What The Future Holds

By Frederick Painton

For the third time in this century the old order is crumbling in Europe, and the world waits anxiously for a new one to be born. The transition promises to be long, difficult and hazardous. But rarely if ever has the vision of a peaceful and relatively free Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals seemed so palpably within grasp. Thus 1989 is destined to join other dates in history -- 1918 and 1945 -- that schoolchildren are required to remember, another year when an era ended, in this case the 44-year postwar period, which is closing with the rapid unraveling of the Soviet empire.

Because events in Eastern Europe sometimes appear to be spinning out of control, the need grows more urgent to perceive and outline even the vaguest contours of the reshaped Continent to come. The crumbling of Communism in the East carries risks that might be avoided and offers opportunities to choose policies most likely to bring stability to a new European order.

Accordingly, TIME invited five experts on European political and economic affairs -- a Soviet, a Hungarian, a Frenchman, a West German and an American -- to try and give definition to what Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev calls "the common European house." During a six-hour meeting last week at an 18th century mansion in Brussels, the "capital" of the twelve-nation European Community, the group was asked to share insights on the future of Europe. The panel was not always in agreement but found consensus on some basic points:

-- Gorbachev's unprecedented attempt to democratize Communism and his drive for economic reform or perestroika have brought the Soviet Union to the brink of breakdown. As popular frustration rises, recourse to some form of more autocratic rule -- either under Gorbachev or a successor -- is increasingly possible.

-- Instability is likely to prevail in Eastern Europe for years to come, but for all its problems, the region has a far better chance of building democratic institutions and a market economy than the Soviet Union, which lags decades behind its former satellites.

-- The reunification of Germany is inevitable. That need not represent a military or commercial threat in 19th century balance-of-power terms -- but only if reunification is achieved within a European framework.

-- The U.S. -- and NATO -- still has a major role to play in Europe, especially before more sweeping arms-control agreements come into force and before a new political equilibrium is established on the Continent.

-- Western Europe should not be tempted into slowing or diluting its program of economic integration scheduled to culminate in 1992. The European Community must remain a beacon and a model for reformist leaderships in the East.

-- Eastern Europe's emergence from 40 years of isolation may well come at the expense of the Third World, which will see Western concern and capital flows diverted to the transition from Communism.

-- With the winding down of the cold war, national power will no longer be measured in military terms but in shares of world markets and in technological achievement.

The most somber note at the session was struck in assessing the state of the Soviet Union. Soviet panelist Andranik Migranyan, senior research fellow at Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, warned that after five years of perestroika, "our economists say we have yet to hit the bottom. The people are acutely aware of the gap between words and deeds by the government. We feel we might be entering a period of chaos." Already, Migranyan warned, a loose coalition of forces -- disgruntled members of labor bureaucracies, ethnic Russian nationalists and members of the Communist elite, or nomenklatura -- can be discerned that might eventually seek Gorbachev's overthrow. "The longer Gorbachev's reforms are stuck," said the Soviet analyst, "the greater the opportunity for his adversaries to organize against him."

French analyst Dominique Moisi, co-founder of the Paris-based French Institute for International Relations, agreed. On recent visits to Moscow, he said, he was struck by gathering popular pessimism. Said Moisi: "The elite around Gorbachev sound like the aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution. Even among the most devout Gorbachev supporters hopes have been replaced by fears."

According to Migranyan, the unsettling change in climate is partly due to Gorbachev's democratizing efforts. Those measures have permitted grass-roots resistance to unpopular reforms. "The Soviet Union," said Migranyan, "is acting like a democracy without really being one." Above all, said Migranyan, his country needed a model to make the transition from state-owned to free- market economy. "Nobody knows how to do it," he said, including Gorbachev, whose government lacks "conceptual ideas and clarity about what to do." Migranyan said the short-term remedy was either food or force. As long as there was sausage in the shops, the government had room for maneuver, but the sausage was running short, so perhaps it was time "to limit democracy in a period of autocratic rule."

