STEVE SCALISE, the House Minority Whip, brought a visual aid to the House floor in the run-up to a vote formalising the impeachment inquiry. It depicted the Red Square’s onion domes, and blasted the Democrats’ “37 Days of Soviet-Style Impeachment Proceedings”. Though the Soviet Union lacked a constitutional mechanism whereby freely elected legislators could censure and remove the country’s executive, following months of open hearings and a public trial, Mr Scalise’s point was that the impeachment process—which has so-far operated behind closed doors—is some kind of show trial.
That is one of two main defences of President Donald Trump offered by congressional Republicans. The other is that there was no quid pro quo in withholding military aid to Ukraine, as Mr Trump himself has repeatedly asserted. This implies that asking for foreign help in an American election is perfectly fine; the impeachable conduct would be demanding something in return. Both these lines are starting to fray.
The first was always rather weak. Just as a criminal trial involves a grand jury gathering information to determine whether to indict, an impeachment inquiry involves the House doing the same. Closed-door hearings have long been a feature of congressional oversight. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, has given Republicans the full House vote that they long demanded. And next week open hearings begin.
The second defence has grown difficult to sustain as witness after witness has testified, under oath, that there was in fact a quid pro quo. Gordon Sondland, America’s ambassador to the EU, is the newest member of this chorus line. Mr Sondland had previously testified that he never talked to Ukrainian officials about opening an investigation, that he never thought there was any precondition attached to the military aid, and that he “didn’t know why” it was delayed.
In a revision released on November 5th, Mr Sondland wrote that testimony from William Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, until recently the National Security Council’s top adviser on Russia and Europe, had “refreshed my recollection”. Mr Sondland said he now recalls a conversation with Andriy Yermak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, “where I said that resumption of US aid [to Ukraine] would likely not occur until” Mr Zelensky made the “public anti-corruption statement” demanded by Mr Trump. He said he had “no reason to question the substance” of Mr Morrison’s recollection that aid “might be conditioned on a public statement reopening” an investigation into the firm that employed Joe Biden’s son.
Mr Trump’s defenders have consequently shifted, arguing that foreign policy routinely involves quid pro quos, and that even if Mr Trump engaged in one, it is not impeachable conduct. “Get over it,” as Mr Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters in October. That appears to be the argument that Republicans are carrying into the next, public phase of the impeachment process. Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee and therefore could play an important role in the trial of the president in the Senate, offered another approach—less a defence than a shrug. “I’ve written the whole process off,” he told CBS, a news network. “I think this is a bunch of BS.”
Germans still don’t agree on what reunification meant
Discontent may even be growing
On november 9th 1989, as the Berlin Wall tumbled, Hans-Joachim Binder was on night shift at the potash mine in Bischofferode, a village in the communist-ruled German Democratic Republic. Mr Binder, a maintenance worker who had toiled in the mine for 17 years, had no idea of the momentous events unfolding 240km (150 miles) to the east. The first sign something was up was when most of his colleagues disappeared to investigate what was happening at the border with West Germany, just ten minutes’ drive away. Only three returned to complete their shift.
Less than a year later Germany was reunited, capping one of the most extraordinary stories in modern history. Not only had a communist dictatorship collapsed, releasing 16m people from the fear of the Stasi (secret police) and the stultification of censorship. Unlike any other country ever freed from tyranny, the entire population of East Germany was given citizenship of a big, rich democracy. As a grand, if ill-fated, gesture of welcome the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, converted some of their worthless savings into hard currency at the preposterously generous exchange rate of one Deutschmark to one Ostmark.
More than 1m Ossies took advantage of their new freedom by moving to the West, where most thrived. Official statistics no longer counted this group—who were disproportionally young, clever, female and ambitious—as East Germans. For those who stayed behind, however, the 30 years since the fall of the Wall have been a mix of impressive progress, often taken for granted, and sour disappointment.
A price to pay
The harm wrought by four decades of oppression and indoctrination could not be undone overnight. But a people brought up in a society where initiative was ruthlessly crushed had to adapt suddenly to the rigours of capitalism. Unsurprisingly, many could not. Mr Binder was laid off. So were hundreds of thousands of others who previously toiled in safe, dreary and unproductive state-backed jobs. Despite attempts to save it, including large protests and a hunger strike, the potash mine was shut down—one of 8,500 companies in the east privatised or liquidated by the Treuhand, a new government agency. Mr Binder bounced around in odd jobs for a while, eventually winding up on Hartz IV, the stingiest of Germany’s unemployment benefits, where he languishes today. Like many East German women, his wife retrained and left for a job in the west. Asked how he feels about the reunification of his country, he shrugs. “My safe job was gone. For me, the gdr could have carried on.”
