Mike LoweThese months see the 20th anniversary of the ‘autumn of nations’ when communist regimes across central and eastern Europe collapsed one after the other in response to popular protest.

From Poland, where the first free multi-party elections in June saw the Communist Party routed, through Czechoslovakia’s ‘velvet revolution’ in November, to Romania’s bloody revolution which culminated in President Ceausescu’s arrest and execution on December 25, an unstoppable momentum for change built up, fuelled by decades of frustration at the economic inefficiencies, the corrupt cronyism and lack of freedom.

But deeper than the frustration was a vision and a hope, expressed by the Polish Pope, John Paul II, for a different kind of world – one grounded in Europe’s Christian and humanist traditions. This would be a society marked by the dignity of man, where solidarity with one’s fellow citizens was a reality not a slogan; a society which valued honesty and rewarded merit.

Reflecting on ‘what has been achieved?’ two decades later, it is clear that many of the hopes and expectations on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’ were unrealistic. Liberal democracy, it turns out, depends to a large extent on the social capital of trust.

Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama describes it thus: ‘Trust is the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and co-operative behaviour, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community. Those norms can be about deep “value” questions like the nature of God or justice, but they also encompass secular norms like professional standards and codes of behaviour.’

Those of us who live in liberal democracies often take for granted that we can trust the police and judiciary. We trust that employers will pay wages and that workers will work. Governments trust us to pay our taxes and we, in turn, trust them to provide useful services. Cases of government corruption and the greed which led to the recent Global Financial Crisis represent costly breaches of trust – and should act as a spur to raise our standards of integrity.

The most damaging legacy of communism was the systematic breakdown of trust. In East Germany, for instance, up to one in seven citizens were spying for the security forces. Children were encouraged to report on parents. The politicization of every aspect of life meant that everything from newspaper reports to scientific papers depended on the capricious will of those in power. As Soviet historians used to lament, ‘the past is always changing – only the future is certain’.

Restoring the shredded fabric of society has been compared to trying to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. Yet this is what continues to happen, helped by a growing civil society and programmes such as IofC’s Foundations for Freedom. Although there is still far to go, the remarkable speed at which trust has been re-woven is a tribute to the moral and spiritual vision of so many who fought for change, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel who became Presidents of their respective countries.

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain has also meant the beginning of an end to the cold-war mistrust between western and eastern Europe. With that has come the chance to heal some wounds going back to World War II. One example of this, first reported in the Initiatives of Change magazine For A Change is the Dresden Trust. Read more here.