XII

DIVISA ET INDIVISA

Part II

Europe Divided and Undivided, 1945–1991

East-West Relations: The Cold War in Europe, 1948–1989

From start to finish, the Cold War was focused on Europe. Its dynamic developed from the collapse of the ‘Great Triangle’ of European Powers, which had left the victorious Western Allies face to face with a victorious Soviet Union (see p. 1312). It grew from the inability of the wartime allies to reach agreement on the independence of Poland, on the future of Germany, and on the division of Europe as a whole. There can be some debate as to when exactly it began; but it came to a head through the American commitment to Europe, as expressed in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan of 1947, and through subsequent expressions of Soviet disapproval. It was clearly in progress during the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948–9 which led to the formation of NATO; and it did not end until the Iron Curtain in Europe was breached 40 years later. None the less, it is important to stress that the Cold War soon overreached its European focus. There was always an Asian component; and there was a strong inner logic resulting from Soviet-American rivalry which turned it into a truly global confrontation.

The Asian component developed over disagreements parallel to those that occurred in Europe. In this case the Soviet Union entered the scene in August 1945, when the Soviet army was thrown into the final campaign of the Pacific War against Japan. The Yalta Agreement had made provision for the Soviets to occupy the Kurile Islands as the price for Stalin’s participation. But no one at Yalta had foreseen the sudden and total collapse of Japan, brought about by the US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the event, the Soviets were given an altogether unexpected bonus. They rapidly occupied Manchuria, whence they carried off 600,000 men of the Kwantung army into the Siberian camps. In addition to the main Kurile chain, they seized four northern Japanese islands, hitherto regarded as part of Hokkaido, renamed them the ‘Lesser Kuriles’, and turned the Sea of Okhotsk into a strategic Soviet lake. What is more, they openly championed the cause of communist revolutionaries in China and Korea, to which they now had direct access. In China, they were taking sides against America’s longstanding client, Chiang Kai-shek, who had been part of the Grand Alliance throughout the war with Japan. By the time that Mao Zedong entered Beijing in 1949, a ‘Bamboo Curtain’ was rising in the Far East to match the Iron Curtain in Europe.

The globalization of the Cold War took place in the course of the 1950s. In its geopolitical aspect, this was the natural outcome of a confrontation that pitted one power which dominated the land mass of Eurasia against another which could project land, sea, and air forces to all parts of the world. In its political, economic, and ideological aspects it reflected the rivalry of one bloc with pretensions to the worldwide patronage of communist-led revolution and another wedded to democracy, capitalism, and free trade. It was fuelled by the contemporary process of decolonization, which left a string of unstable, ex-colonial countries open to wars by proxy, and where, as in the oil-rich Middle East, valuable resources presented irresistible temptations. It was finalized in the late 1950s by the invention of ICBMs, which put the whole earth within the range of constant surveillance and instant nuclear attack. Henceforth, the cities of the Russian and American heartlands found themselves in the front line no less than Taiwan or Berlin.

In the military field, the Cold War passed through several distinct phases. In the 1950s, when the USA held a decisive lead both in its nuclear arsenal and in the means of airborne delivery, the Soviets could not risk a major clash. At the Moscow meeting in January 1951, whilst the Americans were tied down in Korea, the leaders of the Soviet bloc were apparently given orders by Stalin to prepare for the Third World War. But the plans were never put into effect.28 First Britain (1952) then France (1960) developed independent nuclear capacity; and NATO professed a doctrine of ‘overwhelming retaliation’. Two communist proxy wars were fought—one against an American-led UN force in Korea in 1950–1, the other in Indo-China, where defeated French troops gave way to the Americans in 1954. Europe, though bristling with weapons in two armed camps, did not erupt.

In the late 1950s the game changed. Thanks to the Sputnik (1958) and the U2 incident (1960),the Kremlin was able to demonstrate that its rocketry had more than closed the technological gap. The superpowers poured vast resources into the ‘Space Race’ and into the deployment of earth satellites and ICBMs. Although the USA won the competition to put a man on the moon, there was no certainty where the true military advantage lay. The USSR seemed to be building a remorseless superiority in nuclear, conventional, and naval forces. But the advent of ‘tactical’ and later of ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons, coupled with NATO’s new doctrine of ‘flexible response’, rendered any purely quantitative calculations redundant. Pressure on the European theatre was somewhat relieved by the knowledge that the main exchange of ICBMs, if it happened, would be directed over the North Pole. Stalemate was reached at maximal levels of military spending. The offensive doctrines adopted by the Warsaw Pact were not put into practice; the vastly expanded Soviet Fleet was not put to the test; massive rearmament proceeded alongside repeated and much feebler attempts at disarmament. But once again the European conflict stayed cold.

In the 1980s another turn of the screw was reached with the deployment of a more deadly generation of weapons, notably Soviet SS-20S, and American Pershing 2 and Cruise missiles. In 1983 President Reagan’s announcement of the multi-billion-dollar Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), commonly known as ‘Star Wars’—a space-based anti-ICBM defence system—openly challenged Moscow to a race that simply could not be run. Each side possessed the kilotonnes to destroy the planet many times over; neither side could possibly use them. Advocates of the nuclear deterrent believed strongly that their point was being made. Their opponents—who could only speak fieely in the West—believed with equal passion that the military planners, like Dr Strangelove, had gone mad. But the Pax atomica held.

With some slight delay, the political rhythms of the Cold War usually followed military developments. Tensions were highest in the late 1950s, since both sides could pursue their cause with convictions unsullied by failure. They reached their peak in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In the 1960s, despite numerous alarms, both sides lost their expectations of a simple victory. International communism was all but paralysed by the Sino-Soviet split which in 1969 came close to a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Beijing; the mighty USA was immensely disheartened by its inability to coerce the diminutive state of Vietnam; and NATO was profoundly disrupted by de Gaulle. In the 1970s, therefore, both Soviets and Americans felt sufficiently contrite to give greater emphasis to the process that was cleverly labelled détente. The initial Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) at Vienna were soon joined by political discussions leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. In the 1980s tensions rose again after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979)—the Kremlin’s Vietnam—and the declaration of martial law in Poland (1981). At all stages, in fact, one could observe a subtle mixture of threats and relaxations. There were early moments of détente in the coldest years of confrontation, and frigid intervals in the so-called era of détente. Certainly in Europe, where no open warfare occurred in four decades, it is probably less accurate to talk of the Cold War than, in a French commentator’s phrase, of the ‘Hot Peace’. It was a fever which rose and fell many times.

Economic relations could never reach their potential levels. The West was reluctant to sell advanced technology of military value. The American COCOM list grew to contain many thousands of forbidden commercial items. The East, for its part, believed strongly in economic self-sufficiency, preferring backwardness to dependence on capitalist imports. By the late 1970s Soviet harvest failures regularly caused panic purchases of vast quantities of US grain, whilst 50 per cent of Soviet oil production was earmarked for loss-making trade within the CMEA.

Cultural relations remained conservative in scale and content. Tours by the Bolshoi Ballet and the Red Army Choir, or the Mazowsze folk dance ensemble, were exchanged for visits by various western orchestras or the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Soviet bloc countries set great store by the Olympic Games, where their state-sponsored athletes performed very well. Sport was used as a political instrument, most openly by the US boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, and Soviet retaliation at Los Angeles in 1984.

Diplomatic relations were beset by obstacles of all sorts. The Security Council of the UN was paralysed for 40 years, most frequently by the Soviet veto. The war of spies reached grotesque proportions: Western intelligence was penetrated at the highest levels by Soviet recruits in Britain, and by East German agents in Bonn. In the 1950s, in the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, reasonable fears about the activities of communist agents in the USA caused a totally unreasonable witch-hunt. Successive American embassies in Moscow were so riddled with bugging devices that they had to be abandoned. There was no trust.

The origins of détente go right back to the start of the Cold War. Stalin once offered to permit the reunification of Germany in return for American disengagement. At the Geneva meeting in 1955 when President Eisenhower met Stalin’s successors, the West was surprised again by far-reaching Soviet proposals for disarmament. 1959 saw Khrushchev at Camp David, and Macmillan, in Cossack hat, in Moscow. But the developing dialogue was withered by the U2 incident, by the second Berlin crisis, and, most severely, by the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The U2 was a high-altitude American spy-plane, supposedly immune to attack. In 1960 a flight from Turkey was shot down over the Volga. Eisenhower was foolish enough to deny the existence of all such operations until Khrushchev produced the pilot and the damning evidence of his duties.

