by Tony Judt
Naturally, there were variations. Nationalists and even some political and religious conservatives—many of them active and influential in 1989—were not disposed to think so much of Europe as of ‘Poland’ or ‘Hungary’. And some of them were perhaps less interested in freedom and individual rights than others. The immediate priorities of the crowd also varied—the idea of somehow returning to Europe was more important in mobilizing popular sentiment in Czechoslovakia than in Romania, to take an obvious example, where removing a dictator and putting food on the table took precedence. And whereas some of the leaders of 1989 set out from the start to build a market economy (when forming his first government in September 1989 Tadeusz Mazowiecki memorably declared that he was ‘looking for my Ludwig Erhard!’) others—notably Havel—preferred to focus upon the civic foundations of democracy.
The significance of these nuances would only emerge later. It may be appropriate here, however, to offer an observation concerning the place of the United States in this story. Eastern Europeans, especially East Berliners, were perfectly well aware of the US’s role in containing the Soviet Union. They also understood the nuances distinguishing West European politicians—who, for the most part, were content to live with Communism so long as it left them alone—from American politicians like Ronald Reagan who openly described it as an ‘evil empire’. Solidarity was financed largely from the US and it was the US that gave the most insistent official encouragement to protesters in Berlin and elsewhere—once it was clear that they would probably win.
But it should not be concluded from this, as it sometimes is, that Eastern Europe’s captive peoples were yearning to become . . . American; much less that it was American encouragement or support that precipitated or facilitated their liberation. 302 The US played a remarkably small part in the dramas of 1989, at least until after the fact. And the American social model itself—the ‘free market’—was only occasionally posited as an object of admiration or emulation by the crowds or their spokesmen. For most people who had lived under Communism, liberation by no means implied a yearning for untrammeled economic competition, much less the loss of free social services, guaranteed employment, cheap rents or any of Communism’s other attendant benefits. It was, after all, one of the attractions of ‘Europe’, as imagined from the East, that it held out the prospect of affluence and security, liberty and protection. You could have your socialist cake and eat it in freedom.
Such euro-dreams were harbingers of disappointments to come. But few saw this at the time. In the marketplace of alternative models, the American way of life was still a minority taste and America, for all its global clout, was a long way away. The other superpower, however, was right on the doorstep. The satellite states of eastern Europe were all colonies of the Communist empire based in Moscow. Accordingly, there is only so much about the changes of 1989 that can be attributed to indigenous social or political forces—whether they were underground Catholic organizations in Slovakia, rock-music groups in Poland or free-thinking intellectuals everywhere. In the last analysis, it was always Moscow that counted.
In the heady afterglow of liberation, many East Europeans belittled the significance of Moscow, the better to highlight their own achievement. In January 1992, Democratic Forum’s József Antall, now prime minister of Hungary, bemoaned to a Hungarian audience the West’s lack of appreciation for Central Europeans’ heroic role in the downfall of communism: ‘This unrequited love must end because we stuck to our posts, we fought our own fights without firing one shot and we won the third world war for them.’ Antall’s embittered account, however flattering to his audience, misses the seminal truth about 1989: if Eastern Europe’s crowds and intellectuals and trade union leaders ‘won the third world war’ it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.
On July 6th 1989, Gorbachev addressed the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and informed his audience that the Soviet Union would not stand in the way of reform in Eastern Europe: that was ‘entirely a matter for the people themselves.’ At a conference of eastern bloc leaders in Bucharest on July 7th 1989, the Soviet leader affirmed each socialist state’s right to follow its own trajectory without external interference. Five months later, in a stateroom on the SS Maxim Gorky off Malta, he assured President Bush that force would not be used to keep Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes in power. There was no ambiguity about his position. Gorbachev, as Michnik had remarked in 1988, was ‘the prisoner of his foreign policy successes.’ Once an imperial metropole had so publicly acknowledged that it would not, could not hang on to its colonial periphery—and had been universally acclaimed for saying so—its colonies were lost and with them the empire’s indigenous collaborators. All that remained to be determined was the manner and direction in which they fell.
The collaborators themselves certainly understood what was happening: between July 1988 and July 1989 Károly Grósz and Miklós Németh, the leading reformers in the Hungarian Party, made four separate visits to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. Their colleague Rezsõ Nyers also spoke with him in Bucharest on July 7th 1989, the day after Kádár’s death, by which date it was already clear that their cause was lost. Gorbachev did nothing actively to precipitate or encourage the revolutions of 1989: he merely stood aside. In 1849 Russian intervention had sealed the fate of the Hungarian and other revolutions of that year; in 1989 Russian abstention helped assure their success.
Gorbachev did more than just let the colonies go. By indicating that he would not intervene he decisively undermined the only real source of political legitimacy available to the rulers of the satellite states: the promise (or threat) of military intervention from Moscow. Without that threat the local regimes were politically naked. Economically they might have struggled for a few more years, but there, too, the logic of Soviet retreat was implacable: once Moscow started charging world market prices for its exports to Comecon countries (as it did in 1990) the latter, heavily dependent on imperial subsidies, would have collapsed in any event.
