‘Paul P’ writes ‘Mr Hitchens again uses the device of rubbishing associations with Munich in 1938, again intimating that Crimea in 2014 is as meaningless to our interests as was Czechoslovakia in 1938, therefore the expansionism of the respective leaders of 1938 and 2014 can be ignored. I think this is delusional analysis, and possibly as dangerously delusional in 2014 as quite obviously it turned out to be in 1938. We at this distant remove, and on an island to boot, might be understood for regarding Putin's moves in Crimea as too distant to be concerned about or bothered with. But what of the other Balkan and Baltic states which are now wondering (if their TV-polled residents' worries can be taken seriously) if Russia might also be considering their re-entry into the precinct of Russian hegemony? A quick 'referendum' among Russian-speaking ethnic minorities in Estonia, say, might encourage Putin to think about another land-grab, and another, and then another. All he need fear from the West at every 'signature on a piece of paper' is increased travel restriction on his oligarchs. That and a too-late scramble by western governments to find non-Russian sources of energy. Mr Putin must be laughing his former-KGB boots off.’
I thought I’d address this as it is such a clear and concise statement of the beliefs being encouraged by almost all media coverage of recent events in Ukraine and Russia.Let us see if I am in fact guilty of 'delusional' thinking.
It might first of all be worth addressing the Czechoslovak question. Can any reader explain what Britain’s interest was, in 1938, in the survival of Czechoslovakia as a state?
Of course it would have been pleasanter if it had survived. With all its many faults, the Czechoslovak state of 1938 was a relatively free and rather prosperous country. I feel this very strongly having visited Prague many times (long before it was fashionable or even much known about), and having a strong emotional sympathy for the Czechs, having seen them under the Soviet heel and having watched them being liberated in the winter of 1989. It was certainly much preferable to the other countries created or shaped by the Versailles Treaty, using leftover bits of the old Austro-Hungarian , Russian and German Empires - despotic Hungary, anti-Semitic undemocratic Poland, the mess of Yugoslavia. But self-indulgent sentimentality about other countries is no more than that, unless it is matched by armed force and the willingness and ability to use it. Britain has never had either that force or that readiness.
But multi-national states are tricky things to manage. Belgium remains a hopeless failure, Switzerland is a rare success. Almost a quarter of the inter-war Czechoslovakia’s population were German, and the Czechs and Slovaks who formed a sort of Slavic bloc partly to outnumber the Germans more effectively, were not that harmonious. Poland coveted one piece of her territory, Hungary a much larger one ( and both cruelly and selfishly took what they wanted in 1938 after Munich). Opinions differ as to how well it worked. A revisionist history ‘Czechoslovakia: the State that failed’, by Elizabeth Neimann, has been much criticised for alleged unfairness and inaccuracy, and I’m not competent to judge. But the history of post-war Czechoslovakia, with the violent ethnic cleansing of the German population, and the eventual split between Czechs and Slovaks into two separate EU provinces, makes it difficult to work out how things might have continued if (by some miracle) the inter-war republic had survived.
I tend to suspect that, even without outside interference, Czechoslovakia would have ended up being dissolved, as it has been, though in a peaceful world without Hitler some humane way might have been found of returning its German speakers to German government, rather than the shameful expulsion and brutalities which actually happened, inflicted as they were largely on women and children. . I tend to think (contrary to current wisdom) that moving borders to suit people is usually a lot more sensible and humane than moving people to suit borders.
But Woodrow Wilson’s plan for Europe, which replaced the old multi-ethnic empires with not-very-mono-ethnic new nations, created too many complex and insoluble border questions, within and without the new states. An intended liberation ended up as an explosive mess, one which led directly to war in 1939 and which has now quietly been expunged by the Schengen agreement. It wasn’t just Germans in the wrong place, though there were a lot of them. It was Romanians in the wrong place, Poles in the wrong place, Ukrainians in the wrong place.
