The world rejoiced at the fall of the Berlin Wall. But 1989 was a year of missed opportunities

"Madness" was the word of the night of November 9-10, 1989. The people on the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, where live ammunition would have been fired just hours before, became icons of joy and freedom around the world. Only one person refrained from expressing such emotions: George Bush, the then American president, declared that he would not dance on the Wall, and he signaled this attitude primarily to Moscow. His greatest concern was that the situation at the end of the Cold War could escalate. "The enemy is the lack of stability," Bush declared at a press conference in the weeks following the events in Berlin.

When the Wall fell, Germany's future was uncertain, and the question of how Europe could be reorganized for the third time after 1918 and 1945 was also on the table. Since the Cold War had ended without military conflict, meaning there were neither tangible victors nor vanquished, neither a formal ceasefire nor a surrender, key issues remained unresolved: Who would bring about the post-war order? What should it look like? And who was responsible for what, anyway?

Today, 35 years later, new questions arise. Why did the 1990 order fail? Was this failure inevitable? Or were there alternatives that could have made things different?

After wars, it had become customary in modern Europe to hold a major peace congress. These conferences sometimes lasted for years and often regulated a wide range of issues. In the case of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648, they ranged from the transfer of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg to Brandenburg to the independence of the Swiss Confederation from the Holy Roman Empire; in the case of the Congress of Vienna (1814/15), which followed the Napoleonic Wars and the defeat of France, they ranged from the unification of the Netherlands to river navigation.

The Paris Order after the First World War also regulated issues such as the German-Danish border and the establishment of mandated territories in the Middle East. Unlike the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna, however, the Paris Conference, with its five Presbyterian treaties – from Versailles to Sèvres – did not create a stable order after 1918. It collapsed after only two decades when Japan, Italy, and then, above all, the German Reich sought to revise the status quo by military force, sparking World War II.

At its end, there was no new Grand Congress of all participating states; not even the four victorious Allied powers of 1945 were able to reach agreement. Ultimately, a new order was established out of embarrassment, with the status quo frozen at the end of the war and reinforced by the Iron Curtain, which from then on separated East and West during the Cold War. Key questions remained unanswered, such as the state of defeated Germany, German reparations, and border lines and alliance affiliations in Eastern Europe.

With the end of the Cold War, they arose again – especially the German one. However, it was also unclear how to proceed: Should the old questions from 1945 be resolved, or the urgent ones from 1990? Should the Soviet Union emerge as the victorious power of World War II or the loser of 1989? And what say should it have? "To hell with it," US President Bush cursed to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl: "We won, not they. We cannot allow the Soviets to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat."

There are therefore three reasons why a comprehensive peace conference did not take place in 1989/90. First, there were the negative experiences with the last conference in 1919/20. Second, a major international conference threatened to take an incalculably long time and develop a dynamic of its own in terms of its course and results, which, third, did not fit with the self-image of the USA and the West.

They may not have won the Cold War militarily, but they had won politically and economically. This clearly placed them in a strong position to shape the third post-war order. Thus, the 1990 order was not founded on a comprehensive congressional act. Instead, it was based on a single, thematically limited treaty, a set of existing institutions, and the enshrinement of supposedly universally valid values.

On September 12, 1990, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, the so-called Two Plus Four Treaty, was signed in Moscow. It was concluded between the two German states and the four victorious Allied powers of World War II: the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The six foreign ministers signed the treaty in a rather austere atmosphere at the Oktyabrskaya Hotel in Moscow, which had been built less than ten years earlier on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party for high-level events and guests.

In just four rounds of negotiations between May and September 1990, the issue that had thwarted the Allies between 1945 and 1949 had been resolved: the German question. Just a year earlier, this treaty would have seemed completely unthinkable.

In October and November 1989, the socialist regime of the GDR collapsed within a few weeks under the pressure of a citizens' movement that, after the fall of the Wall, was divided over whether the goal should be a reformed, independent GDR or rather a unification with the Federal Republic.

The proponents of unification allied themselves with the Bonn government, which placed the issue on the international agenda at the end of November 1989. The Soviet leadership, in particular, initially strongly opposed the move before reversing its stance at the end of January 1990 and accepting German reunification.

The Two Plus Four Talks were established to negotiate this process internationally. Poland was also included, given its special interest in the German-Polish border, which had not been conclusively settled by treaty after 1945. For other wartime enemies of Germany at the time – Czechoslovakia and Greece – and their reparations demands, however, what West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told his Italian counterpart when asked about his participation applied: "You are not part of the game!"

