TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082090/0820630.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 56

Sorry to See the Cold War Go


A University of Chicago analyst predicts that the decline of
superpower tensions will make Europe a more dangerous place

By STROBE TALBOTT


    Now that almost everyone agrees the cold war is over,
policymakers and analysts have begun to debate whether
jubilation or apprehension is in order. Even before Iraq's
mugging of Kuwait, some experts worried that without the
superpowers to rein them in, other nations tend to live by the
law of the jungle, and hot wars are a condition of nature.
Hence Europe could revert to patterns of international behavior
that not too long ago made it every bit as dangerous and
violent as the Middle East is today.

    One of the first to sound a note of alarm was Deputy
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. In a speech last
September he said, "For all its risks and uncertainties, the
cold war was characterized by a remarkably stable and
predictable set of relationships among the great powers." The
changes in the East, he warned, may prove "destabilizing."

    Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia, recently
told a visiting delegation of historians that he particularly
fears the "Balkanization" of Eastern Europe. With the retreat
of the Soviet army, the countries of that region may once again
be susceptible to the clash of national hatreds and ambitions
that accompanied the breakup of empires earlier in this
century.

    A short version of this concern is echoed by Eagleburger's
boss, George Bush, who has taken to saying that the new enemy
in Europe is "instability and unpredictability."

    Now comes the long version. It is a 52-page article, titled
"Back to the Future," that appears in the quarterly
International Security. An 11-page abridgment is the cover
story in the August Atlantic. Copies of that piece are being
circulated and discussed at the State Department and the White
House.

    Author John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political
scientist, argues that Europe enjoyed 45 years of durable if
chilly peace precisely because it was divided into two camps;
the U.S. and the Soviet Union have kept not only each other in
check but their allies as well. For Mearsheimer and other
academic experts on war and peace, two is a lucky, even magic,
number. As he puts it in social-sciencese, "a bipolar system
has only one dyad across which war might break out." In other
words, if nations are going to square off against one another,
better they do so along a single, well-defined, well-fortified
line that everyone knows not to cross. With a balance of power
has come a balance of terror. War can be averted by that saving
grace of the nuclear age, mutual deterrence.

    Now Mearsheimer sees the emergence of a multipolar Europe,
cluttered with dyads, or pairs of rivals, that could easily
slip out of balance and alliances that constantly shift. The
major states in the region -- Germany, France, Britain, perhaps
Italy, certainly a shrunken but still formidable Russia -- will
jockey for advantage, sometimes with, but often against, one
another. Meanwhile, Hungary and Romania, Poland and
Czechoslovakia may dig up ancient border disputes. "The
geometry of power," writes Mearsheimer, would become "a design
for tension, crisis and possibly even war."

    The solution he proposes is ill defined but highly
unsettling nonetheless: the "well-managed proliferation" of
nuclear weapons. Perhaps, he suggests, when some latter-day
archduke is assassinated on a bridge in Sarajevo, there will
be enough fingers on enough nuclear triggers to scare everyone
into salutary paralysis. Among the states that should get the
Bomb, he says, is a unified Germany. That prospect appeals to
few Germans and virtually no one else. A Germany armed with
nuclear weapons would, almost unavoidably, raise the atavistic
specter of militarism that would be threatening to neighboring
states.

    Mearsheimer knows his views will generate controversy. "Some
people have called my ideas downright dangerous," he said last
week. "I've tried to follow the logic of my analysis where it
leads. I welcome the intellectual combat."

    He holds out little hope for an alternative that he seems
to agree would be preferable -- the rise of a multinational
superstate. Mearsheimer believes the European Community, like
the Long Peace itself, has been a benign by-product of the cold
war. He expects the process of integration to slow down, even
go into reverse as the Continent lapses into the anarchy of
every nation for itself.

    The good news about Mearsheimer's message is that the bad
news with which he concludes is unpersuasive. His pessimism is
unwarranted by what is already happening in Europe. British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Europe's most unabashed
opponent of the superstate, is increasingly the odd woman out.
Other leaders, particularly Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West
Germany and President Francois Mitterrand of France, seem
committed to moving in the direction that Thatcher disdains --
toward forms of political and military cooperation that entail
the pooling of sovereignty.

    The crumbling of the Iron Curtain has, if anything,
accelerated the quest for ties that will bind across national
frontiers. Now that the West is freed from its obsession with
the menace to the East, statesmen are likely to be more
vigilant against the dangers of nationalism in their midst. And
the more willing they are to suppress old motives for making
war, the more able they will be to restrain the proliferation
of new means.