As this last example suggests, Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself—just as Stalin had built the satellite regimes not for their own sake but as a security for his western frontier. Tactically Gorbachev miscalculated badly—within two years the lessons of Eastern Europe would be used against the region’s liberator on his home territory. But strategically his achievement was immense and unprecedented. No other territorial empire in recorded history ever abandoned its dominions so rapidly, with such good grace and so little bloodshed. Gorbachev cannot take direct credit for what happened in 1989—he did not plan it and only hazily grasped its long-term import. But he was the permissive and precipitating cause. It was Mr Gorbachev’s revolution.
PART FOUR
After the Fall: 1989-2005
XX
A Fissile Continent
‘I don’t have to do anything to stop it; the Soviets will do it for me. They
will never allow this greater Germany just opposite them’.
François Mitterrand, November 28th 1989
‘When we started, we did not understand the depth of the problems
we faced’.
Mikhail Gorbachev, 1990
‘Our country has not been lucky. It was decided to carry out this
Marxist experiment on us. In the end we proved that there is no place
for this idea—it has simply pushed us off the path taken by the
world’s civilized countries’.
Boris Yeltsin, 1991
‘The existence of the Czech nation was never a certainty, and precisely this
uncertainty constitutes its most striking aspect’.
Milan Kundera
Liberated from Communism, eastern Europe underwent a second and even more striking transformation. In the course of the 1990s four established states disappeared from the map of the continent and fourteen countries were born—or resuscitated. The six westernmost republics of the Soviet Union—Estonia, Latv
ia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova—became independent states, together with Russia itself. Czechoslovakia became two separate countries—Slovakia and the Czech Republic. And Yugoslavia broke apart into its constituent units: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia-Montenegro and Macedonia.
This making and breaking of nations was comparable in scale to the impact of the Versailles treaties that followed World War One—and in certain respects more dramatic. The emergence of nation-states at Versailles was the culmination of a long drawn-out process with its roots in the mid-nineteenth century or before; it came as no surprise. But the prospect of something similar occurring in the late twentieth century was anticipated by almost no-one. Indeed, three states that were to disappear in the course of the 1990s—Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR—were themselves of post-1918 vintage.
It is not, however, a coincidence that these were the last remaining multi-ethnic, federal states in the region. The territorial fission of the Nineties accompanied the extinction of the last of Europe’s four continental empires—that of Russia. It was, in effect, a delayed epilogue to the post-imperial state-making that had followed the fall of the other three: Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria and Wilhelmine Germany. But the logic of imperial break-up would not in itself have triggered the institutional re-arrangement of Eastern Europe. As so often in the past, the fate of the region was determined by events in Germany.
Credit for German re-unification—a unique case of fusion in a decade of fission—must go in the first instance to Helmut Kohl. The West German Chancellor was initially as hesitant as everyone else—on November 28th 1989 he presented to the Bundestag a five-year program of cautious steps toward German unity. But after listening to East German crowds (and assuring himself of the support of Washington) Kohl calculated that a unified Germany was now not merely possible but perhaps urgent. It was clear that the only way to staunch the flow west (2,000 people a day at one point) was to bring West Germany east. In order to keep East Germans from leaving their country, the West German leader set about abolishing it.
As in the 19th century, German unification was in the first instance to be achieved by a currency union; but political union inevitably followed. Talk of a ‘confederation’, which the West Germans had initially encouraged and Hans Modrow’s GDR cabinet had eagerly pursued, was precipitately dropped and in the hastily called East German elections of March 1990 Christian Democrat candidates ran on a unification ticket. Their ‘Alliance for Germany’ won 48 percent of the vote: the Social Democrats, handicapped by their well-advertised ambivalence on the subject, won just 22 percent.303 The former Communists—now the Party of Democratic Socialism—secured a respectable 16 percent showing; but Alliance ’90, a coalition of former dissidents including Bärbel Bohley’s Neues Forum, won just 2.8 percent.304
The first act of the new majority in the GDR Volkskammer, represented by a CDU-SPD-Liberal coalition led by Lothar de Maizière, was to commit their country to German unity.305 On May 18th 1990 a ‘monetary, economic and social union’ was signed between the two Germanies, and on July 1st its crucial clause—the extension of the Deutschmark to East Germany—came into force. East Germans could now exchange their virtually useless East German marks—up to the equivalent of DM 40,000—at a hugely advantageous rate of 1:1. Wages and salaries in the GDR would henceforth be paid in Deutschmarks at parity—a dramatically effective device for keeping East Germans where they were, but with grim long-term consequences for East German jobs and the West German budget.
