Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  I can add my personal experience of the selective changes in Indonesia. I worked there for 17 years during the Suharto era, from 1979 to 1996. I then didn’t go back until 2012 (14 years after Suharto’s fall) and have continued to visit Indonesia ever since. Many surprises awaited me upon my return.

  The first surprise involved air travel. In the 1980’s and 1990’s the operations of Indonesian commercial airlines were often careless and dangerous. In addition to being shaken down for bribes and diverted excess baggage charges, I experienced one flight on which large fuel drums were placed unsecured in the passenger cabin, the steward remained standing during take-off, and seatbelts and vomit bags for passengers (including one who was vomiting) were lacking. During another flight on a large passenger jet into the provincial capital of Jayapura, the pilot and co-pilot were so absorbed in chatting with the stewardesses through the open cabin door that they failed to notice that they were approaching the runway at too high an altitude, tried to make up for their neglect by going into a steep dive, had to brake hard on landing, and succeeded in stopping the plane only 20 feet short of the runway perimeter ditch. But by 2012 Indonesia’s leading airline, Garuda, was rated as one of the best regional carriers in the world. Every time since 2012 that I have checked in with overweight baggage, I have been sent to Garuda’s excess baggage office to pay the charges by credit card to Garuda itself in return for a receipt. I was regularly asked for bribes until 1996; I have never been asked for a bribe since 2012.

  While at sea in Indonesian coastal waters in 2012, I spotted a military-looking vessel nearby, asked what it was, and learned to my surprise that it was a government patrol boat looking for illegal fishing boats. Until 1996, I would have regarded the phrase “Indonesian government patrol boat” as a self-contradicting oxymoron like “jumbo shrimp.” I had become accustomed to the Indonesian military’s activities as creating a need for patrolling, rather than as carrying out patrolling.

  When I landed on the coast of Indonesian New Guinea in 2014, I was astonished to encounter big or colorful birds, which had formerly been the prime target of illegal hunting, now calling and displaying near and even in coastal villages: imperial pigeons, hornbills, Palm Cockatoos, and birds of paradise. Previously, those species were shot out or trapped near villages, and encountered only far from habitation.

  Upon my return to Indonesian New Guinea, Indonesian friends related to me what at first sounded like the same old stories that used to happen in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In this New Guinea village, an Indonesian policeman had recently shot four New Guineans; in that district, the district administrator had been very corrupt. Ho-hum, of course, so what else is new? The difference, this time, was that both the policeman and the administrator were put on trial and sent to jail; that wouldn’t have happened before.

  While these are signs of progress, they shouldn’t be exaggerated. Many of Indonesia’s old problems persist, to varying degrees. Bribery is reportedly still widespread, though I no longer encounter it myself. My own Indonesian friends still don’t talk about the mass killings of 1965: my younger friends today weren’t alive then, and my older friends who were alive in 1965 have remained silent about it to me, although American colleagues tell me that they do encounter many Indonesians interested in the killings. There is still fear of Indonesian military interference in Indonesian democracy: when a civilian politician defeated a general in the 2014 presidential elections, anxious months passed before it became clear that the general wouldn’t succeed in his efforts to annul the election. In 2013 a rifle shot from the ground broke the windshield of my chartered helicopter in the air over Indonesian New Guinea; it remained uncertain whether the shot had been fired by New Guinean guerrillas still fighting for independence, or by Indonesian troops themselves feigning guerrilla activity in order to justify a crackdown.

  My remaining personal observation requires more explanation. Among the nations discussed in this book, Indonesia is the one with the shortest national history and the greatest linguistic diversity by far, and initially was the only nation at serious risk of its territory falling apart. The former Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies might have dissolved into several separate nation-states, just as the former French colony of Indo-China did dissolve into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. That dissolution was evidently the intention of the Dutch when they tried to establish separate federal states within their colony in the late 1940’s, in order to undermine the nascent unified Republic of Indonesia.

  But Indonesia didn’t fall apart. It built from scratch, surprisingly quickly, a sense of national identity. That sense grew partly spontaneously, and partly was reinforced by conscious government efforts. One basis of that sense is pride in the revolution of 1945–1949, and in the throwing-off of Dutch rule. The government reinforces that spontaneous sense of pride by retelling the story of 1945–1949, with considerable justification, as a heroic struggle for national independence—just as American schools retell the story of our own revolution to all American schoolchildren. Indonesians are proud of their wide territorial extent, expressed in an Indonesian national song “Dari Sabang sampai Merauke” (“From Sabang to Merauke,” Indonesia’s western and eastern extremities, respectively, 3,400 miles apart). Another basis of national identity is Indonesians’ rapid adoption of their easily learned and wonderfully supple Bahasa Indonesia as the national language, coexisting with the 700 local languages.

