The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1945 to 2000

	Postwar Territorial Changes
	The Nuremberg Trials
	The Iron Curtain Descends
	The Marshall Plan
	Occupied Germany and the Berlin Airlift
	Yugoslavia Breaks With Moscow
	The Postwar Leaders of Western Europe
	Unrest in the Soviet Empire
	The Late-Blooming Mediterranean Republics
	The Nations That Tried to Buy Happiness
	Northern Ireland's Troubles
	The End of the Cold War
	A United States of Europe?
	Eastern Europe in the 1990s
	The Yugoslav Wars: The Slovenian and Croatian Phases
	The Yugoslav Wars: The Bosnian Phase
	The Yugoslav Wars: The Albanian Phase
	Demographics, 1914-2000
	Europe Today
	Go to Page Navigator

Before 1914 there had been nine major powers: the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. World War I knocked out the last four nations on the list, but the Germans and Russians managed to recover in the 1930s, bringing the total number back up to seven. Now Germany, Italy and Japan were in ruins. Britain and France were not much better off; both of them had nearly bled to death in the two world wars. France had lost half its livestock, and Britain, which had been the world's banker before the war, now owed more money than any nation. Neither one could have won without US help, and they had spent too much, in men and resources, to lord over the world the way they had done in the age of imperialism. The land that had once hosted the world's most advanced society saw little beyond starvation and poverty in its future. It also ran the risk of becoming a battleground again--this time a nuclear one--if the two remaining superpowers (the USA and USSR) did not agree to keep the peace. Winston Churchill put it this way in a 1947 speech: "What is Europe now? A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground for pestilence and hate."

In the adjustment of frontiers in Europe, the result of the war was obvious: Germany lost and the Soviet Union won. The Germans paid for their defeat twice. First, they lost all of Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; the Soviets took half of East Prussia, while everything else went to Poland. Second, Germany would be divided for the next 45 years, into a communist East and a capitalist West. Because the Soviets insisted on keeping most of the Polish land they took in 1939, it was as if somebody had picked up Poland, carried it more than a hundred miles west, and put it back down again. Warsaw, for example, was in western Poland before the war, and in the east afterwards. This prompted Churchill to mutter some warnings about "stuffing the Polish goose with too much German food." A wave of name changes followed in the ex-German areas: e.g., Danzig became Gdansk, Konigsberg became Kaliningrad, and Breslau became Wroclaw. Then Stalin changed the ethnic makeup of eastern Europe to fit his new boundaries; in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR, those Germans and Poles caught on the wrong side of the line were deported. He also kept all three Baltic republics, held onto the frontier areas taken from Finland and Romania in 1940, and took Petsamo, Finland's only Arctic port, as punishment for Finland's wartime support of the Germans. On top of that he moved the USSR's border up to Hungary by adding Ruthenia, the tail end of Czechoslovakia. The Western Allies conceded most of these annexations without protesting much, because there were Eastern Slavs like Ukrainians and Belarusians in the areas taken, and because the Soviet Union had suffered so much; two thirds of the European war's casualties, both military and civilian, were Russian.

Despite all this, the Soviet frontier was usually farther east than the old frontier of the Russian Empire; Stalin didn't hold Finland and central Poland, while the tsars did. In fact, Stalin could claim that what he took was modest, in view of the USSR's past sufferings and present strength. What made a mockery of that statement was the way he made bigger gains by satellite. Eight eastern European countries unfortunate enough to be "liberated" by communists had communist governments imposed on them. The people living here were blocked from any political, economic, or cultural contact with the West. For Stalin this became a four-hundred-mile-deep buffer zone, to protect against any future wars and to provide the USSR with the resources for rebuilding. Only Finland escaped Soviet domination, and Stalin made sure it would be neutral, rather than a pro-Western state. This was the first step in the creation of the Soviet Bloc, a coalition of client states that were treated like Russian colonies.⁽¹⁾

Because Italy was a minor participant in the destruction (compared to Germany), its losses were less. The Allies assigned the Dodecanese islands to Greece, while Yugoslavia got the port of Zara and all of Istria except Trieste.

The Western Allies took almost nothing for themselves. The United States and Britain realized that the world had changed too much to expect any return to a more innocent, imperialist age. They dismantled the Italian colonial empire in Africa, and the Japanese one in the Pacific, but this time, unlike with the "mandates" set up by the League of Nations, they took their duties seriously; these territories would receive independence as soon as they were ready for it, and they wouldn't be treated like colonies in the meantime. As a result, they let go of most of the ex-Italian and ex-Japanese holdings within a few years. At the time of this writing, only the Northern Marianas are still under foreign rule, and that is because they voted to remain with the United States. France and the Netherlands tried to go back to exploiting their colonies as if it was business as usual; instead they got sharp criticism from the United States, and the natives, now motivated by nationalism, launched armed uprisings that eventually got rid of their overlords (e.g., Indonesia, Vietnam, and Algeria).

The Nuremberg Trials

Hermann Göring, Luftwaffe commander	Hanging
Adm. Karl Doenitz, chief naval commander and Hitler's heir	10 years
Rudolf Hess, deputy to Hitler	Life (committed suicide in 1987)
Adm. Erich Raeder, former naval commander	Life (released in 1953)
Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister	Hanging
Baldur von Schirach, youth leader	20 years
Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, chief of High Command	Hanging
S. S. Gen. Fritz Saukel	Hanging
Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi theoretician	Hanging
Gen. Alfred Jodl, last army chief	Hanging
Hans Frank, governor general of Poland	Hanging
Franz von Papen, ambassador to Turkey and former vice chancellor	Acquitted
Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior	Hanging
Artur von Seyss-Inquart, Commissar for Holland and former governor of Austria	Hanging
Julius Streicher, Nazi propagandist	Hanging
Albert Speer, chairman of armaments council	20 years
Walther Funk, minister of economics	Life
Konstantin von Neurath, protector of Bohemia and Moravia	15 years
Hjalmar Schacht, Reichsbank president	Acquitted
Hans Fritzsche, Nazi radio chief	Acquitted
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of security police	Hanging
Martin Bormann, S. A. chief (tried in absentia)	Hanging

Those defendants who were not acquitted went to Berlin's Spandau prison. Ten Nazis were hanged in October 1946; Göring, however, cheated the hangman by taking a smuggled dose of poison, just hours before his trip to the gallows. Among those locked up, all but Rudolf Hess were dead or released by 1967. Since the trial, some have questioned whether it is right to try the leaders of a defeated country for war atrocities--because war itself is an atrocity--but in this case most agreed that the defendants got what they deserved. For better or for worse, the Nuremberg trials set a precedent on how to treat those who plan and wage war against others, and international courts have followed it ever since.

Meanwhile, lesser officials were brought to justice. Besides German officers, the Allies went after those citizens who collaborated with the Nazis after their countries had fallen under Hitler's tyranny. In France alone, 100,000 were convicted of collaborating, and 800 were sentenced to death. Marshal Petain got a death sentence at first, but because of his extreme age (he was eighty-nine when the war ended) and his record of heroism in World War I, General de Gaulle changed it to life imprisonment. The real leader of Vichy France, Pierre Laval, went before a firing squad, and so did his Norwegian and Dutch counterparts, Vidkun Quisling and Anton Adrian Mussert. Those French women who fraternized with the enemy got the humiliation of being paraded through the streets with shaven heads. Only after the Europeans put the wartime treachery, shame and executions behind them could they begin to rehabilitate their continent.

There was also the question of what to do with eight million surviving Nazi slaves, who had been put to work in Germany's factories and prison camps. By the end of 1945, five million of them had been sent home, including many Soviet citizens who were forced to return against their wishes ("Operation Keelhaul"). Some of the latter chose suicide rather than return to Stalin's rule.

The Iron Curtain Descends

"There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate . . . are all on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations . . . are on the other . . . their quarrel would tear the world to pieces."⁽²⁾

Even before the war ended, communists were ruling Albania and Bulgaria, and had driven away all opposition. In 1946 Tito crushed Yugoslavia's monarchists by executing his main rival, Drago Mihailovich. The other states of eastern Europe briefly had coalition governments, but with Soviet troops still garrisoned in all of them, it was clear who was in charge. In June 1947 they helped Romania's communists suppress their coalition partner, the National Peasant Party; King Michael was forced to abdicate and flee the country before the year was over. The process was even quicker in Poland; rigged elections in February 1947 gave 85 percent of the vote to the communists and socialists. Hungary had four parties in its coalition, so the communists used a step-by-step approach to take over the Magyar state. In January 1947 some of the leaders of the Smallholders' Party were charged with conspiring to overthrow the republic and were arrested by the communists; officers suspected of disloyalty to the communists were purged from the army. Elections for a new parliament were held in August. Although the communists won only 22 percent of the votes, they dominated the coalition government, by pressuring the Social Democratic Party to join the Communist Party. A purge of the party in early 1949 made sure that only true communists were in charge, and the next parliamentary elections (May 1949) presented voters a single list of candidates, all communists and their supporters. In August the assembly adopted a constitution, establishing the Hungarian People's Republic.

Czechoslovakia's prewar president, Eduard Beneš, had resigned and left the country in 1938. The Allies recognized him as the head of a Czech government in exile, but he was disgusted with how the Western nations had failed to help Czechoslovakia in its hour of need, so in 1943 he signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviets. After the war he returned to Prague and agreed to share power with the communists. In May 1946 national elections were held, and these ones, unlike those in Poland and Hungary, were genuinely fair; Beneš retained the presidency, while the communists gained some key cabinet posts and more than a third of the parliamentary seats. The honeymoon didn't last long after that; communists began assassinating their opponents and packing the police force with their followers. President Beneš, now dying and afraid of a civil war, was blackmailed into resigning by a general strike and the threat of a Soviet invasion (February 1948). In his place came a government that only had one non-Communist member, Jan Masaryk, the son of Czechoslovakia's founder, Thomas Masaryk. Shortly after that, Masaryk fell out of a window, and his death was officially declared a suicide. Now that the communists had all of eastern Europe, they introduced the same tools of repression that Stalin had perfected in the Soviet Union: political purges, massive economic planning, the jailing of political and cultural opponents, etc.

