Ten years ago this month, Poland voted in its first semi-free election since the communist takeover at the end of the second world war. I will never forget the quiet satisfaction of my friends as they crossed off the names of so many communist candidates, one by one, from those absurdly long ballot sheets. The result was a triumph for the opposition movement, Solidarity. Within three months, the country had a non-communist prime minister. Within six months, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had followed where Poland and Hungary led. The Berlin wall was no more. The cold war was over. Soon there was no Soviet Union either.
The central European revolution of 1989 was without precedent in European history. A rapid and fundamental change of system was achieved without violence, by a combination of mass civil disobedience and negotiation between government and opposition elites. It was an extraordinary, creative departure from European revolutions as they had been known since 1789: the roundtable replaced the guillotine. It produced a model of non-revolutionary revolution which would be looked to as far away as South Africa, and by Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, but also by an unknown French-trained intellectual called Ibrahim Rugova in a distant corner of Europe called Kosovo.
While the main causes for communism's collapse lay inside communism itself, this was a triumph for the west, and specifically for what was then still called the European Community. However ropey the EC looked from inside (Orwell once said, "from inside, everything looks worse"), people behind the iron curtain saw it as a shining example of a peaceful, prosperous, integrating Europe: and this was an inspiration for their revolt. The leaders of the velvet revolutions would famously talk of the "return to Europe."
The 1989 revolution-and its immediate consequences-ended the short 20th century, marked by the great, three-cornered battle between communism, fascism and liberal democracy. If one thought of the history of Europe in the 20th century as a line on a graph, then it began to look like a "V": descending from 1914 to the depths of barbarism in the second world war and the Holocaust, but then slowly ascending again since 1945, first in western and northern Europe, then in southern Europe, and now in eastern Europe. A "V," it seemed, for Victory.
That was the euphoric spirit in which we set out to build "the new Europe." But where is it now? Ten years on, Europe has found itself at war. British and German pilots have been bombing Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic has driven 1.5m Kosovars from their homes. Here, as before in Bosnia, we have gone right back to a kind of barbarism not seen in Europe since the late 1940s. The line which seemed to be soaring upward in 1989 has wavered, then plummeted again.
Of course, the picture is not so dark all over Europe. To use two slightly pretentious but useful terms, the contrast is diachronic, but also synchronic. There is a drastic contrast in time between 1989 and 1999. But there is a still more drastic contrast between what is happening in different parts of Europe at the same time. If you compare the maps of Europe in 1989 and 1999, there are no less than 14 new nation-states on it-or 15, if you count Bosnia. So much for the end of the nation-state. It was always misleading to generalise about the communist-ruled part of Europe (hence the revival in the 1980s of the term "central Europe," as opposed to "eastern Europe"), but it is even more dangerous to generalise about post-communist Europe. Divergence is its hallmark.
None the less, we can identify four main political zones of Europe today; and, at the end of the decade, we have a fair idea of the basic direction in which three of them are heading. First, the states of western, northern and much of southern Europe are organised in what is now called a European Union, with most of them joining the great gamble of monetary union. Emu is the defining development for this zone; what, since 1945, has been called "the European project" seems to stand or fall with it. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently went so far as to say that "the value of Europe is the value of the euro."
Second, there is central Europe, a zone whose boundaries have always been disputed, but which in its current political incarnation certainly includes the former East Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and now again (after a painful absence) Slovakia. These countries are still riven by corruption, disillusionment and all the pains of post-communism. One can be misled by the gleaming western appearance of their new airports and hotels. But there is no question about their basic direction. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have joined Nato. They are negotiating to join the EU. They are rapidly becoming part of the west, of the first Europe. This is, with all due caveats, the great success story of the decade.
The third zone is the Balkans-politely called "south-eastern Europe." If the progress in central Europe has outstripped our dreams, the regress in the former Yugoslavia has been worse than our worst nightmares. Here you see most starkly the great divergence of the post-communist world. Ten years ago, Belgrade was more prosperous and in many ways more open to the west than Warsaw. When I was in Belgrade last November, the city felt about 30 years behind Warsaw-and that was before the destruction caused by Nato bombs.