Under the old empires, this had been unpleasant for many smaller peoples. Under Versailles, it became a prelude to war, as there were now so many more disputed borders, and France, which had been at the height of its power in 1918, had rapidly sunk back into itself, denuded of young men, anxious for peace, without the will or the means to sustain the anti-German alliances it had gaily set up in the early 1920s. As for the USA, it had simply disappeared. Washington’s puniness as a land power was astonishing, with an army(in 1939) about the same size as Portugal’s, poorly equipped and trained, and a pitiful air force. Only the US Navy could be said to be a serious and well-trained modern military formation and that (of course) was of little use on Continental Europe. The same could be said of Britain, which had chosen in 1936 to develop a strengthened Navy, to guard the Empire, and a much-enlarged Air Force, to defend the home islands against what many then believed was the principal danger, aerial bombing . This, by the way, explains Churchill’s very wise refusal to throw the RAF into the Battle of France in 1940. That wasn’t what it was for.
So what we had in 1938 was a whole lot of unsustainable borders, most of them designed to cramp and limit Germany, unaddressed during the years when Germany had been a law-governed free country, and now festering badly just as Germany acquired an aggressive despotism. (By the way, those who compare Vladimir Putin with Hitler really should be careful. Domestically, Putin is repressive in an old-fashioned pre-Communist way, but his repression is simply not comparable even with that under Brezhnev, let alone the Stalinist system. Nor is he a Nordic racialist maniac).
The Sudetenland, by the way, had never been *German* , despite being just down the road, and along the Elbe valley, from Dresden and Saxony. But it had been *Austrian*, or rather Austro-Hungarian, and once Germany had swallowed Austria (which many democratic Austrians had wanted it to do in the 1920s, not least because this truncated remnant was just as devastated by hyper-inflation as Germany, but lacked the means of recovery ) the distinction wasn’t particularly important.
As I never tire of pointing out, the expansionist policies associated with Hitler were not his idea, or specifically National Socialist. They were German. The idea of a German-dominated ‘Mitteleuropa’, part political and part economic, stretching eastward across Poland and Ukraine, into the Baltic states in the North, and into the edge of the Caucasus in the South, originated with Friedrich Naumann in the middle of the Great War. It was largely put into effect at the 1918 Peace of Brest-Litovsk, but did not endure because Germany was soon afterwards defeated in the West. Naumann was not a militarist or a nationalist, but a civilised liberal still revered by the Modern Free Democrat Party. When he first set out his plan, Austria-Hungary still existed, which he considered part of Mitteleuropa, and he presumed it would continue to do so, so it would have included the territory which became Czechoslovakia, and which became independent Hungary, and which became inter-war Poland. Things, as always grew more complicated at the edges, in the Balkans and in Ukraine.
But one would have to be a convinced coincidence theorist to look at the recent eastward expansion of the EU and not see some congruence between Naumann’s scheme and the EU’s desired sphere of influence.
When you put that alongside the USA’s longstanding and enthusiastic support for the creation of a United States of Europe (papers making this absolutely clear were deposited by accident in the Georgetown University library a few years ago, and I have seen some of them myself. Much of the detail is to be found in Richard Aldrich’s interesting book ‘The Hidden Hand’), you can perhaps wonder about the origins of the current clash of interests in Kiev. Few things make me laugh more than British conservatives who think that the USA is on the side of ‘Euroscepticism’ and would welcome the recreation of an independent Britain. Nope.
Anyway, had we really wanted to preserve the anti-German states to the east and north of post-Anschluss Germany, our only conceivable ally would have been Stalin’s USSR. But Poland and Romania did not trust Stalin, and so there was no possibility of them allowing the Soviet Army across their territory to help the Czechs. Moscow was therefore able to posture as Prague’s friend, without having to do anything about it. Later, when we sent a delegation to Moscow in 1939, Stalin made it clear that he wanted a very free hand in Eastern Europe and the Baltics in return for any sort of anti-Hitler alliance. And we declined to give him this, which was why he turned instead to Hitler (who readily gave him half of Poland and the Baltic states) . This may well have seemed clever and principled at the time, but we later had to give far, far more away in return for Stalin’s involuntary alliance with us, after 1941.
My own view is that everyone under the ‘Habsburg Yoke’ in 1914 (right down to Gavril Princip) would have begged the Habsburgs to rule them forever and a day, if they had known what would come soon after their ‘liberation’ from Vienna in 1918. This is why I am so against attempts to reorder Europe radically. 1992 seems to me to have been a new Versailles, unreasonable, unsustainable and unrealistic, and the harder we stick to it, the more tragic and violent will be the end.