There was no manual to guide the absorption of east into west. The policies that failed people like Mr Binder were always going to be subject to fierce dispute. The surprise, as Germany approaches the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, is the speed with which these debates have roared back into the public sphere. Newspapers and magazines are full of reassessments of the Wiedervereinigung (reunification); westerners are lapping up memoirs and polemics by eastern authors. Never before has Germany debated its reunification with such vigour. Why?
Many observers say the debate grew louder three or four years ago. The most obvious explanation is therefore the migrant crisis of 2015-16. Petra Köpping, the integration minister in Saxony, one of the five eastern states established at reunification, says that when she tried to explain to her constituents why the state was helping refugees, some replied: “Integrate us first!” Many easterners resented the resources being devoted to help newcomers when they felt left behind. They also disliked the labelling of their complaints as racist.
But the refugee crisis merely triggered a deeper shift, says Christian Hirte, the government’s special commissioner for east Germany. One idea, floated by Angela Merkel, who as chancellor is east Germany’s best-known export, is that the east is undergoing something comparable to the experience of West Germany in 1968, when children forced their parents to account for their activities in the Nazi period. Now, the argument runs, young east Germans seek explanations for what happened to their parents in the early years of reunification. “The long-term wounds were concealed because people were absorbed finding a place in the new society,” says Steffen Mau of Humboldt University in Berlin. “Perhaps you need 25 years to realise this.”
This summer Marie-Sophie Schiller, a young Leipziger who hosts a podcast called “East—A Guide”, had an “emotional” talk with her parents about their experiences after 1990. She was astonished to learn about their daily hardships and humiliations. Stefan Meyer, an activist who grew up in East Berlin, remembers watching his parents’ confidence ebb as they struggled to find their feet in the new country.
After 1990 “the whole software of life changed” for east Germans, says Markus Kerber, a bigwig at the interior ministry. Short-term pain was inevitable. Average labour productivity in the east was 30% of that in the west. Kohl’s decision to exchange Ostmarks at a 1:1 rate for Deutschmarks made swathes of firms uncompetitive overnight. Those that survived struggled with the western rules they had to import wholesale. By one estimate, 80% of east Germans at some point found themselves out of work.
Perhaps the Treuhand could have proceeded more gently, some argue today. Maybe the unified country should have developed a new constitution rather than simply extending the western one eastwards. The west might have learned from the more enlightened aspects of life in the gdr, such as free child care and encouraging women to work outside the home. Radical parties on left and right take such arguments to a ludicrous extreme, arguing that reunification was the “colonisation” of a bewildered people by an exploitative west.
Understanding required
Such views tap into a feeling among many easterners that they have struggled to take back control of their own destiny. Ms Köpping says east Germans hold barely 4% of elite jobs in the east. Many rent flats from westerners, who own much of the eastern housing stock. “Sometimes east Germans feel that they’re ruled by others, not themselves,” says Klara Geywitz, a Brandenburger running to lead Germany’s Social Democrats. Nor have east Germans stormed the national citadels of power. Almost 14 years after she took office Mrs Merkel—and Joachim Gauck, president from 2012-17—remain exceptions rather than a vanguard. Rarely one to dwell on her origins, Mrs Merkel has lately begun to reflect publicly on the mixed legacy of reunification. “We must all…learn to understand why for many people in east German states, German unity is not solely a positive experience,” she said on October 3rd.
One obstacle to such understanding is that Germans view reunification differently. Half of west Germans consider the east a success. Two-thirds of east Germans disagree. Many westerners were oblivious to the upheaval their new compatriots endured. “On October 4th 1990 [the day after reunification], after a night of partying I carried on my life as normal,” says Mr Kerber. “Not a single east German had the same experience.” In places western stereotypes of easterners have persisted, the Jammerossi (“complaining easterner”), ungrateful for the largesse showered on the east after unification, or Dunkeldeutschland (“dark Germany”), a cold-war term implying backwardness. More recent is the notion of the east as a cradle of neo-Nazism, bolstered by the strength there of the far-right Alternative for Germany (afd). Portrayals of the east in Germany’s national (for which read western) media have often read like dispatches from an exotic, troubled land, where the far right are always marching in the streets or thumping immigrants.
