Russia, the big loser of 1989, remains two decades later mired in a mix of social and economic depression and political regression and illusion. Life expectancy continues to decline; investment in infrastructure, research, and education are stunted; the economy is barely able to compete internationally; and the social divide between poor and rich is deepening.
Economically, Russia has turned into a commodity exporter, dependent on the imponderables of the global energy market, while simultaneously dreaming that it can use energy as a tool to revise the post-Soviet order in its neighborhood.
Russia’s elites still largely think in the power categories of the 19th and 20th centuries. This constitutes the illusionary and historically regressive element of current Russian policy. Russia’s desire to reclaim its role as a powerful global player is understandable and legitimate. If it turns toward the past in looking for its future, however, and if it believes it can dispense with investments in the future in favor of shameless personal self-enrichment, it will continue to lose ground.
Nov. 9, 1989, marked not only the end of the Cold War era, but also the beginning of a new wave of globalization. The real winners of this new world order are the large emerging countries, first and foremost China and India, which increasingly set the pace of global economic and political development.
The G8 has been dismissed by history as a club of Western industrial nations; its place has been taken by the G20, which conceals the underlying formula of power distribution within the new world order: the G2 (China and the US). All these changes reflect a dramatic transfer of power from West to East, from Europe and the US to Asia, which within the next two decades is likely to bring to an end 400 years of Eurocentrism.
The past two decades also have seen the world begin to reach its ecological limits. The majority of humanity has sought since Nov. 9, 1989, to achieve Western living standards at all costs, over-stretching our planet’s climate and ecosystems.
The years since the Berlin Wall came down have been rich in dramatic change, but the real era of upheaval lies ahead. Global warming is only the tip of the iceberg toward which we are moving, knowingly, with eyes wide open. What matters now is that states act globally and in unison. Twenty years after Berlin, Copenhagen is calling.
Joschka Fischer, a leading member of Germany’s Green Party for almost 20 years, was German foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 until 2005.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE/INSTITUTE OF HUMAN SCIENCES
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