History

«It was my question that brought the Wall down»

The question “that brought the Wall down" was posed at 6.53 P.M. on November 9th 1989 by Riccardo Ehrman, the ANSA correspondent in Berlin. The answer, provided live on TV by the then DDR government spokesperson Günter Schabowski, resulted in the borders being opened and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The East Germany correspondent for ANSA from 1976 to 1982, and then from 1985 until the Wall fell, Riccardo Ehrman is now 80 years old and lives in Madrid. ResetDOC contacted him and asked him to retrace the events of those memorable days. This is the clear and exclusive testimony of a journalist who played a leading role in one of the 20th Century’s most significant events.

«East Germany must still come to terms with its history»

Without change implemented by Kohl, Germany would not be the great country it is today and the differences between the East and the West would be significantly greater. At an economic level, reunification has been a positive event. A clearly positive one. At a cultural level and as far as remembrance is concerned there is instead “resistance.” The superstructure has survived cultural change as the success of Die Linke in the recent national elections proves . This is the opinion expressed by Angelo Bolaffi, an authority on German affairs who runs the Italian Institute of Culture in Berlin. Resetdoc spoke to him on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

«It all happened thanks to Gorby»

Without tacit approval from the Soviet Union, 1989 would never have happened. There would have been no peaceful and democratic mass revolts that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is thus to Moscow, at the centre of the communist empire, that one must look, if wishing to examine the now two-decade-old epoch-making changes. An unexpected, sudden and phenomenal change that led the Eastern regimes to collapse one after the other. Two years later the Soviet Union also imploded and Mikhail Gorbachev lost his battle. We discuss these events with Andrea Graziosi, Professor of Contemporary History at the Federico II University in Naples, President of the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History and author of two scholarly books on Soviet history published by Il Mulino; Lenin and Stalin’s USSR and The USSR from triumph to collapse.

An interview by Matteo Tacconi.

Failed integration

The autonomous Uyghur region of Xinjiang, as it was renamed in 1955, is in fact rich in gas, oil and mineral fields. Although exploitation poses problems due to the climate and the morphological conditions, natural resources could be used by the region’s neighbouring countries such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. For China, the Uyghurs inclination for closer ties with central Asia, due to cultural and ideological reasons, represents the possible loss of a strategic area for future commercial development.

The great taboo

The younger generations know little and only learn about those events when travelling abroad. Can the Tiananmen Square massacre remain a taboo twenty years after taking place? The government says it can and for the simple reason that admitting a mistake and stating one was wrong means looking weak in the eyes of the Chinese people and would threaten the party leaders’ hold on power.

The european dilemma

China is today the market growing fastest in the world in terms of imports from EU. At the invitation of Mr. José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, Premier Wen Jiabao of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China paid an official visit to the Headquarters of the European Commission on 30th January 2009. The two leaders promoted mutual trust and bilateral cooperation and reaffermed their commitment to further develop the EU-China comprehensive and strategic partnership. Economic development does not mean democratic or social development, as well as economic dialogue is not intercultural dialogue. Nevertheless, Chinese opening, although mainly due to economic interest, is however an “opening” that, inevitably, goes beyond the mere economic sphere.

The consequences of Tiananmen

Twenty years have gone by, but the Tiananmen Square Massacre is still a taboo. Andrew J. Nathan - professor of Political Science at Columbia University, one of the leading scholars of modern Chinese politics and human rights, co-editor of the book The Tiananmen Papers, a collection of the Chinese government's secret deliberations from April to June 1989 – explains what happened and the impact the event has had on Chinese politics and international relations.

"The economy has never revived"

“Peace has never been completely restored, one cannot however deny that we are no longer experiencing the dark days of the Nineties. As far modernisation of the economy is concerned, I believe that the objective has also not been achieved.” Benjamin Stora, Professor of History at the INALCO in Paris and a great expert on the history of the Maghreb, takes stock of contemporary Algeria. He is the author of numerous essays on the war in Algeria, among them Histoire de la guerre d'Algérie.

An interview by Marco Cesario.

The Slaves of Oil

During October the seven financial markets in the Gulf lost a total of over 160 billion dollars in one week. Panic increased due to the spectacular fall in the price of oil. This new situation decreed the end of the financial improvements resulting from the rise in the price of oil over an uninterrupted seven-year period. Generally speaking, the Arab economies are not very competitive, not very productive, and continue to depend on imports. Attempts to form an economy that is not based on oil, such as Saudi Arabia has tried to achieve, and to a lesser extent also Algeria, are far from achieving their objectives. Most Arab countries distribute income from oil rather than investing it in projects for creating wealth.

“Mit brennender Sorge”, the cry of Pius XI

An obstacle to Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Israel would be the fact that the plaque at the Yed Vashem museum criticising Pius XII's attitude during the Shoah has not been removed. This news, instantly disclaimed by the Vatican, has reopened the debate on relations between the Church and Hitler's regime. On this subject we present here a text previously published in the magazine Reset.

