Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (64 page)

The outcome was a massive 20–40 per cent drop in industrial output and sharply rising unemployment, offset only by increased flows of workers migrating elsewhere. The new democracies thus faced the reckoning with global competition which their predecessors had postponed. Whole towns and industries collapsed, decontrolled rents soared and income differentials suddenly widened as a new class of capitalists flaunted their wealth in societies which had taken the egalitarian rhetoric of communism very seriously. “Now there is no social safety net,” complained one Hungarian worker. “At least then there was. There are terrible lay-offs. They turn off the electricity if people can’t pay.” The old system had, after all, had benefits as well as drawbacks, and people had been accustomed to both. The new capitalism was more unstable, creating new mafiosi, breeding crime and destroying the savings of honest people through pyramid scams which they mistook out of inexperience for regular banks. The moral economy of communism was bankrupt, but nothing has yet replaced it except perhaps a new individualism and sense of suspicion.
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GERMANY REUNIFI ED

The most fundamental alteration in the European balance of power created by the collapse of the Soviet empire was the reunification of Germany. Yet this was as unforeseen as partition had been forty years before. The original division of Germany might not have figured in the plans of any of the major powers (except France), but once it had happened, none of them hurried to reverse it. In both West and East Germany, the issue of reunification declined in importance as time passed and appeared forgotten by the time of Honecker’s state visit to
Bonn in 1987.
Ostpolitik
was a substitute for unification more than a strategy for achieving it. Of course, this reflected the perception inside and outside the country that calling for unification would reawaken dormant fears of German power. As it was, opinion polls confirmed that fear of Germany was declining sharply in eastern Europe as the memory of the Second World War receded: it was this very decline which undercut the old justification for the Soviet Army’s continued presence in Europe, and which therefore—by a paradox more apparent than real—permitted the retreat of communism that ultimately made German reunification not merely advisable but unavoidable. For as Kohl’s chief foreign-policy adviser realized, should the ideological divergence between the two Germanys disappear, then there would no longer be any reason for the country’s partition.

Gorbachev talked about overcoming the division of Europe, but did not apparently contemplate overcoming the division of Germany. Like a Stalin in reverse, Gorbachev came to unification only gradually. Many in the West too envisaged the ending of the Cold War while keeping two Germanys; Mrs Thatcher, for instance, declared in November 1988 that “we’re not in a Cold War now,” but remained suspicious of German power and opposed to reunification. Only George Bush saw matters differently. Unlike Gorbachev, he wanted the unity of Europe based unambiguously on “Western values”; unlike Kohl, he was not ready to hold eastern Europe hostage to good relations with Moscow.
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Yet would reunification have ever happened without the opening of the Berlin Wall in November? In the chaotic and unpredictable summer of 1989, many commentators suddenly discovered the virtues of the Cold War and the stability it had created. Writing in June, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper speculated: “Perhaps if controls were removed, communism in East Germany would shrivel like a scroll. But would that not be a revolution, a de-stabilisation of Europe, which for 44 years has lived in a balanced peace?… The only questions are, do the Germans really want it, and if so, how can it be achieved without destroying the delicate balance of Europe which has been based on division?”
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Certainly, neither the refugee exodus of August, nor the demonstrations
of October, seemed at the time necessarily to spell the end of the East German state. The demonstrators in Leipzig, who in December would be shouting “Wir sind ein Volk!” (We are one people), were two months earlier shouting the very different “Wir sind das Volk!” (We are the people). Behind the Wall, the first calls for unification came barely a month before the Wall itself fell.

Perhaps the Cold War ended therefore as a result of a simple administrative error. More than one Western journalist claims the credit for having posed the vital question at the 9 November press conference in East Berlin: from when did the newly liberalized travel regulations for East Germans—just announced by Günter Schwabow-ski, the government’s exhausted press spokesman—come into effect? Without instructions on this point, Schwabowski replied off the cuff: “From this moment.” Later he admitted the authorities had not anticipated “the rush, the emotional drive” that drove thousands within hours to Checkpoint Charlie. Bewildered border guards had no idea what to do with them; by the time the politicians ordered them to let people through, they had started to do so anyway.

