TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121889/12188900.040

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 23

What the Future Holds


A panel of TIME experts foresees East European instability --
and inevitable German unity in a reshaped Continent

By Frederick Painton


    For the third time in this century the old order is
crumbling in Europe, and the world waits anxiously for a new one
to be born. The transition promises to be long, difficult and
hazardous. But rarely if ever has the vision of a peaceful and
relatively free Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals
seemed so palpably within grasp. Thus 1989 is destined to join
other dates in history -- 1918 and 1945 -- that schoolchildren
are required to remember, another year when an era ended, in
this case the 44-year postwar period, which is closing with the
rapid unraveling of the Soviet empire.

    Because events in Eastern Europe sometimes appear to be
spinning out of control, the need grows more urgent to perceive
and outline even the vaguest contours of the reshaped Continent
to come. The crumbling of Communism in the East carries risks
that might be avoided and offers opportunities to choose
policies most likely to bring stability to a new European order.

    Accordingly, TIME invited five experts on European
political and economic affairs -- a Soviet, a Hungarian, a
Frenchman, a West German and an American -- to try and give
definition to what Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev calls "the
common European house." During a six-hour meeting last week at
an 18th century mansion in Brussels, the "capital" of the
twelve-nation European Community, the group was asked to share
insights on the future of Europe. The panel was not always in
agreement but found consensus on some basic points:

    Gorbachev's unprecedented attempt to democratize Communism
and his drive for economic reform or perestroika have brought
the Soviet Union to the brink of breakdown. As popular
frustration rises, recourse to some form of more autocratic rule
-- either under Gorbachev or a successor -- is increasingly
possible.

    Instability is likely to prevail in Eastern Europe for
years to come, but for all its problems, the region has a far
better chance of building democratic institutions and a market
economy than the Soviet Union, which lags decades behind its
former satellites.

    The reunification of Germany is inevitable. That need not
represent a military or commercial threat in 19th century
balance-of-power terms -- but only if reunification is achieved
within a European framework.

    The U.S. -- and NATO -- still has a major role to play in
Europe, especially before more sweeping arms-control agreements
come into force and before a new political equilibrium is
established on the Continent.

    Western Europe should not be tempted into slowing or
diluting its program of economic integration scheduled to
culminate in 1992. The European Community must remain a beacon
and a model for reformist leaderships in the East.

    Eastern Europe's emergence from 40 years of isolation may
well come at the expense of the Third World, which will see
Western concern and capital flows diverted to the transition
from Communism.

    With the winding down of the cold war, national power will
no longer be measured in military terms but in shares of world
markets and in technological achievement.

    The most somber note at the session was struck in assessing
the state of the Soviet Union. Soviet panelist Andranik
Migranyan, senior research fellow at Moscow's Institute of
Economics of the World Socialist System, warned that after five
years of perestroika, "our economists say we have yet to hit the
bottom. The people are acutely aware of the gap between words
and deeds by the government. We feel we might be entering a
period of chaos." Already, Migranyan warned, a loose coalition
of forces -- disgruntled members of labor bureaucracies, ethnic
Russian nationalists and members of the Communist elite, or
nomenklatura -- can be discerned that might eventually seek
Gorbachev's overthrow. "The longer Gorbachev's reforms are
stuck," said the Soviet analyst, "the greater the opportunity
for his adversaries to organize against him."

    French analyst Dominique Moisi, co-founder of the
Paris-based French Institute for International Relations,
agreed. On recent visits to Moscow, he said, he was struck by
gathering popular pessimism. Said Moisi: "The elite around
Gorbachev sound like the aristocrats on the eve of the French
Revolution. Even among the most devout Gorbachev supporters
hopes have been replaced by fears."

    According to Migranyan, the unsettling change in climate is
partly due to Gorbachev's democratizing efforts. Those measures
have permitted grass-roots resistance to unpopular reforms.
"The Soviet Union," said Migranyan, "is acting like a democracy
without really being one." Above all, said Migranyan, his
country needed a model to make the transition from state-owned
to free-market economy. "Nobody knows how to do it," he said,
including Gorbachev, whose government lacks "conceptual ideas
and clarity about what to do." Migranyan said the short-term
remedy was either food or force. As long as there was sausage
in the shops, the government had room for maneuver, but the
sausage was running short, so perhaps it was time "to limit
democracy in a period of autocratic rule."

