Neonationalism: After the Cold War

Summary

The communist regimes lost their grip on Eastern Europe from 1989 onwards. As the example of Germany shows (where the retrieval of political liberty was immediately translated into the reflex towards territorial unification), national thought, in various gradations of intensity, filled the ideological vacuum. The USSR crumbled into the nationalities that had already asserted their autonomy between 1900 and 1920: the Baltic states, Ukraine and even Belarus immediately made use of the weakening of central rule to set up autonomous governments. The federation of Yugoslavia proved too weak to survive the death of Tito and of one-party rule, and crumbled into its constituent nationalities. The process was relatively painless for Slovenia but led to violent conflict on the frontiers of Serbia, involving gruesome civil war along ethnic lines in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Serbia, the strongest member of the Yugoslav complex, used the greatest force in that conflict, but overplayed its hand. It emerged from the war as a weakened and isolated pariah state, unable to stem the secessionist tendencies in Kosovo and Montenegro; even the northern, ethnically mixed province of Vojvodina has shown strong tendencies to dissociate itself from Belgrade. Meanwhile, a similar centrifugal tendency, though much more peacefully resolved, led to the break-up between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The ‘hyphenated’ nationalities that had emerged from nineteenth-century Pan-Slavism (Serbo-Croat, Czecho-Slovak) fissioned into their component parts.

The European Union made it its policy to support post-Communist regimes with ‘soft diplomacy’ and to foster their fledgling civic structures by embedding these in the EU framework. The debate whether the EU should broaden its membership or deepen its existing collaboration was answered firmly in favour of the former option. At the same time, the post-Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe sought not only the economic and civic benefits of EU membership, but also a military protection against their Russian neighbour and erstwhile hegemon: between 1997 and 2004 Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Baltic States, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria joined NATO, and Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, Georgia and Ukraine have been recognized as aspiring members.

Russia's response to something it could hardly fail to see as encirclement has been harsh, and reminiscent of similar overreactions launched by Kaiser Wilhelm II, a leader equally phobic of encirclement.