EUROPE: TIME TO MAKE THE BIG DEAL

THE classic Cold War confrontation be- tween the two superpowers, between Nato and the Warsaw Pact, between militant capitalism and militant collectivism, is rapidly being replaced by a more fluid relationship. The reason for this is clear. The rulers of Soviet Russia, almost over- whelmed by its internal problems, have renounced their claim to be creating the society of the future and to constitute an altefnative to the world system. Instead, they have decided to become part of it.

In a sense, then, this means putting the clock back to 1917, or rather to 1914. Of course there are important differences. In 1914 Tsarist Russia had the world's fastest- growing economy, which over the past decade had grown more swiftly even than America's or Japan's. Today, Soviet Rus- sia has the weakest and least productive of all the major economies, and there is no evidence at all that its rulers know how to reverse its relative decline. On the other hand, in a purely military sense, Russia is one of the only two superpowers in the world. It is, and is likely to remain for many years, the paramount force in the Eurasian land-mass. As its sole military rival is the United States, some of the

Paul Johnson argues that the break-up of the Eastern bloc opens the way for the world dominance of a Greater Europe

tension of the last 40 years is likely to continue. But, as Russia abandons collec- tivist certitudes and edges itself nervously into the world market system, this tension will take the form of traditional Great Power rivalry rather then ideological com- petition. In a way, we are crossing another great historical watershed, like the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. That key event did not end war. But it ended the wars of religion. Thereafter alliance and wars were motivated by secular greed rather than doctrinal rectitude. So it is today. Now greed may not be very elegant, but it has two merits. It is the same everywhere. And it is basically rational. So, as Russia be- comes 'normal', it may continue to be dangerous and perhaps even aggressive. But it will speak the same language as anyone else. We are leaving the Age of Doctrine. We are entering the Age of Deals. That is progress.

How will Europe fare in the Age of Deals? Before we can try to answer this question, we must remind ourselves of three important, indeed salient, facts about the Europe of today. And the first fact is that Europe is living through the most fortunate epoch in its entire history. In 1945 it was in ruins and virtually impotent, its future apparently in the hands of two non-European powers, Russia and the United States. Today, in 1989, it has already enjoyed the longest period free from general war — 44 years, 1945-89, as opposed to the next best, 43 years, 1871- 1914 — since the very concept of 'Europe' was formed in the Dark Ages. The second fact is equally remarkable. West of the Iron Curtain, and again for the first time in its history, every single European state is a parliamentary democracy under the rule of law. That is an astonishing fact, and one to which far too little attention is paid. Thirdly, Europe west of the Iron Curtain is making steady progress towards creating common economic institutions. This third fact helps to explain why all the free European states, without exception, are enjoying the highest living standards in their history, and it holds out even better prospects in the 1990s, as the 1992 single market begins to have an impact.

If free Europe has been able to flourish and advance in the Age of Doctrine, it ought to do still better in the Age of Deals. For a self-unifying Europe, as it has slowly come into existence, is a remarkably un- doctrinal and undogmatic concept. It is very much an empirical creation, itself the product of deals. The true architect of the European Community, Jean Monnet, was a man of grand ideas but remarkably free of ideology. He wanted Europe to advance step by step feeling its way through a series of practical deals. He wanted its rules to be the minimum, its institutions to be as uncumbersome as possible and its bureaucracy to be minuscule. Monnet's wishes have not been carried out in all respects — there are, for instance, too many regulations and certainly too many bureaucrats. Nevertheless, the notion of proceeding by a series of mutually accept- able, hard-headed deals which reflect the realities of economic power, has remained the working dynamic of the community.

We can in fact note three stages in the making of the new Europe, each the result of a deal. The first was the decision of the French and the West Germans to dissolve their ancient rivalries and hatreds and come together in a working economic relationship. Without this basic deal no European agreement would have been possible. It took the form of the French government renouncing its traditional in- dustrial protectionism and giving West Germany access to its markets. In return, the Germans accepted the broad terms of the Common Agricultural Policy, a French system of farm support which allowed France, over a period, to reduce its tradi- tional peasantry from nearly a half to not much over a tenth of the population, and in doing so to become a modern industrial country.

