I don’t think Europe quite realizes the potential for violence in Yugoslavia, and it could be about to start any time now.
Srđa Popović, Yugoslav human rights lawyer, June 1991
I asked the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki when before in its history Poland had been so well placed. Scarcely hesitating, he replied, ‘Probably the second half of the sixteenth century.’
Timothy Garton Ash, November 1995
The end of the Cold War gave rise to great expectations. It was a time of new beginnings in Europe. This was most obviously true of the former communist countries, where liberal economic systems and democratic government started to take shape. But Western Europe, too, saw important new departures in the establishment of the European Union and moves towards the creation of a common currency. Hopes of lasting peace were meanwhile encouraged by the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact’s military structure in March 1991. And as political leaders turned their intention to strengthening European integration, the potential of a Europe united by a common interest in peace underpinned by democratic government and guaranteed by shared prosperity seemed realizable. More than anywhere else hopes were high among the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe that following the collapse of communism they would soon begin to enjoy the prosperity already widespread in the western half of the continent.
The years of transition in the first half of the 1990s were, however, to prove more difficult than anyone amid the early euphoria had anticipated. Only after the middle of the decade would the picture look encouraging. And even as people at the beginning of the 1990s dared to dream that a better world was imminent, a great shadow was falling once more over the continent. At the very beginning of the decade war returned to Europe.
The war in Yugoslavia – or rather a series of wars – that lasted from 1991 to 1995 was a major shock to the new Europe. A dreadful term, ‘ethnic cleansing’, came into use to epitomize the character of the war. Forcible expulsions and mass killing of people in order to make the disintegrating Yugoslavia more ethnically homogeneous caused the rest of Europe to shudder. The European Union wrung its hands, but its attempts to resolve the complex issue could do nothing to stop the terrible conflict. The United Nations sent peacekeeping forces that failed to keep the peace. Ultimately, Europe proved again incapable of ending a war on European soil and establishing a durable post-war settlement without, yet again, relying upon American intervention.
Ethnic war in Yugoslavia was not, as many in the West unthinkingly presumed, just the Balkans reverting to type – a modern version of age-old conflicts. It nonetheless had a crucial historical background, if a recent one. This was the channelling of disaffection at the growing failings of communism in Yugoslavia during the 1980s into ethnic nationalism. In his long rule, Tito (who died in May 1980) had ruthlessly suppressed ethnic grievances, ruling Yugoslavia with an iron fist and strong personal authority, which he deployed to sustain a careful balance of interests in the complex state. Grievances – together with some deep animosities that lingered from the Second World War – had, however, bubbled beneath the surface and emerged strongly as communism failed to provide answers to mounting, and comprehensive, economic and social distress. The ethnic divisions of Yugoslavia formed the crucible in which the tragedy of that country was to unfold.
The post-war communist state comprised six republics – Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia – whose populations varied in size. Serbs (nearly eight million) greatly outnumbered Croats (the second-largest ethnic group, under five million). At the other extreme, Montenegro’s population was only some 600,000. The distribution of population did not for the most part correspond to the borders of Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, leaving an ethnic mix that reflected differing cultural traditions, language and religion. While Slovenia in the north-west was almost entirely mono-ethnic, in other parts of the federal state Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and other ethnicities were not separated by neat borders. Many Croats lived in Serbia. There were Serbian enclaves in Croatia, and both Serbs and Croats lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina, cheek by jowl with two million Muslims, as they had done, generally peacefully, for hundred of years. Montenegrins, Macedonians and Albanians formed other parts of the ethnic patchwork of Yugoslavia, alongside other ethnic minorities. Tito’s ruthlessly imposed balancing act ensured that each of the republics had benefited (if not equally) from the rapidly growing economy in the post-war decades and in so doing helped to defuse underlying ethnic tensions.
From the economic downturn of the 1970s onwards, however, rising discontent started to be voiced in terms of cultural difference and identity. These gained further emphasis when the gap between the more prosperous and the poorer republics widened as Yugoslavia plunged by the middle of the following decade into a full-scale economic crisis – huge, unpayable international debts, plummeting standards of living, soaring inflation and mass unemployment. Through the ethnic lens there was a double distortion: the poorer republics were viewed by the richer ones as parasites, the richer by the poorer as the beneficiaries of a federal system that was set up to serve their interests.
Slovenia, already in the early 1980s the most Westernized, culturally tolerant and economically advanced republic, was by 1989 far and away the most prosperous part of economically struggling Yugoslavia, followed at some distance by Croatia. At the opposite pole were Bosnia-Herzegovina and, easily the worst off, Kosovo. The increasing social and economic disparities fostered disaffection, which in turn fuelled ethnic prejudice and animosity. Slovenes and Croats became more resentful at some of their relative prosperity being siphoned off to benefit less productive parts of the country. Serbs looked enviously at the better standard of living among Croats and Slovenes. Kosovan Serbs looked to Belgrade to protect them from discrimination by Albanians. Expatriate nationalists who worked abroad or had been forced into exile helped to promote ethnic resentment back home.
Plainly aware of the traumas that were afflicting the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavs too wanted change. Political crisis loomed as the communist system, incapable of offering any remedy to the country’s woes, lost legitimacy. By 1986 as many as 88 per cent of Slovenians and 70 per cent of Croats were expressing unwillingness to join the Communist Party. Even in Serbia, the dominant republic in the federal state, the figure was as high as 40 per cent. The waning hold of communist ideology brought a revival of religious belief – a divisive element as Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims began to see religion as a sign of ethnic identity.
Ethnic nationalism was rapidly becoming the main replacement ideology. Most young adults (though less so among Croats and Slovenes), according to a survey in 1985, still put their Yugoslavian identity ahead of ethnic identity. Other surveys nonetheless pointed towards worsening ethnic relations. So did some elements of popular culture. Football fans turned matches into symbolic displays of aggressive ethnic rivalry – waving banners to advertise their ethnic identity, singing old Second World War refrains of Chetnik Serbian nationalists, or, on the Croat side, giving the fascist salute of the Ustaše, who had been guilty of unspeakable wartime crimes. Football hooliganism – a feature of the 1980s in a number of European countries (especially Britain) – acquired in Yugoslavia an outright ethnic dimension. When Dinamo Zagreb played Red Star Belgrade in 1990, 1,500 Croats and Serbs engaged in a pitched battle. The leader of Red Star Belgrade’s ‘Ultras’ was Arkan, the nickname of the violent criminal Željko Ražnatović, soon to spearhead the most notorious Serbian paramilitary force.
History became reinterpreted in accordance with the emerging ethnic divisions. From the mid-1980s onwards a more liberal climate permitted public discussion in books, literature, film and in the mass media of topics that had long been taboo. The Second World War became a topic of discussion, beyond the traditional Yugoslav extolling of the partisan army. Tito himself was far from exempt from criticism. Previously the untouchable national hero, he was increasingly portrayed as a decadent autocrat whose personal luxurious lifestyle stood in sharp contrast to his publicly avowed socialist principles. His wartime role was revised as the Chetniks, for long officially decried as monarchists and reactionaries (if not outright fascists), were rehabilitated by the Serbs. This in itself amounted to reducing the part played by Tito’s communist partisans. By the beginning of the 1990s streets and squares in Tito’s honour were being renamed. His mausoleum was closed.
A crucial element in the use and abuse of history in promoting an aggressive and intolerant sense of ethnic identity revolved around the terrible atrocities perpetrated by the Ustaše fascist militia of the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War. The Ustaše had killed, often bestially, hundred of thousands of (mainly) Serbs, Jews and Roma. The numbers killed were, however, bitterly contested by both Serbs (who hugely exaggerated them) and Croats (who grossly reduced them). Franjo Tudjman, soon to become President of Croatia, was among those strongly playing down the scale of the Ustaše killings (and bizarrely blaming the persecution of the Serbs largely on Jews, whose numbers murdered in the Holocaust he also claimed to have been wildly exaggerated). Croats emphasized their own grievous suffering at the hands of Serbian partisans after Croatia had capitulated at the end of the war. The collective Serbian memory of the Ustaše atrocities, on the other hand, bolstered the rapidly spreading view that only in a Serbian state would the people be free from the threat of any recurrence.
No unifying figure capable of transcending the underlying, and mounting, ethnic tensions had succeeded Tito, the war hero and symbol of national unity. The unwieldy constitution of 1974, in attempting through decentralization to provide ethnic balance to the governance of Yugoslavia, merely compounded the growing centrifugal tendencies and political problems of the country. Institutional power, in Tito’s last years of deteriorating health, was shared among an eight-member presidency (from the six republics and Serbia’s two provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo), one of whom on an annual rotating basis would serve as head of state and commander-in-chief of the army. Yugoslavia had a federal parliament, six parliaments of the republics, two for Serbia’s provinces, and ten communist parties (including one for Yugoslavia as a whole, and one for the army). Unsurprisingly in this complex balancing act, regional parties and governments became more important than the federal entities. The major exceptions – large ones – were the army and the security police, which remained under federal control.
Still, there was as yet no sign of imminent explosion. This was before Slobodan Milošević, a skilful political tactician who had progressed assuredly upwards on the path of career advancement to become the leader of the Serbian Communist Party, realized that exploitation of ethnic nationalism, not the promotion of communism, was the way to attain the aggrandisement of his own power, and that of Serbia.
Milošević lit what would prove to be the touchpaper to widening ethnic conflict when he delivered an incendiary speech in Kosovo on 24 April 1987. Kosovo held a special place in Serbian mythology. It was seen as the cradle of the Serbian nation, where in 1389 the Serbian aristocracy, vanquished in battle with the Turks, had heroically chosen death rather than capitulation. By the late twentieth century the Serbs formed a deeply resentful minority of the population in Kosovo – grievously persecuted in their own land, as they saw it, by the Albanian majority (around 85 per cent of the total). Milošević went to Kosovo as a high-ranking communist functionary. He returned a fêted nationalist. Responding to an angry crowd of Serbs who were claiming that they had been assaulted by the Albanian Kosovan police, he had told them, in a televised speech, ‘This is your land’ and ‘No one should dare to beat you’, immediately unleashing a night of anti-Albanian violence. He had poured petrol on the flames of Serbian nationalism, and not just in Kosovo. It also gave him the platform soon afterward to manoeuvre successfully to become Serbian President. It marked the beginning of Yugoslavia’s long death throes.