The Two Plus Four Treaty comprised only ten articles. It "finally" fixed Germany's borders along the external borders of the Federal Republic and the GDR, thus enshrining the loss of the territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. It ended the remaining control rights of the Allied occupying powers, thus granting the united Germany full constitutional sovereignty. It also obligated Germany to renounce nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and to limit the total strength of its armed forces to 370,000 troops.

The right to "belong to alliances with all the rights and obligations that entail" effectively made NATO membership possible for a united Germany—the ultimate Western ideal. At the same time, the Soviet Union, unlike the three victorious Western powers, committed itself to withdrawing all its troops previously stationed in the GDR from Germany within four years. This demonstrated that it was the losing power.

Equally important was what the Two Plus Four Treaty did not address: reparations and other settlements for war damages, which were repeatedly imposed on Germany in the years to come – and the order of Europe as a whole.

European integration and its institutions were not an issue in this context, neither for Germany nor for the members of the European Community (EC), nor for the post-communist states. Consequently, Europe's institutional form after the Cold War was left to the normative force of fact.

The end of the East-West conflict had literally interrupted the process of European integration. Initially a Western European affair, it had begun in the mid-1980s and led to the founding of the European Union (EU) with the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). The subsequent goal was to create a European internal market and a common currency. As post-communist states pushed for EU membership, the question for this Europe arose: expansion or deepening – more members or more integration?

The deepening corresponded to the general interest in increasing prosperity, but also to the French interest in integrating and containing Germany, especially after reunification.

The enlargement reflected the interest in stability in the traditionally unstable east of the continent, but also a moral responsibility: Western Europe had achieved freedom and prosperity after the Second World War with the help of the USA, while the Eastern European states had been subjected to decades of Soviet oppression.

The answer was ultimately: deepening and expanding.

One year after the Maastricht Treaty established the goal of an "ever closer union among the peoples of Europe," the European Council adopted the "Copenhagen criteria" for the admission of new states at a summit in the Danish capital in June 1993. According to these criteria, accession candidates needed stable institutions as "guarantees of a democratic order based on the rule of law." They also had to have a functioning market economy.

With the admission of thirteen new countries – eleven of them in Central and Eastern Europe – the European Union experienced its greatest enlargement in the first decade of the 21st century: compared to 1989, it now comprised more than twice as many members.

Meanwhile, NATO had already decided on a fundamental transformation during the process of German reunification. Founded in 1949, the Western defense alliance had relied on deterrence, rearmament, and preparedness against the Soviet Union during the Cold War to guarantee the security of its members. In November 1990, a new strategy was adopted. It emphasized crisis management, conflict prevention, and cooperation, aimed at disarmament, and offered the Soviet Union the opportunity to conclude a joint declaration: they no longer considered each other adversaries.

At first, there was no official discussion about expanding NATO. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact, the Eastern Bloc's military alliance, was dissolved, it became clear: NATO remained as the only central security structure.

As early as 1991, it became apparent that the Central and Eastern European states were striving to join the remaining alliance; in April 1993, the presidents of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary declared their willingness to do so. They were admitted in 1999, and a second wave of eastern enlargement followed five years later: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia joined in 2004.

The fact that NATO admitted these countries is branded a "fraud" in today's Russia. The West, it is said, promised in 1990 not to expand its alliance even a single centimeter eastward. Vladimir Putin, in particular, has repeatedly claimed this to justify his belligerent policies. "We were betrayed time and time again, decisions were made behind our backs, and we were presented with a fait accompli." This is how he put it, for example, in March 2014, in his speech on the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation. And this is also the dominant Russian narrative on the matter.

It's a myth with a kernel of truth. US Secretary of State James Baker, and especially his German counterpart Genscher, did indeed signal during talks in Moscow that "there is no intention to expand NATO eastward." That was in February 1990. However, there were never any binding agreements on the matter. The Soviet side accepted German NATO membership. And the desire of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to join did not elicit a consistent reaction in Russia.

This means that NATO expansion was only later perceived as a fundamental threat in Russia. While talk of Western "deception" may have a material basis, its exaggeration is a post hoc construct. Either way, the new alliance in Central and Eastern Europe opened up a far-reaching field of conflict in which the West and Russia would soon come face to face.

Some politicians could have envisioned a different security concept in 1990. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, advocated strengthening the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). It had been founded in 1973 as a bridge between East and West and had subsequently managed to maintain an exchange between the blocs. By 1990, the majority of European countries were integrated into the CSCE, and the Soviet Union, the USA, and Canada had also been involved from the beginning.

