It’s especially surprising since the fall of the Berlin Wall ranks alongside events like 9/11 in its significance for our generation’s consciousness. Unlike 9/11, however, it most matters for us because it’s not there. None of us can truly remember its lifetime or demise. The best I can do myself is to remember the leftover globes and atlases we used in elementary school that still had “Former U.S.S.R.” or occasionally “East Germany” on them. Now, it’s only the subject of historical or political discussion.
For our parents, however, the U.S.S.R. was a seemingly immortal, hulking menace. It colored everything the United States did abroad. America worried about Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Berlin because of the Cold War. Anything the United States did abroad, it did in a strictly bipolar world. The presence of Soviet communism even reached into domestic politics, on issues like economics or civil rights.
Accordingly, the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall garnered stunning attention in Europe from leaders who remembered it well, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany. Closer to home, a few public lectures and a conference marked the ceremony. The lecturers, of course, could remember the Wall. From the student body, though, we heard nary a peep.
It’s always risky to extrapolate too much from the absence of something, but this seems representative of the divide in political experience between our generation and our parents’: most of us did not feel the need to mark Nov. 9. Anecdotally, it appears that most of those who did were conservatives inspired by the roles of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in defeating the Soviet Union.
And though we still study the Cold War in the classroom, many students of foreign policy have recalibrated away from the political outlooks of the Cold War. For our age group, there never has been an entire half of a continent oppressed by a totalitarian system that deprived citizens of their political, economic and natural rights. Freedom is the rule now in much of communism’s old stomping ground, and today we sort countries without complete freedom — say Iran or Cuba — into a special category of exceptions. The democracy-capitalism-human rights agenda publicly sought by the United States and its allies in the Cold War has all too often shed the former two, leaving only human rights, with this generation.
Instead, a host of non-state concerns and regional powers like Iran — all of which are worthy of our energy, for the record — dominate academic study and political debate. The question of freedom has lost its urgency for wide swaths of the political spectrum. It seems outdated for college students to agitate for political freedoms today — social concerns like workers’ rights or transnational issues like global warming are more apropos, particularly among liberals.
The cause of freedom, though, remains a pressing one from North Korea to Iran to Burma. The leaders of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations understood the implications of an evil regime like the Soviet Union, but we can’t entirely understand it the same way they did without the foil of Moscow. That doesn’t mean the lessons are outdated, though.
On a cultural level, our generation also resorts much more quickly to America-bashing in the foreign policy arena. President Obama’s foreign policy approach of heavily criticizing America sharply breaks with a tradition of foreign policy that stressed what America could do. This parallels the zeitgeist that a majority of college students have embraced, and it could well become the chosen dogma of the post-Wall American left.
To be realistic, there’s no need for our generation’s future leaders to ossify inside a Cold-Warrior-without-a-Cold-War mentality. That would introduce a whole new set of problems. But at the same time, it seems unwise to discard all of our parents’ precepts when they are still relevant, albeit in different ways. In five years, the 25th anniversary will be upon us, and the event’s significance may be more palpable.
But if not, perhaps those who lived in the cold shadow of the Iron Curtain can take solace in the irony of this homage in kind. Our generation can feel free to ignore the questions that occupied presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush only because Soviet communism is dead. The Berlin Wall can influence us through its absence. Only in an era without it could we neglect to mark its memory, interred for two decades now in the ash heap of history.
Brian Lipshutz is a sophomore from Lafayette Hill, Pa. He can be reached at lipshutz@princeton.edu.
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