In the three years after Milošević’s baleful Kosovo speech things went from bad to worse. The federal state increasingly struggled to keep a hold over its constituent parts as the economy collapsed. Mirroring what was happening across Central and Eastern Europe, pressure grew for democratization and autonomy within Yugoslavia. In 1990 communist rule in Yugoslavia came to an end. But in pluralist elections that year, the first in over four decades, nationalist parties were the winners everywhere apart from Serbia and Montenegro (little more than a Serbian puppet). And even there the communist parties were becoming by now effectively vehicles of Serbian nationalism. The federal state of Yugoslavia was already struggling for survival.
Franjo Tudjman, who in 1989 had founded the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union Party and became President of Croatia following the next year’s election, was by now appealing to the unity of ethnic Croats, inside and outside Croatian borders. Ominously, he referred to Bosnia as a ‘national state of the Croatian nation’, in which Muslims were seen as merely Islamicized Croats. His party spoke of defending Croatia at the River Drina, the border of Bosnia and Serbia. As President he pressed increasingly for Croatia’s independence (while initially paying lip service to the notion of a loose Yugoslav federation). Croatian national assertiveness rapidly became worrying for the Serbian minority in Yugoslavia’s second-largest republic. The red-and-white chequered flag that almost overnight fluttered from so many buildings reminded them of the wartime Croatian state, run by the dreaded Ustaše. The Croatian language became the only one permitted in administrative arrangements. Signs were changed to use only the Croatian Latin characters, discarding the Serbian Cyrillic script used by Serbs. (In Belgrade the reverse happened. The Latin script was degraded, replaced everywhere by Serbian Cyrillic.) The cautious ethnic balance of the state administration was disturbed as Serbs were dismissed and replaced by Croats. Worst of all, Serbs were also removed from the police, unfailingly conjuring up the spectre of the return of the fascist Ustaše.
The fears of the Serbian minority in Croatia were to spark the beginning of four long years of war in Yugoslavia. The war fell into a number of phases, bewildering to outsiders in their complexity. During the first, in 1991–2, after Slovenia had, following a ten-day ‘phoney war’, been allowed to secede from Yugoslavia, Croats were with great brutality driven out of those parts of Croatia that were inhabited mainly by Serbs. The second phase was the first part of what amounted to the core of the war: the three-cornered murderous conflict of Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia that lasted from 1992 to 1995, as Serbs and Croats waged ethnic war against the Muslims – the main victims of the dreadful unfolding of ethnic cleansing. The Serbs at this point had behaved worst and gained most. In the third phase – the latter part of the Bosnian war – however, the Croats, having built up their army, saw it in their own interest to ally with the Muslims, and now turned the tables on the Serbs, expelling them from areas they had formerly occupied. In this last phase the Serbs were the main losers, and victims of extensive Croat and Bosnian Muslim brutality.
Serbian fears at the outset were especially pronounced in the Krajina (an ancient word denoting a frontier or borderland, a long rim along the western and northern border of Bosnia-Herzegovina), where they formed about 12 per cent of the population. Milošević inspired their hopes of protection in a Greater Serbia and inflamed aggression towards neighbouring Croats. Serious trouble was already brewing in 1990. Once Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991 – the same day as Slovenia – the trouble boiled over. Milošević, the key player at this stage, saw Slovenia’s secession from Yugoslavia (which followed a brief armed conflict with few casualties) as no great loss to his ambition to bring about Greater Serbia. He had bigger fish to fry. His attention could now switch to the question of the Serbs who lived on Croatian territory.
Milošević had already in March 1991 admitted that ‘Yugoslavia is finished’. What would replace it was unclear. But when he met Tudjman for secret talks later in the month, there was discussion of both Croatia and Serbia benefiting from the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Croatian and Serbian expansion were both on the agenda. Before any attention could be turned to Bosnia, however, Tudjman’s ambitions to establish an ethnically homogeneous Croatian state and Milošević’s schemes for a Greater Serbia were bound to clash over the issue of the sizeable Serbian minority living on Croatian territory.
The British journalist Misha Glenny was shocked at the level of mutual hatred between Croats and Serbs he encountered when travelling in the Krajina even prior to the Croatian declaration of independence. ‘Croats and Serbs argued endlessly with me,’ he recorded, ‘as to why Serbs and Croats, respectively, were congenital monsters. They would cite history, religion, education and biology as reasons.’ The visceral hatred struck him as new, a product of the enormous upsurge of nationalism in the dying embers of the Yugoslav communist state – the flames deliberately fanned by state-sponsored media in Belgrade and Zagreb. Young men from mixed ethnic areas and border territories, soaked in male machismo, were drawn to paramilitary units – and once there to a pervasive climate of whipped-up ethnic hatred and glorification of violence. Old fears and handed-down memories were now embedded in recently inflamed hatreds – Croat fears of the return of the Second World War Chetniks, Serbian fears of the revival of the Ustaše. As violence spread, spawning counter-violence, the murderous mentality widened to previously peaceable parts of the population.
When Serbs killed and mutilated the bodies of several Croat policemen in a village near Vukovar in the north-east of Yugoslavia in May 1991, it lit the fuse to an explosion of violence across the Krajina, chiefly perpetrated by Serbian paramilitaries backed by the units of federal (in practice largely Serbian) Yugoslav army units under the command of a highly able – and utterly ruthless – Colonel (soon to be General), Ratko Mladić. Between August and December 1991 around 80,000 Croats were expelled and forced to flee – many more would follow over subsequent months – from predominantly Serbian areas. Areas outside the Krajina were also attacked as the violence spread. The beautiful Dalmatian resort of Dubrovnik, once visited by countless tourists, was bombarded, besieged and much destroyed – with scant military rationale. The port of Split on the Adriatic also suffered. All this took place in view of journalists and television cameras. Worst of all was the terrible violence in the pretty Danubian town of Vukovar, where thousands of civilians were caught up in a three-month siege and bombardment. As the world looked on in horror, hundreds were killed and many more wounded before the siege ended with the fall of the town to the Serbs on 20 November 1991.
This phase of the war ended in January 1992 (following negotiations conducted by a special envoy of the United Nations, the former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance). An armistice, to be supervised by a United Nations peacekeeping force of around 12,000 troops, was agreed. It could do nothing, however, to ensure that expelled Croats felt safe enough to return to the designated ‘Protected Areas’, or to prevent the Yugoslav army, on its withdrawal over subsequent months, from leaving much of its weaponry with Serbian militia and security forces. About a third of Croatia had by then fallen under the control of the rebel Serbs.
Hopes, faint though they were, of an overall political solution to Yugoslavia’s troubles, rested on the efforts of Lord Carrington, formerly British Foreign Secretary and subsequently Secretary General of NATO. These were torpedoed when Germany – echoing strongly anti-Serbian public opinion at home – put strong pressure on other countries in the European Community to recognize Croatian independence. There were direct consequences for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
This central Yugoslav republic – of its population 44 per cent were Muslim, 33 per cent Serbian and 17 per cent Croat – now faced an unenviable choice: declaring its own independence, or remaining in a Yugoslavia dominated by Serbs. The Bosnian Serbs were led by Radovan Karadžić, a former psychiatrist convicted in the mid-1980s of embezzlement and fraud, whose wild mane of hair would soon make him instantly recognizable to a global television audience. Karadžić refused to contemplate Bosnian independence, which stood in complete opposition to the aim of unifying all Serbs in a Greater Serbian state. For Karadžić and his followers, a Bosnian declaration of independence meant war. On 3 March 1992, following a referendum held on 29 February and 1 March, in which nearly two-thirds of voters supported independence, the Bosnian President, the Muslim lawyer and intellectual Alija Izetbegović, who had served five years in prison during the 1980s for his opposition to communism, issued precisely that declaration.
On 7 April, the day after the European Community had recognized the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosnian Serbs declared their own independence in what they were before long calling the Serbian Republic (Republika Srpska). Already in preceding weeks Muslim civilians had been wantonly killed and assaulted in north-eastern Bosnia by Serbian paramilitaries. By the end of April, Sarajevo, the ancient and beautiful capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for centuries the home of an ethnically and religiously mixed population, was besieged by thousands of troops from the Yugoslav army (overwhelmingly Serbs) and Bosnian Serbian police and paramilitaries. The diary entries of an eleven-year-old girl, Zlata Filipovic, offer a taste of the daily fears of Sarajevo citizens during the siege: ‘It’s dangerous to walk around town. It’s especially dangerous to cross our bridge, because snipers shoot at you. You have to run across. Every time [my mother] goes out, Daddy and I go to the window to watch her run . . . You run, and you run, and you run, and there’s no end to the bridge.’ The siege was set to last for almost four years, and cost the lives of nearly 14,000 people, thousands of them (including over 1,500 children) civilians, and a further 56,000 people (nearly 15,000 of them children) injured.
Ethnic hatred did not consume everyone. Two twenty-five-year-old lovers, killed as they tried to escape Sarajevo in May 1993, had been sweethearts since school days; he was a Serb, she was a Muslim. But they belonged to a dwindling minority. For a terrible spiral of atrocities in the escalating ethnic war by now engulfed the entire region. Milošević and Tudjman looked on from Belgrade and Zagreb respectively. As they had recognized in their secret talks in 1991, they stood to gain. War for them was a rational business.
Each side committed atrocities. The worst, however, were inflicted on the Muslims. Killing, rape, beatings, robbery and destruction of property (houses, shops, mosques and other community buildings) were all part of a systematic use of terror that successfully drove the Muslim population above all from their homes and ‘ethnically cleansed’ entire areas. Terrified Muslim women and children were put into train wagons in Banja Luka, in northern Bosnia, and ferried away, like Jews who half a century previously had been deported to Auschwitz. Men were rounded up and put into modern-day concentration camps, redolent of the horrors of the Second World War. Columns of refugees walked for days on roads and through mountain passes to escape the terror, but were themselves subjected to horrific violence – abuse, intimidation, pillage and often murder – as they fled. It was estimated that a minimum of 20,000 women were raped.
By the time the Bosnian War ended in 1995 the dead, according to the most reliable calculations, numbered over 100,000. Over 60 per cent of those were Bosnian Muslims, who also comprised the overwhelming majority of the civilian deaths. Their fate contributed to the deepening process of radicalization in the Islamic world. Serbs made up 25 per cent of those killed, Croats 8.3 per cent. Around 2.2 million had been forced to flee their homes. No conflict since the Second World War had left so many dead or displaced.
