Britain, as usual, is rather an exception. For long centuries, these islands were a Christian bastion against nothing more menacing than marauding herring-gulls. But, for most Europeans, Christendom has been a place to keep others out of -pagan Mongols and Huns, and above all Turks.
And so it remains. For this coming year of 1986 will be, for Western Europe, another year of preparing for Turkish invasion. This is not a matter of hordes of horsebowmen and banners embroidered with the crescent of Islam. It is a matter of treaty.
More than 20 years ago, in 1964, the European Economic Community signed an agreement with Turkey which soon made its way to the oblivious back of the filing cabinets. It was, indeed, only recently that certain provisions of that agreement were remembered. The papers were fished out, dusted and inspected, and the faces of many a statesman and Brussels bureaucrat turned pale. For the 1964 agreement provided that, with effect from 1 December 1986, the Turks will enjoy the right of free movement into the EEC already assured to all the member states under article 12 of the Treaty of Rome.
Turkey admits officially to 3.5 million registered unemployed. How many more millions in that huge and impoverished peasant country have nothing profitable to do is mere speculation. But, unless something happens in the next 12 months, all of them will acquire the right to enter the EEC, still in deep recession, to search for work.
Above all, they will head for West Germany and West Berlin. West Germany in the boom years was by far the biggest employer of Turkish contract labour, and that was the destination of some 90 per cent of all Turkish emigrants. As ‘guest workers,’ they built the whole superstructure of the ‘economic miracle’ in the Sixties and Seventies. In spite of regulations designed to prevent settlement, 1.4 million Turks are already resident in West Germany.
And the Germans resent it. A recent poll showed that 80 per cent of the sample felt that there were already too many foreigners in West Germany, above all in the cities (a quarter of the population of Frankfurt is foreign-born now, and 18 per cent of the population of Stuttgart). A special buy-out scheme has encouraged over 300,000 Turks to return to their homeland in the past two years. But the inflow of foreigners from outside Europe goes on, helped by West Germany’s liberal asylum laws. Not all of them are poor, either. Some arrive in Berlin by East German airlines, and hire a West Berlin taxi for nearly 200 marks to drive them straight to the West German frontier at Helmstedt, where they demand refugee status.
Faced with the December deadline, Chancellor Kohl is trying to persuade the Turkish government to restrain emigration in return for lavish West German aid – some industrial and some military. The Community has also tried to erect a dam against the coming flood, suggesting that Turkish freedom of entry and movement in the EEC is only ‘inspired’ by, not equivalent to, article 12 of the Rome Treaty. But Turkey still insists on ‘totally free movement,’ and has so far declined to be bought off.
In the end, it is all futile. Slowly but with a tremendous inevitability the frontiers and bastions of Europe are crumbling. All the Immigration Acts, all the shipments of tractors and jet fighters, all the arguments that ‘there is no room at the inn’ will not be able to hold back for ever the movement of Asia and Africa into Europe which is just beginning. The peasant masses of the world are becoming mobile, transport is becoming cheaper. They will come, and they will settle.
As this century runs to its end, other European countries will study Britain – or more properly England – to see what happens when Third World populations begin to settle in a small and overcrowded Western society. They won’t find a model. The black and white British have not yet decided how to live with one another, or on what terms. But they will discover this much: that the old ‘melting pot’ theory is out. The idea that the newcomers – except for a marginal few – will assimilate into ‘new Germans’ or ‘new Belgians’ with a few pretty folk customs of their own is an illusion, and an illusion born of the remnants of European imperial arrogance.
Social workers in Hackney, for instance, talk now about a ‘salad-bowl’ society, made up of contrasting ingredients whose different flavours must each be sharpened. The West Germans, to judge by a government report last year, still think that ‘there is only one alternative to voluntary repatriation and that is integration.’ I don’t say that integration of a sort does not take place, where cultural difference is not too wide or numbers are not too great. One Luxemburger out of 10 is now Portuguese, and these immigrant children speak the ‘Letzeburgesch’ tongue in the street. But the sheer scale of the population movements to come will make that type of assimilation impossible.
