King—chap 30, excerpt

Introduction: the shrinking West?

Beginning around 1500, the West became dominant among the regions of the world. With its booming

economy, innovative technology, dynamic cultural institutions, not least its printing presses, it surged

ahead of all competitors. At the same time, its explorers, entrepreneurs and adventurers harnessed the

promise of the Americas and pried open the ports of Africa and Asia (see especially Chapter 15).

But after 1900, the West began to shrink. Two devastating wars in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945

consumed its European heartland. The Cold War that followed pitted against each other two powers on

the peripheries of Europe: the United States and the Soviet Union (see Chapters 25-29). With the demise

of the Soviet Union, the West shrank still more, as the once-colonized regions of the world demanded

their place in the global enterprise.

Although Western cultural and political models remained vibrant in the post-Cold War era, the

great issues of the age—economic, technological, cultural, and social—were global in scope. So, too,

were the battlefields, located on the margins of the West, or in Africa and the Middle East. From here

there erupted, as well, the terrorist campaign still ongoing against Western civilization of the West.

Readers of this chapter will explore:

· how in the destabilized world of the post-Cold War era shifting power relations

culminated in the outbreak of wars in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans and genocide

in Africa, even as the European states moved towards unification;

· how economic, technological and cultural innovation produced a globalized world

that still faced problems of environmental degradation, overpopulation, famine, and

disease;

· how weapons of mass destruction proliferated in a post-Cold War world, in which

struggles along civilizational divides threatened Western Europe, the United States,

and Israel, and the civilization of the West more generally.

A new world order

The Cold War’s conclusion destabilized the international system, and major conflicts soon exploded in

the Middle East and the Balkans. Meanwhile, instances of genocide in the Balkans elicited an inadequate

response from a wary post-Cold War international community. Unwilling to intervene forcefully, it

permitted on its watch the mass slaughter of innocents.

The First Gulf War: 1990-1991

The end of the Cold War shattered the balance of power in the Middle East. In the aftermath, the

imperiled dictator of Iraq launched an aggressive war against his neighbors that summoned a swift

response from the international community.

In 1988, a savage eight-year conflict between Iran and Iraq ended inconclusively. The Iraqi

regime of Saddam Hussein (1937- ) was left owing roughly $75 billion to the oil-producing kingdoms of

the Persian Gulf—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. For much of the Cold War, Iraq

was a client state of the Soviet Union. But the United States also aided Saddam during the conflict with

Iran, while firms from France and Germany, eager for commercial expansion in the region, had been

important customers of the Iraqi regime. The decline of Soviet power and the ending of the Iranian war

left Saddam to fend for himself. He demanded that the Gulf States forgive the debt, arguing that the

funds defended their territory from Iran’s theocracy. When they refused, he threatened to annex

Kuwait, which he suddenly termed “Iraq’s 19th province.”

Western intelligence agencies believed that Saddam was bluffing when he stationed his army on

his neighbor’s border. They were wrong. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, which fell

within a matter of hours. By coincidence, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1925- ) was visiting

the United States that day, and she reminded her hosts of the dangers of appeasing dictators. Bolstered

by this advice, President George H.W. Bush (1924- ) publicly announced that the invasion “will not

stand.”

On August 6, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd (1923-2005) formally requested military assistance. By the

end of the year, more than half a million foreign troops were stationed on Saudi territory. Though the

United States supplied approximately three-fourths of the coalition forces, countries from both Western

Europe (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey)

and the former Soviet bloc (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland) also contributed troops.

This degree of European cooperation, of course, could not have occurred during the Cold War.

Indeed, for the previous 40 years, the threat of either a U.S. or a Soviet (or even occasionally a Chinese)

Security Council veto effectively nullified the UN’s collective security provisions. But in Mikhail

Gorbachev’s (1931- ) final years in power, the Soviets wanted cooperation, not confrontation, with the

West. Meanwhile, China was eager to repair relations with the West frayed in 1989, when Chinese

troops killed between 2,500 and 5,000 pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. By this

stage, Saddam’s only support came from Jordan, which depended on Iraq economically, a few rogue

states (such as Libya), and the PLO. On November 29, 1990, the UN Security Council passed a measure

authorizing the use of “all means necessary” to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The Soviets joined the United

States, Britain, and France in voting for the resolution; China abstained.

When Saddam still refused to withdraw his troops, war commenced on January 17, 1991.

International forces began their campaign with massive aerial bombardment, designed both to limit

coalition casualties and to soften Iraqi resistance. Cable News Network (CNN), the only Western media

organization that retained a presence in Baghdad throughout the conflict, broadcast the war around the

world. After more than 40 days of bombing, coalition troops routed the poorly trained and ill-equipped

Iraqi conscript army.

The triumph might have served as a model for post-Cold War international cooperation, but

coalition unity quickly broke down. President Bush encouraged the Shiite majority in the South and the

Kurdish minority in the North to rebel, seeming to promise U.S. protection. But he then agreed to a

cease-fire, allowing Saddam’s regime to suppress the Shiite insurrection. By the mid-1990s, nonetheless,

the Kurds had established a de facto autonomous state in the north.