The worst single atrocity came last. By 1993 the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia had become a Muslim enclave in Serbian-controlled territory – grossly overcrowded by refugees fleeing from murderous ethnic cleansing in nearby villages. The town was placed under United Nations protection as a ‘safe area’ in April that year. The Serbs were nonetheless determined to take the enclave. Their blockade of food and even medical supplies caused conditions to deteriorate alarmingly. Fewer than 400 Dutch soldiers, as part of the United Nations protection force, were left to defend the ‘safe area’ by the time Serbian troops, almost four times greater in number, commanded by General Mladić, began their offensive to take the town on 6 July 1995. Within five days Srebrenica was in Serbian hands. From 12 July the Serbs began to separate the men and boys from the women (who were transported by force to Bosniak territory). Around 8,000 of them were taken into the woods and systematically massacred. It was the grimmest episode in the entire grim war, a stain on European civilization. Europe, and the wider world, was reminded of a horror it thought had been eradicated for good. Finally, the West was stirred into a concerted effort to end the conflict.
A number of attempts had been made, the most promising (as it seemed for a time) by Cyrus Vance and the former British Foreign Secretary David Owen. But proposals for territorial division had invariably fallen foul of one belligerent side or the other. By 1995, however, the war was becoming counter-productive for Serbia – badly affected by UN sanctions, internationally isolated, and under the threat from the United States – despite European reluctance – that it would arm the Bosnians (whose plight had gained them wide international sympathy). Moreover, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats had stopped fighting each other in March 1994. So Serbia stood friendless and alone. Milošević decided that the time had come to hold on to what he had – and at the expense of the Serbs who lived outside Serbia itself, precisely those he had promised to protect by incorporation in a Greater Serbia. For Milošević the intransigent Bosnian Serbs had become no more than a hindrance.
The two decisive steps in 1995 were interlinked: the end, under American pressure, of the Croat offensive against Muslims in Bosnia, and the new determination of the United States to find a territorial solution to the Bosnian War, which the Europeans (and the United Nations) had failed to achieve. The enormous bloodletting and huge destruction had occurred in a part of Europe with the Europeans looking on. In Srebrenica the Dutch UN soldiers had helplessly stood by while the Muslim men and boys were led out to their execution. Timothy Garton Ash, visiting Bosnia in 1995, castigated ‘the external policy of that thing called Europe, which looked so bright and hopeful just four years ago’. The hubristic claim by Jacques Poos, the Luxembourg Foreign Minister, in 1991, that ‘the hour of Europe has dawned’, seemed four blood-soaked years later like a sick joke.
The Americans now brought new urgency to the search for a peace settlement. Military cooperation between Zagreb and Washington was offered as the bait to Tudjman to stop hostilities against the Bosnian Muslims and make territorial gains at the expense of the Serbs. The stick to match the carrot was that if Croatia did not comply, the country would face international isolation, sanctions, and most likely indictment of its leaders for war crimes. Recognizing where his interests lay, Tudjman was ready to comply. In the late spring and summer of 1995 the Croats, having built up their armed forces in the meantime, turned the tables on the Serbs in the Krajina, inflicting their own ethnic cleansing of Serbian areas. The Serbian uprising against Croat rule had begun in 1990 in the Serb-inhabited town of Knin, about forty miles inland from the Dalmatian coast. By 1995, the ‘ethnically cleansed’ town was Croatian. Where once 37,000 Serbs had lived, the town had been reduced to an empty shell with a population of just 2,000.
The balance of power had by now completely shifted. Tudjman, the loser in 1991, had turned out to be a winner. Milošević, triumphant early in the war, was now on the defensive. And without the support of Milošević, who had cut off their arms supply, the Bosnian Serbs themselves faced the prospect of losing all their gains. The chances of ending the conflict were greater than they had been since its beginning. But there was still some way to go before the warring parties might reach a settlement – demanding reluctant compromise on all sides – that could hold.
The thorny path to any potential deal was trodden by the tough, no-nonsense American negotiator Richard Holbrooke, a former US Assistant Secretary of State with extensive diplomatic experience. By late September 1995, Holbrooke had pressed Tudjman and, more unwillingly, Izetbegović into accepting the basis of a settlement in which Bosnia-Herzegovina would remain a sovereign state, but as a federation in which Bosnian Serbs would control just under a half (almost all in the Republika Srpska) and the Croats around a fifth. This was the essence of the deal that was eventually agreed at a conference held in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 (later formally signed in Paris on 14 December). The agreement was to be implemented by a NATO force of 60,000 troops. It was an uneasy, fragile arrangement – as all sides acknowledged, far from perfect. But the pragmatic settlement, despite continuing tensions, proved surprisingly durable.
The issue of Kosovo, which in a way had sparked the entire conflict, remained unresolved. Serious, endemic ethnic violence had not ceased. Much of it was carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army. This guerrilla organization of Albanians who had turned to armed struggle for Kosovan independence had hardened criminals among its members, though most had been radicalized by their maltreatment at the hands of the Serbian police. A lesson the Kosovans had drawn from the Dayton Agreement was that violence pays. The West had bowed to the realities of armed might in Bosnia but had forgotten, it seemed, the demands for autonomy of the overwhelmingly Albanian majority in Kosovo. Milošević’s response to the violence was to unleash a Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing against Albanian villages. Over the following two years an estimated 10,000 Albanians were killed, and over half a million took flight into neighbouring countries. When brutal Serbian reprisals against the supporters of the guerrilla army were stepped up in 1998, they prompted what amounted to an armed rising by the Kosovans – backed by weaponry they had looted from arsenals in Albania itself. For the West the circulation of pictures of the bodies of forty-five Albanians, victims of a Serbian police action, on 15 January 1999, in a village south of the capital city of Priština, was the decisive moment. It brought a reminder of Srebrenica, anxiety that another Bosnia was in the making, and a determination this time to act before it was too late.
The Bosnian War helped to persuade the West to adopt what became known as the doctrine of liberal (or humanitarian) interventionism – the belief that Western democracies needed to act against misrule to protect the human rights of those menaced by regimes. The Contact Group (as it called itself) – the USA, Russia, Britain, France and Germany – that had earlier fruitlessly sought a settlement in Bosnia met again at Rambouillet, near Paris, on 6 February, but despite threats of military action Milošević rejected their peace plan, since it involved stationing NATO troops on Serbian territory. The day after talks were finally broken off on 19 March the Yugoslav army – Yugoslavia by now was reduced to Serbia and its puppet, Montenegro – began an offensive in the north-west of Kosovo, carried out with much violence. Milošević still refused to negotiate. On 24 March major NATO air strikes, with the United States in the lead, began against Yugoslavia. More than a thousand planes inflicted extensive damage on the country’s infrastructure, destroying many buildings in the capital, Belgrade, itself, and killing hundreds of civilians. The air strikes were carried out without any mandate from the UN Security Council – the Russians and Chinese had indicated that they would use their veto – thereby calling their legality into question. Many in the West were appalled. Those in favour of the West’s new doctrine of humanitarian intervention claimed, however, that in such an emergency, where human rights were being trampled on but where political interests were certain to impose a veto in the Security Council, a higher morality had to prevail. Lessons from the past – not just the most recent past in Yugoslavia – were invoked. Germans compared inhumanity in Kosovo with Hitler’s crimes. The British spoke of the dangers of appeasing dictators.
Serbian forces in Kosovo intensified their offensive in retaliation at the air strikes. By now more than three-quarters of a million Kosovans had taken flight, mainly towards Albania and Macedonia. It took eleven weeks before Milošević finally backed down on 9 June 1999. Air strikes were halted the next day. Kosovo became a United Nations Protectorate within Yugoslavia, to be guaranteed by a NATO peacekeeping force. The final status of Kosovo was left unresolved. But the Serbs had had enough of their one-time champion Slobodan Milošević. In the wake of huge popular protests following (disputed) presidential elections Milošević yielded to the pressure and on 7 October 2000 was replaced as President of Yugoslavia by the lawyer Vojislav Koštunica, leader of the Serbian Democratic Party. A year later Milošević was handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, set up in The Hague in the Netherlands in 1993 to prosecute the perpetrators of serious crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars.
Kosovo staggered on, its internal violence by no means ended, most directed at the Serbian minority. In 2008, opposed by Serbia and without United Nations backing, Kosovo’s parliament unilaterally declared independence, which promptly gained international recognition. Two years earlier Montenegro had terminated its union with Serbia and itself became fully independent. With that, the state of Yugoslavia, which had arisen from the upheavals of the First World War, survived the Second, and then successfully defied Stalin, had ceased to exist – a victim of its own internal enmities.
The judicial reckoning was still to come. Slobodan Milošević was one of 161 persons indicted before the International Tribunal in The Hague. More than half were sentenced to a lengthy period of imprisonment. Milošević died during his trial in 2006. Radovan Karadžić (belatedly indicted after years in hiding) was eventually sentenced to forty years, in March 2016. Ratko Mladić also evaded justice for many years. He was finally convicted in November 2017 of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The interest of the world had moved on long before the trials approached their conclusion. For the three million whose lives had been ruined and for the hundreds of thousands who had seen loved ones killed or maimed by four years of bitter fighting, the verdicts of the court, while no doubt welcome to most, were scant compensation for the torment and suffering.
The fall of Yugoslavia had shown that even in the new Europe armed might could still ride roughshod over the rule of law. Violence had paid off. The power of the gun had again proved decisive. Bosnia and Croatia had been ethnically cleansed. The new nation states that had arisen from the wreckage of federal Yugoslavia reflected a pattern in Europe’s twentieth century: they had borders based on high levels of ethnic homogeneity. Most Europeans, sickened to the core by the daily television bulletins on the horror as Yugoslavia disintegrated, shut out of their lives what was actually happening in another part of their own continent. Yugoslavia was a reminder, even so, that the past still cast a long shadow over Europe. Expectations after the demise of communism that unity and peace would spread across the continent had been no more than an illusion.
Yugoslavia’s disaster was a profoundly negative reversion to the type of ethnic and territorial conflict that had once afflicted much of Eastern and Central Europe. And the failure of the rest of Europe to prevent it was deeply depressing. Nevertheless, the tragedy should not hide the fact that, whatever the initial disappointment and at times disillusionment, the states of the former Soviet bloc did not return to earlier forms of authoritarian nationalism. The pull of the European Union, reflecting the principles of democracy and the rule of law, was the strongest counterweight to any such tendencies.
The euphoria felt by much of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was so great in 1990 that disenchantment was bound to follow during the early years of difficult transition to completely new economic and political systems. Massive disruption to people’s lives was unavoidable during the double transformation from communist states with state-controlled economies to democratized political structures and liberalized economies. Living standards often suffered in the early years, though economic growth saw them start to improve significantly during the later 1990s.