The Berlin crisis of 1961 had been brewing for years. The stream of refugees from East to West was gathering pace. Ten thousand crossed in the last week of July 1961 alone. The Kremlin had repeatedly threatened to sign a unilateral treaty with the DDR, and to terminate the rights of four-power occupation. The Soviets held overwhelming local military superiority. But the West made no move. Then, on 13 August 1961, the Wall was built. The young President Kennedy was being tested as never before. Privately relieved that the Wall had lessened the chances of a second Berlin blockade, he did not react militarily; instead, he staged a propaganda coup. Standing beside the Wall, he shouted defiantly in his inimitable Boston drawl, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.*

The Cuban crisis of the following October brought the Cold War to the brink. Kennedy had come out of the Berlin crisis, and his earlier meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, convinced of his failure to impress Moscow with America’s determination. Next time, he had to give proof of firmness. He increased US commitments to South Vietnam. When aerial photography revealed the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuban silos only 90 miles off the coast of Florida, he decided that the Kremlin must be forced to back down. The only question was how. Washington rejected a surgical air strike in favour of putting Cuba into quarantine. For a week the world held its breath; then the Soviet missiles were withdrawn. The USA undertook to withdraw its own missiles from Turkey, and refrain from invading Cuba.29

Disarmament talks dragged on for decades. The Geneva offer foundered over Soviet refusals to allow inspection. In 1963 the Moscow Agreement banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, but only after enormous damage had been caused to the global environment. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 was designed to maintain the monopoly of the five existing nuclear powers and, in particular, to exclude China. It failed on all counts, except as a temporary brake. The first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) reached an interim conclusion in 1972 after four years. SALT II ground along until blocked by the US Congress in 1980. The further stage of trying to negotiate an absolute reduction in the size of military arsenals, as opposed to limiting their rate of increase, proceeded from the mid-1970s onwards. Talks on Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR), concerning conventional armaments, were located in Vienna for fifteen years. The Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), concerning nuclear weapons, were located in Madrid from 1982. Thirty years of intergovernmental talking proved as impotent as the series of popular campaigns against nuclear weapons which attracted considerable support in the West in the early 1960s, and again in the early 1980s.

Direct European involvement in Cold War diplomacy inevitably took second place to the main US-Soviet confrontation. But it gradually asserted itself from the mid-1950s onwards. In 1957, with Soviet agreement, Poland presented the UN with the Rapacki Plan for a nuclear-free zone in central Europe, and in 1960 the Gomułka Plan for a nuclear freeze in the same area. Nothing much ensued. In 1965 the Polish Catholic bishops published an open letter to their counterparts in Germany, stating their readiness ‘to forgive and to be forgiven’. This courageous initiative, denounced as traitorous by the communist governments, pointed a clear way forward through the moral fog of fear and hatred.

Soviet policy in Eastern Europe played heavily on the German bogey, and communist propaganda made huge efforts to keep wartime germanophobia alive. In West Germany the strident voice of the expellees carried considerable weight with Christian Democrat governments; and the unregulated fate of their Eastern homelands only served to keep passions simmering. The prevailing political climate only began to thaw in the late 1960s, largely through the good offices of the German Churches, who thereby prepared the way for the Ostpolitik of Chancellor Willy Brandt.

The Ostpolitik or ‘Eastern Policy’, launched in 1969, was based on consistent short-term, mid-term, and long-term objectives. In the immediate situation, Brandt sought to break the deadlock in East-West relations which had set in after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ever since the full recognition of the Federal Republic, West Germany had pursued the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, refusing to deal with any government (except the USSR) which dealt with the DDR. The result had been almost total isolation from all of Germany’s Eastern neighbours. After breaking the ice, Brandt then sought to establish a modus vivendi with the DDR, and with other members of the Soviet bloc. Over 10,20, or perhaps 30 years, he hoped that growing intercourse between Western and Eastern Germany would soften the regime in East Berlin, and lead to eventual reconciliation. On the first two scores the Ostpolitik undoubtedly gained its objectives. On the third it had the opposite effect from that intended. Indeed, it is not certain that Brandt ever really expected Germany to be reunited. During his retirement, he admitted: ‘Reunification is the lie of German political life.’

None the less, Willy Brandt’s appearance on the international scene had a very considerable impact. Eastern Europe had not been conditioned to the idea of a German Chancellor who was a socialist with manifestly peaceful intentions. Born the illegitimate son of a Lübeck salesgirl, Brandt (Herbert Frahm, 1913–92) overcame every possible social disadvantage. Having lived in Norway during the war, and fought the Nazis, he had impeccable democratic credentials. What is more, as the Mayor of West Berlin from 1957 to 1963, he had gained a reputation for staunch resistance to communism. When he appeared in Moscow in August 1970, therefore, 25 years after the defeat of the Wehrmacht, he made a great impression. That December in Poland, where he fell to his knees before the memorial to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, he made an emotional gesture that was long remembered. In East Berlin, his overtures could not be resisted. Within three years, he had forged a German-Soviet Treaty of Co-operation (1970), a German-Polish Treaty (1970) which drew the sting of Germany’s lost territories, and in 1973 a treaty of mutual recognition with the DDR. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were not breached; indeed, they were given a new lease of life. The German problem had not been solved; but it had been fixed in a stable framework of minimal intercourse. Brandt’s conservative opponents accused him of giving away Germany’s birthright. ‘One cannot give away something which has already been gambled away,’ was his reply.

Historians will always debate whether West Germany’s Ostpolitik served to prolong the division of Europe or whether, through humiliating compromise, it set the course which eventually led to reunification. The two interpretations are not, in fact, exclusive. It certainly set the tone for the next decade. By ending the boycott of the DDR, it involved the Federal Government in a great deal of expense with no visible return, and a large number of shady operations—such as the scandalous trade in political prisoners, which East Berlin sold off for royal ransoms. By defusing the threat-laden atmosphere of the late 1960s, it opened the way for ‘the era of détente’.

Détente is a diplomatic term of the choicest ambiguity. For those who so wish, it can mean ‘relaxation’ or ‘a mild spell of weather’. It is also the French word for the trigger of a gun. In the context of the 1970s it obviously signified the release of pressure; but whether that release was to have a benign or a deadly effect was entirely open to conjecture.

Apart from Bonn’s Ostpolitik and the progress of SALT I, an important spur to détente must be found in distant China. In 1972 the American President, Richard Nixon, visited the ageing Chairman Mao, thereby ‘playing the China card’. The bipolar structure of the Cold War was transformed into a new, triangular configuration made up of the Soviet bloc, China, and the West. The Soviet leaders, resigned to an uneasy stalemate with Beijing, felt constrained to stabilize their position in Europe. After all, 30 years after the triumph of Stalingrad the Soviet Union was still having to live without a formal settlement on its Western flank. Discussions started in 1970 and culminated in the Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which ran on from 1973 to 1975.

From the Soviet viewpoint, the Helsinki Final Act took the place of the German Peace Treaty that never was. From the Western viewpoint, it marked a recognition that Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe could not be ended by force, and a decision to make the Soviets buy stability at a high political price. Basket One of the negotiations, on security issues, ended with an agreement to guarantee Europe’s existing frontiers, except for peaceful changes by mutual consent. Basket Two contained measures for extending economic co-operation. Basket Three contained an agreement to promote a wide range of cultural and communication projects, and to guarantee human contacts. This was the political price-tag. From the day that the Final Act was signed in 1975, the regimes of the East had to choose between respecting their citizens’ rights or being exposed for breaking their solemn undertakings.

The Helsinki Final Act was criticized by many as a capitulation to the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. At the same time, it gave formal encouragement to political dissent throughout the Soviet bloc. In Poland, it gave an early boost to KOR, the predecessor of Solidarity; in Czechoslovakia, to the Charter 77 group led by Václav Havel; and in the Soviet Union, to numerous ‘Helsinki Watch Committees’. It was totally ignored by Andropov’s KGB; but it was taken very seriously by the American administration of President Carter, who, in view of constant Soviet violations, saw no reason to disengage from Europe.

At the end of the 1970s three new faces appeared in the West. In 1978 a Slavonic Pope ascended the throne of St Peter, endowed with a vision of reuniting Christian Europe. In 1979 a woman of great fortitude moved into 10 Downing Street. She was soon to be dubbed, by the Kremlin, ‘the Iron Lady’. In 1980 a retired film actor entered the Oval Office of the White House. The ‘Great Communicator’ was soon to call the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’. These three personalities breathed a new spirit into East-West relations. All three opposed communism on moral principle; all three were hugely popular in Eastern Europe—more so than in the West; all three looked unhappy with the accommodations of the previous decades. Reagan and Thatcher honed the twin-track policy of NATO, which held out the palm of peace whilst strengthening its military shield.

