Opinion: How history's first draft got it wrong

The fall of communism in eastern Europe was not, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, "the end of history."

Michael GoldfarbNovember 11, 2009 12:34Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

(Photos by Reuters; Illustration by Street Attack)

LONDON, U.K. — Please pay attention. I'm going to say this name only twice, once at the start of the piece and once at the end, but the name is enough to suggest the theme.

Francis Fukuyama.

Need I say more? Intentionally or not, by penning an essay called "The End of History" the year the Berlin Wall fell, this American academic defined the western view of the event. The original essay had a question mark at the end of its title, then it grew into a book and the question mark disappeared and an extra phrase was tacked on: "The End of History and the Last Man."

All because the wall came down, then the Soviet Union collapsed.

Great events inspire hubris of a grand order in academic historians and lay workers like us hacks who write history's rough draft. To look back at the writing and reporting in the first weeks after the Berlin Wall was breached is to be amazed at how the daily political concerns of the time produced grand theorizing.

An item from the Financial Times in 1989 reminds us that behind the glowering anti-communism of Margaret Thatcher lurked an old-fashioned imperialist. The FT carries an item quoting Thatcher as saying the peoples of eastern Europe needed to wait "10 or 15 years" before any maps were redrawn — as if it were for Britain to say how the little peoples of Europe should determine their future. Hard to imagine that having rhetorically struggled to free them from the Stalinist yoke, the Lady wanted to turn Poland and Czechoslovakia into the equivalent of displaced persons camps, but there you have it. Who knew what the collapse of communism in Germany meant?

Other political leaders had no idea either. U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev flew to Malta for a summit of equals just after the wall came down. Gorbachev would be gone in a year and Bush would be preparing for war with former American client Saddam Hussein. Believe me, neither man read those runes in the delirium in Berlin.

Their concern was managing Germany as if it was 1933. They were no different than the ordinary people of central Europe who were living the dream. Many of them were looking backward, as well. A reunited Germany was their central fear. History was not a linear process reaching its natural, evolutionary end. It was a loop and now people feared it was heading back in the direction from which it came. Poles were wary of Germans uniting and renewing their old expansionism. Turks in West Germany were wary of mass deportation as East Germans took their jobs.

At least one aspect of the mechanics of state terror remained in place. Reuters reported that 10,000 attack dogs were still kenneled in East Germany. They had been trained to kill people trying to escape and no one was sure what would happen with them.