History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Yet it may also fail by succeeding. That is, succeed in the narrow, technical, sense but fail in the broader purpose. A single market is perhaps difficult to sustain without a single currency, but it may be even more difficult to sustain with a clear, formalized division between monetary core and periphery. And how would this work in the councils of EU-rope? Would representatives of the core states have separate meetings on those fundamental issues of fiscal and macro-economic policy on which they would now need a common stance? (The idea of EMU as gold standard, with each state bound to keep its own budgetary house in order or go broke, is theoretically attractive but not practical European politics.) Or would the core group be a permanent caucus, coming to each Council with an agreed position? One of the great strengths of the EU is its flexibility: You have changing national alliances on different issues. Set one alliance in concrete, and you risk breaking the whole structure.

  The great gamble of this Continental project is that the Franco-German core will indeed be magnetic, that where Bonn and Paris lead others will sooner or later follow. And the reason why people in Bonn and Paris (and quite a few older “pro-Europeans” in London) think this will happen is that that is roughly what did happen for about thirty-five years, from 1955 to 1990. But a process that worked, almost with the regularity of a physics demonstration, in the air-cooled laboratory of “Western Europe” in the cold war will not necessarily work in the same way in the much larger, messier, post-Wall Europe of today.

  Anyone who has played with magnets as a child knows that they can have two effects: one way around they attract, the other way they repel. There is now a serious danger of the would-be magnetic core exerting magnetic repulsion. The best can be the enemy of the good. The rationalist, functionalist, perfectionist attempt to “make Europe” or “complete Europe” through a hard core built around a rapid monetary union could well end up achieving the opposite of the desired effect. A procedure aimed at finally overcoming the bad old European ways of competing nation-states and alliances risks hastening a return to precisely those bad old ways. Press the fast-forward button, and you go backward.

  Yet even if it succeeds, both economically and politically, even if Britain and others in the EU once again follow where France and Germany have led, this in itself offers nothing to the rest of Europe knocking at our door. Indeed, the current Inter-Governmental Conference threatens to be “Maastricht 2” in another sense—with the leaders of EU-rope so totally preoccupied with the EU’s own internal reforms that they simply don’t have enough time, energy, and attention left for the parts of Europe where our actions might actually make the difference between democracy and dictatorship, war and peace.

  Yet it is not enough to point out—empirically, skeptically, and pragmatically—the flaws and dangers in a Franco-German project that is, characteristically, at once teleological, idealistic, and instrumental. For the French and Germans will quite rightly retort, Do you have a better one? For anyone who cares about Europe, the task is therefore to come up with a better one. Or, at the very least, to ensure that there is something else under way so that the whole “European enterprise” at the end of the twentieth century is not seen to stand or fall with this hair-raising adventure, this Europe as Will and Idea, of unification through money.

  That “something” should, I believe, be a detailed project both for the enlargement of the present EU to include, over the next twenty years, the recently liberated second Europe, and, simultaneously, for a more closely coordinated and in some respects “common” foreign, security, and defense policy, to meet the challenges and dangers both within Europe itself and from the dangerous world around. This project would therefore approach the political goal directly, by political means, not by the functionalist diversion through economics. Unlike EMU, it would not be one simple big thing but a whole jigsaw of complex, piecemeal things, since it would necessarily involve many other, overlapping European institutions, and, above all, EU-rope’s second true pillar: NATO. But, however precisely it were done, it would require more sharing of power and sovereignty—both in the form of Qualified Majority Voting, without which an EU of twenty and more member states would simply not work, and in the rather different procedures for what one might call Qualified Minority Acting (by varying groups of states, but usually involving France, Germany, and Britain), which are what is needed in foreign, security, and defense policy.

  But if you don’t care about Europe as Europe, just about Britain as Britain, why bother and why pay the price? For two reasons: because if we don’t we’ll be left out, and because if we don’t we’ll be dragged in. Left out, in the short term, from the next stage of Franco-German EU-ro-building, with (at the very least) high risks for Britain; but then dragged in by the probable failure of that design and by the disorder of the rest of Europe, which that design does so little to address.

