Postwar
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MJ: Racing forward, we get to ’89 to ’91, when the whole Soviet edifice comes tumbling down. The standard narrative is that it fell under the weight of its own contradictions, and in your account that holds up pretty well. And yet, the way you describe it, there was nothing inevitable about the timing.
TJ: Right. It was easy to say at the time and it’s even easier to say in retrospect, that the dysfunctional qualities of the economies of these socialist states were such that they couldn’t carry on forever. On the other hand, there was no reason why at any given point they couldn’t carry on a little longer, as we’ve seen, because the defects were no different, let’s say, in 1981 than they were in 1987. The crucial variable is Moscow, and I wanted to emphasize that, because everything depended on the initiative coming out of Russia. If the Soviet Union chose to use tanks again, it could, and there’d be nothing to stop it. And that’s why Gorbachev becomes crucial.
MJ: Though he himself didn’t seem to have much of an idea of where it was all going.
TJ: Well, it’s the theory of unintended consequences taken to an unexpected conclusion. Gorbachev was a Communist as much as anyone else, he grew up in a Communist world; it’s the only world he knows, and it’s the only vocabulary of political behavior that he knows, and he has no intention of bringing the system down. He starts to do what many other Communist reformers, including Khrushchev at one point, tried to do, which is reform the economy without making structural changes to the political system. Now, previous reformers realized fairly early on that that’s not possible, so they abandoned economic reform, because politics matters much more. The difference with Gorbachev is that he doesn’t do that; he does the unexpected and accepts the need to change the political system--not all overnight, and not completely. But then there comes the unexpected—the complete unraveling of power, not merely a diminution of the dysfunctional bits of it.
MJ: So then we have a situation where the Soviet Union falls, which among other things seems a triumph for the West. But then very quickly Yugoslavia devolves into a vicious war.
TJ: Well, the larger story that Yugoslavia was the last multinational empire in a way—that’s not a reason why it would end up the way it did, but it provided the sort of material for internal division, which other countries no longer had, with the exception of the Soviet Union itself. The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn’t come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It’s an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn’t know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.
Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: “Everyone says, ‘Never again. Never again.’ But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw.”
MJ: Europe today has its challenges, clearly. The population is graying; there’s no consensus as to what kind of organization the EU should be; there are questions about how sustainable enlargement is, particularly if it includes Turkey. And yet there are those who argue that the 21st century belongs to Europe, in the sense that the European model--of pooled sovereignty and adherence to overarching laws in everybody’s interests--is the most effective political arrangement available.
TJ: Well, I tend to agree. There’s no better model; at least, there’s no alternative model. And Europeans, accidentally it seems to me, have over the decades emerged with a workable model for the 21st century. Of course, Europeans don’t seem to understand that and don’t seem to know what to do with it or how to move forward with it. I’m not sure that it will work [for Europe], but certainly it is the only game in town.
MJ: And its chances of succeeding in Europe are enhanced if Europeans understand how their system came into being, right?
TJ: Absolutely. The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It’s not about building perfect futures; it’s about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it’s one of the big differences between the two Western cultures. I worry that even though most educated Europeans under the age of 25 today are now beginning to forget why the system that came about did come about, and therefore it becomes much easier to imagine doing away with it in the name of freedoms. I worry that we have forgotten that the de-ideologized, de-politicized, uncontentious public space of the last 50 years as Europeans have experienced it is not the normal human condition. We shall be sorry to have abandoned a little too quickly the institutions that were set up by our parents and grandparents to protect themselves against a return of the bad old world. Because the bad old world can still come back to haunt you.
Julian Brookes is the editor of MotherJones.com.
