The New Penguin History of the World (214 page)

Foreign disapproval was almost universal. Yet, as so often in China, it is hard to know what had really happened. Obviously China’s rulers felt they faced a grave threat. It is probable, too, that they acted in a way deplored and opposed by many of their fellow Chinese. There was disorder, some of it serious, in over eighty cities, and the army encountered resistance in some working-class districts of Beijing. Yet the masses did not rise to support the protesters; they were often hostile to them. Much was to be made in future years of Tiananmen as evidence of Chinese disregard of human rights, but it cannot be confidently asserted that China would have been bound to benefit if the party had given way to the student movement. More Asian lives were shattered by banking fiascos in the 1990s than in China’s troubles in 1989.

Although the party and ruling hierarchy were somewhat in disarray, vigorous attempts to impose political orthodoxy followed. Neo-Marxist slogans were heard again. Discipline was reimposed in the party. Economic liberalization was for a time reined in. China, it was soon clear, was not going to go the way of eastern Europe or the USSR. But where was it going? Perhaps the safest conclusion to be drawn at this stage is that it was once again moving to its own rhythms, stimulated by forces peculiar to it, for all the rhetoric of regime and protesters alike. The youngsters in Tiananmen Square who met the tanks not only put up a statue as their icon of Liberty, but also showed what they owed to another non-Chinese and western inspiration by singing the ‘Internationale’. That suggests both the complexity (even the incoherence) of the opposition movement and its alienation from much that was still influential in China. As recently as 1987, a poll had reported that even among urban Chinese, the moral defect that was most strongly deplored was that of ‘filial disobedience’. Transformed though so much of the world already was, China after Tiananmen Square still baffled observers and futurologists by its seemingly massive immunity to currents outside its borders. One of the traditional roles of its governments has always been to act as the guardian of Chinese values. If, anywhere in the world, modernization might turn out in the end not to mean ‘westernization’, it could be in China. Two thousand years of history do not easily go away.

5
Openings and Closures

NATIONALITY AND ETHNICITY

Well before the collapse of the USSR, it was clear that very little of the world would remain wholly unaffected by what was happening in Europe. Immediately, the end of the Cold War reawoke old questions of identity throughout that continent and beyond, as well as presenting new ones. Peoples began to see themselves and others afresh in the light of what soon turned out to be for some a chilly dawn; some nightmares had blown away, but only to reveal troubled landscapes. Fundamental questions about identity, ethnicity and religion could again be asked, and some of these questions were disturbing. Once again new determining circumstances were emerging in world history.

Almost incidentally, not only had one half of Europe’s security arrangements disappeared with the Warsaw Pact, but the other half, NATO, had also been subtly changed. The collapse of the USSR, the major potential opponent, had deprived the alliance not only of its main role, but also of the pressure that had shaped it. Like a blancmange in a warm room, it began to sag a little. Even if, as some thought, a revived Russia were to emerge as a new threat at some future date, the disappearance of the ideological struggle would mean that potential opponents would have to think in new ways about it. There were soon ex-communist countries seeking to join NATO. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined up in 1999, and Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic countries followed five years later. In total contravention of the promises US president George H. W. Bush had given Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, NATO had expanded not just up to the borders of the Soviet Union, but beyond them. The alliance had become an instrument for linking most of Europe (minus Russia) to the United States. But the purpose of its military power was by no means clear, even if in the mid-1990s the American government began to look to NATO as a machine for dealing with new European problems, notably in the former Yugoslavia; and for use outside the European area.

After the Cold War, the fate of peoples in eastern and south-eastern Europe seemed for the first time in the century entirely and evidently in their own hands. Like the old dynastic empires or the extemporizations of the German and Italian dictators in the Second World War, the communist scaffolding of the region had now collapsed. As much buried history re-emerged and more was remembered or invented, what appeared was often discouraging. Slovaks felt restive about their inclusion in Czechoslovakia, but Slovakia itself had a large Hungarian percentage in its population, as did Romania. Hungarians could now agonize more openly over the treatment of Magyars both north and east of their borders. Above all, old issues escalated rapidly into new violence and crisis in the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, as all former republics of the Yugoslav federal state declared their independence, wars were being fought between local Serbs and the new governments of Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina. The Serb minorities were supported by the government in Belgrade, headed by the militant Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic, and by the remnants of the Yugoslav federal army.

The civil war in Bosnia–Herzegovina led to the worst atrocities against civilians in Europe since the end of World War II, as the three main ethnic groups – Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks – tried to control as much territory as possible, often driving out the other population groups as they advanced. At Srebrenica Serb forces massacred several thousand Bosniak civilians in 1995, and Serbs besieged the Bosnian capital Sarajevo from 1992–95. Both the EU and the United States were reluctant to intervene, and it was only the military setbacks for the Serbs that made an agreement possible at Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995. From being a peaceful mosaic of different ethnic groups, Bosnia–Herzegovina had given rise to the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ – the expulsion by force of people who were defined as enemies. Croatia made use of the decline in Serb military fortunes throughout the region to reclaim Krajina, driving out many of the majority Serb population there. Having gone from one disaster to another in his so-called ‘defence’ of the Serbs, Milosevic was finally toppled in 2000, after his heavy-handed policy in the Albanian-dominated region of Kosovo had led to NATO intervention against his troops. Fearful of a repetition of the Bosnian atrocities, the western allies had at last found agreement to intervene.

