TAKE OUT THOSE MAPS AGAIN

The countries of Eastern Europe are changing fast.

Timothy Garton Ash argues that whether they prosper

or fail depends on the response of the West

IN THE autumn of 1916 the historian R. W. Seton-Watson started, in close co-operation with the exiled Czech leader Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a weekly periodical. It was called The New Europe. It only lasted four years, but with its vigorous and informed advocacy of the dismantlement of German and Austro- Hungarian supremacy, and its ethnic dia- grams of Central and Eastern Europe, it played a significant part in shaping the political map of Europe that emerged from the peace settlement. To this day, the name of Seton-Watson is remembered with respect and affection in the Slav lands, while disgruntled Magyars may still be heard to murmur against that `Scottish lord' who single-handedly robbed them of Transylvania.

Now everyone is talking again of a New Europe. Now as then, the most difficult questions, the great unknowns, lie in the eastern rather than the western half of the old continent, as suppressed people and, which is not precisely the same thing, suppressed peoples — emerge from under yet another imperial yoke: in most cases, their third this century. Thus far, however, the signs at the birth of this latest New Europe have been more propitious than at those of the previous three. For Hitler's New Europe and Stalin's New Europe the case against hardly needs arguing, although the latter was at least counterba- lanced by the New Europe of George C. Marshall and Jean Monnet. At first glance, a Slightly closer parallel might be disco- vered in the New Europe of Seton-Watson and Masaryk, for there is the same basic challenge of fitting a new strip of sovereign, independent small states, be- tween Germany and Russia, into a larger peaceful order in Europe. Yet how much betterthe chances now seem.

For a start, Masaryk's and Seton- Watson's New Europe was, almost as much as of those of Hitler and Stalin, a child of war and revolution. But in 1989 we have had the revolution without the war. Indeed, these revolutions have happened not only without armed intervention or Conflict between nations, but also almost entirely without domestic violence — with the single exception of Rumania. No bastil- les have been stormed, no guillotines erected. Lamp-posts have been used only for street-lighting. Rumania alone has seen tanks and firing-squads. The revolutionary — that is, sudden and sweeping — change of rulers has happened within the frontiers of existing' states, conducted by the people for the people, and, with that one excep- tion, peacefully.

Perhaps the closest historical parallel to the events of 1989 is not 1918, but 1848 the springtime of nations. The year 1848 ended badly because of the triumph of forces of reaction, both internal and exter- nal. No comparable forces can be seen today. Prussians, are making their own revolution, not crushing their neighbours'. Austrians are not repressing the Hungarian reform-revolution, they are helping it along. And the Russians? Here, of course, the transformation is miraculous: to the point where the West would almost have welcomed a Soviet military intervention to smash the Securitate death squads in Rumania. But no, for Rumania, as for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria, Soviet leaders and commentators from Gorbachev down have assumed a saintly expression and said that they would never dream of interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

Ah, you say, but what if the dominoes start falling across the Soviet frontier? What about Lithuania, already demanding effective sovereignty? What about the Rumanians in Moldavia, demanding reun- ion with their now-liberated brothers? What, above all, if the political earth begins to move in the Ukraine? Given the mixture of economic chaos and spiralling political/national demands, a major check or reversal in the Soviet Union is certainly a serious possibility. If, say, tanks rolled in Lithuania, this would cast a chill not just across Eastern Europe, but across the whole continent.

Yet even in that event, even if Gor- bachev were replaced by some conserva- tive alliance, it is still extremely difficult to imagine the Soviet Union undoing what they have now permitted to happen in Eastern Europe by armed intervention. After all, if they invaded one East Euro- pean country they would really have to invade them all. And then, what would they `restore'? The shattered Humpty- dumpties that are today's Eatt European communist parties? So a reversal inside the Soviet Union would make life much less comfortable in the new Europe, and direct- ly affect developments in a Germany still partly occupied by Soviet troops, but it would not in itself suffice to turn the map of Europe back to what it was before the annus mirabilis, 1989.

Nor is it easy to see the triumphant forces of reaction inside individual East European countries. One of the curious advantages of the dependency of East European ruling elites on the Soviet Union is that when the Soviet Kalashnikov-crutch is removed they don't have another leg to stand on, unlike entrenched dictatorial mafias in other parts of the world. Ruma- nia is the exception that proves the rule. It is no accident that it was precisely in the country for so long most independent of Moscow that the resistance of the security arm of the powers-that-were was most fierce, bloody and prolonged. Elsewhere, the ruling elites and their armed servants have distinguished themselves by their comprehensive unreadiness to stand up in any way for things in which they have so long claimed to believe, and their almost indecent haste to embrace democratic capi- talism, blue in perm and claw. All over Eastern Europe there is the quiet flap of turning coats: yesterday they denounced Walesa, today they applaud him; yesterday they embraced Honecker, today they im- prison him; yesterday they vituperated Havel, today they elect him President.

