The financial crisis has meant equally imposing obstacles confront us 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, writes JOHN WATERS
ALTHOUGH THE celebrations of the 20th anniversary of its fall have implied something remote and spectacularly diversionary, what we called the “Berlin” Wall might, if you think about it, have crumbled a couple of hundred yards off the east coast of Ireland. Its collapse, in this sense, happened in slow motion, starting that night in November 1989 and culminating in the opening of European borders in 2004.
For us, the influx of former citizens of the Soviet satellites confirmed everything about Ireland had changed for good. This brought a new confidence, enabling us to move beyond what seemed pessimistic comparisons with times past. We could never, after this, go back to the 1980s, and the 1950s were finally confirmed as a cultural ground zero, the dim past in which Ireland was another country.
In his triumphalist 1992 work The End of History And The Last Man, Francis Fukuyama celebrated the final victory of this "directional" concept of history. At the time, his book was blindly embraced as gospel in a world fixated on the idea of two competing bids for the franchise to satisfy human desire. November 1989 had seemed to announce the final victory of the capitalist tender; the rest would be post-history. There was, as Fukuyama's title implies, minimal expectation back then that the 20th birthday of liberation from communism would occur in the unprecedented shadow cast by a structural limitation in the capitalist system no less real for not being built in concrete.
A few sceptics had at the time pointed out that, although Fukuyama was announcing the triumph of the market economy, he was applying a Marxist view of history, in which human progress was assumed to follow a preordained and predictable course.
Twenty years on, although there is a widespread view that his announcement was “premature”, Fukuyama’s model continues to drive our moment-to-moment sense of things. Virtually all commentary on the subject this past week has returned to the question of the passive-aggressive struggle represented by the Cold War, as though the final satisfaction of human desire had indeed hinged on the outcome. Here, the field divided into those who felt the present condition of capitalism is merely an unexpected crater in the road “going forward”, and those who sought to take advantage of the moment to slyly hint that Lenin, Stalin et al might not have been such a bad bunch of bastards after all.
We were invited to smirk sardonically last week at the “irony” of the MTV “wall” that curtailed viewing of the free 20th birthday U2 concert at the Brandenburg Gate. But what was the nature of this irony? It had to do, surely, with the realisation that there is more than one kind of wall, that the market, too, is capable of standing between the human being and the imagined target of his happiness.
There is, of course, a difference between limits on human freedom resulting from economic liquidity and limits enforced by a military sniper; but, for the human being, both have the potential to lead to the same place. The current despair of “post-history” Europe reminds us that insolvency, negative equity and the denial of credit can be as restricting as bricks and barbed wire, and sometimes as fatal as a bullet in the back.
Ireland feels more “free” now than 20 years ago, or at least it did until the summer of last year. There is this unanswerable – perhaps unaskable – question: would we prefer to have back our happy-maidens-at-the-crossroads Ireland, rather than face the price we now must pay for the explosion of the Celtic Tiger boom, among the consequences of which was the attraction here of hundreds of thousands of seekers-of-happiness who, metaphorically or otherwise, clambered over that crumbling wall 20 years ago? Without the lending bubble, we would not have created the beacon of optimism that drew so many of these people here. Now, they and we stare upwards at another kind of wall.
All this surely tells us is that what happens in human society is neither predictable nor ultimately subject to human control. An event, economic or political, is best seen not as a scripted happening in the imagined procession of a preordained history, but an eruption of real life in front of our eyes. Human desire is boundless and indefatigable, and freedom is not something a political or economic system can deliver. Because our desires are infinite, we will always want more. We may knock down walls to follow the insistent demands of our deepest longings, but the answers we seek are not to be discovered in the ideas or the trappings of the rival system on the other side.
The idea of a “directional history”, defined by progress in science, politics and market efficiency, with potential to deliver to all the satisfaction of human desires, is a fiction that is possible only as a result of the post-religious imagination, which has rewritten our understanding of human desire without changing one wrinkle of our own nature.