Issues Confronting Europe

In your work, you have focused a lot on the two major powers of Central Europe -- Germany and Poland. Let's talk about how you see each of their roles in the emerging Europe after the end of the Cold War. What is your sense of where Germany is going, or does it know, or can we tell?

Another very modest question. Germany itself does not know. Obviously, where Germany is heading is crucial to the whole of Europe in a way that where Poland is heading is not. These are two different orders of magnitude, important as Poland is to answering that question. And, Germany is itself, in my view, profoundly confused about where it is heading.

Let me give you one small example. The official theory of the German government is that the Federal Republic of Germany, having achieved unity, is about to dissolve its sovereignty into a larger united Europe, a European Union to which monetary union will be the crucial step. At the same time, the same new Federal Republic of Germany is building in Berlin a magnificent and impressive national capital with public buildings of a grandeur, pomp and circumstance that we haven't seen being built in Europe for thirty or forty years. There is a certain contradiction between the architecture on the one hand and the rhetoric on the other. That's a very good example, and it's a genuine contradiction, that Germany itself does not know which way it will go. If you ask me my best bet, and it can only be that, it is that Germany, having regained its full sovereignty, is not about to give it up; that it will remain, like France and Britain and Italy, a modern nation-state, sharing elements of sovereignty [with other European states], but still in crucial fields sovereign.

The question is, how will it use the power that it has as Europe's most powerful nation-state, in the center of Europe, for good or evil? And there, Poland has always been, and is again, a crucial indicator. Will this united, powerful Germany work to integrate its largest immediate eastern neighbor into a larger European Union, or will it, for example, go back to the old game of German eastern policy and look for a special relationship with Russia over the heads of the Poles and the other East Europeans?

And what is your best guess for the answer to that?

I'm a cautious optimist. I'm always very, very reluctant to say that people have learnt from history, but I do think that the present political leadership of Germany has taken those lessons on board. I'm a cautious optimist about the future of central Europe. I'm a cautious pessimist about the future of the Balkans or of the former Soviet Union.

Throughout this recent history, the role of the United States has been critical -- in the Cold War, during the transition, and now there is really a big question mark. How do you see the role of the United States toward Europe evolving in the near future?

We can't do without you. We absolutely can't. As someone nicely put it, the United States since 1945 has been Europe's pacifier and we still need the American pacifier. I hope that the American pacifier could be kept in the cupboard rather more often and not actually need to be sucked so often. But Bosnia doesn't lead one to hope that that will be so. I absolutely agree with Dick Holbrooke when he says that it is absurd that it is America that had to walk in to knock heads together, to broker the peace agreement for Bosnia, when in 1991, as you remember, Jacques Poos, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, had said "The hour of Europe has come"; or even that it's America that has to come in to resolve a dispute between Greece and Turkey. So, I'm afraid that the pacifier will be needed as much as ever.

As a realistic European who believes in a realistic Europeanism, and someone who sees enlargement as a process for realizing liberal values, what do you think the meaning of Bosnia will be? How will this whole experience further what your preferred goals are?

Well, Bosnia tells us that we can go almost all the way back. By 1990, most of the people in Europe, not just in Western Europe, thought that we had put genocide and the atrocities that we knew in Europe up to 1945 behind us for good. We really believed that. We haven't. We've gone all the way back and this is not just "the Balkans." This is no strange jungle where people do that to each other. This is part of Europe. So, the first answer is: Bosnia is Europe too. That's what can happen in Europe if we don't have structures in place that prevent it.

Now, what the effect will be is a different question because there are two possible effects. The first is the one I hope for, namely that it will strengthen very powerfully the case I am making for enlargement and for a European common foreign and security policy, but it is also possible that it strengthens the temptation to "fortress Europe"; because we've survived Bosnia, it wasn't any skin off our nose. Admittedly, there were some refugees, but put very crudely, we lived with that an hour's flying time away. Which will it be? I'm not sure.

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