The expansion of communism beyond the USSR was a departure from Stalin's old policy, which called for "socialism in one country." Now the missionary zeal of the Marxists alarmed the West. Winston Churchill had lost his reelection bid in 1945, but a year later the former prime minister gave a name to the new barrier between East and West. In a speech at a college in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declared that "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." To Churchill only the combined strength of the democracies could stop communism, for the Russians respected might, "and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness." This speech shocked those who didn't want to offend the Soviet Union, but soon various events, from Berlin to Korea, would prove Churchill had been right again. The West had trouble understanding the new war of nerves, soon to be called the Cold War, as well as the unconventional weapons of the other side; the communists preferred to use guerrillas and political chaos to advance their goals, since both are so much harder to watch and control than tanks, planes and soldiers. Nevertheless, the democracies would have to fight this conflict, if it wasn't going to lose the whole world to communism.

An American diplomat, George F. Kennan, formulated the policy the West adopted in dealing with the Soviet Union, "containment." In an article entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," written under the byline of "Mr. X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kennan proposed a "realistic understanding of the profound and deep-rooted difference between the United States and the Soviet Union" and the exercise of "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."⁽³⁾ Rather than denounce the USSR for its behavior, as so many others had done, Kennan called for making the current situation a stalemate; the US could and should prevent the spread of communism to any more countries, but it must not try to remove the communist regimes that already existed. The Soviets would see an anticommunist counteroffensive as a threat to them, and that would be enough to trigger World War III, which is what Kennan wanted to avoid most of all. On the surface, containment resembles the policy of appeasement that failed to prevent World War II; this time it worked because both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons by 1949, and they believed that using these arms would destroy the human race. When the Soviet empire finally fell, it collapsed on its own, without a push from outside.

The Marshall Plan

Before long Truman had also authorized massive assistance for the rest of western Europe. Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a plan of economic aid to help Europe to solve its postwar financial problems. Congress authorized the plan, officially called the European Recovery Program but better known as the Marshall Plan. Sixteen nations, with a combined population of 270 million people, eagerly accepted the aid, and $23 billion poured across the Atlantic between 1947 and 1952, compared with $15 billion before 1947. The Marshall Plan also offered aid to eastern Europe, but Stalin rejected it, because each country that received aid had to open up its economy to American financial planners, and he wasn't going to allow anything that would make him dependent on the United States. In the end Czechoslovakia was the only satellite to ask for Marshall Plan funding, and the 1948 coup in Prague made sure that the Czechs wouldn't get any money. In western Europe, the plan was a complete success; the risk of starvation was gone by the end of 1948, and by the mid-1950s every nation west of the Iron Curtain was fully recovered. Equally important, the danger of communism began to fade. Only in Portugal during the mid-1970s did the communists come close to taking over any western European nation. Some communists tried extreme measures; the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany resorted to terrorism. Incidents they caused, like the assassination of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro (1978), got them worldwide attention, but they failed to win popular support; by the late 1980s both groups had lost so many members that they were no longer relevant.

Occupied Germany and the Berlin Airlift

To rebuild central Europe and prevent the establishment of a new government bent on revenge, the Allies divided both Germany and Austria into four zones of occupation. Since Austria was no longer important, the "Big Four" agreed to a treaty that made Austria a neutral nation, and they withdrew from Vienna in 1955. It was not so easy in Germany, though. There the Americans got Bavaria and Hesse, the French took Baden-Württemberg and most of the Rhineland, the British administered the northwest (Westphalia, Hanover and Schleswig-Holstein), and the east (old Brandenburg and Saxony) went to the Russians. Berlin was deep in the Soviet zone, but because it was the capital, it was also split into British, American, French and Soviet sectors.

The last conference between the American, British and Soviet leaders (held at Potsdam, July 1945) failed to reach an agreement on what form postwar Germany should take; the USSR demanded $10 billion in reparations, while the West wanted to rebuild Germany as a Western-style democracy. No treaty concerning Germany's future was ever signed, and each side developed its own version of Germany. The Western Allies went ahead with their own plan, merging their zones first economically, and then politically. Stalin responded in June 1948 by blocking all access by land and water to the part of Berlin he did not control, now called West Berlin. He thought this would starve the 2,250,000 residents of West Berlin, many of them refugees from Soviet-ruled districts. Instead of giving in, the West launched a massive airlift called "Operation Vittles," which brought food, fuel, and all other supplies. Since the main cargo plane available, the American C-47, carried just three tons, they had to fly in and out of West Berlin's Templehof Airfield constantly. At the peak of the Berlin Airlift, a plane landed almost every minute, and together they brought in 13,000 tons of supplies a day. The pilots became heroes to the Berliners, especially the "candy bombers" who dropped treats to the children. More than 70 Allied pilots died in crashes; Stalin kept up the blockade for eleven months because he remembered how a German airlift during the war had failed to save the army trapped in Stalingrad. This time he was wrong; on May 12, 1949, the Russians conceded defeat and reopened the roads to Berlin to Western traffic.

In the spring of 1949 Washington established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a permanent military alliance. The first members were the United States, Canada, Iceland, and nine nations of western Europe. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, followed by West Germany in 1955. The purpose of NATO, as its first secretary-general put it, was to keep "the Soviets out, the Americans in and the Germans down." It succeeded marvelously in all three, and became the model for other alliances that the United States formed during the next few years: SEATO and ANZUS in the Pacific, CENTO in the Middle East, and the OAS in Latin America. In response the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which formalized the stationing of Red Army units in eastern Europe. This alliance, which included every satellite state of the USSR, lasted until 1991.

Yugoslavia Breaks With Moscow

Incidentally, the break between Tito and Stalin also brought an end to the Greek communist guerrillas, because the three countries that backed them were now too busy watching each other to advance the cause of revolution anywhere else.

The Postwar Leaders of Western Europe

Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in May 1946, and when a plebiscite abolished the monarchy, his son Humbert soon followed him into exile. The prime minister who replaced both king and dictator was Alcide de Gasperi (1881-1954), a veteran nationalist. Born in the south Tyrol when Austria ruled it, de Gasperi started his career by campaigning for the liberation of Italia Irridenta. Mussolini imprisoned him from 1926 to 1929, and then he spent the rest of the Mussolini years as a librarian in the Vatican. When he took charge he discarded the communists, who had been coalition partners, and encouraged a free-enterprise economy. His "government of rebirth and salvation" was unstable, and he had to reshuffle cabinet members eight times before he retired in 1953, but he succeeded in making sure Italy would be one of the most prosperous nations of the late twentieth century. Italy's presence in the "G-7" group of nations is the legacy of de Gasperi today, though Italian politics remain as chaotic as ever.

In Germany the American, British and French zones became the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1949, with its capital at Bonn. The elections that followed chose Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), the Christian Democrat Party's leader, as the first chancellor. Adenauer had been mayor of Cologne under the Weimar Republic, and was jailed by the Nazis; at the age of seventy-three, he was already an elder statesman. He predicted that poor health would force him to retire in two years, but as it turned out, he stayed in office until 1963. Abroad, he cultivated good relations with France and the United States, rather than with East Germany. At home his administration succeeded in everything he considered important, and West Germany played a leading role in the creation of the Common Market, which Adenauer saw as an important step toward uniting the continent. Most of all, his presence reassured many Europeans that the new Germany would be peaceful; in this grandfather-type figure nobody could see another Kaiser or a Hitler.

West Germany's industry recovered at a speed that astonished even the Germans; they called it the Wirtschaftswunder, the "economic miracle." Helping it were a total overhaul of the currency, a large supply of trained workers, an avoidance of the strikes and labor unrest that disrupted other countries, and as we noted, the fact that the West Germans did not have to pay for their armed forces until 1955. They even made a profit from the Korean War, by increasing steel production during that time. Before the 1950s had ended, West Germany's economy became the strongest in western Europe. The miracle ended with a major recession in 1966, followed by the oil crisis of 1973, allowing Britain, France and Italy to catch up. In the 1980s the average growth rate was 1.6 percent a year. This was less than half of what it had been previously, but still ahead of the stagnating economies to the east.

France was under martial law immediately after liberation; Charles de Gaulle stepped down in 1946 so that a civilian government, the Fourth Republic, could take charge. During the Fourth Republic's twelve-year existence, it saw even less stability than Italy; twenty governments rose and fell, while de Gaulle, still the country's most capable leader, watched from the sidelines. Before the war, American humorist Will Rogers had joked that American tourists go to London to watch the changing of the guard, and then they go to Paris to watch the changing of the government; this was even more true of postwar France (and Italy). What finally brought the Republic down was its insistence on fighting two wars it could not win, to keep France's colonial empire; each lasted for eight years and terribly drained the country's wealth and manpower. The first, in Vietnam, ended in a humiliating defeat, when the Vietnamese communists besieged and captured Dienbienphu (1954). The second, in Algeria, became the "grave of the Fourth Republic." Paris freely gave independence to neighboring Morocco and Tunisia, but French colonists insisted that the Tricolor remain over Algeria forever, so fighting erupted here only four months after the fighting ended in Vietnam. The corrupt colonial regime pursued a campaign of terror against Algerian natives, and the army ignored the directives issued from Paris. Despite this, the French were not any closer to winning, and in May 1958 the war caused the government to disintegrate. Militant army officers and European civilians, fearful that Paris was preparing to talk with the rebels, seized control of Algiers; the army supported them, and a military coup in France looked likely. The National Assembly was forced to call de Gaulle out of retirement, and it voted him almost dictatorial powers, to govern the country for six months and to prepare a new constitution.

