Berlin Wall

At the school for international studies of the Johns Hopkins University at Washington DC, there is a small yard with a small garden. The centerpiece of that garden is an ugly concrete slab marred with graffiti.

On closer inspection, it turns out the slab is a piece of the infamous Berlin Wall that once cut across the great German city. It was carefully packed and meticulously transported across the Atlantic to become what it is today at that small garden: an understated monument to the greatness of the human spirit.

The realization made the garden a more beautiful place. Each day I was there, I paused before that rather unsightly slab of concrete, treating it as a shrine to Freedom.

This month, we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the high point of a swift and completely unexpected process of change in what was then, in the grim language of the Cold War, referred to as the Eastern Bloc.

I was in Amsterdam the day before the Wall was brought down peacefully, by joyous crowds on both sides. I was preparing to travel home when my friends informed me that “something like your Edsa” was happening in Berlin. They were hurrying to go to Berlin to witness the event unfold.

This I would regret later: I did not feel inclined to join yet another rally in a foreign land. The weather was turning much colder and Berlin seemed to me then such a forbidding city. Eager to bring home the toys I got for my kids, I did not want to be stranded there. Besides, I have had more than my dose of staring down tanks. So I flew out as scheduled.

As soon as I got home, the full magnitude of what I chose to miss became clear. Portions of the wall were felled and East Germans, themselves bewildered by the reluctance of the border guards to mow them down, simply walked across and acquainted themselves with the future. Soon enough, East Germany ceased to be a political entity and a divided nation became one.

I felt exactly as my Japanese friend, who specialized in Philippine studies, felt a few years before. The night before Ramos and Enrile announced their defection in February 1986, I hosted dinner for my friend who was due to return to Tokyo the next day. I begged him to change his plans, saying something big seemed to be turning up.

Weary of how things always seemed to end up inconclusively in this country, he chose to go home as scheduled. Days later, he gave me a call saying he felt like kicking himself in the butt for choosing to leave.

I felt exactly that way about Berlin and the opportunity I missed to witness history unfold first hand.

The succession of events was breathtaking. The other eastern European countries began asserting independence from Soviet control as they, in their own peculiar ways, found a road to democratization. Soon enough, what was once the Soviet Union — a superpower in its own right — crumbled like a deck of cards. The Russian people seemed as eager to get rid of the dependent republics as the people in those republics wanted to rid themselves of the Russian yoke.

My work for the United Nations University gave me the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union before that entity evaporated. Quickly, I understood that the dysfunctional Soviet state could not last much longer. Despite the massive apparatus maintained for political control, people in the streets were becoming restless and all the more outspoken. The bureaucrats charged with repression seemed to tire of their duties.

The central planning model seemed to work only insofar as it expunged society of its talent and individuals of whatever opportunity they had to improve their lot. Many years before the Soviet Union dissembled, everyone seemed to tire of socialism — including the designated guardians of the socialist vision. Communism had become like a religion entirely incapable of producing miracles.

In the old, dysfunctional Soviet model, the state dictated price, supply and wages. That made everything imaginary. Nothing delivers the point more poignantly than the sight of people wandering about the main shopping district of Moscow, money in hand, searching for something to buy in a maze of shops with nothing to sell.

The money in hand did not seem to have any value if nothing could be bought with them. The wages people received did not seem meaningful they did not distinguish real values of work. A nuclear physicist I met selling herbs at the market in Samarkand received the same wage as the moron whose work consisted entirely of limiting what people earned in the informal market economy. The physicist made more money gardening than doing physics.

Twenty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the dissipation of that bizarre ideology that peddled visions of paradise at the point of a bayonet, we ought to have learned a thing or two about the futility of politically-inspired price setting.

Even in the academic discipline in which I work, the old conception of government as a self-willing, unilateral entity imposing its will on society has been replaced with the more modern notion of governance: the continuing effort to build complementarities between state and market. Government gets society to be organized; governance causes social life to be more efficient — and free.

Modern political leadership is all about improving standards of governance. It is no longer about imposing controls on things better left to follow their own dynamic. It is no longer about dictating prices as enabling competition and efficiency to take hold. It is no longer about telling individuals how to behave as it is about educating citizens on how their own interests are best served in an arrangement that better serves the interests of all.

Having said all this, why in Heaven’s name, are the authorities here still trying to dictate the price of fuel in complete defiance of market forces?