  There is a surreal, even a grotesque, discrepancy between the contorted, rapidly sleep-inducing, acronym-ridden, polit-bureaucratic detail of the current debate about reforming EU-rope and the huge, fateful, almost melodramatic challenges facing us across the rest of Europe after the end of the cold war. And yet our answer to the latter must start from the former—for where else should we start except where we are?

  And going where? All divisions of time are artificial, and perhaps the last five years of the twentieth century and the second millennium A.D. should be considered no differently from any other five years. But the millennial deadline does concentrate the mind. In these next five years, we probably have a larger chance but also a greater danger than at any time in the past fifty. The chance is that in 2000 more of Europe will be more peaceful, prosperous, democratic, and free than ever before in its history. The danger can also be described simply. If we get things wrong now, some time in the early part of the next century we will stop talking about 8 May 1945 as the end of the war in Europe—because there’ll be another.

  I develop this argument further in “The Case for Liberal Order,” p. 279.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1995

  16 MAY. Milan prosecutors propose that 160 politicians and business people should be tried for bribery and corruption. They also request the indictment of Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister until December 1994.

  25-26 MAY. NATO bombs Bosnian Serb targets. In revenge, Bosnian Serbs take UN peacekeepers hostage and shell “safe areas.”

  31 MAY. Prince Charles becomes the first member of the British royal family to visit Ireland since it gained independence in 1922.

  3 JUNE. Creation of a NATO “rapid-reaction force” to support UNPRO-FOR in Bosnia.

  9 JUNE. Russian president Yeltsin and Ukrainian president Kuchma sign an agreement on the future of the Black Sea fleet.

  11 AND 18 JUNE. In French local elections, the far-right National Front makes major gains.

  19 JUNE. Árpád Göncz is reelected president of Hungary.

  26-27 JUNE. An EU summit in Cannes. Agreement on an “irreversible” move to economic and monetary union by 1999.

  3 JULY. Serious rioting in Northern Ireland follows the early release of Private Lee Clegg, a British soldier serving a life sentence for shooting dead a Catholic driving a stolen car.

  4 JULY. British prime minister John Major wins the election for leadership of the Conservative Party, defeating John Redwood, who receives votes from Major’s “Euro-skeptic” critics.

  11 JULY. Bosnian Serb forces take the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica. Dutch UN peacekeepers offer no resistance. Local Bosniak men of military age are subsequently massacred by Bosnian Serbs; older men, women, and children are forced to flee. In Russia, President Yeltsin suffers a heart attack, starting a long period of impaired health.

  25 JULY. Bosnian Serb forces take the UN “safe area” of Zepa. The UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague indicts Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadžič and military commander Radko Mladič on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

  30 JULY. A Chechnya peace agreement prov
ides for withdrawal of Russian troops. The issue of formal independence is left unresolved.

  4 AUGUST. The Italian parliament approves a pension-reform plan, cutting public expenditure.

  5-9 AUGUST. Croatian forces retake Serb-held Krajina in “Operation Storm.” More than 150,000 local Serbs flee.

  AUGUST. Holidays in a part of western Poland that was Germany until 1945. The architecture is still overwhelmingly unmistakably German. The redbrick Gothic church is a German Protestant church with a Virgin Mary and twelve stations of the cross slapped around the walls to make it a Polish Catholic one. Many of the place-names are just Polish translations of the original German names. On the murderously busy main road from Poznan to Berlin, a billboard advertises “New Cars—after accidents in Germany.” The Germans are not yet coming back in any great numbers, whether as landowners, factory owners, or pleasure seekers. But as Poland comes closer to the West, and the German capital moves to nearby Berlin, they surely will.

  28 AUGUST. Another mortar bombing of a marketplace in Sarajevo.

  AUGUST-SEPTEMBER. NATO responds by a series of air attacks on Bosnian Serb positions, including their artillery emplacements around Sarajevo.

  31 AUGUST. The son of Slovak president Michal Kováč is kidnapped and taken to Austria. Operatives of the Slovak intelligence service, answerable to Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, are almost certainly involved.