New Cold Warriors often warn of the threat to the three Baltic states. No doubt there is one, though I think it takes the form of internal destabilisation and installation of Moscow-leaning governments at some stage in the middle distance, rather than outright invasion. I hope not, but I suspect so. That threat would be incomparably smaller if they had stayed out of NATO and the EU. Moscow could tolerate the three countries indefinitely as neutral neighbours, but as forward bases for an expansionist alliance, they increase the risk of trouble, and especially of destabilisation, rather than decreasing it. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, about the soberest, most rational and open-minded Russian leader of modern times, was almost livid with fury over the Baltics’ demands for full independence. I don’t say this to endorse his feelings, though I think I understand them. I just say it to point out that it is a fact, and that it is only Russian weakness that has – up till now – prevented trouble over this.
I’m not sure where the Balkans come into this.
But I fear that some future Russian state, which might make Vladimir Putin look like Jimmy Carter, will indeed do the dreadful things the New Cold Warriors warn of. But if it does it will be because we didn’t have the sense to reach a reasonable compromise with Russia under its present government, so helping to bring about the elevation of a truly monstrous autocrat, as bad as we wrongly imagine Vladimir Putin to be. The more we slight and provoke Russia, the more aggressive and resentful Russia will become. So why do this?
This is in fact the *true* parallel between now and the pre-1939 world. We are in the late 1920s rather than in the late 1930s. The country which has been foolishly humiliated in defeat, and driven back behind unsustainable borders, is still open to reason and compromise and still part of the international diplomatic system. Vladimir Putin may not be Gustav Stresemann (who was a liberal democrat (not a Liberal Democrat) but more or less shared Hitler’s views on Germany’s lost eastern territory). But he is also emphatically not Adolf Hitler.
My other point about standing up for Czechoslovakia is that we haven’t done so even in this free, safe modern Hitler-Free, Stalin-free, unmilitarised world. Germany, in Europe’s name, has dissolved Czechoslovakia and nobody cares. It has no borders. It has been cut into two (or rather three, with the removal of sub-Carpathian Ukraine). Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist . And nobody minds or notices, because power-grabs through supranational bodies (which tactfully allow the conquered to fly their flags and pretend to be countries) are all right whereas power-grabs using naked armed force are not.
There’s a lot of sense in that. Naked armed force is horrible. But let’s not pretend that the abolition of European borders, and the imposition of a single currency, and the single market, are not a power grab. I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. The EU has finally taken Clausewitz into the post-modern world. The EU is the continuation of war by other means.
Don’t then act shocked if the other fellow responds in the same way. Moscow’s first response to the EU/NAT0 push to the west was the Eurasian Union, a sort of mirror to the EU. It didn’t work for various reasons. Next came gas politics, and next came the aid package.
And then, in response to Western media propaganda, western political interference, western street demonstrations, western exaggerations of the danger from the other side, came their more or less mirror image in Crimea and (to a much lesser extent) in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine. The most reliable reports suggest that this policy was arrived at quite late on, after the collapse of the (EU-brokered) deal that had been supposed to save Yanukovich, and that pro-Moscow figures in Crimea insisted on full incorporation in Russia because they feared ending up in the sort of nowhere limbo endured by Moscow’s allies in South Ossetia and Transnistria .
People do go on about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past as if it automatically damned him . All accounts suggest that his role was very minor. Also most don’t understand that the KGB, especially its foreign intelligence branch, was the best-informed and most intelligent organ of the Soviet state. Its officers often spoke foreign languages and had lived abroad (as did and had Putin), and knew exactly how bad things were and how far the country had fallen behind. Mikhail Gorbachev himself was sponsored by the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, and I have often suspected that his project was, essentially, a KGB one which got out of hand. The 1991 putsch was a failed attempt to get things back under control. Vladimir Putin is a more successful attempt to do the same thing. But it is absurd to imagine that he wants the old USSR back. I think the collapse of the British empire was a global tragedy, just as he thinks the collapse of the USSR was one. But I don’t for a moment imagine it can be recreated, and I strongly suspect he doesn’t either. Also, like all sensible Russians, he knows that Soviet communism was stupid, wasteful and doomed, as was the USSR’s contest with the USA for global power. He wouldn’t want it, or the Cold War, back.