Two outcomes were possible, Migranyan suggested: Gorbachev might become more authoritarian, "crushing all obstacles and imposing economic reforms," or a conservative regime might emerge that would jettison him along with his political and social reforms, even while seeking to modernize the economy. With Gorbachev's room for maneuver shrinking, Migranyan said, "maybe we need an authoritarian period of development . . . if democracy prevents market mechanisms from developing."

Henry Grunwald, U.S. Ambassador to Austria (and former editor-in-chief of Time Inc.), who expressed his personal views, acknowledged that there would be "a great temptation for the Soviets and others to have a little repression on the way to free markets," a process he called "perestroika without glasnost." But Grunwald doubted even that would have the desired result. He pointed out that while some Asian economies -- Taiwan's and South Korea's, for example -- flourished under authoritarian regimes, much of Latin America's had not. Said he: "There must be a degree of democracy and freedom for people to do their best, to take chances."

Moisi countered by arguing that for the West, a measure of democracy in the Soviet Union was "a guarantee against the return of Soviet imperialism." He told Migranyan, "You are calling on the West to help you, but there will be linkage between the amount of help you will receive and the image you transmit of yourselves." Moisi's message: Democracy pays, even if it poses problems for Eastern Europe's reformers. Conceded Migranyan: "This is the key problem for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union."

Compared with his Soviet colleague, Geza Jeszenszky, spokesman for Hungary's Democratic Forum and dean of the School of Social and Political Science at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, was optimistic. Said he: "In Central Europe we have a better chance for controlled change."

Admitting that it was relatively easy to change the constitution and restore democracy in a small country like Hungary, Jeszenszky said the economic challenge faced by East European nations was formidable but not impossible. "Miracles cannot be expected," he warned, with specific reference to Poland. Nonetheless, he urged the creation of "small islands of prosperity" in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe that would be attractive examples and inspire imitation. "A few years ago, people in Hungary were pessimistic," he said. "They thought reforms brought only inflation and trouble. But now, and in East Germany and Czechoslovakia as well, the fear is gone and the people welcome change."

Eastern Europe, Jeszenszky suggested, had already found a political form that made dramatic economic restructuring possible: the "grand national coalition," modeled on the government in Warsaw. "Poland's Solidarity movement set the pattern," he said, comparing loose non-Communist political groupings in Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia to national coalitions formed in Western Europe after World War II. "We are emerging from 40 years of war against the people. Changes have to be made -- economic, political and moral ones. These new governments soon will have to make unpopular decisions, so it's best to have governments credible to all parties."

On the volatile issue of German reunification, West Germany's Heinrich Vogel, director of the Cologne-based Federal Institute for East European and International Studies, suggested that West German politicians and the press were exploiting the subject partly because it was bound to be a major issue in West Germany's parliamentary elections next year. Who knew what East Germans really thought about reunification, Vogel asked. "There has been no vote. There are no reliable polls. Let us try to be less hysterical about this subject, less dramatic." Vogel complained of an atmosphere of "suspicion, growing, creeping, seeping in and destroying the climate of well-established trust we had" between West Germany and its allies.

Vogel was skeptical that a majority of East and West Germans would insist on reunification when the realities sank in: East Germans might reject the bitter side of capitalism, competition and unemployment. West Germans, already fearful of an immigrant invasion from the East, might well shrink from the cost and inconvenience of accommodating their poorer brethren.

Migranyan noted Moscow's persistent rejection of reunification. "The Soviet Union is not yet ready to accept any form of reunification," he declared. "It would have a major destabilizing effect." Even a loose East-West German confederation, he said, would create internal problems for Gorbachev and tensions with the West. Migranyan suggested that the Soviet Union, the U.S., France and Britain formally agree to prevent any joining of the Germanys in the near future. Grunwald demurred, pointing out that the U.S. could never accept such a formal accord because of Washington's official commitment to the goal of reunification. Moreover, said Grunwald, the Soviets could do little to prevent such a course if it actually took place, short of using force, which all agreed was highly improbable.

