Ukraine and the Freedom Movement: On Marko Martin’s Bellevue Speech
by Russell A. Berman
German author Marko Martin delivered this speech at a celebration of the 35th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. Recall November 1989: the iconic symbol of the divided city, the divided country, and divided Europe suddenly lost its role as barrier and became a site of freedom. Surely this was an event that deserved celebration on its anniversary.
Yet since then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has chipped away at European freedom and the system of sovereign nations. To be sure, there was initial widespread support for Ukraine, evidenced in the proliferation of blue and yellow flags. Yet Western governments, especially in Germany (the concern of Martin’s speech) but elsewhere too, including the United States, never gave Ukraine sufficient support to achieve its war goals through a decisive victory. And as the war has dragged on, frustration grew and with it opposition to providing continued support. Hence the rise of anti-war voices on the right and the left. Martin’s speech identifies the source of this reluctance to enable Ukraine to win. Raising this issue at the Berlin Wall celebration turned into a scandal.
The immediate scandal of the Bellevue speech was a matter of Martin attacking his host. He reminded the president of the Federal Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in whose home—Bellevue Palace—the address was delivered, as to how he, Steinmeier, had earlier decried NATO maneuvers in 2016 as a matter of “saber-rattling.” And Martin locates Steinmeier’s anti-NATO characterization in the history of Social Democratic “Ostpolitik,” the policy of non-confrontation—dare one say, appeasement—toward the Soviet Union and its empire. In contrast, Martin sides emphatically with the history of the real dissidents when he mentions Solidarność, the Polish workers’ movement, and German authors Wolf Biermann and Jürgen Fuchs. Meanwhile Martin treats Social Democratic politicians like Egon Bahr and Gerhard Schröder, who wanted to build bridges to Moscow, with disdain.
Ostpolitik or dissidents: that is all a compelling German story. It involves both the moral clarity (Fuchs) and the realpolitical opportunism (Bahr) of the Cold War and its aftermath today, in the face of Putinist ambitions. Martin explains the current reluctance to support Ukraine as a direct heir to the non-confrontational Ostpolitik of the Cold War. The prioritization of peace—then and now—quickly comes to mean accommodating repression. As the saying went back then, “better red than dead.”
Yet this German story has wider ramifications with regard to the current debate over Western responses to Russia’s assault on Ukraine. In addition to Martin’s diachronic claim, which connects Cold War–era pacifism then with timidity in the face of aggression today, he posits a synchronic connection between the anti-war extremes (on the right and the left) and the hesitant center. The willingness to cave into Putin’s ambitions has spread like a contagion across the political spectrum. In Germany, it might at first seem that pro-Putin politics are reserved for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Bündniss Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW), both viewed as creatures of the deficient political culture of regions that formerly belonged to East Germany. Yet Martin argues that the pro-Putinism in the AfD and BSW only reproduces the same willingness to cooperate with Moscow displayed by the center parties, the SPD and the CDU, for example in their tenacious loyalty to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. Anyone who wants to call out AfD and BSW for their stance toward Russia should really start with chancellors Merkl (CDU) and Scholz (SPD).
The same political phenomenon holds, perhaps not quite so starkly, in U.S. politics. The American neo-isolationists on the right and the left—which are effective corollaries to AfD and BSW—certainly deserve the criticism that they are facilitating Russian imperialism and abandoning core principles of freedom. Yet the Biden administration has never provided Ukraine with weaponry sufficient to win, nor has it tried to increase oil production that would undermine the value of Russian energy sales. That same Biden administration even initially abandoned the objections to Nord Stream that had been central to Trump foreign policy. To the extent that Washington only threw money (admittedly enormous amounts) at Ukraine without a will or the weapons to win, it is hardly surprising if political forces have popped up calling for Ukraine to lose. The extremes have emerged because the center failed.
Therein lies the importance of Martin’s Bellevue speech. He demonstrates the continuity between misguided Cold War–era appeasement policies and contemporary policies toward Russia. He also shows how the pro-Putinism of the extremes is just a blunter version of the hesitation and “escalation management” of the center. Even more importantly, Martin reminds us of the historical significance of Ukraine’s fight for independence: it is the contemporary manifestation of the freedom fight against the Russian empire. He mentions the 1980 strike in Gdansk and the 1989 moment in Berlin, but also Bloody Sunday in Vilnius in 1991, a trajectory that stretches further back through Budapest 1956, Berlin 1953, and beyond. How the war in Ukraine will end is at this moment unpredictable, but there should be no doubt as to where the freedom movement lies.
Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.