WORLD, Page 23What the Future HoldsA panel of TIME experts foresees East European instability -- andinevitable German unity in a reshaped ContinentBy 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
