20 Years Ago 16: Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ran the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, first as party general secretary and then as president, won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize ...

... for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community. During the last few years, dramatic changes have taken place in the relationship between East and West. Confrontation has been replaced by negotiations. Old European nation states have regained their freedom.

Nobel peace laureates are often controversial. I have not shied away from such controversies myself.

But what are we to make of Gorbachev's role in the revolutions of 1989?

His main achievement was not something he did, but rather something he didn't do.

The Brezhnev Doctrine was outlined in a speech by Soviet Communist General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, in November 1968. He justified the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of that year, which ousted a reform Communist regime:

The peoples of the socialist countries and Communist parties certainly do have and should have freedom for determining the ways of advance of their respective countries. However, none of their decisions should damage either socialism in their country or the fundamental interests of other socialist countries, and the whole working class movement, which is working for socialism ... Discharging their internationalist duty toward the fraternal peoples of Czechoslovakia and defending their own socialist gains, the U.S.S.R. and the other socialist states had to act decisively and they did act against the antisocialist forces in Czechoslovakia.

Although his name is attached to it, Brezhnev did not originate that idea. His predecessor Nikita Khrushchev applied the same therapy to Hungary in 1956.

Gorbachev faced several situations in 1989 in which the Brezhnev Doctrine would have called for armed intervention. He held back, and he made it clear to all involved that he intended to continue holding back. Once the jailhouse door was opened, the prisoners did not linger inside.

So, Gorbachev's achievement was that he was not as evil as Brezhnev. Does that make him a hero?

To answer "no" to that is not to say that Gorbachev's behavior was insignificant, or that it didn't take a certain type of courage to purse that path. Perhaps we can turn around Edmund Burke's famous phrase and say that all that was necessary for the triumph of good was that evil men do nothing.

Gorbachev advanced through the Soviet Communist system, and benefited from the perquisites of power. I probably would have done the same thing in his circumstances. But the true heroes are the dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, who sacrificed a very comfortable life to be true to his conscience.

This is another of those unanswerable what-ifs, but I wonder whether Gorbachev would have governed in the orthodox Communist fashion, if the Soviet Union's economic circumstances had allowed for that. Some cite the falling oil prices of the 1980s as one factor depressing the Soviet economy. But there was also the cumulative effect of the inefficiencies of socialism that had been acting on the country for 70 years. In other words, an argument can be made that Gorbachev's benign inaction was forced on him, and was not necessarily evidence of a genuine intent to reform the system.

Oh, and then there's that little technicality that he never won a free and fair election. Marxist-Leninist politicians' refusal to compete against opposition parties has always been justified by gobbledygook such as "dictatorship of the proletariat".

Many Western intellectuals bought into that. The notion was that there were idealistic ends that, to some extent at least, justified brutal means.

But I agree with the school of thought that says there was never any idealistic intent; it was all about seizing power by force, and holding on to it by force for as long as possible. Submitting to competitive elections would have inhibited their full exercise of power. And, Marx forbid, they might lose, as they started finding out in various European countries starting in 1989.

And what happened when Gorbachev did run in a multi-party election? He got 0.5% of the vote when he ran for president of Russia in 1996. That's all the democratic legitimacy he ever had, when he interacted with Ronald Reagan, who had been reelected with 58.7% of the popular vote in 1984, and George H.W. Bush, who won with 53.3% in 1988.

And, yet, there are many on the left who want to make Gorbachev the hero of the story, and give only a small share, if any, of the credit, to Reagan and other democratically-elected leaders, including Margaret Thatcher.

The best I can bring myself to do is to damn Gorbachev with faint praise by writing that he was perhaps the least bad of the major Communist leaders.

Political Philosophy

In this post, I quoted the great political philosopher Tip O'Neill.

When I think back on all the time I wasted as a political science major, reading Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Marx, etc., it's too bad I didn't realize at the time that just about the only political philosophy I would need to write this blog, is contained in three quotes by the following 20th-century philosophers:

A week is a long time in politics.

-- British Prime Minister Harold Wilson

Money is the mother's milk of politics.

-- California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh

All politics is (should that be "are"?) local.

-- U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill

Regular readers of this blog will note how useful I find those quotations to be. Perhaps I'll try to work something in from Locke sometime, and see if you're impressed.

20 Years Ago 15: More Velvet

In this post, I briefly alluded to Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, its ever-so-peaceful transition away from Marxism-Leninism, beginning in 1989.

The subsequent decision of the Czechs and Slovaks to go their separate ways, which was implemented in 1993, was equally peaceful. Therefore, it was inevitable that it would be labeled the "Velvet Divorce".

