23

Strains Past and Present
1989–

The end of history?

The world watched mesmerized as the once mighty Soviet empire gave a sigh, tottered and collapsed. It vanished in just over a year. No one had predicted it and the surprise was total. Europeans had, for half a century, taken for granted a divided Germany and a divided Europe. The gulf seemed a permanent shadow across the map of the continent. In terms both sides were careful not to use, the west had ‘won’ the cold war – Gorbachev shrewdly called it ‘our common victory’ – without a shot fired in anger, other than briefly in Romania.

The end did not come from any shift in the balance of power or any military supremacy, much though this was cited by defence lobbyists. The historian Robert Service attributed 1989 directly to ‘Gorbachev’s personal realization that communism was unsustainable’. It had to find new forms of consent. Moscow would have to relinquish control over its satellite regimes in eastern Europe, but it would also have to open up internal channels of accountability. Service stressed the value to Gorbachev of ‘high-level political engagement by the United States’, in particular Reagan’s personal liking for him. Something synchronized between leaders in both east and west, a synchronicity so long absent from Europe’s inter-state dealings.

For two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev struggled to maintain control. He sought free elections to party soviets and thus the democratization of political life. It was not easy. In losing its autocratic character, the Communist Party lost its brain and its spine. It disintegrated, and with it the fount of institutional discipline within the Leninist-Stalinist empire. Into the resulting vacuum flowed empire’s most insistent opponents, nationalism and anarchy.

In Moscow, the result was power shifting from Gorbachev’s Kremlin to the headquarters of the formerly somnolent Russian republic in its ‘White House’ on the Moscow River. Here a new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was a boisterous, bibulous throwback to past Moscow rulers. He resisted a coup attempt in August 1991 by KGB hardliners, when Gorbachev was briefly absent by the Black Sea. By December, the Warsaw Pact regimes were going their own way and so was Russia itself. A weakened Gorbachev was finally forced to sign the formal dismantling of the USSR. It meant his own downfall and Yeltsin (1991–9) moving into the Kremlin. On New Year’s Day 1992, the hammer-and-sickle that had graced the fortress battlements for sixty-eight years was hauled down, and the tsarist tricolour rose in its place.

Gorbachev remained a hero in the west, but there were no eulogies for the Soviet Union. In the history of absolutism, it was an empire without redemption. Stalin’s rule in the thirties and forties brought more death and misery to the people of one European country than any government in history. In Norman Davies’s words, the union finally fell because ‘the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life’. While those organs had, in the years since Stalin’s death, maintained internal peace, it was a peace that denied its subjects the unprecedented prosperity and freedom enjoyed since 1945 by peoples across western Europe.

Communism’s saddest epitaph became evident only under Yeltsin. Russia’s most able and enterprising citizens did not stay to help reconstruct their blighted economy. In their thousands, they fled to the west, taking with them as much of its resources as they could grasp or steal. The curiously named ‘oligarch’ became the symbol of that flight. In the bitterest blow of all, Russia had to watch its old ally China adjust itself to entrepreneurial capitalism, without bothering to dismantle the framework of a communist state.

To the west the new order after 1989 was a moment of exhilaration. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared it ‘the end of history’. He said that the world had reached ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. In retrospect this was naïve, but it reflected a widespread optimism that swept across Europe in the 1990s, a repeat of the fin-de-siècle exhilaration of the 1890s. It was as if Europe’s evolution had reached a sort of apotheosis, or at least become uninteresting.

West Europe’s practical response to the fall of the Soviet empire did its best to defy Fukuyama’s optimism. There was no lowering of tariffs or other barriers to trade with the east, and therefore little stimulus to growth in the post-communist economies. Brussels lobbyists opposed any inrush of low-cost produce, especially food, into the EEC’s protected markets. Despite initial pleas from Gorbachev, there was no new Marshall Aid, nor substantial inward investment, at least until former communist states joined the EU. Instead London opened its markets to Russia’s stolen roubles. At the same time there was a torrent of low-cost labour migrating westwards, bleeding the east of talent and further aiding the west’s economies.

