Europe

I first saw the Berlin Wall in March 1976, when I arrived for a semester's study at Stanford's overseas program there. As an international relations major interested in security affairs, I wanted to see the Cold War "up close and personal," and what better place to do it than the divided city that was the site of numerous Soviet-American confrontations?

It was an education, especially for a rather naive kid from California who had never been outside the United States. Foreigners could visit East Berlin relatively easily by then, yet crossing at Checkpoint Charlie was always a somewhat forbidding experience. The lines to cross were often long and tedious, the border guards sullen and arbitrary, and I always seemed to be the person they wanted to take into the back room for an extra search and a lot of questions.

The Wall itself was an ugly thing: a concrete scar across a once-great city, complete with barbed wire, guard towers, and checkpoints. It was both an iconic symbol of division but also something very real and tangible. It divided families, stifled dreams, and sometimes killed people. Some 5,000 people reportedly tried to get across the Wall while it stood, and a hundred or more died in the attempt.

Like other barriers that divide human beings, the Wall was also a confession of failure. Had the communist vision been a success, there would have been no need for Wall to keep people in. It was an education in itself to live in West Berlin and to visit the East; whatever the failings of liberal capitalism might be, it was palpably superior to life on the Other Side. West Berlin seemed a bit like Oz -- a vibrant, lively, and decidedly materialistic city, filled with cafes, stores, students, dogs (and a lot of elderly people too), but East Berlin was a bit like Dorothy's black-and-white Kansas: drab, monochromatic, and obviously much poorer. And by most accounts, East Germany worked better than the rest of the Soviet empire did.

What lessons do I draw from the Wall, its history, and its eventual destruction? Here are five.

First, although the Wall was an affront to human freedom, it also made a signal contribution to global stability. Berlin had been a flash point for international politics in 1948, 1958, and again in 1961, largely because Germany's fate remained uncertain so long as the DDR continued to lose people to the economic miracle in the West. As Marc Trachtenberg pointed out some years ago, the erection of the Wall completed the Cold War division of Europe and dampened security competition there significantly.

The second lesson is that containment worked. The Wall eventually came down because the Soviet Union collapsed without a superpower war, and Eastern Europe was liberated peacefully. As Kennan had foreseen, the Western system was in fact superior to the communist order on numerous dimensions, which meant that patient forbearance made more sense than a strategy of "rollback" or preventive war. We might have brought the wall down sooner by starting a big war, but fortunately leaders on both sides understood how foolish that would have been. There's a lesson there for those trigger-happy folks who think preventive action is the best way to deal with threats, even dangers that far less ominous than the Soviet Union was.

Third, if containment worked, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a vivid reminder that empires don't. The history of the 20th century is littered with the corpses of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, Dutch, and Soviet empires -- none of whom could withstand the corrosive solvent of modern nationalism. Once the desire for national self-determination had the opportunity to express itself, the Soviet empire collapsed with remarkable swiftness.

Fourth, the destruction of the Wall-and indeed, the collapse of the entire Soviet order-teaches that revolutionary upheavals are nearly impossible to forecast with any precision. As Timur Kuran and others have shown, an individual's willingness to rebel is a form of private information that cannot be reliably known in advance, especially in an authoritarian society where repression is a real possibility. As a result, seemingly minor events can suddenly induce rapid contagion effects that even the participants themselves did not anticipate. Although a few observers recognized that the Soviet order was in trouble, hardly anyone believed it could collapse as quickly as it did or that Germany would reunify in a few years. The real lesson, however, is that although dramatic political change does occur from time to time, it rarely does so accordingly to anyone's timetable. The moral: Don't base your policy towards an adversary on the assumption that its rulers are on their last legs. Maybe they are, but maybe not, and nobody really knows.

Fifth and last, the fall of the Wall highlights the critical role of the individual in history. I'm a big believer in the importance of large structural forces -- the changing distribution of power, economic growth rates, demographic trends, and even evolving normative understandings -- but history sometimes turns on an individuals's ideas and initiatives. As I see it, it wasn't Reagan's saying "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" that led to it being broken into a million pieces (and then sold off, in a wonderful symbol of capitalist triumph), it was the fact that Gorbachev listened and was already thinking along similar lines. Had Andropov or Chernenko been younger or in better health, the Wall would have remained standing well into the 1990s, and we would not be celebrating anything today.