De Gaulle submitted his constitution to a plebiscite in September 1958, and the voters gave it a 79 percent approval rating, an overwhelming vote of confidence for the author. Thus, de Gaulle became the first president of the Fifth Republic. He promised that, "There will be no Dienbienphu in Algeria," but that meant he would negotiate a peaceful settlement, whereas his supporters expected him to push for an ultimate victory. In 1960 he began peace talks with the Algerian rebels, and--undeterred by revolts of army officers in Algeria, assassination attempts against himself, and by terrorist violence--he pursued these negotiations until they reached an agreement granting independence. In an April 1962 referendum, 90 percent of the voters approved. At any rate, Algeria's one and a quarter million French residents had given de Gaulle more headaches than nine million Algerians.

For de Gaulle, the most important task was to restore France as a first-class power. However, the French had learned the hard way that the age of colonialism was over, so he gave the rest of the French empire (most of it in Africa) the choice of staying or leaving. Most of the colonies chose independence; by the time de Gaulle pulled out of Algeria, only a few choice islands and coastal enclaves were left. Therefore, he worked instead to make France the most important nation in continental Europe; because of him, France played a major role in the Common Market and all other activities that involved more than one western European nation. He got along well with Konrad Adenauer, and together they ended the century-old rivalry that had caused three bitter wars between France and Germany. At the same time, he cooled relations with the United States, declaring that: "We will never descend to the level of American vassals." In 1966 he removed the French armed forces from NATO, making France a nonparticipating member of that organization, and developed a French atomic bomb to further reduce the need for American protection. As far as de Gaulle was concerned, the British were little more than American agents, so in 1963 he vetoed the first effort to bring the United Kingdom into the Common Market. Despite all this, he was a nationalist first, not anti-American or anti-British as much as he was pro-France.

France saw considerable economic growth during the de Gaulle years, but also inflation and rising unemployment. A surplus of university graduates found no suitable jobs for them as they left school; having grown up in an age of affluence, they found themselves in an unrewarding consumer society. In 1968 this led to widespread student revolts, like the strikes and demonstrations that shook other Western nations at that time. The government's efforts to end it by persuasion and concession failed, and de Gaulle called for new elections. The voters, fearful of growing disorder, gave de Gaulle's party an absolute majority in the new assembly. De Gaulle, however, felt the need for additional endorsement of his presidency, so in 1969 he announced a referendum on two constitutional reforms and declared that he would resign if the voters rejected his proposals. 53 percent of the electorate voted against them, so de Gaulle resigned, and died a year later.

France has seen four presidents since de Gaulle: Georges Pompidou (1969-74), Valery Giscard d'Estaing (1974-81), François Mitterand (1981-95), and Jacques Chirac (1995-). Mitterand was a socialist, while the rest belonged to the center-right "Gaullist" party. All of them have promoted European unity, independence from the superpowers, and a strong economy; even under Mitterand the confrontation many expected between government and business never took place.

Britain started the postwar era with a head start; its factories had suffered less damage than those on the Continent, and the Allied victory had apparently proven that democracy was the best kind of government. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom failed to keep ahead of the recovering states. It may have won the war, but it had lost a fourth of its net wealth. Instead of collecting reparations from its defeated enemies, Britain was helping them get back on their feet, because having their support against communism was now more important than any punishment. The British found it especially galling when they had to send aid to Germany, to prevent mass starvation during the winter of 1946, and it was no accident that the Americans gave more assistance to Germany and Italy than to their allies. Over the next twenty years Britain managed a growth rate of 2.5 percent a year, but this was far less than France and Germany's. An inflation rate of 20% and a poorly organized industry caused even more trouble, requiring a major loan from the International Monetary Fund in the 1970s and a vigorous overhauling of the economy while Margaret Thatcher was prime minister (1979-90). Instead of dominating the Continent, Britons gave most of their attention to domestic matters.

The British Empire disintegrated in a single generation. During and immediately after World War II, the Americans made it clear that their vision for the future called for a world government, namely the United Nations, but it had no place for any empire, including Britain's. And there was considerable nationalist activity in the colonies before the war, so Britain had to make concessions (like independence for India) to keep the nationalists on their side throughout the war years. Afterwards Britain honored its agreement, and let India go in 1947. Once this happened it didn't have the resources to hold on to the rest of its empire, and many Britons thought colonies had lost their relevance anyway, so the British empire became the first in history to give itself away. By 1970 the only colonies left were little ones in places that saw British rule as better than the alternatives, and Britain turned these loose once the natives changed their minds. In 1982 Argentina seized South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, causing a brief war that Britain won easily; the English-speaking inhabitants of those islands never wanted to be under Argentine rule. Hong Kong went back to China in 1997, leaving a small list of places where the Union Jack still flies: Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks & Caicos Islands, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Falkland Islands, South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, Gibraltar, the British Indian Ocean Territory, and Pitcairn Island. Between them these outposts have only 200,000 people, and nearly half of those residents live on Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, places best known for beautiful beaches and loose financial regulations. Most of them are too small to find independence attractive, since it would mean giving up the money London sends them every year to keep their economies afloat. At this point one could say that the sun still never sets on penguins and volcanoes!

Unrest in the Soviet Empire

After Yugoslavia left the Soviet Bloc, most of the other satellite states remained loyal, but only Bulgaria gave Stalin and his immediate successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, the cooperation they wanted; the others saw unrest, and sometimes revolts, at one time or another. Here is a capsule description of how they behaved during the Cold War era:

The religious issue and the USSR's de-Stalinization (Hoxha was a devout Stalinist) prompted Albania to break with the Soviet Union in 1961. Since Albania was not adjacent to any Soviet Bloc state, it was able to get away with this, unlike Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The break in relations between China and the Soviet Union occurred around the same time, so Albania sided with China, seeing Mao Zedong's brand of communism as purer than that of the Russians; in return, China replaced the USSR as a major supplier of trade and economic aid. Then in 1978, Albania broke with China as well, denouncing China's abandonment of Maoism and the normalization of relations between China and the United States. After that Albania went alone for the next few years, despite a declining economy.

The only signs of opposition came from within the ruling party. In 1981 Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu died under mysterious circumstances; officially it was declared a suicide, but many suspect he tried unsuccessfully to unseat Hoxha. When Hoxha died in 1985, he was succeeded by Ramiz Alia; still, there was hardly any loosening of the regime's absolute rule until 1990.

Soviet tanks in Prague, 1968.

Dubcek got the last laugh; he lived as a private citizen for the next twenty-one years, and then took part in the revolution that toppled communism in his country. He had the right idea about "socialism with a human face," but was a generation ahead of his time.

First East Germany built barbed-wire and chain-link fences, minefields and guard towers, all along its border with West Germany. Whenever some defector managed to get over these obstacles, more were added, until this became the most heavily fortified frontier between two nations. However, there was still a problem with Berlin, where it was relatively easy for somebody in East Berlin to sneak over to West Berlin and not come back. Suddenly on August 13, 1961, East Germany began building a concrete wall, all the way around the 28-mile perimeter of West Berlin. To make the wall truly formidable, the construction crews added additional barricades: landmines, trip wires, broken glass, sentries with vicious dogs, etc. East German leader Walter Ulbricht called the wall an "antifascist protection barrier," to keep the enemies of communism out, but everyone knew its real purpose was to keep the East German people in.

The desire for freedom was so strong that some East Germans tried to get over the Berlin Wall anyway. Those who succeeded became local legends, and today Berlin has a museum to commemorate their exploits. One defector flew over the wall in a balloon; another had himself lowered on the other side by a crane. A West Berliner drove through one of the wall's gates to get his girlfriend out of East Berlin, and while he was on the east side, he cut the whole top half of his car off, so he could drive under the gate's lowered crossing barrier when he returned. An entire nursing home of senior citizens, located a hundred yards from the border, managed to escape by digging a tunnel with spoons. However, these were the lucky ones; 75 were killed by guards when they tried to cross. West Berliners showed how they felt by covering their side of Die Mauer ("the Wall") with graffiti, and they cursed the structure, declaring that moss would never grow on it. Even so, the Berlin Wall was a success in that it stopped the mass defections, and the officer in charge of its construction, Erich Honecker, succeeded Ulbricht as secretary general in 1971.

Ironically, Kádár succeeded for as long as he did because he made Hungary the most capitalist state in the Soviet Bloc. Although he kept absolute control over the Communist Party and the government, he allowed western-style economic reforms, long before the Soviet Union tried them. Peasants were allowed to earn a profit from their land, and industry was free from state control. This nearly free market improved the Hungarians' standard of living, so that by the 1980s one family in three had a car, and nearly half the population could take vacations abroad. However, they depended too heavily on trade with the West, which declined during the bad economic years of the 1970s and early 80s, so Hungary nearly went bankrupt by 1985. What kept the economy going at this time was the unofficial black market, which produced an estimated 30 percent of the nation's GDP in 1985. Two thirds of all apartments were built without government approval, and 80 percent of Hungarians made ends meet with an unofficial second job. It wasn't the safest way to live, but it allowed people to joke that Hungary had the most comfortable barracks in the Soviet concentration camp.

