World

Moscow has long view on Europe change

MOSCOW — The cold war with all of

its “eternal verities” is suddenly in eclipse
and history is bending rapidly, sometimes
wildly, into new shapes and down new
avenues. Nowhere is this more apparent, or
more breathtaking in its scope, than in
Eastern Europe, where four decades of the
“pax sovietica” have suddenly evaporated
and everything thrown into flux.

Many of the forces now moving confi-
dently into the vacuum are hard-core
nationalists, westernophile pro-capitalists
—even utopian free-marketeers whose
dogmatic certitudes would make Margaret
Thatcher blush — and tough anti-Soviet
street-fighters.

The old order would seem in a state of
final disintegration. People in Moscow who
deal with Eastern European relations say
there is an irrational, often even self-
destructive stampede to slash contacts and

-cut economic links with the USSR under-

way.
In Krakow, Poland and other places,
there have been anti-Soviet riots, with peo-
ple shouting “down with Yalta” and “Rus-
sians out.” Even in some western capitals
there is unease as professional diplomats are
recalled from Eastern European embassies
and replaced with former dissidents who
seem eager to sell their countries as quickly
and expeditiously as possible into the
embraces of NATO and the transnational
corporations.
You would think there ought to be alarm
in Moscow. Yet, somehow, there isn’t. An

Fred
Weir

FROM
MOSCOW

air of relaxed, alinost smug calm reigns
among the foreign policy community and
party intelligentsia here. To understand
why, we need to step beyond the mindset of
the cold war and set aside the almost hyster-
ical emotional dynamics of the present
moment.

The first myth.to be discarded is the
notion that the Soviet: Union somehow
benefitted from its postwar domination
over Eastern Europe. Stalin’s security para-
noia, great-power pretension and propen-
sity to export the Soviet model has been not
just an ordeal for Eastern Europe but also
an enormous, draining expense for the
USSR. History repeated itself as tragedy,
and the costs were compounded when Stal-
in’s successors opted to re-impose the
appearance of things by force. Having
finally, and belatedly, taken the plunge and
cut these byzantine arrangements loose,
today’s Soviet leaders may be forgiven for
feeling that a great weight has been lifted
from their shoulders.

The second is the cold war misconception
that Eastern Europe represents some kind
of monolithic “Soviet bloc.” The pax sovie-
tica did bring a certain surface uniformity to
these very different countries, accelerated
their social and economic development in
ways that will be hard to alter now, and also
isolated them to some extent from global
processes for 40 years.

Yet, beneath that, few generalizations

can be made. Socialist ideas, and Commt- -

nist parties, existed in varying strengths in
all Eastern European countries before the
war and will now re-assert themselves
— despite the present eclipse — in authen-
tic and genuine ways.

Alexander Yakovlev noted at the recent

8 « Pacific Tribune, February 26, 1990

Former West
German
Chancellor Willy
Brandt
campaigning for
Social Democrats
in East Berlin:
dramatic change
now but
longstanding
traditions are
expected to re-
emerge.

CPSU central committee plenum that there
are vast differences in the processes pres-
ently going on in these divergent countries,
and outcomes will therefore be very differ-
ent as well.

“Tn general,” he said, “there is a govern-
ing rule that the more profound the crisis
was, the more dramatic the consequences.
This clearly shows that these transforma-
tions have come much belatedly.”

What seems apparent to Soviet experts
— although most Eastern Europeans are in
a highly emotional stage of vigorously deny-
ing this — is that when the dust from cur-
rent upheavals settles some key patterns of
the past 40 years are going to firmly reassert
themselves, not through force this time but
through natural logic.

@ The Warsaw Pact: Gorbachev has a
fine vision, of a “common European
home,” in which states with different social
systems will peacefully co-exist in an open
and co-operative continental framework,
and in which the bipolar structures of con-
frontational military blocs will be a thing of
the past. This is gradually beginning to look
really possible, but there is no doubt that the
road to it is going to be long and compli-
cated. The first, small steps in that direction
are only now being seriously discussed: a
general peace conference to put a legal end
to World War II, and the long-awaited
“Helsinki 2” meeting, likely to be held in
1992.