Such accounts risk ignoring the huge strides made by east Germany since reunification. Citizens were liberated from the humiliations of life in a surveillance state. They were allowed to choose their leaders, express their opinions and travel, to west Germany and beyond. Economically, despite the hardships of the early years, the east soon began to converge with the west, and life improved drastically across a range of measures. Today some east German regions have lower unemployment rates than western post-industrial regions like the Saarland or the Ruhr valley. West-east transfers of close to €2trn ($2.2trn) have reduced the infrastructure gap. (Today they run at around €30bn a year, mainly in the form of social-security payments.) Wages in the east now stand at around 85% of the level in the west, and the cost of living is lower. The life-expectancy gap has closed, the air is cleaner, the buildings smarter. According to Allensbach, a pollster, 53% of east Germans are content with their personal economic situation, the same figure as in the west. “It all worked surprisingly well, but this story doesn’t fly in the east,” says Werner Jann of the University of Potsdam.
One of the best
Last year Andrea Boltho, Wendy Carlin and Pasquale Scaramozzino, three economists, contrasted east Germany’s post-reunification performance favourably with the Mezzogiorno in Italy, where gdp per person remains little over half that of the north. Perhaps the most apt comparison is with other parts of Europe that shook off communism. East Germany’s per capita growth has outstripped most other eastern European countries (see chart), despite starting from a higher base. As Richard Schröder, a former East German dissident, notes, the application of western laws and practices saw off the threat of oligarchic corruption that has plagued many of Germany’s eastern neighbours.
Yet if east Germans do not always appreciate their good fortune, it is because their reference points have been Hamburg and Munich, not Bratislava or Budapest. Implicit in the promise of reunification was a pledge that east Germans could finally enjoy what they had so long envied in the west. For years they were forced to witness a lifestyle that remained out of reach, in the packets of coffee and sweets sent by relatives in the west, the western goods on display in Intershop outlets accessible only to those with hard currency, or the commercials on western television beamed across the border. In 1990 Chancellor Kohl promised east Germans “blooming landscapes”. Instead they got deindustrialisation and mass unemployment. “In 1990 300,000 people came to shout ‘Helmut!’ on Augustusplatz [in Leipzig],” recalls Kurt-Ulrich Mayer, who helped establish Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (cdu) in Saxony. “Four years later he came back, and we needed umbrellas to protect him from all the eggs and tomatoes.” Unlike Poles or Hungarians, east Germans had someone else to blame when things went wrong.
The convergence between west and east eventually ground to a halt. Today just 7% of Germany’s most-valued 500 companies (and none listed in the dax30 index) are headquartered in the east. This starves municipalities of tax revenue and contributes to the east-west productivity gap, which has stood at around 20% for 20 years. Most assets liquidated by the Treuhand fell into western or foreign hands, hindering the development of an eastern capitalist class.
For many, the best way to get western lifestyles was to move west. Over one-quarter of east Germans aged 18-30 did so, two-thirds of them women. Rural parts of the east were especially affected. As towns and villages emptied and tax revenues slumped, schools were closed, shops shuttered and housing blocks demolished. The mass emigration of youngsters led to a plummeting number of births. Since 2017 net east-west migration has been roughly zero, but there has been no growth in the number of people moving east; the westward exodus has simply fallen to match it.
The east is also much older than the west. Since 1990 the number of over-60s there has increased by 1.3m even as the overall population has fallen by 2.2m. iwh, a research outfit in Halle, thinks the working-age population in the east will fall by more than a third by 2060. By 2035, 23 of Germany’s 401 Kreise (administrative districts) will have shrunk by at least a fifth, says Susanne Dähner at the Berlin Institute for Population and Development; all of them are in the east. In some districts, there will be four funerals for every birth. Instead of losing people to the west, eastern Germany will lose them to the grave.
The constitutional pledge of “equivalent living conditions” across Germany thus looks unattainable. The government tries to help so-called “structurally weak” regions, in the east as well as the west. But although investment in infrastructure or technical universities may help some towns, it cannot stop the demographic decline in many east German regions.
Coming to terms
The picture is much brighter in some eastern cities. Potsdam, Jena and Dresden have clusters of industry and tourism as well as cheap housing; some, like Leipzig (“Hypezig”, to irritated locals), have been booming for years. The “bacon belt” around Berlin benefits from the success of the capital, especially as older workers move out to the suburbs. Yet even as overall emigration to the west dries up, eastern cities are sucking educated people away from already struggling small towns and villages. That trend may continue, as only half of east German workers work in cities, compared with three-quarters in the west.