By the 1980s, hard experience had shown that the West had been suffering from three persistent illusions. It had been the vogue among political scientists to talk of ‘convergence’—the idea that time would draw the political and economic systems of East and West closer together. This was pure make-believe. The gap was widening with every day that passed. It had also been judged appropriate to ‘differentiate’ between communist regimes according to their degree of subservience to Moscow. This policy had given the greatest favours to the most repressive of regimes, like that of Ceausescu. Détente had fostered a hypothesis that has been called ‘ornithological’. The conduct of the communists, it was argued, was dependent on the good conduct of the West. Beastly comments in Western capitals would only encourage the ‘hawks’; kindness would encourage the ‘doves’. In practice, no such pattern emerged. No one had been subjected to such harsh words as Jaruzelski, yet he turned to reform. No one was offered so many sweeteners as Honecker—and Honecker remained as hawkish as ever. The fact is, the communists did not respond to kindness. As one of the earliest critics of détente had argued in his Theses on Hope and Hopelessness, raising the tension of East-West relations was a dangerous ploy; but it was the only strategy which held out a promise of ultimate success.30

In the midst of these divided counsels there appeared a new star in the East. In March 1985 Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev (b. 1931) emerged as the fourth General Secretary of the CPSU in three years. He was chosen by the Party apparatus, and had no democratic credentials. Yet, as a person, he was completely different; and he was the first Soviet leader to be untainted by a Stalinist record. He was affable, quick-witted, and spoke without notes. Here at last was a man, as Mrs Thatcher was quick to announce, ‘with whom we can do business’.

Gorbachev’s early months in office were taken up by reshufflings of the Politburo, by the ritual denunciation of previous leaders, and by an ominous campaign against corruption. But the style had obviously changed. The world waited to see if the content would change with it. Foreign policy offered a Soviet leader the most room for manoeuvre. It was reasonable to assume, if Gorbachev moved, that he would first make a move on East-West relations.

The initial meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan were not specially productive. The newcomer was taking the old ‘Star Warrior’s’ measure. But the burden of military spending was no secret; long preparations for a treaty on the reduction of Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) preceded the summit scheduled at Reykjavík, Iceland, for December 1987. Suddenly, in the middle of the talks at Reykjavík, Gorbachev struck without warning. He proposed a sensational 50 per cent cut in all nuclear weapons. Reagan reeled, recoiled, and regretted. The INF was signed; but the ultra-cautious, ultra-suspicious encounters of the past were over. This General Secretary seemed intent on stopping the Cold War in its tracks.

Shortly afterwards, an extraordinary incident served to puncture the balloon of East-West tensions. Air defence had been the burning military issue of the decade: it was the issue behind Cruise, and behind Star Wars itself, and it was costing multi-billions. Each side was terrified that the missiles and bombers of the other would find their target without response. The Soviet Union had attracted enormous opprobrium for building an unauthorized anti-IBM radar station at Krasnoyarsk, and for shooting down a South Korean passenger flight, KAL 007, which had strayed into Soviet air space. Yet all the expert anxieties of the world’s military planners were cut down to size by the prank of a German schoolboy. On 28 May 1987,19-year-old Matthias Rust piloted a tiny private monoplane up the Baltic from Hamburg, crossed the Soviet frontier in Latvia, flew at treetop level under the most concentrated air defences in the world, and landed on the cobblestones near Moscow’s Red Square. Single-handed, he made the whole Cold War look ridiculous.

By the time of the Malta Summit in December 1989, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev felt free to announce that the Cold War had ended.

Integration and Disintegration, 1985–1991

For two or three years after Gorbachev’s appearance, the main contours of Europe’s political landscape remained untouched. In Western Europe the American presence was still a determining factor; and the horizons of the EEC were still confined to the economic sphere. In Eastern Europe people were still being shot for trying to cross the Iron Curtain. All the old immovables still held office—Honecker, Husák, Kádár, Ceausescu, Zhivkov, Hoxha. The ‘Other Europe’ was still ‘the last colonial empire in existence’.31 Even Gorbachev maintained a granite exterior. In November 1987 he presided over the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution in traditional style. As late as May 1988 he was promoting the Orthodox millennium in Kiev in a spirit of Russian nationalism of which Stalin himself would have approved.

Yet Europe, both East and West, was fast approaching the brink of unforeseen transformations. As the clouds of the Cold War lifted, new, exciting vistas could be glimpsed on many fronts. Within two years of Gorbachev’s disarmament offensive at Reykjavík, the Soviet Union had relinquished its grip on its satellites. Within three years, political union was moving up the agenda in Western Europe. Within four years, the Soviet Union itself evaporated. As Western Europe integrated, Eastern Europe disintegrated.

No single individual, or individuals, can claim the credit for upheavals on such a scale. But two men found themselves promoted to positions at the centre of the swirling tides. One was Gorbachev; the other was the new President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors. Their enemies would say that both lacked a sense of realism—the reformer in pursuit of the unreformable, the integrator in charge of the unintegratable.

Jacques Delors (b. 1925), formerly French Finance Minister, presented the outward appearance of an archetypal technocrat. Born in Paris, he was at once a practising Catholic and a socialist, but had never visited the USA. But he was also a man with a mission, a true disciple of Monnet and Schuman, whose wider vision had lain dormant for 30 years. His opponents called him a Euro-fundamentalist. ‘Europe will not be built at a stroke or according to a single plan,’ Schuman had once remarked; ‘it will be built through concrete achievements.’ This summed up the Delors approach exactly. The principal instrument for his ambitions was the Single European Act (SEA). Two terms of office, 1985–9 and 1989–92, would be sufficient to see it through from conception to realization.

In the formal sense, the Single European Act could be regarded as nothing more than the contents of its text—an elaborate programme for the total abolition of barriers to trade and mobility within the EEC. As presented in 1985 and adopted by member states in 1986, its 282 chapters set out a long list of humdrum measures which would lead to a single unified market of 320 million customers by the end of 1992. It envisaged the removal of internal frontiers, free business competition, the standardization of consumer protection, the equalization of living standards, the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, the harmonization of VAT and other indirect taxes, and unified guidelines for television, broadcasting, and telecommunications. Article 148 introduced the principle of qualified majority voting in the executive Council of Ministers. Members’ votes were to be weighted in the ratio of West Germany, France, Italy, and Britain (10 each), Spain (8), Belgium, Netherlands, Greece, Portugal (5 each), Denmark and Ireland (3 each), and Luxemburg (2). An effective majority was to require 54 of the 72 votes, or 75 per cent.

However, it was not hard to foresee that the SEA could be used as the Trojan Horse for more comprehensive plans. Once launched, there was every opportunity to argue that the single market could not be made viable without the abolition of still more barriers. This is indeed what happened: a chain reaction of demands set in for further financial, political, legal, and social integration. After two decades of very modest advance, the tempo of the EEC was quickening: the catch-word in Brussels was ‘ça bouge’ (it’s moving). In 1987, as a sign of the times, the Community officially adopted the flag of the Council of Europe. Twelve golden stars on a deep blue ground no longer symbolized the starry ideals of Strasbourg. They now stood for the twelve member states in an expandable circle of perfect union.

The European Commission issued a growing flood of directives. Taken separately, these directives often looked petty. One concerning the obligatory dimensions of the European condom (whose size the Italian Government apparently sought to reduce) was not the sole butt of ribaldry. Taken together, they formed an avalanche moving in a consistent direction. After the Council’s acceptance of the free movement of capital, in June 1988 the Commission issued a directive for reviving the process of Economic and Monetary Union.

When the Commission’s intentions became apparent, its critics pressed the alarm button. Margaret Thatcher had accepted ‘Project 1992’ with reluctance. In a speech to the College of Europe in Bruges on 20 September 1988, she now attacked the prospect of a ‘European superstate’, and of ‘an identikit European personality’ with passion. On another occasion her strident protests of ‘No! No! No!’ recalled de Gaulle’s performances 20 years before. She won the sympathy both of the ‘Little Englanders’ and of conservative Americans who feared the growth of an anti-American ‘Fortress Europe’. But she misjudged the mood of her own Party, which removed her in a ‘Cabinet Coup’ in November 1990.

