IT’S TEMPTING to dismiss this all as a joke. Ruthenia even sounds like something out of a Tintin book; perhaps a neighbor to Ruritania. And the provisional government is certainly good for a laugh. Yet the Ruthenian Question takes you to the heart of one of the most important problems of international politics in our time. For, in the decade since the end of the cold war, in the new freedom, these suppressed or sometimes only half-formed nationalities have reemerged and formulated political aspirations all over Europe.
To understand the Ruthenians’ case, you need first to swallow a little potted history. The Ruthenians are a part of the family of east Slavic peoples, like the Russians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians, all of whom were at one time or another described as part of Rus’. One scholar wanted to call them “Rus’ians” as opposed to “Russians,” but you can see why the fine distinction did not catch on. Everything about their origins, culture, language, and politics is disputed.
For most of their modern history, most of them lived in the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were mainly farmers or woodcutters in the heavily forested Carpathian foothills. (You still see peasant woodcutters at work in mountain villages that look like pictures by Chagall.) It was the Habsburgs who christened them Ruthenen; the English word derives from the German. When the empire was broken up after the First World War, they found themselves scattered between Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what would shortly become the Soviet Union, but the greatest concentration was in the new state of Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia—the most democratic and liberal of those successor states—gave them considerable autonomy, in a province it called Sub-Carpathian Rus’. The book in which they found me the words of the national anthem was actually published in prewar Czechoslovakia. In those golden days of freedom, there was a great debate between Ukrainophiles, who argued that the Ruthenians were really Ukrainians; Russophiles, who thought they were closer to Russians; and Rusynophiles, who said they were altogether different. Today, the debate has revived as freedom has returned. In Slovakia, I visit two rival organizations: the Union of Rusyno-Ukrainians, who insist that they are just a kind of Ukrainian, and Ruthenian Renaissance, whose spokeswoman tells me it’s impossible to be both Ruthenian and Ukrainian.
The autonomy of Sub-Carpathian Rus’ reached a perilous height after Britain and France agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. For six months, it was a separate unit in a rump federal Czechoslovakia. The official English name for this unit was Ruthenia. Then, as the Nazis marched into Prague, Ruthenia was gobbled up by Hungary. But that didn’t last long either. At the end of the Second World War, Stalin seized it for the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it became part of Ukraine.
Through all this, the Ruthenians went on chopping their wood. Professor Turyanitsa tells me the classic east European joke about the old man who says he was born in Austro-Hungary, went to school in Czechoslovakia, married in Hungary, worked most of his life in the Soviet Union, and now lives in Ukraine. “Traveled a lot, then?” asks his interviewer. “No, I never moved from Mukachevo.”
One of the big questions that little Ruthenia prompts is whether the ethnically checkered successor states of the former Soviet Union might yet go the bloody way of former Yugoslavia. Are the Ruthenian rumblings an exception, inspired by the relatively recent experience of autonomy in prewar Czechoslovakia? Or are other suppressed nationalities even now forming provisional governments in remote hospital offices?
Perhaps as many as one million Ruthenians live in Ukraine. There are another one hundred thousand or so in Slovakia, some sixty-thousand in Poland (where they are called “Lemkos”), and smaller numbers in Romania, Hungary, and the Vojvodina province of rump Yugoslavia. (They also have one vital asset for any would-be nation: a large community in the United States.) So they live across half a dozen frontiers. One dramatic way in which they describe themselves is as “the Kurds of Central Europe.”
Moreover, these are not just any old frontiers. Samuel Huntington argues in his influential book The Clash of Civilizations that the great dividing line in Europe, after the end of the Iron Curtain, is that between western (Catholic or Protestant) Christianity and eastern (Orthodox) Christianity or Islam. Here, according to Huntington, is the new eastern boundary of Europe and of “Western civilization,” no less. The Ruthenians, true to form, cut right across it. They worship in both the Orthodox and the Uniate (or Greek Catholic) Church, which uses the eastern rite but acknowledges the authority of the western pope. If you drive through the Ruthenian mountain villages of eastern Slovakia, you often see two churches side by side: an old wooden one, which is Uniate, and a new Orthodox one. The original wooden churches were illegally given to the Orthodox by the communists after 1945, then returned to the Uniates after the end of communism, whereupon the Orthodox congregations stormed off and built their own churches next door.
More immediately, the Ruthenians will soon straddle the new eastern frontier of NATO. That will be true when Poland joins NATO in March 1999, and even more so if a now rapidly reforming Slovakia enters the Western alliance in a few years’ time. Then you will have significant numbers of Ruthenians on both sides of the West’s front line. The foreign minister tells me confidentially that his government is “delighted to see NATO coming closer to us.”
The Ruthenian story is, in every respect, a quintessentially east European one, and those of us with the perverse taste for such things may love it for its own sake. But it’s not just an east European question. In western Europe, too, we have nationalities, in varying degrees of formation, striving for anything from autonomy to statehood. Think of Scotland and Wales in Britain, or Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain.
And it’s not just in Europe. When I ask the prime minister if his government has achieved international recognition, he proudly declares, “Yes, we’ve been accepted into UNPROFOR.”