The changes in the east have social, cultural and political consequences which are now coming to the fore. Last February thousands of Dynamo Dresden supporters at an away game in Hamburg began an unfamiliar chant: “Ost [east], Ost, Ostdeutschland!” A video of the episode went viral, sparking a lively debate: were the fans expressing a dubious “eastern” variant of militant German nationalism? Or was this a cheerful reappropriation of an identity that for so long was taken to connote stupidity and closed-mindedness?
“Identity is key to understanding east Germany,” says Franziska Schubert, a thoughtful Green who represents Görlitz in Saxony’s state parliament. Fully 47% of east Germans say they identify as easterners before Germans, a far higher proportion than at the euphoric moment of reunification. (The equivalent is true for 22% of westerners.) Regional identity is hardly abnormal in Germany—ask the Bavarians—but in the east it can seem grounded in politics as much as culture or tradition.
When Jana Hensel, a writer, recently gave a talk to a school in her home town of Leipzig, she was astonished to find herself spending half an hour fielding questions from teenagers about an Ossiquote (a proposal to give east Germans preference in public jobs). “More than 25 years after the end of the gdr, students have become east German again,” she says. “If we’re not careful, we’ll lose another generation.”
The afd has exploited the power of eastern particularism. Under slogans like “The east rises up!” the party has scored 20%-plus in eastern state elections, most recently in Thuringia on October 27th. There, and in recent elections in Brandenburg and Saxony, it was only voters over 60 whose support for the established parties ensured that the afd did not come first. In Saxony and Thuringia the afd was the most popular party among under-30s. This is worrying in a part of the country where extremism has found fertile ground. More than half of Germany’s hate crimes take place in the east, though it has just 20% of the population and few immigrants.
But eastern identity is not the exclusive preserve of extremes. Many young easterners simply developed an “Ossi” identity after encountering ignorance or scorn in the west. Nor need it be only negative. Matthias Platzeck, a former Brandenburg premier now in charge of a commission for the 30th anniversary of reunification, says that the recent election in his state was the worst-tempered ever. Nonetheless, he hopes for the emergence in the east of healthy self-confidence, built on the back of success stories—and a new focus on the many problems that span east and west. His commission’s informal motto, he says, is “as little state celebration as necessary, as much discussion as possible.” And since the Berlin Wall has gone, no amount of debate will land anyone in jail. ■
Pictures by Stefan Koppelkamm from his book, “Ortszeit / Local Time”
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Germans still don’t agree on what reunification meant"
FOR ANYONE trying to follow protest movements around the world it is hard to keep up. Large anti-government demonstrations, some peaceful and some not, have taken place in recent weeks in countries on every continent: Algeria, Bolivia, Britain, Catalonia, Chile, Ecuador, France, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more. On November 1st Pakistan joined the ever-lengthening roll as tens of thousands of protesters converged on the capital, Islamabad, to demand that the prime minister, Imran Khan, stand down within 48 hours.
Probably not since the wave of “people power” movements swept Asian and east European countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s has the world experienced such a simultaneous outpouring of popular anger on the streets. Before that, only the global unrest of the late 1960s bears comparison in terms of the number of countries swept up and the number of people mobilised.
Even at the time, however, those two waves of global unrest seemed more joined-up than the present spate of apparently unconnected and spontaneous movements. Protesters in many different countries had similar grievances and aims. This time, some themes inevitably crop up in country after country. Pakistan in fact illustrates three of them: economic discontent (rising inflation and austerity imposed in cahoots with the IMF); perceived official corruption; and allegations of electoral fraud (in the vote last year which installed Mr Khan’s government).
But this seems more coincidence than coherence. The initial causes of the protests could hardly be more varied: in Lebanon a tax on phone calls via services such as WhatsApp; in Hong Kong proposed legislation allowing the extradition of criminal suspects to China; in Catalonia long prison sentences for advocates of independence; in Britain, demands for a second Brexit referendum. Far from representing a global movement coalescing around common demands, the protesters’ shared slogan, if they had one, would be borrowed from Marlon Brando’s character in the banned 1953 film “The Wild One”. Asked what he is rebelling against, he answers: “What’ve you got?”
The difficulty in discerning a pattern has of course not stopped pundits from trying. Broadly speaking the explanations fall into three categories: the economic, the demographic and the conspiratorial.
Economic explanations make much of the way in which seemingly minor knocks to living standards (a 4% rise in metro fares in Chile, for example) have proved the final straw to people struggling to get by in increasingly unequal societies. For the left, this is just the latest paroxysm of a dysfunctional and doomed capitalism. As Red Flag, an Australian socialist journal, sees it: “For more than four decades, country after country has been ravaged by neoliberal policies designed to make the mass of workers and the poor pay for what is a growing crisis in the system.”