I can’t say that this worries me. The ideal of cultural unity in one country – everyone studying the same history book under the portrait of the same President – belongs to the dying ideology of the modern nation-state.
There are other models, anyway. I look out of this Warsaw room at the snow and the statues, and remember the Polish commonwealth of many centuries ago, a region of Europe inhabited by Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians and Scots, held together only by consenting loyalty to a Crown. In 100 years, all Europe will be like that.
Let it come. Let the new Attila be a foreman in Ford’s, Cologne, let the new Great Khan open a chain of nightclubs on the Riviera, let the new Sultan of Turkey take his seat in the House of Lords. Let us stop thinking, however subconsciously, of Christendom as a matter of frontiers to be held. It was, after all, a skilled migrant worker (Local Work Permit: none; Spouse/s: one, pregnant; In Temp. Accom. Unlicensed Agricultural Premises) who started all that.
[1985
IV
Waltzing With Molotov
Eastern Europe
Gorbachev’s Gift
Twice since the war, the Soviet Union has delivered to the West an enormous gift-wrapped parcel whose label read ‘Utopia.’ Twice, the leaders of the West have stood round the parcel, nervously fingering the ribbons and bows, wondering whether the act of cutting the string and opening the lid will fill the world with peace and harmony – or detonate a booby trap.
The first time was in March 1952, when Stalin produced a famous Note on the German question. In the Note, he offered the reunification of Germany in return for the withdrawal of all foreign troops and neutral status. That time, the West, and especially Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany, decided to send the parcel back unopened.
The second time is now. The Gorbachov proposal for a step-by-step abolition of all nuclear weapons is astonishing, universal in scale. It offers concessions which the Soviet Union has refused to make in the past: for example, Britain and France would retain their nuclear arsenals for a transition period, and Gorbachov would permit on-site inspection of Soviet missile bases.
There are some obscurities, some things missing. But if the idea worked out, our children in the twenty-first century would live in a world free of the nuclear threat, in which even the superpowers would have no nuclear weapons.
Should we open this parcel? It is the Americans who will decide. Gorbachov has set the condition that President Reagan’s plans for an anti-missile shield in space – ‘Star Wars,’ or the Strategic Defence Initiative – must not be put into practice, although he does not ask for a ban on SDI research. But a flat American refusal to touch this offer might hand Gorbachov a propaganda triumph and drive European alarm over Reagan’s policies to a new height.
The question in 1986 is really the same as it was in 1952. It is a double question. Does he mean it? And, even if he does, do we want it?
By coincidence, West Germany is arguing passionately over a new book about the Stalin Note of 1952. The historian Rolf Steininger, in his book ‘A Missed Chance,’ insists that Stalin was in earnest. If his offer had been accepted by the West, the East German state would have been liquidated. Out of an international agreement would have emerged ‘a reunited Germany free of the military blocs.’
Two things are certain, whether we believe Steininger or not. One is that the rejection of th
e Note finally confirmed the destiny of West Germany as an integrated member of the Adantic Alliance, and ended – may be for ever – the possibility of a united Germany between the Rhine and the Oder. The second is that opinion polls today show that over half the population of the Federal Republic would welcome something like Stalin’s solution, an approval which ranges from the far Left, the peace movement and the Greens across to German nationalists of the far Right.
The second part of the double question is easier to answer than the first. Whether Stalin meant it or not, the West did not want reunification, even with free elections. Adenauer, a conservative Catholic, knew that a united Germany would sweep him from power; it would contain an invincible majority of Protestants and Social Democrats. The West had more fundamental objections.
It comes down to what you think the Allies’ war aims were. The answer may seem obvious: they fought to smash Hitler and the Nazis, so they could never revive. But it has always seemed to me that, as the war approached its end, the Allies became half-consciously possessed by another aim. The German Reich – the state which had existed since 1871 – had proved impossible to live with. Its size and power unbalanced the continent. Its aggressive wars had bled Europe white. Its position ‘in the middle’ had allowed it to play off Russia and the western democracies against one another and to make a European security system impossible.