  In addition to those underlying roots of national identity, the Indonesian government continues to try to reinforce identity by emphasizing the five-point framework of Pancasila, and by annual ceremonies remembering the seven murdered generals at Jakarta’s Pancasila Monument. But, despite having stayed in many Indonesian hotels since my return to Indonesia in 2012, I haven’t seen another hotel lobby display like the account of the “communist coup” that greeted me in the lobby of the first Indonesian hotel where I stayed in 1979. Indonesians now feel sufficiently secure in their national identity that they don’t need misleading accounts of a “communist coup” to reinforce it. To me as a visitor to Indonesia, that deepening sense of national identity is among the biggest changes that I’ve experienced.

  FIG. 6 Map of Germany

  CHAPTER 6

  REBUILDING GERMANY

  Germany in 1945—1945 to 1961—Germans holding judgment—1968—1968’s aftermath—Brandt and re-unification—Geographic constraints—Self-pity?—Leaders and realism—Crisis framework

  Germany’s surrender on May 7 and 8, 1945 marked the end of World War Two in Europe. The situation in Germany as of that date was as follows.

  The Nazi leaders Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann had committed or were about to commit suicide. Germany’s armies, after conquering most of Europe, had been driven back and defeated. About 7 million Germans had been killed, either as soldiers, as civilians killed by bombs, or as civilian refugees killed while fleeing, particularly from the advancing Soviet armies in the east taking revenge for the horrible things that the German military had done to Soviet civilians.

  Tens of millions of Germans who survived had been traumatized by severe bombing (Plate 6.1). Virtually all of Germany’s major cities had been reduced to rubble, from bombing and fighting (Plate 6.2). Between one-quarter and one-half of the housing in German cities had been destroyed.

  One-quarter of Germany’s former territory was lost to Poland and to the Soviet Union. What remained of Germany was divided into four occupation zones that would eventually become two separate countries.

  About 10 million Germans were homeless refugees. Millions of Germans were searching for missing family members, of whom some miraculously turned up alive years later. But most never turned up, and for many of them the time and place and circumstances of their deaths remain forever unknown. My first German teacher, living in exile in 1954, happened to mention having a son. When I naïvely asked him about his son, my teacher burst out in pain, “They took him away, and we never heard anything about him again!” By the time that
I met my teacher, he and his wife had been living with that uncertainty for 10 years. Two of my later German friends were “luckier”: one learned of her father’s probable death “only” a year after the last news from him, and another learned of his brother’s death after three years.

  As of 1945, the German economy had collapsed. The German currency was rapidly losing its value through inflation. The German people had undergone 12 years of Nazi programming. Virtually all German government officials and judges had been convinced or complicit Nazis, because they had had to swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler in order to hold a government job. German society was authoritarian.

  Today, Germany is a liberal democracy. Its economy is the fourth largest in the world, and is one of the world’s leading export economies. Germany is the most powerful country in Europe west of Russia. It established its own stable currency (the Deutsche Mark); then it played a leading role in establishing a common European currency (the euro), and in establishing the European Union that now joins it peacefully with the countries that it had so recently attacked. Germany has largely dealt with its Nazi past. German society is much less authoritarian than it once was.

  What happened between May 1945 and today to produce those changes? I first visited Germany in 1959, lived there for much of 1961, and have frequently returned for visits ever since. I’ll now discuss five of the changes that I witnessed in post-war Germany. Two of them (partition and West German economic recovery) were nearly complete by the time of my residence in Germany; two others (Germans facing the legacies of Naziism, and social changes) were already underway then but accelerated afterwards; and one (re-unification) happened only decades later and seemed utterly inconceivable to me and to my German friends in 1961. From the perspective of this book’s framework of crisis and change, Germany represents an extreme case in many respects, including in its geopolitical constraints and in the role of distinctive leaders for bad and for good. Most of all, Germany represents an extreme in the magnitude of the crisis that it faced. Meiji Japan was merely threatened by attack; Finland and Australia were attacked but remained unoccupied; but Germany and Japan in 1945 had been attacked, conquered, occupied, and far more devastated than any other nation discussed in this book.

  World War Two’s victorious Allies carved Germany into four occupation zones: American in the south, French in the southwest, British in the northwest, and Soviet in the east. While the capital city of Berlin lay in the middle of the Soviet zone, it too was divided into occupation sectors of all four powers, like an island of non-Soviet occupation within the Soviet zone. In 1948 the Soviets imposed a blockade on American, British, and French overland access to their enclaves within Berlin, in order to compel the three Western Allies to abandon their enclaves. The Allies responded with the Berlin airlift and supplied Berlin by air for nearly a year, until the Soviets gave up and abandoned their blockade in 1949.

  In that same year of 1949, the Allies joined their zones into one entity, called the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as West Germany, or Bundesrepublik Deutschland. The Soviet zone became a separate entity called the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany or its German-language acronym DDR. Today, East Germany is routinely dismissed as a failed communist dictatorship that eventually collapsed and became in effect absorbed by West Germany. The term “German Democratic Republic” is remembered as a big lie, like the name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” that North Korea adopts for itself today. It’s easy now to forget that not just Soviet brute force but also German communist idealism contributed to East Germany’s founding, and that numerous German intellectuals chose to move to East Germany from West Germany or from exile overseas.

