Making freedom work

BERLIN – The Berlin Wall came down nearly 25 years ago, over three years after people power restored democracy in the Philippines.

What have we and the East Germans done with newfound freedom since then?

The circumstances are of course different; the Philippines and reunited Germany may be like apples and oranges.

Reunification has been painful for Germany; productivity in the German Democratic Republic was just a third of the former West. Today unemployment is still higher in the former GDR compared to the West. But reunification has pulled the East along toward rapid modernization and prosperity. Unified Berlin has benefited from its restoration as Germany’s capital.

Post-EDSA Philippines didn’t have an advanced economy determined to pull us along to make us at par with its own level of development. But the Philippines also had enormous financial help and goodwill, not just from one country but from the international community.

The world loved Corazon Aquino. In 1987, the United States proposed a so-called mini-Marshall Plan to help the Philippines, with a target aid amount of $5 billion to be given over five years on top of more private investments. By the time the aid program came to be called the Multilateral Aid Initiative, or the Philippine Assistance Plan (PAP), the figure had ballooned to $10 billion.

The first PAP pledging session was held in Tokyo in July 1989, with donors committing $2.8 billion in direct aid and Japan promising $600 million in debt relief.

Another $3.3 billion was pledged in Hong Kong in February 1991. Actual disbursements, however, did not reach $1 billion. Apart from slow aid utilization by the Philippine government, donors reportedly noted the resistance of Congress to economic policies agreed upon by Cory Aquino’s administration with the International Monetary Fund.

Since then, as the Germans moved to make the former GDR catch up with the former Federal Republic of Germany, we fell progressively behind our Southeast Asian neighbors.

In the latest Global Competitiveness Index prepared by the World Economic Forum, we improved seven notches to 52nd place out of 140 countries, but we’re still behind the regional achievers.

Germany ranked fifth in the index, behind only Switzerland, Singapore, the US and Finland.

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Berlin has become a magnet for youths eager to explore or try out new ideas and new lifestyles. There is a common thread running through their concepts: money isn’t everything.

Across a soap factory on the banks of the Spree River in this city, in an area that was once a timber yard, a new entertainment complex is going up. Instead of the usual concrete buildings, a warren of wooden structures with quirky finishing, accents and patches of green is taking shape. There will be a theater, cafés, bars. Parking will be provided only for e-vehicles and bicycles. The complex will use recycled water and solar energy as much as possible.

The Cooperative for Urban Creativity, currently with 120 members, still needed start-up funding for the complex, but didn’t want it from traditional sources that might want to impose their own profit-centered ideas. So the group turned to the Swiss Abendrot pension fund, which requires adherence to ethical social criteria in its investments.

Cooperative member Johannes Husten would not say how much the Swiss plunked in, but the Holzmarkt project has gained renown and now turns down offers of large commercial sponsorships.

They want to show that urban development “does not have to be office buildings,” Johannes said as he explained their concept: “Take an old house and do something with it.”

“Money is just a placeholder for other values,” said the 24-year-old Johannes, who studied international business. “We don’t think in terms of making money.”

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Melisa Karakus and Omer Mutlu, both also in their 20s, will grasp that idea. Through Facebook, the two Turkish-Germans met and moved to Berlin because, they said, the city is “the cultural capital of innovation.”

The two paid with their own money for domain rights to start an online magazine called Renk (meaning color), dedicated to stories about the Turkish community in Germany – the largest minority in the country.

Also wanting full independence, the two have refused to accept advertising, instead relying on readers to pay for regular access to the magazine. They hope to eliminate German clichés about the Turkish community and promote racial understanding.

The one-year-old e-magazine has won a German award for cultural journalism, but has yet to turn a profit.

A group of youthful men and women also started a consultancy called Dark Horse, to enable enterprises to utilize the market potential of the digital age.

Monika Frech, one of the 30 founders – all of them part of the second batch of graduates of the School of Design Thinking – says with a chuckle that in their first year, they earned “basically nothing.” Their first client was a small neighborhood organic shop that wanted to improve its sales. The advice of Dark Horse worked.

Today the company is providing ideas to a client engaged in railroad operations. It has designed a unique pier-to-pier logistics system, which is being piloted in Stockholm, Sweden, and a mobile phone payment service concept that Vodafone is testing. Monika says they “became solid” in their third year.

“Freedom, flexibility, responsibility from the start – a lot of young people want not only money,” Monika says.

Holzmarkt’s Johannes has a similar message.

“We want to take the difficult path,” he said. “Making the best out of things you have – there’s a good charm about it… everything we want we’re doing here. That’s what we want to see here – people being able to live their dreams.”

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi troops killed such thinking. The Soviet-backed GDR also killed creativity and innovation. It built the Berlin Wall partly to stop the brain drain resulting from the exodus of millions of its people, including artists and scientists, to the West.

Today there’s a reverse movement, with vibrant Berlin drawing creative thinkers not only from all over Germany but also from other countries.

Filipinos may consider the German subculture’s attitude too offbeat (especially the part about money). But it’s this kind of thinking out of the box, this readiness to take risks, blaze a trail and even face failure, that have been among the strengths of the German economic juggernaut.

The spirit is palpable here, in unified Berlin.