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One Europe?
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18005 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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5 / 1990 |
2,582 Words |
| Author
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Terry McNeill
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Yesterday the "common European house" was a Gorbachev catch-phrase; today the upheavals in Eastern Europe that have sent communist regimes tumbling and bulldozed the East-West divide make it a realistic objective. But how should it be erected?
The problem is multidimensional and has at a minimum security, economic, military, geo-strategic, and institutional dimensions. First, there is the problem of replacing the present adversarial alliance structures with a comprehensive system no longer focused on superpower confrontation. This new structure must be geared to the no less complex task of maintaining order in a period of possible turmoil and conflict in the liberated East.
Related to this is the problem of reshaping military strengths, doctrines, deployments, and purposes in away that will make them compatible with peace rather than war.
The economic dimension is itself multithreaded and has within it various subsets of questions, such as how to revitalize bankrupt rust-belt Comecon economics and how best to ease Eastern Europe's painful transition from planning to market without creating new forms of dependency. Also to be considered is how to balance and adjust to the dramatically increased weight of the new German superpower.
At the institutional level, there are also a number of distinctive issues; for instance what institutional path should one Europe follow? Should the aim be to
(a) create universal EC membership on similar terms;
(b) allow different degrees of integration appropriate to different levels of development (the concentric rings approach);
(c) seek greater commonality through the medium of a variety of associated but functionally distinct institutions(a Europe a la carte);
(d) last but not least, determine where the Soviet Union - half-European, half-Asiatic, half-democratized, half-Stalinist - fits in, with its unbalanced , semi-Third World, semi reformed economy, and its history of cultural and intellectual semi-detachment from the rest of the continent?
Does the Soviet Union, or more correctly Russia, belong within the European family at all, or is it condemned to be a bystander and bit-part player as the rest of the continent forges a common identity?
Concerns on the bloc
It is clear that the only institutions fit to provide common security are those on the Western side. The Warsaw Pact is now an organizational shell with at best some residual coordinating functions as far as its members are concerned. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from the territories of the former satellites and the political emancipations of the satellites leaves the pact militarily hamstrung. It's past raison d'être was not primarily to defend its members but to coerce them to Soviet designs. With Gorbachev's substitution of the "Sinatra" for the Brezhnev doctrine it becomes bereft of meaning.
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