Today is the penultimate of my six lectures
on NATO’s history and the key turning points
in NATO’s evolution since the end of the
Cold War.
In fact this week you’re very lucky – you’re
getting two lectures not just one.
The final one will be on Thursday when we
look at Yugoslavia and how NATO used force
for the first time in its history in the mid-1990s
and the consequences for what NATO is doing
today in Afghanistan.
So hope to see you back.
But this year we’re celebrating – and
I think that’s the right word – 1989:
20 years ago already!
Can you believe it?
1989 was really the miracle year, the annus
mirabilis in European history when things
that nobody would believe they could possibly
see in their lifetime actually happened.
Ernest Bevin, the great British Foreign Secretary
and one of the founding fathers of NATO back
in the 50s, once said that his foreign policy
was to go down to Victoria Station in London,
buy a ticket and go anywhere that he chose.
And of course for my generation growing up
in the 60s and the 70s, Central and Eastern
Europe was an impenetrable area.
It was cut off by 1400 kilometres of barbed
wire, automatic machine gun firing positions,
watchtowers.
Very difficult to get in and even more difficult
for people on the other side of course to
get out.
And at the time everybody hoped and believed
that ultimately this system would, would mellow,
would change, more people to people contact
would become possible.
I spoke last time to you about the famous
convergent theory that the communists would
become more capitalist, the capitalists would
become more social democratic at least and
the two systems would converge in the middle.
But even on the eve of the fall of the Berlin
Wall in November 1989 and the great velvet
revolutions, even the opponents of communism
in Eastern Europe were rather sceptical that
much would really change.
For example, I dug out this quotation from
one of Poland’s leading anti-communist intellectuals
around the solidarity movement in the 1980s
who is called Adam Michnik and he once said
that the best we can hope for – the best
we can hope for, this is just a couple of
months before the fall of the Berlin Wall
– is I quote, “a hybrid society which
is conceivable, one where the totalitarian
organisation of the state will co-exist with
democratic institutions of society.”
In other words, a kind of communist democratic
hybrid.
And one of my favourite quotations is from
Erich Honecker – you remember Erich Honecker,
the leader of the DDR, East Germany – who
woke up in January 1989 looking forward to
this golden year, the 40th anniversary of
the foundation of the state of workers and
peasants as East Germany was known as, saying
that “the wall will still be standing in
50 or a hundred years, if the reasons for
its existence have not been removed.”
What a bad piece of prediction that turned
out to be.
So the first point that I want to emphasize
is that 1989 took everybody, even the most
ferociously anti-communist in the West, by
surprise.
This chain reaction of uprisings, of people
power demonstrations on the streets of Leipzig
or Dresden, the collapse of the old order
… this chain reaction was such that when
we looked at this on television and believed
that nothing more dramatic could happen for
example, than the return of Alexander Dubcek,
the hero of 1968 to a platform together with
Havel in Wenceslas Square, or the site of
the car people, all of the East Germans jumping
in their little Trabbis and driving through
the open fence between the Czech Republic,
or Hungary and Austria when the Hungarians
opened up the border in the spring of 1989,
or the hundreds of thousands in fact of Germans
who climbed over the wall of the German Embassy
in Prague saying that they would not leave
unless they could be taken in a sealed train
directly from Prague across East Germany to
the West.
Just when you thought that it couldn’t get
any more dramatic, then we had of course the
ultimate symbol, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But what I would like to emphasize at the
outset is that although the fall of the Berlin
Wall is what is very much in our memory 20
years on, of course it wasn’t the only or
even the most dramatic happening in 1989.
As I cast my mind back in preparation for
today over what had happened, certain things
stand out.
For example, one million Poles in a field
outside Krakow listening to Pope John Paul
II tell them be not afraid.
Stalin once quipped, how many divisions does
the Pope have, implying that secular military
power would always be more than a match for
spiritual moral power.
John Paul II proved him wrong.
Moral conviction, eloquence, moral authority
is able to ultimately defeat even the most
encrusted authoritarian regime.
Another memory which I have is of May the
8th 1989 when one million Balts if I can call
them that – today of course we call them
Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians and they’re
all part of NATO – one million formed a
human chain which extended 650 kilometres
from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, through
Riga in Latvia, all the way to Estonia.
I remember too the swearing in of the first
democratic Polish government in the summer
of 1989.
And also Gorbachev attending the ceremonies
of the 40th anniversary of the foundation
of the DDR in October 1989 and telling Honecker
and the East German leadership that life punishes
those who stay behind.
And Honecker then giving a speech proclaiming
that East Germany was in fact the 10th largest
economy in the world and it out performed
many capitalist countries and Gorbachev snorting
with laughter and derision.
It was certainly a wonderful, wonderful year.
It reminds me of Shakespeare’s Henry the
Fifth, when on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt,
Henry V goes to harangue his troops and to
inspire them before the battle the next day.
And Shakespeare writes that what Henry says
is that those people who are in bed asleep
in England, when they realize that they have
missed the Battle of Agincourt and they were
not there to witness this creation of a new
order, would feel accursed.
And certainly all of us who witnessed these
incredible events simply wanted to leave our
offices, jump in our cars, drive through the
night and be there to join in the massive
street festivals and the people parties.