More dangerous was an instant NATO welcome to Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies. Those republics closest to Russia, such as Belarus, Ukraine and the central Asian ‘stans’, formed a Commonwealth of Independent States under Moscow’s aegis. But the Baltic states together with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary turned their backs on the east and began negotiations with NATO as guarantor of their future security. There was no doubt this is what these countries wanted, but the alacrity with which NATO seemed ready to advance its frontier eastwards rubbed salt into the gaping wound of Russia’s national pride. Yeltsin pleaded with the west to hold back, describing NATO’s expansionism as ‘a major political mistake’. He warned that ‘the flames of war could burst out across the whole of Europe’. He was ignored. In this respect, there was an ominous sense of the cold war’s demise replicating the casual triumphalism of Versailles.

A new Germany, a new Europe

West Germany’s Helmut Kohl was on a visit to Poland in November 1989 when told of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is said he wept tears of joy. He called for the immediate reunification of his country. Both France and Britain were less sure. Thatcher seemed to regret the passing of the old order, and warned that a reunited ‘Germany would once again dominate the whole of Europe’. To Kohl it was a matter of practicality. In just two months from the opening of the wall, 200,000 East Germans migrated to the west. East Germany’s economy faced collapse.

There was not even a plebiscite on reunification. Elections were held and by July 1990 new members from the East German provinces took their seats in the Reichstag. A vote was then taken on moving Germany’s capital back to Berlin, decided on a tide of emotion driven by the East Germans. The new provinces became a sorely depressed part of Europe’s richest state and were to emerge as its most conservative region politically. The former east contributed just five per cent to German output, but was to double the national debt.

At the very moment the eastern bloc disintegrated, the EEC mooted a major step in the opposite direction. The commission’s head, Jacques Delors, proposed in 1990 that the EEC become an executive agent of the European Parliament, with the currently sovereign Council of Ministers as merely its senate. This would drastically increase the unelected commission’s authority and diminish national sovereignty. It was constitutionally – not to mention politically – explosive. The EU was becoming a state without a nation.

Britain’s Thatcher reacted in the House of Commons, ‘No, no, no!’ She later added, ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ The Delors initiative won little support and was scrapped, but Thatcher’s days were numbered. In November 1990 she was felled by a party coup and replaced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major. Apart from her dominant hold on British politics in the eighties, Thatcher’s ‘iron lady’ stance in the cold war won her heroic status in east Europe. I watched her idolized at a Warsaw banquet in 1991, when some Poles pleaded with her to stand as their, presumably honorary, president.

The EEC went into conclave in Maastricht in 1991 to decide on its most momentous step since its formation. It would take the existing European Monetary System – in which governments agreed to keep their currencies roughly in line – into a full currency union by the end of the century, embracing eleven of its members (later twelve). For Germany this was a difficult step, meaning the death of the Deutschmark, talisman of its post-war prosperity. The compensation was an overvalued euro and the lack of any tool of internal economic equilibrium, much to Germany’s advantage. The euro finally replaced national currencies in 2002, wiping away such ancient symbols of national pride as the franc, the lira, the drachma, the peseta and the escudo.

The eurozone’s significance was more than symbolic. It implied the gradual synchronization of its members’ economies, including monetary policy, national investment and transfers between rich and poor regions. For northern Europe the euro bound Germany into ever closer union. For Spain, Italy and Greece, it was a double-edged sword. It signified merger with Europe’s most sophisticated economies, but also economic adjustments for which these countries were by no means ready. Britain had joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism, but dropped out with the pound under extreme pressure on ‘black Wednesday’ in 1992. The Major government declined to join the euro. It also ‘opted out’ of Maastricht’s ‘Social Chapter’, which covered areas such as employment rights.

The EEC now became the European Union (EU), the word economic being significantly dropped and ‘union’ left to imply anything and everything. Britain’s semi-detachment from it meant that Germany stood alone as its most potent member. Its bankers headed the eurozone’s financial regime, with a whip hand over the terms of Europe’s trade. Germans seemed to accept their new economic hegemony. In particular, they eagerly invited the former Soviet bloc nations to join the EU. First in line stood Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia having split into this and Slovakia in 1993.

To Germany these states, also now members of NATO, would form a buffer between it and any emergent Russia, under the continuing security shield of the American deterrent. The EU insisted that the states ‘satisfy the union’s political and economic conditions’, including political freedom and action against corruption. This insistence proved lax in the extreme. Sweden, Finland and Austria also left EFTA and in 1995 joined the EU, with Bulgaria and Romania to follow. Apart from Norway, Switzerland and some mini-states, the EU was now all of Europe other than the Russian federation. A sort of dream had been realized.