It may be foolhardy, with the future of Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro and even Macedonia still unclear, to suggest that here, too, we can glimpse the basic direction of development. But I will suggest it. What we see in the former Yugoslavia is a bloody separating out into new nation-states with clear ethnic majorities. What has happened there in the 1990s, is what happened in central Europe in the 1940s. As Ernest Gellner memorably put it, thinking of the pre-war ethnic maps with their different colours for different ethnic groups, the picture by Kokoschka, with its glorious mixtures of colour, becomes a picture by Mondrian, with its distinct patches of single colours. The process is nearly complete. In Bosnia, the new Habsburg governor-Carlos Westendorp-presides over a reality of ethnic separation. In Kosovo, the hard truth is that an international protectorate will almost certainly preside over an essentially Albanian entity. Then only Macedonia will be a genuinely multi-ethnic state-and a very fragile one at that.
The fourth major political zone of Europe is the former Soviet Union. Here, the least is clear. Can we say with any confidence what even the basic shape and direction of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus will be? Will they survive as integral states? Will they be democracies or dictatorships? Are they heading west or east or any which way? We don't know.
There are also borderline cases: the Baltic states, spatchcocked between Scandinavia, central Europe and the rest of the former Soviet Union; Romania, a multi-ethnic state perilously balanced between central Europe and the Balkans. The picture is full of synchronic contrast, and the most acute is between the first and third Europes, between western Europe and the Balkans, between Emu and ethnic cleansing.
Europe today is a piece of Simultantheater: simultaneous theatre. This is a theatrical form, developed by German directors like Peter Stein, in which several different, apparently unrelated actions take place on different parts of the stage at the same time: in one corner, a husband and wife are having an argument; in another, a couple is dancing; a blind man delivers a monologue from a balcony above. The challenge is to follow them all-and to work out how they relate.
I am hardly the first to point out that the so-called information revolution means that we watch all these events in real time, on CNN, BBC World and Sky, as on a single stage. And then, of course, there is the mobile phone. Earlier this year, as I sat with General Mike Jackson, the Nato commander in Macedonia, in his Skopje headquarters, talking about the military possibilities of going into Kosovo (and the lessons he and his German comrades-in-arms were learning from the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941), my mobile phone rang: "It's the BBC here," said a voice. "We were wondering if you would take part in a discussion at the LSE... about monetary union." Two weeks later, it rang again as I stood in Pret A Manger in Oxford, munching a flapjack. It was the wife of the leading Kosovar editor Veton Surroi, desperately asking if we could do anything for her husband, who is still in hiding somewhere in Kosovo.
This Simultantheater, with its intense juxtapositions of modernity and barbarity-of Emu and ethnic cleansing-poses, in the first place, a moral challenge. During the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht wrote that there are times when even "a conversation about trees is almost a crime/ because it implies being silent about so many horrors..." You may object that the whole world is now Simultantheater: the genocide in Rwanda was brought into our living rooms just as Kosovo is. This raises the issue of whether what is happening in Kosovo matters particularly to us because it is happening in Europe. What do we mean when we say this? What we are emphatically not saying-I trust-is that white European lives are intrinsically more precious than black African lives. But then, what is being said? Well, perhaps that Europe is also a moral community: not as strong as the nation, let alone as the family, but still something stronger than the moral community of all humankind. And also, quite simply, that it is closer to us. Duties are related to distance. Being closer to us, Kosovo also affects our interests more directly: whether in the form of refugees (when we take any), the impact on our trade, European security and so on.
so the jarring proximity of Emu and ethnic cleansing is a defining feature of our brave new Europe, a moral challenge and a political one. But we have also to ask, like the puzzled visitor to Peter Stein's Simultantheater, whether there is any connection between these apparently unrelated actions; between the bankers in Frankfurt and the butchers in Kosovo. I think there is. What is more, I believe it is a causal connection.
