AMERICANISING THE ESCHATON
American's understand the East Germans: shoppers of the world, unite.
Washington WHAT to the British is Remembrance Sunday is to the Americans 'the Veterans' Day holiday'. You honour the dead, we honor those who made it — or we would if they hadn't gone shopping or left town for the long weekend. They are the winners; the dead — meaning no disrespect of course — are, well, not. They're just history. And we all know what that means. Nowadays the good guy says to the had guy (or the bad guy to the good guy, as the case may be) when he has the drop on him: 'Make a move and you're history.' That is, not just 'dead', as the more plain-spoken cowboys used to say, but as dead as you can be: dead, rotten and, paradoxically, forgotten. History is what is interred in a book somewhere and stored away where it will not be needed again. So the Washing- ton Times headlined the opening of the Berlin Wall: 'Cold war symbol is history.'
Well, it was fairly historical even when it was built, but now that it is a mere relic, an irrelevance, it has become 'history' in the American idiom. The question for the historian to come is whether or not Amer- ican leadership of the Western alliance has gone with it. At a time when we com- memorated those other historic events for which we have Germany to thank, it was fitting that we should observe a minute's silence — or go shopping, according to local custom — to mark the end of that American dominance in Western Europe. The Germans went shopping.
President Bush might as well have done the same. At his press briefing in the Oval Office he was 'as relaxed as a pound of liver', in Dan Rather's felicitous phrase. The press thought he should have acted more 'elated'. 'I'm elated', he protested. 'Well, how elated are you?' shot back the interviewer. Not very, it would appear. To say, as Bush did, that German civilians dancing on the Berlin Wall was 'a long way from the harshest Iron Curtain days' is to carry understatement to an extreme. And, as Bush's foreign policy is already under attack for 'timidity' — especially in its response to last month's coup attempt in Panama — it was actually rather risky politically: it raised again the spectre of his *impishness'.
The reasoning behind this particular episode of cautiousness, however, was not far to seek. 'We are not trying to give anybody a hard time,' he said. His right wing would say that that's just the prob- lem, but to others it sounded like a reassurance to Mr Gorbachev, who, wor- ried that the United States might attempt to exploit East German instability, had cabled to Mr Bush that he hoped 'the situation will remain calm and peaceful'. For the same reason, Bush is attempting to dampen expectations about the seaborne summit on 2-3 December: as a Yalta-like carving up of Europe is no longer possible for either side it would be foolish to lead 'I'd have been happier in a don't-give-a- damn profession.' people to expect anything momentous.
Of course they will go on doing so. Newsweek this week very considerately draws up in 1,000 words an agenda for a new Congress of Vienna. Bush, who didn't much want the meeting in the first place because of Gorbachev's skill in exploiting such events for propaganda purposes, doesn't even like to call this one a 'sum- mit'. And he has a point. For if anything is clear from the course of events in Eastern Europe it is that the day of that sort of bilateral hegemony is past. Even before the bombshell from Mr Krenz, an adviser to Chancellor Kohl was saying: 'It is time to do more, and we Germans will do it. Perhaps in time the United States will take care of places like Central America, and we will handle Eastern Europe.' That kind of talk will send a shiver up one or two Eastern European spines.
Nowadays, moreover, even taking care of Central America is more than the United States can manage. As Marxism was collapsing in ruins throughout Eastern Europe, Marxist guerrillas were mounting another offensive — 'the last battle', said one — in El Salvador. American military and political power throughout the world is even more irrelevant than Soviet power. At least the Soviets can still supply arms to their allies in Nicaragua, and it will be Bush who comes to the summit cap in hand to ask them please not to do that any more.
Nevertheless, the events in Eastern Europe are a vindication of American and Nato foreign policy throughout the long years of 'containment' and America's shift towards the diplomatic margin in Europe and elsewhere can be seen as a kind of victory. As Bush said in a Veterans' Day speech: 'The ideals of America are now the ideals of the world.'
And so, he might have added, are its shopping malls. To those crowds of East Germans pushing their noses up against the shop windows of West Berlin German reunification was a vague and distant pros- pect compared to those video recorders. Shopping defeats history once again. That is a testimony to the success of the unoffi- cial imperative of US foreign policy, which is to make everybody else just like us so that the world will be at peace.
Last summer a Japanese-American- Hegelian by the name of Francis Fukuyama first put the case for America- nising the eschaton. In an essay entitled 'The End of History?', he proclaimed 'an unabashed victory of economic and politic- al liberalism'. Moreover, he said, since there is no 'viable systematic alternative' to such liberalism, history itself has come to an end and we are left with nothing but 'the endless solving of technical problems'. This is what America wants to hear, apparently: Fukuyama, a middle-echelon government employee, has been offered a $275,000 advance to write a book. He, too, is going to get a lot of shopping out of the end of history.
Previous page