  14 SEPTEMBER. Bosnian Serbs remove their heavy weaponry from around Sarajevo.

  27 SEPTEMBER. The European Court of Human Rights condemns the 1988 Gibraltar killing of three unarmed IRA terrorists by British security forces.

  7 OCTOBER. Representatives of Greek and Turkish political parties in Cyprus express commitment to a negotiated solution for the island.

  12 OCTOBER. A sixty-day cease-fire in Bosnia, negotiated by U.S. mediator Richard Holbrooke, comes into effect.

  CLEANSED CROATIA

  Zagreb

  I NEED NO VISA TO ENTER CROATIA. PLANINKA FROM BELGRADE does. She had to wait for weeks and got one only because Slavko Goldstein, her editor here, intervened with the Croat authorities. But others have been refused, in both directions. It’s as if I, as an Englishman, were suddenly forbidden to visit Cardiff. “Yugoslavia was a small country,” says Slavko, “and now we’ve made five even smaller ones.”

  At dinner in one of Zagreb’s plush restaurants, we talk about the siege of Sarajevo. “The Serbs” did this, a Croat friend tells us; “the Serbs” do that. Planinka, a lady of a certain age, smartly dressed, and immaculately made up, has an almost permanently fixed smile. But I wonder how she feels. Serb?

  “Before the war,” says Slavko, and for a moment I think he means, “Before the war …” This is Europe’s new semantic dividing line. In Britain, France, or Germany, “the war” still means 1939—1945. Here it means 1991-1995. So far, that is, since no one knows whether the war has really ended or merely paused for a year.

  To Glina

  With Slavko, his son Ivo, and Planinka packed into a puttering Renault 4, we drive south from Zagreb to the Krajina, under Serb rule for nearly four years but now “liberated” by the Croatian army in “Operation Storm.” At Karlovac, where Slavko lived as a boy, we visit the marketplace bombed by the besieging Serb forces. Look, here’s the mark of the mortar bomb on the pavement; that’s where the shoppers died.

  On the way out of town, we pick up Mate, an elderly Croat farmer who hid Slavko in his village during the war (the last war, that is), when the Ustasha—the Croat fascists—were rounding up the Jews of Karlovac. Slavko then went off to fight with Tito’s communist partisans, but Mate hid in the woods, refusing to fight for any side. The old man has a broad, nut-brown face, a ready smile beneath the cloth cap, and quiet dignity.

  Leaving Karlovac, we cross what for the last four years was the Serb front line. Suddenly all the houses are roofless, scorched, plundered, or simply reduced to rubble. It’s like the photographs of German cities in 1945, except in color and 3-D. We come upon a man demolishing, brick by red brick, a wall that is still standing. The bricks are then passed down a line, composed mainly of women and children, to a woman who crouches in the ruins. She carefully brushes off each intact brick and places it on a pile, ready for the rebuilding. In Germany in 1945 they called such women Trümmerfrauen, the women of the ruins.

  We drive eastward along the valley of the river Kupa, which for much of its length was the front line, just twenty miles south of Zagreb as the missile flies. In the Croat villages, almost every house has been plundered and had the roof burned or blown out by the occupying Serbs. Here and there, we see Croats returning to their houses, starting over, with the checkerboard flag of Croatia flying from the balcony. But for the most part the villages are still deserted.

  We stop off at the house of Mate’s son-in-law, well built, with a still intact solid concrete roof and a good view down the valley. It has survived because the Serbs used it as a command and observation post. Inside, red-painted graffiti in the Serbs’ Cyrillic script say, “Welcome to the heroes,” “Keep this place clean!” and “If you want to eat, wash up the dishes!” Orderly folk.