The UN also imposed stringent sanctions designed to compel Iraq to disarm, but as the 1990s

proceeded, this policy generated tensions among the coalition that had driven Saddam out of Kuwait.

The United States and Britain consistently opposed any attempt to weaken the sanctions, citing

Saddam’s refusal to cooperate with international arms inspectors. France, on the other hand, was the

most prominent European state in calling for a new approach to Iraq. In 1998, French president Jacques

Chirac (1932- ) unsuccessfully urged lifting the international embargo on Iraqi oil. Though Saddam had

refused to fully comply with the UN resolutions that had originally triggered the sanctions, Chirac was

eager for French firms to exploit a reopened Iraqi market.

The Balkan Wars: 1991-1999

The end of the Cold War also transformed conditions in the Balkans, leading to internecine warfare

between the region’s restive factions. For 35 years in Yugoslavia, the independent brand of communism

practiced by Marshal Tito (Josip Broz; 1892-1980) had maintained unity between the nation’s orthodox

Christian Serbs and Montenegrins, Roman Catholic Croatians and Slovenes, Muslim Bosnians and

Albanians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Tito’s death in 1980 shook the Yugoslav union. The

country disintegrated entirely with the collapse of communism.

Seeking to avoid the fate of communists elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Slobodan Milošević

(1941- ), leader of Serbia’s Communist Party, constructed a new power base. He deliberately stoked

nationalist tensions, replacing the support of Communist apparatchiks with backing from Serbian

nationalists. Under the constitution promulgated by Tito before his death, Yugoslavia consisted of six

federated republics—Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia. The

presidency rotated between the six on an annual basis, and each unit enjoyed considerable autonomy.

The country also had two “autonomous regions”—Vojvodina, which contained a sizable Hungarian

minority, and Kosovo, with an Albanian majority. Both lay inside Serbia.

Kosovo contained the site of the 1389 battle in which the Turks defeated the Serbs, ushering in

five centuries of Ottoman rule. The area thus had deep historical significance for the Serbs. By the mid-

1980s, however, 90 percent of the region’s nearly two million citizens were Albanian, and local

Albanians possessed almost complete autonomy. In 1987, Milošević traveled to Kosovo to promise

protection for the region’s Serbs. Two years later, he terminated Kosovo’s autonomy altogether.

Repudiating Tito’s philosophy of downplaying nationalist tensions in the ethnically divided nation

unsettled leaders in other provinces. In 1991, when it came turn for Serbia’s representative to assume

Yugoslavia’s presidency, Slovenia and Croatia withdrew from the federation. After a brief ten-day

conflict, ethnically homogeneous Slovenia won its independence.

Croatia. Croatia posed more complicated problems. Its new president, Franjo Tuman (1922-

1999), embraced a platform as fanatically nationalist as that of Milošević. In his writings, Tuman

defended the pro-Nazi wartime Ustaša government (see Chapter 27), and even questioned claims that

the regime had massacred Serbs and Jews. Tuman’s political party, the Croatian Democratic Union,

renamed Zagreb’s main square from the “Square of the Victims of Fascism” to the “Square of Great

Croats.” During World War II, the square had housed the Zagreb offices of the Gestapo and the Ustaša

security police.

Given this record, it came as little surprise that Serbs, who comprised one-eighth of Croatia’s

population, refused to recognize Tuman’s authority. With support from Milošević and the Serb-

controlled Yugoslav army, local Serbs rebelled. They eventually seized one-third of the new republic’s

territory and devastated tourist areas along the Dalmatian coast. Serbs also drove Croatian civilians en

masse from contested areas, a process called “ethnic cleansing.” But the tide of the war reversed in

1995, when the Croatian military forced most of the Serb civilian population to flee. Four years of

fighting to create an “ethnically pure” Croatian state left 700,000 people, on both sides, as refugees.

Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croatian conflict previewed the much bloodier battle that occurred

over Bosnia-Herzegovina. Located in the geographic center of Yugoslavia, the history of the ethnically

divided province (43 percent Muslim Slav, 35 Orthodox Serb, and 18 percent Catholic Croatian)

intersected with broader international affairs throughout the 20th century. The assassination in its

capital, Sarajevo, of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand by Serb terrorists in 1914 triggered the start of World

War I (see Chapter 25). Bosnia suffered through some of World War II’s fiercest partisan fighting (see

Chapter 27). The province experienced greater stability under Tito’s regime. Symbolizing its renaissance,

Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.

A decade later, Sarajevo encapsulated the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The

withdrawal of Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia left Bosnia exposed, since Serbia dominated what

remained of the federation. Under international pressure to demonstrate popular support for secession,

Bosnia’s government scheduled a plebiscite. Of those who went to the polls, 99.4 voted yes, but the

province’s Serbs boycotted. When the Bosnian leadership nonetheless went ahead and declared

independence, local Serbs, including many Yugoslav army veterans, established a separatist

government. Serb paramilitary operatives waged a campaign of genocide, targeting for death Muslim

and Croatian professionals, intellectuals, and musicians. Serb militants also destroyed Muslim and

Croatian cultural sites, as if to purge the land of any memory of groups other than the Serbs.