At this point the tide seemed to be turning fast in the Commission’s favour. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc was transforming the political and economic landscape. German reunification led to unease (not least in Germany itself) about Germany’s disproportionate influence. With no common policy, there was a danger that Europe as a whole would begin to drift.

In this climate, yet another wave of initiatives swept the Community. A Belgian memorandum of March 1990 set out the fourfold objectives of Subsidiarity, Democracy, Efficiency, and Coherence. A month later, a Franco-German letter raised the issues of common foreign, security, justice, and police policies. At that year’s Madrid summit, Delors spoke of ‘an embryo European Government’ within five years. The further enlargement of the Community, and the strengthening both of the European Parliament and of European security, all reached the agenda. Enlargement plans were directed at several categories of entrant. By 1991 the Community was proposing to admit the remaining EFTA countries to the Common Market (though not yet to full membership), to grant associate status to three post-communist states, and to finalize the admission of Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Norway within three years. Applications for full or associate status were pending from a number of extra-European states such as Turkey and Israel. The Twelve stood fair to become the Twenty or even the Thirty.

One reason why the member states welcomed the Commission’s initiative lay in their understanding of the principle of subsidiarity. This principle, borrowed from the practices of Catholic Canon Law, stated that the central organs of the Community should only be concerned with the most essential areas of policy, leaving everything else to ‘subsidiary levels of government’. National governments were eager to insist that everything else was going to be left to them. But subsidiarity, if extended, could also be used to link Brussels directly with regional or local authorities, and to bypass the national level of government. Definitions were urgently required.

The more rigorous advocates of political union made no secret of their dislike of the nation-state. In addition to all its historic sins, the nation-state was now seen to be ‘too small to cope with the big issues, and too big to cope with the small ones’. There was some reason to fear that the Community might be turned, like the UN, into a club of governments. It was certainly consistent to argue that European democracy could not progress until the Community’s own Parliament was upgraded against the separate assemblies of member states.

It was in this context that debates about the ‘regions’ of Europe came to the fore. Any strengthening of the central organs of the Community automatically encouraged centrifugal tendencies within the member states. The rise of Brussels was bound to be followed by the rise of Edinburgh, of Milan, of Barcelona, and of Antwerp. Regional interests could be identified both within and between member states. Within the decentralized Federal Republic of Germany, for instance, the governments of the Lander enjoyed far-reaching autonomy. France, too, once the bastion of centralism, had recently strengthened the competence of its 22 regions. (In Britain, by contrast, where regional ‘devolution’ had been rebuffed and local government diminished, the opposite trend prevailed.) The concept of ‘Euroregions’ came into being to bridge the gap between the Community and its Eastern neighbours. Italy mooted the creation of a ‘Pentagonale’ of five countries in the Adriatic hinterland; Germany, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries discussed the possibility of future regions of co-operation on either side of the Baltic.

Political uncertainties strengthened centrifugal pressures within member states. In Spain, the long-standing discontents of Catalans and Basques were controlled but not fully satisfied. In Italy, a Lombard League was reborn with the aim of ‘liberating’ the north from the burdens of theMezzogiorno. In Britain, the Scottish Nationalists were drawing their second wind: an independent Scotland looked a better risk inside the European Community than outside it.

In practice, though, everything remained to be played for. The Community was still debating whether it should be geographically enlarged before it was constitutionally ‘deepened’. Delors preferred ‘Deepen first, enlarge later’. His critics thought this a ruse for keeping the community small, Western, and controlled by the Commission. Even so, by the time that the leaders of the Twelve were due to meet at Maastricht in Limburg in December 1991, the momentum was still accelerating. To this end, the Commission was preparing to present a massive Treaty on European Union designed to amend and expand the Treaty of Rome. The 61,351 words of its text were to mark ‘a new stage in the process of European integration’. It mapped out pathways towards ‘economic and monetary union’, ‘a single and stable currency’, a ‘common citizenship’, and ‘a common foreign and security policy’.32 But it said nothing about enlargement, nothing about the transformation of Europe as a whole. Conceived by a Commission still preoccupied with purely Western concerns, Maastricht in no way prepared Europe for the avalanche that was about to break in the other half of the Continent.

Meanwhile, as Delors flourished, Gorbachev flashed, floundered, and flopped. His analysis of the Soviet crisis can be deduced from his subsequent actions. Much of it was explicitly stated in his book, Perestroika (1989). It was a sorry catalogue. Further expansion of the Soviet arsenal did not promise greater security. Military spending had reached levels which precluded any improvement in civilian living standards. Indeed, the Soviet economy could no longer sustain established patterns of expenditure. Communist planning methods had failed, the technology gap with the West was widening every day. The Party was corrupt and dispirited; the young were turning their backs on communist ideology; the citizenry had lost patience with empty promises. Soviet society was beset by apathy. Soviet foreign policy was in disarray. The war in Afghanistan, like all the other revolutionary struggles, was a bottomless drain; Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe paid no dividends. Gorbachev’s strategy lay first in defusing the Cold War climate of fear and hatred on which the old system had thrived, and then, having cleared the air, to move on to the trickier problems of internal reform. On the external front he was brilliantly successful. On visits to the USA and to West Germany, he was hailed as a conquering hero. Gorbymania raged. Notwithstanding his continuing support for traditional communist subversion in Western countries, he was eager to welcome President Reagan to Moscow.

Gorbachev’s internal policies were encapsulated in two programmatic buzzwords that went round the world. Perestroika, ‘restructuring’, envisaged the injection of market principles into economic management and of non-Party interests into political life. Glasnost’ was wrongly translated as ‘openness’. It was, in fact, a standard Russian word for ‘publicity’, the opposite of ‘silence’ or ‘taboo’. It was initially intended as a goad for the Party comrades to propose solutions to problems whose very existence had hitherto been denied. Gorbachev set out to stimulate debate; and for this, it was essential that outspoken views should not be punished. So the Party began to talk, and then the media, and eventually the public. For the first time in their lives, Soviet people found that censorship and the police were not going to be used against them. With some delay, therefore,Glasnost’ didturn into openness, in an unprecedented, unrestrained, unstoppable torrent of argument. The strongest stream within that torrent was the near-universal denunciation of communism.

Very soon, therefore, General Secretary Gorbachev found himself in an anomalous position. In spite of his liberal reputation in the West, he was a convinced communist who wanted to humanize and revitalize the system, not to dump it. He stood for ‘democratization’, not democracy. Like Brezhnev before him, he arranged to be given the office of state ‘President’—as if he were the equivalent of the American President. Yet he never faced the electorate, and never sought to relinquish his main, unelected office of Party leader. His six years of reform, therefore, could never proceed beyond half- or quarter-measures. He supplemented the central Party organs with a new Congress of hand-picked People’s Deputies; but he never granted free elections. In the economic sphere he toyed repeatedly with marketization, but rejected all the more radical plans. He refused to decollectivize agriculture or to desubsidize prices; he delayed the legalization of private property. As a result, the planned economy started to collapse in conditions where the market economy could not start to function. On the nationality issue, he encouraged the republics to state their demands, then refused to grant them.

Gorbachev was a political tactician of consummate skill, coaxing the conservatives and restraining the radicals; but he did not win any substantial degree of public confidence. In the eyes of the ordinary Russian, he was tipicheskiy komu-nisticheskiy aktivist—a typical Communist activist. Gorbachev, and his Western admirers, seemed to grasp neither the elementary features of the Soviet system which he was running nor the unavoidable consequences of Soviet history. They ignored the implications of removing coercion from a machine that had known no other driving force. They abandoned the Party’s dictatorial powers, the spine of the body politic, and were surprised when the limbs stopped responding to the brain. They underestimated the effects of decades of Party indoctrination which rendered the majority of administrators incapable of independent thought. They persisted in thinking of the Soviet Union as a natural, national entity—moya strana (‘my country’), as Gorbachev was still calling it in 1991. Above all, they misjudged the effect of Glasnost on the suppressed nationalities, for most of whom freedom of expression was equivalent to demands for independence. Tinkering was the worst possible course of action.

