POLITICS
Mr Gorbachev announces a birth: will Pinochet be the godfather?
NOEL MALCOLM
END (the journal of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement) had a cover picture earlier this year which has stuck in my mind. The photograph was of a newsvendor's placard which read, 'Cold War is Over — Official'. Added to it was the caption, 'So who won?'
I was reminded of this by the headlines in the Guardian which announced the news of Mr Gorbachev's speech to the United Nations in New York. `Gorbachev's new era', it said; and, beneath that, 'Old certainties swept away to end European nightmare'. So what are the new certain- ties? I searched the article for an answer to that question, but found only the news that Mr Gorbachev had 'announced the birth' of 'a new world order through universal human consensus', rather as if he had done so by placing an advertisement in the personal columns of the Times. 'The grand vision of a new global order has been unfurled by Mikhail Gorbachev', the arti- cle concluded. 'Now the nit-picking begins as the old world piles up its objections.'
Nit-picking, in this context, can signify two rather different things. It may mean objecting to the detailed proposals which Mr Gorbachev put forward — pointing out, for example, that although a 100-year moratorium on Third World debt might be feasible for the Soviet Union, it would cause great damage to the Western bank- ing system. Or it may mean objecting that the particular proposals contained in his speech, admirable though many of them may be, simply do not amount to a new grand vision of world order.
The latter, I suspect, is the way in which nits are currently being picked in most of the foreign ministries of the Western world. Even Mrs Thatcher must have breathed a small sigh of relief when she learned that Mr Gorbachev had had to postpone his visit to London. Without last week's terrible events in Armenia, the spotlight would soon have been blazing down on her as the world waited for a grand gesture of encouragement or sup- port. In fact, the Foreign Office's problem is not just that it does not know how to respond to Mr Gorbachev's UN speech — the real problem is that it does not even know how Mr Gorbachev would like it to respond. Such are the obscurities and uncertainties in the grand new, brand new order of things.
Britain's position is a peculiarly ticklish one at present. On the one hand, Mr Gorbachev's pledge to cut the Red Army and withdraw 50,000 troops from Eastern Europe will have a psychological impact more damaging to Mrs Thatcher than to any other European leader in Nato. Ever since Reykjavik, she has stuck to the principle that the Western powers must maintain their nuclear defences in Europe at an adequate level (which means, among other things, continuing to modernise them), in order to counter the Warsaw Pact's massive superiority in conventional forces. Now, at a time when both France and Germany are already hesitating and temporising over the need to update the Lance tactical nuclear weapon, Mr Gor- bachev's gesture of withdrawal will act as a powerful piece of psychological ammuni- tion for Mrs Thatcher's critics. Why, they will ask, should Nato act so provocatively to counter a 'threat' which is already diminishing of its own accord?
On the other hand, Mrs Thatcher is one of the Soviet leader's most starry-eyed enthusiasts when it comes to his internal economic reforms, and she will not want to seem discouragingly negative towards him. During the Carter presidency, the Russians used to complain bitterly about the prac- tice of 'linkage' — the conditional linking together of arms negotiations, economic agreements and human rights commit- ments. What Mr Gorbachev seems to have achieved with his UN speech is a form of psychological linkage more powerful than anything the West has managed hitherto. 'If you accept any part of what I stand for', he is saying, 'you must accept the rest.'
To help us swallow the whole package, he has added some attractive phrases about the decline of ideology in global politics and the rise of a universal human consen- sus. But while we know roughly what this Means for Western Europe (a gradual detachment from America), we simply do not know what, if anything, Mr Gorbachev is committing himself to where the political future of Eastern Europe is concerned.
In the circumstances, it will not be surprising if the Government remains cau- tious and distrustful over the strategic significance of this speech. Pulling back 50,000 Russians from Eastern Europe sounds very impressive, until you remem- ber that 475,000 will remain, and that while many of the withdrawn troops will be taken from Hungary, which is of almost no strategic significance, none at all will be taken from Poland. Ah, the reply will come, but the important thing is not so much the numerical reduction as the fact that he has said that Soviet policy will be purely defensive in future: a new policy of 'reasonable sufficiency' and the reduction of tensions. It must be pointed out, howev- er, that such statements are not unpre- cedented. 'The Soviet Union's defence potential must be sufficient to deter any- one from taking the risk of interfering with our peaceful life. Our policy is aimed at arms reductions and at lessening military confrontations.' That was Mr Brezhnev in 1977.
But caution is not the only line of response the Government could take. The West could respond, more positively, with some psychological linkage of its own. For too long we have given the impression that the move towards a more market-oriented economy in Russia is a purely technical matter, something organisational and non- political. That may indeed be how Mr Gorbachev views it; for whatever else he may be, he is certainly a technocrat. But the idea that economic liberalisation will just automatically lead to political liber- alisation is not obviously true. One con- sultative member of the Central Commit- tee told a friend of mine last month that he hoped Mr Gorbachev would do two things: establish a real, property-owning free- market economy, and crush democracy. 'You mean — the Pinochet solution?' asked my friend, surprised. 'Exactly.'
The West could certainly do more to advertise the links which can and should exist between a free market and a pluralis- tic social and political system. The term 'human rights' has been hived off, unfortu- nately, to cover a rather specialised area of concern: refuseniks, conscientious objec- tors, psychiatric hospital internees and so on. But 'human rights' is not a registered trademark of Amnesty International, however laudable their good works. West- ern politicians should not be afraid of using it to describe the basic rights of human beings to take responsibility for their own lives, both economically and politically. If to say such things is to indulge in 'cold war rhetoric', then it sounds like a good reason for thinking that the cold war was a war worth fighting. And if we are now told that we cannot say such things, then I think I know who won it.
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