“If the Mahatma were still alive he would be ashamed of us”

“I once asked the Mahatma what surprised him the most. ‘How hard of heart people in authority are,’ he answered. This is even truer nowadays. It is obvious that Gandhi’s moral legacy has vanished. What is the system of values in a State that launches a moon mission but says it has no funds for building schools?” Mohan Guruswami, founder and chairman of the Centre for Policy Alternatives in New Delhi, spoke to Resetdoc about what has happened to the Mahatma’s legacy, and dejectedly said that “Every day the newspapers report violent events linked to the caste system, religion or racism. The Mahatma is now only an icon, a legend exploited for political purposes.”

One World, responsibilities included

“I believe in Gandhi dream of ‘One World’, one single world with many cultures. But this means that we are all equally responsible for all that happens on our planet, for everything that affects our lives, for the bomb that explodes in Tel Aviv and those who die of hunger in Rwanda”. With these words, the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanebgloo explained in a video-chat room what he considered to be the Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual, cultural and political legacy, expressing his thoughts on Friday September 26th on the Telecom Avoicomunicare.it website.

An easy scapegoat

Ireland has had enormous advantages over the past 35 years thanks to its EU membership. The country has changed from being an exported of butter, beef and Guinness to the place where some of modernity’s symbols are produced – ranging from Viagra to Botox, and including microchips. The Irish ‘No’ was the result of a complex mix of different kinds of generally unfounded fears. With a financial crisis resulting in pessimism, the EU has, even more than in the past, become the easy scapegoat. There is a need for new idealism, or perhaps it is precisely idealism (the sort that aspired to a new European Constitution) that has been rejected? A great deal now is in the hands of France, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, current President of the European Union. The time has come to establish whether there is still a will to move forward and above all in which direction.

The duellists and the Council that still instils fear

Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger. Just like duellists in a film, it seems, at times, that the two grand old men of international theology, the Pope and the rebel, are the only ones in the Church still addressing the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council and its defenders have in turn ended up in the dock, both within and outside of the Church. The ideology in vogue during the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, 1968 and thereabouts, when Christ without the Church was fashionable, has been replaced, often with the blessings of the highest ecclesiastic authorities, by Christianity reduced to a Western ideology. A Church without Christ, and hence an atheist one.

When the Pope disillusions me

It was the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, the great critic of the Church’s Roman Curia’s perspective, who placed Joseph Ratzinger in the chair that was the key to his career, that of dogmatic theology in Tubingen. “Yes, I was the one who proposed him as the ‘unico loco’ (a straightforward candidature, without the usual procedures involving academic competitions) for the chair parallel to my own, because he was the most qualified person in Germany – he explains – and I wanted someone influential who would work with me. And in fact, we did cooperate for three years”. The eighty-year–old intellectual and man of the church, known all over the world for his counciliar, ecumenical outlook, open to dialogue with other religions, in favour of responsible procreation, against the dogma of infallibility, the author of an important trilogy on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is visiting Italy to present the first volume of his autobiography, My Battle for Freedom. Memoirs.

“Küng is mistaken, in the Church this tradition is still very much alive”

“It is a great tragedy for today’s Church that it is incapable of moving along the path indicated by the Second Vatican Council and that in Rome they continue to do everything possible to block renewal” said Hans Küng when interviewed by Giancarlo Bosetti for the daily newspaper La Repubblica, once again deploring the Church of Rome’s abandonment of the Council’s spirit. So, has the Church really shelved the Second Vatican Council as an expression of a past “spirit of the age”? Kung’s accusations are answered by Catholic theologian Piero Coda, professor of Systematic Theology at Rome’s Lateran University and recently appointed Dean of the Sophia University Institute for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Dialogue (Loppiano, Florence).

A great opportunity for the Muslim world

Nowadays it has become impossible too to not show interest in the Oriental Christian world. This because it has become impossible to ignore the Middle East. This interest has increased because Oriental Christians are experiencing a difficult transition; their numbers are dwindling through emigration, hence their percentages are decreasing compared to their Muslim compatriots, their survival is at risk. It would be a serious mistake to envisage an attitude involving a modern version of the protection provided by Christian powers to Oriental Christians. These are policies that often led to a process involving Christians becoming estranged from their own environments. These Christians are not only the victims of Muslim intolerance, but also a great opportunity for the Muslim world not to be self-absorbed.

The Copts, from Nasser to Mubarak

Giuseppe Scattolin has been a Combonian priest since 1968, and a missionary in the Lebanon, in Sudan and in Egypt where he has lived since 1980. He teaches Islamic mystical theology at the PISAI (Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies) in Rome and has published many books on Islam and spirituality: “We need a new dialogue between Muslims and Christians, based on the a convergence of our shared values and in the name of humankind’s common good. I believe that 14 centuries of conflicts and invective between these two religions are more than enough. We must be capable of turning over a new leaf – he says, talking to Resetdoc from Cairo – It is only together that we will really be able to protect the young from the dangers of extremism, which is where they take refuge when reacting to globalisation”.

