RORY MACLEAN
News Editor

I am too young to have any significant memories of the Berlin Wall falling.

The fateful day in November 1989 when soldiers threw up arms and opened the gates to let a flood of East Germans into West Berlin — foreshadowing the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union — had little effect on my immediate world. What it drastically altered, however, was the world I grew up in.

It has been a blessing to grow up in a time when the debate over which economic system is superior, capitalism or communism, no longer figures so heavily in the relations between countries or commands the deployment of so many nuclear weapons.

This is not to say it represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism, or of the United States. It represents a great movement past ideology and great power politics.

Thanks to the end of the Cold War, people worldwide are no longer forced to believe that they are merely defined by their self-interested or communal natures. And while the United States came out as the immediate victor in the tug-of-war with the Soviet Union, it took not much more than a decade to show that the perceived global dominance of America was nothing more than an illusion. The two poles of global power did not collapse into one, but many points.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Union’s subsequent crumbling, was read in the U.S. as a decisive vote of confidence. It emboldened the budding neo-conservative movement to call for more aggressive shows of global dominance.

They urged America to take advantage of its power and cast the entire world in its image — a new Rome, they said — and with the election of George W. Bush in 2000 the neo-cons found an attentive ear in the White House.

After 9-11 his administration developed the Bush doctrine, essentially codifying as official international policy the neo-conservative’s audacious mixture of realism and ideological fervour. It’s not that I think American-style capitalism and liberal-democracy is unappealing, but it’s tough to sell through the barrel of a gun.

The subsequent unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (still ongoing) have just shown that being the biggest cock in the coup still won’t help you forcefully change another society. By relying only on its hard power the U.S. squandered all the soft power it had accumulated over the years by virtue of the appeal of its liberal-democratic ideas.

This is not as bad as it sounds. American power has waned, China’s has risen, but no country has come to dominate the system. Countries have become interwoven in so many complex ways that brash, unilateral action is simply not strategically viable anymore. It took the last dark decade of American overconfidence to make this abundantly clear and it would never have happened without the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the fall of the Berlin Wall represents the beginning of the end of the agonizing fight between capitalist and communist ideologies.

For these two stalwart economic systems, the story is much the same as that of American power — one seemed dominant at first blush, but in the end, both have proven inadequate. Both command and market economies have flaws, as the current U.S. economic meltdown is proving. At the height of stimulus-mania, Newsweek magazine even declared, “We’re all socialists now.” This represents a great step for American humility.

The issues of power and ideology were so interwoven during the Cold War as to be indistinguishable. Now, embracing socialist policies here and there is not necessarily considered a de facto attack on the institution of American capitalism.

Both systems have flaws, but they both have strengths too, especially when combined.

Socialism helps soften the crude and blunt force of capitalist excess, while the capitalist emphasis on self-interest reduces the risk that commitment to the good of the community will too far overshadow personal freedom.

Thanks to the relaxing of rigid ideological boundaries, the most prominent “communist” country in the world, China, is now communist in name only. They have fully joined the global marketplace. Say what you will about their domestic policies, categorically denouncing the entire system will have little effect. If you want to change someone, make friends. The more interdependent we become, the more soft influence we exert on each other.

The only way we will overcome the challenges of this century is by working together, and this requires leaving ideology behind us. I think it’s a step we’re ready for — we who came of age in this time without barriers, after the Berlin Wall.

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Raisa Pezderic