Despite being fully informed of the Serb atrocities, the Western community responded meekly.

In general, the Bush administration opposed using the U.S. military for humanitarian ventures.

Moreover, the United States considered the Balkans a European problem. For their parts, Britain,

France, and Germany adopted a policy reminiscent of the democracies’ response to the Spanish Civil

War. They imposed an arms embargo against all factions in Bosnia, ostensibly to contain the conflict.

Since the Bosnian Serbs received a regular supply of arms from Serbia, the strategy effectively harmed

the victims of Serb aggression, the Bosnian Muslims, by denying them the means for self-defense.

During the 1992 campaign for U.S. President, Democrat Bill Clinton (1946- ) criticized Bush’s handling of

the crisis. But once in office, he maintained his predecessor’s approach.

Massacre at Srebrenica. Between 1992 and 1995, Bosnian Serb paramilitaries starved and

bombed Sarajevo. The siege and the resulting atrocities regularly appeared on the world’s television

screens. In a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” Serb forces persecuted, expelled, raped, and killed Bosnian

Muslims. Eventually, responding to popular outrage, the UN stationed peacekeepers to protect several

Muslim cities in southern Bosnia. The Serbs ignored the action. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb troops

overran the “safe city” of Srebrenica. Six hundred lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers offered no not

resistance. General Ratko Mladić (1943- ), commander of the Bosnian Serb army, ordered all males aged

12 to 77 taken into custody for “interrogation for suspected war crimes.” Only a handful were ever again

seen alive; Serbian forces murdered at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys. In 2005, a video surfaced

showing Serb paramilitary officers shooting six Bosnian boys and men. Before the atrocity, the killers

had received a blessing from an orthodox priest.

The Srebrenica massacre, the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II, at last galvanized

Western leaders to act. Under threat of a U.S. military intervention, Milošević agreed to attend peace

negotiations in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Peace Agreement of November 1995 divided Bosnia into

Serbian and Muslim–Croat entities, each to be ruled by a single parliament, elected under the eye of

60,000 NATO peacekeeping troops. In practice, after a war that cost 200,000 Bosnians their lives, the

republic existed as three ethnically pure statelets.

Kosovo. The financial cost of the Bosnian conflict, coupled with international sanctions against

Milošević’s regime, produced an economic crisis in what remained of Yugoslavia. Milošević responded

by again stoking nationalist sentiments, returning his attention to Kosovo. In January 1999, Yugoslav

army forces occupied the province. This time, with the region’s ethnic Albanians under grave threat, the

United States and NATO acted quickly. After 34,000 sorties by NATO planes and a well-conceived attack

plan from U.S. General Wesley Clark (1944- ) that targeted Serb security installations but minimized

civilian casualties, Milošević withdrew his troops from Kosovo. The province then regained its autonomy.

Instability in the former Yugoslavia ended only in October 2000, when a spontaneous coup in Belgrade

deposed Milošević.

Events in Bosnia stimulated calls to prosecute those guilty of crimes against humanity, including

massacre, torture, and military rape, all considered illegal by international conventions. (The explicit

criminalization of rape occurred in 1996.) The UN International Criminal Tribunal, seated in The Hague,

has to date indicted 80 suspects. This total included 51 Bosnian Serbs; 18 Bosnian Croats; 8 former

Yugoslav officials, including Milošević; and 3 Bosnian Muslims. The prosecution of those who in positions

of political or military leadership committed acts the world no longer deems acceptable is a new feature

of the European and international landscape. British and Spanish courts, for instance, held former

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-) responsible for human rights violations committed following

the 1973 coup that brought him to power. The courts reached these rulings even though Pinochet had

committed the relevant acts not in Europe but in his native country.

The Former Soviet Bloc

In 1989, a Hungarian opposition leader lamented, “With the erosion of communism, ethnic problems

are bursting out all over Eastern Europe.” Yet only in the former Yugoslavia did war result. Like

Yugoslavia, Hitler partitioned Czechoslovakia along ethnic lines during World War II (see Chapter 27).

Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia while establishing a protectorate in Slovakia. Unlike

Yugoslavia, Czech leaders did not respond with force when a revival of Slovak nationalism accompanied

the end of the Cold War. Instead, in the “Velvet Divorce,” the country split into two, with Bohemia and

Moravia becoming the Czech Republic and Slovakia receiving its independence. The Czech Republic and

Poland moved toward a peaceful resolution with Germany of another wartime legacy—the forced

resettlement of at least 11 million ethnic Germans from their lands (see Chapter 28). Even Hungary and

Romania avoided armed conflict, despite the continued abysmal treatment of the Hungarian minority in

Transylvania (see Chapter 29).

The EU and NATO. The appeal of the West helped to prevent further ethnic bloodshed in post-

communist Eastern Europe. In the 1990s, the former Warsaw Pact nations made clear their desire to join

the continent’s key supranational organizations, NATO and the European Union (EU), the successor

organization to the EC. EU affiliation promised the economic benefits of open access to Western

Europe’s markets. NATO provided a strategic barrier if Russia revived its expansionist ways, and

membership also served a symbolic purpose. As Bulgarian president Petar Stoyanov (1952- ) explained in

1996, “We badly need encouragement from the West, for we have made a civilizational choice to be

part of NATO.”

