“This project was hugely successful, perhaps one of the most effective aid projects ever conducted.” What would you guess this to be?

The line is from Katja Hoyer’s Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990. The context was the fact that the GDR ran out of coffee in 1977. “Afternoon coffee had become a daily ritual, not just comforting but essential as a psychological crutch,” Hoyer writes. It signalled stability and material comfort after the deprivations the middle-aged and older generation had experienced as young adults. The commodities crisis and the GDR’s chronic lack of foreign exchange meant the country couldn’t import any more coffee. What to do?

The solution was to come to a fraternal socialist arrangement with Vietnam, desperately poor after its own conflict. “East Germany could help the brother state rebuild itself while solving its own coffee problem.” GDR provided an enormous aid package and helped build massive infrastructure including a hydropower plant, and in return would get half of Vietnam’s coffee output for 20 years.

Vietnam now produces 20 million 60kg bags of coffee a year – almost all exported – in an industry employing 2.6 million people, the book reports. Unfortunately for East Germany, the coffee plants didn’t produce their first beans until 1990, too late to save the Communist regime. The coffee shortage was a striking illustration of the economy’s long-term unsustainability. It was too small and unproductive to continue to provide enough material and consumerist comforts to keep the population satisfied.

For a few years in the late 1980s a small part of my job involved monitoring the Soviet economy during the era of perestroika. The best estimates in the west (the CIA’s) over-estimated the strength of the planned Communist economies in the years running up to 1989. Extensive borrowing – and for the USSR itself, resource exports – was needed to fund enough consumption for political stability, given low productivity. Beyond The Wall is very interesting in its highlighting of the social benefits of the stability and the growing comforts East Germany provided its population; for a (significant) minority life there was intolerable, but for the majority it had some compensations. Until it didn’t.

Two of my latest reads have been Melvyn Bragg’s memoir of growing up in mid-20th century, working class Cumbria, Back in the Day, and Alwyn Turner’s canter through early 21st century British politics, All In It Together. They make quite an instructive contrast. Bragg’s warm perspective on postwar optimism – despite material hardships – complements his own story of academic success through grammar school and Oxford scholarships. Turner’s jolly but fundamentally pessimistic account of a materially far richer country is a contribution to the large and sadly still-growing literature on the UK’s decline. Both good reads, although as a working class kid from the north west who clambered the social ladder via grammar school scholarship and Oxford (albeit 20+ years later) I particularly enjoyed Back in the Day: pick according to your mood.

My non-econ reading lately has been Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. I describe it as an elegy because of its melancholy narrative trajectory: from the 2nd world war and ‘never again’, through the ups and downs of the EU project, to today’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, “illiberal democracies” tearing up the hard-won freedoms, and the pressures of mass immigration – which will only get more intense as climate change leads to conflict and destruction.

Like the author, I mourn the way our European citizenship has been stripped from those of us in the UK, by a slender margin, by voters who were lied to by mendacious and greedy politicians and businessmen. And at the same time recognise the challenges the EU itself needs to address. No wonder the book ends by quoting Gramsci on pessimisim/optimism. But also Vaclav Havel: “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. …. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

So, not a cheering read, at least for those likely to pick up a book about Europe. But a compelling read, by someone who had a ringside seat at many of the key meetings and ‘where were you when…’ events (above all the fall of the Berlin Wall) of the past 40 years.

PS For those who haven’t read it, Garton Ash’s The File: A Personal History is a must- read.