The rise of Putin

Yeltsin had warned NATO of the flames that might accompany a tilt in the balance of European power. The first ignition appeared in the one communist state that had stayed outside Moscow’s orbit, Yugoslavia. In June 1991 the Yugoslav province of Slovenia had declared independence of Belgrade and been left in peace after a brief conflict. When it was followed by Croatia, and Bosnia, and then by a separatist rising in Kosovo, the largest province, Serbia, took military action to prevent secession. Both the EU and the UN were powerless to halt the resulting conflict, which lasted from 1991 to 1999. It was left to NATO to overstep its defensive remit and intervene. By 1999 NATO had found itself compelled to guarantee Bosnian and Kosovan independence. It thus legitimized the break-up of a European state.

A light-headedness now crept into discussion of European defence policy. The Soviet Union, the great enemy, had vanished and its Red Army was shrinking. The Russian component of the old Soviet arms budget plummeted from $33 billion in 1988 to just $14 billion in 1994. Common sense might suggest that Europe’s defence should now transfer to the ‘ever closer’ EU. It was perhaps time for the American umbrella to be replaced by a European deterrent, even for NATO in its current form to be wound up.

Russia under Yeltsin was at this point experiencing extremes of humiliation and paranoia. It had a wrecked economy and a triumphant western alliance advancing towards its doorstep. Negotiations now began for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania also to join NATO, turning the earlier necklace of former communist states into what looked to Moscow more like a noose. But Yeltsin had other worries. He decided not to move Russia gradually towards capitalism, by ensuring currency control and strict financial policing. Instead he went full speed ahead. He curbed public spending, cut subsidies, freed prices and gave the ownership of factories and utilities to Russian citizens in the form of share vouchers. These grossly undervalued vouchers were swiftly bought up by middlemen and sold on to a network of oligarchs, who became sensationally rich before vanishing abroad. A Siberian oil well was swiftly converted into a Knightsbridge mansion.

The value of Russia’s copious natural resources was thus invested in London, Cyprus, the Middle East and other boltholes in what became one of Europe’s most systematic acts of kleptomania. (William the Conqueror’s plunder of England in the eleventh century at least remained largely in situ.) By the end of the nineties, Russia’s national product had halved and the rouble collapsed. Millions lost their savings and, in some parts of the country, there was a cry for a return to communism. This in turn led to attempts to unseat Yeltsin. If Gorbachev had lost control over the demise of communism, Yeltsin lost it over the rise of capitalism.

In 1999 the ailing Yeltsin anointed a former Leningrad KGB boss, Vladimir Putin, as his successor. The contrast was total. Putin was the epitome of a tough, communist-era apparatchik. The ex-intelligence officer had no time for the niceties of democracy, but a keen sense of the need to restore Russian pride. He would issue pictures of himself hunting and bare-chested on horseback. His court of oligarchs made sure he secured as much overseas wealth as they had. Putin’s politics, endorsed at increasingly rigged elections, made no mention of civil rights or market economics. He was a populist and a nationalist, his pledge merely to restore Russia’s integrity and self-confidence. Opponents were bribed, imprisoned or killed. The west might have felt able to humour and torment Yeltsin. It now faced the pastiche tsar of a macho state. That Russia’s economy was debilitated was irrelevant. Dictatorship thrives on poverty.

The credit crunch

The European Union had by the end of the century expanded to twenty-eight very different members, with a constitution designed for six like-minded ones. As recognized in America’s federalist debates in the 1780s, the constitutional relationship between a central state and its component members is crucial to its stability. America’s constitution had flaws, but it proved astonishingly robust. Europe’s at the end of the twentieth century was fragile. It sought to govern not a mostly homogeneous set of commonwealth states, but countries with distinct personalities, cultures and vulnerabilities. Few were ready to submerge them in a continental whole, as fashioned by the champions of ever closer union in Brussels.

The European Commission and Parliament had both become unwieldy. The former’s bureaucratic expansion into everything from building regulations to food sizing and bat control was ridiculed. The impending eurozone was a gamble. Lacking the safety valve of internal devaluation or other adjustments, it would involve a severe loss of sovereignty for its member governments. The European Parliament was a paper tiger, given over to lobbying for domestic projects. Election turnouts fell steadily from sixty-two per cent in 1979 to forty-three per cent in 2009.

