European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - January 3, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page 10 the stars and stripes David . Must help democracy survive in Rast bloc Amsterdam a if i9s9 was the year of Triumph for Freedom then 1990 will surely be the year of Challenge for democracy. The United states has a vital stake in the outcome. Three weeks ago when this reporting trip through Europe began. I heard the sound that will Fores or signify 1989 to millions the ring of hammers on chisels wedged into the hated Berlin Wall playing a syncopated hymn to Freedom. Quot a month had passed since the Wall was first breached. And yet on this Gray sunday hundreds of people from around the world continued to arrive each eager to gouge his own chunk out of that reviled Symbol of division and repression. As i took my turn Chipping away 1 Felt an exultation 1 had not expected. And later at a Church in Warsaw Poland at a Midnight mass on Christmas eve i had the same feeling As i listened to the prayers for peace and Freedom in that devastated but hopeful land a and for the lives and souls of the people of Romania who also had risen in struggle against their masters. When the French invited world leaders and a huge International press corps to Paris in july no one imagined that the fireworks marking the 200th anniversary of the French revolution would usher in a new burst of Freedom. Since that night in the French capital Poland has formed its first non communist government Hungary and East Germany have scheduled free elections Czechoslovakia. Bulgaria and Romania have ousted their stalinist regimes a All Quot a in some imply need Union. If Ever there was a time for Celebration it is this year which ended with two of the worlds most abominable dictators Nicolai Ceausescu and Manuel Nori a. Being overthrown. Incidentally whatever the debates at Home the role of the United states in booting Noriega from Power was As. A a a. Halves loudly applauded by people in both of Europe As the earlier Bush administration appeasement of Beijing s oppressors of Freedom had been found dismaying. With the benign approval and. Instances the implicit support of the Reform minded leaders of the soviet the lesson i bring Home is that the rejoicing across Europe in 1989 presages real struggle in 1990. The nations that have achieved Freedom this year have precious Little working experience or to edition of self Rule. None of them is equip Jussi far democracy none has a wide variety 0? Xihua realistic institutions to give voice to Peoples try seems. None Nas professional and comic Nfn raws organizations Independent of gov Erff men or party control committed to informing the citizenry. None has legislators and government officials with the know How and equipment to make a truly representative government work. What they do have in All these countries is communist cadres still entrenched in the bureaucracy and just waiting for the reformers to fail. And sadly almost All these countries also have nationalist right Wing elements ready to exploit the first signs of Public frustration with democracy by voicing Siren Calls to a just give us Power and we will set things  native fascism is no stranger to most of these lands the ideals of the Brave men and women who led the liberation struggles arc exemplar but they Lack the practical Means to carry out their democratic functions. The Only newspapers operating today in East Germany arc those controlled until now by the communist party. The same is True in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In Poland the jump in newsprint costs and the decline in consumer purchasing Power threatens the survival of Many non communist journals already crimped by shortages of printing equipment. All these countries this Spring and summer face elections where information is a vital necessity. They look to the West for financial and technical help a especially to the United states which is not As suspect of having its own commercial or political Agenda As say West Germany is. Not just the press but the politicians need help from their counterpane in the West. Before Christmas As legislators debated risky free Market reforms Poland s parliament building had the Hustle the same sense of urgency As our Capitol in the Days before adjournment. But step into an office and you find secretaries wailing turns for a single typewriter and a phone that works Only sporadically. Printing and Tel copying equipment promised by the . Con Gress and the West German bundestag have not be arrived. As a result the speaker of the polish House of representatives said a we cannot really Tell our constituents what we Are  it May seem a Long step Down from the fireworks Over the Arch of Triumph to training staff members for East German newspapers or finding typewriters for the polish parliament. But democracy de ends on such help in 1990 a and the United states is the one country that can provide it most easily without arousing suspicions As to its intent. In the eyes of Eastern europeans we arc the embodiment of democracy. This is the moment when we must redeem their Faith by we Ping the responsibility and oppo ratty