Gomulka's successor, Edward Gierek, was less successful at solving the country's problems. By the end of the 1970s, the economy was in dreadful shape, and on August 14, 1980, this triggered a strike at the Lenin Shipyard of Gdansk. Within weeks the strike was joined by others all over Poland, the strikers began demanding political rights, and Gierek was forced to step down. The strikers, led by an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa, quickly formed a trade union named Solidarnosc (Solidarity), and by the end of the year its membership had grown to exceed that of the Polish Communist Party.

Lech Walesa.

Solidarity gave Marxist ideologists, like the Politburo's Mikhail Suslov, major headaches; Marxist philosophy repeatedly states that communism is a government for the workers, so the existence of unions was a strong indication that communism had not lived up to its promises; that's why labor unions were not allowed in the USSR. Suslov made a personal trip to warn the Poles that they had gone far enough. So did Walesa and other moderates, who now urged the Polish people to stop for the good of the nation, but food shortages, rationing, and strikes caused by radical workers got worse. On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the commander of Poland's armed forces, declared enough was enough and imposed martial law on the country. In defense, Jaruzelski argued that he had saved Poland from outside intervention; if the Poles did not put their own house in order, the Russians would do it for them. Solidarity was outlawed, but it was too popular to die; one year later Walesa was released from prison. Negotiations concerning the relationship between the government and the workers went on for most of the 1980s.

Ceaucescu was praised in the West as a champion of national self-determination, but his activities abroad concealed what he was doing to his own people. There was persecution of the country's Hungarian minority, and he tried to destroy the culture of the peasants by uprooting and resettling them in drab apartment complexes. To gain much needed capital from abroad, he exported the country's abundant meat, grain and oil, making those items scarce at home. In the 1980s Ceaucescu grew senile, and he launched strange economic programs and megalomaniac building projects that impoverished the country. Ceaucescu built a personality cult around himself that rivaled Stalin's, became the first communist leader to carry a scepter in public, and filled the country with secret police. By 1989 Romania was tied with Albania for the dubious title of Europe's poorest, most oppressed nation.

In foreign policy, Tito successfully cultivated his image as the head of a neutral state. At international conferences he often appeared with other famous neutral leaders, like India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. He also entertained Khrushchev and Brezhnev when they visited Belgrade, but neither guest could persuade him to return to the Soviet fold. At the United Nations, Yugoslavia generally voted with other communist countries on most issues, but condemned the Soviets for intervening in Korea and Czechoslovakia. The last conference he attended was the 1979 meeting of the nonaligned nations in Havana, and there he claimed he was a better representative of the Third World than the host, Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Economics proved to be the one challenge Tito couldn't overcome. The 1950s and 60s saw rapid growth, urbanization and industrialization, as Western nations rushed to do business with Yugoslavia; the country also became a popular tourist destination. However, the incoming money was not distributed evenly. Slovenia, Croatia and Voyvodina became the richest areas, while Kosovo was the poorest. From 1965 to 1988, a massive welfare program transferred funds from rich republics to poor ones. It didn't work, and the controversial program was abandoned because it produced no significant results. The Slovenes and Croats came to resent the Serbs for taking their profits away, calling it an abuse of federal power against the republics, while Kosovo's lack of development suggested that much of the money earmarked for it never reached the intended destinations. During Tito's final years, the country suffered from inflation, unemployment and strikes, and the trade deficit bloomed to $15 billion per year, one of the world's highest.

Tito died in 1980, after two months in the hospital. The mourning at his funeral was real, because all Yugoslavs knew that nobody could hold the country together as well as he had. The 1974 constitution called for Tito's successors to set up a rotating government, where the leaders of the republics, and the leaders of the two autonomous districts, took turns as president, each serving for one year. The system worked for a decade, so all eight regions got their turn in the president's chair. Still, a solution like this is not a formula for stability, and the deteriorating economy eventually undermined it.

The Late-Blooming Mediterranean Republics

During the Cold War, the Americans were willing to forgive Spain in return for Spanish support against communism, so in 1953 Spain gave the United States the right to use Spanish air and naval bases, in return for important military and economic aid. Two years later, Spain was finally allowed to join the UN. However, Franco's fascist origins were not completely forgotten; many European nations remained unfriendly, and Spain was kept out of NATO. Still, open hostility ended, and Spain was no longer a pariah nation.

Franco had the backing of three conservative factions: the army, the Falange Party, and the Church. In 1947 he announced that Spain would return to monarchy after his death, but waited until 1969 to choose an heir: Juan Carlos, grandson of the last Bourbon king, Alfonso XIII. During the second half of his reign, Franco released control over business and labor, and Spain's economy finally industrialized. Abroad, Spain avoided wars in Africa by giving its colonies (Equatorial Guinea, the Western Sahara and part of Morocco) independence. The country saw unprecedented growth, foreign investment and socioeconomic change during the 1960s, but in politics El Caudillo (the Leader) remained oppressive; in fact, he ruled by martial law from 1962 to 1970. This was because he could not suppress the Basques in the north and the Catalans in the northeast, after peace had returned everywhere else. The Catalans weren't really Spanish, and they remembered how on several occasions they had been part of France (see Chapters 7, 11 and 12). The 1931 revolution had given the Catalans their own president and parliament, but they lost these gains when Franco took over, because of their support for the Loyalists. It took a restoration of limited Catalan autonomy to satisfy the folks in Barcelona, and that didn't happen until 1977, two years after Franco's death.

The Basques were far more difficult to please. Four hundred years of Spanish rule had not extinguished their desire to be free; one of their favorite mottos was: "Neither slave nor tyrant." Like the Catalans, the Basques enjoyed autonomy from 1931 to 1939, and under Franco they formed a separatist movement called the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, meaning Basque Homeland and Liberty). In 1969 they began a campaign of terrorism, and the government responded with counter violence against random targets in the Basque provinces. One year later several ETA members were sentenced to death, but international pressure caused the government to back down and commute the sentences. The ETA scored its biggest success in 1973, when a car bomb assassinated Premier Luis Carrero Blanco. The regime was badly shaken, but the next premier, Carlos Arias Navarro, chose liberalization instead of repression; his program included the legalization of political associations, which had been banned since 1939. Hard-core Phalangists opposed this, and after they sabotaged Arias's attempted reforms, they passed a law requiring the death penalty for terrorists who killed police. As a result, five Basques were executed in September 1975, but this was the last hurrah for the fascists. Already gravely ill, Franco went into the hospital around this time; two months and five heart attacks later, he was dead.

Juan Carlos never wanted to be anything more than a constitutional monarch, so the fascist regime was quickly dismantled. In July 1976 he appointed Adolfo Suárez González, a moderate Phalangist, to succeed Arias, and Suárez successfully led Spain's transition to democracy. First Suárez introduced the Political Reform Law, which was approved by referendum in December 1976; then he legalized the Communist Party, despite strong army objections. In June 1977 the first democratic elections in four decades gave him a vote of approval; his new party, the Union of the Democratic Center (UDC), won 34 percent of the vote, with the Socialists a close second. A new democratic constitution, introduced in 1978, did much to decentralize the government by granting autonomy to seventeen regions, especially Catalonia and the Basque country.

Suárez ran into problems after that. His policy of cooperation with other parties broke down, and the economy went into a recession. He resigned in January 1981, and was succeeded by Deputy Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo. This administration only lasted for a little more than a year; the main accomplishment was Calvo Sotelo's decision to have Spain join NATO. The next time elections took place (October 1982), the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, led by Felipe González Márquez, won a decisive victory. Despite his leftist background, González acted moderately once in office, and thus was able to manage the country for fifteen years.

By 1992, Spain could claim to be a fully modern member of the European community. That year saw the 500^th anniversary of Columbus' first expedition to America, a world's fair in Seville, and the Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona. Nevertheless, high inflation and unemployment were producing growing dissatisfaction among the country's workers, as well as several corruption scandals involving government officials. González was elected to a fourth term in 1993, but the Socialists failed to win a majority, placing him in a precarious political position. His response was to seek support from the Catalan and Basque nationalist parties in exchange for greater regional autonomy and benefits. When the next election occurred (March 1996), the Socialists lost to the conservative Popular Party, led by José María Aznar. Aznar pledged to introduce economic austerity measures, and Spain's 1997 budget included cuts in public investment and a freeze in public-sector pay, without cutting significantly into social welfare programs.

The Basque question remained a major concern. By the mid-1990s, the Basque separatist ETA had killed more than 800 people, and a growing peace movement turned public opinion against it. In July 1997 the ETA kidnaped Miguel Angel Blanco, a young town councilor who was a member of the Popular Party. The ETA demanded that all Basque prisoners in Spanish prisons be transferred to the Basque provinces. When the government did not meet the demand, an ETA gunman killed Angel Blanco, prompting millions of Spaniards to march in protest against the ETA's violent tactics. Despite this, the terrorist campaign continued, until the ETA suddenly announced a cease-fire in September 1998. Although many in the government were skeptical of the ETA's motives, peace talks began. In December Prime Minister Aznar authorized the transfer of 21 ETA prisoners from prisons in the Balearic and Canary Islands to the Spanish mainland, though the ETA continued to demand the transfer of another 500 additional prisoners closer to the Basque region. Tensions flared again in early 1999, however, when Spanish and French authorities arrested 20 suspected ETA members and raided the headquarters of Herri Batasuna, the ETA's political wing, in San Sebastian. The tenuous situation left many wondering whether real peace was possible between the ETA and the Spanish government.

Among the fascist regimes of twentieth-century Europe, Portugal's was both the least belligerent and the longest lived. Antonio Salazar ruled for forty years, giving us some idea of how long Adolf Hitler might have lasted, if he hadn't been such a bully-boy; Salazar never even set foot outside of Portugal. However, he also presided over a terribly backward country; the Portuguese were 30 percent illiterate, and had the second highest infant mortality rate in Europe.