Genscher hoped to further develop the Cold War dialogue format so that NATO and the Warsaw Pact could be integrated into it. However, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in agreement with the US administration, called him back. Washington, in particular, was concerned about reliable stability and therefore relied on NATO's proven structures rather than untested innovations.

Thus, the order of 1990 was based on the Western institutions from the time of the East-West conflict: on a further developed EU and a reformed NATO, both of which were expanded to include Central and Eastern Europe within fifteen years. This also gave Western, liberal values international validity. At least, that was the perception in the West.

After all, these values were officially formulated and codified: On 21 November 1990, the heads of state and government of the CSCE countries adopted the Charter of Paris for a new Europe, and this was supported by expectations of a truly paradisiacal peace.

"Now the time has come for the fulfillment of the hopes and expectations of our peoples, which have been cherished for decades," states this agreement, which was also intended to end the Cold War in ideological terms and to enshrine the new era in world history: The agreement promised an "unwavering commitment to a democracy based on human rights and fundamental freedoms, prosperity through economic freedom and social justice, and equal security for all our countries."

The Charter combined two levels. They seemed to belong together at the "end of history" – as political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously put it – but they had a crucial difference: One level was the order between states, the other the order within states.

The liberal order between states, as formulated in the Charter of Paris, was based on sovereign states that fundamentally treat each other as equals. They committed themselves to refraining from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. The Charter of Paris thus reaffirmed the universal prohibition of the use of force, which the members of the United Nations had already adopted at its founding in 1945. Furthermore, it granted all states the right "to freely determine their security policy dispositions," in other words, to choose their alliances independently.

This also included various arms control measures, not least the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994. Under this agreement, the post-Soviet states of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan handed over the Soviet-era nuclear weapons stationed on their territory to Russia. In return, the signatories—the United States, Great Britain, and Russia—guaranteed the three countries their territorial integrity, as well as the refraining from violence and economic coercion. As for Russia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were just as blatant a violation of this commitment as they were of the Charter of Paris, to which the Soviet Union had committed itself in 1990.

The second level of the Paris Agreement addressed order within states. It committed the signatory countries to "establish, consolidate, and strengthen democracy as the only form of government of our nations," because only it could bring freedom, justice, and peace. This was linked to a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and pluralism as the internal organizational principles of states. It was easy to see that these values, declared to be universal, were essentially of Western origin—they constituted the liberal order within.

Western liberal principles also applied to economic matters. They were not explicitly included in the Charter of Paris, but were reflected in the generally accepted Washington Consensus at the beginning of the 1990s. This was an economic program followed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; it emphasized fiscal consolidation and monetary stability, competition and supply-side orientation, trade liberalization and deregulation of markets and prices, as well as privatization and the reduction of subsidies.

The liberal order of world trade was institutionalized when the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995. Brazil joined the WTO that year, followed by China in 2001, and finally Russia in 2012.

Overall, the 1990 order was based on four foundations that corresponded more to the general economic, socio-cultural and power-political developments at the end of the East-West conflict than they were explicitly negotiated: first, the liberal order of Western institutions and Western values; second, the global dominance of the United States; third, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the at least temporary weakness of Russian and Chinese forces; and fourth, a surge in technological and economic globalization.

Looking back, the 1990 order faced two fundamental questions. Would it be possible to reconcile the security interests of the Central and Eastern European countries with Russian great power aspirations—and, at the same time, with a sustainable Western relationship with Russia? This posed a serious dilemma for the West. And: How would an economically growing China relate to this order?

After all, the period after 1989 wasn't just the time after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also the time after the Chinese leadership had bloodily suppressed the freedom movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in full view of the world. The People's Republic thus demonstrated that it wanted to avoid a fate like that of the Soviet Union at all costs.

History would show whether China and Russia would integrate into the new Western-dominated order—or whether the two countries would develop into revisionist forces, pursuing the goal of attacking and reversing the new conditions. For the time being, however, the West was preoccupied with other issues, such as German power and American involvement in Europe. Conscious of their historical strength, they believed in an "end of history" under the auspices of the Western order.

"This is the hour of our victory," German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had already told US President Bush in May 1989. Indeed, the West had won the Cold War, not militarily, but through the collapse of its global political rival in the East. Mikhail Gorbachev, head of state and party of the Soviet Union, saw things differently. A year later, he also said to Bush: "I hope that no one present here believes the nonsense that one of the sides has won the Cold War."

