's bad luck that the first tyranny he allowed to go to the wall - and make no mistake, it was a tyranny - was replaced by the even worse tyranny of Khomeini. However, Reagan effectively continued his policy, and the next dictator to come down was replaced by an imperfect but functioning democracy led by that charming lady and courageous democrat, Corazon Aquino, whose passing we mourned recently.
From then on, there was no going back. I do not regard Reagan as anything like the moral hero that conservatives have painted on him, and cannot forgive his cowardly performance in Lebanon in 1983; but he was a sincere believer in democracy, democracy as a universal norm, and that was enough. All of a sudden, the notion that Latin America had no choice but between some sort of military tyranny and some sort of Castro-style tyranny was out of fashion, and one by one the epauletted tyrants went into retirement, into exile, and sometimes into jail. Even where American influence was not basic, things changed; this was the time when the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico relaxed its control over the state - after sixty years of barely disguised one-party dictatorship - and real multi-party democracy, permanent and without revolutions or civil wars, came to Mexico. Similar developments took place in Taiwan and South Korea.
So the final collapse of that enormous, lowering, threatening mass of grim-faced tyrannies that had cut across our very homes and lands, inflicting an artificial border that separated Prague from Vienna and Budapest from Trieste - and that is as artificial and painful a division as that of Berlin itself, a crime against nature - was only the climax of a process that had been going on across the continents for more than a decade. The climax, and the termination; apart from the flawed and unhappy end of the Soviet Union itself, there would be no more real advances of liberty. The tyrants of Beijing and the various monsters and oddities who imposed their will on the Muslim world would remain in place, or on occasion be replaced by worse ones.
But the enormity of what has happened must never be underrated. Within a lifetime, the very rule of life for the majority of mankind has changed. Democracy, still a new thing and unsteady on its feet even where it held sway, had started going backwards in 1918; by 1940, it was barely holding on in one island in Europe; and in the North American continent, the greatest democratic power surviving had already got into the bad habit of finding its allies in Latin America among uniformed goons and enemies of liberty. All those who believed in the significance of trends and the Spirit of the Time were more or less convinced that democracy was outmoded and condemned to go down before what were then defined as more efficient and dynamic forms of government. That was true even of the enemies of tyranny; George Orwell, in particular, was certain that the future was in the shape of a boot stamping on a human face, for ever.
Within a man's lifetime, no, not even so much, democracy not only triumphed over all its enemies, it became recognized as the default mode of government of any civilized country. It is now the tyrannies that are seen as the exception, in spite of their power and influence (and indeed, in order to survive at all in such a climate, a tyranny has to have power and influence). And all this had the effect of a wonderfully calming and healthy opening, of clean air coming through. I remember the days when the Wall went down, as the final stage of something I had been watching with delight and passionate belief for a whole decade. This was the beginning of my second and final year at SOAS; my own life was unravelling. But the world was not. And as I watched the unbelievable images streaming over the TV, thinking of Europe united, free and unthreatened at last, I remembered Kipling's verses:
What chariots, what horses
Against us shall bide
When the stars in their courses
Do fight on our side?
Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall went down. I remember my delighted feeling - a sense between disbelief and inevitability. The Eastern bloc had been visibly falling apart for months, and though the possibility remained of a violent fit of Soviet repression, the person and career of Gorbachev guaranteed to most of us that the possibility would remain theoretical. When the Wall came down, a number of tyrants - those of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Mongolia, and the two differently tragic cases of Yugoslavia and China - were still in charge; but their destiny now seemed as clear as the fall of a row of dominoes.
One thing that people on the other side of the Atlantic may not remember so clearly is that the end of tyranny in Eastern Europe came as the climax of a process that had not affected the East alone. And for this we must give credit to two American Presidents whom I do not often place together or praise, Carter and Reagan. These men put an end to a bad, decades-old American political tradition of finding their default allies in the third world among the military and the most repressive forces. It was Carter's bad luck that the first tyranny he allowed to go to the wall - and make no mistake, it was a tyranny - was replaced by the even worse tyranny of Khomeini. However, Reagan effectively continued his policy, and the next dictator to come down was replaced by an imperfect but functioning democracy led by that charming lady and courageous democrat, Corazon Aquino, whose passing we mourned recently.
From then on, there was no going back. I do not regard Reagan as anything like the moral hero that conservatives have painted on him, and cannot forgive his cowardly performance in Lebanon in 1983; but he was a sincere believer in democracy, democracy as a universal norm, and that was enough. All of a sudden, the notion that Latin America had no choice but between some sort of military tyranny and some sort of Castro-style tyranny was out of fashion, and one by one the epauletted tyrants went into retirement, into exile, and sometimes into jail. Even where American influence was not basic, things changed; this was the time when the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico relaxed its control over the state - after sixty years of barely disguised one-party dictatorship - and real multi-party democracy, permanent and without revolutions or civil wars, came to Mexico. Similar developments took place in Taiwan and South Korea.
So the final collapse of that enormous, lowering, threatening mass of grim-faced tyrannies that had cut across our very homes and lands, inflicting an artificial border that separated Prague from Vienna and Budapest from Trieste - and that is as artificial and painful a division as that of Berlin itself, a crime against nature - was only the climax of a process that had been going on across the continents for more than a decade. The climax, and the termination; apart from the flawed and unhappy end of the Soviet Union itself, there would be no more real advances of liberty. The tyrants of Beijing and the various monsters and oddities who imposed their will on the Muslim world would remain in place, or on occasion be replaced by worse ones.
But the enormity of what has happened must never be underrated. Within a lifetime, the very rule of life for the majority of mankind has changed. Democracy, still a new thing and unsteady on its feet even where it held sway, had started going backwards in 1918; by 1940, it was barely holding on in one island in Europe; and in the North American continent, the greatest democratic power surviving had already got into the bad habit of finding its allies in Latin America among uniformed goons and enemies of liberty. All those who believed in the significance of trends and the Spirit of the Time were more or less convinced that democracy was outmoded and condemned to go down before what were then defined as more efficient and dynamic forms of government. That was true even of the enemies of tyranny; George Orwell, in particular, was certain that the future was in the shape of a boot stamping on a human face, for ever.
Within a man's lifetime, no, not even so much, democracy not only triumphed over all its enemies, it became recognized as the default mode of government of any civilized country. It is now the tyrannies that are seen as the exception, in spite of their power and influence (and indeed, in order to survive at all in such a climate, a tyranny has to have power and influence). And all this had the effect of a wonderfully calming and healthy opening, of clean air coming through. I remember the days when the Wall went down, as the final stage of something I had been watching with delight and passionate belief for a whole decade. This was the beginning of my second and final year at SOAS; my own life was unravelling. But the world was not. And as I watched the unbelievable images streaming over the TV, thinking of Europe united, free and unthreatened at last, I remembered Kipling's verses:
What chariots, what horses
Against us shall bide
When the stars in their courses
Do fight on our side?