There is a topic which has always fascinated me and made me question - how has the unification of Germany been?
I must admit that I have not made a sincerely concerted effort to really delve into the matter much, but I have read whatever I have come across on this subject, and frankly, I have not come across much. Writing entirely from my own ignorance on the subject at this moment, what i know is this - the two Germany's, by the end of the 1980's, were vastly different in terms of their economic capabilities and material progress. The West was the developed, capitalist nation with a vast global trade, world beating companies and good public relations. The East was well, an ally of the USSR, and thus, on the other side of the capitalists. It was economically weak, poorer people and barely getting by. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany happened alongside the historically symbolic event of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Since then, since the two regions (as opposed to calling them countries/nations since they were more or less the same peoples) were so different economically, the unification was not without its major problems and issues. With a lot of economic wealth that the West Germans had to share with their East German fellow citizens, there was a lot of disagreement among them. Once in a while I hear opinions that the unification is still not a completely over process, even in the economic and infrastructural sense.
The Berlin Wall has been one of the most notable symbols of war, and how it divides societies that are similar in every way, including language and culture. Germany itself, after WW II and the defeat of the Nazi Party, was bombed into oblivion, and divided by the Cold War parties - the US and Soviet Union. The wall was constructed to prevent the East Germans from migrating/defecting to the more prosperous West Germany, and eventually Western Europe and North America.
The Wikipedia page on the Berlin Wall is all about the US and what it did and didn't do, and talking about that, or them, is not my purpose. Besides, there is a whole international relations aspect to this story, about who supported the reunification, who opposed it, and for what reasons. Just to round up on the wall, which was built in 1961 and finally brought down in 1990 with the unification of Germany on October 3, eventually was chipped into pieces by thousands of souvenir seekers and maybe even residents of the Berlin city who saw it as a dark evidence of their city's, and nation's history.
The German international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, has an article on the German reunification written in 2010, two decades after the process was started. It does corroborate what I believed to the issues with the reunification process. The infrastructure can be put in place quickly, I think, but what is difficult is bringing the citizens of the two regions to come around and accept each other as one. The elderly East Germans, loyal to the communist cause and having lived all their lives like that, never really allowed themselves to integrate, I read in an article sometime ago.
Economy, undoubtedly, is the key measurable indicator of the reunification process. On that front, the DW article says:
Just about every eastern German city and town has been thoroughly renovated. And while income and other economic indices in the East are only 70 to 80 percent of what they are in the West, costs of living - especially for rent - are commensurately lower.
As of July 2010, unemployment in the east (11.5%) was nearly double what it was in the West (6.6%), and an astonishing 50 percent of the 80 billion euros ($103 billion) in annual developmental subsidies transferred from west to east is eaten up by social benefits and welfare payments.
Some 1.6 million people have relocated from east to west since 1990, most in search of better job opportunities, and that trend shows no sign of letting up. Moreover, sociologists speak of a "brain drain" from the East since it's the better educated who make up the majority of those who leave. (so the brain drain that the original Berlin Wall aimed to stop from the East is still happening!)
The current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, hails from the East, although many Germans tend to forget that fact.
The Left Party, the successor to the old socialist party in Communist East Germany, combined with left-wing fringe parties from the West, has established itself as a mouthpiece for disgruntled easterners.
The establishment of the Left Party as a form of peaceful political protest can be seen as evidence of eastern Germans' adoption of western democracy. But it has also deepened many western Germans' sense of a cultural divide between them and their fellow citizens.
The social changes, as I said before, are more difficult to come by, and met with greater resistance.
Ostalgia - eastern Germans' supposed longing for the way things were - is a regular topic in the media, but in polls only around ten percent of easterners say they preferred life under socialism. And eastern Germans' self-identification as a group decreases the later they were born.
Meanwhile, around half of western Germans say the time before 1989 was better than afterward.
Partnerships between eastern and western Germans make up only around four percent of all German marriages.
Two decades on from 1990, it is more apparent than ever that "reunification" is not a restoration of a past society, but a process of creating something new that is inextricable from globalization.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome!