The Penguin History of the World

In two countries events turned out differently. Romania underwent a violent revolution (ending in the killing of its former Communist dictator) after a rising in December 1989, which revealed uncertainties about the way ahead and internal divisions ominously foreshadowing further strife. By June 1990 a government some believed still to be heavily influenced by former Communists had turned on some of its former supporters, now its critics, and crushed student protest with the aid of vigilante squads of miners at some cost in lives and in disapproval abroad. The GDR was the other country where events took a special turn. It was bound to be a special case because the question of political change was inescapably bound up with the question of German reunification.

The breaching of the Berlin Wall revealed that not only was there no political will to support Communism, but there was no will to support the GDR either. A general election there in March 1990 gave a majority of seats (and 48 per cent of the vote) to a coalition dominated by the Christian Democrat Party – the ruling party of the West German Federal Republic. Unity could no longer be in doubt, only the procedure and timetable remained to be settled. In July the two Germanys joined in a monetary, economic and social union. In October they united politically, the former territories of the GDR becoming provinces of the Federal Republic. The change was momentous, but no serious alarm was openly expressed, even in Moscow, and Gorbachev’s acquiescence was his second great service to the German nation.

Yet alarm in the USSR there must have been. The new Germany would be the greatest European power to the Union’s west. Soviet power was now in eclipse as it had not been since 1918. The reward for Gorbachev was a treaty with the new Germany, promising economic help with Soviet modernization. It might also be said, by way of reassurance to those who remembered 1939–45, that the new German state was not just an older Reich revived. Germany was now shorn of the old East Prussian lands (had, indeed, formally renounced them) and it was not dominated by Prussia as both Bismarck’s empire and the Weimar Republic had been. More reassuring still (and of importance to west Europeans who felt misgivings), the Federal Republic was a federal and constitutional state seemingly assured of economic success, with nearly forty years’ experience of democratic politics to build on and embedded in the structures of the EC and NATO. It was given the benefit of the doubt by west Europeans with long memories, at least for the time being.

At the end of 1990, the condition of what had once seemed an almost monolithic east European bloc already defied generalization or brief description. As some former Communist countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary) applied to join the EC, or got ready to do so (Bulgaria), observers speculated about a potentially wider degree of European unity than ever before. More cautious judgments were made by those who noted the virulent emergence of new – or re-emergence of old – national and communal divisions. Over all eastern Europe there gathered the storm clouds of economic failure and the turbulence they might bring. Liberation might be coming, but to peoples and societies of very different levels of sophistication and development, and with very different historical origins. Prediction was unwise and just how unwise became clear in 1991. In that year, a jolt was given to optimism over the prospects of peaceful change when two of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia announced their decision to separate from the federal state.

The ‘Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, which had appeared as the successor to Serbia and Montenegro in 1918, had as long ago as 1929 changed its name to ‘Yugoslavia’ in an attempt to obliterate old divisions, accompanied by the establishment of a royal dictatorship. But the new kingdom was always seen by too many of its subjects, Serbs and non-Serbs alike, as essentially a manifestation of an old historical dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’. When its second king, Alexander, had been assassinated in 1934 in France, it was by a Macedonian aided by Croats, acting with the support of the Hungarian and Italian governments. The bitterness of the country’s divisions had thus soon attracted outsiders to dabble in its affairs, and local politicians to seek outsiders’ support; Croatians subsequently declared their own independence as a state when German troops arrived in 1941.