In a final act of the revolution which had begun in 1917, a popular uprising swept away the last vestiges of communism in Germany, and swept the political elite along with it. Yet even after 9 November, many politicians and intellectuals—from Gorbachev to Günter Grass—still sought to preserve a separate East German state, linked to its western partner in confederation. At the end of November, Kohl himself suggested a long-term, phased approach to reunification. But the popular mood inside Germany was impatient, and Kohl too astute a politician to hold out against it. Within a year of the Wall’s demolition, currency union and then full constitutional unification were achieved.

“A final line is being drawn under post-war German history,” declared General Matvei Burlakov, the last commander of Russian troops in eastern Germany on the eve of withdrawal in 1994. Western forces had already left; Soviet war memorials were beginning to crumble. With a swift resurgence of neo-Nazism, and the spread of mass unemployment among the Ossis, it was natural to feel a certain apprehension at Europe’s newly dominant power. This apprehension was, of course, a reflection of those historical fears—held with especial
tenacity in Britain and France, the two countries most desperate to cling to their illusions of great-power status—which often obscure a more balanced view of the present. But it was also based on simple bewilderment at the speed and unpredictability of reunification, which had underlined the difficulty of foreseeing, still less controlling, events in the new Europe. Interestingly, ordinary people—to judge from opinion polls taken in 1990—were less perturbed by German unification than intellectuals and politicians.

To the historian, it seems obvious that Kohl’s Germany is not the threat to Europe which Hitler’s was. It is buoyed up by the resilience of its post-war democratic experience and the historical failure of communism and fascism. Its lack of militarism reflects the memory of five million German war dead from the last war; its lack of expansionism, the disappearance of German minorities in the East as a primary concern of foreign policy, and the collapse of the Darwinist views of international relations which held sway for nearly a century between the eras of romantic nationalism and the Third Reich.

The most powerful country in Europe is now forced to devote itself to the reconstruction of its eastern half. Should it be criticized for introspection, or attacked for seeking to dominate eastern Europe through economic aid and investment there, more than half the West’s total? Should it be praised for halving the Bundeswehr’s troop strength, or attacked for lack of assertion in projecting its strength abroad? It was expected to take the lion’s share of refugees from the former Yugoslavia, while any tightening of its asylum laws provokes cries of fascism. It sometimes seems as though other Europeans find it as hard to come to terms with German democracy as Germans do with their former dictatorship. But that may be less because of the past than because Germany today—with its loose federalism and its faltering social-market economy—seems likely to be their future.

THE WAR IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

After 1989, Western commentators became transfixed by nationalism. As national memories and old hatreds resurfaced, it was easy to see the revival of nationalism as the return of history and the root of Europe’s future troubles. The study of ethnic minorities has now
become a growth industry for academics, security experts and international lawyers. Communist elites may have made an easy switch to new roles as nationalist figureheads, but their Western observers were not far behind them, expertly retooling their own Cold War analytic skills.