This was the rational, concrete deal which has worked on the whole very well, and it was on the basis of this deal that the second phase, the creation of the original European Economic Community, was able to proceed. The original 'Europe of the Six' had an organising geographical princi- ple — it was the Europe of the great river-valleys radiating from the Alps. It also had, or appeared to have, an organis- ing historical principle, since it was very much the Europe of the Carolingian empire. As such it did seem to have ideological underpinning, and in the 1950s, even before the Treaty of Rome was signed, those who favoured it were often termed, in a hostile sense, les Carolingiens, who were seen as men of a certain rigid, ideological turn of mind. Men like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi, who shared common attitudes on religion, the family, the state, the business world, were accused of seeking to recreate

the mediaeval Europe of 'Christendom:, albeit in a modern industrialised form.

Clearly, if Community Europe had re- mained within its original bounds it might have developed marked ideological charac- teristics on these lines. But thanks to the decision of Britain to force its way into the Common Market in the early 1970s, allow- ing Europe to enter a third phasie, taking in part of Scandinavia and the Iberian penin- sula and moving even into the Balkans, the unifying principles of 'Carolingian Europe' were abandoned. This third deal, or series of deals, opened the way to a Europe on a much wider scale.

It is precisely this wise decision to expand the European Community which makes it possible for us to enter the Age of the Deal with confidence, and even with a certain excitement. If the EEC had kept its Carolingian boundaries and ideological limitations, all kinds of obstacles, perhaps including insuperable ones, would have arisen to the process of reconciling it with the consequences of Russia's decision to become a 'normal' Great Power. In par- ticular, the problem of a continually di- vided Germany would have remained as intractable as ever.

As it is, however, a flexible, expanding, dynamic European Community, should have no long-term difficulty in responding to the new prospects which are opening up. It can even contemplate them with relish. For a Europe which embraces, and has adjusted itself to, Britain and Denmark, Spain and Greece, as well as the old core countries, is clearly a Europe which has nothing to fear — and much to gain from a dissolution of the old Iron Curtain. For membership is already open to those European peoples who have embraced democracy and the rule of law, and who are willing to accept the Community's supranational institutions and do a deal to enter.

That being so, as Europe behind the Iron Curtain liberalises and normalises itself, as the market is embraced and democratic institutions make their appear- ance, it seems right and inevitable that the European Community should expand east- wards as it has already expanded south and north. Poland has recently, in effect, elected itself the first non-communistgov- ernment in Eastern Europe for 40 years. Hungary is moving in the same direction and has now torn down its old physical frontier barriers with Austria, so that refugees from East Germany can cross it without fear of mines or being shot on the wire. Even East Germany itself will have to change. For the East, normalisation means Europeanisation and the process has already started. In Warsaw they proud- ly take you to a monolith in a public park, a stone whch they claim is the exact geog- raphical centre of the European continent. And of course if you define Europe as running from the Atlantic to the Urals, that claim is justified.

The entry of these peoples, as and when they liberate themselves and resume their legitimate rights of self-determination, will be part of a further expansion of the Community idea to the limits of its con- tinental frontiers — an expansion which will include Austria, and possibly Switzer- land, and the whole of Scandinavia, includ- ing Finland. Within the context of this expansion, it should be possible to tackle, and finally resolve, the historic problem of Germany. Germany was always too big and powerful, the Germans too industrious and numerous, to play a limited role in central Europe. Therein lay the origin of two world wars. In 1945 the problem was temporarily shelved by keeping Germany divided and thus comparatively weak. Un- til very recently the Russians had been totally unwilling to contemplate any change in this messy but, for them, conve- nient arrangement. However, a reunited, wholly sovereign and independent Ger- many is one thing. A unified Germany within the supranational constraints and in the context of communal decision-taking of the EEC is quite another. This can be made to operate without arousing any reasonable fears among Germany's neigh- bours — as Mikhail Gorbachev has already implicitly acknowledged when he express- ed his view that the Berlin Wall would go in time. The European Community's poli- tical and economic institutions provide the context for removing ancient national fears and antagonisms of all kinds, including the still unresolved ethnic frontier disputes of Eastern Europe, between Germans and Poles, Poles and Lithuanians, Hungarians and Rumanians, to mention three of many cases. For the last half-century, first Hitler, then Stalin and his successors, kept the lid firmly down on these old but living animo- sities — which were the immediate cause of both world wars — and they are re- emerging into the open as the Soviet grip is relaxed. We have hitherto seen the Euro- pean Community as the institution where- by the old Franco-German hatred has been buried, for ever. But the truth is that it is a practical mutual-security system with a much wider scope, for by persistently enlarging the area of shared law and the authority of common institutions, it makes the frontiers of all its members, and their ethnicity too, seem less and less important. There may come a day when the growth of Community law and institutions may make even the problem of Ulster seem obsolete.

