Well before the collapse of the USSR, it was clear that very little of the world would remain wholly unaffected by what was happening in Europe. Immediately, the end of the Cold War reawoke old questions of identity throughout the east of the continent as well as presenting new ones. Peoples began to see themselves and others afresh in the light of what soon turned out to be for some a chilly dawn; some nightmares had blown away, but only to reveal troubled landscapes. Fundamental questions could again be asked, and that was disturbing. Once again new determining circumstances were emerging in world history.
Almost incidentally, not only had one half of Europe’s security arrangements disappeared with the Warsaw Pact, but the other half, NATO, had also been subtly changed. The collapse of the USSR, the major potential opponent, had deprived the alliance not only of its main role, but also of the pressure that had shaped it. Like a blancmange in a warm room, it began to sag a little. Even if, as some already thought, a revived Russia were to emerge as a new threat at some future date, the disappearance of the ideological struggle would mean that potential opponents would have to think in new ways about it. There were soon ex-communist countries seeking to join NATO. In 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic would all join up, though no former part of the USSR seemed likely to follow them (the Baltic republics were those about which the Russians went on showing most concern).
In the 1990s, the American government appeared to begin to look to NATO more willingly as a machine for dealing with new European problems, notably in the former Yugoslavia; so the alliance acquired a new purpose. In south-eastern Europe, the fate of peoples seemed for the first time in the century entirely and evidently in their own hands. Like the old dynastic empires or the extemporizations of the German and Italian dictators in the Second World War, the communist scaffolding of the region had now collapsed. As much buried history re-emerged and more was remembered or invented, what appeared was often somewhat discouraging. Slovaks felt restive about their inclusion in Czechoslovakia, but Slovakia itself had a larger Hungarian component in its population than did Romania. Yet Hungarians could now agonize more openly over the treatment of Magyars in Romanian Transylvania. Above all, old issues escalated rapidly into new violence and crisis in the former Yugoslavia. Its republics were soon quarrelling with one another over the treatment of their minorities. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ began in Croatia and Bosnia and conflict also broke out between Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia, foreshadowing, many feared, a further spread of ethnic and communitarian violence. Old stereotypes were resurrected and exploited. Bosnian Serbs spoke of their opponents as ‘Turks’, and while Catholic Croatian clerics fanned the flames of conflict with the Orthodox Serbs, so there were Orthodox clergy in Serbia happy to denounce Bosnia’s troubles as consequences of a supposed renewal of Islamic advance in Europe. The government of the Serbian republic (the only part of the former Yugoslavia where the pre-1989 communist rulers were still in power ten years later) was in fact keen to use the opportunity of a final solution to the problems of its mixed ethnic areas. The former Yugoslav army had been Serb-dominated and this gave it an initial advantage in choosing to fight to preserve the federation. Yet federal Yugoslavia was soon reduced merely to Serbia and Montenegro. The preservation of its old shape had ceased to be conceivable and a battle for the spoils was soon under way.
Thus, 1989-91 left millions of east Europeans facing grave problems and difficulties. Agreement was lacking on legitimating principles and ideas. Insofar as the region had possessed ‘modernizing’ elites, these, whether effective or not, were usually to be found in the old communist hierarchies. Unavoidably, in some countries professionals, managers and experts whose careers had been made within the communist structures continued to govern simply because there was no one to replace them. Another problem was the fickleness of populations now voting freely as the immediate euphoria of political revolution ebbed. There was nostalgia for the apparent security of the old days. As people cast about for a new basis for the legitimacy of the state, the only plausible candidate often seemed to be the nationalism that had so often bedevilled past politics, sometimes for centuries. Old tribalisms had quickly resurfaced and imaginary histories were soon turning out to matter more than what had actually happened in the past.
Some ancient confrontations had, tragically, been brought to an end by the Second World War. In the most horrifying and greatest instance, the Holocaust, as people had come to call the Nazis’ attempt to extirpate the Jewish people, had ended the story of eastern Europe as the centre of the world Jewry. In 1901 three-quarters of the world’s Jews had lived there, mostly in the Russian empire. In those once Yiddish-speaking areas, only a little more than 10 per cent of Jews now live. Nearly half of the world’s Jews are now to be found in English-speaking countries, and another 30 per cent of them in Israel. In eastern Europe, communist parties anxious to exploit traditional popular anti-Semitism (not least in the Soviet Union) had encouraged emigration by harrying and judicial persecution. In a few countries this virtually eliminated what was left in 1945 of the Jewish population as a significant demographic element. Two hundred thousand Polish Jews surviving in 1945 had soon found themselves again victims of traditional pogrom and harassment and by 1990 those who had not emigrated numbered a mere 6,000. The heart of the old eastern European Jewry had gone.
In some western European countries, too, minorities showed a new recalcitrance. Basque separatists terrorized Spain. Walloons and Flemings nagged at one another in Belgium. Northern Ireland was probably the most striking instance. There, Unionist and nationalist feeling continued throughout the 1990s to block the road to settlement. Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985 had acknowledged the Irish Republic’s right to a role in discussion of the future of Ulster and set up new machinery to provide for it. One ceasefire ended tragically after a little less than eighteen months but when a Labour government came to power at Westminster in 1997, it proved willing to take the important symbolic step of opening direct negotiations with Sinn Fein, the political movement that masked the terrorists of the IRA. Before the end of that year Sinn Fein representatives had been received by the British prime minister in London and in 1998, in cooperation with the Irish government, British initiatives succeeded, against the odds, in winning the acquiescence of the official leaders of Sinn Fein and of the Ulster Unionists in putting to an all-Ireland referendum proposals that went further than ever before in institutionalizing both safeguards for the nationalist minority in the north and the historic tie of the north with the United Kingdom. This, of course, implied fundamental change in what the sovereignty of the Crown was to mean in the future (and incidentally went much further than the measures of devolution the British government was contemporaneously introducing in Scotland and Wales). Though the detail was potentially still very divisive, the principles of the new arrangements met with popular approval on both sides of the border. There was every prospect, though, that the lunatic fringe on both sides of the nationalist-unionist divide would persist in trying to wreck any progress towards peace on the ground. They could still exploit, too, the old resentments and hatreds of sectarian communities bitterly divided from one another, whose members shunned employment or even shopping in each other’s tribal areas.