Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

At least one significant fault line—that separating liberal democrats from populist nationalists—could already be detected,

Many of the seasoned leaders of the intellectual opposition shared a common history with the regime’s

own critics within the Party. To students and other young people, however, they thus appeared cast in the same mould: part of a past that could not and should not be revived.

The memories and illusions of the ‘Dubček generation’ were not shared by their children, who evinced little interest in remembering 1968 or saving the ‘good’ aspects of the GDR. The new generation was less concerned with engaging its rulers in debate, or offering radical alternatives to their rule, than in simply getting out from under it. This contributed to the carnival-like aspect of 1989 remarked upon by some observers in Poland and Czechoslovakia; it also contributed to the unconcern with violent retribution. Communism was no longer an obstacle so much as an irrelevance.

With the coming of the Soviet bloc, the sense that their part of Europe was severed from its roots had become a leitmotif of intellectual dissent and opposition across the region. But the lament for their lost European identity had acquired special significance for Eastern Europeans in recent

years with the emergence in the West of something new: an institutional entity—a ‘European Community’, a ‘European Union’—built around self-consciously ‘European’ values with which East Europeans could all too readily identify: individual rights, civic obligations, the freedom of expression and movement. Talk of ‘Europe’ became less abstract and therefore, among other things, more interesting to young people. No longer just a lament for the lost culture of old Prague or Budapest, it now represented a concrete and attainable set of political goals. The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’. This was more than just a matter of rhetoric. Whereas the old Communist cadres could convincingly (and even with conviction) point to the depredations of an abstraction called ‘capitalism’, they had nothing to offer in place of ‘Europe’—because it represented not an ideological alternative but simply the political norm. Sometimes the thought was inflected as ‘the market economy’, sometimes as ‘civil society’; but in either case ‘Europe’ stood—squarely and simply—for normalcy and the modern way of life. Communism was now no longer the future—its insistent trump card for six decades—but the past. Naturally, there were variations. Nationalists and even some political and religious conservatives—many of them active and influential in 1989—were not disposed to think so much of Europe as of ‘Poland’ or ‘Hungary’. And some of them were perhaps less interested in freedom and in...

For most people who had lived under Communism, liberation by no means implied a yearning for untrammeled economic competition, much less the loss of free social services, guaranteed employment, cheap rents or any of Communism’s other attendant benefits. It was, after all, one of the attractions of ‘Europe’, as imagined from the East, that it held out the prospect of affluence and security, liberty and protection. You could have your socialist cake and eat it in freedom.

In the last analysis, it was always Moscow that counted.

if Eastern Europe’s crowds and intellectuals and trade union leaders ‘won the third world war’ it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.

Once an imperial metropole had so publicly acknowledged that it would not, could not hang on to its colonial periphery—and had been universally acclaimed for saying so—its colonies were lost and with them the empire’s indigenous collaborators. All that remained to be determined was the manner and direction in which they fell.

Gorbachev did more than just let the colonies go. By indicating that he would not intervene he decisively undermined the only real source of political legitimacy available to the rulers of the satellite states: the promise (or threat) of military intervention from Moscow. Without that threat the local regimes were politically naked. Economically they might have struggled for a few more years, but there, too, the logic of Soviet retreat was implacable: once Moscow started charging world market prices for its exports to Comecon countries (as it did in 1990) the latter, heavily dependent on imperial subsidies, would have collapsed in any event. As this last example suggests, Gorbachev was letting Communism fall in eastern Europe in order to save it in Russia itself—just as Stalin had built the satellite regimes not for their own sake but as a security for his western frontier.

As in the 19th century, German unification was in the first instance to be achieved by a currency union; but political union inevitably followed.

Kohl must commit himself to pursuing the European project under a Franco-German condominium, and Germany was to be bound into an ‘ever-closer’ union—whose terms, notably a common European currency, would be enshrined in a new treaty (to be negotiated the following year in the Dutch city of Maastricht)

This was the very outcome the US (and many West German politicians) feared most: an enlarged Germany, neutral and unattached in the middle of Europe, destabilizing and unsettling its neighbours on both sides.

Why did Mikhail Gorbachev so readily allow German unification to go forward?

What he was able to do was extract, quite literally, a price for his concessions. As the West German Chancellor had foreseen, the USSR was open to financial persuasion.

Helmut Kohl also agreed to alleviate Soviet (and Polish) fears of German irredentism by pledging, as we have seen, to accept as permanent his country’s eastern boundaries, a commitment enshrined the following year in a Treaty with Poland.

This was not the recovery of history, however, but rather its erasure—it was as though the GDR had never been.

Meanwhile, to avoid upsetting West German voters—by no means all of whom had greeted unification with unalloyed enthusiasm—Kohl chose not to raise taxes. Instead, in order to meet its vast new commitments the Federal Republic—which had hitherto run substantial current account surpluses—had no choice but to go into deficit. The Bundesbank, aghast at the inflationary impact of such a policy, accordingly began steadily to raise interest rates, starting in 1991—at precisely the moment when the Deutschmark was being locked for ever into a planned European currency. The knock-on effect of these interest rates—increased unemployment and slower economic growth—would be felt not just in Germany but throughout the European Monetary System. In effect, Helmut Kohl exported the cost of his country’s unification and Germany’s European partners were made to share the burden.

But that, of course, was Gorbachev’s problem: by the end of the 1980s he was so absorbed in domestic challenges that his response to the rapid onset of problems in the USSR’s ‘near-West’ was, as we have seen, to leave the latter increasingly to its own devices.

The Baltic republics of the Union—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—were distinctive in three significant respects. In the first place they were more exposed to the West than any other region of the Soviet Union proper.