history has placed in our hands t c the warts Voton pot George will the watchword of the 90s could be a anschluss what a difference 3.653 Days can make. But then this decade got a running jump into itself. Abroad it began june 2, 1979, when the Quot polish Pope returned to Poland. The vicar of an ancient Faith kindled the secular passion of nationalism lighting the fuse that would detonate All the revolutions of 1989. Intellectually the decade s great development was the death of the socialist idea. The old argument made by intellectuals that intellectuals should plan economic life in accordance with equal tarian notions of Quot fairness a had two flaws intellectuals did not know How and the masses did not want it. Institutionally socialism committed suicide and not just in the East bloc. In France a socialist president embarked upon a predictable program of a a planning and redistribution with predictable disastrous results. In Spain too a socialist government wound up embracing the Market and pruning government ownership and subventions. Even Britain a invincible ignorant labor party found the wilderness of socialist ideas conducive to rethinking. In 1981, the worlds three largest figures a Reagan Sadat and the Pope a were shot the Pope by a bulgarian backed agent of a the evil  by calling it that Reagan who did More than anyone to end the cold War was accused of a taking us backs to the cold War. In a sense he did. To end the cold War. The detente mentality first had to end. The hinge on which the decade turned was 1983. Reagan used the phrase Quot evil Empire Quot in March 1983. Two weeks later he proposed the strategic defense initiative ski the devastating Challenge to the soviet Union to compete in an Arena a the most advanced science a that depends on the fecundity of Freedom. Elections in 1983 in Britain and More problematic in Germany Defeated the soviet attempt using Western a peace movements a to Stop nato s intermediate nuclear forces inf deployment. In America the 1980s began on june 6, 1978, when californians passed proposition 13, the tax limiting measure that can be called the beginning of the revolt of the Middle class. So in Eastern Europe and the Western United states the two revolutionary meaning transforming forces of the 19th Century were still going Strong nationalism and the bourgeoisie. At the beginning of the decade rational people a that is pessimists a feared that inflation was the systemic and perhaps fatal disease of democracy. It no longer seems to be because it radicalized and drives to the right the Middle class. Reagan s tax cuts shrank the government s Revenue base and shifted to the right perhaps for a generation the nations political Agenda. The two most interesting democratic governments Reagan s and Margaret thatchers were highly ideological about economics at a moment when economic theories seemed to have lost their predictive uses. Americans National debt doubled in five years the Stock Market in 1987 dropped 508 Points in a Day but inflation declined and expansion continued. The chord struck by two books Tom Wolfe a novel a Bonfire of the vanities Quot and Allan Bloom s Quot the closing of the american mind Quot indicated that a vague  of a dare we say it a malaise survived from the 1970s among a significant minority of americans. For the mass of americans a suitable Symbol of the decade was the re Mot control Wand for Vars and Cable equipped television. The american grazed in private in a vast Field of frivolous choices actively choosing which pictorial stimuli passively to absorb. For much of the rest of the world the next decade will not allow the luxury such As it is of passivity. Although the 90s arc supposed to feature the blurring of particularities Europe �?T92. The decade May see sharpened distinctions including new Sovereign nations a three in the Baltic six or so from Yugoslavia. The end of perestroika such As it was it barely began in the 1980s and glasnost May arrive abruptly in suppression of National aspirations in the Ukraine and other captive nations within the soviet Union. The soviet Union a dismembered or not a will be eclipsed by Germany reunited whether or not others wish it. The most intriguing question about reunification has not been imagined by most people but it has been by Geoffrey Wheatcroft of the London sunday Telegraph. There arc he notes not two German states but three a the Federal Republic the people s Republic and lest we forget Austria. In 1945, the allies chose to regard Austria As liberated rather than conquered. But says Wheatcroft the austrian Republic is essentially artificial. It was created a in spiteful fashion by the victors after the War against the Kaiser when the austrians were the Only people formerly ruled by the hapsburgs who were deliberately denied self determination. They would have joined the rest of Germany if they could have. Indeed As they did in March of 1938. Perestroika was the foreign word Given widest currency in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the word could be anschluss a the re annexation of Austria by Germany a and Germany could extend from the Baltic almost to the Adriatic. C to Washington Post