The Allies meant to destroy not only Nazi fascism but the German Reich itself. And they did. Germany is divided, and divided it will remain until – or unless – a Europe can be constructed strong enough to contain it.
That, really, is why the West refused to open the 1952 parcel. Anthony Eden summed it up when he asked who would be able to keep a neutral Germany disarmed – and who would be able to keep a disarmed Germany neutral.
But the Germans, ever since, have been obsessed by the other question: did Stalin mean it, or was his offer just a final propaganda trick to stave off West Germany’s entry into NATO? Some, like Steininger, talk of the ‘missed chance.’ Others talk sceptically about the ‘legend of the missed chance.’ Without the Soviet files, Rolf Steininger cannot prove that Stalin was in earnest. All he produces is an anecdote: Otto Grotewohl, the East German Premier, told an Italian politician some years later that in 1952 Stalin had wished to put the East German Communists in ‘a new situation, and we did not know what would happen to us.’
It does not much matter whether the chance was real or mythical. The West did not care about Stalin’s motives. It was the label on the parcel they did not like.
Now comes the Gorbachov offer. The West – above all West Germany – is plainly fascinated, and much more approachable than in 1952. Perhaps this is just a manoeuvre to delay Star Wars, and perhaps, if they achieve that much, the Russians will cheat on the rest of the package. But on the other hand, this may be the last and greatest chance to end the arms race, and our descendants will curse us for missing it as they die in a radioactive twilight.
Last week in southern Germany, I talked to Erhard Eppler, a leading Social Democrat whose voice is respected by the peace movement and by the Greens. ‘It’s very logical,’ he said. ‘Reagan says to Gorbachov: We will build Star Wars, then offer it to you, and then we can scrap the weapons. Gorbachov is retorting: Why go such a long way round? Why don’t we just start scrapping the nuclear arsenal now?’
But, just as Stalin in 1952 smoked out those who did not want a reunified Germany, Gorbachov is beginning to smoke out those who actually do not want to see nuclear weapons abolished. The New York Times now writes openly that a world in which the superpowers did not have such weapons would be a worse world. ‘No sane Soviet or American leader would give up weapons that simultaneously keep the peace and assure his nation’s pre-eminence.’
So should we open the parcel, and agree to explore the Soviet plan? It is a matter of two Utopias which confront each other. For President Reagan, it is the ‘dream of invulnerability’ through defence in space; he reminds Erhard Eppler of the aggressive Siegfried who fancied that he was invulnerable because he had been dipped in dragon’s blood. For Gorbachov, it is the Utopia of total nuclear disarmament, which does not tell us how these weapons would be taken away from China, or how their use by Libya or Israel would be prevented.
I believe that we should untie the string – but I do not believe that we will. The Americans will not give up Star Wars. That whole fantasy will probably pass into oblivion when President Reagan passes, but not before then. The Soviet negotiators, now busy touring Western Europe to explain their plan, almost certainly know that too. The best that we in Europe can hope for is to keep the parcel intact, on the table, until the climate in America has changed.
[1986
Changing Partners
This week, the man who danced with Molotov tells all. I beg every student of history-as-absurd-theatre to read the current number of Granta. It contains extracts from a book called ‘They,’ in which those who ruled Poland in the time of Stalinist terror, now garrulous old pensioners, spill their beans to an interviewer.
One was Jakub Berman, for eight years responsible for the secret police. Here he is describing a party in 1948 at Stalin’s villa:
‘Once, I think it was in 1948, I danced with Molotov.
You mean with Mrs Molotov?
No, she had been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov – it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple. …
As the woman?
Molotov led; I wouldn’t know how. He wasn’t a bad dancer, actually, and I tried to keep in step with him….
What about Stalin, whom did he dance with?
Oh, no, Stalin didn’t dance. Stalin wound the gramophone: he treated that as his duty. He would put on records and watch.
He watched you?
He watched us dance.