“UNPROFOR? But that was the military force in Bosnia!”
“Sorry, I mean UNPRO.”
Finally, we establish that it’s UNPO—the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. On my return, I visit UNPO’s website and find a list of more than fifty members, starting with Abkhazia, Aboriginals in Australia, Alcheh/Sumatra, then on to East Timor, Kurdistan, Nagaland, and Tibet. And, in the middle, Kosova—the Albanian spelling of Kosovo.
All over the world there are these peoples who would be states. Or at least recognized political units. This is a problem in dictatorships, when established identities are brutally suppressed, as in Tibet or East Timor. It’s also a problem in liberal democracies, when people wish to be governed by those who they feel speak the same language or are of the same kind. Perhaps most of all, it’s a problem at the fragile halfway stage between dictatorship and democracy. So often the road that begins with an UNPO ends in the need for an UNPROFOR.
THE RUTHENIANS are still far from being Kurds or Kosovars. For now, their “representatives” want some basic minority rights, such as education in their own language. Improvements in Slovakia will increase the calls for change in Ukraine. They demand that Ruthenian nationality should be an option in the Ukrainian census scheduled for 2001, and that Ukrainian state forestry companies should stop the mechanized stripping of the trees from their beloved hills. Those forests are their national heritage. They hope to prevent the Transcarpathian OBLAST from being incorporated into a new, enlarged province ruled from Lviv, in a planned reform of public administration for which, they tell me, the International Monetary Fund has been pressing. And they look for more cooperation across the frontiers, in what is already the Carpathian Euro-region.
That’s a long way short of statehood. But Professor Turyanitsa is a gifted demagogue. If the circumstances were right, and he was given access to the media, I could imagine him—or someone like him— persuading an audience of Ruthenian hill farmers, woodcutters, and impoverished town dwellers that they are heirs to a great tradition; that they were more prosperous and free as part of Czecho
slovakia before the war; that the Ukrainian “national chauvinists”—a phrase he repeats often and with relish—are to blame for all their troubles; in short, that they’d be much better off governing themselves. As we speak, rainwater is pouring down from the Carpathians and flooding the lowlands on the borders with Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. “You see,” he exclaims, “the very waters are pushing us to the West.”
Absurd as it may sound, I have a strange hunch that one day we will again see the name Ruthenia on the map, if not as a sovereign state, then at least as some sort of autonomous province. When that day comes, remember: You read it here first.
CHRONOLOGY
1998
19 NOVEMBER. President Bill Clinton is impeached for lying under oath.
16-20 DECEMBER. The United States and Britain bomb military installations in Iraq. The United States proclaims removal of Saddam Hussein to be a policy objective.
DECEMBER. Major cease-fire violations in Kosovo by both Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army.
1999
1 JANUARY. Monetary union comes into force between eleven member states of the EU. Only Britain, Sweden, Denmark, and Greece do not participate.
4 JANUARY. The Euro makes a strong start on its first day of trading.
14 JANUARY. The European Parliament votes on a resolution to sack the whole European Commission, because of corruption in two commissioners’ areas of responsibility.
15 JANUARY. Serb forces massacre forty-five Kosovar Albanian civilians in the village of Raçak.
29 JANUARY. The Contact Group on former Yugoslavia issues ultimatum to the Serbian regime and Kosovar Albanian rebels. If they have not agreed on an interim political framework in three weeks, NATO will take military action against both sides.
6 FEBRUARY. Negotiations chaired jointly by the French and British foreign ministers begin in Rambouillet between Kosovar Albanian and Serbian government delegations.
17 FEBRUARY Kurds protest across Europe after the arrest of Addullah Ocalan by Turkish special forces.
23 FEBRUARY. The Rambouillet talks end inconclusively with provisional agreement by the Kosovar Albanian delegation to an autonomy deal. Tony Blair announces plans for the “changeover” from pound to euro.
WHERE IS CENTRAL EUROPE NOW?
“I ’M DELIGHTED,” SAID HENRY KISSINGER, “TO BE HERE IN EASTERN, I mean Central Europe.” And for the rest of his talk he kept saying, “Eastern, I mean Central Europe.” The place was Warsaw; the time, summer 1990; and this was the moment I knew Central Europe had triumphed.
For nearly forty years after 1945, the term was almost entirely absent from the political parlance of Europe. Hitler had poisoned it; the cold war division into East and West obliterated it. In the 1980s, it was revived by Czech, Hungarian, and Polish writers such as Milan Kundera, György Konrád, and Czeslaw Milosz, as an intellectual and political alternative to the Soviet-dominated “Eastern Europe.” At that time, I wrote a sympathetic but also skeptical essay entitled “Does Central Europe Exist?”1
In the 1990s, Central Europe has become part of the regular political language. To mark the shift, both the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office have Central European departments. Although people still privately tend to say “Eastern Europe,” every greenhorn diplomat knows that one should refer to the whole postcommunist area as “Central and Eastern Europe”—a phrase so cumbersome it is often reduced to an abbreviation: CEE in English, MOE (Mittel- und Osteuropa) in German. Even Queen Elizabeth II has spoken of “Central Europe,” in the Queen’s Speech to Parliament. So that’s official. If the Queen and Henry Kissinger say it exists, it exists.