The West, in turn, made clear the conditions required for that “civilizational choice.” As NATO

redefined its mission to focus on promoting European stability, protecting human rights, and

undertaking peacekeeping efforts, the United States and Britain insisted on militaries that met what

they considered professional standards. The EU, meanwhile, listed three minimum criteria for

membership in the organization:

· stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and

respect for and protection of minorities;

· the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive

pressure and market forces within the EU;

· the ability to assume the obligations of membership, including adherence to the aims of

political, economic, and monetary union.

In short, the nations of the former Eastern bloc could choose to wage ethnic battles or to become part

of the European institutional family—but they could not do both. With the exception of Serbia, all

selected the latter path.

The lure of democracy. The former Communist states took three distinct paths to integration

with the European whole. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary all aggressively reached out to the

West. Each nation quickly displaced Communists from office and adopted some type of economic “shock

therapy”—a combination of decontrolling prices, stabilizing the currency, privatizing state-owned

enterprises, and creating other conditions to attract foreign investment. The three nations experienced

the downside of fast privatization (higher unemployment, especially for industrial workers, and

increased consumer prices), with a slow but steady recovery by the late 1990s. And even though voters

ousted the privatizing politicians, a basic political consensus existed. In Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski

(1954- ), head of the Democratic Left Alliance (which included the reconstituted Communist Party)

replaced former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa (1943- ) as president in 1995. In his decade as president,

Kwaśniewski proved to be more pro-Western than Walesa. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary

joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004.

In Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, by contrast, unreconstructed former communists either

immediately took over from Communist dictators (Romania) or were quickly restored to power after the

fall of communism (Bulgaria, Slovakia). As a result, many of the negative aspects of communism

persisted—harassment of government opponents, sluggish economic growth, corruption, shortages of

consumer goods. In addition, Romania and Bulgaria suffered through a proliferation of organized crime,

which coordinated the black market efforts to pierce international sanctions against Serbia. Yet by the

late 1990s, pro-Western democrats captured elections in each nation, and began the arduous process of

economic reform. Slovakia’s economy grew at an average of 4 percent annually between 2000 and

2005; Bulgaria’s GDP increased by more than 5 percent in 2004; and Romania’s figure for the same year

exceeded 8 percent. The three nations joined NATO in 2004. Slovakia became a member of the EU in the

same year, while Romania and Bulgaria were named candidate members.

The Baltic States formed the third cohort of European nations that turned westward in the

1990s. As countries that had lost their independence to the Soviet Union in 1940, Estonia, Latvia, and

Lithuania confronted unique conditions. For most of the 1990s, strong doubt existed in both the United

States and Western Europe about the advisability of extending Western institutions to the Baltic States,

lest doing so alienate Russia. The legacy of Stalin’s resettlement policies left Latvia and Estonia with

sizable Russian minority populations (36 and 32 percent, respectively, more than triple the 1940

percentages). While Lithuania gave its much smaller number of ethnic Russians automatic full

citizenship, Estonia and Latvia did not. Moreover, their detachment from Russia initially caused severe

economic hardship: in 1994, for instance, hot water operated only one week a month in the Lithuanian

capital of Vilnius. The country could not afford to purchase oil, which Russia previously had provided at

below-market rates. Yet, in part due to Russian restraint, ethnic confrontations were avoided, while all

three countries reached out to other Baltic democracies such as Finland and Sweden to create a cultural

and economic bloc. In 2004, the three Baltic States, who spent half of the 20 th century under Soviet rule,

became full-fledged EU and NATO members.

A common element unites Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania,

Poland, Romania, and Slovakia: each selects its leaders through free and fair elections. This democratic

surge represents one of the most notable trends of the post-Cold War world. In 1972, according to

figures compiled by the NGO Freedom House, citizens of 44 countries possessed freedom in both the

political and civil realms. By 2003, that total had nearly doubled, to 87 nations. Latin America and former

Soviet bloc states featured the most impressive increases in freedom. At the time of the Freedom House

survey, Belarus was the only European country under authoritarian rule.

Europe United

In 1992, the Treaty of Maastricht created the EU, which by 2005 was a partnership of 25 states, with its

own parliament, located in Brussels. The EU aims to establish a common foreign policy for its members,

with a long-term goal of eventual political and economic integration. It also envisions common European

policies on issues such as human rights and social justice. In 2002, EU nations had a total economic

output of eight trillion dollars. (The U.S. figure was 10 trillion dollars.)

Meanwhile, 12 EU members with 292 million inhabitants—Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain,

France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal and Finland—belong to the

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The EMU exercises strict discipline over member states in

matters such as national indebtedness and monetary policy. In January 2002, the EMU’s new currency,

the “euro,” became the single currency for the 12 countries, further limiting the power of nation-states.