Much ink has still to be spilled on the causes of communism’s collapse. Political scientists inevitably put their emphasis on systemic political causes, economists on the failings of the economy. It may be that equal attention should be paid to the everyday lives of ordinary people. There are some excellent anthropological studies of East Europeans struggling with the absurdities of life under communism. It now seems that a generation which had lost the pervasive fear of the Stalinist era suddenly decided that enough was enough. As the Party bosses lost the will to enforce their authority, millions of men and women simply lost the inclination to obey. Communist society was as rotten at its grass roots as it was at the top.33 Independent culture, especially religion, played a greater role than is often supposed. Artists and believers were often the only people who could imagine a world without communism. The rest were like the inhabitants of a submerged planet in a science fiction story which the censors had failed to spot. They had been trained with great difficulty to live under water; when the water began to subside, they had forgotten how to breathe in the open air.34

Once again, in this final round, the earliest cracks in the edifice appeared in Poland. Material conditions were deteriorating; renewed strikes loomed. Desperate ministers turned to the leader of the banned Solidarity union, Walesa. It was an admission of political bankruptcy. Early in 1989 they called round-table talks to discuss power-sharing with the illegal opposition. The result was an agreement whereby Solidarity would compete for a limited number of parliamentary seats. The elections produced a sensation: Walesa’s people swept the board in every constituency where they competed. Many prominent communists were unable to get themselves re-elected, even where they were the sole candidates: voters simply crossed them off the ballot. In this most recently ‘normalized’ of ‘communist countries’, communist authority was fast approaching zero.

In June 1989 China showed the world what demons lurked beneath the skin of communists facing popular wrath. Gorbachev, on an official visit to Beijing, witnessed the protests though not the massacre. He could not fail to draw conclusions. Later, when visiting East Berlin for the 40th anniversary of the state, he let it be known that the DDR could not count on the use of Soviet troops. There was to be no Tiananmen Square in Europe. The Brezhnev Doctrine had died before anyone noticed.

In August Poland’s bewildered communists invited Solidarity to form a government under their own continuing communist constitutional and state presidency. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a devout Catholic, was accepted as Premier. He took his seat in the Council of the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet bloc was no longer a bloc. Hungary was engaged in its own roundtable talks. Regular demonstrations were being organized by the Protestant Churches of East Germany.

The decay was well advanced, therefore, when the avalanche began to slip in the autumn of that annus mirabilis. In Budapest, on 23 October, on the 33rd anniversary of the Hungarian national rising, the Hungarian People’s Republic was abolished. The Hungarian communists admitted the Opposition into the parliament, whilst turning themselves into a social democratic party. Still more astonishingly, in Berlin on 9 November 1989, East German border guards stood idly by as crowds on both sides of the Berlin Wall demolished it with gusto. The DDR government had lost the will to fight. In Prague, on the 17th, a student demo went wrong: a demonstrator was reported killed by the police. But then, a week later, Havel and Dubček appeared together on a balcony in Wenceslas Square before the adoring crowds; and a general strike soon finished off the unresisting authorities. The ‘velvet revolution’ was complete. The sharpest of foreign observers on the spot was moved to utter the much-repeated quip: ‘In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks, and in Czechoslovakia … ten days.’ Finally, over Christmas, a bloody uprising in Bucharest, where the hated Securitate defended itself to the death, culminated in the grisly execution of the Ceausescus.

Gorbachev’s role, though honourable, has been exaggerated. He was not the architect of East Europe’s freedom; he was the lock-keeper who, seeing the dam about to burst, decided to open the floodgates and to let the water flow. The dam burst in any case; but it did so without the threat of a violent catastrophe.

In 1990, the practical consequences of the previous year’s crash began to work themselves out. First the CMEA, then the Warsaw Pact, ceased to function. One after another, the ruling communist parties bowed out. Every new government declared itself for democratic politics and a free market economy. With varying degrees of haste, treaties and timetables were drawn up for the phased withdrawal of Soviet troops. In Germany, the drive for reunification accelerated. The organs of the DDR simply evaporated. The. West German parties began to campaign in the East, and a general election was won by Chancellor Kohl. In October the Federal Republic formally absorbed the citizens, territory, and assets of East Germany. The fires of freedom spread far and wide on the westerly wind. Bulgaria and Albania ignited, as did the constituent republics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Slovenia and Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Chechenia all declared their independence, as yet unrecognized. Bosnia and Macedonia, Armenia, Georgia, Moldavia, and Ukraine were poised to follow suit.

The pulverization of the Yugoslav Federation was specially vicious. Democratic elections had brought militant nationalists to the fore both in Serbia and in Croatia. In Belgrade, the Federal State Council was overtaken by the designs of a Serbian leadership stoking the passions of a ‘Greater Serbia’. When in August 1990 the Serbs of Knin in Croatia rebelled against Zagreb, the stage was set for the open wars, which erupted the following Spring. After a miserable rout in Slovenia, the Serbian-led Yugoslav army launched its assault on Croatia. Panic and intercom-munal violence rapidly gripped several parts of a disintegrating state, where ethnic minorities were as common as compact majorities. Just before his death, Tito had sighed: ‘I am the only Yugoslav.’ It was not true. But, with the genie of ethnic violence on the wing, it was all but impossible for supranational ‘Yugoslav’ policies to be asserted, [CRAVATE [ILLYRIA] [MAKEDON] [SARAJEVO]

Only in Poland did the pace slacken. The country which had been the first to loosen the communist yoke was the last to cast it off. The Mazowiecki Government gave priority to economics. In December 1990 Walesa pushed his way to the presidency after losing a quarter of the votes to a stooge of the ex-security service. Liberation from a parliament still dominated by communists took ten months more. According to the old stereotypes, the Polish Revolution was rather un-Polish.

The reunification of Germany was undertaken impetuously, not to say thoughtlessly. No one questioned the propriety of reunification. ‘What belongs together’, said Willy Brandt, ‘is now growing together.’ But when the ex-DDR became part of the Federal Republic, it was automatically joined to the European Community with no questions asked; and, contrary to the advice of the Bundesbank, the O-Mark was exchanged for the D-Mark at the rate of one for one. Little thought was given to the political and financial costs for Germany or for Germany’s neighbours. The Government in Bonn took it for granted that East Germans, being Germans, would welcome the imposition of the institutions of the Federal Republic, and that the West Germans, being Germans, would pay for it cheerfully. The prospect dawned that a united Germany might not be so interested in Europe as a disunited Germany had been. As public opinion grew more anxious and self-centred, the Federal Government felt obliged to reassert its commitment to European integration. ‘In a symbolic act of profound significance, the same Article 23 of the Basic Law under which German unification had been achieved was amended… so that the Federal Republic, instead of being open “for other parts of Germany”, was now committed to “the realisation of a united Europe”.’

Decommunization proved a thorny problem in all post-communist countries. The prevailing laws, though lacking legitimacy, could not be abandoned wholesale. The communist nomenklatura, now declaring undying devotion to democracy, could not be dismissed en masse. The ex-secret policemen could not be easily unmasked. Germany was rocked by the exposure of thousands and thousands of Stasi informers; Poland reopened investigations into political murders; in Romania, the new regime was actually opposed to decommunization. Czechoslovakia was alone in passing itsLustracni zakon, or ‘Verification Law’, which sought to exclude corrupt or criminal officials.

The legacy of Soviet-type economies was dire. Despite initial successes, such as the currency reform and the conquest of hyperinflation under Poland’s Balcerowicz Plan (1990–1), it became painfully clear that no overnight remedy was to hand. All the former members of the bloc faced decades of agonizing reorganization on the way to a viable market economy.38 In the mean time, their problems could be used to exclude them from the European Community.

Everywhere, the social attitudes engendered by communism persisted. Embryo civil societies could not rush to fill the void. Political apathy was high; petty quarrels ubiquitous; residual sympathy for communism as a buffer against unemployment and surprises was greater than many supposed. The decades ‘under water’ had conditioned the masses to disbelieve all promises and to expect the worst. The cynical idea that someone loses if someone else is gaining was all but ineradicable. No one could have guessed the dimensions of the devastation.

The fact that communism died without a fight did not ease the pain which it left behind; there was no catharsis. One participant complained of ‘the impossibility of epiphany in peacetime’. Another remarked: ‘I’m happy to have lived to see the end of this disaster; but I want to die before the beginning of the next one.’

The second stage of the avalanche, in the Soviet Union, began to slide in 1991. Economic reform had made no appreciable progress; material conditions were deteriorating. Over the winter, Gorbachev had drawn closer to the Communist Party apparatus. Several of his colleagues resigned in protest against the impending reassertion of dictatorship. Most ominously, the national republics were lining up to follow the example of the Baltic States, where national and Soviet authorities governed in parallel. In Moscow itself the city council elected a democratic mayor, whilst the Government of the RSFSR elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin began to distance Russia from Gorbachev’s Soviet Kremlin. Armenia and Azerbaijan were at war over Nagorno-Karabakh. In Georgia, where Gorbachev had earlier sanctioned the use of deadly force, the revolt against Moscow was finalized. In Vilnius, where Soviet troops had also killed civilians, the Lithuanian parliament despaired at the lack of outside support. The Kremlin was moving to replace the USSR with a much looser union of sovereign republics. The new union treaty was set to be signed on 20 August.

