SPECTAT THE OR
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GERMANY ON THE MOVE
ifty years ago this week Britain in- volved herself in an all but ruinous world war ostensibly to save Poland from totalita- rian domination. At the end of that war Britain was victorious but materially and Morally exhausted and Poland was left under totalitarian domination. It is hardly surprising, then, that the anniversary has been marked by revisionist historians Maurice Cowling in the Sunday Telegraph, for example, and John Charmley in the Times — who have questioned the wisdom of Britain's decision to fight in such a futile cause. Even if the casus belli was irrelevant and Britain was simply playing her tradi- tional role in preventing any one power from enjoying hegemony on the Conti- nent, the ultimate carve-up of Europe by the two superpowers can hardly be consi- dered a triumph of British arms.
Now, however, the advent of a non- communist government in Poland makes it tempting to believe that at last the post-war system is breaking down as the Soviet empire is breaking up. Mr William Wal- degrave, Minister of State at the Foreign Office responsible for Eastern Europe, says that Poland and Hungary, at least, have gone too far in the direction of democracy 'for an old style regime to be reimposed without a civil war, even if the unthinkable were to happen in the Soviet Union and Gorbachev were to fail'. He foresees the `Austrianisation' of Hungary and Poland, as they are suffered by their erstwhile Soviet masters to declare neutral- ity between East and West.
This may be over-optimistic. Certainly it seems that, whether or not his own liber- alisation is 'irreversible', Mr Gorbachev's aims are not inconsistent with greater economic and political freedom in Poland and Hungary. This week the head of the KGB himself has given his blessing to Mr Mazowiecki's brave experiment with par- liamentary and non-communist govern- ment. But it would be a mistake to see such Soviet benevolence as evidence of mere acquiescence in the disintegration of her empire. So long — but only so long — as there is no threat to the military and political integrity of the Warsaw Pact, the Russians can afford to let Poland and Hungary tinker with democratic reforms similar to those they are trying out for themselves. Where there are real fissipar- ous tendencies, however, as in the, Baltic states and Moldavia, the Soviet rhetoric is as forbidding as ever — as was shown this week when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued its stern warning against 'the virus of nationalism'. If the empire is breaking down, its collapse will not be sudden but long-drawn-out and fraught with dangers.
The most serious of these from the point of view of the Eastern Europeans them- selves lies in the inequality of progress towards democracy and liberal economic institutions within the empire. This week has also seen the gathering momentum of migration from more repressive to less repressive states within Eastern Europe and between East and West. Czechs are
crossing the border into Poland, Ruma- nians into Yugoslavia, Bulgarians into Turkey and East Germans into Hungary. It is the, last of these movements which presents potentially the most serious prob- lem. Since the opening up of the border between Hungary and Austria in May, thousands of East Germans have made their way to the West. It is now a matter of some interest to speculate on how many of the estimated 200,000 East Germans in Hungary will also refuse to return home and instead try to make their way to Austria.
West Germany is in danger of being swamped. Already she was expecting over 400,000 immigrants from the East this year, including over 100,000 East Ger- mans; throughout Eastern Europe she has had to close diplomatic missions to which East Germans had flocked seeking asylum. Ultimately, however, Bonn's hands are tied by the long-standing principle of rec- ognising only one sort of German citizenship. The Frankfurter Ailgemeine Zeitung estimates that 10 per cent of East Germans intend to move West, but even if all 20 million of them do, West Germany is constitutionally committed to grant them a right of abode.
By coincidence, the exact date of the 50th anniversary of the war's outbreak, 1 September, is the date which, as Die Welt reports, East Germany will attempt to staunch the flow by treating Hungary as a Western country. This, or rather the rumour of it, which East Germany denies, seems bound in the short term to swell the tide of Germans from the east moving west, uncannily like the, Jewish refugees of 50 years ago. But it is a step whose implications for the Warsaw Pact the Soviet Union could not overlook. East Germany must act eventually, and the only question is, what will be the consequences of her action for nascent freedom else- where in the Eastern bloc?
If the justification for Britain's going to war in 1939 for Polish liberties now seems obscure, our course today is no less so. The war has changed our position in the world so that we are even more helpless in the face of the disintegration of an empire than we were before the attempted establish- ment of one.
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