There are two usual sorts of objection to Emu. There are those of principle, about the loss of sovereignty, democratic control and so on, and those of practicality: there is not sufficient real convergence between the participating economies; a one-size-fits-all interest rate will therefore result in growing tensions, as it helps some countries but harms others, especially when they face what economists call "asymmetric shocks." I share a little of the first kind of concern and much more of the second. In less than six months of the single currency, we already have evidence of the strains likely to arise with a one-size-fits-all interest rate: inflation is threatening Ireland and Spain, while the performances of even the core economies of France and Germany diverge. But this I can only judge as an informed citizen, a non-economist choosing between the incompatible assertions of rival economists. Since so much has been invested in Emu, economically, politically, psychologically, I want it to succeed-but I fear it may be a bridge too far.
My main objection to Emu, however, is a different one, much less frequently aired in the British debate. Even if monetary union is right in principle, and feasible in practice, it was the wrong priority for the 1990s. In fact, my central argument is that the leaders of western Europe set the wrong priorities at the end of the cold war. Instead of seizing the opportunities, and preparing to confront the dangers, that would arise from the end of communism in half of Europe, they set about perfecting the internal arrangements of an already well-functioning, peaceful and prosperous community of states in western Europe.
We were like people who for 40 years had lived in a large, ramshackle house, divided down the middle by a concrete wall. In the western half we had rebuilt, mended the roof, knocked several rooms together, redecorated and installed new plumbing and electric wiring, while the eastern half fell into a state of dangerous decay. Then the wall came down. What did we do? We decided that what we needed most urgently was a superb new computer-controlled system of air-conditioning in the western half. While we prepared to install it, the eastern half of the house began to fall apart and even to catch fire. We fiddled in Maastricht, while Sarajevo began to burn.
Now of course I cannot prove the causal connection that I am suggesting. You can never prove "what would have happened if...." But let us make a thought experiment. Let us suppose that, after the wall came down, the leaders of the EU concentrated all their efforts on responding to the challenge in the east. They launched something like a Marshall Plan for the transformation of the post-communist economies. They supported the build-up of civil society, political parties and independent media-including, for example, that amazing piece of peaceful Albanian self-organisation led by Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo in the early 1990s. They began the specific reforms of the EU's decision-making and budgets that would be necessary for a rapid enlargement; slimmed down the CAP; changed the way commissioners were appointed; streamlined decision-making in the council of ministers, and so on. They moved towards a closer coordination of foreign and security policies, appointing, in early 1990, a single EC foreign policy representative. Recognising that post-communist nationalisms could lead to armed conflict, they used the post-cold war restructuring of armed forces to build up a substantial rapid reaction force, having full compatibility of equipment and joint training, with each other and with Nato. A common army, rather than a common currency.
So, (still, alas, in the thought experiment), when Milosevic's forces besieged Vukovar, two months before the planned Maastricht EU summit of December 1991, they took decisive action to stop him-with the approval of President Gorbachev, and a UN mandate. The Maastricht meeting was then devoted to what to do about former Yugoslavia, European foreign and defence policy, and preparations for eastward enlargement.
I do not suggest that this would have solved everything. The problem of how to turn poor, undemocratic, multi-ethnic states into stable, democratic ones, without bloodshed or a tyranny of the ethnic majority, would have remained intractable. But if west European leaders had devoted to these matters even half the time and energy that they had expended on Maastricht and momentary union, we would be in a better position today. Who can seriously doubt it? And Kosovo gives the lie to those who suggest that none of these difficulties could have been foreseen. In the chronology which links the essays, reportages and sketches in my new book, History of the Present, one of the very first entries reads "January-February 1990, Albanians in Kosovo protest against their province being stripped of its autonomy by Slobodan Milosevic." The Kosovo crisis was already there.
This is not just a historian's counter-factual, such as "what if the steam engine had never been invented?" or "what if Oliver Cromwell had been a woman?" It describes a real policy alternative available at the time, that some of us were vigorously urging. (And incidentally, what would have been lost by working for another ten years of solid convergence between the economies in the single market before deciding whether to complete it with a single currency?)