So as we congratulate ourselves for winning the Cold War and congratulate Germans on the destruction of a hated symbol of division, let us also reserve a word of thanks for those on the other side who also helped make that destruction possible.

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Denmark is a lovely country and Air Force One is a very nice plane, so I hope Barack and Michelle enjoyed their little jaunt to Copenhagen. I said it was a mistake for Obama to go shilling for the City of Chicago even before we knew the results, and now of course I'm sure of it.

What I'd really like to know is which one of his aides told him that this was a good idea, and convinced him that his involvement would seal the deal.  Sending the President across the Atlantic to lobby in this fashion might make sense if you knew the vote would be close and were very confident that his intervention would be decisive, but it now looks like it wasn't a near thing at all. Don't these people know how to count noses in advance?  Chicago's bid got rejected in the first round, leaving the Leader of the Free World looking ineffectual. And that's just about the last thing you want a president to seem.

It's not a huge deal -- though you can count on the right-wing smear machine to be all over it -- but I hope somebody at the White House gets taken to the woodshed on this one. As I've said repeatedly, they are trying to do way too much, and have been forced to use Obama for too many small things. I hope they learn a lesson from this, and I sure hope the president does better with his next overseas sales pitch.

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While visiting Geneva last week, I was reminded of how well many aspects of public infrastructure work in Europe. Geneva is beautiful, clean, and the transport system seemed to be a model of efficiency and convenience. I took a public bus to the airport, which entailed walking one block from my hotel to the bus stop and then riding a clean and inexpensive bus for about 20 minutes, ending up right at the terminal. The Geneva and Zurich airports are gleaming, uncrowded, and comfortable. To get from my home to the airport via public transit in Boston, I'd have to walk 12 minutes to a T stop, ride a slow, crowded, and erratic trolley line (the dreaded "Green Line") into downtown, change twice, and then take an airport shuttle bus to reach the terminal. And Boston's Logan Airport, though better than it used to be, isn’t going to win any prizes. Let's not even talk about rail service or health care.

Maybe the differences in public infrastructure between Western Europe and the United States have something to do with the amount of money we spend constructing a different sort of "public infrastructure" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and lots of other places around the world. 

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A number of readers wrote in regarding my last post, which described French Open champion Roger Federer as having delivered most/all of his acceptance speech in English (even though he speaks French fluently). They report that I was dead wrong, and that most of his remarks were in French, save for the comments he directed at runner-up Robin Soderling (who spoke in English), and Andre Agassi (who was there to present the award).

Except for the announcer, I didn’t hear any French in the broadcast I watched, but NBC may skipped that portion of the coverage. It's also possible that I was refilling my coffee cup and returned to catch the English portion of his remarks. Mea culpa, and apologies to all for missing this one.

Speaking of French, I will be trying to resurrect my own rusty skills in that language over the next week. I'm visiting the The Graduate Institute in Geneva to participate in a thesis defense and give a colloquium, and then attending a conference on "Rising Powers Amidst International Turmoil: The United States and Europe Facing China and Russia" in Talloires, France. I'm told the hotels all have WiFi, so I'll be posting from the road as time permits.

I watched the Men's final at the French Open tennis tournament yesterday, and I was struck by the dominance of: 1) Roger Federer, who won his 14th Grand Slam tournament handily, and 2) the English language. The announcer at *Roland Garros* Stadium reported the scores en francais and French TV apparently got the first courtside interview with Federer after the match (while NBC took a commercial break), but Federer and Swedish runner-up Robin Soderling gave their acceptance speeches  in English (with a French translation for the crowd). One imagines the spirit of Charles de Gaulle whirring rapidly in his tomb, not to mention the "Immortals" in L'Academie francaise.

It’s possible that Robin Soderling (the Swedish runner-up) spoke to the crowd in English because he doesn't speak French. But Federer reportedly speaks fluent French, German, and Swiss-German, as well as English, so why wasn’t he addressing the local crowd in their native tongue?

My guess is that this was dictated by the global TV market, and by the growing position of English as the lingua franca of contemporary globalization. The tournament was being watched all over the world, and English is the language that would be understood by the greatest number of potential viewers world-wide.  

