Everywhere, the social attitudes engendered by communism persisted. Embryo civil societies could not rush to fill the void. Political apathy was high; petty quarrels ubiquitous; residual sympathy for communism as a buffer against unemployment and surprises was greater than many supposed. The decades ‘under water’ had conditioned the masses to disbelieve all promises and to expect the worst. The cynical idea that someone loses if someone else is gaining was all but ineradicable. No one could have guessed the dimensions of the devastation.
The fact that communism died without a fight did not ease the pain which it left behind; there was no catharsis. One participant complained of ‘the impossibility of epiphany in peacetime’. Another remarked: ‘I’m happy to have lived to see the end of this disaster; but I want to die before the beginning of the next one.’
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The second stage of the avalanche, in the Soviet Union, began to slide in 1991. Economic reform had made no appreciable progress; material conditions were deteriorating. Over the winter, Gorbachev had drawn closer to the Communist Party apparatus. Several of his colleagues resigned in protest against the impending reassertion of dictatorship. Most ominously, the national republics were lining up to follow the example of the Baltic States, where national and Soviet authorities governed in parallel. In Moscow itself the city council elected a democratic mayor, whilst the Government of the RSFSR elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin began to distance Russia from Gorbachev’s Soviet Kremlin. Armenia and Azerbaijan were at war over Nagorno-Karabakh. In Georgia, where Gorbachev had earlier sanctioned the use of deadly force, the revolt against Moscow was finalized. In Vilnius, where Soviet troops had also killed civilians, the Lithuanian parliament despaired at the lack of outside support. The Kremlin was moving to replace the USSR with a much looser union of sovereign republics. The new union treaty was set to be signed on 20 August.
The abortive Moscow coup of 19–22 August 1991 was launched to stop the Union Treaty, and thereby to preserve the residual power of the CPSU. It
precipitated the disaster which it was supposed to prevent. The plotters were in no sense ‘hardliners’: they were committed to the limited form of
perestroika
which they had good reason to believe was Gorbachev’s own preference. Indeed, they clearly believed that Gorbachev himself would acquiesce. As a result, they made none of the provisions which competent putschists make. In fact, it was not really a coup at all; it was the last twitch of the dying dinosaur’s tail. On Sunday 19 August, seven nervous apparatchiks appeared in a row on Soviet television and announced the formation of their emergency committee. They were obeyed by the Party’s organs and media. They had timed their action to coincide with Gorbachev’s last day on vacation in Crimea. When he refused to deal with their emissary, they had nothing else to propose. Yeltsin, unarrested, clambered onto a tank in front of the Russian Parliament and breathed defiance. No move was taken to disperse his supporters; the tanks on the streets had no ammunition and no orders. After three days, the plotters simply climbed into their limousines and drove off. The attempted coup proved beyond doubt that the system was brain-dead. The Soviet communists were still in control of the world’s most formidable security apparatus; but they could not bring it to perform the simplest of operations.
For a time, Gorbachev did not grasp what had happened. He flew back from Crimea still talking about the future of the Party and of
perestroika
. He was brutally brought back to reality by Yeltsin, who made him read out the names of the plotters to the Russian parliament. They were Gorbachev’s men every one. Gorbachev’s credit was exhausted. He resigned as General Secretary just before Lenin’s Party dissolved itself. On 5 September 1991 the Soviet Congress of Deputies passed its last law, surrendering its powers to the sovereign republics of the former Union. On 24 October 1991 Gorbachev issued a last decree, splitting the Soviet KGB into its component parts. He was left stranded as the figurehead president of a ghost state.
Nothing better illustrated the realities of the Soviet collapse than the fate of Sergei Krikalyev, a Soviet cosmonaut who was fired into space in May 1991. He was still circling the earth at the end of the year for want of a decision to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower; he would return to a world from which the Soviet Union had disappeared. His controllers at the Baikonur Space Centre found themselves in the independent republic of Kazakhstan.