The abortive Moscow coup of 19–22 August 1991 was launched to stop the Union Treaty, and thereby to preserve the residual power of the CPSU. It precipitated the disaster which it was supposed to prevent. The plotters were in no sense ‘hardliners’: they were committed to the limited form of perestroika which they had good reason to believe was Gorbachev’s own preference. Indeed, they clearly believed that Gorbachev himself would acquiesce. As a result, they made none of the provisions which competent putschists make. In fact, it was not really a coup at all; it was the last twitch of the dying dinosaur’s tail. On Sunday 19 August, seven nervous apparatchiks appeared in a row on Soviet television and announced the formation of their emergency committee. They were obeyed by the Party’s organs and media. They had timed their action to coincide with Gorbachev’s last day on vacation in Crimea. When he refused to deal with their emissary, they had nothing else to propose. Yeltsin, unarrested, clambered onto a tank in front of the Russian Parliament and breathed defiance. No move was taken to disperse his supporters; the tanks on the streets had no ammunition and no orders. After three days, the plotters simply climbed into their limousines and drove off. The attempted coup proved beyond doubt that the system was brain-dead. The Soviet communists were still in control of the world’s most formidable security apparatus; but they could not bring it to perform the simplest of operations.

For a time, Gorbachev did not grasp what had happened. He flew back from Crimea still talking about the future of the Party and of perestroika. He was brutally brought back to reality by Yeltsin, who made him read out the names of the plotters to the Russian parliament. They were Gorbachev’s men every one. Gorbachev’s credit was exhausted. He resigned as General Secretary just before Lenin’s Party dissolved itself. On 5 September 1991 the Soviet Congress of Deputies passed its last law, surrendering its powers to the sovereign republics of the former Union. On 24 October 1991 Gorbachev issued a last decree, splitting the Soviet KGB into its component parts. He was left stranded as the figurehead president of a ghost state.

Nothing better illustrated the realities of the Soviet collapse than the fate of Sergei Krikalyev, a Soviet cosmonaut who was fired into space in May 1991. He was still circling the earth at the end of the year for want of a decision to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower; he would return to a world from which the Soviet Union had disappeared. His controllers at the Baikonur Space Centre found themselves in the independent republic of Kazakhstan.

December 1991 was a month of decision at both ends of Europe. It started on 1 December with a referendum in Ukraine, where 91 per cent of the people, including the great majority of the Russian minority, voted for independence. The Republic of Ukraine was second in Europe in territory, fifth in population.

On the 9th and 10th at Maastricht, the twelve leaders of the European Community met to consider their scheme for comprehensive European union. Having banished the dreaded ‘f-word’,* the British Prime Minister inserted a monetary opt-out clause, refused to sign the social chapter, persuaded his partners to reconfirm the role of NATO, and claimed a famous victory. Fears were expressed that Variable geometry’ and a ‘two-speed Europe’ were in the making. Yet the great bulk of the Treaty’s provisions were accepted. The leaders initialled agreements which provided that citizenship of the Union would be given to all citizens of member states (Title II, 8–8e), that members should follow a common economic policy (II, 102–109111), that EMU and a European Central Bank (ECB) were to be achieved by 1999 within a joint banking system (II, 105–108a), that the European Parliament should be given powers of co-decision with the Council of Ministers (II, 137–138a,158,189–90), that an advisory Committee of the Regions was to be established (II, 198a-c), that common foreign and security policies were to be pursued (VI), and that subsidiarity should leave most Community action ‘to Member States’ (II, 3b). They accepted detailed chapters on education, culture, health, energy, justice, immigration, and crime. Outside the Treaty, they also confirmed recognition of the three Baltic States, but not Croatia or Slovenia. It was all suspiciously easy. All that remained was ratification. It would not be long before merchants of doom would be predicting the Treaty’s demise.40

That same weekend, President Gorbachev was making a last vain attempt to summon the heads of the Soviet Republics to Moscow. Unbeknown to him, however, the leaders of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine were already negotiating in a forest hunting-lodge near the Polish border. At 2.17 pm on 8 December they signed a declaration stating that ‘the USSR had ceased to exist’. Next day they announced the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States. The CIS was a convenient cover behind which the core of the strategic arsenal could be kept under a single command whilst most other Soviet institutions were quietly buried. By the end of the year, the peaceful passing of Europe’s last empire was complete.

Some small steps were taken to bridge the East-West divide. NATO established a Joint Co-operation Council to which former Warsaw Pact members were invited. The European Community signed treaties of association with Poland, Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia. A joint European Bank of Development and Reconstruction was opened in London. Food and financial aid was sent to the ex-Soviet Union, and peace-keeping missions to ex-Yugoslavia. Yet the steps were exceedingly small. The EC was still blocking agricultural imports from the East, throttling trade. Except for German investment in East Germany, Western investment in the former East was minimal. No co-ordinated foreign policy was forthcoming; no effective action was taken to contain the looming wars in Croatia and Bosnia; no dynamic leadership emerged. The gulf between ‘White Europe’ and ‘Black Europe’ still gaped.

Events moved so fast after 1989 that few observers had the leisure to reflect on the interdependence of Western and Eastern Europe. The habits of a lifetime led people to assume that East was East and West was West. Western statesmen were preoccupied with the cultivation of their own gardens; they did not readily notice that the explosion which had demolished their neighbours’ house had blown away their own fence and gable. ‘They leaned against the Wall in comfort,’ a Hungarian had written, ‘not knowing that the Wall was made of dynamite.’

For 40 years the Iron Curtain had provided the framework for political and economic life in the West as well as the East. It had defined the playing-field for Marshall Aid, for NATO, for the EEC, for Germany’s Federal Republic, for Western Europe’s economic success. It had been extremely convenient, not just for the Communists but also for Western bankers, planners, and industrialists, whose efforts could be directed to the easy part of Europe. It was specially advantageous for the protectionist element within the EEC, and hence for the distortions of the CAP. In short, it was one of the factors which threatened to turn Western Europe into a short-sighted and self-satisfied rich man’s club, careless of other people’s welfare. It was responsible for attitudes mirroring the Brezhnev Doctrine, where ‘the gains of capitalism’ had to be defended at all cost, where Western statesmen dreamt of perpetuating their isolation indefinitely. In the long run, Europeans would have to face the choice either to rebuild their village in unison or to reinvent the Iron Curtain in a new guise.

In reality, the events of East and West in Europe were closely connected. The success of the European Community, as seen from the East, had been a potent factor in the failure of the Soviet bloc. The success or failure of the post-communist democracies would condition the fate of European Union. Moscow’s retreat from Eastern Europe and from critical regions such as that of oil-rich Baku would create new arenas where the new Russia might feel compelled to resist expanding Western firms and institutions.

To some, the common denominator seemed to lie in the universal attachment to liberal democracy and free market economics. The Western victory appeared to be so complete that one academic gained instant fame by asking whether the world had reached ‘the End of History’.42 Nothing could have been further from the truth: Europe was locked in an intense period of historical change with no end in view.

In the eyes of one ex-statesman, the revolution of 1989–91 had given rise to three Europes. ‘Europe One’ consisted of the established democracies of Western Europe. ‘Europe Two’ coincided with the Visegrád Triangle of Poland, Hungary, and Czecho-Slovakia plus Slovenia. These four post-communist countries had reason to hope that they could join the European Community with no greater obstacles than those overcome in the previous decade by the post-fascist countries of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. ‘Europe Three’ comprised the remaining countries of the former Soviet bloc, whose European aspirations would have to await the twenty-first century.43

Yet declarations of goodwill could not of themselves bring results. The priority given to economic considerations was suffocating the wider vision. Any rigid insistence on economic convergence was bound to delay the Community’s enlargement, perhaps indefinitely. On the other hand, any major enlargement was bound both to involve extensive costs and to strengthen the case for institutional reform. If Germans could resent the costs of integrating seventeen million fellow Germans, other member states of the Union were unlikely to welcome the sacrifices required for integrating ever more new entrants. If governments were to face difficulties over ratifying the Maastricht Treaty, they would encounter much greater problems implementing it.