The path adopted (with numerous variants) in the process of fundamental economic restructuring followed neo-liberal theories that by now had almost entirely displaced Keynesianism as orthodoxy. A programme, dubbed ‘the Washington Consensus’, originally devised in 1989 for Latin American countries, was widely deemed to be the way forward in the formidable task of transforming the moribund state-owned economies of Eastern and Central European countries. It gave outright priority to fast liberalization of the economy through deregulation, privatization, and opening up to the freedom of the market. This required the quickest possible abolition of state controls and ownership in favour of market competition. For the people of the former communist countries to reach the broad sunlit uplands of prosperity enjoyed in the West, they would first have to pass through a vale of tears. Emerging on the other side, the journey – it was presumed – would have proved worthwhile.
The neo-liberal approach was welcomed by Central and Eastern European leaders as the best way to align their countries in the shortest possible time with the more economically advanced Western Europe. Copying the West was, so it was thought, the key to ‘rejoining’ Europe. Poland’s Finance Minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, and the Czechoslovakian Finance Minister (later Czech Prime Minister), Václav Klaus, were the most ardent European supporters of ‘shock therapy’, as it was labelled, a term associated with the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs. But in one form or another neo-liberalism dominated the strategy to convert socialist to capitalist economies as rapidly and thoroughly as possible.
New laws deregulated the economy as the straitjacket of socialist planning was removed. Market prices replaced price controls. Currencies were made convertible. Foreign trade was liberalized by reducing or eliminating tariffs to allow free movement of goods and capital. Banks, stock exchanges, and a whole panoply of financial laws had to be speedily introduced. Privatization of state concerns gathered pace. It was more successful at first for small and middling-size concerns than for big enterprises, for which major foreign investment proved initially difficult to attract.
The International Monetary Fund helped to subsidize the transition, providing a total of $27 billion by 1997, though in loans not grants. Poland was singularly fortunate to have its debts effectively written off by 1993 – a reward for being the ‘shop-window’ country of the ‘shock therapy’, and also on account of its size and strategic importance. Assistance also came from the European Economic Community (soon to be renamed the European Union). This at first targeted Poland and Hungary, but soon became a wider programme. The amounts were, however, much lower in relative terms than the Marshall Plan of 1947, which had been so important to Western Europe’s post-war rebuilding, and less generous in their stipulations.
For millions of citizens of the countries of the former Soviet bloc the impact of the economic changes during the first years of such rapid and draconian transformation was dire. The former German Democratic Republic was exceptional in benefiting from largesse amounting to billions of marks from West German coffers. Nevertheless, here as elsewhere living standards at first fell as unemployment rose steeply and industrial production plummeted to little more than a quarter of what it had been in 1988. At least East Germans could, and did, vote in large numbers with their feet by joining the drain to the more prosperous Western Germany where they could find work in their own country. Around 600,000 (nearly 4 per cent of the population) left in 1989–90, though the numbers dropped thereafter to around half that level before increasing again in the later 1990s. Nowhere else did people have that option. Elsewhere, too, the blight on the living standards was generally even harsher. At a time when income was rising in Western Europe, it was dropping by 20 to 30 per cent in Central and Eastern Europe. Unsurprisingly, only a small minority of citizens in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania felt (according to opinion surveys in 1993–4) they were better off than they had been before the fall of communism.
Gross domestic product dropped in all post-communist countries in the first years of transition. Industrial production in Poland fell by nearly a third in 1990–91, the country’s gross national product by almost a fifth. By 1992, 13.5 per cent of the working population – 2.3 million people – had no job. In the famous Gdańsk shipyard, birthplace of Solidarity, the number of employees dropped from 17,000 to 3,000 by the mid-1990s, and financial losses became unsustainable. The pattern was similar across most of Central and Eastern Europe. Compared with 1989, Albania’s industrial production had declined by 1993 by a staggering 77 per cent. In Romania industrial output dropped by 22 per cent in 1992 alone. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary the decline between 1989 and 1993 was over a third. It was similar in the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Unemployment soared in each country, while purchasing power was eaten away by rocketing inflation. Rural areas also suffered badly. Agriculture slumped in some countries to only a half of its output before the collapse of communism. The population drained away since agricultural employment was in steep decline (though still far higher than in Western Europe, especially in the Baltic countries, Poland and, above all, the Balkans). The privatization of former collective farms was slow and piecemeal, affected by disputes over ownership and lack of capital. The mainly small farms that came into being were poorly mechanized and unprofitable.
By the mid-1990s, however, and already as early as 1992 in Poland, the worst was over. Growth, averaging almost 4 per cent (much faster than in Western Europe, though from a far lower base), began to gather pace across the region. Unemployment rates started to come down, as did inflation (though not in the still deeply troubled economies of Bulgaria and Romania). By the turn of the millennium, benefiting from global growth, Central and Eastern Europe, taken as a whole, had almost recovered to the level of 1989 – and now had completely restructured economies. Although the price had initially been high, and although there were substantial variations in the levels of success achieved, they had taken major steps towards ending state monopolies, extending private ownership, and building functioning, liberalized market economies. By the end of the decade prospects were looking far brighter for the former ‘eastern bloc’ countries.
Had the pain of such an abrupt transition from socialism to capitalism been necessary? On this, the opinion of eminent economic experts differed at the time, and it continues to differ diametrically. Advocates of the ‘shock therapy’ remain convinced that the bitter medicine offered the best and quickest possible route to economic health. Critics claim that the medicine need not have been so nasty; similar, if not better, results could have obtained by more gradual acclimatization to the demands of economic change. A slower transformation, they argue, which placed greater store on modifying market forces through a (modernized) state sector, would have produced growth without countries first having to undergo such drastic decline (and the accompanying social distress).
Hungary, where steps towards partial liberalization of the economy had already been taken well before the fall of communism, is usually highlighted as showing the merits of a more gradual approach. However, by 1995 Hungary was struggling to combat its high level of foreign debt and compelled, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to introduce severe austerity measures. The economy slumped as a result, and nearly a third of the population were classed as falling below the poverty line. There was much disillusionment at the rise in unemployment, the impact of privatization, and cuts in state welfare. Moreover, Poland, the paradigm of successful ‘shock therapy’, in fact soon diluted the worst effects of its chosen strategy. Steps were taken to moderate the speed of reform and in particular to defer privatization. In addition, as mentioned, it was alone in benefiting from debt remittance. The Czech Republic, the other prime example of the remedies of ‘shock therapy’, actually still heavily subsidized large enterprises and anyway did not avoid financial crisis by the mid-1990s. (The two halves of the former federal state of Czechoslovakia, unable to agree on a political direction, decided on an amicable divorce in 1993, creating the separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.) The interpretational debate is unresolved. Beyond the often arcane debates among economists, however, the reality was that every path from socialism to capitalism was strewn with thorns. There was no easy way through the thickets.
Those countries fared best that had good prerequisites for making the painful transition. Within the former Soviet bloc (leaving aside the abnormal case of the German Democratic Republic), Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had strong industrial bases, rapidly developing commercial sectors, relatively good transport infrastructure and emerging civic cultures, and held attractions for Western investment. Slovenia, easily the most advanced Yugoslav republic, fell broadly into this pattern. So, in most respects, did the Baltic countries. Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, on the other hand, lagged far behind in every regard, while much of Yugoslavia was consumed by war.
Whether or not the strong dose of neo-liberalism was the right medicine, by the arrival of the new millennium there had been growing levels of convergence with Western economies. Societies, too, for so long separated by the Iron Curtain and forced to follow differing trajectories, were starting to come together. Ease of communication and travel, television, popular culture and sport all played their role in helping to unify what had still so recently been divided. Cities, benefiting most from the advantages of freedom of travel and ease of communication, fared best. Prague and Warsaw were examples of rapidly booming cities. There was a big gap, though, between the showcase capitals and the provincial towns and rural areas, which witnessed a population drain (especially of young people) away to expanding conurbations. Regions turned into wastelands by de-industrialization were also left behind. But even here, once the worst of the drastic economic adjustment was overcome, membership of the European Union served as a hope for future prosperity.
That route was not open to the European successor states to the Soviet Union – Russia itself, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. For these countries there was, and could be, no turn to the West. This was the new dividing line in Eastern Europe. The prerequisites for successful, if arduous, transition that generally existed in Central Europe were wholly lacking in an economic zone dominated by Russia. The basis for state regulation of a commercialized economy was as good as non-existent. There was little attraction for foreign investment. The infrastructure was poor. And there were no traditions of the rule of law, pluralist democracy, and a civic culture independent of the state. What emerged in Russia was robber-baron capitalism. Corruption on a colossal and endemic scale transferred many of the state resources, including the enormous profits from oil and gas, into the hands of unscrupulous oligarchs who invested much of their vast wealth in the West, ostentatiously flaunting their untold riches in luxury Mediterranean yachts or palatial houses in London and other Western European cities. Industrial production in Russia meanwhile plummeted, state debt soared, and by the late 1990s the Russian Federation was bordering upon economic collapse while much of the population endured a miserable standard of living. Most people thought they had been better off under communism and lamented the decision to dissolve the Soviet Union.
Ukraine, possessing some of the most fertile land in Eastern Europe, underwent prolonged economic crisis during the 1990s, experiencing rocketing inflation and deep depression. Gross domestic output fell to under a half of what it had been before the fall of communism. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were forced to seek work abroad to provide meagre subsidies for families at home. The city of Lviv, for example, saw its population dwindle by nearly a fifth over the 1990s as people left for work elsewhere. Poverty levels in backward rural areas were profound, average incomes far lower, for example, than in Turkey.
Belarus and Moldova, both of which, like Ukraine, were highly dependent on Russia, also suffered a prolonged deep economic depression during the 1990s. The response in Belarus after 1994, to restore price and foreign-exchange controls and restrict private enterprise, could not halt the economic decline. Moldova’s abrupt turn from a planned to a liberalized economy in 1992, with an infrastructure unprepared for such a drastic shift, produced huge inflation and unemployment, leaving much of the population in poverty and the country languishing among Europe’s poorest. Both countries, together with Ukraine and Russia itself, took a decade to recover from the economic shock that accompanied the fall of communism. High rates of growth (from a low base) were experienced after the turn of the millennium. But corruption was deeply ingrained, poverty (compared with Central and Western Europe) extensive, and economic instability entrenched.