The fall of communism underlined nationalism’s disruptive potential for several reasons. First, liberation from communism was often seen in the context of demands for national independence—this was most obviously true in the Baltic states, but also for most of Eastern Europe too. Second, the old mechanisms for smoothing minorities disputes inside the Warsaw Pact, already badly worn out, no longer operated after 1989. Third, the greater ease of access to eastern Europe for Westerners meant a harsher light now shone on xenophobia and racism in the region. “The flame-thrower is the only weapon I need to win / All Gypsy adults and children we’ll exterminate,” sang a Hungarian skinhead band. “But we can kill all of them at once / When it’s done we can advertise: Gypsy-free zone.” Anti-gypsy prejudice united such foes as Slovak premier Meciar and the Hungarian politician István Csurka, as did the new passion for commemorating wartime nationalists with nasty collaborationist and anti-Semitic records like Tiso, Pavelić and Marshal Antonescu.
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On the other hand, a lot of the talk about a return to past hatreds was beside the point, part of a fashionable
fin de siècle
gloom that was not based on any serious appraisal of the overall political outlook. In fact, the international context differed dramatically from the first half of the century, when nationalism had threatened the stability of Europe. Wartime genocide, mass expulsions and population engineering had led the proportion of East Europeans with minority status to drop dramatically from the high levels of the inter-war years. Jews, Germans and Ukrainians had been wiped out, deported or expelled and their return was neither biologically nor politically possible. The German Question in consequence was now a matter of unification, not irredentism, and no one in the 1990s seriously anticipated a German
Anschluss
with Austria. Compared with the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the ethnic Germans in northern Italy and the increasingly restless subject peoples of Great Britain, Eastern Europe on the whole looked fairly peaceful. The only minority there
capable of triggering off a wider conflict was the ethnic Russians in the Baltic states, who faced discrimination and pressure to leave. Elsewhere, minorities remained a focus for prejudice and assault, an Other (to use a fashionable French term) against which the Nation might define itself, but hardly at the centre of daily political concerns. In this respect, at least, east and west Europe were coming to resemble one another.

It was, of course, the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia which set nationalism centre stage—the one case where the failure of communism had devastating consequences (and showed what Russia had escaped). Slovenia’s defection in 1991, after a few days’ desultory fighting with the rump Yugoslav Army, showed that break-up was possible in a relatively peaceful fashion. But then Slovenia had no Serb minority. Croatia and Bosnia did, and when they sought to secede from the federation, the Serbs refused to let them.

Serbia’s communist boss—Slobodan Miloševič—guaranteed his own hold on power for years longer than his former comrades elsewhere in Eastern Europe by going to war as a Serbian nationalist and Yugoslav socialist at one and the same time. When Ceaušescu had tried to play the nationalist card, he found the crowds and the army against him. Miloševič purged the army of his opponents, and tanks drove demonstrators off the streets of Belgrade. Thereafter there was little overt opposition—though much desertion, emigration and withdrawal—inside Serbia until the war reached its inglorious conclusion in 1995. Nationalism, self-obsession and the regime’s lock on the media minimized Serbian opposition to the war itself.

In Bosnia, the Serbs were clearly fighting for ethnic purity and land—in a reversion to the kinds of methods and values last employed by the Germans, in Hitler’s bid for
Lebensraum
. Ethnic cleansing was the first stage in this process, a strategy of terror designed to force non-Serbs out of their homes and push local Serbs into line. It worked brilliantly, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees within months, and eventually more than two million in all. The West tried to contain the refugee crisis without addressing its fundamental cause, and waited for a Serb victory. If this failed to come it was because ethnic cleansing itself could not guarantee military success. So long as the cities—above all Sarajevo—held out against bombardment, the Serbs’
massive superiority in artillery was not decisive, and they needed to go in for street fighting, with the heavy losses that could entail, in order to win. They shied away from this, and settled for stalemate. But time shifted the balance of forces in favour of their enemies: with American support, the Bosnians and Croats became more powerful, while Serb morale fell. In 1995 they suddenly learned a truth which had eluded the Nazis half a century earlier: it is not enough to win land, it must also be held. Ethnic cleansing had brought them too much land, and driven away the hands to make it productive.

Thus the Serb defeat in 1995 was a defeat for the idea of
apartheid
in Europe. But it was also a defeat for the West, which failed to meet the first serious challenge to liberal values after the Cold War. It was bad enough that it chose realpolitik over the protection of rights and the prevention of genocide; worse that even its realpolitik was a failure. Having declared for three years that military intervention was bound not to work, it suddenly found in the summer of 1995 that it worked all too well. Bosnian government forces had to be prevented by Western diplomatic pressure from taking the vital Serb stronghold of Banja Luka, a prize which would have guaranteed a viable Bosnian state. The outcome of the war was therefore that there were no outright victors—a recipe for continued uncertainty in the region, and a triumph for Western indecision.