Economic and cultural integration. The development of common ground rules has spread the

wealth among Europe’s member states. In 2005, each of the countries that belonged to the EU at the

time the Treaty of Maastricht was signed (along with Hungary) ranked at least one company among

Europe’s 45 largest corporations. Britain, Germany, and France had the most individual companies on

the list, but the Netherlands (5), Spain (3), Italy (3), Belgium (2), Sweden (2), and Finland (2) also had

multiple representatives.

The more integrated European economy has particularly benefited nations that ranked among

Western Europe’s poorest in the 1970s—Portugal, Spain, and, most dramatically, Ireland. The EC and

later EU had longstanding policies of extending subsidies to poorer-performing economies. But while

Ireland started receiving the subsidies after it joined the EC in 1973, it continued to sputter economically

until the mid-1980s. Then, embracing a policy of lower labor costs, limited government regulation, an

improved education system, and reductions in government spending and tax rates, the Irish aggressively

cultivated foreign investment. The economy of the “Celtic Tiger” averaged an annual growth rate of 5

percent between 1990 and 1995 and 8 percent between 1995 and 2002. In 1987, per capita income in

Ireland stood at 63 percent of the British total, with 17 percent of Irish workers unemployed and the

country’s young emigrating to find jobs. By 2003, in contrast, the average Irish citizen earned more than

$25,500 per year—or $3200 more than in Britain.

Increased cultural inter-connection has accompanied the political and economic ties established

by the EU and NATO. Intra-European tourism soared during the Cold War. Thirty million tourists annually

crossed European borders in the 1950s. That number rose to 100 million annually by 1966. Reverting to

the arrangements that existed before World War I, by the late 1990s, European countries no longer

required citizens of other EU states to carry passports when crossing into their territory. Tourism has an

obvious economic benefit, as well. Eight million Europeans work in the tourism sector, with the total

expected to increase by two million in coming years.

Political developments. A political convergence has accompanied this cultural and economic

integration. In recent years, European politics have moved towards the center, with principal leaders

chosen alternately from left-center and right-center parties. The beginning of the 1990s found left-

leaning Social Democrats ruling 11 of Western Europe’s 16 nations, a higher total than at any time since

1945. Yet each of these parties had long since renounced Marxism, and many even embraced the

market economy. Thus, in France, when conservative Jacques Chirac replaced Socialist François

Mitterrand (1916-1996) as president in 1995, the change had little effect on policy. A similar pattern, it is

worth noting, emerged in the United States: Republicans ran against Washington when they seized

control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 elections. In the aftermath, even Democrat Bill Clinton

publicly called for abandoning “the illusion that there is a program for every problem.” But overall levels

of federal spending nonetheless continued to grow, and major policy changes were few.

Two major countries under conservative control when the Cold War ended also shifted to the

center in the 1990s. In Britain, intra-party dissension led to the ouster of Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher in 1990. Her replacement, John Major (1943- ), scored an upset victory in 1992, but proved an

indecisive and ineffectual leader. His Conservative Party suffered a crushing defeat in 1997, when British

voters turned to the centrist, Europe-conscious Labour candidate Tony Blair (1953- ). Understanding the

political lessons of Thatcher’s rule, Blair made no attempt to reverse the trend away from state-owned

industries dominated by powerful trade unions. He did, however, adopt a more Europe-friendly

approach than had Thatcher and Major. In 2001, the prime minister declared, “We must be

wholehearted, not half-hearted, partners in Europe.”

In Germany, the reign of Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl (1930- ) ended in 1998, when Social

Democrat Gerhard Schröder (1944- ) led a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens to power. Joschka

Fischer (1948- ) became the first member of the environmentalist Green Party to serve as foreign

minister of any European country. This former student radical earned the enmity of many on the far left

when he supported, on humanitarian grounds, the U.S.-led military campaign in Kosovo.

In many ways, Italy stood isolated from the broader European trends, since corruption more

than ideological differences defined its politics. On trial for bribery, former Socialist prime minister

Bettino Craxi (1934-2000) defended himself by claiming (accurately) that leaders from all Italian political

parties, except for the Communists, regularly took bribes. To escape imprisonment, Craxi fled to Tunisia,

while the electorate repudiated both the Socialists and the Christian Democrats. In 1996, Italian voters

turned to a left-of-center coalition, the Olive Tree, which included members of the former Communist

Party. Five years later, they elected as prime minister television magnate Silvio Berlusconi (1936- ).

Berlusconi, who described himself as a non-politician, ran as the candidate of the right-leaning “Forza

Italia.” The phrase, translated as “Go, Go Italy!,” previously had been used as a cheer for the Italian

national soccer team.

Threats to European unity

Even as Europe has moved towards greater political, economic, ideological, and cultural unity, two

contradictory patterns have emerged. First, the erratic behavior of post-communist Russia has, at times,

brought back memories of the Cold War. Second, the dramatic resurgence of anti-integrationist,

nationalist sentiment has threatened the moves toward unity.

Russia. During the nine years that Boris Yeltsin (1931- ) served as president of the Russian

Republic, he adopted a largely pro-Western course. He opened the country up to greater Western

investment, a poorly administered policy that produced severe economic distress. In international

affairs, Yeltsin criticized but did not otherwise prevent NATO’s eastward expansion. But one important

exception to this pattern existed—his handling of the breakaway province of Chechnya.

