Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (65 page)

To speak of the West is to disguise the fact that all the major initiatives to break the deadlock in Bosnia came from the Americans. It might have seemed to the neutral observer that Bosnia was a European problem, but this could not have been deduced from the behaviour of the Europeans themselves. EU policy-making was completely marginalized, and the West European Union seemed little better. The British and the French preferred to operate through the UN and NATO, bodies in which they shared power with the Americans, and—in the former case—with the Russians too. London and Paris vaunted their commitment by sending troops, but were confused for long periods as to what they wanted them to do. Both liked complaining about American arrogance and hypocrisy, but neither was able to summon sufficient resolve to act alone. Thus Bosnia showed how hard it was for Europeans to handle their own conflicts without Washington, even after the end of the Cold War.

One of the arguments of the pro-interventionists in the Bosnian war was that left to run unchecked it might destabilize the rest of eastern Europe. In the short run, at least, this fear was not borne out. Scenarios of a domino effect across the Balkans—with fighting spreading through Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania—ignored the war’s deterrent impact. Television footage of burning villages and shelled cities brought home the real costs of nationalist hysteria, and thus may have helped inhibit inflammatory rhetoric, and contain expansionist or irredentist plans, encouraging compromise and mediation.

At the same time, the West’s inability to bring the fighting to an end, and its seeming reluctance to enforce norms of international behaviour, increased nervousness throughout the region. A serious arms race between Greece and Turkey escalated in the early 1990s, and brought the two countries closer to war than they had been for decades. In Kosovo it was starting to look as if the Serbs could not repress the Albanian majority for very much longer, while in Macedonia, ethnic tensions and violence spilling over from Albania itself threatened to destabilize a precariously balanced regime. The deterrent effect of the Bosnian war will not last indefinitely and is no substitute for a coherent European security policy towards the Balkans.

The war in Yugoslavia can perhaps best be seen as a product of the collapse of federalism after 1989. This was the only case in Europe where the outcome was settled by fighting. In Czechoslovakia—the only other surviving federal creation of Versailles—a Velvet Divorce ensured a peaceful and civilized separation between Czechs and Slovaks. The real difficulties lay mostly in the sphere of the former Soviet Union, with its large Russian minorities on the western and southern periphery of the old empire. In fact, in the European zone, the conflict—with the partial, brief exception of Moldova, and the Baltic republics in 1991—remained confined to the political level and did not escalate.

In general, eastern Europe, and therefore Europe as a whole, was a far more stable place than at any time earlier in the century. Inter-war revisionism had sought to change the borders laid down at Versailles. But in the end people moved—or were moved, or killed—and with the exception of Poland, the USSR and Germany, there was little alteration of borders by the end of the 1940s. After 1989 it was generally
accepted that borders should stay where they were. This was what had been agreed at Helsinki in 1975, and it remained an article of faith even when this meant accepting the injustices of the post-1945 settlement. Germany finally recognized Poland’s western border and gave up all claims to the old eastern territories. The Baltic states too accepted independence within the post-war boundaries and did not seek a return to the pre-1939 status quo ante. Stability was too precious to be jeopardized, and much of the West’s seemingly amoral and contradictory policy towards the former Yugoslavia is best understood as a desperate attempt to uphold this principle.

This general acceptance is all to the good, since there is little sign of any greater willingness on the part of east European states to cooperate with one another. On the contrary, the old suspicions remain: the West is still expected to act as saviour, the Russians still regarded as the enemy. Western indifference is matched by Eastern irresponsibility. The Western excess of realpolitik is counterbalanced by excessive east European nationalist myopia. How to fit perennial geopolitical truths—that Russia, for instance, will always be more important to the West than Poland or Romania—with the new post-1989 realities is a task that so far neither half of the continent seems willing to contemplate.

Epilogue: Making Europe

In these last years there has been and still is much talk of Europe and European civilization, of anti-Europe and forces opposed to European civilization and so on. Appeals, articles in newspapers and magazines, discussions and polemics: in all, the word “Europe” has been tossed around with unusual frequency, for good reasons and bad. But if we stop to analyse a little more closely what is meant by “Europe” we immediately become conscious of the enormous confusion which reigns in the minds of those who talk about it
 …

—F. CHABOD (1943–4)
¹

“Democracy has won,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1990. “The free market has won. But what in the wake of this great ideological victory is today the substance of our beliefs?” As the euphoria which greeted the end of the Cold War gave way to gloomy misgivings, Francis Fukuyama saw communism’s collapse ushering in the end of history and the dawning of a more prosaic and less heroic era. Others foresaw instead the rebirth of history’s demons—nationalism, fascism and racial and religious struggle. They talked about “the return of history” and drew grim parallels—as Sarajevo hit the headlines—between 1992 and the eve of the First World War.

In fact, history had neither left Europe nor returned to it. But with the end of the Cold War, Europe’s place in history changed. Europe is once again undivided, but it no longer occupies the central role in world affairs which it held before the Cold War began. Understanding where we stand today thus requires not only seeing how the present resembles the past, but how it differs from it as well. Sometimes it
is easier to dream the old dreams—even when they are nightmares—than to wake up to unfamiliar realities.