So you had a good time?
Yes, it was pleasant, but with an inner tension.
You didn’t really have fun?
Stalin really had fun. But for us those dancing sessions were good opportunities to say things to each other which we wouldn’t have been able to say out loud.’
And so on. Yes, this is genuine; these things really happened. Policy was made that way. Molotov didn’t ask Berman if he came here often but (one, two, three; one, two, three) murmured that Poland was being infiltrated by hostile organisations. No doubt Berman went home and arrested thousands more.
Another snatch of that forgotten music will be heard this week in Warsaw. They are holding a ‘World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace,’ a title which instantly recalls those ancient Stalinist times when fellow-travellers and innocents trooped about waving Picasso’s dove and signing appeals for struggle against Wall Street Fascism. Indeed, the congress is presenting itself as a repeat of that famous Congress of Intellectuals at Wroclaw in 1948, held among the ruins ‘in times of enthusiasm and hope.’
This is a very weird scheme indeed. The world, thank God, has changed since 1948. The species ‘fellow-traveller’ is extinct, or seriously endangered. Everyone knows that most Polish intellectuals refuse to have anything to do with the congress, and it is not at all clear who will consent to come. Wildly-compiled invitation lists mention everyone from Graham Greene to Woody Allen, Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl Streep, Dr Runcie, Lord (Harold) Wilson, Kurt Waldheim and Marcel Marceau. How many of these worthies have actually been sent an invitation card is quite obscure.
The Polish authorities insist that this is a non-governmental affair. But ‘we won’t ask those who eagerly await a world war or have a colonialist attitude to the third world.’
What staggers me is that the Polish organisers apparently look back on the Wroclaw congress as a great success. It certainly was historic. It was historic because Wroclaw 1948 was for many Western intellectuals the moment of blinding light on the Damascus Road. It was there that the true nature of Stalinist power, its bullying, menacing and cheating, was revealed in a way that no open-minded ‘progressive’ could ignor
e.
The British delegation included Kingsley Martin, Julian Huxley, the novelist Richard Hughes, Edward Crankshaw of the Observer, J. B. S. Haldane, George Weidenfeld, Ronald Searle, the ‘Red Dean’ Hewlett Johnson and A. J. P. Taylor. The British Embassy noted nastily that ‘a factor in the invitation which was undoubtedly strong in the case of some of the British was that the trip was in the nature of a free jaunt.’ Cigarettes were free, but vodka was not.
On the first day, a group of Polish professors and linguists offered to act as guides to the delegates. On the second day, 12 of these guides were arrested for ‘giving false information about Poland.’ The congress began with a speech by Alexander Fadeyev, Stalin’s head writer, who said that the Soviet Union had won the war unaided, that Western culture was trash, and that if monkeys could type, they would produce the poems of T. S. Eliot.
Rapturous applause from most of the hall, but the British were appalled. Huxley and Ritchie Calder suggested a walkout. Behind the scenes, Jakub Berman was also horrified and rang his dancing-partner in Moscow to get a muzzle put on the Soviet delegation. Molotov obliged, but it was too late.
A. J. P. Taylor hit back. He spoke, then as now, off the cuff, so nobody could censor his speech. It was ‘not less violent in delivery and scarcely less aggressive in content than that of Fadeyev.’ The embassy observer noted that this speech, ‘represented in the Polish Press as a typical reactionary outpouring of a travelling salesman for American imperialism…. was at first greeted by the 500 delegates with gasps of astonishment; next there were some hisses and boos from the massed ranks of the Slavs….’
Crankshaw drafted a resolution of protest at the way the congress was being manipulated. Some of the British party signed, but Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, withdrew his signature when Taylor suggested publishing the resolution in the Manchester Guardian. The American delegates, terrified, refused to touch it. The French crumpled it up and flung it in Crankshaw’s face. The congress platform said they had lost the resolution and then, when a copy was produced, said that the British had withdrawn it – a lie. A message to the congress from Einstein, critical of State power, was read out in a heavily falsified version, and the congress broke up.
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