After World War II, Stalin had deported many of the small Islamic enclave’s residents to Siberia,

falsely accusing them of collaborating with Germany. Khrushchev lifted the decree in 1957, but the bitter

memories remained. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chechnya declared its independence, but

Russia refused to recognize the act. A bitter two-year war ended with the Chechen president, Dzhokhar

Dudayev (1944-1996), killed by Russian mortar fire. In 1996, Yeltsin and the Chechen leadership agreed

to a truce, but fighting resumed within a year, with no end in sight.

In August 1999, Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin (1952- ), a little-known former KGB official, prime

minister. Then, on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, elevating Putin to the presidency.

His position was later ratified by two elections whose fairness most outside observers called into

question. As president, Putin dramatically expanded the Kremlin’s control over regional governments,

the media, and the economy. He succeeded partly because of his ability to consolidate power in the

presidency. But he also ruled over a public with few examples of effective political leadership upon

which to call. One 1998 poll asked Russians aged 18 to 29 to evaluate their nation’s leaders of the 20 th

century. The only figure to receive a positive rating was the incompetent Tsar Nicholas II.

Putin enjoyed less success on the international front. He continued Yeltsin’s counterproductive

campaign against Chechnya, even as the province increasingly transformed into an ungovernable hotbed

of Islamist terrorism. More controversially, Putin pursued an interventionist foreign policy toward

neighboring states. His affirming Russian ties with Sootechestvenniki (“compatriots”) living abroad fueled

concerns of a revived Russian expansionism. In Georgia, Russia encouraged separatist movements, but

in 2003, the nation’s “Rose Revolution” brought to power Mikhail Saakashvili (1967- ). Saakashvilli, who

had been denied victory by election fraud, committed himself to re-establishing the central

government’s control over the nation’s Russian-speaking enclaves. Even more dramatic was Putin’s

unsuccessful intervention in Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election. The Russian president clumsily backed

the candidacy of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych (1950- ), who initially bested opposition candidate

Viktor Yushchenko (1954-) in a vote marred by massive improprieties. As Putin defended Yanukovych,

the EU and various pro-democracy NGOs demanded new elections. In the “Orange Revolution,” an

estimated 500,000 Ukrainians protested daily in the capital city, Kiev. They dressed in orange, the color

of Yushchenko’s political movement. The Ukrainian government eventually ordered a new election,

which Yushchenko won easily.

Nationalism resurgent. In both Georgia and Ukraine, nationalists had their own reasons for

supporting European integration. With Russia as the main enemy, local nationalists viewed the newly

empowered EU as a welcome potential ally. Among the Western democracies, however, nationalist

movements, largely quiescent during the consensus politics of the Cold War, emerged forcefully in the

mid-1990s. Common patterns included hostility to immigrants and to EU bureaucrats, along with an

ability to articulate a right-wing populism that appealed to voters concerned about social and economic

modernization.

At the root of this nationalist upsurge lies a demographic transformation in modern Europe. The

native population of Western Europe has long been aging. To remain steady, a general population

requires 2.1 children per mother. But in 2002, France’s fertility rate was 1.89. In Britain, the figure was

1.64; in Germany, 1.31; in Spain, 1.25; in Italy, 1.23. At the start of the 20 th century, one-third or more of

the population was age 15 or less in every European country but France. By the end of the century, that

percentage dropped below 20 in most European nations. At the other end of the ledger, between 1900

and 2000, the percentage of people over 65 had doubled in Western Europe—testimony to the success

of welfare state programs such as old-age insurance and better health care.

These figures had a concrete effect in the labor market, creating shortages for lower-paying

unskilled positions. Labor scarcity first appeared in Western Europe in the late 1960s, and it grew more

pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s. Countries in the region, long ethnically homogeneous, increasingly

turned to immigration—especially from Turkey and Muslim nations in North Africa. Through the 1970s,

West Germany employed a temporary guest worker program, with the expectation that the workers

would eventually return to their homelands. Instead, many elected to remain in Germany, where they

possessed a limited range of political and social rights. Then, between 1982 and 1992, two million new

immigrants came to the country. By the mid-1990s, over 8 percent of Germany’s population was

foreign-born.

The pattern throughout the region was similar. New emigrants tended to congregate in cities,

near the available jobs. By the early 1990s, 22 percent of Amsterdam’s population was foreign-born. The

figure for Frankfurt was 25 percent; for Brussels, 28 percent. With a new population—ethnically,

culturally, and religiously distinct—in their midst, even mainstream European politicians often engaged

in demagoguery. In campaigning for the 1993 legislative elections, France’s Jacques Chirac ridiculed the

average immigrant household as containing a “father, three or four wives, about 20 kids, earning 10,000

francs a month without working.”

Chirac had to apologize for his remarks, but other parties more willingly seized upon the issue.