As I mentioned here, the reunification of Germany was directly tied to the events of 1989. The division of Germany that existed between 1949 and 1990 was completely based on Cold War tensions. The USSR could not come to agreement with the other occupying powers, the U.S., Britain and France, on arrangements to unify the country, which had been the goal when the occupation zones were mapped out at Yalta in 1945. But, once the Cold War was over, the dividing line was quickly erased.

By contrast, the multinational state of Czechoslovakia came into existence long before the Cold War started. As was the case with Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia emerged out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in World War I. There is no logical reason why the Czechoslovak state could not have been kept together post-1989, if the political will had existed for that. But it did not.

The country's Communist dictators had no incentive to split up Czechoslovakia, because that would have diminished their power. However, after 1989, democracy allowed interests in both sides of the country to push their separatist agenda. In other words, the grass roots had a very different view than the former top-down rulers. The democratization allowed Tip O'Neill's famous saying to apply: "All politics is local."

To summarize: the Velvet Divorce was tied into the events of 1989, just not as directly as German reunification was.

But why wasn't the breakup of Czechoslovakia as violent as that of Yugoslavia? Here is a summary of a lecture by Valerie Bunce, a Cornell professor, going into at least as much detail as you're probably interested in, regarding differences in governmental structure. The key is:

Serbs were angry at not getting what they saw as their due, and Serbian leaders had significant institutional resources at their disposal to give a clear voice to these resentments.

Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, a product of Yugoslav Communism, had, by the early 1990s, no counterpart in Czechoslovakia. As was typical of Communist leaders, Milosevic gave top priority to preserving his power. By contrast, the democratic leaders of Czechoslovakia had no incentive to use force to prevent a breakup.

Aside from those issues of governing structure, the religious demographics are different. Roman Catholicism is the primary religion in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. That differs markedly from the combination of Catholics, Serbian Orthodox and Muslims in Yugoslavia. That seems to have been a major factor in the animosity between the various Yugoslav nationalities.

20 Years Ago 14: Pax Sovietica

When the Roman Empire controlled many of the areas that were on or near the Mediterranean Sea, one of the benefits Rome provided, in exchange for those regions giving up their political independence, was the Pax Romana. That's Latin for "Roman peace".

The website unrv.com summarizes conditions from about 27 BCE to 180 CE as follows:

The Legions patrolled the borders with success, and though there were still many foreign wars, the internal empire was free from major invasion, piracy or social disorder on any grand scale.

The Empire went into decline thereafter, and eventually fell, but, at its height, Rome for the most part enforced peace in the areas it controlled.

As was the case with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 20th century, the Roman Empire combined many cultures and religions into one political entity. Those disparate peoples may well have engaged in frequent warfare, had the iron hand from above not held them in place.

That concept is sometimes applied to the USSR and its satellite nations. Moscow is said to have enforced a Pax Sovietica, that was similar to the Pax Romana.

As the Soviet Union's power waned, and eventually disintegrated, fault lines in its empire began to show. Christian Armenia fought against Muslim Azerbaijan. Minority peoples within Russia itself, such as the Muslims of Chechnya, fought for autonomy. The potential for such violence had always been there, but the iron hand from Moscow had kept those groups in check for many decades.

The Pax Sovietica also extended to the satellite countries of eastern Europe. Minority ethnic groups in many of those countries nursed grudges against their perceived oppressors.

Yugoslavia was not controlled by the USSR, after its Communist dictator Josep Broz (a.k.a. Tito) broke with Moscow in 1948. But there was a "Peace of Tito" (not being fluent in Latin, I can't translate that) that was a smaller-scale version of the Soviet Peace. Tito held together the different cultures within Yugoslavia, continuing to rule until his death in 1980.

The combination of Tito's absence, and the general air of revolution in the region, doomed the Yugoslav state, by the early 1990s. As I said here, I'm not going to go into detail but, as you undoubtedly know, the result was extremely violent in most of the territory that had constituted Yugoslavia.

Religious differences, which can paint The Other as a demonic force that needs to be dealt with accordingly, accentuated the violence.

The Communists did not eliminate nationalism within the territory they controlled. They kept a lid in place for several decades that was tight enough to prevent those pressures from exploding.

Was the eventual explosion worse than it would have been, had that lid not been held in place? That's one of those what-ifs of history that can't be definitively resolved. But the poverty and the suppression of civil society that were produced by totalitarian rule probably made things worse.

