How the fall of The Wall led to a book

On 9 November it will be 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, on this occasion Alia Papageorgiou talked to Mirjam van Reisen, Director of the Europe External Policy Advisors organization about her course researching documenting and writing a book on the European Community’s Development Cooperation program and how it has been affected by this momentous occasion in its history Window of Opportunity’.

How would you describe the development of this book?
I was 20-something at the time and really moved by that vision, and I think that that is really the basis for the book. My studies and my background I had done in North/South relations, and had been at The Hague Institute of Social Studies, which was a very international environment but very much North/South. Then my first professional position as a researcher was with the Peace Research Centre, which was a very traditional, Cold War, thing, first of all we didn’t have any women only guys who were there mainly trying to avoid being in the army for ideological reasons. It was very much an anti military environment in the Netherlands, but very much analyzing war through the lenses of that environment. All of these people, that were analysts of the Cold War, none of us had seen it coming; we were looking for comments, constantly looking at progress but not expecting what did happen. But the interesting thing for me was to compare that community of anti-Cold War specialists and the development aid community from the north. Which weren’t enthusiastic at all, they were worried that aid would go to the east, that poverty or development in the south would become irrelevant.

How did the whole period evolve? What was the affect on the other few member states at the time?
I worked in a department that looked at aid to the south and I was then within the Interior Department and focusing on research on war and peace at the peace institute. It became increasingly interesting to see how this whole community from a research environment was so different and of course how history would play out.
I started looking from an even more distant historical perspective on it, and what I saw was that the establishment of the whole European Community is so tied up within this context of the whole East/West, the target was the whole rationale push for Western European integration as a bloc against the Soviet Union but also tied up with decolonization and for the different member states the need to look for another strategy to the colonies becoming former colonies and also to expand the markets away from those colonies into Europe – so there was an economic strategy that really was related to that decolonization. If you see how those 2 relationships of East/West and North/South were very intrinsically part of the establishment of the European community then it becomes an interesting question that with the fall of the Berlin wall and one of those conflicts disappearing then what will be the consequences?

So this book is the result of this question?
Yes, then I started to look at how one event, the fall of the Berlin Wall became so symbolic that it could change the whole concept of the policy agenda. For instance the unification of Germany really was not on the policy agenda the day after the fall of the Berlin wall. It was such an idea that was not serious, not ready to happen, maybe one day, but not anytime soon. There was the mayor of East Berlin who tried to suggest in January 1990 that they should change the whole internal affairs of Germany, but you know the whole movement was so against those retro ideas that it was a no-go.

So how has development changed since then in Europe?
I think that the fall of the Berlin wall really allowed development cooperation to come out of really being used for strategic games in the context of the Cold War. So in 1995 you have the UN summit where all the heads of state of 89 countries gathered there and agreed that poverty eradication is doable then the MDGs followed on from that, a lot of positive framework resulted. And now we have the Lisbon treaty – the Lisbon treaty is clearer than ever than all other treaties have been that poverty eradication is the main aim of cooperation. Before those objectives could be interpreted in different ways but now the objective is very clear – the Treaty says that the aim of the development cooperation policy is the eradication of poverty, so that is very, very progressive language.