Undaunted, the Brussels establishment continued to pursue unification. By 2005 it had sought to adopt a new constitution, overseen by the veteran French politician Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. This awarded the EU a third presidency (now of the European Council as well as its Commission and Parliament), and further extended majority voting in the European Council. This ran into immediate trouble. Rarely in the EU’s history were the peoples of Europe directly consulted on its powers, or even its existence. Decisions were taken by elected governments. The Giscard constitution was rejected in French and Dutch referendums, and the final treaty by the Irish. These votes were either rerun or ignored. The final Treaty of Lisbon was signed in 2007, with virtually no concessions to subsidiary nationalism, its authors blind to any incipient resentment it might breed.

A year later, Europe and America experienced the most traumatic financial crash since 1929. In Europe the chief impact was on the weaker states of the EU, notably those of southern Europe. The eurozone’s German-controlled European Central Bank (ECB) looked immediately to the security of Germany’s overseas loans, including those to the zone’s weaker members. Though the ECB was impressively ready to print money – there was no repetition of the squeeze of 1929 – the liquidity went to German (and other) banks rather than to member states or their citizens. Extreme austerity was forced on Greece, Spain and Italy, with levels of unemployment that rose to twenty-five per cent of the working population. In Spain, half of all young people became unemployed. Nothing could have more boosted a re-emergent European nationalism, or more damaged the cause of closer union.

Russia resurgent

In 2004 the Baltic states, Bulgaria and Romania formally joined NATO, as did Slovakia and Slovenia. Soon afterwards, the American president, George W. Bush (2001–9), openly mooted Ukraine and Georgia also joining, which would advance NATO to Russia’s southern frontier. Both Germany and France challenged the wisdom of such blatant provocation. Putin repeated Yeltsin’s warning that any NATO advance to the frontier ‘would be taken in Russia as a direct threat to the security of our country’. In the summer of 2008 he reacted by invading Georgia’s Russian-speaking northern provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Europe’s only response was for France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to negotiate a ceasefire.

In 2010 the pro-Russian leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, opposed any move to take the country closer to NATO or the EU, but within four years he was ousted by pro-western parties in Kiev, precipitating an open civil war in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern provinces, the latter supported by Moscow. Tension was further increased when in 2014 Putin annexed the formerly Russian territory of Crimea, granted to Ukraine in the 1950s. Europe replied with a barrage of economic sanctions, which had no political effect beyond entrenching Russia’s siege economy and bringing Putin closer to his oligarchic associates. The economy switched to import substitution, including the manufacture of domestic mozzarella and camembert. NATO reopened its invitation to Ukraine and conducted military exercises in the Baltic countries. Russia did likewise. Europe slid back into brinkmanship mode.

Misjudging Moscow had long been the occupational disease of European diplomacy. It cursed alike Swedes, Poles, Napoleon and Hitler. It now blighted a western alliance divided on how to respond to this newly aggressive Russia. The EU had no military arm, though it often toyed with the idea of one. There had been a European ‘defence community’, a Eurocorps, a rapid reaction force, a ‘military action plan’ and even a joint operational headquarters. For good measure, Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair had in a speech in Chicago in 1999 suggested that a concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ be seen as valid wherever democracy and human rights were under threat. To him, there could be no limit to NATO’s responsibility. But who should define threats and responsibilities?

After New York’s 9/11 atrocity in 2001 at the hands of Al Qaeda, NATO found itself expected to intervene wherever Washington’s rulers ordained. Armies from virtually all Europe’s states were summoned to fight with varying degrees of enthusiasm and engagement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. As America tested its hegemonic muscles, obedience was the price for the continuance of the nuclear umbrella. No one asked, let alone answered, the question of who should police the ever-expanding borders of democratic Europe.

In 2017 a new American president, Donald Trump, directly called Europe’s bluff. His two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama (2009–17), had both indicated a desire to withdraw from the role of policing Europe. While Bush was consumed by the Middle East, Obama ‘pivoted’ towards Asia-Pacific. Trump dismissed NATO as ‘obsolete’ and suggested Europe was now rich enough to defend itself. At a rally in December 2017 he said he had told the people of Europe ‘they’ve been delinquent. They haven’t been paying … I guess I implied you don’t pay, we’re out of there.’ He was also avowedly a friend, if not an ally, of Putin.