California Governor: The Republican Primary

I've written about next year's Democratic nomination for governor of California, in this and other posts. But there is a more spirited contest on the Republican side, where three major candidates are contending for that party's nomination. To be scrupulously fair, they are, in alphabetical order:

Tom Campbell, 57, was elected to the U.S. House in 1988. His service in the House was interrupted, when he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that was won by Barbara Boxer in 1992. Campbell returned to the House in 1995, but again gave up his seat for an unsuccessful Senate candidacy. In 2000, he won the Republican nomination to run against Dianne Feinstein, but lost to her in a landslide in the general election. Trained as an economist and a lawyer, he has held college faculty positions during periods out of elective office.

Steve Poizner, 52, is California's insurance commissioner, an elected official in that state. Before he was elected to that position in 2006, Poizner was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Meg Whitman, 53, is making her first run for public office. She is a businesswoman, whose career also took her to Silicon Valley. She was CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008. Last year, Whitman was associated with the presidential campaigns of, first, Mitt Romney, and then, John McCain.

George Will has written favorably about Campbell and Poizner. As far as I know, he hasn't said much, one way or the other, about Whitman. I'm not sure if that means he just hasn't gotten around to doing a column about her, or he opposes her candidacy.

According to Real Clear Politics, Whitman leads Campbell by an average of 9.2 percentage points in polls that have been taken since August. Poizner is far behind in third place.

The primary election will be held on June 8, 2010.

20 Years Ago 13: Nations

In this series about the fall of the Berlin Wall, and related events, I don't plan to go into much detail about the breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But I do want to address how nationalism has affected events in many parts of the ex-Marxist-Leninist countries of Europe.

The end-game of Communism in some of the places that had been part of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was much more violent than in other places such as Czechoslovakia, home of the Velvet Revolution.

The violence took place between different nations that had been thrown together in the same state.

I'm not a lawyer, let alone an international lawyer, but I'm using the terms "state" and "nation" according to what I understand to be their technical legal meanings, which are different than the way we use those words in American political conversation.

"State" means an independent country. But since, of course, we apply that word to political subdivisions of our country, we tend to call an independent country a "nation". But the international meaning of "nation" is a people with a common culture, which may or may not have a state of their own.

So, for example, there is a Japanese nation and a Japanese state. However, there is a Kurdish nation, but no Kurdish state. And to illustrate one more variation on the theme, Belgium, for example, is a state with two nations (Flemings and Walloons).

The USSR and Yugoslavia consisted of multiple nations crammed into a single state. The USSR created that situation by conquest, while Yugoslavia was somewhat of an artificial creation, as part of the Versailles peace settlement after World War I.

There is a story about the creation of Yugoslavia that gets repeated so often, I assume it must be apocryphal. But, whether it happened or not, it makes a good story, especially for a Republican to tell. Supposedly, President Woodrow Wilson, representing the U.S. at the Versailles peace conference in 1919, micromanaged the creation of Yugoslavia to such a degree that, at one point, he was down on his knees, drawing boundaries on a map that was placed on the floor. In a PBS interview in 1999, journalist Harold Evans describes:

... when Wilson went to Versailles to make the world safe for democracy and was on his knees drawing a map of Yugoslavia on the principle of self-determination ...

Serbians, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians were combined into Yugoslavia, the land of the South Slavs. The boundaries needed to be redrawn because those areas had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was broken up when it ended up on the losing side in World War I.

The notion that Yugoslavia was totally dreamed up in Wilson's idealistic head is at least an exaggeration. Srdja Trifkovic, writing under the auspices of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, describes unification efforts by some of the people in those nations, that predated Wilson.

But regardless of who gets the credit or blame for its creation, the fact remains that multiple nations with disparate cultures were combined in one state. Among other differences, Yugoslavia threw together Catholic and Orthodox Christians, as well as Muslims.

Next: What held the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia together, temporarily?

Circular Reasoning

Adam Liptak writes in The New York Times about points of agreement between some on the left and some on the right of the spectrum, regarding criminal justice issues.

This is an excellent example of something I wrote about here, which is that the political spectrum can be represented graphically by a circle, rather than a line.

Liptak quotes one interested party who sees it that way:

“It’s a remarkable phenomenon,” said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The left and the right have bent to the point where they are now in agreement on many issues. In the area of criminal justice, the whole idea of less government, less intrusion, less regulation has taken hold.”

Criminal justice issues seem particularly conducive to producing that bending-around effect. More purely economic issues lend themselves more to the traditional linear view of the spectrum. No model ever exactly fits reality.