We already noted that Portugal sat out World War II, but its economy suffered anyway. The fishing industry declined, exports lessened, and refugees crowded the country; in the Pacific, Japan's occupation of Timor didn't do the Portuguese any good. By the end of the war, unemployment and poverty were widespread, but the National Union remained in total control. In May 1947, after crushing an attempted revolt, the government deported numerous labor leaders and army officers to the Cape Verde Islands. Marshal Carmona died in April 1951 and General Francisco Lopes, another ally of Salazar, became the next president. Lopes served until 1958 and was then in turn succeeded by Rear Admiral Américo Deus Tomás.

The brush fire of nationalism which had brought down other colonial empires spread to Portugal's colonies around this time. Rebellions broke out in Africa (Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea) during the early 1960s, while India annexed Portuguese Goa in 1961. Lisbon tried both the stick and the carrot; it sent in the army against each rebellion, while granting Portuguese citizenship to Africans in the territories. Neither had much effect, and the United Nations condemned Portugal for waging "colonial wars."

Salazar's long reign ended when he was incapacitated by a stroke in 1968. Marcello Caetano, a law professor and businessman and a longtime associate of Salazar, became the new prime minister. Although Caetano called for reforms when he took office, he continued Salazar's repressive policies, especially in Africa. This, combined with defeats at the hands of African liberation movements, persuaded a group of leftist army officers that the time had come to end fascism. They overthrew the Caetano government on April 25, 1974; a seven-man junta, under Gen António de Spínola, promised democracy at home and peace for the colonies. It kept both promises; by the end of 1975, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé & Príncipe, and Angola were independent. Portugal also got out of East Timor, but instead of independence coming, Indonesia seized that territory.⁽⁵⁾ A socialist, Vasco Gonçalves, became prime minister in July. Spínola resigned the presidency on September 30, warning of growing Communist influence; he was replaced by General Francisco da Costa Gomes. The return of troops and European settlers from Africa aggravated Portugal's problems of unemployment and political unrest.

1975 was a year of near-anarchy for Portugal. In March a right-wing coup attempt, reportedly directed by Spínola, was suppressed. In April the Socialists led in the voting for a constituent assembly. Gonçalves formed a new government, but it proved unstable. After a series of clashes between Socialists and Communists, followed by violent anti-Communist demonstrations, the military established a triumvirate consisting of Costa Gomes, Gonçalves, and General Otelo de Carvalho, Portugal's security chief. In September, at the army's insistence, Gonçalves was replaced as prime minister by Vice Admiral José de Azevedo. Under the Azevedo government, stability began to return. New parliamentary elections gave the Socialists a plurality of the vote in April 1976, and their leader, Mário Soares, became prime minister. Unfortunately for Soares, the country experienced severe economic problems for the next two years, and in mid-1978 Soares was dismissed. After Soares came two short-lived interim governments; then in December 1979 the conservative Democratic Alliance, headed by Francisco Manuel de Sá Carneiro, won a clear majority in parliamentary elections.

Sá Carneiro served as premier until he was killed in a plane crash the following December. The next premier was another conservative, Francisco Pinto Balsemão. On his initiative, a constitutional amendment abolished the military Council of the Revolution (1982). Parliamentary elections in April 1983 brought Soares back into power as prime minister. This time Soares' government introduced an austerity program and conducted negotiations to bring Portugal into the Common Market. New elections in October 1985 led to the formation of a minority government under a Social Democrat, Aníbal Cavaco Silva. Soares returned as president following elections in 1986, but he now ran a minority government; the Social Democrats controlled both the prime minister's office and parliament until the general elections of October 1995. In January 1996, Aníbal Cavaco Silva ran for president and was soundly defeated by the Socialist candidate Jorge Sampaio, marking the first time since the 1974 coup that both premier and president came from the same party.

In Greece, political instability caused the postwar constitutional monarchy to slide into dictatorship. In 1952 the right-wing Greek Rally party won the election, and Field Marshal Alexandros Papagos became prime minister. After Papagos died in 1955, King Paul chose another conservative, Konstantinos Karamanlis (1907-98), as his successor; he would be the most important figure in Greek politics in the late twentieth century.

For Greek citizens and politicians, Cyprus was by far the most important issue. Under British rule since 1878, this island had a population that was 80 percent Greek, 20 percent Turkish. Greek Cypriots wanted to become part of Greece, while Turkey declared itself the protector of the Turkish Cypriot minority. The two sides and Britain reached an agreement which allowed Cyprus to become an independent nation in 1960, but bad memories of the Greco-Turkish war in the 1920s helped make sure that no agreement would last for long; the elaborate plan for power-sharing between the Greek and Turkish communities soon broke down in violence.

Karamanlis narrowly won the elections of 1958 and 1961. However, allegations that the 1961 election had been manipulated made this a hollow victory. Georgios Papandreou, a centrist and the main opponent of Karamanlis, fought a vigorous campaign to overturn the result of the election; growing resentment toward the government's autocratic policies worked in his favor. Eventually Karamanlis had to resign, and the next election (February 1964) gave Papandreou's Center Union party a clear majority. Papandreou didn't do better, though; his administration lasted for only seventeen months. There was the crisis in Cyprus, and he was unable to get along either with the conservatives or with the new king, Constantine II, who had succeeded Paul in March 1964. When Papandreou moved to assume control of the Ministry of Defense, he was accused of seeking to protect his leftist son, Andreas, and the king refused to sanction the move. Papandreou resigned in July 1965; massive demonstrations followed, because the center and the left resented the king's action, while the right, which included anticommunists in the armed forces, saw the younger Papandreou as a dangerous radical.

On April 21, 1967, a group of army officers, led by Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, launched a bloodless military coup. The junta, which came to be known as the Colonels, claimed that they had acted to prevent a communist coup, although no evidence for this ever appeared. What really motivated the Colonels was a wish to stop the elections scheduled for May, which many expected would return the Papandreous to power. Then the regime rounded up hundreds of people with records of left-wing political activity and sent them to prison camps, where reports of torture and mistreatment soon emerged. There had been military juntas in Greece before World War II, but at least they had shared power with civilians who agreed with them. Now the Colonels showed by their actions that all power would remain in their hands until further notice; they suspended the constitution, abolished political parties, imposed censorship, and undid the reforms of the Papandreou government. When a counter coup by the king failed in December 1967, Constantine II went into exile, ending the Greek monarchy.

Western governments often criticized the junta but took no formal action against it. In fact, the United States continued to provide aid, because it saw Greece as a crucial front-line member of NATO. In a 1973 referendum where he was the only candidate, Papadopoulos was elected to an eight-year term as president. University students responded with anti-government demonstrations and the occupation of the Athens Metsoveion Polytechnical University; the military brutally suppressed the occupation, and killed many students. Papadopoulos was ousted by an even more extreme hard-liner, Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis, who led the much feared military police.

In the end, it was Cyprus that brought down the junta. That hot spot blew up in the summer of 1974 when Greek Cypriots, with the support of Ioannidis, launched a coup against Archbishop Makarios, the president of Cyprus, who had made no secret of his dislike for the junta. Turkey invaded Cyprus to protect the Turkish Cypriots, and within a few days occupied the whole northern side of the island. Nobody abroad raised a finger to help Greece, and instead of mobilizing to fight the Turks, the incompetent government collapsed; the army did not fight to hold on, but simply went back to its barracks. Karamanlis, who had been living in Paris since 1963, returned and was sworn in as prime minister, bringing the dictatorship to an end without bloodshed.

Two quick elections gave a "yes" vote to Karamanlis and a "no" vote to restoring the monarchy, so in June 1975 the parliament approved a constitution which split executive power between the prime minister and a president. The first president, Konstantinos Tsatsos, was an ally of Karamanlis. In the next election (1977), Andreas Papandreou's radical Panhellenic Socialist Movement (known by its Greek acronym, PASOK) emerged as the principal opposition party, with a 25 percent share of the vote. In May 1980 Karamanlis was elected president and relinquished his post as prime minister to another ally, Georgios Rallis. As president, Karamanlis achieved one of his long-standing objectives when he secured Greece's entry into the Common Market (1981).

The October 1981 elections gave the PASOK party 48 percent of the vote; thus, Papandreou became Greece's first socialist prime minister. Papandreou's campaign platform included a heavy dose of anti-Americanism; many Greeks blamed the United States for supporting the junta. Once in power, however, Papandreou did not carry out his threats to withdraw Greece from NATO and the Common Market. In March 1985 Papandreou secured the election of his chosen candidate, Christos Sartzetakis, to replace Karamanlis as president.

Growing economic problems, combined with scandals in the government and in Papandreou's personal life, caused PASOK to lose its parliamentary majority in the elections of June 1989. Presidential elections, held in April 1990, gave a narrow majority to the New Democracy (ND) Party of Karamanlis, allowing him to return for a second term (he finally retired in 1995). PASOK won back a majority in parliament in 1993, but the second administration of Papandreou introduced few new policies. Cancer forced him to resign in January 1996, and he died six months later. His successor, Costas Simitis, represented the modernizing, technocratic wing of PASOK, and was confirmed in office in the 1996 elections.

The Nations That Tried to Buy Happiness

Belgium faced a royal succession crisis in the immediate postwar years. Many Belgians were disgusted by the defeatist attitude of their king, Leopold III; he surrendered without warning in 1940, and the Nazis locked him up in Austria. The Belgian government in exile declared the king's surrender "illegal and unconstitutional," voted to remove him, and elected Leopold's brother, Prince Charles, as regent. After the Allies liberated Belgium, the Belgian parliament extended the regency of Prince Charles indefinitely, effectively exiling Leopold.

