Now, About Those Baltic Republics

...What would the Politburo reaction be if the Baltic Republics actually seceded from the Soviet Union, declaring that they were turned over to Stalin by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939...

...Moreover, beyond the provisions of the Soviet Constitution on the right of secession, Gorbachev has inherited Stalin's agreement with his allies at Yalta to allow free elections for the states of Eastern Europe...

...The interest of the United States is that the reform of Soviet and Chinese economic life be accomplished in collaboration with the Western nations as a group, and not with one or another of them alone...

...In preparing a coordinated, prudent, conciliatory policy regarding the nationalities crisis now emerging in the Soviet Union, Western leaders should keep in mind one advantage they have at the moment, and will not have long: Perestroika within the So viet Union and Eastern Europe cannot succeed without the sustained economic cooperation of the advanced Western countries—cooperation not only in loans but in the free and large-scale participation of Western business firms in the East European economies as owners, investors, entrepreneurs, and managers...

...What would it do if Hungary, for example, or Poland, withdrew from the Warsaw Pact and asked the great powers to agree to its neutrality, on the Austrian or the Swedish model...

...If the pressure for secession that is today a relatively timid and tentative threat becomes a full-blown challenge, would the Soviet leaders carry out their warning with overwhelming force...

...Hence, those few Soviet citizens who dared to advocate secession were sent to psychiatric hospitals, prisons and gulags, along with other troublemakers...

...and that the elections in which their people ratified the annexations were amanifest fraud...

...To recall and generalize the language of the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué that marked President Richard M. Nixon's historic trip to China, it is in the equal interest of every state—and emphatically in the interest of the United States —to oppose all hegemonic power...

...Arms control treaties, cultural exchanges, visits of athletic teams, professors and generals cannot substitute for the Kremlin's unilateral withdrawal of its Armed Forces to the Soviet Union's legitimate boundaries as an influence for peace...

...Of all the problems thrown up by the turbulence in the East, the nationalities issue in the Soviet Union is perhaps the most serious...

...The far-reaching changes summed up in the words glasnost and perestroïka surely constitute such an event...

...When a people claims the right to secede from a state in which it has been deposited by history, Americans, despite their own revolutionary tradition, instinctively think of their Civil War and deny that a right of secession can exist...

...It remains to be seen whether the present leadership of the Western world will do better...

...That crisis is clearly one of the major events of the 20th century...

...The United States should start to use its tested procedures of crisis management to develop and apply a dynamic Ostpolitik, and work actively with its NATO allies and Japan to achieve what is indispensable to success—a concerted Ostpolitik for the entire Western coalition...

...Gorbachev may eat them too, and for the same reasons...

...The American Constitution is deemed to have been created by the people of the United States, not by the states, through a single parturitive act of the General Will that created an indissoluble Union...

...What would be the impact on Soviet policy of a secret diplomatic démarche by the United States alone, or by the U.S., its NATO allies and Japan together, making clear that it is hoped the USSR will live up to its Constitution and to Stalin's pledge at Yalta, and that use of force to deny the Baltic Republics and the Warsaw Pact members their political independence could not be treated indifferently...

...The USSR is the last surviving European Empire...

...The process of achieving true peace with the Soviet Union cannot begin until it honors Stalin's pledge of self-determination for the countries of Eastern Europe and fulfills the promises of its own Constitution...

...To some extent, at least, he is the prisoner of his own rhetoric...

...The prospect of China modernized in partnership only with Japan, or of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union modernized in partnership only with Germany or the European Community would raise new fears that could profoundly endanger the hopes for peace...

...Gorbachev said in 1985 that policy must be based not on the intentions but on the capabilities of potential adversaries...

...Yalta was wasted because the West dithered and did nothing for two years while Joseph Stalin broke his agreements with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and launched his programs of expansion in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East...

...But the Constitution of the United States and that of the Soviet Union rest on different principles...

...Mikhail S. Gorbachev, after all, just came to power in 1985...

