America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

In an important respect, the 20th century has come full circle. Once again national groups are asserting themselves as nation-states; provinces are declaring themselves countries. Balkanization is back in fashion, and not just in the Balkans.

This atavistic trend is a direct result of the Soviet capitulation in the cold war. The core of communism was a strong center: it was from there that the orders and the troops came. A single ruler could intimidate or punish the farthest corner of his domain. The Yugoslavs used to say, "We have six republics, five ethnic groups, four languages, three religions, two alphabets -- and one Tito." Now that there is no Tito, things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Totalitarianism dies hard, taking innocents with it. But the Soviet military campaign against the Baltics has a spasmodic, last-gasp quality. Similarly, the late, unlamented Warsaw Pact was probably the only military alliance in history that did nothing but invade its own member states, and the Yugoslav army has finally seen action -- in a civil war. The federal government's bullying of Slovenia is a reminder that fear and force are all that keep these decrepit regimes together.

The custodians of all this disarray are vulnerable as never before to censure, pressure and restraint from abroad. Mikhail Gorbachev wants and needs the approval and assistance of the West. When his friends George, Helmut and Francois urge him to call off the Black Beret commandos who are harassing the Balts, Gorbachev listens. In fact, he obeys. (Whether the Black Berets always obey him is another matter.)

Tito's mastery at playing off East against West left him free to quash uppity subjects at home. Now that the East is out of the game, his successors must heed remonstrations from Bonn and Brussels. Among other things, that's where the money is. And Belgrade, like Moscow, is desperate for financial help.

The 40-year standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union tended to reinforce long-established boundaries no matter how artificial or unwelcome they were to the locals. Any attempt to redraw the map might lead to superpower intervention, hence superpower confrontation. No one wanted that.

Third World dictatorships had their First or Second World patrons to help maintain borders and thwart secession. Only as long as the Kremlin armed Ethiopia was Mengistu Haile Mariam able to cling to Eritrea and his own position in Addis Ababa.

Now that it is so much easier for people to vent their grievances, pursue their aspirations and raise their flags, George Bush's instincts, formed during the cold war, sometimes seem outmoded. He has been too quick to endorse the status quo. By defeating Saddam Hussein but then letting him remain the President of Iraq, Bush chose the devil he knew over the uncertainties represented by Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels. In his response to the dizzying events in the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia, Bush has been slow to realize that multinational communist states are, almost by definition, relics of a cruel, failed ideology and therefore not viable in anything like their present form. The Balts and Slovenes are motivated by more than tribal passions: they want out of the system. So, incidentally, do a lot of Russians and Serbs.

Bush tends to speak about territorial integrity as though it were an absolute good and instability as though it were nearly the ultimate evil. These propositions made more sense as part of the bedrock of American policy when regional conflicts could escalate to global war, but that danger is past.

Others, of course, remain. Adam Smith said, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." There is also going to be a lot of disorder in the new world order. The problem of nationalism requires managing, but not denial, and certainly not suppression.

So far, West European governments have been out front in meeting the challenge. In the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the leaders of France and Britain nudged Bush into establishing sanctuaries for the Kurds. The Ukraine, which is untying many of its bonds to Moscow, finds Paris and Rome more supportive than Washington. In their attempt to defuse the Yugoslav crisis, the Europeans did their share of flailing around. But they still seemed a bit more responsive to the Slovenes than the U.S initially did. The explanation goes beyond geographical proximity and relates to the transformation of the continent itself.

The demise of old countries and the birth of new ones are more likely to be peaceful if they occur in a cooperative international environment where economies are capitalist, trade is free, political life is democratic, security is collective, and some degree of sovereignty is pooled. Europe -- thanks to the Common Market, the Helsinki process and the march toward integration in 1993 -- is closer to that ideal than anywhere else. Hence Slovenia, Lithuania and the Ukraine have somewhere to go. And, crucially, their masters in Belgrade and Moscow have less to fear in letting them do so.

It was an American President who put the issue best: "There must be not a balance of power but a community of power," said Woodrow Wilson in 1917. A year later, in his Fourteen Points, he specified that "guarantees of political independence" for "great and small states alike" would be possible only in "a general association of nations." Cast in those terms at the beginning of the century, the championship of self-determination is the right policy for the U.S. in the decade ahead.