"A message to the Left: Israel has the right to exist"

"You have to make a choice: does the state of Israel have the same right to exist as other states or is it to be demonized like none other? If you believe it has a right to exist, then it is perflectly legitimate to criticize this or that government policy. It is another matter if your goal is really Israel's abolition rather than a real compromise between Israelis and Palestinians," says Mitchell Cohen, professor of political science at Bernard Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center and co-editor of "Dissent," in his comments on left-wing and Muslim criticism of the selection of Israel as guest of honour at this spring's International Book Fair in Turin. In response to Ramadan's call to boycott the event, Cohen adds, "I have the impression that too many people on the left have a romance with Ramadan. It reminds me a little too much of romances with Stalinism seventy years ago." 

The Visoki monastery and the imposition of tolerance

The Orthodox monastery in Visoki, in Kosovo, is the most important religious museum in the Balkans, as well as a place of pilgrimage for followers all over Serbia. “Outside” the walls of Visoki, the area around Decani has been stage for a Certosina work of counter-ethnic cleansing: in this way Visoki is like a dot in the ocean, it is a small Serbian bastion sinking right in the middle of ethnically pure and monolithic territories. The ex UN envoy Ahtisaari’s plan has provided extra-territorial status for Serbian churches and monasteries, similar to those given to embassies, with the aim of embanking possible devastations and of guaranteeing free worship. Kosovan Albanians are against this. But extra-territorialism helps “impose” tolerance.

Benjamin Franklin and Chinese Civilization

No other figure has had such a clear vision concerning the future of American civilization and how American civilization could grow out of European civilization. In the long process of “the breaking of the old world,” Benjamin Franklin wanted to turn himself from being a European “to be American.” Franklin’s efforts to draw positive elements from Chinese civilization in the course of building an American civilization carried much weight in Franklin’s contribution to the formation of American civilization. His correspondence and miscellaneous papers throughout his life indicate that he was amazed in Chinese culture. He explored almost every aspect of Chinese civilization, from spiritual to material. He believed that China was “the most ancient, and from long Experience the wisest of Nations”.

France, Algeria and the challenge of forgiveness

“Is Algeria a democracy on the face of things? It seems to me to be over the top. It is a society which has changed a lot in the past ten years, and which is having difficulty developing its democratic space”. Khaled Fouad Allam, born in Tlecem in Algeria, professor of sociology of the Muslim world at the University of Trieste in Urbino, and since last year minister of the Italian parliament, sustains that Algerian society is fundamentally democratic. The problem – he says – “is transporting these values from the sociological level to the political one”. Another crucial point, the theme of forgiveness, which neither France nor Algeria has the courage to face but which “is essential in leading two peoples towards friendship”.

A history dating back to Muhammad’s death

Today, Shiites represent about 10-15% of the Muslim population. They constitute a religious majority in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Azerbaijian and Bahrein and are a significant minority in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and UAE. As a matter of fact, far from being unitarian, the Muslim world is riven with divisions , the most prominent being the one between Sunnis and Shiites, which dates back to Muhammad’s death. But what is it that makes Sunnis and Shiites different, although they are still sides of the same moon? The answer lies in Islamic history.

Coexistence is an inevitable destiny

Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China. But also London and the French banlieues. Is it possible to live together? Globalization speeds up, migrations increase, more and more cultures find themselves in the same territories. Is there an alternative to war and conflict? Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio and a member of Reset DoC Scientific Committee, explores the topic in his latest book, in which he draws a map of the cultural, religious and ethnic conflicts that stain the world with blood.

When Arafat protected the Jews

Nowadays there are just one hundred, but once Jews were a vital part of Lebanon. In the '50 and '60, "Jews, Druzes, Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, everyone lived in peace and was neighbourly and friendly". By that time, there were some 14,000, and once the Lebanese Jews were also protected by Fatah, Arafat's group. Their heirs have decided to stay. They have also survived this war and its hate. Even though the Maghen Abraham synagogue, in Beirut, is now the ruined temple of a lost people.

The Middle Ages, when the West wanted to learn from the East

The West and the East grew up together. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the West needed to translate scientific Arab texts in order to fill lacunaes “in three principal areas in which the Latins were felt to be particularly lacking: mathematics (especially geometry and astronomy), physics and medicine”. Charles Burnett, a Professor of History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute, London, he reminds us that during the Middle Ages “the Jewish and Islamic world shared with Christendom a common knowledge of science and philosophy” and that “a commonwealth of scholars had come into being, which transcended political and linguistic borders”. A time when the West and the East knew they needed each other.