Politics in Russia and the other Soviet successor-states were turbulent and only superficially democratic. The tendency was towards strong executive powers vested in a president. If in a new guise, a revival, or continuation, of authoritarianism incorporating significant elements of the Soviet heritage, was the norm. The dominant figure in Ukraine turned out to be Leonid Kuchma, whose rule was characterized by corruption and close relations with powerful oligarchs linked to criminality. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, President from 1994, soon sharply curtailed the powers of parliament and ruled in autocratic fashion. In Russia itself President Yeltsin’s impulsive and autocratic tendencies, not helped by his copious alcohol consumption, were an outright provocation to his many enemies, inside and outside parliament. An attempt to overthrow him in 1993, after he had overstepped his constitutional powers, failed, however, amid bloodshed in central Moscow.
In the aftermath Yeltsin took steps to shore up his executive powers by a new constitution that was backed by the electorate in a referendum and parliamentary elections, though low turnout and strong suspicions of manipulation showed the weak legitimacy of his position. Yeltsin’s popularity suffered in subsequent years from ubiquitous and scandalous corruption – reaching into his own family – and from the continuing disastrous finances and economic state of the country. The rapidity of the moves in 1992 to liberalize the economy and deregulate prices had brought rampant inflation that had wiped out the savings of countless citizens. And privatization, beginning the same year, had simply placed huge state assets for a fraction of their true value into the hands of a small number of super-rich oligarchs, the bosses of newly constituted big private concerns. Organized criminal gangs used extortion, blackmail and even murder to force through the process of privatization and consolidation of enormous wealth. Russia, within the space of only a few years, became a criminalized society.
Yeltsin’s attempts at liberal reform were, unsurprisingly, widely condemned not just as an outright failure but as a scandalous destruction of the national economy. By the late 1990s there had been some economic recovery. But the living conditions of most Russians were still miserable while the gross corruption and blatant abuse of power were all too evident. It was little wonder that many looked to the country’s former glories. What were seen as Yeltsin’s pro-Western leanings provoked desires to restore ‘true’ Russian values.
The pre-selected heir, when Yeltsin suddenly announced his resignation on 31 December 1999, was Vladimir Putin, who had begun his career in the Soviet security police, the KGB, and had been Prime Minister since August. Yeltsin, by now in poor health, had singled out Putin, regarded as a firm loyalist, as his desired successor – doubtless on assurances that he and his family would be protected from all charges of corruption (which indeed followed through Putin’s very first presidential decree on the day he took office). Rumours, backed by considerable circumstantial evidence, that Putin’s succession had been engineered in sinister fashion have never fully subsided. According to these claims, a number of bombings in Moscow in September 1999 that killed and injured hundreds of people and were blamed on Chechen terrorists were in fact the work of the Russian state security services, the FSB (successor to the KGB). The presumed purpose was to gain support for retaliatory war in Chechnya, to be directed by Putin, which would boost the new president’s popularity. This, indeed, turned out to be the case. Whether or not the conspiracy theory holds, the fact was that Russia was ready for a new ‘strong man’ – without Yeltsin’s obvious flaws – to take the reins.
Whatever the variations in national cultural and political traditions in Central and Eastern Europe beyond former Soviet republics, there were some general features in the transition to liberal democracy. Despite the immense difficulties of adjustment, there was no turning back to one-party rule. Pluralist forms of politics established themselves everywhere during the 1990s. People overwhelmingly liked the freedom – of expression, to travel, to live without fear of arrest, to practise religion – that had been denied under communism. The end of the snooping society of informers (usually to gain some material advantage or avoid disadvantage), reporting on and often denouncing other citizens – which was a common feature of all the communist states but found classical representation in the shadowy omnipresence of the Stasi in the German Democratic Republic with its 170,000 or more ‘unofficial collaborators’ – was as good as universally welcomed. Democratic government, in principle and in (often chequered) practice, became accepted.
According to opinion surveys undertaken in eight countries in Central and Eastern Europe during 1993–4, a majority of citizens favoured the principle of a number of parties competing for the power of government. The lowest ratings, between 40 and 49 per cent, were found in Ukraine, Russia and, surprisingly, Poland, with a middle range, from 51 to 57 per cent, in Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Lithuania. Remarkably, though from its singularly awful experience of communism not altogether surprising, Romania recorded by far the highest proportion in favour – far above the norm at 81 per cent. Those opposed in principle constituted about a fifth of those questioned – in the main presumably former committed communists. When it came to democratic practice (though what that meant was left undefined), it was, however, a different story. The highest proportion of those with a positive attitude again, surprisingly, occurred in Romania, where 30 per cent of those questioned approved. (This may well have reflected approval for the early steps taken by the post-communist government of Iliescu to eliminate the most repressive measures of Ceauşescu’s regime.) In the other seven states surveyed, the range stretched from 29 per cent in Estonia to only 12 per cent in Ukraine. Although these levels of dissatisfaction with democracy in practice were higher than in Western European countries, there too a good third of citizens had essentially negative attitudes towards the practice of democracy. Political parties were widely regarded as little more than a necessary evil.
Jaundiced views about the practice of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe were understandable. Corruption had been rife everywhere under the communist regimes. In their early years the new democracies offered no improvement. No country was immune. But in some countries the rule of law – the basis of genuine democracy – barely operated. Romania, Bulgaria and Albania were in the vanguard of inbuilt corruption and clientelism, not far behind Russia and Ukraine, especially in the process of privatization. Slovakia, too, was deeply corrupt. Even in the economically more advanced Czech Republic rampant corruption in the privatization process contributed to the fall of the government in 1997.
Ambivalence about the new democratic politics was also shaped by the continuities in personnel with the former regimes. For those who had detested (and often suffered under) communism, it was often galling to see that many who had served communist regimes were able to make a political ‘comeback’ in different colours as democrats.
In the early phase of the transition the actions of former communist functionaries, especially members of the security police, were systematically evaluated only in Germany. But the former East Germany had by now, of course, been incorporated into an already well-established liberal democracy. The speedy dismantling of the institutional framework of the former communist regime, and the acquisition of most of the state security files that revealed the extent of the ‘Stasi-State’, made thorough evaluation possible. Elsewhere, the picture was much more chequered. Investigation in Hungary and Czechoslovakia was largely confined to responsibility for the Soviet invasions in 1956 and 1968, and in Poland to the imposition of martial law in 1981. Otherwise, only Czechoslovakia, where memories of 1968 and its aftermath were still vivid, introduced in 1991 what it called ‘lustration’ – a ‘cleansing’ – to exclude all former communist functionaries from high public office. It was to be a further six years before Poland, in 1997, followed with its own lustration law.
Political disillusionment and economic hardship brought an increased readiness to turn back to former communist politicians, who could often continue in political life, usually by joining post-communist successor parties. As members of new Social Democratic parties, now operating within democratic pluralism, they returned to government in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and Bulgaria in 1993. Adam Michnik called the process in Poland ‘the velvet restoration’. In Romania the dominant figure during the 1990s was Ion Iliescu, who had earlier been a prominent communist (though he had distanced himself from the worst outrages of Ceauşescu’s regime). Many other former communists could find a home in the party he led, the Social Democratic Party of Romania, as well as in the Socialist Labour Party. In Poland the great hero of Solidarity’s opposition to communism, Lech Wałęsa (by now a more authoritarian, nationalist-leaning figure), was astonishingly – in the eyes of the outside world – defeated in the 1995 presidential election by the former communist minister, Aleksander Kwaśniewski.
Although pluralist systems of government were generally stable, governments themselves were not. The assault on living standards across the whole of Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s produced much volatility. Social tensions grew as millions were thrown out of work, and as high inflation and currency devaluation destroyed savings. Every government that tried to deal with the daunting economic and social problems invited dissatisfaction with its policies. Having sought pluralist elections, many citizens thought it pointless to vote in them. This was partly a legacy of communist times when elections had been little more than farcical acclamation in a single-party dictatorial system. But it also reflected disillusionment with what had taken the place of communism. Turnout in elections fell in consequence, and was often extremely low. Governments, held responsible for unpopular policies or for being unable to alter them and bring about substantial improvement, generally met the wrath of the electorate and were overturned at the next election. Heads of government seldom lasted long. The average term of office of a prime minister in the former Soviet bloc was under two and a half years.
Leading politicians often turned to nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment to improve their sagging popularity. Amid widespread social distress it was easy to find scapegoats among foreigners or ethnic minorities. The Prime Minister of Slovakia, Vladimír Mečiar, who presided over a corrupt, semi-authoritarian regime that rigidly controlled the mass media and intimidated political opponents, had evoked a separate sense of Slovak national identity and culture in pressing for autonomy. Stirring anti-Hungarian feeling – the Hungarian minority constituted just over a tenth of the population – was a convenient part of his political armoury. In Hungary itself there was a rise in nationalist feeling and in animosity to ethnic minorities during the 1990s. Sinti and Roma were made scapegoats here, while discrimination against Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania was exploited to shore up nationalist feeling. FIDESZ, once a liberal movement, became, under its forceful leader Viktor Orbán, strongly national-conservative and increasingly authoritarian in tenor. In Bulgaria the Turkish and Roma minorities were singled out. In Latvia and Estonia there was legal discrimination against the large Russian minorities – less so in Lithuania where the Russians formed only a small proportion of the population.
Whatever their manifold and serious deficiencies, the new democracies of Central Europe, unlike the interwar fragility that had seen nearly all of them turn to authoritarianism, were fairly well consolidated by the end of the 1990s, helped by the significant economic growth that followed the early years of calamitous decline. Another factor was of major importance in ensuring that progress towards stable democracy and economic prosperity would continue: the prospect of membership of the European Union. Despite the disillusionment engendered during the first years of democracy, this prospect offered hope for the future. By the end of the decade the hope was starting to become realizable for the Central European and Baltic states. The Balkans, however, were still desperately poor. The Dutch writer Geert Mak, visiting Bucharest in 1999, described the thousands of homeless children (and the endless packs of stray dogs) roaming the streets. Economic backwardness, high levels of corruption, inadequate basis of the rule of law, and limited progress towards consolidated democracy meant that Romania, and Bulgaria too, faced a lengthy wait before they might contemplate entering the European Union.
Hungary had in 1991 along with Czechoslovakia and Poland signed an agreement in the Hungarian town of Visegrád aimed at promoting their mutual cooperation and advancing their hopes for European integration. With the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia two years later, the original three had become four states. By 1996 all had submitted applications to join the European Union. The attractions of doing so, and pressure to meet the entry criteria, encouraged moves to deepen the hold of democracy and the rule of law. The prospect of ‘rejoining Europe’ was, for instance, a strong inducement to the Slovak electorate, and to the elites, to reject Mečiar’s facade democracy in 1998, end the direst aspects of his rule, rein in the worst of the cronyism, and introduce significant legal, democratic and economic reforms.
