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The Risks of a 'Unified' Europe
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13692 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1988 |
2,413 Words |
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Gerald Frost
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Intimations that the postwar division of Europe is not a permanent and unalterable state of affairs are beginning to excite the Western imagination and to influence the political agenda. That division is the result of the political realities of the mid-1940s; those conditions have undergone significant changes since and now appear to be changing so rapidly as to defy rigorous analysis.
Starting with the Reykjavik summit, U.S.-Soviet relations have recently undergone some major shifts, while the balance of military forces in Europe is altering under the accelerating momentum of the arms control process. These developments have in turn influenced U.S.-European relations, as well as those between individual European states. All of this has occurred against a background of economic and social turmoil and ethnic unrest within the Soviet Union, coinciding with severe economic crises within virtually all of the Eastern European nations, leading one observer to suggest that conditions conducive to revolution exist within five of them.
According to one optimistic view, the Soviet empire, once seemingly monolithic and impregnable, is on the brink of disintegration. This process, it is said, is already sufficiently advanced to permit the withdrawal of U.S. forces, which, it is claimed, would further accelerate the pace of change, thereby making possible the long-awaited reunification of a divided continent.
Such speculation is fueled by the hopes and aspirations of many Europeans and by some highly selective readings of history. The British and French empires, which were held together by much more than the force that alone binds Eastern Europe to the Soviet empire, collapsed within little more than a decade. In the case of the British Empire, hardly a shot was fired in anger, and while its loss may have caused some trauma and loss of national purpose, the convenient invention of the British Commonwealth may have conceded the extent of the loss, thereby preventing deeper pain and consequent domestic upheaval.
In making sense of the geostrategic kaleidoscope to which Mikhail Gorbachev has given an additional shake, two further factors encourage the view that the Soviet Leviathan may be forced to yield up its European possessions under the pressure of events: the withdrawal from Afghanistan and perestroika.
If withdrawal from Afghanistan is total, not merely a smoke screen enabling Soviet forces to regroup behind more easily defendable northern positions, it will have profound symbolic significance. Unlike previous imperial powers, the Soviet Union is a world power in military terms only and one, moreover, that is pledged to uphold the notion of socialist "irreversibility." Any indication that its military strength is waning or vulnerable is bound to excite stirrings elsewhere in its empire. Very little evidence exists, however, of how a totalitarian power behaves when its empire displays evidence of rapid decay. The British and French examples may mislead more than they instruct; we lack an adequate compass.
Second, it is rightly said that the decentralization of a multinational empire could ultimately lead to the dissolution of the empire itself. Gorbachev may have clear ideas about the extent to which perestroika should be permitted to go, but in seeking to preserve and revive the Marxist-Leninist order, he may have
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