As the march towards further enlargement and integration proceeded, therefore, resistance was bound to intensify. In a forum of potential confrontation between the Community and its sovereign members, the status of the European Court would become a critical issue. A ‘Europe of Sixteen’ or a ‘Europe of Twenty’ could not be managed by the structures that had sufficed for ‘The Six’ and The Twelve’. The European Union would steadily grind to a halt if it did not reform its governing institutions as part of the drive towards widening and deepening.

According to one pessimistic observer, Europe would only be persuaded to integrate further if faced by extreme catastrophe—that is, by scenes of genocide, by mass migration, or by war.44 By the same line of reasoning, monetary union would only be achieved through the collapse of the existing monetary regime: and political union through the manifest failure of political policies. ‘Europe One’ might only be driven to accept ‘Europe Two’, if‘Europe Three’ reverted to form.

In December 1991 neither integration in the West nor disintegration in the East had run their course; yet very few Europeans could remember a time when so many barriers were down. The frontiers were open, and minds were opening with them. There were adults too young to remember Franco or Tito. One had to be nearing 30 to recall de Gaulle or the Prague Spring, 50 the Hungarian Rising or the Treaty of Rome, 60 the end of the Second World War. No one much under retirement age could have any clear recollections of pre-war Europe. No one much under 90 could have active memories of the First World War. Centenarians were the only persons alive to have known those golden days at the turn of the century before the great European Crisis began.

Count Edward Raczyński (1891–1993) belonged to this last rare company. He was born in Zakopane, on the border of Austria and Hungary, to a Polish family which possessed large estates in Prussia. Their palace in Berlin had been demolished to make way for the Reichstag. He had studied in Austrian Cracow, at Leipzig, and then at the London School of Economics. He had served as Polish Ambassador to the League of Nations and from 1933 to 1945 at the Court of St James. He later became President of Poland’s Government-in-Exile. He could never go home. But on 19 December 1991 he was honoured on his 100th birthday in the Embassy which Britain’s alliance with Stalin had forced him to surrender forty-six years before. Newly married, he was one of the very few indefatigable Europeans to have seen off the European Crisis from start to finish—if finished it was.

Map 29. Europe, 1992

14 February 1992, Summertown. In the beginning, there was no book. Now the last words are rolling onto the last pages. The desk beside the window of the top studio is dimly lit by the dawn. The night frost has left patches of damp on the roof that glistens through the glass. Clouds amble over the dark skyline towards the brightening band of pale yellow. The leafless apple trees of the old Thorncliffe Orchard straggle through the gloom towards the next row of red-brick Victorian houses. A solitary crow stands sentinel on the tip of the highest beech, as on a thousand such dawns since ‘The Legend of Europa’ was written. For once, the foul fumes of the Oxford Automobile Components factory are blowing elsewhere. The family slumbers on towards school-time.

The family connections of this house span half of Europe. One side of the family is firmly attached to this offshore island, to Lancashire and, further back, to Wales. The other side was rooted in the eastern parts of old Poland, which spent most of the last hundred years either in Austrian Galicia or in the Soviet Union. After education in Oxford and in Cracow, the two principals of the house met on the Boulevard Gergovia in Clermont-Ferrand, in the city of Blaise Pascal, who might well have been amused by such an infinitesimal probability. These happy accidents inevitably colour one’s sense of history. Time and place in the writing of history are sovereign. Historians are a necessary part of their histories.

Today is the feast-day of SS Cyril and Methodius, the co-patrons of Europe. Prayers at the Jesuit church of St Aloysius ‘celebrate the origins of the Slavonic peoples … May their light be our light.’ The rosary is recited ‘in the intention of the peoples of eastern Europe’. The priest explains, eccentrically, that Cyril and Methodius were apostles of the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians (see Chapter V).

School-time. This week at Squirrel School, the headmistress has been talking at assembly about the needy children of Albania.

The morning’s newspapers have nothing to say about SS Cyril and Methodius. The Independent leads with ‘UN Troops for Croatia’. The Guardians ‘Europe’ supplement leads with an extended report on shopping in Murmansk. Yesterday’s El País from Madrid leads with the formation of joint Franco-Spanish brigades to fight the Basque organization ETA; it has just recruited ‘Mikailo Gorbachov’ as a monthly columnist. In Le Monde, three pages of North African news predominate. De Telegraaf from The Hague gives its top spot to a problem with NATO’s low flying F-16 fighters. The front page of Süddeutsche Zeitung from Munich is taken up with the affairs of the federal finance ministry. Gazeta Wyborcza, two days in the post from Warsaw, is preoccupied with the Constitutional Tribunal and its rejection of a statute on pensions passed by the communist-run parliament. The Oxford Times writes a leader about its own letter column, which is headed by a communication from the Anglican Bishop of Oxford on the priestly ordination of women.

The only major story of historical interest appears on the front page of the Corriere della Sera, under the headline ‘Massacrateli’ ordine di Lenin’. Moscow is the growth-point of knowledge about modern European history. A correspondent in Moscow, quoting Komsomolskaya Pravda, lists hitherto secret documents from the archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. They reveal the Bolshevik leader’s personal insistence on revolutionary atrocities. On 11 August 1918, for example, Lenin wrote to the Comrades at Penza:

The rising of the five Kulak regions must be met with merciless repression … There’s need to make an example. 1) Hang not less than 100 Kulaks, rich ones, blood-suckers, … 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their food away. 4) Pick hostages according to yesterday’s telegram. Do everything so that the people will see, tremble, and groan for miles and miles around … PS. Search out hard people. Lenin.46

These flourishes do not come from the correspondence of Hitler, comments the Corriere. So it’s true. Bolshevik barbarity did not start with Stalin.

The week’s home news has been dominated by mean pre-election wrangles, mainly about money. Abroad, one could choose between the travails of the French President, the future of the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal, the conviction of a world boxing champion, or a decision of Ireland’s Constitutional Court to deny abortion to a 14-year-old rape victim. The President of the European Commission has submitted proposals for a larger budget—’to match the Age of Maastricht’. The British tabloids have greeted this last item with derision. Under the headline ‘No, Jacques, It’s Not All Right’, the editorial of the Daily Mail comments: ‘Such Euro-largesse could so easily find its way into the pockets of shady contractors, or under the mattresses of colourful, but lazy, characters, basking in the Mediterranean sun.’ Le Monde analyses the phenomenon: ‘La Grande-Bretagne se mobilise contre les “eurocrates”’.48

Above all, there is the 16th Winter Olympics at Albertville and Courchevel in Savoy. The ‘blue ribbon’ event, the men’s combined downhill and slalom skiing, has been won by an Italian, Josef Pollg.

The European, which claims to be the only all-European newspaper, has recently lost both its crooked publisher and its hero in the Kremlin. This week’s lead story, ‘Italy Faces the Wrath of Europe’, reports on Rome’s poor record in implementing EC directives. The business section slams opposition from ‘American isolationists’ to a $10 billion IMF scheme for stabilizing the Russian rouble.49

In late morning, as predicted, it has started to rain. The papers’ weather maps illustrate the range of their readers’ interest. The Times publishes three weather maps—two larger ones for the British Isles (less the west of Ireland), for a.m. and p.m., and one centred on the mid-Atlantic. Le Mondehas two weather maps for Europe, and one for France. The Corriere has one for Europe from the Atlantic to the Crimea, another for Italy. The SZ has three spacious maps, all for the whole of Europe, providing detailed information from a score of weather stations bounded by Reykjavik, Luleå (Sweden), Lisbon, and Athens. Gazeta Wyborcza has no weather map, but lists the previous day’s temperatures from selected European capitals—Rome and Lisbon (13 °C), London (10 °C), Athens (9 °C), Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, and Minsk (+1 °C), Kiev and Prague (+1 °C), and Bucharest (+3 °C). Varsovians do not know what the temperature is in Moscow.

The European splashes out with the largest of all weather maps, in colour. It marks the new republics, including Slovenia, Croatia, Belarus, and Moldavia, but not Russia, which is wrongly equated with the CIS. The accompanying list of ‘European road works’ mentions nothing further east than the A9-Bad Dürrenberg crossroads near Leipzig. So it’s true: they don’t mend roads in Eastern Europe.

Such is the tangle of daily information from which future historians will have to make sense.

