TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/062992/0629unk.002

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.5 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 60

End of Empire -- For Good


By Strobe Talbott


    There was more bad news from Europe last week. In what
used to be Yugoslavia, the breakaway states of Croatia and
Bosnia formed a military alliance against Serbia, a move that
is likely to escalate the fighting in the Balkans. The country
that used to call itself Czechoslovakia has already split up its
name: it's now the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. That last
word will soon be plural, for both Czechs and Slovaks agreed on
Saturday to create separate states by the end of September. In
what used to be the U.S.S.R., old feuds flared anew in the
Caucasus.

    These convulsions are the natural consequence of imperial
disintegration. Sooner or later, empires have always fallen
apart, and the result has always been ugly. Typically, the
demise of the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th century triggered
the 30 Years' War.

    The Enlightenment promulgated liberal principles of
governance that could, at least in theory, be applied
everywhere. The American and French revolutions were mounted in
the name of equality and the brotherhood of man, ideals that
were anathema to rulers and attractive to the vast majority of
their subjects. Empire's days, or at least its decades, were
numbered.

    In the wake of World War I, four imperial monarchies --
Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Russia -- collapsed. Two
figures emerged on the world stage almost simultaneously, each
a professed egalitarian and internationalist, each claiming to
have a vision for the new world order. One was Woodrow Wilson,
the other Vladimir Lenin. The 20th century can be seen as a
struggle between their legacies.

    An earnest though imperfect attempt to embody the
Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, the postwar
settlement created several new countries that were true
nation-states. The Poles got back Poland, and the Hungarians got
Hungary.

    The peacemakers acknowledged that in some cases a state
might be better off if it included several nationalities. That
is how the Czechs and Slovaks came to share a single republic
while the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were united in what
eventually became Yugoslavia, the land of the south Slavs.

    Given a better break by history and its accomplice
geography, those two countries might be cohesive and thriving
today. But Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia fell victim to
communism. For them, Wilson's legacy was at midcentury
supplanted by Lenin's.

    Lenin had been determined to keep in check all popular
stirrings, especially nationalistic ones. His successor, Joseph
Stalin, perfected a system that was autocratic in the extreme
and prone to territorial expansion. With the Nazis in retreat,
there was a huge vacuum to be filled by the Red Army in Eastern
Europe.

    The plot of the 20th century had taken a perverse twist:
the two World Wars had finished off the imperial ventures of
the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Ottomans, Romanovs, Nazis and
Japanese -- and accelerated the withdrawal of the British,
French and Dutch as well. However, those two conflagrations had
also created the conditions in which the Soviet Union was able
to foist on the world yet another empire.

    Josip Broz Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, earning himself
favor in the eyes of the West. But he was no democrat,
particularly when it came to suppressing nationalism in its more
assertive and divisive forms.

    After Tito died in 1980, the Yugoslav republics could have
worked out a loose confederation. At worst, they might have
ended up negotiating a divorce like the Czechs and Slovaks. But
the chance of gradual, peaceful dissolution was ruined by
Slobodan Milosevic. By trying to reassert Serbian dominance over
the other southern Slavs, he provoked them in effect to
renegotiate the post-World War I settlement: Slovenia for the
Slovenes, Croatia for the Croats, and so on.

    Similarly, the Slovaks are saying to Wilson, as well as to
Vaclav Havel, thanks but no thanks for Czechoslovakia; let the
Czechs have Bohemia and Moravia -- we want independence for
Slovakia.

    Political borders at best approximate tribal ones. Wilson
& Co. gave the Hungarians their own state, but that arrangement
left plenty of ethnic Hungarians in northern Serbia, western
Romania, and even parts of the prospective new state of
Slovakia. Part of Milosevic's pretext for destroying Dubrovnik
and Sarajevo has been the defense of Serbs living in Croatia and
Bosnia. Nagorno-Karabakh has become a universal synonym for
political disaster because British and Bolshevik interests after
World War I coincided in letting Azerbaijan keep the largely
Armenian enclave.

    Across the old empire, neighbors turned enemies are
invoking their right of self-determination as they slit one
another's throats. With the century coming to a close, Wilson's
legacy has won out over Lenin's once and for all, for better and
for worse. In 1989-90 the result was the opening of the Berlin
Wall and the triumph of the "velvet revolution"; in 1991-92 it
has been the outbreak of one civil war in Yugoslavia and the
threat of another in the former Soviet Union.

    But perhaps the good news that came out of Europe two
years ago will prove more enduring than the bad news of today.
If, as there is reason to hope, the Soviet empire proves to
have been history's last, then at least we won't have to go
through any such postimperial traumas ever again.