  But the standard of living and freedom in East Germany eventually fell far behind that of West Germany. While American economic aid was pouring into West Germany, the Soviets imposed economic reparations on their zone, dismantled and carted away whole factories to Russia, and reorganized East German agriculture as collective farms. Increasingly, over the next two generations until re-unification in 1990, East Germans grew up unable to learn the motivation, acquired by people in Western democracies, to work hard to better their lives.

  As a result, East Germans began fleeing to the West. Hence in 1952 East Germany sealed its borders to the West, but East Germans could still escape by passing from East Berlin into West Berlin, then flying from West Berlin to West Germany. The pre-war public transport system in Berlin (U-Bahn and S-Bahn) included lines that connected West and East Berlin, so that anyone in East Berlin could get into West Berlin just by hopping on a train. When I first visited Berlin in 1960, like other Western tourists I took the U-Bahn to visit East Berlin and to return to West Berlin.

  In 1953 dissatisfaction in East Germany blew up in a strike that turned into a rebellion, crushed by Soviet troops. Dissatisfied East Germans continued to escape to the West by way of the Berlin public transport system. Finally, on the night of August 13, 1961, while I was living in Germany, the East German regime suddenly closed the East Berlin U-Bahn stations and erected a wall between East and West Berlin, patrolled by border guards who shot and killed people trying to cross the wall (Plate 6.3). I recall the disbelief, shock, and rage of my West German friends the morning after the wall’s erection. The East Germans justified the wall by claiming that it was built to protect East Germany from West German infiltrators and criminals, rather than admitting that it was aimed at preventing dissatisfied East Germans from fleeing to the West. The Western Allies didn’t dare to breach the wall, because they knew that they were powerless to do anything for a West Berlin surrounded by East German and Russian troops.

  From then on, East Germany remained a separate state from which there was no possibility of fleeing to West Germany without high probability of being killed at the border. (Over a thousand Germans died in the attempt.) There was no realistic hope for the re-unification of Germany, given the polarization between the Soviet Union and the communist East European block on the one hand, and the U.S. and Western Europe on the other hand. It was as if the United States became divided at the Mississippi River between a communist eastern U.S. and a democratic western U.S., with no prospect of re-unification for the foreseeable future.

  As for West Germany just after World War Two, one policy considered by the victorious Western Allies was to prevent it from ever rebuilding its industries, to force its economy to revert just to agriculture under the so-called Morgenthau Plan, and to extract war reparations as the Allies had done after World War One and as the Soviets were now doing in East Germany. That strategy stemmed from the widespread Allied view that Germany had been responsible not only for instigating World War Two under Hitler (as is widely agreed) but also for instigating World War One under Kaiser Wilhelm II (a much-debated historical question), and that permitting Germany to re-industrialize could lead to yet another world war.

  What caused that Allied view to change was the development of the Cold War, and the resulting realization that the real risk of another world war came not from Germany but from the Soviet Union. As I explained in Chapter 4 in connection with U.S. policy towards Chile, that fear was the dominating motive underlying American foreign policy in the decades following World War Two. The communist take-overs of all Eastern European countries already occupied by Soviet troops, Soviet acquisition of atomic bombs and then of hydrogen bombs, the Soviet attempt in 1948–1949 to blockade and strangle the Western enclave in Berlin, and the strength of communist parties even in some Western European democracies (especially Italy) made Western Europe seem the most likely site for the Cold War to explode into another world war. As late as 1961, when I was about to go live in Germany, my (American) father advised me in all seriousness to be ready to flee to a safe refuge in Switzerland at the first signs of danger in Europe.

  From that perspective, West Germany, lying in the center of Europe, and bordering on communist East Germany and Czechoslovakia, was crucial to the freedom of Western Europe.
The Western Allies needed West Germany to become strong again, as a bulwark against communism. Their other motives for wanting Germany to become strong were to reduce the risk that a weak and frustrated Germany might descend again into political extremism (as had happened after World War One), and to reduce the economic costs to the Allies of having to continue to feed and support an economically weak West Germany.

  After 1945, it took several years, during which the West German economy continued to deteriorate, for that change of view to mature among the Western Allies. Finally, in 1948 the U.S. began to extend to West Germany the Marshall Plan economic aid that the U.S. had already begun to provide to other Western European countries in 1947. Simultaneously, West Germany replaced its weak and inflated currency with a new currency, the Deutsche Mark. When the Western Allies merged their occupation zones into a single West Germany, they retained veto power over its legislation. However, West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, proved skilled at exploiting American fears of a communist assault, in order to obtain Allied acquiescence to delegate more and more authority to West Germany and less and less to the Allies. Adenauer’s economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, instituted modified free-market policies and utilized Marshall Plan aid to fuel a spectacularly successful economic recovery that became known as the “Wirtschaftswunder,” or “economic miracle.” Rationing became abolished, industrial output and living standards soared, and the dream of being able to buy a car and a home became reality for West Germans.