What used to be called the Western world, the area of the post-war world centred on the NATO alliance, has this week been celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the effective end of what, on the other hand, used to refer to itself as the World Socialist System. For as the wall was breached and people flowed from east to west in November of 1989, the East Germans seemed to be belatedly responding to the dramatic call made by President Ronald Reagan in June 1987 to then Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” – a call subsequently adopted by the West as the symbolic end of the communism in Europe.
Discussion continues to go on, twenty years later, about the real precipitating processes and events that led to the completely unexpected end of the other global system established by Stalin after the Second World War, and which along with the NATO alliance, seemed to be going to determine the structure of world relations as far as the eye could see and the mind imagine. True, even towards the end of the 1980s, with the death of President Brezhnev and his immediate successors, there were growing indications that within the Soviet ruling elite, there were perceptions that the system, in particular the economic system, over which they were presiding was proving unsatisfactory in meeting their own desires and projections for economic growth. And this became more visible as Gorbachev, from a new, younger generation, succeeding as President of the USSR in 1985, tried to introduce new mechanisms both for domestic economic growth and for the state’s functioning in an international relations system that, among other things, had seen in Europe itself, the successful reconstruction of Western Europe as the European Community. Thus Gorbachev’s initiation of the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).
But it was also the case, recognized in the Western world at that time, that the increasingly visible disputes initiated during Mao Zedong’s time in the last years of his life, between China and the USSR, as to the interpretation of world trends, had led to a fissuring of the ostensible unity of the world socialist camp. And then with Mao’s death, and the end of his Cultural Revolution and the advent Deng Xiaoping as head of the Chinese Communist Party, there came his reorientation of Chinese economic and then foreign relations policies in the 1980s. This marked a decisive break with the orthodox communist economic policy of state domination of production, marketing and trade (a version of which Gorbachev was straining towards), and a dramatic opening of China towards the West, and particularly the United States and American capitalist practices. For Deng this break, with its implication of a certain ideological agnosticism, was marked by his now famous phrase, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
It is not often recalled that there was a virtual coinciding of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism shortly afterwards on the one hand, and the equally dramatic reversal of Chinese economic policy. For one thing, the Chinese change in economic policy has led to changes in the policies of its geographical and ideological neighbours – Cambodia and Laos and particularly to the opening of Vietnam, over which the Americans had spilt so much blood, to American and Western investment. And the disintegration of the Soviet system led of course, also to changes of policies in the Asian republics which had been part of the Soviet Union, and then to a reorienting, in turn, of Chinese foreign policies towards those states, and even the opening of those states to the placement of American military facilities.
No wonder then, that President Putin, soon after his assumption of office, described not only the disintegration of the global socialist system, but more particularly the disintegration of the Union (federation) of Soviet Socialist Republics which encompassed the Asian republics as, for his country, the “greatest geostrategic catastrophe.” Putin, of course, had spent a period of his professional life as a senior KGB official in East Germany, and now suddenly found himself experiencing a de facto loss of Russian prestige, and what he obviously perceived as a diminution in the security and geopolitical status of the newly defined (in some respects, the original) Russia. For the United States had contrived the drawing in of many of the former communist states of Europe into NATO, and the threat of membership for Ukraine in NATO, and the placement of American strategic missiles in that country, the birthplace of Nikita Krushchev.
In what, in pre-1989 days used to be variously called the Third World, the Non-Aligned Group, or the countries seeking a New International Economic Order, perhaps the most significant immediate effects of the disintegration of the world socialist system was a sudden and dramatic loss of diplomatic and strategic economic support, and the loss of their ability to leverage such support in their dealings with the West.
Countries like India, premising much of their diplomacy on non-alignment have had to reorient their policies, focusing on recognizing the significance of the end of the Cold War, the virtual end of a Third World as a diplomatic order, and in particular, the changes in Chinese policies both on the economic front, and in terms of the relations of that country towards herself and the Asian subcontinent and wider Asian region. In both countries’ economic policies the change is clear. And it is undoubtedly true to say, again perhaps in retrospect, that Deng Xiaoping was also undoubtedly responding to new trends in what today we call globalization – trends to which in the 1990s, India under the BJP, and then under the Congress Party with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has positively reacted with a similar loosening up of the hand of the state in domestic economic and external trade economic policies.
It goes without saying that from a Caribbean point of view, the most dramatic effects of these changes, commencing with the USSR’s dismemberment and the end of the Warsaw Pact, have occurred in Cuba, a member of Comecom (the socialist countries’ economic integration system), and the Warsaw Pact which had become the main institutional basis of Cuba’s security. The repercussions on the Cuban economy of the ensuing period, described by Fidel Castro as “a special period in a time of peace,” and bringing in its train severe austerity, have been plain to see. Yet on the other hand, it is undoubtedly the case that the strategic pressure of the United States on Cuban security had been relaxed by the end of the global confrontation.
From the point of view of Caricom, the Cold War had not inhibited their full diplomatic recognition of the Cuban state in 1972, an initiative much valued by Cuba in those days of diplomatic isolation not only by the United States, but by many hemispheric countries. But as far our participation in the Non-Aligned Movement is concerned, a reasonable conclusion is that our countries certainly have lost a sphere for positive diplomatic activity, and of diplomatic assurance at required times, as many countries turned to other pursuits in their search for diplomatic and strategic repositioning in the emerging global order. But, on the other hand, it is probably true to say that at that time, it was the emerging recessions in Caricom, and particularly in Jamaica and Guyana, as in many Latin American countries, that influenced a certain lessening of interest in the wider non-aligned world, in favour of concentration on their new economic policies of so-called structural adjustment.
In retrospect again, for Caricom, it is probably an event occurring only a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall that has produced the effects that have preoccupied us most in the following years. This was the opening, in 1986, of the Uruguay Round of negotiations that led to the establishment of the World Trade Organisation, then the end of Commonwealth and European preferentialism as we knew it, and the beginning of the new ‘open economy’ rules of trade and production that now threaten even the new financial services industries which our countries had begun to put much faith in. And even as Cuba and Russia seek to pursue new modes of economic relations, the Cuban preoccupation must now surely be with finding a place in the new structures of production and trade that are influencing the growth of her hemispheric neighbours, particularly those increasingly in a position to cope with, and influence, the new economic circumstances emerging.