Today is St Valentine’s Day. By tradition, it is the day when birds begin their mating; so it also became the day when human lovebirds exchange suitable signals. The Times publishes page after page of cryptic, and frequently ungrammatical, messages:

AGATHA AARDVAARK, All my love Hector Tree…. ARTEMIS, Not only Hesperus entreats Thy Love, Algy… . CHRISTIANE, Un vraie couscous royale. Je t’aim infini-ment, King… . MENTEN, Blue Seas in Basalt Rocks… . MOONFACE loves Baby Dumpling and Smelly… . POOPS, Ich bin deiner, bist du meine? Wirst du sein mein Valentine?50

Several papers give contradictory explanations of the origins of St Valentine’s Day. One version says that the medievals adopted the Roman festival of Lupercalia; Lupereal or ‘the wolfs lair’ was the cave where Romulus and Remus had been reared by the she-wolf and where Romans would later smear themselves in goats’ blood in the hope of parenthood. Neither of the two Roman martyrs called Valentine can be held responsible for the pagan frolics.

Today is also the tricentenary of the Massacre of Glencoe. It turns out that only 38 persons were killed. ‘In the context of clan history,’ says Lord Macdonald of Skye, ‘the numbers involved were minimal.’ So there are still Macdonalds enough to march with the pipes to the Glen of Weeping. In any case, as The Times reports, the Campbells were acting ‘as agents of the Westminster government’. Now that’s a topical note. Last week’s Die Zeit devoted a major feature article to the roots of Scotland’s separate identity; it was accompanied by a photo of a huge graffito from Glasgow, ‘Brits Out Now’.51

Writing to music is a practical habit. BBC Radio 3 helps the ink to flow. At 07.35 the first paragraphs were started to Bach’s Concerto for oboe d’amore, BWV1055. The morning papers were accompanied by Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3. St Valentine’s Day was suitably preceded by Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasia, Francesca da Rimini. At 2 p.m. the Katowice Brass was missed, but Beethoven’s Eighth is giving strength to the afternoon. Today, there is a good balance between West and East. For once, BBC 3 is not playing Janáček.

It is an irony that historians, who study the past, are invariably pressed to predict the future. It helps to have followed the drift of events, but not much.

To the west, across the ocean, the USA has surely reached the peak of its power. It looks to be heading for trouble with its debt, for trouble with its allies, and for trouble from the ‘diversity’ of its own citizens. It has specially intransigent problems with Japan, whose economic prowess has wounded America’s pride. It is drifting away from Europe, to which it is no longer bound by the chains of the late Cold War. Vice-President Quayle in London this week, protesting to the contrary, did protest too much.

To the north, in Scotland, the independence movement has started to roll again. This week, an absolute majority of Scots expressed a preference for changing the country’s status. They possess the power to destroy the United Kingdom, and thereby to deflate the English, as no one in Brussels could ever do. They may make Europeans of us yet.

To the south, in the heartland of the present European Community, both the French and the Germans are feeling the strain. France is beset by the weight of Muslim immigrants from North Africa, by the nationalist backlash of M. Le Pen, and by a socialist presidency that has outstayed its welcome. Germany is reeling under the costs of reunification. In their distress, both governments have turned to closer European union for comfort and support. This week, a television programme on ‘The Germans’ showed the German Chancellor quoting Thomas Mann, who longed ‘not for a German Europe, but for a European Germany’. The Germans may lose their enthusiasm if they have to lose their Deutschmark.

To the east, the map of Europe is still in flux: a new state seems to be established every month. There is much talk of the dangers of nationalism. Where does it come from? It would be more convincing if it targeted the larger and more dangerous nationalisms, not the petty ones. Not that the dangers do not exist. The three Baltic States are afloat in a sea of troubles. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia are aiming at full membership of the EC by the end of the decade. Czechs and Slovaks may be heading for a divorce. Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania have nowhere to go. The Yugoslav Federation must surely split up soon. Slovenia and Croatia, like Belarus’, Ukraine, and Moldavia, should prove viable, if left in peace. The Commonwealth of Independent States, however, is unlikely to survive; and in its present form the Russian Republic looks no more healthy than the CIS. It is still a vast artificial amalgam, twice the size of the USA, with a very uneven economic infrastructure and no political cement. Its leaders can hardly hold it together by democracy and a prayer. They may have a chance if Moscow allows the Far Eastern Region to drift in the direction of autonomy and Japanese investment, and if Siberia is encouraged to develop its own resources with foreign help. European Russia, as always, has too many people and too many soldiers, and not enough to feed them. The Russians have drawn on their exceptional powers of stoic endurance through two years of Soviet collapse; but they may not do so indefinitely. If democratic Russia does not prosper, it will start to fragment still further. In that case, autocratic Russia will try to reassert itself with a vengeance.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire is certainly ‘the greatest, and perhaps the most awful event’ of recent times. The speed of its collapse has exceeded all the other great landslides of European history—the dismemberment of the Spanish dominions, the partitions of Poland, the retreat of the Ottomans, the disintegration of Austria-Hungary. Yet it is hardly an event which calls for the historian to sit on the ruins of the Kremlin, like Gibbon in the Colosseum, or to write a requiem. For the Soviet Union was not a civilization that once was great. It was uniquely mean and mendacious even in its brief hour of triumph. It brought death and misery to more human beings than any other state on record. It brought no good life either to its dominant Russian nationality or even to its ruling élite. It was massively destructive, not least of Russian culture. As many thoughtful Russians now admit, it was a folly that should never have been built in the first place. The sovereign nations of the ex-Soviet Union are picking up the pieces where they left off in 1918–22, when their initial flicker of independence was snuffed out by Lenin’s Red Army. Almost everyone agrees: ‘Russia, yes. But what sort of Russia?’

The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords.

The consequences of so massive a shock were bound to affect the whole of Europe. It was an open question whether the peoples of the ex-Soviet Empire could continue to reorder their affairs with a minimum of blood and hate. That the collapse occurred so peacefully was proof that it was ripe to happen; but the national warriors who took the field in the Caucasus and in Yugoslavia had many potential imitators. Not surprisingly, the countries of Western Europe had reacted to the Soviet collapse with excessive caution. Governments were slow to assist the struggling republics. Some, in the name of misplaced stability, were eager to keep the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav Federation alive. They were in a phase of confusion, and of half-measures bungled by competing agencies.

Paradoxically, the threat of anarchy in the East may well act as a spur to closer union in the West. Last year, Albanian refugees sailed across the Adriatic in their tens of thousands, and tried to force their way into Italy. Hordes of Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian tramps and traders are pouring into Poland, just as Poles recently poured into Germany and Austria. Germany’s wonderful capacity of absorption is under the severest strain, not only from millions of unemployed East Germans but also from thousands of legal asylum-seekers, whose presence cannot be popular. If scenes of disorder were to be repeated on a larger scale, and in Central Europe, the sense of urgency in Western capitals would be wonderfully enhanced. So far, the consolidation of the European Community has been proceeding at the pace of the slowest. A strong blast of cold air from the East might quicken the pace.

Much depends on developments in America. So long as the USA remains strong and relatively prosperous, the status quo in Western Europe is unlikely to change suddenly. NATO will be preserved, and the European Community will evolve by measured steps. If and when the USA moves into crisis, however, the countries of Europe would draw together for common protection. An Atlantic gale from the west could have the same effect as a cold east wind.

Europe, like nature itself, cannot abide a vacuum. Sooner or later, the European Community in the West and the successor states in the East must redefine their identities, their bounds, and their allegiances. Somehow, at least for a time, a new equilibrium may be found, perhaps in a multilateral framework. Regional groupings such as the Baltic Council, the hexagonale, and some form of ex-Soviet club or clubs, could all play their part. But somewhere between the depths of Russia and the heart of Europe a new dividing line will have to be established—hopefully along a border of peace.

‘Europe, yes. But what sort of Europe?’ The old Europe, which existed before the Eclipse, has passed away. With the poet, one can regret its passing and its ancient, clear-cut walls:

Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!

But one cannot bring it back. The present ‘Europe’, a creature of the Cold War, is inadequate to its task. The moral and political vision of the Community’s founding fathers has almost been forgotten.

Europe is not going to be fully united in the near future. But it has a chance to be less divided than for generations past. If fortune smiles, the physical and psychological barriers will be less brutal than at any time in living memory. Europa rides on. Tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes.

* Meaning ‘I am a doughnut’. He should have said, ‘Ich bin Berliner’.

* To British ears, federalism was coloured by American, as opposed to German or Continental, usage, and was taken to be a codeword for a centralized United States of Europe.