Americans sometimes view the dominant position of English as another component of America's "soft power," but that view is simplistic chauvinism.  With English becoming a "universal" language, no single country will own it or be able to regulate its content. Instead, it will continue to evolve as most languages do, incorporating new words, spellings, and grammatical practices from an wide variety of sources. If they haven't started already, American xenophobes are going to start complaining soon about the corruption of "standard English" by all these foreign influences.  For an interesting collection of views on this topic, check out the "Freakonomics" discussion here.

Of course, this whole discussion may be moot, given the damage that email, text-messaging, and Twitter feeds are already doing to civilized discourse.  Or does that comment make me sound like a technophobe?

*P.S.: Bonus points for anyone who knows who Roland Garros was without looking up the link. Answer: Garros was a French aeronautical pioneer, who developed an armored propeller that allowed the use of a forward-firing machine gun for aerial combat during World War I. His system predated the more effective synchronization device later perfected by the Dutch/German Anthony Fokker. Garros was captured by the Germans in 1915, later escaped, and eventually shot down and killed in 1918. The stadium for which he is named occupies the site of a tennis academy that he attended.

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I haven't watched a video of it, but the text of President Obama's speech to the Turkish parliament sure reads like a home run to me. He offered the gracious words of praise that any guest offers his hosts, but he also managed to be eloquent on matters of great sensitivity and to convey a healthy respect for his listeners. A few highlights, and maybe a bit a tea-leaf reading:

1. Obama began by noting that Turkey was "part of Europe," and later said it "is not where East and West divide -- it is where they come together." And he made it unequivocally clear that the United States supports Turkey's entry into the EU. French President Nicolas Sarkozy wasn’t pleased, but I’ll bet Obama’s audience was.

2. As he did in his famous speech on race during the campaign, Obama used his and our own experiences in order to address the delicate issue of Turkish-Armenian history. In the race speech, he invoked the example of his white grandmother to appeal to white Americans who were struggling in their own way with the implications of our troubled racial history. And he managed to do that in a way that conveyed his deep affection for her despite her human lapses. In this speech, he spoke of America's own "darker periods," and reminded his Turkish audience that "human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past." He deftly turned attention away from his earlier comments about the Armenian genocide (and did not use that word), by noting that "this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past." By referring to America’s own treatment of blacks and native Americans, and to our shameful reliance upon torture under President Bush, he avoided the self-congratulatory hubris that appeals to American audiences but usually puts foreign audiences’ teeth on edge.

3. He thanked Turkey for its diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, and once again stated that the United States "strongly supports" the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace. His language treated the two sides equally, and he again committed himself to "actively pursuing" that goal.

4. Obama also went to some lengths to engage the Muslim world in a broad and expansive manner that looked to the future instead of dwelling on the past. He acknowledged that there have been strains in recent years and made it clear that the United States was still committed to combating terrorism. Yet he emphasized that "America's relationship with the Muslims cannot and will not be based on opposition to Al Qaeda." I'm sure that played better than "you're either with us, or with the terrorists."

5. Finally, I was struck by the language he used when addressing Iran’s nuclear program. He said that “the peace of the region will also be advanced if Iran forgoes any nuclear weapons ambitions” (my emphasis), adding that "Iran's leaders must choose whether they will build a weapon or build a better future for their people." Was this a subtle hint that the United States might be willing to tolerate Iranian enrichment, provided that we are confident that it was not masking a covert weapons program? Hmmmmm.

All in all, I thought it was a terrific speech. But my opinion hardly matters: the real question is what his audience thought. I’ll be very interested to see what they have to say about it.   

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The Council on Foreign Relations sponsored a one-day conference on "NATO at 60" last week, and I participated in a panel discussion with Charles Kupchan of Georgetown/CFR, Ole Waever of the University of Copenhagen, and James Goldgeier of George Washington University, and I thought each of the other participants had lots of smart things to say. (I especially liked Waever's metaphor for NATO as an Old Master painting -- a valuable masterpiece that you'd want to protect but not something you could duplicate, even if you wanted to).

Charlie, Ole and I published a little book on NATO about ten years ago, and I used part of my time on the panel to revisit my earlier arguments and assess what I got right and what I got wrong back then. (Short answer: I was right that the disappearance of the Soviet threat and several other structural forces were gradually pulling NATO apart, but I underestimated U.S. willingness to continue subsidizing its allies' security and understated European willingness to continue deferring to U.S. leadership).