  On down the valley, and then—bang! bang!—two tires on the little Renault have blown as we hit a giant pothole. A passing farmer takes Mate and Slavko off in his trailer to find someone who has the right kind of spare tire. Planinka, still smiling, wanders off into the bushes to have a pee, but Ivo shouts at her: “Stop! The verges are mined!” Half an hour later, Mate and Slavko come back in a lorry with a spare tire and a thickset farmer, grinning from ear to ear. He is a Serb, married to a Croat, and during the Serb occupation he protected the houses of his Croat neighbors. We can see their roofs along the skyline of a nearby hill, miracles of intactness. Now, we are told, he is a hero to the local Croats. But he does seem desperately eager to please. Fear lines his grin.

  Mate’s village, Kovačevac, has hardly a house intact. He leads us through some long grass to an area of rubble and twisted metal: all that is left of an eighteenth-century wooden church, a fine and rare example of its kind. Planinka picks up a small piece of twisted bronze and turns it around. It is beautiful. I feel that she would love to place it on her studio table. But then she puts it back. After all, she, too, is a Serb.

  When Mate came back from hiding in the woods in 1945, he was elected mayor of Kovačevac. He helped rebuild not just his own village, but also the neighboring Serb village of Prško, which had been the victim of an Ustasha atrocity. In 1941, some four hundred women and children had been rounded up by crack troops of the Ustasha leader Ante Pavelič and slaughtered in the forest. So in 1991, when most of the Croats fled before the advancing Serbs, Mate stayed. He’d seen out four regimes, he said, and he’d see out this regime, too. But one night Serb friends came to his house and told him to escape at once. You’ve seen too much, they said. You know who did the plundering and killing. They’re coming to get you. So once again—fifty years on—Mate took to the woods. He stole down to the river Kupa, found a boat, and rowed across to the Croat-controlled side. Next night, Serbs—“Chetniks” says Mate, using the old term for Serb nationalist partisans—came and killed several of the elderly Croats who had stayed in Kovačevac.

  Now Mate and his friends are putting their farms together again. They find the barn roof stacked up as spare timber in a farmyard two villages away. They find the tractor abandoned in a field. And, if they don’t find their own possessions, they take someone else’s. Mate’s immediate neighbor came back with a trailer, which Mate recognized as his own. “Give it me back,” said Mate. “No,” said his neighbor. “I found it. You take another one!”

  We leave Mate to attend the first normal funeral in this village for four years. A normal death—a cause for celebration. In Prško, the bust of the local Serb hero—a close comrade of Gavrilo Princip, the man who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914—has been hacked off and thrown into a hedge. Serb houses are still flying white flags. But virtually all the inhabitants h
ave fled, in the exodus of the Serb population of the Krajina, the biggest single exodus of the war. More than 150,000 people filled the roads to Serbia and Serb-controlled Bosnia. A village became a hundred yards of traffic—vans, tractors, and trailers piled high with baggage and pets and wailing children. Again, I think of 1945, and the endless columns of Germans fleeing westward before the Red Army, from East Prussia and Silesia. Here, as there, the war has come full circle. Innocent women and children are punished for the crimes of their compatriots. Nemesis.

  In one low wooden house we find an old peasant woman, with a deeply lined face, black woolen headscarf, gnarled hands. She, too, had fled with the village, seven days on the road to Belgrade. “Ay, ay,” she sighs, and lifts her hands. But her son went via Hungary to Belgrade and brought her back again. They were lucky to get through. Although paying lip service to the refugees’ “right to return,” the Croat authorities are making it very difficult for anyone to do so.

  We drive through more eerily empty villages, with just the occasional pig wandering along the verge, to the town of Glina, scene of another Ustasha massacre during the Second World War. Here, Serbs from the local area were told they would be spared if they converted to Roman Catholicism. They marched, singing, along the road into Glina. Then they were herded into the Orthodox church and massacred.

  Today, this is a ghost town. The Croats fled in 1991; now the Serbs have fled, too, while most of the Croats have yet to return. However, the Croat administration has started the work of reconstruction by converting a memorial pavilion to the victims of the Ustasha massacre into a “Croat House.” They have removed the marble tablets bearing the names of the Serb victims, raised the checkerboard flag, and held a liberation concert to inaugurate this Croat cultural institute. Western civilization has triumphed.