In fact my boss at the time, a great German
Secretary General of NATO who was called Manfred
Wörner, did precisely that.
He disappeared from the office for nearly
a week and at first nobody knew where he’d
gone!
As soon as he watched on television on the
night of the 9th of November and saw the gates
of East Berlin being opened up and the crowds
flooding through, he was so taken by excitement
that he jumped – he told his driver sorry
– to be there he jumped in his car, drove
through the night to Berlin.
Everybody was trying to track him down until
two days later, two days later we saw him
on German television – Is that Wörner there?
Our boss? – in the crowds with Hans-Dietrich
Genscher, the German Foreign Minister, at
the Berlin Wall!
It became known later as the Sinatra Doctrine.
The spokesman of Gorbachev, who was called
Gennadi Gerasimov a very colourful figure,
said that ultimately everybody had gone ‘his
way’, parodying the My Way theme of Sinatra.
The Sinatra Doctrine – everybody was free
to go their own way and to define their own
future.
It was like a domino theory in reverse.
Not the chain reaction towards more communist
states which Marx and Engels and Lenin had
predicted, but the reverse, a situation where
increasingly the dominos were working towards
the spreading of freedom and democracy, which
seemed at the time to usher in a totally new
world.
Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist British historian,
wrote a book called The Short Twentieth Century.
The 20th Century had been shorter than other
centuries because it had begun in 1914 with
the outbreak of the First World War and terminated
of course early in November 1989 with the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
The problem however, and of course we historians
we like problems, is that everybody knew what
we had left behind with the fall of the wall,
but nobody knew what we were heading towards.
As Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Secretary
at the time, put it, “this was a system
[the Cold War], this was a system under which
we had lived quite happily for 40 years.”
Or as Adam Michnik, again my Polish solidarity
intellectual, put it “The worst thing about
communism is what comes afterwards.”
While our populations were in jubilation in
front of the television screens or on the
streets of Berlin, governments were, it has
to be said, seriously worried about the implications
of this unforeseen, uncontrolled and uncontrollable
collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the communist
system.
Tom Wolf, the American author, at the time
had a bestseller called the Bonfire of the
Vanities and a British MP that I knew at the
time famously rephrased that as the ‘bonfire
of the certainties.’
All of the reference points with which we’d
lived for half a century and which had organized
our diplomacy, our military strategy, our
ideology, were like as many props that were
suddenly pulled from us.
What were the immediate preoccupations of
Western leaders?
The first one was with Germany.
Francois Mauriac, the French novelist, famously
said “I love Germany so much, I’m glad
there are two of them.”
When I was your age or at least the age of
some of you, one of the key textbooks was
by an American diplomat called Anton W. DePorte,
Europe between the Superpowers, where he developed
the thesis, which was very popular at the
time, that the division of Germany was a good
thing because Germany in the middle of Europe
had found it difficult to find its natural
place, swinging uncomfortably between East
and West, too big, too strong to be accommodated
within a European collective security system.
Also the view was that the division of Germany
with the Soviet Union occupying the Eastern
half of Europe had been a convenient way,
whereby the Soviets had put the lid on resurgent
nationalisms, which had been the bug bearer
of European security in the 19th, for much
of the 20th Century as well.
This system may not have been particularly
just, particularly moral, but it did provide
the cherished stability, or so at least seemed
at the time.
And as soon as the wall came down obviously
the big question was what’s going to happen.
Even the Germans were somewhat unsure or confused
in this situation.
The famous security policy specialist of the
Germany socialist SPD, Egon Bahr, famously
announced in the 80s that Germany had renounced
its national unity for the sake of peace in
Europe.
The Germans would sacrifice their unity in
order to maintain this balance which seemed
to suit everybody.
Mrs. Thatcher, or at least one of her government
ministers, infamously warned that a united
Germany might become a Fourth Reich.
I know that this may strike you as totally
ridiculous and silly now and I agree.
It was also ridiculous and silly to say this
at the time but Western statesmen and particularly
those who had come through the period of Hitler
and the Second World War were very worried,
would united Germany be neutral?
Would it come under Soviet influence which
had been the Soviet design in proposing Germany
reunification in 1953?
Would it want, could it, stay within NATO?
François Mitterrand, who shared many of Mrs.
Thatcher’s worries, once said “I don’t
have anything to stop it [German unification]
but the Soviets will do it for me.
They will never allow this greater Germany
just opposite them.”
So much of the thought was how could you construct
two German states based on a democratic liberal
DDR, which would enter some kind of confederation
in the same way of course that Bismarck toyed
in the 19th Century with the idea of Austria
joining a confederation of German states.
It was an idea that went around at the time
– even Helmut Kohl the German leader, proposed
a 20 point plan on the assumption that the
DDR would survive the collapse of communism
and would slowly but progressively join Germany
in a slow way, which would satisfy all of
Germany’s neighbours.
Eventually the Russians agreed to two plus
four talks.
Helmut Kohl went off to Russia and did a bit
of ‘sauna diplomacy’ as he called it with
Boris Yeltsin.
Yes, the unification of Germany was decided
in a sauna, as good a place as anywhere else
if the outcome is a felicitous one and by
1990 the great powers had essentially agreed
on Germany unity going ahead in October of
that year.
Gorbachev toyed with the idea of keeping Germany
in both the Warsaw Pact and NATO at the same
time.