Now, some would maintain that our mistake was not that we gave priority to the internal perfecting of western Europe, but rather that we paid too much attention to central Europe as against the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Indeed, having argued in the early 1990s for a priority for central Europe, I am dismayed by the way in which the concept of central Europe is now often pressed into the service of what I call "vulgar Huntingtonism": the idea that political outcomes in post-communist Europe are culturally predetermined. If you had western Christianity, the Renaissance, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Baroque architecture and coffee with Schlagobers, you were predestined for democracy. If, instead, you had Orthodox Christianity or Islam, the Russian or Ottoman empires, minarets and burek you were doomed to dictatorship. This is simply not true, either way.
In any case it is hard to argue that we did too much for central Europe. It is true that there were EU schemes such as Phare, Tempus and the rest. Certainly, what has been called the "passive leverage" of the EU-"if you do X, Y and Z, you may get in"-was an important factor in the domestic politics of central European countries. But this was, precisely, passive leverage, linked with some very active meanness when it came to imports of Hungarian tomatoes or Czech widgets. The truth is that the central Europeans did the job for themselves: making a reconstruction far more difficult than it had been for western Europe after 1945. The situation in early 1990 was best summed up, as so often, in a joke: the communists have shown us how to turn an aquarium into fish soup; the question is, can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium? In central Europe they have. A rather odd aquarium, to be sure, but the same could be said of the political and economic systems in several countries of what we call "normal" Europe.
The role of the EU in central European transformation comes uncomfortably close to Dr Johnson's definition of a patron: "...one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help." The comparison with the US is unfavourable; in the second half of the decade it was the American-led Nato which pressed ahead with eastward enlargement, while the EU fussed and dawdled, reserving its visionary leadership for monetary union.
why did the leaders of western Europe set the wrong priorities after 1989? Not because of the usual chronic flaw of policy-making in democracies: short-termism based upon following the latest opinion poll. In continental Europe, there was what has been called a "permissive consensus" for further steps of integration. But monetary union was hardly a popular cause, least of all in Germany. To turn it into reality required bold statesmanship, putting the long-term before the short-term, and, finally, creating a fragile majority by convincing the Germans that it was simply inevitable; that Helmut Kohl was, as it were, history on horseback.
So why did these statesmen choose this course? Of course the project was already to hand-the Delors report on economic and monetary union was presented in April 1989 -and there was a certain momentum behind it in the counsels of the EU. But the decisive impulse came from one particular aspect of the end of the cold war: German unification. President Mitterrand and the formidable French political and administrative elite-those super-smooth products of the grandes ?coles-were already committed to trying to regain control of their own currency, and to tie Germany still more closely to France, by monetary union. But the sudden prospect of Germany becoming larger, more eastern, and fully sovereign, gave it a new urgency. Having initially tried to slow down German unification, which he viewed with quite as much alarm as Margaret Thatcher, Fran?ois Mitterrand turned round and agreed-for a price. The price was nicely summed up by a German wit. The deal, he said, was "half the Deutschmark for Mitterrand, the whole of Deutschland for Kohl."
Yet this was a price that Kohl was ready to pay, although he did insist that there should be something described as a "political union" to complement the economic and monetary one. Kohl, "Adenauer's grandson," wanted to see Germany tied firmly to the European mast, like Odysseus, so it would resist the siren calls of the country's terrible past. In a conversation I had with Kohl in 1992, soon after Maastricht, he delivered one of the most breathtaking remarks I have ever heard. "Do you realise," he said, "that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler?" What he meant, he explained, was that he was the first chancellor of a united Germany since Hitler. Conscious of this responsibility, he proposed to put a European roof over Germany, whereas Hitler had tried to put a German roof over Europe.
So much of what has happened in Europe in the 1990s flows from this moment in 1990, when two individual statesmen reached an understanding based on their historically informed judgements of their countries' long-term national interests. It was another example of the importance of individuals in history.
There were other reasons for their choice. Not just Kohl and Mitterrand, but Delors, Andreotti and other EU leaders subscribed to the classic view of European integration proceeding through economic means to political ends. That was how it had been done since the 1950s. Why should it not continue to work? They also believed that a core of states proceeding with further integration would exercise a magnetic attraction on their neighbours-notably on Britain, but also on those in central and eastern Europe. This was how it had worked before; why not again? It did not seem to occur to them that a process that had worked, with the regularity of a physics demonstration, in the cool, controlled laboratory of western Europe in the cold war, might not necessarily work in the raw, fresh air of the larger, messier post-cold war Europe.