On March 12, 1950, after more than a year of political crises brought on by the controversy over the king, Belgium held a plebiscite on the question of Leopold's return; the return of the king was favored by 57.6 percent of the voters. Leopold came home, and strikes, demonstrations, and riots occurred in many urban areas of the country, until a civil war looked possible. On August 1, after consultations with government and political leaders, Leopold agreed to assign his royal prerogatives to his son, Crown Prince Baudouin, and to abdicate the following year, when his son came of age. Leopold abdicated on July 16, 1951, and Baudouin ruled until in 1993, when he was succeeded by his brother, Albert II.

When Norway declared independence in 1905, Iceland and Greenland remained under Danish rule. Nazi Germany's occupation of Denmark in 1940 prompted Britain to occupy Iceland with its own troops; in 1941 the United States sent soldiers to both Greenland and Iceland, relieving the British so they could concentrate on defending their homes. The treaty which united Iceland with Denmark expired in 1943, and because Denmark was still occupied, the Icelanders voted in early 1944 to sever all ties with Denmark. Thus, Iceland celebrated independence while under the rule of a foreign power. Americans are still stationed on Greenland and Iceland today, but since the war ended they have been defense partners, not an occupation force. In 1985 the Althing unanimously passed a resolution that banned the entry of nuclear weapons into Iceland.

After independence, fishing rights became the main political issue for Iceland. In 1958 Iceland decided to extend its fisheries jurisdiction from 4 to 12 miles offshore, thereby closing that zone to foreigners. Britain responded by sending warships to protect British trawlers in Icelandic waters; the resulting dispute was called the "Cod War." Iceland eventually had its way, because fishing was far more important to the Icelanders than it was to the British. Two more Cod Wars occurred when the Icelanders enlarged their territorial waters to 50 miles in 1972 and 200 miles in 1975. It was not until 1977 that Iceland became the undisputed master of this vital resource.

Because of its small population and the bitterly cold climate, Greenland does not feel it is ready to make a complete break with the mother country. In January 1979, the Greenlanders voted for home rule. The result was that Denmark pulled out of local affairs; Greenlandic (an Inuit dialect containing several Danish words) became the official language, and Inuit geographical names replaced Danish ones. Now Greenland sends two representatives to the Danish parliament, while Denmark retains ultimate control over foreign policy. Still, the Greenlanders are able to act independent when they feel like it; in 1985 they pulled out of the Common Market, though Denmark stayed in that organization.

Finland and Sweden refused to take sides during the Cold War, and waited until after it ended to join the European Union. In the case of Finland, neutrality was forced by the Russians, though Finnish sentiments were pro-Western; outsiders described this situation with the derogatory term "Finlandization." Sweden has been under the rule of the Social Democratic Party for most of the years since 1932. Under a leftist prime minister, Olaf Palme (1969-76 and 1982-86), Sweden gave shelter to American opponents of the Vietnam War and actively supported communist movements in the Third World; this seriously strained relations with the United States and endangered Sweden's neutral reputation.

Sweden's famous cradle-to-grave care for its citizens began with the establishment of old age pensions in 1911. A long period of prosperity and peace allowed the welfare state to grow steadily, adding healthcare, housing, and job security programs. To pay for this, taxes on the citizens were among the world's highest, and so was the budget deficit. Excesses on the part of the Social Democrats caused them to be voted out of office in 1976 and 1991, but the Swedes were not willing to give up their safety net, so the center-right coalitions that replaced the Social Democrats could never hold on long enough to make serious spending cuts.

Northern Ireland's Troubles

In the south, Eamon de Valera was voted out of office in 1948. The next prime minister, John Costello, broke the remaining ties with Britain, by changing the Irish Free State's name to the Republic of Ireland (something the British had never wanted), and by withdrawing from the British Commonwealth in 1949. Then he declared that Ireland would remain neutral in outside conflicts, and that Irish foreign policy would follow three guidelines: it would obey the UN Charter, stay out of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and support the battle of "Christian civilization" against communism. The second and third principles would have worked against each other if communism came to Ireland; fortunately that didn't happen. This wasn't the end of de Valera's career, though. The founder of the Irish Free State remained as active in politics as ever, despite his age, and finally got to be the head of state for a third time--he served as president from 1959 to 1973. When he finally retired, two years before his death, he was blind and ninety-one years old.

The IRA began a new campaign in the north in 1956, which it grandly called "the Border War." It proved to be a dud; nineteen IRA men and members of the Northern Ireland police were killed, and acts of violence caused a million pounds worth of damage, but Northern Ireland's Catholics stayed loyal. Eventually Dublin renounced all association with terrorism, forcing the IRA to call off its attacks in 1962. After that the IRA might have faded away, as other unsuccessful insurgent movements have done, but two factors kept it alive: the old antagonism between Britons and Irish, and the dislike of Protestants and Catholics for each other. Add to this a third factor, discrimination against Catholics in the north, and the IRA found enough recruits to give it another chance. Catholic Ulstermen found the best jobs, the best schools, and houses in the best neighborhoods, denied to them; nor were they allowed more than a tiny voice in the local government. The fighting between Catholics and Protestants never became a religious war like those during the Reformation; neither side wished to convert the other. Instead, the struggle has always been an economic one, in which the terms "Protestant" and "Catholic" became the most convenient political labels.⁽⁷⁾

Inspired by the black civil rights movement in the USA, the Catholics organized a civil rights movement of their own in 1968, to protest against discrimination. Moderate Protestants recognized that treating the Catholics as second-class citizens couldn't go on forever, but there was a violent overreaction from the right wing of the ruling Ulster Unionist Party, which saw the civil rights movement as a front for the IRA. Northern Ireland's police, the "B Specials," were first turned loose against the demonstrators, then allowed to terrorize the Catholic neighborhoods of Belfast and Londonderry. By August 1969 the situation had become a virtual civil war, with the IRA and the Protestant Ulster Defense Association engaged in demonstrations, street fighting, bombings, and assassinations. The pattern of violence became tit-for-tat; if a Protestant was killed one day, a Catholic would be killed next, and vice-versa.

London sent in the British army to help the police restore order, and soon they found they had to stay, to limit Protestant reaction. They also became a target for the IRA, and they gave back a heavy-handed response; one of the best-known examples was "Bloody Sunday," where the army killed thirteen civilians in Londonderry (January 30, 1972). In 1970 a radical IRA faction, the Provisional IRA, broke away from the main body of the group, due to the latter's failure to protect Northern Ireland's Catholics from the police. In 1971 internment (imprisonment without trial) was introduced to combat terrorism. One year later London abolished the Northern Ireland Parliament and imposed direct rule. In 1974 it introduced a 15-member council, the Northern Ireland executive, made up of both Protestants and Roman Catholics, and led by the Unionist prime minister, Brian Faulkner. Protestant extremists, like the Reverend Ian Paisley, refused to share power with the "Papists," so they used a general strike to bring down the coalition in the same year.

Overall, the IRA wasn't very successful at winning either battles or international support. They hijacked no airplanes, and about all they did beyond the British Isles was some fund-raising in the United States. However, they did become very skilled in three activities: bank robberies, sniping, and most of all bombing. In 1973 the provisional IRA sent a unit, the "Balcombe Street Gang," over to Britain, and it conducted a vicious bombing campaign until its members were arrested in 1975. More IRA bombers ambushed a party of British soldiers, killing eighteen of them, and on the same day in 1979, the IRA blew up Lord Louis Mountbatten, a member of the royal family and the last viceroy of India, as he was sailing in his yacht off the Irish coast. In 1981 the IRA tried a new tactic to gain sympathy; several members in a Belfast prison went on a hunger strike, to gain the right to be treated as prisoners of war. The most famous of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, actually got himself elected to Parliament just days before he starved himself to death. Each resulting death set off more violence, but London refused to give in; the current prime minister, Margaret Thatcher (the "Iron Lady"), was less conciliatory than her predecessors had been.

As the 1980s ended, the division between the Northern Irish communities remained sharp, British troops still patrolled Londonderry and Belfast, and the IRA continued to launch occasional attacks in Britain. The first peace effort that showed any promise was an intergovernmental conference to promote cooperation between Northern Ireland and Ireland, established in 1985. In December 1993 British prime minister John Major and Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds signed the Downing Street Declaration, a statement of fundamental principles regarding the future of Northern Ireland. The declaration reaffirmed that no changes in Northern Ireland's constitution would occur without the consent of a majority of the people, and that only political parties that were committed to both democracy and peace could participate in any official dialogue on the future of Northern Ireland. This meant that Sinn Fein (which to this point had been excluded from all talks) would be allowed to join the peace process, if it could stop IRA violence.

On August 31, 1994, the IRA announced an unconditional cease-fire. The Protestant extremist groups announced a cease-fire of their own in October, and for the first time in 25 years, Northern Ireland enjoyed a peaceful Christmas. Some progress was made in the peace talks that followed, until John Major insisted that the IRA give up its weapons; both the IRA and Sinn Fein wouldn't have anything to do with this. In February 1996 the IRA announced an end to the cease-fire, just hours before a bomb exploded in London's Docklands district, injuring more than 100 people. Nevertheless, the British and Irish prime ministers continued the talks, this time without Sinn Fein.

The British parliamentary elections of May 1997 replaced Major with Tony Blair of the Labour Party. Sinn Fein also did very well; Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and his deputy Martin McGuinness won seats, though they refused to serve. Blair made the peace talks his top priority, the IRA renewed its cease-fire in July, and the British government dropped its demand for the disarmament of the IRA. Sinn Fein then joined the negotiations, and they reached an agreement in April 1998. This one created a new 108-seat provincial assembly to handle Northern Ireland's local affairs, ending direct British rule over the province. The agreement also created a North-South Ministerial Council to coordinate policies between the two parts of Ireland, and a "Council of the Isles" to allow meetings between representatives from the English, Scottish, Welsh and both Irish parliaments.⁽⁸⁾ Finally, Ireland would drop its territorial claim to Northern Ireland.

