Making Europe safe after communism disappears

Press, 20 November 1989, Page 12

Making Europe safe after communism disappears

The “Economist” reports on life after the upheaval

THIS US how post-Hitler Europe ends: with both a bang and a whimper. The whimper comes from Eastern Europe’s routed communists. Glum Hungarian apparatchiks clutching boxes of mementoes abandon their’ old party headquarters; Poland’s Communists get ready to follow Hungary’s Into oblivion; East Germany’s Mr Egon Krenz throws crumbs to his countrymen, thus encouraging their demand for the whole democratic loaf. In Russia Mr Mikhail Gorbachev must be close to despair about the chances of perestroika, his own attempt at the half-loaf solution. For the bang, turn your ears back westwards. Ever since 1945 the western half of Europe has been able to base its plans for its future on three comfortable assumptions, at least two of which could be about to blow up. Europe, though Europeans did not always appreciate it, has been a haven of order these past 44 years. In Asia the clash between communism and pluralism was fought out with guns, not words, in Korea and Indo-china.

In Latin America half-baked Marxists' have wrestled with cynical populists and concretebrowed generals. The hunger and violence have grown worse in Africa. Only in Europe has the armed truce of 1945 brought the blessing of stability. For East Europeans the price of that stbility has been high: a lifetime wasted under a Government you loathed. For West Europeans the stability has been marvellous.

They could get rich, and start to build a new unity, within a clearly defined zone which ended (the oddity of Greece apart) at the RiVer Elbe and the Bohemian forest. They could reckon that “the German problem,” the detonator of 1870 and 1914 and' 1939, was solved. And they could count on America as the ultimate guarantor of their peace.

This is why the right reaction to what is happening east of the Elbe and the Bohmerwald is a mixture of delight and sudden caution. It is a delight that the enforcers of dictatorship are in retreat over much of Eastern Europe. The geopoliticians can enjoy shifting flags eastward on the map; ordinary people can be happy that Poles and Hungarians, and soon probably East Germans and Czechoslovaks, at last have a chance to rebuild their lives in freedom. The caution is about what all this does to those foundations of post-1945 Europe. For the unity-builders of the European Community, the impending disappearance of the old east-west dividing line almost certainly draws a different sort of line, limiting the amount of unity they can achieve. Two East European countries, Poland and Hungary, have already renounced communism in favour of multi-party democracy and free-market economics. Two more, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, will probably soon do the same; Yugoslavia is a possible fifth.

AU' these countries want the EC to open its arms to them, and the Community should want to say yes. These countries’ economies are not yet ready for full Community membership, so they may. first have to pause at a halfway-house.

But they cannot be denied full membership for ever. Shapers of Europe’s future constitution, note what this means.

The Community can and should complete the organising of its post-1992 single market, including the necessary mechanism for keeping exchange rates steady: the extra wealth the single market offers is one reason East Europeans are so keen to turn westwards. The European Parliament can be strengthened a bit, to check the Brussels commission.

But the foreign policy of the Community can develop only to, the extent that it keeps the door open to would-be new members — which means leaving out defence, and many other big subjects. This is because up to half a' dozen of the members of an ? expanded Community, not just solitary Ireland, will want to be neutral between Russia and the West Any idea of a common military policy would be folly, unless the Community actually wants to ram a fist under Russia’s nose. This fits ill with the idea of a fully federal Europe. France and Italy like that idea because they believe a tighly organised Community would stop Germany pursuing its own interests. They have probably got that the wrong way round: the righter the links, the likelier they are to be pulled, along behind Germany. But the argument is now academic. A federal Europe might have been imaginable in 1988. After 1989, the likelier prospect is of a Europe of still-distinct

nations which want to live together under a discipline of blurred sovereignty, the better to achieve economic openness. This is where the second foundation'Of post-1945 Europe starts to wobble. The way things are going, by the early 1990 s one of those still-distinct nations could be a reunited Germany. It would have nearly 80 million people, and a GDP almost as big as Britain’s and France’s combined, plus the biggest army in Europe , outside Russia. This will make most other Europeans gulp, even if that greater Germany stays both non-nuclear and inside all the institutions of the West. If Germany leaves N.A.T.O. in order to win reunion —and this may now be-all Mr Gorbachev can hope to rescue from Russia’s East European disaster — it* will be impossible to pretend' that nothing has changed; A . neutralised Germany would not be a demilitarised one. The powermap would have been dramatically redrawn. Of course, if a majority of both East and West Germans say they want reunion, it is nobody else’s business to say they cannot have it It is also wrong to exaggerate the likely consequences. A reunited Germany would not produce another Bismarck, becuse Europe’s nationalisms have been tempered by what Europe has done to itself in the past 120 years;' still less would it produce another Hitler. But it would produce a revised version of a previously destructive bal-ance-of-power system, and this

will give other Europeans pause.

So will the matter of size. One big Germany could out-argue and out-manoeuvre the mere Britains and Frances and Italys on any issue where its interests differed from theirs.

A single Germany is not inevitable. It may turn out that most people in a decommunised East Germany would like to keep a separate flavour of their own, as Austria and German-speaking Switzerland do. Many people in West Germany, on both Left and Right, certainly see the risks in reuniflcation.

For other Europeans to say to Germany, “Thou shalt not!” is impermissible, and gives more votes to the reunifiers. “How much better if you didn’t” might still work. * ,

To help it work, one voice in this murmured chorus must be the* voice of a continuing America-in-Europe. A visible American presence in Europe has been the third great assumption of the past 40 years, arguably the most important of them all, and the one it is essential to keepalive. One sort of American presence will certainly continue, regardless of what the politicians decide. For most Europeans America is still the richest source of tunes to fit into your Walkman, of novel ideas about running your business, of bright ways to make daily life a bit more fun.

At that level America and Europe are now inextricably entangled. The American economic presence in Europe is also

strong, and will survive the challenge of the pbst-1992 single market.

The part of the American presence that is in danger of disappearing, and must not disappear until and unless Europe establishes a rock-solid new stability for itself, is a sufficient number of Americans in uniform. The Americans are as delighted as everybody. else that Mr Gorbachev may soon be ready to . sign a disarmament deal that will cut all the armies in Europe. But some of them are tempted by the current chaos in the Warsaw Pact — and by/the nagging of West German /neo-’ pacifists — to take all the boys home.

That would be a disaster. A continuing American armed presence (maybe half the size of today’s)® needed lest some furious Russian * general over; throws Mr Gorbachev, and the West’s defences have to be built up all over again; but not just for that. The American presence Is ’also a great force for steadiness at a time when Europeans are filled with a curious mixture of exhilaration and unease about their future.

Years like 1989 do not happen often, and when they do history usually discovers they were not as simple as they seemed at the time. Give three cheers that the smear of communism is being wiped away from much of Europe. Then make sure the repainting job is done in a way that lasts. \ <