Altogether, they subscribed to the Whig interpretation of European history. The kind of interpretation that you find in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle's Europe: A History of its Peoples, published in 1990: a charming story of progress to peace, prosperity and ever closer union. The irony is that they were confirmed in this mythopoeic, fairy-tale view of the story of 20th-century Europe by the new central and east European leaders. From V?clav Havel to Mikhail Gorbachev, these leaders all said: yes, yours is the true, the modern, the normal Europe, and we want to return to it. This rose-tinted, outsiders' view of the European Community had itself been a cause of 1989, and now contributed to the subsequent mistake.
Indeed, one could go further and wonder whether the trouble with the velvet revolutions was that they were too velvet, too gentle, too peaceful. It is a horrible line of thought, but perhaps west European leaders needed a more violent challenge to provoke an adequate response. In the event, they underestimated the destructive power of the social and political forces that were to manifest themselves after the end of communism. Some of our west European leaders thought these forces could all be sorted out by a dose of EU arbitration. And so we had the ludicrous spectacle of Jacques Poos going with an EU delegation to Belgrade in June 1991, telling the Yugoslavs that small states in Europe have no future-this from the foreign minister of Luxembourg-and then declaring that "the hour of Europe has come." One of the truly emblematic moments of the decade.
Finally, of course, they were west European leaders. With a few exceptions (such as Hans-Dietrich Genscher) their whole formation and life experience was in western Europe. (Kohl once said that he regarded the city of Mainz as being at the centre of Europe.) In this they were quite typical of their peoples. The Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad wrote in the 1980s that most west Europeans lived with their backs to the Berlin wall. But this attitude built on a far older tradition of regarding central, and especially eastern and southeastern Europe, as not really part of Europe. I am not sure how much this has changed after ten years in a supposedly undivided Europe. Take one small example. On 25th March this year, as the Nato bombing of Serbia began, British newspapers led with headlines saying "War in Europe," and the rubric persisted. Actually there had been war in Europe since 1991, on and off for nearly eight years, with perhaps a quarter of a million people killed and already more than 2m driven out of their homes. But it only became "War in Europe" when our boys were off to fight in it.
There are many ironies in this story. Kohl argued repeatedly that the cause of European integration, and specifically the Maastricht process, with Emu at its core, was "a question of war and peace." By clear implication, we needed the euro to stop us fighting each other again. Why on earth stable, mature, liberal democracies, already closely intertwined in the EU and the other institutions of bourgeois internationalism such as Nato, should go to war with each other was not clear. Nor was it clear how a common currency would stop them if they wanted to. While Emu was being prepared, no less than three European federations with common currencies fell apart-the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, two of them with accompanying bloodshed. Then, within three months of the euro being launched, we were directly involved in a war in Europe. And the final irony: the euro not yet in your pocket was worth about 70p at its launch in January; it is worth about 65p as I write in early June. One reason given for its weakness is the markets' fears about... the war in Europe. Not only did the euro not prevent war in Europe; it became one of its first casualties.
One or two writers have gone a step further and argued that Emu itself brings an increased danger of war between participating countries. While I would not underestimate the tensions it may cause, this is far-fetched. If the worst comes to the worst, Emu will simply break up, as currency unions have before. If the Czechs and Slovaks, amid all the nationalist hysteria of post-communism, were capable of a velvet divorce, surely the French and Germans would be.
But then the question is: what would remain of the EU, and the sense of a "European project" that sustains it? At the moment that project seems to stand or fall with Emu. This is why it is so important that the EU has some other big undertakings: eastward enlargement, foreign and security policy, a common defence force. At the Cologne summit of the EU, under the impact of the Kosovo crisis, our leaders finally decided upon the outline of a common European defence force and appointed Nato's secretary general, Javier Solana, as its new security and foreign policy representative. War has made us start to do at the end of the decade what we should have done at the beginning. But will we finish the job? I wouldn't count on it.