December 1991 was a month of decision at both ends of Europe. It started on 1 December with a referendum in Ukraine, where 91 per cent of the people, including the great majority of the Russian minority, voted for independence. The Republic of Ukraine was second in Europe in territory, fifth in population.
On the 9th and 10th at Maastricht, the twelve leaders of the European Community met to consider their scheme for comprehensive European union. Having banished the dreaded ‘f-word’,
*
the British Prime Minister inserted a
monetary opt-out clause, refused to sign the social chapter, persuaded his partners to reconfirm the role of NATO, and claimed a famous victory. Fears were expressed that Variable geometry’ and a ‘two-speed Europe’ were in the making. Yet the great bulk of the Treaty’s provisions were accepted. The leaders initialled agreements which provided that citizenship of the Union would be given to all citizens of member states (Title II, 8–8e), that members should follow a common economic policy (II, 102–109111), that EMU and a European Central Bank (ECB) were to be achieved by 1999 within a joint banking system (II, 105–108a), that the European Parliament should be given powers of co-decision with the Council of Ministers (II, 137–138a,158,189–90), that an advisory Committee of the Regions was to be established (II, 198a-c), that common foreign and security policies were to be pursued (VI), and that subsidiarity should leave most Community action ‘to Member States’ (II, 3b). They accepted detailed chapters on education, culture, health, energy, justice, immigration, and crime. Outside the Treaty, they also confirmed recognition of the three Baltic States, but not Croatia or Slovenia. It was all suspiciously easy. All that remained was ratification. It would not be long before merchants of doom would be predicting the Treaty’s demise.
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That same weekend, President Gorbachev was making a last vain attempt to summon the heads of the Soviet Republics to Moscow. Unbeknown to him, however, the leaders of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine were already negotiating in a forest hunting-lodge near the Polish border. At 2.17 pm on 8 December they signed a declaration stating that ‘the USSR had ceased to exist’. Next day they announced the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States. The CIS was a convenient cover behind which the core of the strategic arsenal could be kept under a single command whilst most other Soviet institutions were quietly buried. By the end of the year, the peaceful passing of Europe’s last empire was complete.
Some small steps were taken to bridge the East-West divide. NATO established a Joint Co-operation Council to which former Warsaw Pact members were invited. The European Community signed treaties of association with Poland, Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia. A joint European Bank of Development and Reconstruction was opened in London. Food and financial aid was sent to the ex-Soviet Union, and peace-keeping missions to ex-Yugoslavia. Yet the steps were exceedingly small. The EC was still blocking agricultural imports from the East, throttling trade. Except for German investment in East Germany, Western investment in the former East was minimal. No co-ordinated foreign policy was forthcoming; no effective action was taken to contain the looming wars in Croatia and Bosnia; no dynamic leadership emerged. The gulf between ‘White Europe’ and ‘Black Europe’ still gaped.
Events moved so fast after 1989 that few observers had the leisure to reflect on the interdependence of Western and Eastern Europe. The habits of a lifetime led people to assume that East was East and West was West. Western statesmen were preoccupied with the cultivation of their own gardens; they did not readily notice that the explosion which had demolished their neighbours’ house had
blown away their own fence and gable. ‘They leaned against the Wall in comfort,’ a Hungarian had written, ‘not knowing that the Wall was made of dynamite.’
41
For 40 years the Iron Curtain had provided the framework for political and economic life in the West as well as the East. It had defined the playing-field for Marshall Aid, for NATO, for the EEC, for Germany’s Federal Republic, for Western Europe’s economic success. It had been extremely convenient, not just for the Communists but also for Western bankers, planners, and industrialists, whose efforts could be directed to the easy part of Europe. It was specially advantageous for the protectionist element within the EEC, and hence for the distortions of the CAP. In short, it was one of the factors which threatened to turn Western Europe into a short-sighted and self-satisfied rich man’s club, careless of other people’s welfare. It was responsible for attitudes mirroring the Brezhnev Doctrine, where ‘the gains of capitalism’ had to be defended at all cost, where Western statesmen dreamt of perpetuating their isolation indefinitely. In the long run, Europeans would have to face the choice either to rebuild their village in unison or to reinvent the Iron Curtain in a new guise.