Even fans of free markets see widening inequality in a number of countries as a cause of the concerted disgruntlement. Chile, they point out, long seen as a haven of stability in Latin America, yet so turbulent now it has had to cancel two international summits due to be held in Santiago, is on some measures the most unequal country in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries.
The demographic explanation notes that protest is, by and large, an activity of the young, and humanity is still relatively youthful, with a median age of just under 30, and a third of people aged under 20. The generation reaching what might be seen as the peak-protesting years of the late teens and early 20s have come of age since the global financial crisis of 2007-08. In demographic terms, this might be seen as the reckoning for the great recession that resulted from it. In the Times of London, Niall Ferguson, a historian, takes this argument one stage further, drawing a parallel with the 1960s, and pointing out that in both periods there was an “excess of educated young people”, because of a boom in tertiary education, producing more graduates than there are jobs for.
As for conspiracies, governments of course like to suggest that protests are whipped up and manipulated by sinister outside forces. On Hong Kong, the Chinese foreign ministry suggested in July that the protests were “somehow the work of the US”. In Latin America, theories have spread that the socialist regimes of Cuba and Venezuela were fomenting unrest across the continent to distract attention from their own troubles.
Economic and demographic factors and even outside meddling may have played a role in some of the protests. But as unifying theories, none really stands up. The world economy faces many troubles, but they do not approach the seriousness of those faced a decade ago when the world was on the brink of depression and unemployment soared, yet far fewer people were taking to the streets. Protests tend to be dominated by the young. But a striking feature of many demonstrations—from “Bremain” marches in London to anti-China protests in Hong Kong—is how many of the middle-aged and elderly have turned out as well. And as for the foreign meddling—nobody, except perhaps those camped in the wildest fringes of the internet, really believes some global mastermind is pulling strings all over the world.
So perhaps the search for a unifying theory is pointless. After all, when you look more closely at the earlier waves, the impression of coherence seems illusory. They too were more variegated than is often assumed. The global upheavals of the late 1960s ranged from Red Guards in China, pursuing a millennial cult concocted by Mao Zedong to help him win an intra-party power struggle, to affluent Western youths who had stumbled on the joys of long hair, psychedelic drugs and sexual promiscuity. In between were protesters against the Vietnam war, the Soviet domination of eastern Europe and the tedious insistence on attending lectures at universities. Even the people-power revolutions of 20 years later were as marked by their differences as their similarities. Right-wing strongmen such as the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos or South Korea’s Chun Doo-hwan were a far cry from east European thugs such as Nicolae Ceaușescu and Wojciech Jaruzelski.
Perhaps the answer is to go back to first principles and ask: what makes people take their grievances to the streets? Two reasons are rarely mentioned: that, for all its legal and physical dangers, protest can be more exciting and even more fun than the drudgery of daily life; and that when everybody else is doing it, solidarity becomes the fashion. Every wave of protests has its copycat element. The ubiquity of the smartphone, however, has transformed how protests are organised, popularised and sustained. Encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram enable protesters to stay one jump ahead of the authorities. New symbols and techniques can spread like wildfire. Almost as soon as a specially written “anthem” for Hong Kong’s protesters went online, shopping malls were brought to a halt by apparently spontaneous mass renditions.
The third obvious reason for demonstrating is that using conventional political channels seems futile. In the protests of the late 1980s, the targets were usually autocratic governments that allowed at best sham elections. In the absence of the ballot box, the street was the only way to demonstrate “people power”. Some of this year’s protests—against Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria, say, or Omar al-Bashir in Sudan—have been analogous. But apparently well-functioning democracies have also been affected.
For a number of reasons, people may be feeling unusually powerless these days, believing that their votes do not matter. One is the increasing attention paid to environmental issues, notably climate change in some protests (though some others have been provoked by environmental taxes, designed, for example, to curb fuel consumption). Carbon emissions demand global solutions beyond the reach of one government, let alone one vote. A second, again, is the influence of social media, with its tendency to amplify those voices that agree with you and mute others, and hence make more acute the feeling that the powers-that-be “never listen”. A third is a perhaps related growth in intolerance, a breakdown in the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy—that losers, who may often represent a majority of the popular vote, will agree to accept rule by the winners until the next election.
This, however, is not an especially helpful or hopeful conclusion. Little suggests these trends are about to go into remission. In which case, this third wave of protest may not be the harbinger of a global revolution, but simply the new status quo.
