The Unfulfilled Promise of the West

On October 8th, I attended a conference organised by the Canal Foundation and Musealia. Entitled “The Promise of the West. Eastern Europe after the Wall,” the conference was linked to the Berlin Wall exhibition that has been on display in Madrid since November of last year. Mira Milosevich, the senior researcher for Russia, Eurasia, and the Balkans at the Elcano Royal Institute, delivered a lecture. 

“The Wall is one of the symbols of the Cold War, and its fall is a symbol of the promises of the West and the hopes placed in it,” Milosevich said at the beginning of his speech, stressing that it was the Soviet Union, not Germany, that built it. The wall, the most tangible symbol of the “Iron Curtain,” as Winston Churchill first called it, would also be proof of the defeat of the socialist model in the face of liberal democracy, as Milosevich noted: “Walls are built to defend against the outside, so that those outside cannot get in; but this one was built so that those inside could not get out.” At the same time, the Kremlin extended its dominance over the countries behind the Iron Curtain through the Warsaw Pact: “There’s a Russian expression that translates as ‘force to be friends,’” Milosevich said, and that’s what the USSR did with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Two good examples of ‘forcing friendship’ are Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968.

Coincidentally, on the same Tuesday, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko expressed his wish for Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine to return to the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States: “It would be very good if Georgia returned to our family, Moldova resumed its full participation, and the Ukrainian authorities came to their senses, because we will have to participate in the restoration of normal life. I am absolutely certain that this will happen. It is only a question of time.” With Georgia and Moldova having part of their territory occupied by Moscow-protected separatists, and Ukraine suffering a full-scale Russian invasion, the idea of ‘forcing friendship’ seems more relevant than ever.

But to return to the topic of Berlin, Milosevich argued that “The fall of the wall is the result of the failure of communist ideology and socialist states in political, economic, social, etc. terms. The physical collapse is only possible because of the collapse of the ideology.” In the euphoria that followed the fall of the wall, Milosevich points to the creation of the West’s great promises, at a time when Francis Fukuyama’s concept of the “end of history,” of the final victory of the model of liberal democracy, is being discussed. As Milosevich observes, “There are three main objectives. The first is to maintain a world economy that opens the door to development and globalisation; the second is to pacify the Balkans and extend democracy; and the third is to bring China and Russia into the international liberal order.”

For Milosevich, globalisation and stability in the Balkans are two fulfilled promises, but the most important is the concept of ‘democratic enlargement’ which stems from an idea advanced by Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and is summed up in the creation of a world that is safe for democracy. Hence Milosevich believes that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of containment of the Soviet Union, “The West’s great promise to integrate the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the transatlantic institutions of NATO and the European Union was fulfilled.” 

But there is an unfulfilled promise to bring China and Russia—especially Russia, the big loser of the Cold War—into the international liberal order. As Milosevich observed:

Here is the tipping point between good wishes and what your adversary really wants, because Russia has never claimed to want to integrate into liberal institutions. And that unfulfilled promise has brought us to a very dangerous moment. Thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventy-nine years after the end of the Second World War, we have a war in Europe. A war that began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and was limited to the Donbass, but in February 2022 turned into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In this regard, the recent publication of Bob Woodward’s book ‘War’ is relevant, in which the current U.S. president, Joe Biden, criticises the management of former president Barack Obama during the invasion of Crimea in 2014: “Barack never took Putin seriously. We did nothing. We gave Putin a licence to continue.” Inaction never resolves conflict, it exacerbates it, and this is another history lesson we in the West seem determined to forget.

Are we facing a cold war? Milosevich answers this question in the affirmative, seeing the war in Ukraine either as a continuation of the old Cold War or as the first ‘hot’ war of the new Cold War between the United States, which supports Ukraine, and China, which supports Russia.

Regardless of the definition, for Milosevich this war demonstrates two things: 

First, the failure of the end of history and the promise of bringing Russia and China into the fold of the liberal nations. Second, that the relatively peaceful disintegration of the USSR in 1991 merely postponed a more violent disintegration like that of the former Yugoslavia. Ukraine, like Georgia in 2008, shows that the violent disintegration of the USSR was postponed and that, for better or worse, it was partly due to the West’s efforts to deliver on its promise.

It is true that, compared to the violence in Yugoslavia, national and ethnic tensions in what was the Soviet Union were, with some exceptions, resolved in a less traumatic way, and we can think that the West was instrumental in avoiding this process, especially given the danger of a disintegration of a country with a huge atomic arsenal. The postponed disintegration that Milosevich speaks of may come precisely because of the Kremlin’s attempt to rebuild the Soviet empire. 

We are now at a time when autocracies like China, Russia, North Korea or Iran want to build a world safe for autocracies. By invading Ukraine, Russia has activated the balance of power mechanism, and the United States and the European Union have rallied to support Ukraine. But this balance of power is fragile because it is no longer as it was during the Cold War; it is much more like the Great Game of the 19th century. Geopolitics is back, it never really went away. There was no end to history.

Yes, history is not over and the Cold War is back in a much more complicated world. The question is: Can the West regain its strength to bring down the Wall again? For our sake, let’s make it so.