By the turn of the millennium the citizens of Central and Eastern European countries had endured a turbulent decade. Dreams of an early great improvement in the quality of life based upon a better Western model of liberal democracy had rapidly faded. But new hopes had gradually replaced them – of future benefits they could foresee as members, before too long, of the prospering European Union.
As Yugoslavia collapsed into bloodshed and ruins, and as the citizens in Central and Eastern Europe saw their lives turned upside down by the harsh transition to capitalism, the leaders of Western European countries assembled, still in somewhat self-congratulatory mood following the fall of communism, in the Dutch city of Maastricht in December 1991 to plan further steps towards ‘ever closer union’. The advances made towards introducing the Single Market (to be launched on 1 January 1993) made the time seem propitious to press forward with the process of integration. And an increasing majority of Europeans, according to opinion polls in 1991, viewed the European Community favourably and supported efforts to unify Western Europe.
The deliberations were anything but straightforward. But on 7 February 1992 the path-breaking Treaty of Maastricht was signed by twelve leaders from the European Community, to take effect in November the following year. That was the easy part. The pursuit of unity would prove to be bedevilled with problems. Much would indeed be achieved in the remainder of the decade and beyond. The attainments of what, henceforth, was to be called the ‘European Union’, were significant, and of great importance. But hopes of overcoming deeply entrenched national interests to create a genuine political union underpinned by commitment to a European identity were impossible to fulfil.
In fact, the ambitions of the Maastricht conference fell far short of any attempt to create a political union in Europe. At best this remained a distant and nebulous vision. Helmut Kohl had for some years been among the strongest proponents of political union. So had his Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. For them, political union was the ultimate objective. But what it meant was left open. And even in Germany strong voices – most notably that of the President of the Bundesbank, Hans Tietmeyer – argued that currency union should follow, not precede, political union.
The concept of political union was neither at this point nor in the future clearly defined. It was actually little more than a rhetorical device, an implied direction of travel that might be acceptable in principle to most (though not all) members of the European Community as long as there was no attempt to turn it into reality. In practice, political union might well have looked like Germany on a European scale – a federal ‘united states of Europe’ – with some powers residing in the nation states, but crucial powers transferred to a central European government. Resting on common values, much of the sovereignty of nation states – including economic, social and security matters – would be located at the European level and upheld by a parliament that would ensure the representation of full democratic rights. But federal Germany, if that was indeed the implied model, comprised constituent parts that shared the same history, traditions and culture. Its strongest bonds were national. The same was true of the United States of America, the other model sometimes cited. Forging a single political union out of the disparate histories, traditions, cultures and languages of Europe’s numerous nation states was, however, a different matter altogether. Few if any would have been prepared to make the extensive surrender of sovereignty necessary to create a genuine political union to replace a much looser confederation of nation states. The very prospect of Germany, after 1990 far and away the most populous state with the strongest economy, coming to dominate any future political union, was in itself not likely to encourage moves towards that goal. And although they were among the most enthusiastic pro-Europeans, even Germans, as Kohl was well aware, would have been unwilling to concede too much sovereignty to a European government based in Brussels.
However noble the vision, itself in good measure a reaction against Germany’s dark past and a reflection of Kohl’s strong personal commitment to ruling out forever the nationalist demons that had led into the abyss, it never had the slightest chance of becoming reality. Kohl himself soon acknowledged that the opportunity (if indeed there had been one) had passed. His willingness to embrace the idea of European political union had been part of the price for unification: a readiness to bind a new Germany, like the old West Germany, inextricably into the liberal values and democratic structures of the West. No other Western European country, let alone France, Germany’s chief partner in building the European Community, or Britain, more sensitive still to any implied surrender of national sovereignty, had a similar background or could contemplate the political union envisaged by Kohl. For François Mitterrand, in fact, political union was far from a priority. Following the introduction of the Single Market, the French President saw Economic and Monetary Union as the most promising vehicle of sustaining the momentum of European integration. He was cautious, however, about advancing too rapidly down the route of political union, foreseeing great difficulties in pushing the British, especially, too far in this direction, and concerned not to offer a hostage to French nationalists at home. In Kohl’s dealings with Mitterrand, therefore, as German unification (with all the fears that prospect held for the French) became an imminent certainty, the goal of European political union faded from view. Currency union – an idea with a long pre-history, dating back to the plan proposed by Pierre Werner, the Luxembourg Prime Minister, in 1970 – replaced it as a more attainable goal (and vision) to bind Europe together, and, in French eyes, to constrain any future German power ambitions.
This was the compromise agreed at the Maastricht Conference. A single currency, not yet with a name, would be introduced (at a date later stipulated as 1 January 1999). Much of the strategy for the new currency followed German thinking. Helmut Kohl remarked with satisfaction in December 1991 that the treaty on Economic and Monetary Union ‘bears the German hallmark. Our stability policy has become the Leitmotif for the future European monetary order.’ A European Central Bank – it eventually came into being in June 1998 – would supervise monetary policy and oversee price stability. Countries preparing to enter the single currency had to meet ‘convergence criteria’ and join an exchange-rate mechanism (ERM) to hold currencies steady and interlinked. Government debt was not to exceed 60 per cent, annual deficits were to be no more than 3 per cent of gross domestic product. Targets were set for low inflation and low interest rates.
Currency union without political union was a risk. It had not been tried before. The United States offered no model, since America was in essence a federated nation state with a central government. Without historical precedent, Europe would have to build its institutional arrangements and political framework for its planned single currency from scratch. Political leaders were aware that success was not guaranteed. Helmut Kohl himself, addressing the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, only a month before the European leaders met in Maastricht, had unambiguously outlined the risk. ‘The idea of maintaining in the long run an economic and a currency union without political union is mistaken,’ he had declared. He went ahead, nevertheless, despite his own evident misgivings and the warnings of numerous German economic experts.
Beside the crucial agreement on currency union, Maastricht took steps towards tightening European integration in significant areas. A new legal entity, ‘The European Union’, was formed, integrating the European Economic Community and the Atomic Energy and Coal and Steel Communities and substantially widening inter-governmental cooperation to areas of foreign, security and judicial policy – though cooperation was left far short of anything resembling a central government in these spheres. The Maastricht Treaty also introduced the status of citizenship of the European Union, additional to citizenship of member states.
Maastricht was a major step in the direction of European integration. But divisions were plain even as the European leaders were deliberating. The United Kingdom, despite being a strong advocate of the Single Market and of widening EU membership, the leader as ever of the ‘awkward squad’ in matters of closer European integration, negotiated an exclusion, or ‘opt-out’, from the proposed currency union. It also attained a further opt-out from a protocol (the ‘Social Chapter’) added to the Treaty, which aimed at improving living and working conditions through a wide range of social policies. Denmark was the other country most reluctant to accept the Maastricht provisions. It was a severe jolt to the European establishment when, as part of the ratification process, Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum on 2 June 1992. With that, the Treaty could not come into effect. Significant exemptions (from defence and security commitments, certain aspects of internal affairs and, most notably, the single currency) had to be made before Danes were prepared to accept the Treaty in a second referendum in May 1993.
Before then, France, such a key player from the beginning in the ‘European project’, had in a referendum in September 1992 backed ratification only by the narrowest of margins. In Britain there was no referendum, but Conservative ‘Maastricht rebels’ had joined forces with Labour opponents of the exemption from the ‘Social Chapter’ in May 1992 to cause great difficulty for the Conservative government before the bill to accept the Maastricht Treaty eventually gained parliamentary approval. Even in Germany, the European country par excellence, there was great opposition to the decision to replace the beloved D-Mark, emblem of post-war prosperity, by a new European currency. And it took a decision in October 1993 by the Federal Constitutional Court to establish that the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty did not breach German democratic rights laid down in the Basic Treaty (or constitution) of 1949.
Their specific national cultures and histories had made Britain, France and Denmark, too, particularly averse to further concessions of sovereignty. Maastricht’s provisions were, in fact, not wholly welcomed anywhere. The other member states, however, had fewer misgivings on the question of sovereignty. Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries had long accepted that the pooling of elements of national sovereignty was vital to peace, prosperity and stability in Europe. Spain, Portugal and Greece had seen membership of the European Community not just as the pathway to prosperity, but also as the obstacle to any regression to dictatorship. They accepted that the limited merging of sovereignty was a necessary and positive step towards attaining those goals. For the Republic of Ireland membership of the European Community had already brought substantial economic benefits, a reduction in dependence on the British economy, and a less nationalist perspective on the unresolved and thorny issue of relations with Northern Ireland. In most member states of the European Community, therefore, Maastricht was welcomed as a logical progression from the previous developments towards greater integration (though the complex and abstract nature of the Treaty meant that outright popular enthusiasm was limited).
After such a difficult birth, the Maastricht Treaty finally came into effect on 1 November 1993. Subsequent amendments, revisions and extensions were made in the Treaties of Amsterdam (October 1997) and Nice (February 2001), but Maastricht had been the decisive juncture. It had converted an essentially economic entity, the European Community, into the European Union – something indeed well removed from a federal ‘united states of Europe’, but nonetheless a construct with indubitable political dimensions and ambitions. As Maastricht’s difficult passage in Denmark, France and Britain illustrated, these ambitions stirred much animosity in those countries. The opposition would become more shrill early in the next millennium, when further proposed constitutional changes would struggle to gain acceptance.
By the later 1990s, however, the early turbulence that had accompanied the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty had settled down. Economic growth had contributed from the middle of the decade to a sense of material well-being and progress across most of Western Europe. The feeling among citizens of continental Western European countries that the European Union was bringing tangible benefits was boosted by the implementation in 1995 of an agreement initially reached at Schengen in Luxembourg a decade earlier allowing people to travel throughout much of Europe without border controls. Only Britain and Ireland of the member states remained outside the Schengen zone.
Meanwhile, negative attitudes towards the forthcoming introduction of the Euro (as, it was agreed in 1995, the single currency would be called) had become less strident. When it was eventually launched, successfully, on 1 January 1999 as an exchange currency only – notes and coins were to be in circulation only from 2002 onwards – the currency union comprised eleven states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Austria and Finland). Nevertheless, there were powerful voices prophesying trouble ahead. ‘The Euro is coming too soon’, warned a declaration by 155 economists in 1998. The worries about sustaining a common currency among disparate economies without fiscal or political union were reasonable. The launch had taken place in a good climate. And there was still fair weather. But how would the Euro stand up to a serious crisis? It remained an open question. After all, from the very beginning the Euro had been in the first instance a political project. What had counted above all else was the drive to European integration.