Can you imagine?
Germany would have been a member of two different
alliances simultaneously.
Mrs. Thatcher famously said that in all of
her political career this was, I quote, “the
stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of.”
Eventually Gorbachev was persuaded to give
that up and to agree.
Why did he agree?
Well I think, and this certainly is interesting
from the point of NATO- Russia relations today,
I think Gorbachev actually fundamentally realized
that NATO was not an aggressive alliance,
that NATO was purely defensive and that if
Russia wanted a predictable, integrated, European
Germany, the best solution was to keep it
within the American security umbrella and
in NATO.
I’m not sure that all of his countrymen
would have agreed to that or will even agree
today to that but Gorbachev certainly did.
There was weakness of course.
The Germans paid over the next few years in
excess of 80 billion deutschmarks to Russia,
particularly to pay for the withdrawal of
the Soviet forces from eastern German soil.
They agreed to renounce certain territories
that had belonged to the greater Germany at
the beginning of the century or even up until
the Second World War such as Kaliningrad and
to formalize their Eastern border with Poland
along the Oder-Neisse line.
But all of the worries about Germany failed
to come true.
The second big worry was about the breakup
of the Soviet Union.
George Bush – not W., George H.W. Bush – President
of the United States at the time, went to
Kiev in August 1991 and pronounced his famous
Chicken Kiev speech, where he warned Ukraine
not to push for independence from the Soviet
Union.
The Americans worried about nuclear weapons.
What would happen to the nuclear weapons if
Ukraine or Kazakhstan or Belarus, where these
weapons were based, became independent states
and suddenly you had a situation where Ukraine
or Belarus or Kazakhstan would overtake Britain
and France in terms of being the largest nuclear
powers in the world?
What would happen in terms of violence, minority
unrest if the Soviet Union started to crumble?
Would this lead to a war?
Bush was very worried indeed about all of
these things and though he of course did not
want to stop the emancipation of Central and
Eastern Europe, he certainly didn’t want
to accelerate it either in a way which would
be uncontrolled.
He visited Hungary and Poland in 1989 and
in Poland, Lech Walesa asked him for 20 billion
dollars to help the Polish economy.
Bush gave only 100 million to that effort.
He was also criticized in the United States
for not welcoming more enthusiastically the
collapse of communism, to which he replied
that he didn’t much like the vision thing
and he said, “I guess I’m not an emotional
kind of guy.”
This is not meant critically about George
Bush, who in many cases was the architect
of German unity and who played a crucial role
in persuading Thatcher and Mitterrand to go
along with it, but it does show that at the
time leaders had no idea where this process
was going to end up.
They’d been brought up in a school where
revolutions were always bloody, messy and
violent: France 1789, Russia 1917.
And given the immense amount of military firepower
in the Eastern bloc, given the nationalist
rivalries, at the time there was no reason
to expect that the process would remain peaceful
as well.
The third worry then was very much about the
rise of nationalism in Europe.
What would happen once the Soviets lifted
the lid?
Would the Czechs and the Slovaks go back to
rivalry and the answer is – yes they did,
but fortunately in a peaceful way which led
to the velvet divorce in Czechoslovakia in
1991 – 92.
Would Hungarians or Romanians once again dispute
the fate of Transylvania?
Bulgaria’s expulsion of ethnic Turks in
1984, five years before the wall came down,
had already been a rather worrying harbinger
of the kind of nationalist tensions which
were still there under the surface.
Indeed, one of the reasons why the United
States did not encourage the break-up of Yugoslavia,
when Croatia and Slovenia declared independence
in the beginning of 1991, was the fear that
this would set a bad precedent for what was
happening in the Soviet Union.
The United States was worried that if nationalist
unrest grew Gorbachev and his whole reform
effort, the whole arms control agenda with
the United States would be seriously undermined.
Final big preoccupation of the western powers
– the future of the European Union.
Germany of course, had been integrated into
the European Union.
As Thomas Mann, the Germany novelist, once
put it, “I prefer a European Germany to
a German Europe.”
And for France, particularly given the history
of Franco- German relations before the Second
World War, an integrated Germany, which was
also largely the paymaster general of the
European Union, French agriculture in exchange
for German heavy industry, was an essential
ingredient of reassurance.
What would happen once a united Germany came
about and was spending so much money on the
economic revitalization of eastern Germany
(the former DDR) that it would have very little
money left for the process of European Union.
In fact, one of the reasons why Helmut Kohl
committed himself to the euro and giving up
the deutschmark, no matter how unpopular this
move was in Germany where the d-mark was almost
a sacred symbol of post war prosperity and
success, was precisely to reassure the French
that a united Germany would not slow down
European integration.
However, once the Germans had agreed to exchange
the DDR mark for one German d-mark and once
over the next few years they’d paid out
in the region of 1.3 trillion euros to revitalize
East Germany, making those kind of generous
offers was considerably less likely.
Those of us at NATO in 1989 also were worried,
if I can be quite honest with you.
As much as we were exhilarated by what was
going on in Eastern Europe and as much as
we could claim that this was the vindication
of NATO solidarity, our perseverance during
the Cold War, our sticking to our principles,
what about our jobs?
Were we … would we still be there?
There were rumours of massive job cuts.
