Klaus, Walesa recall Berlin Wall's fall
Klaus, Walesa recall Berlin Wall’s fall
NOVEMBER 9, 2014 BY
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – “After a few vodkas, a secretary realized that the system must change,” says former Polish labour leader and President Lech Walesa, referring to the Soviet Union’s Communist party leader, Michael Gorbatchev, in 1989.
Walesa, and political contemporary Vaclav Klaus, former Czech president and prime minister, Friday 7 November shared memories of events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.
The two men, who played critical roles in the transition from communist authoritarianism to liberal market democracy in their countries, addressed a symposium organized by the Global Studies Institute at the University of Geneva.
Fatalism as the reason for the events that unfolded in the autumn of 1989 was one of the few points on which the two men agreed.
The two former leaders disagreed over Russia today. Walesa lamented the “brutal force” that Moscow has used in Ukraine, and said the West needs to “help Russia take another path”. Klaus feels “Russia behaves rationally”, and that it should be “respected”.
Klaus regrets that now, just as before communism’s fall, the West did not understand what was happening in Eastern Europe. Before 1989, he said, “our oppression was underestimated and misunderstood.”
Berlin and the end of communism
“The communist regime, in many respects, was already an empty shell,” Klaus told the group. “It had passed away. It was not defeated.”
Walesa, a Nobel peace laureate, was responsible for organizing Polish shipbuilders into an independent trade union. He attributes the fall of communism to the pope’s visit to Poland and a sequence of Soviet leaders who “destabilized” the system. “The Soviets were observing this. There was even an attempt to kill the pope, but they didn’t know that he was immortal.”
For Klaus”There was expectation in the West that the end of communism would create chaos, but that didn’t happen.” In Czechoslovakia, “the rapid post-communism transition that we experienced was a success.”
The Velvet Revolution that took place in Prague announced the end of communism, “We proclaimed early that we wanted capitalism, and rejected dreams of third ways.” He said that unlike under British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms, “where three to four firms needed to be privatized every year, in Czechoslovakia, we needed to privatize three to four firms per hour”, as no private enterprise had previously existed. “Fast privatization was essential.”
Klaus emphasized the importance of liberal reforms, which he says were replaced with anti-market measures after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Walesa argued that a “system of values, based on Christian values, should be the basis for building the society.”
The former Polish Solidarity union leader believes that a “super-structure”, such as the European Union, “may be right for certain things”, to avoid divisions within societies becoming too acute. Klaus complained that the Czech entry into the European Union has led to “a more subsidized and harmonized economy now than 10 years ago. The visible hand of the state is more dangerous than the invisible hand of the market.”