...From that position of radically enhanced strength, the Soviet Union openly threatened Iran, Greece and Turkey, and took over Czechoslovakia to prevent elections the Communists would surely have lost...

...The So viet Constitution, on the other hand, purports to establish the political structure of a federation of independent republics, whose right to secede is explicitly confirmed by the document itself...

...In advance, Gorbachev and his colleagues have said that no Soviet Republic will be permitted to secede, and that no satellite country will be permitted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact...

...The most recent and vehement formulation of this position was the Politburo statement of last August 26 reminding the nationalist demonstrators of the Baltic Republics, in effect, that the current Kremlin occupants were not chosen to preside over the liquidation of the Soviet Empire...

...Eugene V. Rostow is Distinguished Visiting Research Professor of Law and Diplomacy at the National Defense University in Washington, and a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School...

...From the meager evidence that is available, it seems obvious there is no Western policy, and certainly not a concerted Western policy, for minimizing the risks and taking advantage of the opportunities being generated by the crisis of Communism, particularly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...The United States should point out that it has never recognized the Soviet annexationof the Baltic Republics, and still maintains symbolic diplomatic relations with them...

...It is now beginning to confront the force of nationalism that has been consuming the other empires for more than two centuries...

...It will help to shape the moral and intellectual climate—and the structure of world politics—for at least the next 50 years...

...And we should not forget that pre-Gorbachev Soviet regimes allowed China and Yugoslavia to withdraw from their alliances with the USSR in the face of secret yet hardly invisible American warnings...

...The Harmel Report, adopted by NATO in 1967, calls on the Allies to coordinate their policies with regard to developments anywhere that may affect not only their common defense but the possibility of achieving true détente with the Soviet Union...

...The decline and fall of empires, it needs to be remembered, has occasioned as many wars as their rise...

...it is the possibility of peace between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world...

...Although his remark is not the whole truth, there is agreat deal of truth in it...

...Perspectives NOW ABOUT THOSE BALTIC REPUBLICS BY EUGENE V. ROSTOW Unless the Western governments have suddenly achieved a capacity for secret diplomacy they have never demonstrated before, they are still at the groping stage in their quest for a policy to deal with the immense flows of change now taking place throughout theCommunist world...

...We should add that wars in Eastern and Central Europe, as the history of the 20th century attests, could have results that no one can foresee or control...

...How Gorbachev and his Western counterparts handlethe question, separately and together, will be of incalculable importance to the possibility of peace...

...Under Gorbachev's predecessors, Soviet officials and law professors solemnly explained the paradox by pointing out that only a lunatic would want to leave the workers' paradise...

...Then came the Truman Doctrine, the Vandenberg Resolution and the creation of NATO in response, and more than 40 costly years of "containment...

...In practice, of course, the Soviet Republics have never had a glimmer of the right to secession...

...Gorbachev and his colleagues should recall that Churchill lived to eat those famous words after he applied them to the future of the British Empire...

...No one can predict with confidence how the Soviet leadership will in fact deal with demands for national liberation as the situation evolves within both the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc...

...Could they count on the Red Army obeying orders to take drastic action, or would it behave as it did during the first days in Hungary in 1956, when Soviet soldiers jumped off their tanks and helped the revolutionaries in the streets...

...But they could hardly have said less...

...The USSR became an immediate threat to the world balance of power between 1945-48 when its military frontier moved 500 miles to the west, halfway between the old Soviet boundary and the Atlantic Ocean...

...that the Soviet Union is trying deliberately to destroy their identity in a flood of Russian immigrants...

...Gorbachev's 1987 book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, his speeches during the last few years, and his often proclaimed commitment to the rule of law should make it impossible for him to repeat such a formula...

...We should not make that kind of cooperation available until the Soviet Union withdraws to its own frontiers and gives up both the imperial dreams of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Lenin, and the capacity to carry them out...

...From the point of view of Western security, what is at stake in the Soviet nationalities question is not simply justice for the captive nations now living under Russian occupation...

...It also offers the West the best opportunity it has had since Yalta for making progress toward peace with the Soviet Union...