Manfred Wörner, once he’s come back from
Berlin, faced the staff and announced that
he was certain that NATO had a bright future
even though the Warsaw Pact adversary was
being wound up and that we would find plenty
of things to do.
I tell you that at the time he was right but
nobody believed him.
We were all rigorously scrutinizing the situations
vacant columns in newspapers and updating
our CVs to send out to perspective employers;
we didn’t believe that NATO would still
be around.
Now of course, I like to joke that I’ve
spent the second half of my NATO career earning
the salary that I didn’t earn in the first
half of my NATO career.
But again, the fact that NATO would still
be in business 20 years later and busier and
bigger and in more places in the world than
ever, that would have … if somebody had
told me that in 1989 I would have recommended
that he seek psychiatric treatment.
Well, what were the factors that caused the
collapse of communism?
Well obviously first and foremost if you believe
in the role of the individual in history,
Gorbachev.
As much as we might wish as good Marxists
to explain the collapse of communism through
socially determined factors, one cannot extrapolate
the key role of Gorbachev.
Andrei Grachev, one of his advisors, once
said and I love this quotation, that “Gorbachev
was a genetic error of the system.
He came out of the system but then destroyed
it.”
When he first became Party General Secretary
in March 1985, he famously said to Raisa,
Raisa Gorbachev his wife, “we cannot go
on living like this.”
Chernobyl, the nuclear accident in 1986, really
did convince Gorbachev that the Soviet system
was incompetent, it was rotten, it had to
be reformed.
He was getting plenty of evidence from the
KGB that the Soviet economy in the 1980s had
actually started to contract.
More of this later.
His great actual talent though was not what
he did, but what he didn’t do.
Gorbachev was like a person peeling an onion
skin; every time a layer comes off you realize
there are more layers underneath and so the
process is endless.
Once he started to reform he discovered that
the problems were much more fundamental than
he’d expected but instead of stopping a
process he went, he went on.
He let things happen.
Was Gorbachev trying to return the Soviet
Union to a free market capitalist system?
No.
His great hero was Felipe Gonzalez, the Spanish
socialist.
He was very much attached to the Swedish model.
He really believed that the fundamentals of
socialism could be preserved in a more efficient
order.
He would have been horrified when he started
in 1985 if he’d known that only six years
later Boris Yeltsin would have put him out
of a job and that the Soviet Union would be
no more.
But if Gorbachev’s role is completely indispensable,
there were other factors at play which historians
like to look at.
The cosmic factors first, those big sort of
strategic shifts in the international paradigm.
First one: new criteria of power.
Those of us who sort of studied the period
between the wars will realize that at the
time there was a big debate on whether democracy
had a future.
Was it really the best system?
Did Europeans prefer to actually live under
democracies or authoritarian totalitarian
systems?
For a long period in the 1930s, Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy were genuinely popular systems.
The Gestapo in 1939 in Germany was 20,000
to control a population of 78 million Germans.
In the DDR, the Stasi was 650,000 to control
a population of 16 million.
That simple fact tells you a lot.
What I’m therefore saying is that immediately
after the Second World War and particularly
in a book like 1984 by George Orwell, there
was a tremendous skepticism whether democracy
was really the system of the future.
Would it produce the goods more effectively,
the more authoritarian command economies?
But what was clear by the 1980s was that democracy
was overwhelmingly the most effective system
for running human affairs.
The number of democracies, notwithstanding
the pessimism of George Orwell in 1947, the
number of democracies quintupled during the
latter half of the 20th Century.
Experts point to the rise of education, of
technology, the fact that societies started
to organize themselves more laterally than
in terms of rigid authoritarian hierarchies.
By the 1980s Marxism had lost the intellectual
battle.
My good friend Tom Friedman of the New York
Times wrote once and I totally agree, that
“by 1989 there were more Marxists in a radical
book store on the upper west side of New York
than in the whole of the Soviet Union.”
He was right.
By the end of the 80s there was virtually
nothing coming out of the intellectual community
in the communist bloc that showed any ability
to reform the system.
The great heroes, intellectual heroes in the
communist bloc were not those who wanted to
preserve the system, but those who wanted
to destroy it: Pope John Paul II, Andrei Sakharov
the nuclear physicist and dissident, Vaclav
Havel the Czech playwright, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
the author of The Gulag Archipelago.
Second factor, historians now look at the
decline of brutality.
Something happened in the second half of the
20th Century that made states increasingly
reluctant to use brutal force to maintain
themselves in power.
Gorbachev wrote a book called Perestroika
– don’t know if any of you have read it
– where he said “one could always supress,
compel, bribe, break or blast but only for
a certain period.”
From the point of the view of the long term,
big term politics one will not be able to
subordinate others; let everyone make his
or her own choice and let us all respect that
choice.
Third factor, the collapse of authoritarianism.
In the 17th Century in my country Britain,
there was a phrase ‘no Bishop, no King’
that was if one side of the authoritarian
system collapses, every other aspect of the
system collapses.
It either holds together or it falls apart,
there is no middle ground.
And Timothy Garton Ash, who some of you may
have come across who is a European expert
at St. Anthony’s College Oxford, wrote about
this in a way which I think sums up the general
sense of authoritarianism being a hollow shell
by the end of the 1980s.