“With the passing of the centuries,” two French historians concluded in 1992, “Europe discovers that beyond the differences of its tongues and customs, its people partake of a common culture … Europe is becoming conscious of the existence of a European identity.”
²
Made with unfortunate timing in the year civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, this bold claim has a respectable pedigree. In 1936, another year of civil war, the British historian H. A. L. Fisher asserted that Europe was unified by a civilization which was “distinct … all pervading and preponderant,” resting upon “an inheritance of thought and achievement and religious aspiration.” And a few years later, in
The Limits and Divisions of European History
, the émigré Polish scholar Oskar Halecki pleaded for the fundamental unity of the continent at the very moment his country formed part of the Communist bloc.
³

It is as though one response to the bloody struggles of this century has been to deny their internecine character: one side is made to stand for the true Europe—
l’Europe européenne
in the striking phrase of Gonzague de Reynold—while the others are written off as usurpers or barbarians. The intellectual tradition which identifies Europe with the cause of liberty and freedom goes back many centuries. But if we face the fact that liberal democracy failed between the wars, and if we admit that communism and fascism also formed part of the continent’s political heritage, then it is hard to deny that what has shaped Europe in this century is not a gradual convergence of thought and feeling, but on the contrary a series of violent clashes between antagonistic New Orders. If we search for Europe not as a geographical expression, but as what Federico Chabod called “an historic and moral individuality,” we find that for much of the century it did not exist.
⁴

What was new in Europe’s history was not the existence of conflict, but rather its scale. Compared with the great dynastic empires of the past—the long centuries of Byzantine, Habsburg and Ottoman rule—the utopian experiments of twentieth-century ideologies came and went with striking speed: yet their struggle brought new levels of violence
into European life, militarizing society, strengthening the state and killing millions of people with the help of modern bureaucracies and technologies. In the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War the death-toll was 184,000; in the First World War it was above eight million, and more than forty million Europeans—half of them civilians—died in the Second World War. The depth of these wounds was directly proportionate to the grandeur of the ambitions held by the various protagonists, each of whom aspired to remake Europe—inside and out—more thoroughly than ever before. It is not surprising if today Europe is suffering from ideological exhaustion, and if politics has become a distinctly unvisionary activity. As Austria’s former chancellor Franz Vranitsky once supposedly remarked: “Anyone with visions needs to see a doctor.”

This disillusionment colours the strange post-1989 triumph of democracy in Europe. Seventy years earlier, the consolidation of democracy across the continent after the First World War fitted liberal dreams of a new world order: Europe seemed destined to become the model for mankind. Through the League of Nations the new states of eastern Europe would learn the habits of democracy from the more advanced and mature states of the West, while through colonies and mandates, the great imperial powers would spread democracy more widely. The defeat of communism in Europe in 1989 carried no such global implications, and no such evangelical dreams. Democracy suits Europeans today partly because it is associated with the triumph of capitalism and partly because it involves less commitment or intrusion into their lives than any of the alternatives. Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics. It is for this reason that we find both high levels of support for democracy in cross-national opinion polls and high rates of political apathy. In contemporary Europe, democracy allows racist parties of the Right to coexist with more active protection of human rights than ever before. It encompasses both the grass-roots politics of Switzerland and neardictatorship in post-communist Croatia.

The real victor in 1989 was not democracy but capitalism, and Europe as a whole now faces the task which western Europe has confronted since the 1930s, of establishing a workable relationship between the two. The inter-war depression revealed that democracy
might not survive a major crisis of capitalism, and in fact democracy’s eventual triumph over communism would have been unimaginable without the reworked social contract which followed the Second World War. The ending of full employment and the onset of welfare retrenchment make this achievement harder than ever to sustain, especially in societies characterized by ageing populations. The globalization of financial markets makes it increasingly difficult for nation-states to preserve autonomy of action, yet markets—as a series of panics and crashes demonstrates—generate their own irrationalities and social tensions. The globalization of labour, too, challenges prevailing definitions of national citizenship, culture and tradition. Whether Europe can chart a course between the individualism of American capitalism and the authoritarianism of East Asia, preserving its own blend of social solidarity and political freedom, remains to be seen. But the end of the Cold War means that there is no longer an opponent against whom democrats can define what they stand for in pursuit of this goal. The old political signposts have been uprooted, leaving most people without a clear sense of direction.

This sense of
fin de siècle
disorientation is largely a European problem which reflects the specific historical experience of Europe this century, and the carnage that followed its once-fervent faith in utopias. A self-belief rooted in Christianity, capitalism, the Enlightenment and massive technological superiority encouraged Europeans to see themselves over a long period as a civilizational model for the globe. Their trust in Europe’s world mission was already evident in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reached its apogee in the era of imperialism. Hitler was in many ways its culminating figure and through the Nazi New Order came closer to its realization than anyone else. Now that the Cold War has ended, Europe is once more undivided, and this makes its loss of belief in the pre-eminence of its civilization and values all the more obvious. Many of the newly freed states of the former Soviet empire cannot wait to join “Europe.” Yet what that “Europe” is, and where it stands in the world, seem less and less clear.