    Two outcomes were possible, Migranyan suggested: Gorbachev
might become more authoritarian, "crushing all obstacles and
imposing economic reforms," or a conservative regime might
emerge that would jettison him along with his political and
social reforms, even while seeking to modernize the economy.
With Gorbachev's room for maneuver shrinking, Migranyan said,
"maybe we need an authoritarian period of development . . . if
democracy prevents market mechanisms from developing."

    Henry Grunwald, U.S. Ambassador to Austria (and former
editor-in-chief of Time Inc.), who expressed his personal
views, acknowledged that there would be "a great temptation for
the Soviets and others to have a little repression on the way
to free markets," a process he called "perestroika without
glasnost." But Grunwald doubted even that would have the desired
result. He pointed out that while some Asian economies --
Taiwan's and South Korea's, for example -- flourished under
authoritarian regimes, much of Latin America's had not. Said he:
"There must be a degree of democracy and freedom for people to
do their best, to take chances."

    Moisi countered by arguing that for the West, a measure of
democracy in the Soviet Union was "a guarantee against the
return of Soviet imperialism." He told Migranyan, "You are
calling on the West to help you, but there will be linkage
between the amount of help you will receive and the image you
transmit of yourselves." Moisi's message: Democracy pays, even
if it poses problems for Eastern Europe's reformers. Conceded
Migranyan: "This is the key problem for Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union."

    Compared with his Soviet colleague, Geza Jeszenszky,
spokesman for Hungary's Democratic Forum and dean of the School
of Social and Political Science at the Karl Marx University of
Economics in Budapest, was optimistic. Said he: "In Central
Europe we have a better chance for controlled change."

    Admitting that it was relatively easy to change the
constitution and restore democracy in a small country like
Hungary, Jeszenszky said the economic challenge faced by East
European nations was formidable but not impossible. "Miracles
cannot be expected," he warned, with specific reference to
Poland. Nonetheless, he urged the creation of "small islands of
prosperity" in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe that
would be attractive examples and inspire imitation. "A few years
ago, people in Hungary were pessimistic," he said. "They thought
reforms brought only inflation and trouble. But now, and in East
Germany and Czechoslovakia as well, the fear is gone and the
people welcome change."

    Eastern Europe, Jeszenszky suggested, had already found a
political form that made dramatic economic restructuring
possible: the "grand national coalition," modeled on the
government in Warsaw. "Poland's Solidarity movement set the
pattern," he said, comparing loose non-Communist political
groupings in Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia to
national coalitions formed in Western Europe after World War II.
"We are emerging from 40 years of war against the people.
Changes have to be made -- economic, political and moral ones.
These new governments soon will have to make unpopular
decisions, so it's best to have governments credible to all
parties."

    On the volatile issue of German reunification, West
Germany's Heinrich Vogel, director of the Cologne-based Federal
Institute for East European and International Studies, suggested
that West German politicians and the press were exploiting the
subject partly because it was bound to be a major issue in West
Germany's parliamentary elections next year. Who knew what East
Germans really thought about reunification, Vogel asked. "There
has been no vote. There are no reliable polls. Let us try to be
less hysterical about this subject, less dramatic." Vogel
complained of an atmosphere of "suspicion, growing, creeping,
seeping in and destroying the climate of well-established trust
we had" between West Germany and its allies.

    Vogel was skeptical that a majority of East and West
Germans would insist on reunification when the realities sank
in: East Germans might reject the bitter side of capitalism,
competition and unemployment. West Germans, already fearful of
an immigrant invasion from the East, might well shrink from the
cost and inconvenience of accommodating their poorer brethren.

    Migranyan noted Moscow's persistent rejection of
reunification. "The Soviet Union is not yet ready to accept any
form of reunification," he declared. "It would have a major
destabilizing effect." Even a loose East-West German
confederation, he said, would create internal problems for
Gorbachev and tensions with the West. Migranyan suggested that
the Soviet Union, the U.S., France and Britain formally agree
to prevent any joining of the Germanys in the near future.
Grunwald demurred, pointing out that the U.S. could never accept
such a formal accord because of Washington's official commitment
to the goal of reunification. Moreover, said Grunwald, the
Soviets could do little to prevent such a course if it actually
took place, short of using force, which all agreed was highly
improbable.