He wrote, I quote, “perhaps the ultimately
decisive factor is that characteristic of
revolutionary situations described by Alexis
de Tocqueville more than a century ago, the
rolling elites’ loss of belief in its own
right to rule.
A few kids went onto the streets and threw
a few words.
The police beat them.
The kids said, ‘you have no right to beat
us’ and the rulers, the high and mighty,
replied in effect, ‘yes we have no right
to beat you, we have no right to preserve
our rule by force, the end no longer justifies
the means’.”
When Erich Honecker gave an order in September/October
1989 to his police to shoot demonstrators
on the streets of Leipzig and Dresden, they
disobeyed in the first sign of dissent and
an internal collapse of these elites.
Now in history we all know that underlying
strategic causes matter a great deal but we
also know that there are immediate triggers,
more proximate factors which cause an international
system to change.
The first one which I alluded to last time
but I’d like to come back, is the severe
economic crisis in the communist bloc by the
mid-1980s.
Looking at the history of the DDR I dug up
a report which was compiled by a group of
East Germany economic experts and which was
submitted to the Party Politburo on the 30th
of October 1989, a couple of days before the
wall came down.
According to this report more than half, this
is DDR, more than half of all of the industrial
facilities were effectively classifiable as
scrap.
53.8 percent of all machines were write-offs,
only repairable at a cost that could not be
justified.
Half the transport infrastructure was in a
state of decay; productivity was 40 percent
behind the West’s; state indebtedness had
risen from 12 billion marks in 1970 to 123
billion in 1988.
And it was a similar situation elsewhere.
In the spring of 1989 inflation hit 1000 percent
in Poland.
In the Soviet Union the oil price dropped
in the 80s; Soviet debt went from 30.7 billion
dollars in ‘86 to 54 billion by 1989.
In the Soviet Union at the time of the collapse
of communism, there was a population of some
256 million all told.
That country had only 30 … 300 … 300,000
entrepreneurs in such an enormous population.
By the 1970s the famous East German spymaster
Markus Wolf, who was the prototype for Karla
in the John le Carré Cold War novels, concluded
that the DDR in particular just couldn’t
work.
The problem of indebtedness meant that the
communist systems had to go increasingly looking
for Western loans in order to be able to survive.
George Bush, he had a policy of not giving
those loans precisely because he felt that
the money would be largely wasted.
More and more money was being borrowed simply
to cover debt, not to invest in economic reconstruction.
Second factor was the emergence of people
power in Eastern Europe.
Ironically in the 1980s, and you remember
my last lecture, the communist bloc formed
these peace movements to lobby against NATO’s
cruise and Pershing missiles.
This turned out to be a very major mistake
by the communists because these movements
became the genesis of people power movements
which in 1989 took to the streets.
I think that the OSCE as we call it these
days, the CSCE (the Conference on Security
and Cooperation in Europe), could take a lot
of the credit for this because those ideals
of the Helsinki Final Act about the right
to assemble, the right to form trade unions,
the right to listen to Western radio broadcasts,
although the Soviets considered these rather
cynically at the time, proved very powerful
in mobilizing popular support.
All kinds of popular movements grew up like
Noyes Form in the DDR, Charter 77 in the Czech
part of Czechoslovakia, A Public against Violence
in Slovakia, Echo Glasnost in Bulgaria proved
effective.
And once people had seen the images of these
popular protests on television, even in the
Eastern bloc, there was a feeling well we
can do that too.
I’m not alone, other people think like me,
we are not powerless.
Modern communications, even inside the Eastern
bloc, had a kind of a knock on effect as one
movement inspired others.
The third is the East-West arms race.
Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister
at the time, later President of Georgia, calculated
that by the 1980s the Soviet Union was spending
50 percent of its expenditure on some form
of defence.
The Soviet economy was one sixth the size
of the United States but was spending three
times more than the Americans on armaments.
Dwight Eisenhower, the only US President in
the post war years to have been a military
officer, once warned the United States against
the military industrial complex.
He said “the problem with defence spending
is to figure out how far you should go without
destroying within that what you are seeking
to protect from without.”
Nice phrase huh?
In other words if you … if the spending
undermines your society, then you are not
really benefitting from the protection that
you get against external enemies.
Eisenhower wanted to warn his American countrymen
but that phrase is much more typical of what
happened in the Soviet Union.
By the mid-80s defence expenditure had become
an intolerable burden.
Arbatov, Georgi Arbatov the famous Soviet
commentator said “we were arming ourselves
and arming ourselves with no idea as to what
were our real needs.”
Final issue, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.
The Soviets withdrew in 1989.
They had 150,000 troops; 15,000 of those died.
Gorbachev told the party congress in February
‘86 that this had been a bleeding wound.
It was.
It was the first major military defeat in
the history of the Soviet Union.
The veterans, the Afghanisti as they became
known, became a powerful lobby within Soviet
society, calling for military reform, pointing
their finger at corruption and nepotism which
had undermined the Soviet military effort.
The inability to impose communism in Afghanistan
showed that communism did not represent the
future but was effectively reversible and
the Soviet Union had stirred up the forces
of Islamic fundamentalism in that region,
which not only became then in Chechnya and
elsewhere a threat to the Soviet Union and
Russia itself, but also as we know from 9/11
and the genesis of Al-Qaida a threat also
to NATO and the Western countries itself.
