The Collapse Of 'The West'

Owen Harries

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1993

Article preview: first 500 of 4,558 words total.

Summary:  NATO cannot move into Eastern Europe. It would greatly annoy the Russians, have little credibility, create splits within the alliance and require much in blood and treasure. But leaving aside the specific problems, beneath all these problems to move NATO east, lies a relic of Cold War thinking-the concept of the political West. The West as a strategic entity was a product of the Cold War. The West has been and will remain a culture and a civilization. But the political unity of the past forty years will give way to differences of interests and strategies as each of the great powers of Europe and America searches for its own security.

Owen Harries is Editor of The National Interest.

OLD THINKING IN A NEW WORLD

UNDERLYING THE RECENT debates over Bosnia, the Balkans and Eastern Europe more generally, there is a much broader and unanswered question about the condition and future of the West. The proponents of intervention in the Balkans believe that, simply put, the West should go East. William Pfaff was surely speaking for many when he argued eloquently in these pages that the West should act through NATO-"the true Great Power in Europe today"-to guarantee existing frontiers in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, "so as to deprive transnational ethnic rivalry of its political and military explosiveness." The NATO guarantee to these new states should be backed up by force if necessary. Only such a policy, it is claimed, can both recover for the West the moral and political ground it has lost through its mishandling of the Yugoslav crisis and lay a base of stability for the future of Eastern Europe.

There are specific problems with such a course of action. But more important, the various policy proposals and position papers advocating such a course reflect a philosophical inertia, an inability or unwillingness to jettison old concepts and modes of thought in the face of utterly changed circumstances. In particular, such proposals for what amount to a new NATO are based on a most questionable premise: that "the West" continues to exist as a political and military entity. Over the last half century or so, most of us have come to think of "the West" as a given, a natural presence and one that is here to stay. It is a way of thinking that is not only wrong in itself, but is virtually certain to lead to mistaken policies. The sooner we discard it the better. The political "West" is not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile "East" to bring it into existence and to maintain its unity. It is extremely doubtful whether it can now survive the disappearance of that enemy.

SHOULD THE WEST GO EAST?

THE PROPOSALS THAT NATO move eastward, guaranteeing the borders of or offering membership to the Iron Curtain states, have support both among certain Western intellectuals and analysts and within the NATO apparatus itself. The organization's secretary general, Manfred Worner, is an enthusiast for NATO taking on the operational responsibility for peacekeeping operations in Europe by its member states. Doing so would obviously go some way toward solving the problem of potential irrelevance that NATO faces in the absence of a Soviet threat.

A move east, however, would suffer from a variety of specific difficulties and complications, making it in all likelihood unworkable.

First, the proposal takes no account at all of Russian susceptibilities and interests and envisages no role for Russia in Eastern Europe. NATO is simply to take over responsibility for the stability of a region that has been in Russia's sphere of influence for centuries. The 45-year interlude of the Soviet bloc was merely ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,558 words total.