Anyone who takes in the atmosphere along the perforated Berlin Wall today, declared Moisi, should be able to discern -- by the body language of the Volkspolizei on the Eastern side and the Berlin police on the Western side -- an extraordinary and palpable tug of togetherness. "The citizens of the German Democratic Republic really have a feeling of humiliation about being second-class citizens ((compared with their Western counterparts)), and that feeling can be ameliorated only by reunification." Opposing that process, suggested Moisi, would ultimately cause more problems than it would solve.

In any case, asked Vogel, "if reunification should happen, where is the threat to the rest of Europe? Please, let us stop thinking of reunification producing a Fourth Reich built on the ashes of NATO." One solution, he suggested, was to make the transformation of the East bloc a "European task. If there is concern about the re-emergence of a German superpower, the best of all ways to get a lever on it would be to invest in a West European relief and aid operation in East Germany and create a European orientation to that process."

"There are those in Europe who fear that the events in Eastern Europe have compromised the dynamics of 1992," said Moisi, "but there are also those who believe in Europe with a capital E, which embraces those nations lost to Soviet power for two generations." He suggested that the people of Eastern Europe had achieved "a spiritual dimension, of those who had to fight for 40 years against oppression" -- an attitude from which the West could learn. Eastern Europe's transformation, he said, "is not a one-way street."

Perhaps, Moisi suggested, Europe in some ways needs German reunification despite all the problems it would bring. He postulated that West Germany still suffers from an identity crisis, a "unidimensional" sense of itself as merely an industrial rather than a political power. The result, he said, was a kind of "German economic arrogance"; if, in the process of reunification, Germany could attain a "more diverse identity," that arrogance might fade. His advice to the West: "Nothing is more dangerous than to say to Germans today 'We fear you.' If we do that, we will create a Germany according to that image, the kind of Germany we would deserve."

Nonetheless, the Frenchman chided the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl for failing to make a clear statement on the inviolability of the postwar borders of West Germany. Kohl appears to have waffled on the question for political reasons, that is, in deference to nationalistic elements within his governing coalition and on the far right who still talk about "lost territories" in the East that were part of Hitler's Third Reich in 1937.

What will Europe look like by the year 2000? The panelists agreed that the Continent would be defined less in geographical terms than by "geography of values," principally the common practice of democracy. By that definition, the reformist East European nations -- Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia -- are already being considered potential members or associates of the European Community. Not so the Soviet Union, which, Moisi maintained, was ineligible for membership so long as some of the people within its empire were deprived of self-determination. For his part, Migranyan recognized that the Soviet Union was too big an entity for inclusion in the E.C. -- "We would break down the walls ((of the common European house))" -- but insisted that for the Soviets the concept of Europe was a symbol of progress and modernity with which Gorbachevian reformers wanted to be associated.

National borders were not going to come down between East and West, the panelists agreed, except in the case of the Germanys. But ideological, cultural and commercial barriers, they felt, would eventually be erased. Said Jeszenszky: "Borders need not change, but the character of borders must change. The barbed wire must come down, the strip searches must be stopped, the examination of the bags -- all that must end."

In the view of the panel, NATO and the Warsaw Pact are no longer in control of the Continent's political agenda. That is now in the hands of the people in the streets, as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, the sheer unpredictability of the upheaval in Eastern Europe will make continued membership in both alliances reassuring for some time to come. NATO, still useful as long as the Soviet Union remains the Continent's dominant military power, was expected to survive cutbacks in force levels and thrive in a more political and consultative role.

Grunwald spoke for the group when he noted that "instability in Eastern Europe is a given for the next few years." The new reformist governments may be striving for other versions of West European social democracy, but as Grunwald pointed out, "Social democracy or capitalism with a human face is an achievement of prosperity. Before the luxury of humanizing the system, there will be cruel changes."

With reporting by Cathy Booth and William Mader/Brussels