This inability to expand communism led to
a lot of questioning about internal reform.
So now in the last part of my remarks I come
to the inevitable question, well how did NATO
survive?
Why did we not get our pink slip of dismissal
sometime around 1990?
Why are we still here today?
Now some of you, if you want to be really
nasty, could say it’s bureaucratic sort
of ineptitude or immobilism, the fact that
Italy apparently had a Ministry of the Colonies
still 20 years after giving up its last colony.
There may be some truth in that.
Frankly it’s much easier to create an institution
than it is to dismantle one.
But I think there are some more sincere and
fundamental reasons.
Let me enumerate them very quickly.
First of all I think at the time of change
when everything is in turmoil around you,
you hold on to what you’ve got.
In England we say “always hold onto nurse
for fear of getting something worse.”
And that was very much the mood: keep NATO.
Maybe NATO won’t survive forever but at
time of change you need an ordinance factor
as the Germans would call it, you need a frame
of reference whereby Europe and the United
States can work together to manage this change.
If you, if you sort of change Western Europe
while you’re changing Eastern Europe, then
you will completely lose control of the situation.
Number two, and this I think is a powerful
thing, there was an assumption in 1989 that
all of those great intellectuals who had pushed
change in Eastern Europe would argue for a
new European collective security system, not
only should the Warsaw Pact be dismantled,
but NATO should be dismantled as well.
Indeed, in Eastern Germany there was a group
of intellectuals around the writers Christa
Wolf or Stefan Hane that launched a for-our-land
appeal and actually regretted that the Berlin
Wall had come down too early.
That the wall had fallen precipitating German
unification before they had had time to create
a democratic German socialist state in the
East, but they were exceptions.
Those early idealists were blown away very
quickly and a new generation of Eastern European
leader came on the scene.
Lech Walesa (Poland), Vaclav Havel in the
Czech Republic that generally believed that
the solution was for their countries simply
to join NATO.
They wanted not for the West to go East, but
they wanted to go West themselves.
Havel famously called this ‘the return to
Europe.’
Havel came here very famously in 1990, I shall
never forget, and gave probably the best speech
that has ever been delivered to the North
Atlantic Council where he apologized, he apologized
on behalf of his people for all of the lies
that had been spread about NATO in Eastern
Europe during the communist years.
Edmund Burke once said about intellectuals
that the best were only men of theory, rather
unkind but the ideas of Gorbachev for a common
European home and the ideas of Mitterrand
for a European confederation got nowhere because
Western Europe may have been interested but
Eastern Europe wasn’t.
As far as the Eastern Europeans were concerned
NATO was the real thing, the rest was a conversation.
So any pressure from the East to dismantle
NATO disappeared quickly.
Even today the biggest fans of NATO are often
on the territory of our former adversaries.
Finally NATO was able to successfully reinvent
itself, to change with the times before obsolescence
risked to take over.
At our ministerial meeting in Turnberry in
December 1989 we extended the hand of friendship
to the East.
In July 1999 at NATO’s Summit in London
we produced the best declaration that we have
ever produced, the only one which is really
readable by our publics, where we offered
a non-aggression pact to the East, where we
pledged that we would not militarily exploit
the vacuum in central Eastern Europe, where
we invited Gorbachev to visit NATO headquarters.
In 1991, we set up the North Atlantic Cooperation
Council, which is today of course the Euro
Atlantic Partnership Cooperation Council,
inviting these countries not necessarily to
join NATO but to come and talk with us about
the future of European security.
And in 1994 around a lunch table in Truman
Hall, the residence of the US Ambassador to
NATO, we invented the Partnership for Peace,
one of the best ideas in post war history
which will allow all of these countries to
be associated with NATO and to benefit from
NATO’s defence reform whether they wanted
to join or not.
Douglas Hurd, him again, the former British
Foreign Secretary, said that this was a comfortable
waiting room while we worked out what to do
with these countries of Central and Eastern
Europe.
I think frankly NATO was also helped by the
fact that the European Union at that time
was in the throes of currency union, going
through the Maastricht Treaty, once again
preoccupied with its own institutional reform.
The common foreign and security policy of
the European Union had not yet been born.
The hour of Europe which we’ll talk about
on Thursday had not yet arrived in the former
Yugoslavia and so to some degree NATO took
advantage of the fact that we were the outward
looking institution at a time when the European
Union was still largely an inward looking
institution.
Well ladies and gentlemen as I come to the
end, did we manage the end of Cold War well?
Well difficult question.
Lately a mood of revisionism inevitably has
set in – historians love to be revisionists.
What seemed at the time to be so miraculous,
of course has left an aftertaste, particularly
in Russia which of course experienced the
end of the Cold War rather differently to
its satellite states in Central and Eastern
Europe.
Putin a couple of years ago said that the
biggest tragedy of the 20th Century was the
collapse of the Soviet Union when the vast
majority of Europeans would say on the contrary,
it was the biggest success story and that
Ronald Reagan was right when he described
that as ‘the evil empire.’
We now know from research, particularly the
famous Black Book on Communism, which came
out a few years ago, that over 100 million
people died at the hands of various communist
regimes in the 20th Century and therefore
there was absolutely no reason whatever to
feel any kind of nostalgia for a system that
not only had failed to deliver its vision
of an egalitarian society but often had imposed
a rather bloody toll on its own citizens.