In reality, the events of East and West in Europe were closely connected. The success of the European Community, as seen from the East, had been a potent factor in the failure of the Soviet bloc. The success or failure of the post-communist democracies would condition the fate of European Union. Moscow’s retreat from Eastern Europe and from critical regions such as that of oil-rich Baku would create new arenas where the new Russia might feel compelled to resist expanding Western firms and institutions.
To some, the common denominator seemed to lie in the universal attachment to liberal democracy and free market economics. The Western victory appeared to be so complete that one academic gained instant fame by asking whether the world had reached ‘the End of History’.
42
Nothing could have been further from the truth: Europe was locked in an intense period of historical change with no end in view.
In the eyes of one ex-statesman, the revolution of 1989–91 had given rise to three Europes. ‘Europe One’ consisted of the established democracies of Western Europe. ‘Europe Two’ coincided with the Visegrád Triangle of Poland, Hungary, and Czecho-Slovakia plus Slovenia. These four post-communist countries had reason to hope that they could join the European Community with no greater obstacles than those overcome in the previous decade by the post-fascist countries of Spain, Portugal, and Greece. ‘Europe Three’ comprised the remaining countries of the former Soviet bloc, whose European aspirations would have to await the twenty-first century.
43
Yet declarations of goodwill could not of themselves bring results. The priority given to economic considerations was suffocating the wider vision. Any rigid insistence on economic convergence was bound to delay the Community’s enlargement, perhaps indefinitely. On the other hand, any major enlargement
was bound both to involve extensive costs and to strengthen the case for institutional reform. If Germans could resent the costs of integrating seventeen million fellow Germans, other member states of the Union were unlikely to welcome the sacrifices required for integrating ever more new entrants. If governments were to face difficulties over ratifying the Maastricht Treaty, they would encounter much greater problems implementing it.
As the march towards further enlargement and integration proceeded, therefore, resistance was bound to intensify. In a forum of potential confrontation between the Community and its sovereign members, the status of the European Court would become a critical issue. A ‘Europe of Sixteen’ or a ‘Europe of Twenty’ could not be managed by the structures that had sufficed for ‘The Six’ and The Twelve’. The European Union would steadily grind to a halt if it did not reform its governing institutions as part of the drive towards widening and deepening.
According to one pessimistic observer, Europe would only be persuaded to integrate further if faced by extreme catastrophe—that is, by scenes of genocide, by mass migration, or by war.
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By the same line of reasoning, monetary union would only be achieved through the collapse of the existing monetary regime: and political union through the manifest failure of political policies. ‘Europe One’ might only be driven to accept ‘Europe Two’, if‘Europe Three’ reverted to form.
In December 1991 neither integration in the West nor disintegration in the East had run their course; yet very few Europeans could remember a time when so many barriers were down. The frontiers were open, and minds were opening with them. There were adults too young to remember Franco or Tito. One had to be nearing 30 to recall de Gaulle or the Prague Spring, 50 the Hungarian Rising or the Treaty of Rome, 60 the end of the Second World War. No one much under retirement age could have any clear recollections of pre-war Europe. No one much under 90 could have active memories of the First World War. Centenarians were the only persons alive to have known those golden days at the turn of the century before the great European Crisis began.
Count Edward Raczyński (1891–1993) belonged to this last rare company. He was born in Zakopane, on the border of Austria and Hungary, to a Polish family which possessed large estates in Prussia. Their palace in Berlin had been demolished to make way for the Reichstag. He had studied in Austrian Cracow, at Leipzig, and then at the London School of Economics. He had served as Polish Ambassador to the League of Nations and from 1933 to 1945 at the Court of St James. He later became President of Poland’s Government-in-Exile. He could never go home. But on 19 December 1991 he was honoured on his 100th birthday in the Embassy which Britain’s alliance with Stalin had forced him to surrender forty-six years before. Newly married, he was one of the very few indefatigable Europeans to have seen off the European Crisis from start to finish—if finished it was.