Ten Years After 1989
Ryan, Alan
BERTRAND RUSSELL was not the most SUCcessful of political prophets. If he had not died almost thirty years ago of extreme old age, he would surely have been astonished to see that humanity has...
...Two things were obvious all along, though their impact was not predictable...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is dissent@igc.org . (4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...Without American leadership, Europe is incapable of making decisions on anything more demanding than the size of fruit allowed to be sold in European supermarkets...
...but it is equally hard to imagine that he doesn't by now know what they knew then...
...If you stir ethnic and nationalist passions into that situation, you will be very lucky to end with nothing worse than the infinitely sad but happily nonviolent divorce of the Czech Republic and Slovakia...
...For fifty years, there has been a latent military-cum-diplomatic structure in Europe in the form of the Western European Union...
...AMONG THE innumerable reasons for depression in the aftermath of the Yugoslav collapse into ethnic civil war, two strike Europeans particularly hard...
...Groups do forget to hate each other, and bigotry is a bad habit societies often shake off when they have better things to do with their time...
...If he had not died almost thirty years ago of extreme old age, he would surely have been astonished to see that humanity has not yet blown itself to bits...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...The other reason for depression is the speed with which we all find ourselves thinking that ethnic and religious strife are "primordial," somehow built into European societies and the European psyche in a way that liberal values and cooperative inclinations cannot be...
...THE EDITORS DISSENT /Fall 1999 17...
...Although we had all abandoned our old hope that Yugoslavia might be the home of a socialist third way with real workers' participation in the management of the companies they worked for, and a sort of Marxist cooperativism as its eventual result, it was hard not to think that Yugoslavia was on the way to a cheerful embrace of the modern world, and that Tito's legacy would be the burying of old ethnic hatreds by prosperity and political common sense...
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...Marx was right about the way socialism would have to draw on the resources of a liberal, progressive society if it was to prosper...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...multiparty democracy without a talent for compromise and coalition building is exceedingly hard to operate...
...The first was that the failure of Soviet communism owed a lot to the failure of the 1848 revolutions to take liberalism, constitutionalism, and economic ambition into the farther reaches of Eastern Europe...
...The temptation will always be either to stand on narrow principle even when this means that no stable government can be established or to use political access to make off with whatever resources the old regime has left to be looted...
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...It was a thought Russell might himself have reached for in the last years of his life, when he waxed sentimental about the Viet Gong...
...but it is certainly a thought that we all have to hang on to when looking back over the last decade...
...It is hard to imagine Boris Yeltsin spending his evenings with the works of Benjamin Constant or Francois Guizot...
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...In the absence of a bedrock conviction of the merits of tolerance, the return of democracy was always likely to be more impressive as a solvent than as a binding agent...
...Lest that sound too Pollyanna-ish to be tolerable, however, it is also worth observing how far the past decade has reminded Europeans of the truths that emerged from the wreckage of the French Revolution two centuries ago: prosperity is a great healer, but hard to achieve without strong, honest, regular and predictable government, which is hard to achieve unless there is enough widely diffused prosperity to encourage clever and energetic people to make their money without looting the state...
...of course, socialism had been imposed by the Red Army rather than popular feeling, but whether it was its coercive origins or its Russian associations that destroyed its chances of acceptance is hard to say...
...It is a mixture of intellectual idleness and political despair that the British are prone to when contemplating Northern Ireland, and just about all of Europe is prone to when contemplating the wreckage of Yugoslavia...
...Like almost everyone else, I imagine, I did 16 DISSENT / Fall 1999 not think that Yugoslavia would bring pre-1914 Balkan infighting back to the edges of Western Europe...
...Hungarian friends of mine had been taught Russian in school for ten years and swore they understood not a word...
...It won't do, however...
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...The second was that nationalism was more attractive to the average citizen than socialism had ever been...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...On the contrary, we might think that justice demands their emancipation, but we should expect them to use their freedom to settle old scores and to perpetrate a good deal of oppression in their turn...
...In a sprightly little essay on "The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed," he urged his readers not to confuse the need to liberate oppressed peoples from their oppressors with the expectation that they would behave nicely when they had been liberated...
...Prosperous Western Europe beckons both economic migrants and refugees from the horrors of war, but its political capacity is almost nil...
...But add the two things together and there is a recipe for trouble of the sort that Russell understood...
...but when it might have been activated, it could not be...
...ALAN RYAN teaches politics at New College, Oxford...
...But he did have an acute eye for the unregenerate side of political human nature...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...The first is the way Europe's inability to act in concert on either the diplomatic or the military front reveals the shallowness of the European Union's roots...
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...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
