How Europe's revolution changed British politics

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By Anne McElvoy Presenter, 1989: The '89 Generation The fall of the Wall transformed the political landcape of Europe

Like a lot of people contemplating the anniversary of the autumn of 1989, I look back on it with a mixture of pleasure at the recollections - and puzzlement that it must make me 20 years older.

As I travelled through the old East recently, talking to the participants of the gentle revolutions, I did, however, find myself brooding on what the impact had been on us as well as on them.

Were we merely spectators of the changes - or did it also change British political attitudes?

And if so, what impact does that have on the '89 generation who are in power - or preparing for it - in Britain today?

The magic of 1989 was the way that the political shape of Europe was changed, not by a process, speeches or grand strategic designs - but by the exercise of "people power" western politicians frequently talk about, but rarely see delivered to quite such positive effect and so quickly.

"The Facebook generation before Facebook," is how Foreign Secretary David Miliband views the concerted but spontaneous protest of that year.

'Heart of Europe'

The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and Conservative Party chairman Eric Pickles both told me they shed a tear as they watched the TV pictures - a rare outbreak of cross-party unity there.

One German commentator noted that the Wall, though made of concrete, was a kind of mirror into which the West could look to see its own superiority reflected.

After it fell, the democratic left and right lost a kind of alternative, against which they had been measured and defined themselves.

"A great day for freedom," said Margaret Thatcher, as the dust settled in Berlin

But her subsequent resistance to German unification baffled many of her younger supporters in the Tory ranks, like the shadow Universities Secretary David Willetts. He was a then thoroughly Thatcherite intellectual, running the Centre for Policy Studies.

The big losers from the changes were actually workers in the West Ken Livingstone <a class="" href="/2/hi/europe/7961732.stm">1989: Key events</a>

Now he recalls: "She was arguing that you needed a long slow process. She was wrong and it cost us a lot in terms of forming a new and direct relationship with Germany."

Outside Eurosceptic circles though, the aftermath of 1989 was the high point of pan-Europeanism. It persuaded John Major that Britain's place was "at the heart of Europe" and produced a generation in New Labour who assumed that institutional Europe was the answer to their problems.

That divide is still there - evident in the recent lively argument on the Today programme between David Miliband and William Hague about whether British Conservatives are principled or foolish to sit outside the main centre-right power bloc in the EU.

Bafflement

Leading centre-left figures, like David Miliband, were pleased to be rid of the accusation that they were in some way associated with the Red threat.

There was a flowering of radical and liberal ideas and centre-left governments did sweep to power in many parts of Europe in the 1990s.

Further left though, Ken Livingstone perceives that the aftermath of communism's collapse accelerated the retreat of collective action - not least trade unionism. "So the big losers from the changes were actually workers in the West," he says.

On the right, the impact has been rather different.

Michael Gove feels that 1989 carried a wider message of democratic ideals

The collapse of communism vindicated an ideology that placed individuals and civil society above the state - but it also created the idea that former communist societies would automatically embrace Western ways.

A degree of bafflement and readjustment ensued when it turned out not to be that easy.

David Willetts says that his initial response was that "the free market was a universal set of principles".

He says he has since come to "the realisation that Western capitalism is an unusual and precious cultural phenomenon and that a market has moral and cultural foundations which have to be nurtured.

"I'm much more aware of that and sensitive about it than I was then."

Soviet threat

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove however is a child of '89 in his abiding faith in the spread of democratic ideals.

He says the fall of the Wall carries a broader message of human aspirations: "The sorts of things that I thought were important in politics were also animating people across the globe."

The crisis of capitalism, often prophesied in the old East, did finally rear its head in the form of the recent banking troubles and the credit crunch

Having moved on from Berlin to cover the war in Yugoslavia - a consequence of the fall of communism and the eventual military interventions by the West in Bosnia and Kosovo -  I saw the appetite for involvement in other states' crises and internal strife grow after 1989.

The ending of the fear of a Soviet backlash opened new foreign and security policy options which simply had not existed in the straitjacket of the Cold War.

Did we overreach ourselves? A question I put to the shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

"There is something in that," he replies, adding that replacing dictatorship with democracy is "an immensely difficult process." Here is a tension in the New Conservative thinking which will be tested if they come to power.

New freedoms

The period after German unification was the high point of Europeanism.  Jacques Poos, the Luxembourg foreign minister preached the "Hour of Europe" had come when the Balkan wars erupted - but Europe slept through the call.

Today's wider Europe is the consequence of the old Eastern bloc joining "Old Europe" - and that conditions the arguments still ranging recently about the Conservatives' retreat on a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and Labour's faith that Britain's interests are well served by existing EU structures.

But these new freedoms have also created many arguments which define the positions of the parties today - not least on immigration.

The crisis of capitalism, often prophesied in the old East, did finally rear its head in the form of the recent banking troubles and the credit crunch.

"I'm not sure that it would have happened if there had still been an alternative system," says Ken Livingstone.

We all choose the lens through which we see the events of that year. But whatever we make of it now, it surely changed us a lot more than we might have thought, when the first hammers hit the Wall.

1989: The '89 Generation is broadcast on Monday 23 November on BBC Radio 4 at 1100 GMT and can be heard on demand <a class="inlineText" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ny7k2">from this page.</a>