I’m not being a propagandist in saying that,
I think it’s objective truth.
But of course the fact that Russia, as a country
which had lost its empire but had not found
it easy to find a new role, felt humiliated
by the process, obviously has meant that the
final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, reconciliation
with Russia, bringing Russia into the same
democratic Euro-Atlantic system has not yet
happened even 20 years on and how to do so
today is still one of the biggest questions
on NATO’s agenda.
Of course, Russians experienced the end of
the Cold War in a traumatic way.
Their standard of living collapsed, the theory
at the time was shock therapy – there was
a lot of shock but not very much therapy.
An egalitarian society, at least on the surface,
suddenly became very unequal.
By 2004 as the result of privatization via
the oligarchs, there were 36 Russian billionaires
with a combined wealth of 110 billion dollars,
in other words 25 percent of the entire Russian
GDP.
Not bad huh?
Even in the United States with all of these
rich bankers you don’t have a situation
where 36 people own 25 percent of GDP.
Was the transition too brutal, should it have
been slowed down, is a legitimate question
to ask.
But I don’t believe that the West frankly
can be blamed for the fact that Russia still
felt badly treated or humiliated.
We recognized Russia rapidly as the successor
state of the Soviet Union.
The nuclear weapons that were in Ukraine,
Kazakhstan, Belarus were given back to Russia
with the support of the Western countries.
NATO announced that it would not station forces
nor nuclear weapons on the territory of its
new member states or in Eastern Europe.
Indeed between ‘90 and ‘94 Germany gave
Russia 71 billion dollars in various forms
of assistance and 36 billion dollars to other
countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
There was absolutely no desire on behalf of
the Western countries to humiliate Russia.
In fact Bush was very, very careful to avoid
all kinds of triumphalist language along the
lines of we won the Cold War, we’re the
winners and you’re the losers.
But it’s also true of course that countries
which perceived themselves to be on the losing
edge often invent all kinds of myths as to
why that has happened.
By the 1990s the theme that was going around
was that of Weimar Russia modelled on the
Weimar Republic.
The myth of the Dolchstoß: that an empire
which had been strong, had been somehow stabbed
in the back by Gorbachev and by other devious
politicians and that the Soviet Union had
more or less given up the Cold War without
getting what it should have got in return.
In other words should you be rewarded for
doing the right thing?
This is a key question, but that survives
to this day.
Finally the legacy of 1989.
Well we all know that history is written by
the victors.
I love this quotation from Winston Churchill.
He said “history will be the judge and I
will write the history.”
It’s true.
In 1989 all of those debates of the earlier
part of the century, which I mentioned to
you, the debate about you know whether democracy
was the natural form of government, whether
democracies produced the goods – that debate
had been swept away.
Francis Fukuyama, the American intellectual,
published his famous article in a national
interest The End of History.
No more debates, life would be boring, there
would be nothing to argue about, no competition
of values; the West had sort of won the argument.
Der Spiegel said that we didn’t need an
army anymore because henceforth the military
factor would no longer play in politics.
Peace had broken out, we were all harvesting
the peace dividend.
It’s seen that henceforth as Flora Lewis,
the famous columnist of the New York Times
put it, “when guns force silence, money
talks.”
In fact the future of NATO would be as a financial
institution.
Of course we realize now that that notion
of a perpetual peace, a world without challenges,
a holiday from history, a strategic vacation,
call it what you like, that has all become
an illusion.
Peace did not break out or only for a short
time.
Security military forces did not suddenly
become redundant, we use them more today in
more places than ever.
If you’re in the military, your chance of
getting killed is infinitely greater than
at any time during the Cold War with the exception
of Korea of course and Vietnam.
The idea that we could rely only on soft power:
wrong.
Hard power still counts and we need more of
it in places like Afghanistan.
Teddy Roosevelt said “speak softly and carry
a big stick” and certainly we need a bigger
stick if we are to speak softly.
We’ve discovered that the paradigm of great
power war, which had occupied everybody, had
given way to a whole new set of challenges
which we’ll talk about on Thursday: Islamic
terrorism or at least religiously inspired
extremism, the threat of nuclear proliferation.
I saw the head of the Atomic Energy Agency,
El Baradei, the other day say that nearly
50 countries now have the ability to make
nuclear weapons around the world.
There is a phrase, ‘you may not like war
but war likes you.’
In other words, you may want to escape from
these conflicts and declare neutrality, which
you still could do in the Cold War, but you
can’t do it today.
I was in Munich over the weekend at the Security
Conference and President Sarkozy put it a
very nice way, he said “you can either have
peace or you can be asked to be allowed to
live in peace or at least to be in peace,
in a sense to be left in peace.”
I … leave me in peace, I don’t want to
be bothered but as Sarkozy put it if you want
peace rather than to be allowed to be left
in peace, you have to have a proactive approach
for dealing with these problems.
If we don’t go to Afghanistan, Afghanistan
is going to come to us.
So yes in a way it’s true that 20 years
on that dream world of 1989, the springtime
of the nations, the Immanuel Kant’s period
of perpetual peace, the reconciliation of
groups of brother and sister, the sort of
outlawing of war, no that unfortunately has
not happened.