On May 22, 1998, the Irish voters had their say. They passed the agreement by a landslide: 71 percent voted for it in Northern Ireland, 94 percent in the Republic of Ireland. Then came the elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, which divided most of the seats as follows:

David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party = 28.
John Hume's Social Democratic and Labour Party = 24.
Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (which opposed the agreement) = 20.
Sinn Fein = 18.

David Trimble became the first (prime) minister of the executive cabinet, because his party had the best showing. He didn't have to wait long to see the agreement face a serious test. On August 15, a splinter group, which called itself the Real IRA, detonated a massive bomb in the town of Omagh. Twenty-eight people were killed and more than 200 were wounded, making the blast the single deadliest event in the long history of the Irish conflict. All other parties, including Gerry Adams and the main IRA group, quickly denounced the bombing; four days later the Real IRA issued an apology and declared a suspension of all violent activities.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the conflict is over, for there are still disagreements between the factions. Sinn Fein was supposed to receive two seats in the cabinet, for example, but David Trimble refused to appoint any Sinn Fein members until the IRA gave up its weapons, leading to another stalemate. Currently it looks like the Protestants have prevented a union with Dublin by making Gerry Adams a partner, but demographics may tip the balance in favor of Sinn Fein and the IRA in the twenty-first century. The Catholic birthrate is higher than that of the Protestants, and because the conflict has depressed Northern Ireland's economy, many Protestants have left, convinced that their long-term prospects are not good. In the western county of Fermanagh, for example, census data shows that between 1971 and 1991 the Protestant community shrank by 12 percent, while the Catholics grew by 29 percent. Meanwhile to the south, low taxes have encouraged investment from high-tech companies, meaning that much of the economy has gone directly from agriculture to data processing. Thus, the main goal of the governments in London, Dublin and Belfast is to keep the paramilitary forces under restraint, and hope that things don't get much worse. They may eventually work out a peaceful resolution to one of the twentieth century's most unsolvable conflicts, if the cooling-off period lasts long enough for people to accept it as permanent, and if none of the parties takes a sudden leap into the dark.

The End of the Cold War

The first action came, not surprisingly, from the Poles. The Polish labor union, Solidarity, was made legal again in April 1989. New elections were held right away, with stunning results: the Communist Party tried rigging the elections to make sure that it would win 65 of the 100 contested seats in the Polish Senate, but pro-Solidarity candidates got so many of the votes that they won 99 seats anyway. A transitional government was set up; Jaruzelski stepped down from running the government, though he kept control over the army, and Solidarity's newspaper editor, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became the new president. A year and a half later presidential elections were held, and this time Lech Walesa replaced Mazowiecki. The Polish break with Russia was now complete.

More was in store before 1989 ended. Hungary got rid of its "Iron Curtain" by removing the barbed-wire fence along the Austrian border⁽⁹⁾, and in October the Hungarian Communist Party voted itself out of existence, renaming itself the Hungarian Socialist Party and announcing that there would be a multiparty government from now on. East Germany refused to go with the trend at first, but the mass defection of more than 100,000 East Germans to the West (via Hungary and Czechoslovakia) brought down both the government and the dreaded Berlin Wall in November. The end of the Berlin Wall, shown around the world on television, became the high point of the revolution; Berliners climbed up on the wall and celebrated, or took hammers and began knocking holes into the structure; East German troops stood aside and watched, because they had no orders to stop these civilians. Talks on the reunification of East and West Germany began immediately, and eleven months later East Germany ceased to exist. At first East Germany's ex-leader stayed, but when people started talking about putting Erich Honecker on trial for the deaths of those who tried to get over the Berlin Wall before 1989, he fled the country, eventually dying in exile (Chile, 1994). On June 20, 1991, the newly elected Bundestag, representing both East and West, named Berlin the new capital of Germany, though the transfer of government offices from Bonn took so long that Bonn remained the real capital for the rest of the 1990s.

The Czech and Bulgarian governments were the next to go, and both gave up in November. Vaclav Havel, a Czech playwright, came out of prison to become eastern Europe's most charismatic leader in only 59 days. In Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov, who had been dictator for 35 years, was also thrown out, but the Communist Party was re-elected in the 1990 elections; once again the Bulgarians proved they were Russia's best friend in the Balkans. A poster in Prague summarized the accelerating pace of change:

Incidentally, it is fitting that all of the above revolutions happened in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.

A United States of Europe?

Here the Low Countries led the way, because they were too small to compete with even a single European power by themselves. In 1948 they formed the Benelux Customs Union (renamed the Benelux Economic Union in 1960), which provided for a free trade zone between them and a common tariff imposed on goods from outside the Union. The result was a single economy containing 25 million people-a credible contender in the world of commerce. Because it worked so well for them, the leaders of these countries became the warmest advocates of European cooperation.

The man who got the larger European states involved was Jean-Claude Monnet (1888-1979), a French finance minister in the 1930s and a leading figure in France's postwar recovery. Monnet's real passion was not the rebuilding of France, but the creation of a whole new Europe, and he inspired so many others with this dream that they called him "the Father of Europe." In 1950, the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, proposed a union of the continent's coal and steel industries, and six countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) agreed to try it; Monnet led the ECSC (European Coal & Steel Community) from 1952 to 1955.

Next, representatives of the ECSC member nations, led by Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak, met in Sicily in 1955 to create a more comprehensive cooperative. Eventually they signed a treaty in Rome to confirm their agreements, and in 1958 the ECSC became the European Economic Community (EEC), better known as the Common Market. Thanks to the early lead taken by Belgium in the unity movement, Brussels hosted the Common Market's headquarters. The EEC was an immediate success; together, the six founding states made up the world's largest exporter and the second largest importer.

The original goals of the EEC were to eliminate all tariffs and customs between member nations, and create a single set of tariffs to use when dealing with nonmembers like the United States. This process was completed with the passage of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1986. However, Monnet, Schuman, Spaak and others expected political unity would follow, once economic unity became a reality; they often spoke of forming a "United States of Europe." A Council of Ministers was set up, as well as a Court of Justice to resolve disputes among members, and a European Parliament, first elected in 1979; the European Parliament serves mainly as a debating body, but has some power over the budget and can dissolve the EEC's ruling commission by a two-thirds vote.

From the EEC's start, other nations were invited to join it. Britain objected to the loss of control over national policies that would come with integration, so it attempted to persuade its neighbors to create a free trade area instead. After the EEC treaty was ratified, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal created a competing organization, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The EFTA treaty provided only for the elimination of tariffs on industrial products among the member nations; it did not affect agricultural products, nor did it provide a common external tariff, and members could withdraw at any time. Thus the EFTA was a much weaker union than the Common Market. A few years later, Britain changed its mind and applied for membership, but because of de Gaulle, the British were left out until he retired, as we saw previously. Britain finally was admitted, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973.⁽¹¹⁾ Greece joined in 1981, while Spain and Portugal did in 1986. Three nations that never belonged to NATO, Austria, Finland and Sweden, were admitted in 1994; Cyprus, Poland, Slovenia, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Turkey are the latest candidates.

Britain has been the most reluctant member of the European team to date. Many blame this on the English Channel, which kept Britain physically isolated from the Continent and gave its people an insular mentality.⁽¹²⁾ For a while Britain did some nervous hand-wringing over the question of whether it could be loyal to both the Common Market and the Commonwealth, as if membership in either organization was a marriage. The British also dragged their feet for the longest amount of time over the engineering project that promised to end their isolation--the tunnel under the Channel. This had been a dream for at least two hundred years (Napoleon envisioned digging a tunnel to invade England after Admiral Nelson wiped out the French fleet), but every time somebody started digging, politicians who feared some kind of cross-Channel invasion interrupted it. Francophobes spread absurd ideas about the "Chunnel" allowing rodents to spread rabies to Britain, or that it would cause the air over the island to reek of French garlic! Punch, the famous British comic magazine, ran a cartoon that showed a guillotine blade positioned right over the tunnel entrance, next to a sign saying "Welcome to France." The project was finally finished in 1994, but one observer noted that if the "Chunnel" had gone to the Netherlands instead of France, it probably would have been dug much sooner. Thus, it is safe to say that if those calling for unity can persuade the British to support them, they can convince anybody.

The end of the Cold War, and the end of the polarization it had caused, suggested that the time had come for the EEC to take the next big step. Accordingly, Europe's leaders met in Maastrict, Netherlands, for much of 1991 to produce a new treaty. The Maastrict Treaty changed the name of the EEC to the European Union (EU), adopted a twelve-star flag as its emblem, called for all its members to work responsibly, so that the policies of one state would not hurt another, and introduced the Economic & Monetary Union (EMU), a program that promised to give Europe a single currency. The last feature caused some concern, and French voters ratified the treaty by a slim margin; Danish voters rejected it outright, until some amendments were added to make the treaty more acceptable.

The requirements for participating in the EMU were strict:

1. A country's rate of inflation could not be more than 1.5 percent higher than an average of the rate in the three countries with the lowest inflation.
2. A country's budget deficit could not exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and its government debt could not exceed 60 percent of GDP.
3. A country's long-term interest rate could not be more than 2 percent higher than an average of the rate in the three countries with the lowest interest rates.
4. A country could not devalue its currency against that of another member nation during the two years leading up to the deadline.