This raised the obvious question in the early 1990s: what was to be done about widening the European Union? The big issue was the integration of countries that until very recently had belonged to the Soviet bloc, with very differently structured economies, and which were now undergoing enormous difficulties in converting to capitalism and liberal democracy.
The whole matter of widening the European Union was far from straightforward. There were those who argued that deepening the existing structures should come first and only afterwards their extension. France, under President Mitterrand, especially wanted to deepen Western European bonds and to offer a confederation rather than full membership to states in Central and Eastern Europe. Worries that extending the European Union to Eastern Europe would ultimately strengthen Germany’s position played no small part in Mitterrand’s thinking. The weighty counter-arguments, advanced among others by Germany, Britain and Denmark, gave priority to widening over deepening. Again political determinants carried the day. The baleful history of Central and Eastern Europe after the Versailles Treaty of 1919 carried an obvious lesson. A repetition of the calamitous collapse into fascism and authoritarianism had at all costs to be avoided. Geopolitics, too, came into it. Squeezed between Western Europe and the Russian sphere of influence, questions of the future security of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were also of paramount importance. Yugoslavia’s descent into war at precisely this juncture concentrated minds.
In June 1993, therefore, the decision was taken in Copenhagen to welcome new member states from Central and Eastern Europe, provided that they met stringent criteria on democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights, protection of minorities, and a well-functioning free-market economy. In 1994 Hungary became the first of what would eventually be a long queue of further states to seek admission to the European Union. Already before the Copenhagen agreement arrangements were under way to admit Finland, Sweden, Norway and Austria to membership. These countries had no difficulty in fulfilling the criteria and all but Norway, where a majority (as in 1972) voted in a referendum in 1994 against membership, became members of the European Union on 1 January 1995. The obvious economic and political gulf with member states of the European Union meant, however, that Central and Eastern European countries had to wait far longer.
The reasons for widening the European Union were cogent, and the prospects of joining helped both stabilize and democratize Central and Eastern European countries. But it would not be easy seamlessly to integrate over 70 million people from countries with far less well-developed economies and political cultures than those of Western Europe. There would in due course be a price to pay in a more unwieldy, less cohesive and less economically balanced European Union.
Although a majority of Western Europeans, according to opinion surveys, were well disposed towards the European Union, Europe seldom preoccupied the minds of most citizens during the 1990s. Usually they had other concerns, close to home. Nevertheless, some of the problems that they faced had a European, not simply a national, dimension. They flowed in part from the recession in Europe (overlapping with the American recession of 1990–91) that set in during the early years of the decade. The effects from the impact of the costs of unification on Germany left wide ripples. Whether they stood on the moderate political left, like the French President François Mitterrand, or on the conservative right, such as the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl or the successor to Mrs Thatcher as British Prime Minister, John Major, the issues they had to confront were similar. Among them were questions – none of them new, but none of them mastered – of the competitiveness of national economies, increasing demands for social spending and control of inflation, levels of unemployment and state indebtedness. Wrestling with these issues in the changed conditions after the end of the Cold War usually made for political unpopularity, which in turn often led to new governments that then still had to struggle with the old problems. There was, of course, a pronounced national flavour to the specific impact of the problems in European countries. But the sense of malaise went beyond any single country.
In Germany the burdens of unification played the most significant part. Helmut Kohl had in 1990 rashly awakened expectations of ‘blossoming landscapes’ in eastern Germany within three or four years. The Chancellor had not been alone in grossly miscalculating the extent of what needed to be done to replace antiquated infrastructure and wholly rebuild the economy.* Instead of a swift climb to the promised prosperity, the whole of Germany was by 1992 suffering an economic malaise that was to last for the best part of a decade – though East Germans paid by far the higher price. In 1993, with the economy in recession, gross domestic product fell by 2 per cent, a steeper decline than at any point in the history of the Federal Republic. By 1995 the German state debt was twice as high as it had been in 1989 (partly, however, because of government investment in infrastructure).
A worrying side effect of the economic downturn, and a sign of what would become a growing trend across much of Europe, was the animosity shown towards ‘asylum-seekers’. Over three-quarters of all the ‘asylum-seekers’ in the European Union sought out Germany on account of its generous asylum laws – themselves a reaction to the inhumanity of the Nazi era. In 1992, accentuated by the wars in Yugoslavia, the number seeking asylum reached 438,000 (though under 5 per cent were actually classed as fleeing from political persecution). Some horrifying incidents of neo-Nazi attacks on immigrants, mostly though not only in eastern parts of Germany, shocked Germans and the outside world.
Helmut Kohl was re-elected Chancellor in October 1994 in spite of the stuttering economy. The introduction of a popular health-care insurance scheme had helped him in election year. So did divisions in the Social Democratic opposition. And there was still something of an afterglow attached to the Chancellor of German Unification. But Germany’s economic malaise continued during the following years. Unemployment rose beyond four million by 1996 – a figure that in a different age had caused tremors for German democracy – while the economy, coping with high labour and welfare costs, was struggling to stay competitive. Kohl, once the hope for the future, was heckled at election rallies in eastern Germany by disillusioned voters. The government seemed to have run out of steam. Many people simply felt, as they sometimes do in democracies when a government has been in office for a long time, that ‘it was time for a change’. The issues that dominated the 1998 election were almost entirely national – the high level of unemployment above all. European integration, which eight years earlier had been so central to Kohl’s vision of the future, hardly figured. When the votes were counted, Kohl found himself out of office after sixteen years as German Chancellor, defeated by Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democratic Party.
Germany’s economic problems in the 1990s had an impact on other countries in Western Europe. Over 10 per cent of France’s working population, a record high of three million people, were unemployed by 1993, while the rising costs of social welfare – a large proportion of state expenditure – were driving the already worrying budgetary deficit still higher. Attempts to rein in state spending and privatize parts of the economy were predictably unpopular. Governments that introduced unpopular policies usually lost at the polls. France was no exception. The Socialist Party, the mainstay of the government, lost heavily in the March 1993 general election. The parties of the conservative right under Jacques Chirac were the victors. Two years later, at the end of Mitterrand’s second term of office, the Socialist president – ill with cancer and also unable to stand again according to the constitution – was succeeded by Chirac, who defeated the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. Two features of French politics had wider currency across Europe: allegations of financial malpractice (which led to the suicide of the former Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy); and significant popular aversion to immigration (reflecting in part the influence of the Front National, whose leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, won 15 per cent of the vote in the 1995 presidential election).
Immigration was not yet a significant issue in Italy. Corruption, however, certainly was. Italy, Europe’s fourth-largest economy (after Germany, France and Britain), was already facing serious economic difficulties in the early 1990s. Some flowed indirectly from the consequences of German unification. When the German federal bank, the Bundesbank, sharply increased the lending rate in 1992, it put pressure on weaker economies with high rates of inflation. The upshot was that in September Italy was forced out of the exchange rate mechanism of currencies banded together within a restricted range of fluctuation (and in effect shadowing the D-Mark, against which the lira promptly lost 24 per cent of its value). Italy’s fundamental problem was its level of debt – 120 per cent of gross domestic product, twice as high as that permitted under the Maastricht criteria. Almost 40 per cent of tax revenue went each year simply to pay the interest on the debt. Higher taxes, cuts in public expenditure and privatization were a remedy not likely to win much popularity for the government, headed by the Christian Democratic leader, Giulio Andreotti.
But conventional politics were put in the shade in 1992, just before the general election, when an enormous corruption scandal – nicknamed ‘Tangentopoli’ (loosely meaning ‘bribery city’, or ‘bribesville’) – was exposed. Politicians from all the main parties at the highest level (as well as some major Italian firms) were implicated. The corruption ran through the entire political system. All the major parties lost votes in the parliamentary general election two years later. But the fallout from what emerged as a huge web of corruption and criminality of politicians and public officials went much further than electoral losses.
A thousand politicians and almost 1,500 civil servants and businessmen were accused of taking bribes. Some, including Andreotti, were strongly suspected of collaboration with the Mafia. The former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi was later sentenced in absentia – he had fled to Tunisia in 1994 to avoid punishment – to twenty-eight years of imprisonment. Andreotti himself, following a decade of trials (including complicity in a murder carried out by the Mafia), was finally in 2002 given a sentence of twenty-four years of imprisonment, only to be acquitted finally on appeal of all charges. The Italian public had had enough. The scandal brought down the political establishment that had presided over the country’s fortunes since the Second World War. The Christian Democratic Party, the dominant force in Italian politics for almost half a century, was dissolved in March, the Liberal Party in February, the Socialist Party in November 1994. The Social Democratic and Republican parties were reduced to insignificance. The Communist Party had already disbanded in 1991 and split into two successor parties, neither of which enjoyed as much popularity. Party politics had to begin almost anew. The old party blocs of left and right from the Cold War era were finished. Italy became the first Western European country to turn to new ‘populist’ politics.
The outcome was not altogether reassuring. Into the vacuum stepped the flamboyant media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, at one time closely connected with Craxi and rumoured to have entered politics to gain immunity from arrest for suspected corruption. The party that he had founded from scratch in November 1993, Forza Italia, backed by his media empire, and heavily dependent on Berlusconi’s own forceful personality, promised a new start for Italy (‘a new Italian miracle’, as the party leader himself put it). The style was populist and anti-establishment. Berlusconi portrayed himself as an ‘outsider’, free of the taint of the old, corrupt party politics, who would use the talent that had made him such a successful businessman to reinvigorate Italy. Forza Italia was set up like a business, with neo-liberal economic objectives. But Berlusconi was confident that his popular appeal would win support from the large reservoir of right-leaning, anti-communist voters who were left without a political home. Would it, however, turn out to be more than old wine in new bottles?
The political right, in fact, had started to splinter even before the Tangentopoli scandals. The collapse of communism had robbed Christian Democracy of its ideological cement. And there were new forms of identity politics. In northern Italy the Lega Nord (Northern League), led by Umberto Bossi, demanded regional autonomy and an end to subsidies for the poorer south. In the Mezzogiorno, the Alleanza Nationale (National Alliance), led by Gianfranco Fini, had blended together neo-fascists and remnants of Christian Democracy in a right-wing conservative movement that still drew oxygen from its opposition to organized socialism. Berlusconi, Bossi and Fini joined forces to win almost 43 per cent of the vote in the elections in March 1994, well ahead of the 34 per cent that went to the left-wing ‘Progressives’, formed from the two successor parties to the communists. Their shaky coalition government fell apart, however, nine months later, forcing Berlusconi out of office. It would prove, though, to be far from the end of his political career, and he would return to lead Italy’s government on two future occasions. Nor was it the end of the chronic instability of Italian governments that since 1948 had lasted on average less than a year. And if in a new guise, with numerous and at times bewildering variations, the divisions between left and right and north and south remained the main fault lines in Italian politics.
