The Iron Curtain – Has It Been Completely Demolished?

However, 20 years ago, we were lucky: in Central Europe, the largest military groupings in the history of mankind were facing each other in Central Europe. Nevertheless, the Capitalist class enemy’s successful market economies were always on people’s mind, those societies which were visible when gazing over the death strip of the GDR’s borders or when listening to personal accounts of Hungarian, Polish travelers or those from the Balkan states.

Instead of a North Korean solution, the global situation gave us a Gorbachev, who threw the German cards in the game. The US administration covered for the reluctant government in Bonn and Hungarians quickly cut the Iron Curtain along the Austrian border.

The pictures in which a Western foreign minister, along with his real Socialist college-in-office was cutting through barbed wires had become integral parts of history books and made Alois Mock and Gyula Horn world starts. The GDR literally ran out, because its citizens were now capable to leave through Hungary to Austrian and freedom. On November 9, the “Anti-Fascist Wall of Protection" – as the deadly wall was referred to in the official jargon of the regime – collapsed.

The rest is a success story: the independence of Central European and Baltic states, the removal of Soviet troops, NATO accession and reconciliation with Russia with new modes of cooperation and then, EU accession. Only the bloodbaths in the Balkan region, including the mass murder in Srebrenica committed in the UN-protected zone, cast some shadow on this process.

NATO will bring a resolution on its new Secretary General next week, a person who will traditionally come from a country other than the USA, as a counterbalance to the military Commander-in-Chief. The favored person is the Danish Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a close ally of the former Bush administration. Further serious candidates will come from classic allied countries of the USA, primarily from Poland, Canada and Norway.

But at this time, the Bulgarian Foreign Minister, moreover, one “neighbor", Imre Szekeres, the Hungarian Minister of Defense will also come into question. If NATO decided in support of the Hungarian candidate, the two-decade old work would be symbolically completed: Szekeres used to be a close collaborator of Gyula Horn, that Socialist minister who ventured close to the Iron Curtain with a wire cutter in his hand.

Rüdiger Stix was a Leader of the dissident Ordoliberal faction of the Parliament of Vienna Province, he teaches Defense Economy in Budapest and Vienna.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009, printed edition