Russia was now becoming a dominant factor in European diplomacy. It had copious natural resources, a large army, a nuclear arsenal and a reckless capacity for mischief-making, cyber attacks and overseas assassination. As Churchill had said in 1939, Russia might always be ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, but on one matter Putin was crystal clear. He did not like NATO’s encirclement of his borders or meddling within his ‘sphere of interest’. In this he had an increasingly sympathetic ear from Germany’s Angela Merkel and from some former Warsaw Pact leaders. Geography mattered. It was easy for Britain and France to play belligerence with Moscow. It was less easy for Germany and the still ingénue democracies to its east.

Old troubles reborn

As Europe struggled to recover from recession, in 2015 the British prime minister David Cameron tossed Brussels a grenade. He said he would hold a referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership the following year. The torch of British Euroscepticism had passed from left to right. It was now Conservatives rather than Labour who were most anti-European. Cameron’s attempts to appease his ‘leave’ voters by negotiating reforms to the EU were dismissed by the ever cautious Merkel and, in June 2016, to Cameron’s surprise and dismay, the British electorate voted narrowly to leave the EU. The vote was taken as binding by the government. The date decided by Parliament for departure was March 2019.

Britain’s departure could not lightly be dismissed. Its economy was second only to Germany’s in size, and contributed twenty per cent of the EU budget. The UK might long have been half-hearted in its commitment to European union, but now it was not alone. A Pew survey in mid-2016 was one of many showing disapproval of the EU as high in Germany and the Netherlands as in Britain, and higher in France and Spain. Few governments dared imitate Britain and hold an open vote on continued membership. Union might be popular but the EU was not.

European democracy now entered a period of trauma. As of old, regional identities and grievances came to the fore. Separatist movements gained momentum in Scotland, Catalonia and parts of France, Romania and Italy, wherever clashes between central and local government turned critical. A virulent nationalism began to emerge in the so-called Visegrád-4 countries of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Right-wing parties thrived in Austria, the Netherlands, France and Italy. At the core of their appeal was the oldest of emotions, a desire to protect the character and integrity of established communities from assault by globalization and immigration.

The federalist adventure, so assured in its idealism, had always required the honouring of Rousseau’s social contract, a consensual relationship between the state and the citizen. Europe’s diverse peoples would support union, but only insofar as it did not infringe their perceived character and way of life. Europe’s booming cities might be able to absorb change, but this was not true of formerly industrial provinces, rural areas and ageing populations. Britain’s pro-Brexit voters – heavily provincial, rural and older – reflected this divide. Parties variously labelled right-wing, nationalist or populist gained strength in most if not all European states, responding to a call for voters to ‘take back control’ of their political and social environment. Most alarmingly, the 2016 World Values Survey reported that ‘fewer than half’ of respondents born in the seventies and eighties believed it was ‘essential to live in a country that is governed democratically’. In Germany, Spain, Japan and America, between twenty and forty per cent would prefer ‘a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliaments or elections’.

In 2015 Merkel in Germany made a radical gesture. After the failure of an EU plan to absorb refugees from the Syrian civil war flowing into Greece, she decided to offer them sanctuary in Germany. Over a million accepted. The reaction was fierce. An unashamedly right-wing group, Alternative for Germany, emerged in the 2018 German elections as the third largest party, strongest in the former East German provinces. Merkel, so long the queen of Europe, was almost toppled. A charismatic French president, Emmanuel Macron, elected in 2017, swiftly moved into lead position in the EU and promptly initiated yet another attempt to concentrate and reform the eurozone. Germany disagreed. Europe looked ever more divided and confused.

Darker clouds were gathering to the east. In 2018 Hungary’s quasi-autocratic leader, Viktor Orbán, was overwhelmingly returned to power under the slogan ‘Sovereignty, independence, freedom, God, homeland and security.’ He did not mention Europe, and dismissed the EU as ‘liberal babble’. Opposition, the free press and the rule of law were suppressed. Politicians in Poland, Slovakia, Austria and Serbia were equally out of tune with the liberal ethos of the EU. In a 2018 poll, just twenty-one per cent of Slovaks said they ‘belonged’ to the west. Most were reluctant to enforce tighter western sanctions on Russia and were fiercely anti-immigrant. The old ideological fault-line between east and west was re-emerging, while a gulf was also widening between rich north and poor south.

To these challenges to the values that had fashioned post-war Europe, the EU offered little response. A constitution intended to curb Germany and avoid the emergence of a pre-eminent state now suffered from the lack of just such leadership. Russia was bruised and angry, America unclear on where it stood. There loomed over Europe the same divisions and uncertainties as of old.