That being so, an enlarged Community may find itself taking aboard more and more of the peoples of Eastern Europe. If, for instance, Austria joins, it will not be easy to resist the demands not just of the Czechs and the Slovakians but of the Slovenes, Croatians and Dalmatians, who still share the important if ghostly bond of having belonged to the Habsburg Empire. If, from behind a dissolving Iron Curtain, the Poles and Prussians come in — as well as free Baltic states like Sweden and Finland — how in logic can we deny entry to the Estonians and Latts, and Lithua- nians?

That, in turn, raises the biggest question of all so far, the relationship with Soviet Russia. For one of the most fascinating aspects of what is happening in Russia today is that, in becoming a 'normal' Great Power again, Russia is also becoming more of a European one too. It is ceasing to be the realised socialist Utopia, relinquishing its role as the foundation-state and custo- dian of the international Marxist revolu- tion. In so doing, it is recovering its earlier incarnation as a great bulwark of European civilisation — the Russia of Peter the Great and St Petersburg, his graceful Baltic foundation, the Russia of Alexander I and the liberation of Europe from Napoleon, the Russia which saw itself as being, among other things the residual legatee of Byzan- tine Christianity — the Third Rome. That such a change responds to a huge need among the peoples of European Russia goes without saying. For them to look West, into Europe, is to hope.

If Europe is an entity 'from the Atlantic to the Urals', then the Russians belong there. But this acceptance must be qual- ified in two vital ways. First, if Russia is to become again part of Europe, in an institu- tional sense, it must renounce its global aspirations. It cannot be both part of the European Community and a world super- power, deploying its armies in the heart of Asia and the Far East, and its navies in all the oceans. It must choose, and if it opts for Europe it must decolonise. Moreover, it must decolonise not merely in Asia from Vladivostok to the Caucasus. It must also decolonise in Europe. Not merely the former satellites, but the Baltic peoples, possibly the Ukranians and the White Russians too, the Georgians, the Cossacks and the Armenians, and others, must be given choices and, if they opt for independ- ence, sovereignty. But the second qual- ification is equally important. For Russia to become eligible and ready to join the community, it will of course have to embrace market disciplines in a much more thoroughgoing way than any Gorbachev has yet contemplated — that goes without saying. But what will also be required is a cultural conversion of a quite different kind. Russia will have to recover, and bring to the forefront of her daily consciousness, her European past. This can be done simultaneously in a number of different ways but, if there is one paramount way in which it must be done, it is by allowing the Christian religion once more to occupy the forefront of life. For Russia is at heart a profoundly Christian country, and that Christian consciousness is her chief title- deed to her European status. The claim to be the Third Rome is not wholly specious. It is worth noting that much of what is now Roman Catholic Lithuania was first evangelised from Christian Moscow, long before the Reformation — before indeed the schism between the Latin and the Greek Christians in the 11th century. If Russia de-colonises itself, if it returns to the 'natural' frontiers of its dominant ethnic group, the Greater Russians, it will in effect be carrying out the same process of homogenisation, the return to the his- toric core, which Ataturk successfully car- ried out in Turkey in the aftermath of the 1914-18 war. But that healthy and neces- sary process was accompanied by secular- isation. Imperial Russia, by contrast, is a forcibly secularised state, and its return to its historical ethnic core must be accompa- nied by the resurgence of religious freedom to make it successful.