Thus, the early 1990s left millions of east Europeans facing grave problems and difficulties. Agreement was lacking on legitimating principles and ideas. Insofar as the region had possessed ‘modernizing’ elites, these, whether effective or not, were usually to be found in the old communist hierarchies. Unavoidably, professionals, managers and experts whose
careers had been made within the communist structures continued to govern because there was no one to replace them. Another problem was the fickleness of populations now voting freely as the immediate euphoria of political revolution ebbed. There was nostalgia for the apparent security of the old days. As people cast about for a new basis for the legitimacy of the state, the only plausible candidate often seemed to be the nationalism that had so often bedevilled past politics, sometimes for centuries. Old tribalisms had quickly resurfaced and imaginary histories were soon turning out to matter as much as what had actually happened in the past.

Some ancient confrontations had, tragically, been brought to an end by the Second World War. In the most horrifying and greatest instance, the Holocaust, as people had come to call the Nazis’ attempt to extirpate the Jewish people, had ended the story of eastern Europe as the centre of world Jewry. In 1901 three-quarters of the world’s Jews had lived there, mostly in the Russian empire. In those once Yiddish-speaking areas, only a little more than 10 per cent of Jews now live. Nearly half of the world’s Jews are now to be found in English-speaking countries, and another 30 per cent of them in Israel. In eastern Europe, communist parties anxious to exploit traditional popular anti-Semitism (not least in the Soviet Union) had encouraged emigration by harrying and judicial persecution. In a few countries this virtually eliminated what was left in 1945 of the Jewish population as a significant demographic element. Two hundred thousand Polish Jews surviving in 1945 had soon found themselves again victims of traditional pogrom and harassment and by 1990 those who had not emigrated numbered a mere 6,000. The heart of the old eastern European Jewry had gone.

In some western European countries, too, minorities showed a new recalcitrance. Basque separatists terrorized Spain. Walloons and Flemings nagged at one another in Belgium. Northern Ireland was probably the most striking instance. There, Unionist and nationalist feeling continued throughout the 1990s to block the road to settlement. Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985 had acknowledged the Irish Republic’s right to a role in discussion of the future of Ulster and set up new machinery to provide for it. One ceasefire ended tragically after a little less than eighteen months but when a Labour government came to power at Westminster in 1997, it proved willing to take the important symbolic step of opening direct negotiations with Sinn Fein, the political movement that masked the terrorists of the IRA. Before the end of that year Sinn Fein representatives had been received by the British prime minister in London and in 1998, in cooperation with the Irish government, British initiatives succeeded, against the odds, in winning the acquiescence of the official leaders of Sinn Fein
and of the Ulster Unionists in putting to an all-Ireland referendum proposals that went further than ever before in institutionalizing both safeguards for the nationalist minority in the north and the historic tie of the north with the United Kingdom. This so-called Good Friday Agreement, of course, implied fundamental change in what the sovereignty of the Crown was to mean in the future (and incidentally went much further than the measures of devolution the British government was contemporaneously introducing in Scotland and Wales). Though the detail was potentially still very divisive, the principles of the new arrangements met with popular approval on both sides of the border. And while the British and Irish governments at first failed in putting together a Northern Ireland executive representing all parties – and therefore had to return to direct rule from London – the province was spared the terrorist outrages that had dominated up to 1998.

AN EVER-CLOSER EUROPEAN UNION?

From 1986 the passports issued to citizens of the member states of the EC had carried the words ‘European Community’ as well as the name of the issuing state. In practice, however, the Community faced growing difficulties. Although the main central institutions – the Council of Ministers of Member States, the Commission and the Court of Justice – worked away, they did not do so without contention, while policy – notably over fisheries and transport – provoked well-publicized differences. Fluctuations in exchange rates were another source of awkwardness and institutional bickering, especially after the end of dollar convertibility and the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the oil crisis. Yet in the 1980s there was solid evidence of encouraging economic success. The USA had resumed in the 1970s its pre-1914 status as a major recipient of foreign investment and two-thirds of what it attracted was European. Western Europe accounted for the largest share of world trade, too. Outsiders became keen to join an organization that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986.

The latter turned out to be a decisive year, when it was agreed that a further step should be taken in 1992 to move beyond a mere customs union to a single, integrated, border-free internal market. After difficult negotiations the Maastricht Treaty of December 1991 put in place arrangements for the single European market and a timetable for full economic and monetary union to be achieved not later than 1999. Capital, goods, services and people were to move freely without let or hindrance across
national borders at last. Once again, reservations and special arrangements had to be made for the cautious British. Margaret Thatcher’s successor as prime minister, John Major, was something of an unknown quantity, but almost at once he found himself upholding his country’s position in the Maastricht negotiations at the head of a party divided over it. The treaty that resulted opened the way to a single currency and an autonomous central bank to regulate it. Maastricht also gave citizenship of the new European Union (EU), which replaced the EC, to the nationals of all member states and laid down an obligation on its members to impose certain common standards in work practices and some social benefits. Finally, the treaty extended the area over which EU policy might be made by majority votes. All this looked like a significant accretion of centralized power, although in an effort to reassure the suspicious the treaty also set out agreement to the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, a word rooted in Catholic social teaching; it indicated that there should be limits to the competence of the Commission at Brussels in interfering with the details of national administration. As for agreement over European defence and security policy, this was soon in disarray thanks to events in Bosnia.

Maastricht raised difficulties in several countries. The Danes rejected it in a referendum the following year. A similar test in France produced only a slim majority in its favour. The British government (notwithstanding special safeguards it had negotiated) was hard-pressed to win the parliamentary vote on the issue. In the governing Conservative Party a split that had appeared was to cripple the party when it next faced the electors. European voters still usually thought of protecting or damaging traditional sectional and national interests and these loomed larger as economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s. But Maastricht was in the end ratified by fifteen member states. Debate continued over allegations of encroachment on the independence of member states by the Commission at Brussels and the comparative fairness or unfairness of individual countries’ use or abuse of the Union’s rules.