Just one problem remains: Where is it? “Central Europe,” wrote the U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright in a newspaper article in 1998, “has more than 20 countries and 200 million people.”2 Yet we often find the term used to mean just the countries who are joining NATO this spring—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic— or the “first wave” of postcommunist states negotiating to join the EU: the same three, plus Estonia and Slovenia.
Such disagreement is nothing new. In an article published in 1954, the geographer Karl Sinnhuber examined sixteen definitions of Central Europe. The only part of Europe that none of them included was the Iberian peninsula. The only areas they all had in common were Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia.3 Tell me your Central Europe, and I will tell you who you are.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the debate about who did or did not belong to Central Europe had real political significance. So it has today. For to be “Central European” in contemporary political usage means to be civilized, democratic, cooperative—and therefore to have a better chance of joining NATO and the EU. In fact, the argument threatens to become circular: NATO and the EU welcome “Central Europeans,” so “Central Europeans” are those whom NATO and the EU welcome.
The rival definitions are based on arguments from geography, history, culture, religion, economics, and politics. There are also major differences between how countries see themselves and how others see them. Since countries are not single people, and there are many “others,” one has to generalize dangerously from a whole kaleidoscope of national and individual views. I am mainly concerned here with the way the concept is deployed in what we still often call “the West”—meaning primarily policymakers and opinion formers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other members of NATO and the EU.
Since Central Europe is, by definition, somewhere in the center, every one of its boundaries is disputed: northern, western, southern, and eastern. By the same token, in delineating Central Europe we also delineate the other major geopolitical regions of Europe today.
1
Interestingly, and encouragingly, the boundary that was most hotly disputed at the beginning of the twentieth century is largely uncontroversial at its end: the western one. The idea of “Central Europe” exploded during the First World War as a furious argument between those, such as the German liberal imperialist Friedrich Naumann, who envisaged a German- and Austrian-ruled Mitteleuropa, and those, such as Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the future president of Czechoslovakia, who were fighting for a Central Europe of small states liberated from German, Austrian, and Russian imperial domination. This argument between visions of Mitteleuropa, on the one side, and of Střední Evropa or Europa Środkowa, on the other, continued throughout the “Second Thirty Years War” from 1914 to 1945. It culminated in the Austrian-German Adolf Hitler’s attempt to impose his own grotesque version of Mitteleuropa on Germany’s eastern neighbors.
So, when the term was revived in the 1980s, there was understandable nervousness both among Germany’s neighbors and in Germany itself. Many German writers preferred to use the less historically loaded term Zentraleuropa. But recent years have been reassuring. After some discussion, the Masaryk of the 1990s, Václav Havel, invited President Weizsäcker of Germany to attend regular meetings of “Central European presidents,” and the German president has done so ever since. Most German policymakers now accept that the reunited country is both firmly in Western Europe and in Central Europe again. As Havel once put it to me, Germany is in Central Europe “with one leg.”
Of course, there have been tensions between Germany and its eastern neighbors—especially between Germany and the Czech Republic. And there will be more as the enlargement of the European Union slowly approaches, with Germans fearing that Poles and Czechs will take their jobs and Poles and Czechs fearing the Germans will buy up their land. (The latter fears are especially pronounced in the formerly German western parts of Poland and in what used to be the Sudetenland, in the Czech Republic.) Yet no one could now argue that there is any fundamental political difference between what a mainstream German politician means by Mitteleuropa and what a Czech leader means by Střední Evropa or a Pole by Europa Środkowa. Increasingly, they are just different words for the same thing. This is a tribute to wisdom on both sides, and one of the bright spots on the map
of Europe at century’s end.
Meanwhile, the Austrians quietly pursue their own dream of Central Europe, by which they mean nothing more nor less than the area of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. Symbolically, Austria celebrated its first presidency of the European Union with a “Festival of Central European Culture.” More practically, flying Austrian Airlines is now the best way to get around the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and a new Central European Air Traffic Control center will be located in Vienna. At the same time, Austrians are even more hostile than Germans are to the idea of people from their former empire actually coming to live in their country and competing for their jobs.
For completeness, one should add the eastern parts of Italy that have very special ties with Slovenia, Croatia, and Austria—special ties consisting partly in the fact that Italy contains a small, still largely German-speaking piece of what used to be Austria (the South Tirol or Alto Adige), while Slovenia and Croatia have a little bit of what used to be Italy (eastern Friuli, the area around Trieste and the Istrian peninsula). Some would also include Liechtenstein and German-speaking Switzerland, although the Swiss generally hold themselves above this kind of thing. In all these cases, the historical legacy is still being played out in a hundred intricate ties and tensions. As I write I have before me a purely hedonistic Guida alla Mitteleuropa, published in Florence in 1992, which maps an Italian “Mitteleuropa” from Milan via St. Moritz, Vaduz, and Bayreuth to Prague, then back through Vienna, Budapest, and Zagreb to Trieste, Venice, and Verona.
History of the Present Page 40