While making this optimistic survey of how and why the concept of the European Community can be extended eastward. I have so far left out of the equation a key factor — free Europe's links with the United States. Free Europe is a salient part of 'the West'; and 'the West' is inconceiv- able without America. It is worth recalling that in the decade after the second world war, when Stalinist imperialism was trium- phant in central and Eastern Europe, free Europe itself survived only by virtue of the military and economic help the United States provided through Nato and the Marshall Plan. At the famous 'Festival of the 20th Century' organised by the Con- gress for Cultural Freedom in Paris in 1952, the great French novelist Andre Malraux went so far as to declare: 'Amer- ica is now part of Europe.'

In an important sense that was true in 1952. It remains true today. For Europe is not just or not even primarily a geographic- al concept. It never has been. It is essen- tially a cultural concept. It was born of the union of two historical forces, which together constitute the most powerful cultural current in human history. These two forces are the cultural legacy of the classical world of Greece and Rome, and the moral legacy of mediaeval Christen- dom. The civilisation this union produces is not bounded by geographical space. It has always been exportable — and it has been exported. From the late 15th century on- wards there grew up the physical reality of 'Europe Overseas'.

This flow of European colonists, who settled all over the world, was a human and cultural expansion which no amount of de-colonisation can ever efface. For over four centuries the onward flow of people continued, creating scores of nations which remain, in a cultural sense, ineffacably European, what might be called, on the analogy of Magna Graecia, 'Greater Europe'.

So here we come to a paradox. Which is the more truly 'European' — Russia or the United States? Which is closer in a cultural sense: Britain and Australia, say, or Bri-

tain and Denmark?

The answers may be found by thinking of Europe not so much in geographical, political and economic terms, as in cultural terms. Early in the 1960s I was struck by a remark of President de Gaulle's. He spoke of 'the Europe of Dante, of Chateaubriand and of Goethe'. My first thought, at the time, was that he should have added 'and of Shakespeare'. My second thought was how right de Gaulle was to think of Europe more in terms of its literature, for these four great writers and their works tell us more about what constitutes 'Europe' than the Treaty of Rome can ever do. Once we begin to perceive Europe as a creation of its writers, and its painters and composers and architects too, we begin to see how impossible it is to set geographical limits and to say, 'Thus far and no further'. We are talking, for instance, of the Europe of Ibsen, of Kierkegaard, of Strindberg, of Grieg and Sibelius. If it is right — and it surely is right — to speak of the Europe of Tolstoy, of Dostoievsky, of Turgenev and Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, how do we categorise such figures as Henry James and Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright are they not, in a sense, part of 'European' culture too? If the answer to the question is 'Yes', as it surely must be, how does this affect the future of Europe as a political and economic entity?

It means that the future of Europe, and its relationships with the superpowers, in the 1990s and beyond, will be an expansive rather than a contracting one, that it will be a wider future rather than a narrow one. Any notion of a Europe consolidating itself behind a high tariff wall, of becoming a protectionist superstate, must be rejected. Europe must keep all its windows to the world flung wide open, letting in all the breezes and competition, ideas and innova- tion. It must be a fresh-air Europe.

But, following on from this thought, in the very long term, the European structure will have to be considered the prototype for something much more ambitous. Talk of world government is at least a century old, and has got nowhere. The League of Nations and the United Nations have been exemplary and depressing failures. But an ever-widening association, based on shared cultural values, is a more promising idea. Two and a half millennia ago, the Greeks saw such an entity as the oikoumene, the inhabited-civilised world, which shared Greek ideas and beyond which lay chaos. In post-war Europe, we have begun to build, for the first time, a community which looks beyond the nation-state, which is not just an idea or an aspiration but a practical entity. It works, and it is growing. The European cultural concept is not a continental idea. It is a global one. In creating institutions which embody it, prac- tical, working institutions, we are taking the first steps towards an ecumenical com- munity which will ultimately spread to all four corners of our planet.