This was, in fact, as wrong as it could be: The Eastern Bloc collapsed, the GDR was absorbed into the Federal Republic, and the Warsaw Pact states turned away from Russia. But it said more about the state of the other side than the West realized in 1989 and 1990.

From the Russian perspective, the worst was yet to come: the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This threw Russia back to roughly the borders of 1650. The closest historical analogy is the defeat of the Habsburg monarchy against Prussia in 1866. As the loser, it was spared, accepted the role of junior partner, and thus contributed significantly to the stability of the state order.

But this was precisely what Russia was not to do after the end of the East-West conflict. The country soon abandoned its Western-oriented reform policy and became radicalized under Vladimir Putin.

He called the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 2005 the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," and there is good reason to believe that the unresolved defeat of 1989/91 and the loss of world power status were the decisive drivers of Russian revisionism, which increasingly characterized Russia under Putin.

His rule was based on three principles: a violent authoritarian system, a return to tsarist traditions, and the goal of overcoming the developments of 1989/91.

Vladimir Putin portrayed himself as the successor of the tsars, especially Peter the Great, and reclaimed the territory of the Tsarist Empire (and thus of the Soviet Union) for a "Russian World" dominated by Russia, dubbed "Russky Mir." This notion was increasingly linked to the idea of a distinct Russian civilization superior to that of the West; unlike decadent liberalism, it was rooted in organically grown, native ideals of community and wholeness.

Finally, the revision of the "geopolitical catastrophe" of 1989/91 also included Russia's claim to be able to restrict the sovereignty of its neighboring states. This was based on the assumption that there were few major powers in the world with complete sovereignty over other states: namely the United States, Russia, China, and India.

China was not, in the strictest sense, a loser of the Cold War. Challenged by domestic protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese leadership found itself at the end of that era in a state of defensiveness and shock, with little sign of its willingness to share the Western universalism of the liberal order.

In the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping, who ruled the country as "Paramount Leader," followed the motto "conceal and wait." China strategically adapted to the liberal order, and especially after joining the WTO in 2001, it benefited significantly from this order in its economic rise.

After the global financial crisis of 2008, however, the Chinese leadership increasingly distanced itself. It adopted a nationalist-authoritarian and revisionist-imperialist course. When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012/13, he expanded authoritarian rule.

He re-ideologized the party, and in Document No. 9, a directive of the Communist Party's Central Committee from April 2013, he declared war on a number of "misguided ideas." These included Western notions of democracy and universal values, as well as civil society, neoliberalism, and media freedom.

For example, Document No. 9 states that "Western liberal democracy" is "an expression of a bourgeois understanding of the state, political models, and institutional systems." Those who promote the concepts of this democracy, namely "the separation of powers, a multi-party system, universal suffrage, and the independence of the judiciary," are seeking to "undermine the current leadership and political system of socialism with Chinese characteristics."

At the same time, Xi Jinping, analogous to Vladimir Putin's imperialist plans, pursued the "Chinese dream of a great national renewal," a rebirth and resurgence after China's "age of humiliation" by the Western powers and Japan.

There was a historical pattern behind this: "Tianxia" refers to the idea of a harmonious order, led by a China that, as the "Middle Kingdom," stands between heaven and earth at the center of the universe. This claim to supremacy encompasses territories of "Greater China," including Hong Kong and Taiwan, the historical sphere of influence along its borders, and possibly beyond.

Xi thus shared Putin's vision of regional superpowers. And like the Russian leadership, the Chinese leadership also rejected the Western universalism of democracy and human rights. Thus, both countries firmly opposed the liberal order.

The West, with its belief in the "end of history," faced a completely different question. Should it simply wait until all countries reached the goal of their own accord on the seemingly inevitable path to democracy, human rights, and a market economy? Or should it help and accelerate development? The answer was: help. And the means was the export of democracy.

It became particularly evident after the traumatic attacks of September 11, 2001, for the United States, with George W. Bush's "War on Terror." "Promotion of freedom" was the slogan, and by this the American government understood not only selective support for democracies or no longer cooperation with authoritarian regimes and politically acceptable dictatorships, as had repeatedly been the case during the Cold War. Rather, Washington now relied on "regime change," and did so with a mixture of fear, power, and hubris, as the American historian Melvyn Leffler explains.