Austria, for example, long had been governed by a grand coalition of the center-right People’s Party and

the center-left Social Democrats. But the early 1990s saw the rise of the far-right Freedom Party, headed

by Jörg Haider (1950- ). Haider blamed Austria’s economic problems on its liberal immigration policies

and made several comments suggesting a blasé attitude toward Nazi war crimes. In 1999 elections, the

Freedom Party came second, with 29 percent of the vote. It subsequently formed a coalition with the

third-place People’s Party. When Freedom Party ministers entered the government, 14 other EU nations

imposed diplomatic sanctions on Vienna.

Three years later, the anti-immigrant right performed better than expected in French

presidential elections. Jean-Marie Le Pen (1928- ), head of the National Front, had come to prominence

by advocating a total ban on non-European immigration to France. Like Haider, he also made statements

tinged with anti-Semitic overtones. In 2002, Le Pen stunned observers by finishing second in France’s

preliminary election, edging Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin for a spot in the runoff. After all other

major parties in France endorsed incumbent Jacques Chirac, the National Front nominee decisively lost

the contest. That Le Pen made the finals, however, was a first for a far-right party representative

anywhere in Europe.

While the solutions offered by the nationalist right can be dismissed as xenophobic, the

problems the far right has exploited are not so easily ignored. The Netherlands provides a particularly

telling case study. The Dutch long have prided themselves on their tolerance for diversity and

multiculturalism. Amsterdam, for instance, developed a reputation as a preferred spot for gay tourists,

and the Netherlands joined Belgium, Canada, and Spain as the world’s first nations to legalize marriage

for gays and lesbians.

As part of its commitment to diversity—and, more pragmatically, to address the effects of an

aging population—the Dutch government adopted a liberal immigration policy. Between 1990 and 2003,

the percentage of residents born outside of the Netherlands more than doubled, from 4.6 percent to

10.1 percent. The bulk of the increase in this overwhelmingly Protestant country came from Muslims. In

2003, the leading source of emigrants to the Netherlands was Morocco (79,134 people), followed by

Turkey (77,244). In 2005, Muslims comprised just over 8 percent of the Dutch population, a total of

more than one million people.

Many of these new immigrants, disproportionately young and male, adhered to a

fundamentalist version of Islam at odds with the Dutch tradition of tolerance. In 2004, Muhammad

Bouyeri (1978- ), the son of a Moroccan immigrant, murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (1957-2004),

whose work had been bitterly critical of Islam. After Bouyeri shot Van Gogh eight times, the killer slit the

filmmaker’s throat, stabbed him in the chest, and then attached to the corpse a five-page note

denouncing Western governments and Jews. At his trial, Bouyeri justified his actions by declaring his

allegiance to Islam as the only true faith. The following spring, seven Moroccan youths assaulted and

beat Chris Crain, editor of a U.S. gay newspaper chain, who was walking in Amsterdam with his

boyfriend. Gay rights groups termed the incident part of a pattern of attacks on gays by young Muslim

immigrants.

Dutch developments posed a question—albeit in unusually stark terms—that Western Europe

thus far has struggled to address: to what extent should Europe, in the name of promoting tolerance

and multiculturalism, tolerate ideas whose adherents have proven intolerant?

“Europe” beyond Geography: Turkey and Israel

By 2005, an increasingly united Europe has formed to the extent that the term “Europe” designates not

only a place and an idea, but also a set of institutions that affect every aspect of the lives of people on

the continent. Given this development, must “Europe” remain confined by the limitations of geography?

The question is not a hypothetical one. In recent years two Asian nations—Turkey and Israel—have

increased their connections with the institution of “Europe.”

Turkey. Turkey first requested to join what was then the European Economic Community in

1959, although over the next quarter century, the remote possibility of Turkish membership diminished

even further. In 1974, Turkey occupied one-third of the ethnically divided island of Cyprus. Then, in

1980, the secular Turkish military ousted the civilian government after an Islamic party seemed poised

to form a cabinet. Democracy was restored in Turkey in the late 1980s, although the military continued

to exercise a disproportionate influence over political matters. In particular, the military received almost

complete authority to crack down on Kurdish nationalists in southeastern Turkey.

Only with the EU’s expansion eastward following the Cold War did the possibility of Turkish

membership receive serious consideration. Between 2001 and 2004, the Turkish government enacted a

sweeping reform of its legal structure to meet the human rights criteria required for EU membership.

Turkey abolished the death penalty, allowed Turkish Kurds to use the Kurdish language in schools,

strengthened civilian control of the military, and revised the country’s penal code to eliminate state

security courts. These changes led to the opening of formal membership negotiations between the EU

and Turkey in October 2005, a move welcomed by the United States and by Germany, Turkey’s largest

trading partner. The EU negotiating team, however, continued to express concerns about limits on

freedom of expression and the lack of basic civil rights for the Kurdish population.

The possibility of Turkish entry into the EU has generated enormous controversy in many

member nations. As of 2005, Turkey’s gross domestic product was only 25 percent of the EU average. Its

2005 population of 71 million exceeded that of any EU member except Germany, and demographic

projections predict that Turkey’s population will surpass Germany’s by 2020. Some fear that Turkish

membership could bankrupt the EU by requiring massive subsidies to a state whose living standards will

not reach the EU average for decades to come.