On August 23rd, by pre-agreement with Bonn, the Volkskammer voted to accede to the Federal Republic. A week later a Treaty of Unification was signed, by which the GDR was absorbed into the FRG—as approved by its voters in the March elections and permitted under Article 23 of the 1949 Basic Law. On October 3rd the Treaty entered into force: the GDR ‘acceded’ to the Federal Republic and ceased to exist.
The division of Germany had been the work of the victors of World War Two and its reunification in 1990 would never have come about without their encouragement or consent. East Germany was a Soviet satellite state, with 360,000 Soviet troops still stationed there in 1989. West Germany, for all its independence, was not free to act autonomously on this matter. As for Berlin, until a final peace settlement was reached it remained a city whose fate formally depended upon the original occupying powers—France, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union.
Neither the British nor the French were in any particular hurry to see Germany reunited. To the extent that West Europeans even thought about a unified Germany they assumed—reasonably enough—that it would come at the end of a long process of change in Eastern Europe, not right at the outset. As Douglas Hurd (the British foreign secretary) observed in December 1989, reflecting on the imminent conclusion of the Cold War: This was ‘a system . . . under which we’ve lived quite happily for forty years.’
His Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made no secret of her fears. In her memoirs she recalls a hastily convoked meeting with French President Mitterrand: ‘I produced from my handbag a map showing the various configurations of Germany in the past, which were not altogether reassuring about the future . . . [Mitterrand] said that at moments of great danger in the past France had always established special relations with Britain and he felt such a time had come again . . . It seemed to me that although we had not discovered the means, at least we both had the will to check the German juggernaut. That was a start.’
Mrs Thatcher—and she was not alone—was also worried that German unification might de-stabilize Mikhail Gorbachev, possibly even leading to his fall (by analogy with Nikita Khrushchev’s disgrace following his Cuban humiliation). But the British, for all their anxieties, had nothing to offer by way of an alternative to the course of events then unfolding in Germany and they duly acquiesced. Mitterrand was not so easily appeased. More than anyone else, the French were truly disturbed by the collapse of the stable and familiar arrangements in Germany and in the Communist bloc as a whole.306
The first reaction from Paris was to try and block any move to German unification—Mitterrand even going so far as to visit the GDR in December 1989 in a show of support for its sovereignty. He declined Helmut Kohl’s invitation to attend a ceremony to mark the re-opening of the Brandenburg Gate, and tried to convince Soviet leaders that, as traditional allies, France and Russia had a common interest in blocking German ambitions. Indeed, the French were banking on Gorbachev to veto German unity—as Mitterrand explained to his advisers on November 28th 1989, ‘I don’t have to do anything to stop it, the Soviets will do it for me. They will never allow this greater Germany just opposite them.’
But once it became clear that this was not so—and following Kohl’s decisive victory in the East German elections—the French President adopted a different tack. The Germans could have their unity, but at a price. There must be no question of an enhanced Germany taking an independent path, much less reverting to its old middle-European priorities. Kohl must commit himself to pursuing the European project under a Franco-German condominium, and Germany was to be bound into an ‘ever-closer’ union—whose terms, notably a common European currency, would be enshrined in a new treaty (to be negotiated the following year in the Dutch city of Maastricht)307.
The Germans agreed readily enough to all the French conditions (though the maladroit character of France’s diplomatic maneuvers chilled relations for a while)—an echo of earlier days, when Bonn agreed after 1955 to confine ‘Europe’ to the original six countries in order to assuage French anxiety over the restoration of full sovereignty to Germany. Kohl even concurred in the coming months over a range of minor concessions designed to reward Paris for its forbearance.308 Unification was well worth some appeasement of Germany’s nervous European neighbours. In any case Kohl—born in Ludwigshafen and like his fellow Rhinelander Adenauer instinctively disposed to look west—was not unduly troubled at the idea of tying Germany ever more closely to the European Community.
Bu
t most important of all, the German Chancellor had the wind in his sails, as any contemporary photograph of him will confirm: German unification had the full backing of the United States. Like everyone else, the administration of President George Bush initially supposed along with its allies that German unification could only come at the end of the series of unpredictable changes unfolding in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and then only with Soviet consent. But Washington was quicker to catch the prevailing mood, especially after a February 1990 poll showed that 58 percent of West Germans favored a united and neutral Germany. This was the very outcome the US (and many West German politicians) feared most: an enlarged Germany, neutral and unattached in the middle of Europe, destabilizing and unsettling its neighbours on both sides.
The US thus committed itself wholeheartedly to support for Kohl’s objectives, to ensure that Germans were never required to choose between unity and the Western alliance. Under pressure from Washington, the French and British accordingly agreed to sit down with the Soviet Union and representatives of the two Germanies and thrash out the terms of the emergence of a new Germany. These so-called ‘4+2’ talks, conducted by foreign ministers from February to September 1990, culminated in a Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed in Moscow on September 12th.