(photo by abhijeet.rane/flickr) by Federico Guerrieri When Mikhail Gorbachev was nominated General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, he introduced democratisation as a key element of his radical reform programme, opening up new doors in international relations

 

Twenty years ago, the 9th of November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. One year later, Germany was reunited and the Cold War was officially over. Western countries started to accept the former enemy (USSR) in what Gorbachev saw as a community “united by the common heritage of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the great philosophical and social teachings of the 19th and 20th centuries ”. With the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, the United States remained the only superpower and the world hoped for a long period of peace under the American guide and their economic, social and ideological model - capitalism. These words of Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay “The end of history”, exemplified the atmosphere of those days: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” which would lead to “accumulation without end”. The end of the Cold War was seen by Fukuyama as a “peace dividend”: the US, being the only superpower, would no longer have to waste billions of dollars on arms spending. Fukuyama also argued that China and Russia have infected the spread of liberalism (which in his view means democracy). It appears clear to me that democracy is and has been threatened not only by these two countries, but also by the hegemonic superpower, the United States. Chomsky’s words are clearer than mine to explain the situation: “their terror against us and our clients is the ultimate evils, while our terror against them does not exist, or if it does, it is extremely appropriate”. As we have seen during the past twenty years, Fukuyama (as usual) was completely wrong, in fact the US have incremented their costs on arm spending, and have also used their predominant position to impose their view of the world to weaker states. In a contribution to the Guardian, Mikhail Gorbachev has recently underlined that, for many millions of people around the globe, the world has not become a safer place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appeared like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating large numbers of victims. Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and irresponsibility of the new generation of politicians is the fact that defence spending by numerous countries, large and small alike, is now greater than during the cold war. Alas, over the last few decades, the world has not become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and the poor either remained or increased, not only between the north and the developing south but also within developed countries themselves. The social problems in Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof that simply abandoning the flawed model of a centralised economy and bureaucratic planning is not enough, and guarantees neither a country's global competitiveness nor respect for the principles of social justice or a dignified standard of living for the population. Today's global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of the present model of western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible; it also revealed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform, their own kind of perestroika. European Alternatives believes that Europe should play a more important role in world politics. If the European Union will start to act as a unified entity and will have the capacity to build a pacific and profitable relationship with its neighbours, it would be able to promote collective security and to renew the importance of international institutions. But the European Union can assume an important role in the world affairs only if the single member states will accept a reduction to their sovereignty and the Union will be able to propose a truly unified foreign policy.