Meanwhile, the transformation requires
an existing, in-place security system. Who is
to negotiate with whom? Who will collec-
tively defend the interests of Eastern Euro-
pean states in this process and, crucially,
who will guarantee their borders?

Under conditions of a resurgent Ger-
many, this becomes very urgent indeed. The
new president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav
Havel, unwittingly created a good illustra-
tion of how rapidly instability can reappear
in the European system when he went to
West Germany in December and apolog-
ized profusely for the way his country
solved the “German problem” just after the
war. He certainly meant well, but this
statement produced an angry — and fright-
ened — response in Czechoslovakia, while
it clearly excited right-wing German imagi-
nations.

If any Germans should begin to whisper
the name “Sudetenland” again — and they
will — it may be astonishing how quickly

the Warsaw Pact takes on a whole new
relevance for Czechs.

Poles have already had their scare over
borders, with West German chancellor
Helmut Kohl’s visit to Silesia and_ his
inflammatory assertion that the German
Reich still legally exists within its 1937 front-
iers, and the Polish leadership seems to have
dropped its early interest in exiting from the
Warsaw Pact like a hot potato.

® Council for Mutual Economic Assist-
ance (COMECON): whatever long-term
economic outcomes may be, it seems likely
that in the short run, Eastern European
countries will ‘be re-discovering their eco-
nomic links with each other and with the
Soviet Union rather forcefully over coming
months and years.

What seems apparent to Soviet
experts — although most Eastern
Europeans are in a highly
emotional stage of vigorously
denying this — is that when the
dust from current upheavals
settles some key patterns of the
past 40 years are going to firmly
reassert themselves, not through
force this time but through
natural logic.

A a ene i a in ee ee ey

Granted that there is at the moment a
wave of euphoria in Eastern Europe, and
the widespread belief that if they simply
change ideological allegiance and open up
to the world free market, they will all
rapidly become affluent, westernized econ-
omies. But if that were a realistic hope, then
how to explain so many countries in this
world which have had IMF-imposed eco-
nomic regimes for years, but which keep
growing poorer?

There is also the illusion that Western
firms will pour in investment to take advan-
tage of Eastern Europe’s “cheap labour.”
Some of the new leaders — Lech Walesa is
a good example — have become positively
evangelical about this.

However, when you cost-out the basket
of goods and services — food, housing,

‘frighten the West much more than it does

transportation, medical care, education —
that Czech, Hungarian or even Polish —
workers have grown accustomed to con-—
suming, and express it in world market pri-
ces, it turns out to be not such cheap lake
after all.

Western corporations understand this

perfectly well, hence their réluctance to
invest and their demand that the social sys- —
tem be thoroughly dismantled before they —
will seriously consider doing so. But all
Eastern European countries have inherited
huge trade union movements, to which
revolution has imparted democratic energy
anda spirit of militancy. What will happen?
Soviet experts say the most likely result is
that these countries will return — albeit in
new and much more businesslike forms —
to their historically-evolved economic rela-_
tionships, the only secure and reliable
sources of raw materials and markets they .
have.
Like the Warsaw Pact, rumours of |
COMECON’s death may be greatly exag-
gerated.
One final question that hangs over every-—
thing is the destiny of Germany. Today, as
the socialist intellectuals who engineered the _
GDR’s gentle revolution are muscled off
the streets and out of the political arena by —
the Messerschmitt-Daimler-Deutschebank
Party, German reunification begins to look |
like a flowing tide.
Here Soviet diplomacy, which has a very, )
very long memory, is able to pose itself a_
multitude of options. Specifically, they have —
been reminding the West that the division of -
Germany was not a Soviet idea in the first
place, and that the USSR several times in
the late 1940s and early 1950s proposed a
united, neutral Germany as an alternative. —
This prospect has always appeared to

Moscow.

As one Soviet expert on Germany put it, _
there is Stalingrad, which conjures up one >
tradition of Soviet-German relations, but
then there is Rapallo (a friendship treaty —
signed in 1922) which suggests quite
another. Soviet postwar policy has been —
geared to meet the former, but now Soviet —
leaders are more than ready to embrace the
latter.

This is a time for deep historical perspec- —
tive and careful, measured diplomacy: the
very things that Soviet statecraft is famous
for.