The debate over aid to Mikhail Gorbachev`s Soviet Union was ideological and hypothetical until the European Community decided to do something to help the reforms-at least to talk again about doing something, at the community`s next summit, in October. The United States remains skeptical.
The argument is about practicalities as well as principle. The United States and others opposed to aid for the USSR argue that it will merely postpone the inevitable (and merited) upheaval in Soviet economic and industrial structures, buying a little time for Gorbachev and the Soviet reformers-but time to accomplish what?
The ideological opponents of aid say that until the Soviet Union has installed full democracy and a free-market economy, and has freed the Baltics, the Ukraine, Georgia, etc., it does not deserve help. As these developments are remote, these people in American government, and in the press and policy communities, wait with satisfaction for Soviet collapse.
They admit no reason, prudential or otherwise, to help a Soviet leadership that has not explicitly renounced Leninism and Marxism and adopted multi-party democracy. Until then, these people say, let Gorbachev flounder, and let the Soviets suffer the consequences of their failure to throw the rascals out.
This is comfortably self-righteous, but has a doubtful historical pedigree. The history is that of the political and reparations policies followed by France with respect to Germany after 1918. France remorselessly humiliated the Germans, making them pay for what they had done to France. What France got as a result, in 1933, was Adolf Hitler.
There has been an instructive television program running on the French cultural satellite channel, La Sept. It shows complete German, French and British newsreels as they ran in each country`s movie theaters exactly 50 years ago. Historians of the period or figures from that time offer comment.
It is an illuminating series in a number of ways, but one observation highly relevant today is the defensive, even paranoid, character of the 1940 German newsreels` commentary. The German narrators do not speak of triumphant conquest, Europe`s domination by Germany, German ”living space,” or the rise of a ”thousand-year” Reich.
Instead, they constantly talk about Germany surrounded and threatened, swindled and oppressed, by French, British and Jewish imperialists and plutocrats, ”cosmopolitans,” bankers, monopolists-all set on destroying Germany. At the last minute these enemies have been ”taught a lesson,”
thrown back and defeated. They were poised to crush Germany, the German cinemagoer is told. Instead, thanks to Hitler`s leadership, the enemies` plans have been pre-empted. But Germany`s ordeal is not over. . . .
It is not what one might have expected to hear at the moment when Germany`s armies were consolidating their domination over virtually all of Western and Central Europe, and the greater part of Scandinavia, in possession of what, in July 1940, must have seemed all but total victory. Rather, the theme is of external dangers barely overcome, with new threats waiting. It is not, one reflects, a state of mind one wishes to promote in the USSR.
But the practical objection to Soviet aid remains. Can aid really do any good? Would it not simply go to import subsidies, with little or no lasting effect on reform`s success? Gorbachev has asked for creation of a Western consortium to grant long-term loans. The European Community promises to look into this between now and October. The EC majority seems disposed to say yes, even if the United States says no to American aid.
There may be a useful lesson in the West`s experience at the time of the Marshall Plan. It may be too late for this lesson to do much good for the besieged Gorbachev reformers, but it is worth the attention of Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak leaders, and even of those in Bulgaria and Romania. All of these currently fear that West Germany`s obsession with East Germany, and the overall Western concern for what happens in the Soviet Union, will combine to deprive them of serious Western aid.
The lesson is that they should seize the initiative. The Marshall Plan was not an American aid program pressed on the Europeans. It was a qualified offer of help, with the Europeans expected to define what they needed and to provide the plan for using the aid they were to be given.
This is the approach needed today. If the Soviet government wants assistance, Moscow should provide the United States and the West European governments with a coherent program explaining what it intends to do with that aid so as to make a fundamental change in the Soviet situation.
Similarly, if the governments of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, or the three of them in common with the two ex-communist Balkan states, would define their common problems of structural reform, and develop a program of cooperation to solve those problems, they would get a far more positive response from the United States, and even from the European Community, than is the case now.
These governments have to act in their own interest. They have to take the initiative. They have to say what they need, and offer serious plans for using what they are asking for. If they don`t seize responsibility, they risk losing the Western assistance they want. Without a coherent plan to use foreign aid, they may find that what assistance they do get is squandered.