Instead of maintaining the status quo, particularly in the Middle East, and promoting forces that favored it, the United States now wanted to spread the rule of law and democracy, free elections, and self-government. "Our goal is to help others find their own voice, cultivate their own freedom, and forge their own path," declared President Bush when he began his second term in January 2005.

In the wake of the Iraq war, however, it was shown that, marching in with a wrong reason for war, the United States was inadequately prepared to create a sustainable reorganization at the site of the fallen dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The result: the region was destabilized, the United States lost as a world power of credibility - and with them the liberal order.

Finally, this order suffered another blow through the world financial crisis in 2008. It was interpreted in China as a sign of the descent of the West; Prime Minister Wen Jiabao certified him a "non -sustainable development model" and a "lack of self -discipline".

The stage was thus prepared for the appearance of the revisionist states. If the 1990s were the “Unipolar Moment” (according to a well -known article by the publicist Charles Krauthammer), then the 2000s were the turning time and the 2010 of the decade in which the axis of the autocrats formed.

After 2012/13, Russia and China moved together systematically, and in the Syrian Civil War, the cooperation between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea came to work for the first time in 2015. If the Russian war against Ukraine had already started in 2014, with the annexation of the Crimea, the Russian full invasion on February 24, 2022 meant the frontal attack on the liberal order from 1990. It was now obvious, as was the new east-west conflict.

Nevertheless, this failure was not automatic. It was brought about by chaining developments, experiences and events that more and more broke out the conflict that was created in the international order after the Cold War.

On the one hand, the balance of power is shifted: the Russian side expanded its military means and increasingly used violence, while China experienced historically unprecedented economic growth. On the other hand, mutual perceptions changed.

Russia gradually turned away from a West from which it was increasingly disadvantaged and cheating. And China made its distance from the “Liberal Order” and the west with re-ideologization under XI Jinping. But China was also considered more and more threats in the United States.

In 2018, the Donald Trump government took a turnaround, from a strategy of engagement to a policy of containment. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German Chancellor, representative of the west, diagnosed a "turn of time" of international relationships - from the Charter of Paris to the war in Europe.

Would there have been an alternative to the failure of the 1990 order?

Historically, nothing is without an alternative, and the West could have tried most to moderate the conflict of orders and separate the levels. This means that he could have stood between the states for the liberal order without pounding their spread within other countries.

This would have been possible to avoid the debacle of western democracy export, as well as the fears in Moscow and Beijing that the West ultimately also wanted to change its inner order according to its ideas.

Such a policy would have been more likely to involve the perspective of the other in the calculation instead of allocating your own view. This would also have given the opportunity to readjust the international order again and again in order to maintain it.

However, it is uncertain whether the Russian resentment could have been cleared up compared to the defeat of 1989/91. Because fundamental to the failure of the liberal order was also a fundamental different idea of how the situation between states should be regulated.

The western side represents the ideal that all states are fundamentally confident: the international world consists of this look of partners, not of large powers and subordinates.

In contrast, Russia and China strive for a hierarchical order in which some major powers are confident, while the smaller countries belong to their sphere of influence. This basic contradiction between liberal and imperial ideas would not have been dissolved with more moderation by the West. With the Russian war against Ukraine, it broke up in full sharpness.

Today, three years later, the Trump government raises the question of whether the United States still stand for liberal order and whether they still want to act as the supremacy of the free world as they had done after the first and after the Second World War. A departure of the western supremacy from the idea of the West and the liberal order would mean a historical disruption, which would only be comparable in 1917, with the American entry into the First World War.

An isolationist deportation of America would have a forerunner in history. Until the early 20th century, the United States did not appear as a global policy actor. They focused on their own interests without taking responsibility for the international system. But this attitude contradicts the requirements for a leadership that always has to invest in the good of its own interests. This is the only way to make international order advantageous - and this is the only way to remain stable.

If the United States were withdrawn, the global system would be exposed to attacks on all sides, just in a moment of special fragility. This would not only pulverize the starting point of 1989 in retrospect, but would blow up the railways of world politics since 1917.

Would the West have the power to reinvent itself without the United States to counter Russia and China? This is the question with which the 2020s are moving into the Champions League world -historical conflicts.

Historians always only determine epoch breakdowns afterwards. 1917 was one. 2025 could become one.

Andreas Rödder, born in 1967, is a professor of the latest history at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Senior Fellow at the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at John's Hopkins University in Washington. Rödder is the columnist of the “NZZ am Sonntag” and author of numerous books. Last year he appeared “The Lost Peace” (CH Beck).