    Anyone who takes in the atmosphere along the perforated
Berlin Wall today, declared Moisi, should be able to discern --
by the body language of the Volkspolizei on the Eastern side and
the Berlin police on the Western side -- an extraordinary and
palpable tug of togetherness. "The citizens of the German
Democratic Republic really have a feeling of humiliation about
being second-class citizens (compared with their Western
counterparts), and that feeling can be ameliorated only by
reunification." Opposing that process, suggested Moisi, would
ultimately cause more problems than it would solve.

    In any case, asked Vogel, "if reunification should happen,
where is the threat to the rest of Europe? Please, let us stop
thinking of reunification producing a Fourth Reich built on the
ashes of NATO." One solution, he suggested, was to make the
transformation of the East bloc a "European task. If there is
concern about the re-emergence of a German superpower, the best
of all ways to get a lever on it would be to invest in a West
European relief and aid operation in East Germany and create a
European orientation to that process."

    "There are those in Europe who fear that the events in
Eastern Europe have compromised the dynamics of 1992," said
Moisi, "but there are also those who believe in Europe with a
capital E, which embraces those nations lost to Soviet power for
two generations." He suggested that the people of Eastern Europe
had achieved "a spiritual dimension, of those who had to fight
for 40 years against oppression" -- an attitude from which the
West could learn. Eastern Europe's transformation, he said, "is
not a one-way street."

    Perhaps, Moisi suggested, Europe in some ways needs German
reunification despite all the problems it would bring. He
postulated that West Germany still suffers from an identity
crisis, a "unidimensional" sense of itself as merely an
industrial rather than a political power. The result, he said,
was a kind of "German economic arrogance"; if, in the process
of reunification, Germany could attain a "more diverse
identity," that arrogance might fade. His advice to the West:
"Nothing is more dangerous than to say to Germans today `We fear
you.' If we do that, we will create a Germany according to that
image, the kind of Germany we would deserve."

    Nonetheless, the Frenchman chided the government of
Chancellor Helmut Kohl for failing to make a clear statement on
the inviolability of the postwar borders of West Germany. Kohl
appears to have waffled on the question for political reasons,
that is, in deference to nationalistic elements within his
governing coalition and on the far right who still talk about
"lost territories" in the East that were part of Hitler's Third
Reich in 1937.

    What will Europe look like by the year 2000? The panelists
agreed that the Continent would be defined less in geographical
terms than by "geography of values," principally the common
practice of democracy. By that definition, the reformist East
European nations -- Poland, Hungary, East Germany and
Czechoslovakia -- are already being considered potential
members or associates of the European Community. Not so the
Soviet Union, which, Moisi maintained, was ineligible for
membership so long as some of the people within its empire were
deprived of self-determination. For his part, Migranyan
recognized that the Soviet Union was too big an entity for
inclusion in the E.C. -- "We would break down the walls (of the
common European house)" -- but insisted that for the Soviets the
concept of Europe was a symbol of progress and modernity with
which Gorbachevian reformers wanted to be associated.

    National borders were not going to come down between East
and West, the panelists agreed, except in the case of the
Germanys. But ideological, cultural and commercial barriers,
they felt, would eventually be erased. Said Jeszenszky: "Borders
need not change, but the character of borders must change. The
barbed wire must come down, the strip searches must be stopped,
the examination of the bags -- all that must end."

    In the view of the panel, NATO and the Warsaw Pact are no
longer in control of the Continent's political agenda. That is
now in the hands of the people in the streets, as in East
Germany and Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, the sheer
unpredictability of the upheaval in Eastern Europe will make
continued membership in both alliances reassuring for some time
to come. NATO, still useful as long as the Soviet Union remains
the Continent's dominant military power, was expected to survive
cutbacks in force levels and thrive in a more political and
consultative role.

    Grunwald spoke for the group when he noted that
"instability in Eastern Europe is a given for the next few
years." The new reformist governments may be striving for other
versions of West European social democracy, but as Grunwald
pointed out, "Social democracy or capitalism with a human face
is an achievement of prosperity. Before the luxury of humanizing
the system, there will be cruel changes."