Historic, like epic and classic, is a much overused word. But historic events do happen, if rarely. Twice this spring, America and its allies changed the course of history.
Less than two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate voted to ratify the expansion of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Within days of that, 11 of the 15 member nations of the European Union agreed to scrap their francs, deutsche marks and other national currencies and adopt a single currency, the euro.
Eleven other nations still must ratify the NATO expansion, but the Senate vote was the big hurdle and the three former Communist countries should join next year. Europeans won’t actually have euros jingling in their pockets until mid-2002, but the EU vote launched a project that probably is irreversible.
Many critics contend that both decisions were mistakes, and that history will take its revenge. They may be right. Historic decisions seldom get unanimous support. But both moves remain momentous, nevertheless.
One of the big reasons is that, for centuries, the nations of east-central Europe, especially Poland, have existed in a gray zone of instability and insecurity, between Germany and Russia. Their weakness invited predators and their plains made invasion easy. Their very presence gave Europeans, east and west, something to fight about. World War II started there.
By embracing these nations, NATO simply will remove them as arenas of conflict. An area called home by 60 million people will be declared off-limits to predators. A historical battleground will be admitted formally to the Western family and will have a protection it never had before.
Nothing since the founding of NATO 49 years ago has meant so much to the well-being of so many people.
And there’s more. Other countries–Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria–are clamoring to join. Eventually, NATO must decide whether to admit the Baltic states, even Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. Historic changes of direction, once made, develop momentum.
Another major shift centers on the EU. The group, a historic force for stability and peace between former enemies in Europe, so far has concentrated on strengthening cooperation among its members. The euro is different. For the first time, EU members will be giving up one of the real symbols of national sovereignty, a currency. The EU, in this area, will be like a single nation.
Again, there’s more. By its very existence, the euro could force the EU nations to move toward a single budget and a single tax policy. It also could force Europeans to do what they always have hated to do, which is to leave home and go work in other EU countries.
If a United States of Europe ever comes to pass, it was born this month. Nothing since the founding of the EU 41 years ago has been so important.
Two European leaders involved in the event were in Chicago last week to hail what they had done.
“Never before has it happened that countries joined their currencies,” Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said. Jacques Santer, European Commission president, said, “The euro train is coming, and it’s coming fast. It’s the first time since the 14th Century that we have the opportunity to unite our continent in peace and freedom.”
Historic actions can lead to a bad end but, once done, they cannot be undone.
NATO expansion may so anger Russia that it could ignite a new Cold War. So far, Russia has grumbled but accepted expansion, which seems to be little more than an irritant within the maelstrom of Russian politics.
The euro may push the drive toward European unity farther and faster than the member nations want to go or can go. It could cause recessions and unemployment so severe that the backlash could destroy the EU, which has been probably the most successful political experiment of the post-World War II world. But so far, Europeans are so committed to the dream of unity that they have accepted sacrifices to achieve it.
History changes direction infrequently and never easily. The occasions since World War II probably can be quickly counted–the start of the Cold War, the foundings of NATO and the EU, the triumph of Communism in China, the founding of Israel, the end of colonialism and, especially, the independence of India, the collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods currency system, the rise of the global economy, the computer chip, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the feminist revolution worldwide, the civil rights movement in the U.S., the implosion of the Soviet Union.
History comes in all guises. Sometimes it’s violent, as in the Chinese revolution. Sometimes it springs from one idea, like feminism. Sometimes, it happens when an earlier historic event runs its course, as when the Soviet Union collapsed decades after the Bolshevik Revolution. Sometimes, it happens in reaction to another event, as Israel was born from the horrors of World War II.
And sometimes, historical change comes from a deliberate decision by leaders who are appalled by their own history and are determined to change it. The expansion of NATO and the founding of the euro lie in this category.
Both may be among the last acts of a generation of leaders who remember World War II and are determined never to repeat it. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in particular, has labored to embed a powerful Germany so deeply in a united Europe that it never again can rampage across the middle of Europe. Even if Kohl is voted out of office in September after 16 years in power, European unity and especially the euro will be his legacy.
The historic natures of the euro and the expansion of NATO got less attention than they deserved because the events themselves, like all births, were messy.
The Senate dithered through an off-again, on-again debate over NATO that only really dug into the issue in its last two days. Still, the ratification was never in doubt.
The founding of the euro was the result of years of meticulous planning and several episodes of all-night haggling. This was a revolution carried out by bureaucrats and diplomats, changing history by constant compromise and dry-as-dust attention to detail. But the birth was cheapened by French President Jacques Chirac, who delayed it to win a parochial dispute over the presidency of the new European Central Bank.
Critics of NATO expansion and the euro underestimate the power of the European thirst for unity.
The East Europeans felt the Cold War severed them from their natural home in the West. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, they were determined to tie themselves so firmly to Western Europe and the United States that they never again could become the playthings of czars or commissars. Now, with the expansion of NATO, some of them will make it.
Skepticism about the euro, especially in the United States and Britain (which has refused to join), only underlines the inability of these countries to understand the sheer historical momentum behind the European Union.
Columnist William Safire complained that the euro is a tricky maneuver to force Europeans “to give up political sovereignty through an economic back door.” But the whole idea of the EU is that the member countries will cede the exclusive national sovereignty that has caused so much trouble in Europe this century. Hundreds and thousands of economic agreements, big and small, are taken together, eventually creating an edifice of European unity. The euro is only the latest, if most important, of these agreements.
The Anglo-Saxon mind, in Washington or in London, is a rigorously logical instrument that insists on facts, figures and proof and therefore often misses the truth. This sort of mind likes its dreams programmed on computers or mapped in equations.
One problem with this Anglo-Saxon rationality is that it forever is underestimating the romanticism that is the key to European unity. France and Germany, the cornerstones of the EU, are romantic countries, with the poetry and bloodshed to prove it, and the EU is a grand romantic gesture.
Americans and British who argue, quite logically, that the EU and the euro cannot work are kin to the experts who can prove that the bumblebee, aerodynamically, cannot fly. The EU and the bumblebee have been proving the experts wrong for some time.
NATO and the EU have been two of the great historic postwar success stories. But history occasionally demands a recharge, a grand and romantic gesture, and this is what has happened this spring.