Does that mean that it was all a dream, an
illusion, a kind of interlude, a sunny day
between storms?
No.
There is another lesson of 1989 and I think
that we should remember that this year.
Why this year?
Because this year is a bad year 2009: the
New York Stock Exchange has lost 14 trillion
dollars over the last 12 months, the credit
crunch is now producing not just poor bankers
but more jobless people.
Throughout the world we face not just the
recession, but the prospect of a depression
which could be as bad as the 1930s.
It’s a gloomy time, particularly if you
believe in the ability of people to determine
their futures.
But even, even that arch determinist Karl
Marx who believed so much in social forces
still said “men make history.”
The lesson of 1989 for us today is that spectacular
change is possible.
Even the direst situation can be rescued through
faith, courage, organization, determination.
People can take their future into their own
hands.
We are not the passive sort of victims of
processes over which we have no control.
Europe does not have to be as the Czech politician
Tomas Masaryk once put it, “a laboratory
atop a vast graveyard.”
So in this doom and gloom, particularly on
the financial front in 2009, let’s just
remember or at least try to regain some of
the optimism and belief of 1989 to get ourselves
out of the mess we’re in.
Thank you very much.
Questions and answers
Q: I have a rather personal question to you
Mr. Shea.
How did you live and witness this 9th of November
1989?
Because this intrigues me because I, I have
the impression that that particular day had,
yeah, was the same, you had the same impression
maybe or can be compared to the 9/11 for let’s
say people of our generation.
Dr. Jamie Shea: Yeah I mean you’re absolutely
right to point out to the 9/11 because in
Europe you know the great change was 11/9
as the Americans call it, putting the month
before the day, which was a theme of liberation,
of happiness, of freedom, of threats being
reduced.
And of course for Americans the transforming
experience was 9/11 which was one of 3000
casualties, terrorist attacks, a feeling of
vulnerability, of suddenly safety unexpectedly
disappearing.
And it was later said that during the period
of the Iraq War in 2003 that the fundamental
problem between Europeans and Americans is
Americans have become much more pessimistic
and gloomy about the world and more determined
that they had to sort of deal with dangers
wherever they were confronted, a loss of innocence,
whereas of course in Europe we were still
in the honeymoon period of the fall of the
Berlin Wall believing all problems could be
solved through diplomacy, soft power, through
the United Nations, through resolutions and
that military force would always make the
situation worse rather than better.
I think there’s some truth in that, you
know because of these two different experiences,
11/9 versus 9/11.
The two halves of the Atlantic for a while
at least went off in different directions
and now of course in NATO over Afghanistan
we’re trying to bring those two strategic
cultures together, saying to the Americans
– well a bit more effort on the civilian
side, please and the Americans are saying
– fine but then you Europeans, a bit more
effort on the military side, please, so that
we are more or less doing the equal thing.
For me, it was a surprise just how quickly
the communist regimes collapse, I would admit
that.
The communist, you remember the lectures,
the communist regimes had always shown a willingness
to impose force: Hungary ‘56, East Germany
‘53, Czechoslovakia ‘68, the Brezhnev
Doctrine, you remember.
At the end of the day they would experiment
with reform, they might even allow some liberalization.
Poland, for example, was allowed to develop
private agriculture in the 1970s.
But at the end of the day if Soviet rule was
threatened, then they would intervene to preserve
that.
They couldn’t allow their security system
to unravel.
Well there were two big shocks for me in 1989.
Shock number one was that the Soviet Union
was … refused to countenance the use of
force.
There’s a famous example when Rakowski,
the leader of the Polish Communist Party,
when Solidarity was about to take power in
the Polish elections, phoned Gorbachev and
said: Gorbachev, what do I do, what do I do,
you know, give me your advice.
And Gorbachev in a 40 minute conversation
told him: let it happen.
In other words the communist leaders of Eastern
Europe had no autonomy, you know, they had
no autonomy outside Moscow.
This was strange.
They had not managed to build up any kind
of national power base which was not totally
dependent, you know, they had no idea what
to do unless Moscow told them.
That was the first surprise, that total degree
of dependency.
The second thing was that, have you ever seen
the film The Wizard of Oz?
Well you remember the wizard, he’s this
very powerful dictatorial character and at
the end of the movie Judy Garland, who was
determined to see the wizard, goes behind
the screen and suddenly sees that it’s a
pathetic old man with a projector.
In other words the wizard doesn’t exist,
it’s just an illusion, or if he does exist,
he’s a shadow of the real thing.
And that was the real discovery, that these
structures which on the surface looked incredibly
powerful: secret police, military forces,
ideology, you know, very hard headed people
who had been in the revolutionary struggle
all their lives but had in fact no power.
They had the appearance of power but there
was nothing behind it, rather like the Wizard
of Oz, they were sort of completely empty
shell regimes and that once there was a little
push to challenge it, challenge them, they
collapsed.
But it also, I think, is a humbling lesson
in political science.
We think we understand places, we think we
understand regimes, we think we can make predictions
but at the end of the day we always get it
wrong, everything takes us by surprise and
we know nothing.
We pretend to know but in reality we don’t.
It’s always the great sort of revenge of
history upon anybody who tries to understand
history.
It’s like a mountain that can never really
be conquered.
