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.