This is not to say that East European politics over the next few years will not be an almighty muddle. They surely will be. How could it be otherwise? Every East European country except Poland is due to have free general elections in the first half of 1990. A thousand flowers will bloom. Every possible permutation of the words National, Democratic and Free will be found on the banners of the new political parties. The smooth transition to democra- cy will not be made easier by the need to make, still more urgently, the very rough transition to a market economy. There will be hardship, injustice, protest. In Poland there are already five-star restaurants for the new rich — and soup-kitchens for the new poor. There is no space here to enumerate the special advantages and dis- advantages of each individual country in attempting the transition, but only to emphasise that in all of them, without exception, the difference between success and failure may depend on the economic response of Western Europe.

Of course there is a limit to the amount of aid these developing countries can im- mediately and usefully absorb. Some kinds of help can actually harm. But there is a level of help, considerably higher than what has been offered so far, which they will need in the best of cases. The peaceful reconstruction of Eastern Europe after 1989, like the peaceful reconstruction of Western Europe after 1945, carries a price- tag. And this time the United States cannot afford to pick up the bill. A recent Finan- cial Times editorial pointed out that the United States spent 1.3 per cent of its GNP on Marshall Aid over the three-and-a-half- year authorisation period of the plan. According to the paper's striking calcula- tion, a comparable percentage from the European Community countries today would produce a staggering $200 billion fund.

There are three main arguments of hard self-interest for coughing up, if not that much, then at least more than has so far been offered. The first is that without it Eastern Europe could become a nasty, threatening mess: the Balkans on the Oder. The second is that, if it works, it could provide a positive example and encouragement for the Soviet Union even through a period of conservative reversal in Moscow. In other words, let Eastern Europe be to the Soviet Union what Western Europe has been to Eastern Europe. The third argument from hard self-interest is that what you spend on helping the work of reconstruction you may save on defence.

If the economic transition can somehow be sustained, there are good reasons to believe that — contrary to widespread Western preconceptions — Eastern Europe need not be 'balkanised'. One such reason is that most of the actual or poten- tial new ruling elites of the region are acutely aware of the danger, and deter- mined not to repeat past mistakes. A second reason is that, unlike their pre-war (pre-1939 or pre-1914) counterparts, they are surrounded to west, north and south by established capitalist democracies. A third reason is that the ethnic map of Central and Eastern Europe is now much more homogenous than it was when Seton- Watson sat down to draw his frontiers at the birth of this century's first New Europe. As Ernest Gellner once memor- ably put it, that ethnic map is now a Modigliani rather than a Kokoschka. (The main artists of this new picture were of course Hitler and Stalin: their brushes, war, deportation and mass murder.) Ethnic disputes still remain: notably over the Hungarian minority in Rumania, the Rumanian and Polish minorities in the Soviet Union, and the German minorities in Poland, Rumania and the Soviet Union.

As Central European politics come out of the freezer, so inevitably old arguments, rallying cries and prejudices find public expression. This is inevitable. The question is whether these old poisoned plants will wither after a short period of exposure to fresh, modern European air (being re- duced politically to a 1-10 per cent margin, as in Germany, France and Britain), or whether they will find more poisoned air to flourish in. Beside old domestic rivalries, with ethnic undertones, such as that be- tween 'populists' and 'urbanists' in Hun- gary today, the old frontier questions from 1945, and even from 1918, will surely come up again. But we may reasonably hope that in the most important case, that of the Polish-German frontier on the Oder and Neisse, the question will he aired only at long last to be put finally to rest by a solemn, legally binding declaration from one or both Germanies and/or in the context of a peace treaty with Germany.

The most contentious frontier in 1990, however, may be one that was not meant to be a frontier at all: the line between Germany (West) and Germany (East). For East Germany's giddy slide into the arms of West Germany is the one development in Central Europe against which Moscow has registered objections in principle — to the audible relief of many in the West. But East Germany will have free elections, and the majority there will probably vote for some version of new unification with West Germany. What then? Would a crisis-torn Soviet Union send in its troops? Or would it rather pull out the troops that are still there, but only in return for the effective end of the American, nuclear-backed milit- ary presence in West Germany? A temp- ting little offer for the West German general election in December.

It will be a New Europe indeed, when the West warns the Russians not to . . withdraw.