The Teabag and the European Order

by Prof. Dr. Andreas Rödder

As the Cold War came to an end, the third post-war order of the 20th century had to be constructed in Europe. This resolved outstanding issues of the second, from 1945: Germany was reunified, the Baltic states regained their sovereignty and the Warsaw Pact countries their political independence, and Poland’s borders were confirmed. Accomplishing this required revisiting the issues underlying the first European post-war order, from the years after 1918, now posed anew: how to stabilise newly founded democracies, develop viable economies, and avoid ethnic and nationalist conflicts. The gravity of these risks revealed itself in the 1990s through the brutality in the Balkans – but was also evident simply by looking back in history. After 1918, East-Central Europe was the space in which the “shatter zones” of unstable statehood came into being that ultimately became the “bloodlands” in which the 20th century’s outbreaks of violence raged at their worst.
To stabilise East-Central Europe, and prevent what took place in the former Yugoslavia or, 20 years later, in Ukraine, was the great challenge and at the same time the real European success story after 1990. To be sure, this effort had a twofold downside: it didn’t apply to Ukraine and Georgia, and it strained the West’s relationship with Russia, which felt itself to be isolated and threatened by the West, according to Putin.
Undoubtedly, mistakes were made towards Russia in the years following 1990 – the NATO-Russia Council, for example, has always been a 27-against-one event. But the problems ran deeper. Fundamentally, the interests of the East-Central European states, specifically security with regard to Russia, conflicted with Russia’s great-power interests. This tension could not be easily bridged. As is sometimes said, a Western promise to Russia that NATO would not expand to the east would have been one means of coming to an accommodation with Russia – but any such promise could have been made only over the heads of the East-Central European states, while ignoring their security needs.
This problem is a prime example of the fact that there are often no clear solutions in history. The same is true with regard to the current refugee and asylum-seeker crisis; the German “culture of welcome” is a great humanitarian accomplishment, and at the same time threatens to create a knock-on effect leading to a much greater problem. There is no simple “right” and “wrong”.
 
This view is often drowned out in the mass media, however. While journalists in many countries are happy if they can simply work freely, the debates in Western countries suffer from a double contraction: first, attention spans are becoming increasingly short, and attention paid to one problem tends to displace consciousness of anther without it being solved – it simply disappears from view. Second, emotional and moralising reporting, in which analysis and commentary are mixed, suggest the existence of “right” and “wrong” with an unambiguity that misses the situation’s fundamental complexity, in which there is no simple “right” and “wrong”.
A free press is no gift from heaven, and must be continually defended anew. At the same time, the free mass media also bear responsibility for the public debate within a democracy. Their task is to offer orientation in the vast network of information, and to act as a filter so that the formation of opinion continues to be based on facts and background information. A fundamental part of this responsibility is an openness to conveying complexity, contradiction, and diverse perspectives instead of presenting a simplistic apparent unambiguity.
 
If any such thing exists, this is the lesson of history: whatever people do creates unforeseen consequences – market liberalisation leads to state liability, attempts to establish equality create new inequalities, and pluralism calls forth a new hunger for wholeness. New problems don’t displace old ones, but are added to and link themselves to them, and the world thus appears ever more complex. Over and over, there are no clear and simple solutions. The intervention in Libya in 2011 left a failed state as a gateway for the Islamic State. But what if the intervention had never taken place? If Qaddafi had perpetrated a massacre against his own people, would we today be speaking of a third great humanitarian failure after Rwanda and Srebrenica that should never have been allowed to happen?
Once again, all these experiences should teach openness to complexity and contradiction instead of an uncritical, self-assured certainty. In 1974, Ralf Dahrendorf said that a good idea pushed to the extreme would produce the opposite of what it should achieve. In other words, an idea always becomes harmful and dangerous if becomes detached from reality. This applies to the major ideologies and fundamentalisms, but also to the European monetary union and the supremacy of the market principle, to gender mainstreaming, the spelling reform and the refugee crisis.
The 20th century shows us that the era of grand projects is over. Neither Keynesianism nor neoliberalism were able to control the forces of the economy. We are unable to govern history. As Vaclav Havel said in the 1990s, we are “alone in the universe”.
But that’s not bad news, because closed systems tend to exclude alternatives and prevent openness – openness as expressed in the lovely Anglo-Indian concept of serendipity. An old Persian fairy tale tells the story of three princes from Serendip who make all kinds of useful discoveries they hadn’t expected on their journey, precisely because they were open to them. It was in this way that Columbus arrived in America, it was in this way that the tea bag was invented, and it was in this way that Fleming discovered penicillin. This openness to unexpected opportunities, but also to unforeseen risks, is far from the worst roadmap for the uncertain journey through the 21st century.