I ended my remarks with five "heretical questions," and thought I'd share them with you.

First, how will generational and demographic change affect NATO in the future?  (It was not exactly a youngish crowd at the meeting). If you're 20 years old today, you were born the year the Berlin Wall came down. You were twelve years old when George W. Bush became President, which means you came of age in a period when the U.S. image in much of Europe sank to new lows. The various Berlin crises, "Flexible Response," the Euromissiles controversy, MBFR talks, and all the other familiar landmarks of NATO's glorious past are ancient (and largely irrelevant) history to the next generation. Is an alliance led by the United States really the only world that young Europeans can or will imagine? What about Americans who trace their ancestry to Asia, India, or Latin America, and whose famiy ties or economic interests lie elsewhere?  

Second, why does anyone think that Europe is going to do more to provide for collective defense? The alliance has been arguing about "burden-sharing" since its inception, and we have both well-developed theories and sixty years of history demonstrating why the United States still bears most of the burden while Europe tends to "free-ride." A continent with a larger population and combined GDP than America, and with over a million men and women under arms, still can’t assemble the wherewithal to put 60,000 troops in the field and sustain them for any reasonable length of time. I'm not picking on them, mind you, because it's not obvious to me that Europe needs a lot more capability in order to be secure, especially with Uncle Sam devoting a much higher share of its GDP to defense. But given that NATO's European members have a declining and aging populations and face no imminent external military threats, does anyone seriously believe that they are going to take on a more equal share of the collective burden?

Third, over the next ten to twenty years (at least), America's strategic attention is likely to be focused on the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia.  In light of these priorities, what is the basis for close strategic cooperation between Europe and America? (Note that several NATO allies have already declared that they will be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in the next year or so, just as the United States is ramping up). If the United States were one day to decide to make a greater effort to contain China (not a certainty, of course, but hardly a far-fetched possibility), would Europe join in that mission?  What would be its interest in doing so? Wouldn't it be more likely to seek good relations with Washington and Beijing, and cultivate profitable economic ties with both sides?

Fourth, and following from the third point, why do so many people think that NATO can or should strive for common positions on literally dozens of contentious international issues? For example, a recent joint study by the RAND Corporation and the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Germany calls for major diplomatic efforts to "harmonize" positions across a whole range of problems, including terrorism, WMD, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Central Asia, the reform of Bretton Woods institutions, energy security, global poverty, and a whole lot more.  But is there any reason to expect NATO to do this? If not, what is that point of making this level of agreement on that many issues the benchmark of alliance cohesion? Might we be better off picking the two or three most important issues confronting NATO's members, working hard to reach agreement on them, and agreeing to disagree on the others?

Fifth and last, is there are a point one can now foresee when NATO might actually end, or at least be recognized as essentially irrelevant? Back in 1998, I compared NATO to Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey: it appeared youthful and vigorous, continually holding meetings, exercises, summits, and subsequently managing to fight minor wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan (albeit without much actual coordination), but in reality, the alliance was growing old and tired. Perhaps that’s why the titles of so many recent studies of NATO use the prefix "Re-," as in "Renewing the Atlantic Partnership," "Revitalizing the Transatlantic Security Partnership," or "Alliance Reborn." If so many smart people think NATO badly needs repair, isn't that rather revealing?

There's no need for an acrimonious divorce -- and I don't actually expect NATO to formally dissolve -- but it is hard to see it as America's core alliance network going forward. Perhaps NATO at 70 will be enjoying a quiet and well-deserved retirement. Still alive and kicking, but like most retirees, a lot less active.

Events elsewhere have kept me from paying much attention to the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, but the realist in me has a couple of thoughts. It's obvious that Moscow is using Ukraine's dependence on Russian natural gas as a diplomatic weapon -- no surprise there -- but it's equally clear that Moscow's leverage is reduced by the EU's reliance on gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines. Whenever Moscow tries to squeeze Kiev, Europe hollers and jumps in, and then the Russians have to lighten up in order to avoid a major fight with the Europeans (an important trading partner). But this problem will ease as soon as EU-Russian pipelines bypassing Ukraine are completed and Russia's ability to pressure Ukraine will perforce increase. As long as the rest of the EU is toasty warm in winter, they aren't going to care much about conditions in Kiev. So if I were Ukrainian, I'd think long and hard about where this one was headed.