The chief argument against Turkish membership, however, has centered on the alleged

incompatibility of a majority-Muslim state joining “Europe.” France, Denmark, and the Netherlands—the

three EU countries that have most struggled to assimilate their Muslim minority populations—have all

expressed concern about massive emigration by Turkish citizens seeking better-paying jobs in other EU

states intensifying assimilation problems. In Austria, where polls have shown that nearly 75 percent

oppose Turkish membership, fear of Muslims immigration has appeared in a common anti-EU slogan,

“Vienna is not Istanbul!” In late 2005, moreover, Turkey lost its most powerful supporter among EU

leaders, when German voters replaced Gerhard Schröder with the CDU’s Angela Merkel (1954- ), who

had previously criticized Turkey entering the EU. Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan (1954- ), a

member of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, has shown signs of impatience with

European delay. In 2005, he framed the case for his country’s admission bluntly: “The EU will either

decide to become a global actor or it must accept that it is a Christian club.”

Israel. Though Israel has not sought entry into the EU, it has attempted to obtain other types of

institutional arrangements with Europe. In 1995, Israel and the EU negotiated the “Europe-

Mediterranean Partnership,” which gave Israel low-tariff access to EU markets, the right to compete for

public procurements in EU states, intellectual property protections in EU countries, and the opportunity

to join EU forums for scientific, technical, and cultural cooperation. Israeli exports to EU countries

increased from $526 million in 1976 to $6.7 billion in 1997. Israel has also sought EU assistance in UN

matters. As of 2005, Israel is the only UN member not eligible to serve on the Security Council, whose

non-permanent seats are allotted to candidates chosen by the organization’s regional blocs. Since Arab

opposition has prevented Israel from joining the Asian bloc, the Jerusalem government has (thus far,

unsuccessfully) turned to Europe for possible representation.

The dispute between Israel and the Palestinians has complicated Israel-EU relations, though for

a brief period in the early 1990s, some progress seemed possible. After the 1991 Gulf War, PLO

chairman Yasir Arafat (1929-2004) embraced a more moderate course. In 1993, he joined Israeli prime

minister Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995) in signing the Oslo Accords. The agreement, facilitated by the good

offices of Spain and Norway, established a road map for peace in the Middle East. Israel announced its

intent to withdraw from the occupied territories and to recognize a Palestinian Authority as the

legitimate government in its place. The PLO agreed to renounce the use of terrorism and to repeal the

section of its charter committing itself to Israel’s destruction.

The Oslo Accords deliberately put off the most contentious issues: the status of East Jerusalem,

which the Palestinians claimed as their capital; the fate of Israeli settlements in the West Bank; and the

PLO’s desire to allow any Palestinian the right to “return” to Israel. Negotiators hoped that building up

trust addressing more minor questions would supply momentum for tackling tough problems at a later

stage. This expectation was never realized. In November 1995, a right-wing Jewish extremist

assassinated Rabin, just after the prime minister attended a peace rally.

The Rabin assassination ended any semblance of EU unity over Middle Eastern affairs. Germany,

as had been the case since the 1950s, generally charted a pro-Israeli course. On the other hand, Jacques

Chirac openly sympathized with Arafat, and urged the Palestinian leadership to “stick to your guns.”

Several years of Israeli political and diplomatic instability culminated in late 2000 with U.S. president Bill

Clinton, his time in office winding down, attempting to broker a final peace settlement. Negotiations fell

through, however, and Arafat instead approved a second intifada (uprising). In this round of violence,

Islamic Jihad and Hamas, Palestinian terrorist organizations backed by Iran and Syria, employed a new

tactic. The groups encouraged young male Palestinians to engage in suicide murder attacks against

Israeli civilians.

When Palestinian Authority security officials did little or nothing to prevent the assaults, Israeli

voters chose Ariel Sharon (1928- ) as prime minister. But Sharon’s aggressive security measures failed to

quell the violence, and he eventually employed a more defensive approach. In 2003, the prime minister

authorized construction of a barrier to separate Israel from the Palestinian territories. For six miles in

and around Jerusalem, where Israeli citizens faced threats from Palestinian sniper fire, Sharon’s

government built a wall. The remainder of the barrier was a fence, designed to delay terrorist attacks

long enough to give the army time to respond. Construction of the security barrier dramatically reduced

the terror attacks, but did not eliminate the threat. All told, more than 25,000 attempted or completed

attacks against Israelis originated from the occupied territories between 2000 and 2005.

Construction of the security barrier strained relations between Israel and the EU. Germany

continued to sympathize with Israeli concerns, but Chirac strongly condemned construction of the

barrier. The French president seemed more representative of European public opinion. A November

2003 survey showed that 59 percent of Europeans believed that the Jewish state “presents a threat to

peace in the world.” The Palestinians appealed the case to the International Court of Justice (IJC),

claiming that the Israeli action short-circuited the diplomatic process by imposing a unilateral de facto

boundary settlement. Israel’s response that international law provides all nations with a right to self-

defense persuaded only the U.S. judge. Jurists from Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia,

and Slovakia voted with the Palestinians. The decision was non-binding, however, and Israel continued

construction.