In Britain, Mrs Thatcher’s successor as prime minister, John Major, had defied most predictions by winning the general election in early April 1992 – the fourth election victory in a row for the Conservatives – if with a much reduced majority. But he led a weak and divided government, riven above all by ‘Europe’ (shorthand for Britain’s chequered relationship with the European Union). His administration never recovered from the humiliation of Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on 16 September 1992 – ‘Black Wednesday’, as it was quickly dubbed – after the government had drastically raised the bank rate and spent over £3 billion in vainly trying to prop up sterling. From then on, as the British economy struggled against recession, Major was a wounded Prime Minister, tormented by his party’s Eurosceptic wing, parodied in the mass media, and damaged by financial scandals (though minor by Italian standards) involving prominent Conservatives. He was weakened beyond repair as head of government.
By the mid-1990s Britain’s economy was beginning to recover strongly. But the recovery did little to help Major. Tony Blair, elected Labour leader in May 1994, presented the sharpest of contrasts to Major’s grey image. The highly articulate, ever-smiling and charismatic Blair seemed to embody what was soon being dubbed ‘cool Britannia’. He offered the prospect of a new, dynamic Britain – outward-looking, pro-European, modern, progressive, tolerant, inclusive. He advanced the vision of a ‘third way’ that would transcend the traditional class barriers and social divides. His party, now relabelled ‘New Labour’, rejected the commitment to nationalization of the economy, built into its constitution since 1918, and looked to embrace market forces, tempered by social justice. At the general election of 1 May 1997 the Conservatives were crushed as Blair – at forty-three the youngest Prime Minister since William Pitt the Younger in 1783 – swept to power with Labour’s largest ever majority, of 179 seats. After eighteen years of Conservative government it seemed like a new start, a ‘nation reborn’ as the prominent political journalist Andrew Rawnsley put it.
Blair had been inspired by the US President, Bill Clinton, who had succeeded George H. W. Bush in 1993. And in turn Blair offered a model that some other European leaders sought to emulate. An unspoken ‘third way’ seemed in operation in France under the socialist Lionel Jospin, appointed Prime Minister in 1997. Jospin linked classic socialist policies – improved social security, health-care provision, greater financial assistance for the poorest in society, better representation for women in politics, and a thirty-five-hour working week – with tax reduction and privatization of state-owned concerns, policies associated with neo-liberalism. Germany was soon also following a variant of the ‘third way’. Gerhard Schröder, the telegenic, energetic Social Democrat, who in the 1998 German elections had defeated Helmut Kohl, ending a period of conservative government stretching back to 1982, was among Blair’s most prominent admirers in continental Europe. Schröder, like Blair, offered a modern image of Social Democratic government. Conservatism seemed, if not everywhere, on the retreat in the mid-1990s.
Social democracy in its new, modern guise – combining social advances with the gains to be made from a globalized market economy within an integrated European Union – seemed to many Europeans to offer hope for a better future. Yet within only a few years it would lead, despite notable achievements on the way, to widespread disappointment and disillusionment. In celebratory mood during the night of his election triumph in 1997, Blair declared that ‘a new dawn has broken’. Instead of a new dawn, it turned out to be the start of a long sunset for European social democracy.
Old certainties, both on the conservative right and on the social democratic left, were crumbling. An uncomfortable component of the more fractured politics, in which protest movements often finding voice in nationalist, green and regional parties were an increasingly significant presence, was the growing appeal of anti-immigration as a political issue. By the end of the 1990s Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National was attracting the support of nearly five million French citizens (over 15 per cent of the electorate), compared with 2.7 million in 1986. The Dansk Folkeparti had become the third-largest parliamentary party in Denmark, backed by 12 per cent of the population. In Switzerland the Swiss People’s Party, led by the industrialist Christoph Blocher, increased its vote by 12.6 per cent – a record in Swiss electoral history – to attain 22.6 per cent of the vote in the federal elections of 1999 and become the country’s largest party. And in Austria the Freedom Party of Austria, under Jörg Haider, whose penchant for fast cars combined with remarks that hinted at pro-Nazi sympathies, rose from under 10 per cent of the vote in 1986 to as much as 27 per cent in 1999. Common to the success of all these movements, with counterparts in other European countries, was strident opposition to immigration. Since mainstream parties supported immigration, as did the European Union, anti-immigrant nationalist protest could also be marketed as anti-establishment and Europhobic politics. The sizeable protest element beyond the core base support for anti-immigrant parties meant that the level of backing was unstable. Nevertheless, beyond influencing the programmes of the mainstream parties of left and right, they ensured that immigration was an item of growing importance on the political agenda in the years to come.
The 1990s had been a chequered decade in Western Europe. Much of the bright new promise had proved illusory. By the middle of the decade there was a palpable sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction in much of the population. The steps towards European integration, though in themselves significant achievements, remained for most people detached from their daily lives. But as economic growth returned the second half of the decade became far brighter. By the end of the decade, with, surprisingly, ‘cool Britannia’ setting the trend, Europe – east as well as west – seemed on the verge of a more exciting era. At the New Year celebrations in 2000, as Europeans joined the billions around the world to celebrate the start of the new millennium, Tony Blair captured the mood, wishing that the ‘confidence and optimism’ could be bottled and kept forever.
In September 1990, still in the glow of the end of the Cold War, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed the beginning of a ‘new world order’ that would be ‘freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace’. It was to be ‘an era in which the nations of the world . . . can prosper and live in harmony’. They were fine words. But the vision all too rapidly turned out to be an illusion.
There were certainly some encouraging developments. The swift and decisive defeat of Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait in early 1991, by a big American-led multi-national coalition under a United Nations mandate, seemed to end the menace of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, in the Middle East. The agreement by the United States and Russia to dismantle two-thirds of their nuclear warheads under the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) in January 1993 still further reduced the threat of nuclear conflagration. The bitter Arab-Israeli conflict appeared after many long years to have real prospects of eventual resolution under the somewhat improved relations of what was euphemistically called the Oslo Peace Process (though the continuation of serious violence was ominous). And under the aegis of the United Nations there was – though on paper more than in reality – growing recognition of the urgent need to limit the emission of greenhouse gasses that were contributing to the global warming and environmental damage which threatened the future of the entire globe.
But a depressing debit side of the ledger had to be set against these positives. Despite pious utterances by world leaders about eradicating world poverty and upholding universal human rights, there was little or no discernible improvement. Poverty, already searing, was getting worse, not better, in sub-Saharan Africa. Somalia was among the countries wracked by famine and civil war, collapsing into near anarchy. Cultural and religious differences in many parts of the world as well as hard economic interest combined to block any real progress on human rights. Worst of all, at a time when awareness of the Holocaust was greater than ever in European countries, another genocide was raging in Rwanda and taking a toll, within a mere three months, of over a million lives. The hapless ‘international community’, unable to act to prevent the slaughter, showed itself again to be little more than a hollow phrase.
Europeans could watch the horrors taking place in distant parts of the globe nightly on the television news. They were appalled by what they saw. And many were generous with donations to charity organizations such as UNICEF, the Red Cross, Oxfam or Médecins Sans Frontières. But along with the general sense of helplessness there was the feeling – where people were not numbed into indifference by the constant reminders of appalling suffering – that the terrible events were far away, of little direct relevance to their own lives. Relief that Europe had overcome its own disastrous past and was now spared such horrors – conveniently forgetting Yugoslavia – was a frequent, if usually unspoken, sentiment.
The complacency was soon to be shattered. Realization that Europe was inextricably part of an ever more closely interconnected world, that it could not be hermetically sealed off from the terror that was commonplace in more disturbed regions of the globe, and that this terror had connections with its own imperialist past, was driven remorselessly home in a single moment. And it came not from an event in Europe itself, but over three thousand miles away, in New York – and quite literally out of a clear blue sky. In the early afternoon (European time) of 11 September 2001 – a date soon known universally simply as ‘9/11’ – in a carefully planned and orchestrated spectacular act of terror, two hijacked planes deliberately flew within minutes of each other into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. A third hijacked passenger plane was directed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the US Department of Defence), while a fourth plane, heading towards Washington D.C., crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers had courageously grappled with the hijackers. The scenes of the disaster as the twin towers crumbled into rubble remained etched in the minds of the millions who watched the scarcely imaginable horror unfold live on television. Around three thousand people lost their lives – including those on the planes – in the atrocity, many of the victims jumping to their deaths from the burning skyscrapers; and twice that number were injured. Unbearably poignant last messages were passed to loved ones by mobile telephone. The perpetrators, it was soon established, were members of the Islamic terror organization Al-Qaeda. There were European connections. The mastermind behind the attack, Osama Bin Laden, was one of the fifteen terrorists involved who originated in Saudi Arabia, America’s, and much of Europe’s, most important ally in the Gulf. The plot, moreover, had been hatched on German soil, in Hamburg, where five of the terrorists, including the pilot of the first plane to strike the World Trade Center, Mohamed Atta, of Egyptian birth, had been part of an Al-Qaeda cell.
The devastating attack on New York – the first foreign aggression on American soil since Pearl Harbor in December 1941 – was not just an immense shock and tragedy. It marked a frontal assault on ‘Western’ values, exactly as its perpetrators had intended. European leaders immediately declared their solidarity with the United States in the defence of those values. Within days President George W. Bush announced a ‘war on terror’ – even, oblivious to the negative resonance of the word in the Middle East, calling it a ‘crusade’ – that would not stop at Al-Qaeda. It would be a struggle to protect Western civilization against the Islamist ideology that had set out to destroy it. Tony Blair quickly went further than any other Western leader in offering Britain’s unconditional support for the USA.
The date ‘9/11’, more than the calendar date of 1 January 2000 a year earlier, marked the real beginning of a new century. Before then the western world had only been dimly aware of the growing problem of Islamic fundamentalism. The next years, however, would see Britain and other European states embroiled in a widening conflict against this rising force. European soldiers would find themselves fighting unwinnable wars in Muslim countries. Islamist terror would soon scar Europe’s cities, affect multicultural relations, and pose liberal democracy with new dilemmas of trying to reconcile freedom and security. Europe could less than ever shut out the problems of the outside world.