Not everyone is happy with the EU's success; excess regulation may be the price of unity. In the 1960s the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) protected farmers by granting them subsidies, and they responded by producing more wine and butter than any market could consume. Books of new rules, laws and guidelines, intended to encourage cooperation and standardization, are getting in the way of businessmen everywhere; Dutch manufacturers are having a hard time carving traditional wooden shoes, while Italian restaurant owners complain that their new regulation-compliant ovens are not hot enough to make good pizza.⁽¹³⁾ In 2001 a British butcher was fined for refusing to use the metric system to weigh his product, and the press instantly dubbed him the "Metric Martyr." Consequently, it looks like local customs will not survive unification; to save their culture from the influence of American corporations and media, the Europeans may end up destroying it themselves!

Eastern Europe in the 1990s

In March 1991 a general amnesty for all political prisoners was declared, and multiparty elections to the People's Assembly (the first free elections in more than fifty years) took place the same month. The Communist Party and its allies won 169 of the 250 seats, while the newly formed Democratic Party won 75. The Communist victory provoked more protests, in which police killed four people in the city of Shkodër. Following a general strike by thousands of workers, the government resigned and a coalition government was created in June. However, the new government collapsed after six months, forcing another election in March 1992. This time the reorganized People's Assembly had 140 seats; the Democrats won 92 of them, and the Socialists (the renamed Communist Party) won 38. The leader of the Democratic Party, Sali Berisha, became the first non-Communist president, and he arrested and jailed several communist officials, including Alia, on charges of corruption. Opponents accused the president of authoritarianism, for restricting press freedoms, persecuting former Communist officials, and controlling the courts. Berisha managed to win the next two elections, in 1996 and early 1997, but the third time was not the charm; in June 1997 the Socialists won yet another round of voting, and their leader, Rexhep Mejdani, succeeded Berisha as president. One of Mejdani's first acts was to release the Socialists jailed by the previous administration.

1997 also saw the widespread failure of several investments, many of them outright pyramid schemes, which thousands of Albanians had put their meager savings into. Although the government promised to partially reimburse many investors, the combination of economic disruption and political scandal prompted Albanians in several cities to riot. By March a sporadic rebellion had broken out and government control disappeared in several parts of the country. Order was not completely restored as the twentieth century ended, thanks to the fighting across the border in Kosovo. Thus, as we go to press, it looks like Albania is going back to the anarchy and blood feuds that characterized it in the past.

After the 1989 revolution, Petur T. Mladenov, Todor Zhivkov's foreign minister, took charge as general secretary. The first thing Mladenov did was restore the civil rights of Bulgarian Turks, who had been persecuted and forced to take Slavic names under Zhivkov.⁽¹⁴⁾ Then he began to institute a multiparty system. In June 1990 the Communists, now called the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), won the nation's first free parliamentary elections since World War II. Mladenov, however, resigned just one month later, because of a scandal involving the use of force to suppress student demonstrations. Parliament replaced him with a president from the opposition party, Zhelyu Zhelev of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). Before the year ended the Bulgarian economy collapsed, forcing the scheduling of new elections for 1991. This time the UDF won by a narrow margin, and Filip Dimitrov, head of the UDF, became the new prime minister. Under a new constitution providing for direct presidential voting, Zhelev won reelection in January 1992.

Meanwhile, the government slowly began initiating economic and industrial reforms, which allowed foreign investment, privatization of state-owned companies, and called for the return of land seized by the Communists to its original owners. However, the reforms did not bring quick prosperity, and public dissatisfaction led to the overthrow of Dimitrov's government in October 1992. The next two years saw political paralysis, because the BSP and the UDF refused to get along. Eventually President Zhelev dissolved parliament in and appointed a caretaker government, which served until parliamentary elections were held in December 1994. This time the BSP won a clear majority, capturing 125 of the 240 seats, and Zhan Videnov, the 35-year-old BSP chairman, became prime minister.

In 1996 Zhelev lost his party's nomination to Petar Stoyanov, and Stoyanov won the November presidential elections with 60 percent of the vote. That, along with a collapsing economy and an in-party rebellion against his leadership, caused Videnov to resign his posts. The BSP parliamentary majority then appointed the interior minister, Nikolay Dobrev, as their choice for prime minister. In January 1997 tens of thousands of Bulgarians began to hold daily protests, calling for early parliamentary elections and an end to the economic crisis. When the BSP ignored this, the opposition parties walked out and began a boycott of parliament. Protesters immediately stormed the parliament building, trapping more than 100 BSP deputies inside until police broke through and enabled the deputies to escape. President-elect Stoyanov took office on January 22, but the BSP waited two more weeks before it conceded to the opposition's demands. New elections took place on April 19, and the United Democratic Forces (ODC)--an electoral alliance of the UDF and several smaller parties--won a resounding victory, capturing 137 parliamentary seats. The leader of the alliance, Ivan Kostov of the UDF, was unanimously chosen to be prime minister. He immediately established a currency-board system, required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in exchange for aid, and promised to battle organized crime and corruption.

The last king of Bulgaria, Simeon II, was only six years old when crowned in 1943, and deposed by the communists just three years later. He spent most of the next fifty years as a consultant in Spain. In 1996 he returned, re-entered politics, and formed his own party, the Simeon II National Movement (SND). The continuing poor state of Bulgaria's economy caused Simeon's popularity to grow, and in the June 2001 elections, he beat Kostov easily. Simeon's National Movement won 120 seats, one short of a majority, so he formed a coalition with the Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which held 21 seats. Besides promising to be a better prime minister than his predecessors, Simeon also announced that he would bring Bulgaria into NATO and the European Union. However, everyone made it clear that the sixty-four-year-old former king would rule by law rather than by decree, and that there would be no restoration of hereditary monarchy.

Following its creation, the Czech Republic showed far more stability than its neighbors. Support for Havel and his prime minister, Vaclav Klaus, remained high, and there was little popular support for extremist groups of any kind. As with the rest of the Soviet Bloc, the economy declined in the aftermath of communism, but it was also the first to begin recovering, in the mid-1990s. Inflation dropped, unemployment remained low, and the country attracted foreign investors. Czech leaders emphasized the importance of close ties with western Europe, and called for full integration into the European Union and NATO.

In June 1996 the Czech Republic held its first parliamentary elections since the country split from Slovakia, and to the surprise of many observers, Prime Minister Klaus's center-right coalition lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of parliament) by a narrow margin. However, Klaus signed a coalition agreement to form a minority government and thus remained prime minister. In November elections were held for the Senate, or upper house of parliament, which had just come into existence a year earlier, and center-right parties of the ruling coalition won the majority here.

In November 1997, Klaus and his cabinet were forced to resign amid campaign finance scandals. An interim government headed by Prime Minister Josef Tošovský ran the country until after parliamentary elections in June 1998. The center-left Social Democrats won the most votes, but took only 32 percent of the seats. Miloš Zeman, chairman of the Social Democrats, was appointed prime minister of a minority government, after promising key parliamentary posts to Klaus's Civic Democrats, who had won 28 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, President Havel was reelected in January 1998 to another five-year term.

An inefficient and obsolete industrial base, inflation, and high unemployment were among the problems facing Slovakia. In March 1994, just a year after independence, Meciar lost a vote of confidence, and a coalition of five parties chose a moderate, Jozef Moravcik, to be the next prime minister. However, the elections held in October 1994 allowed Meciar to return to power at the head of his own coalition. Now Meciar's main opponent was the president of Slovakia, Michal Kovác; though they came from the same political party (HZDS), their inability to get along hindered Slovakian efforts to join the Western community. Foreigners criticized the Meciar government for slowing down the privatization of state-owned businesses, returning radio and television communications to state control, and for its backing of controversial legislation, including a law making Slovak the sole official language; since the country has a significant Hungarian minority, this strained relations with neighboring Hungary.

When Kovác's term ended in March 1998, a divided parliament was unable to produce the majority vote needed to appoint a successor; with the president's seat vacant, many presidential powers went to Meciar. However, he did not get to hold them for long. New parliamentary elections in September defeated the Meciar government, and Miklos Dzurinda became prime minister. Meanwhile, the constitution was amended to allow the people, rather than the parliament, to vote for the president. Meciar ran for president in March 1999, but was defeated by Rudolf Schuster, who pledged to steer a more pro-European course.

The last Russian troops left Berlin in August 1994, signaling the conclusion of a complete pullout from Eastern Europe by the former Soviet Union, after almost 50 years of occupation. Eight days later, the remaining 200 troops from the Western Allies also left Berlin, marking the first time since World War II that the city had not been a host to foreign soldiers.

At first the administration of the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, attempted to solve all problems by imposing West German practices onto the East. The cost of this was immense; providing goods and services to the eastern part of the country proved a severe strain for the West. Western Germany lost hundreds of billions of dollars, while eastern Germany did not get richer. Large transfers of capital from the west to the east led to budget deficits, which were made worse by an economic recession. This forced the government to cut social services, raise taxes, and reduce spending.

Many of the industries in the east, which had been protected under the Communist system, were far too inefficient to compete in Western markets. The government wanted to privatize them, using public and private investment, because they were too costly to support. However, bringing these industries up to speed required time and capital, which slowed the German economy overall. As eastern state industries were closed and sold, hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. Many also lost their homes under a new law permitting the repossession of property that could be proved to have been illegally confiscated by the Nazi or Communist governments. Salaries and state pensions in the east remained lower than similar payments in the west. Eastern television and radio stations, periodicals, and familiar consumer products disappeared. Most important of all, the unemployment rate in the east was much higher than the prevailing rate in the west. Eastern Germans grew angry as they saw their way of life destroyed; that, coupled with the poverty of the east, made it a fertile ground for neo-Nazi and other illegal extremist groups.

Despite austerity measures and cuts in spending, German unemployment continued to rise. By 1998 it was 12.6 percent overall, and 21.1 percent in the east. Helmut Kohl's popularity declined because of this and growing inflation; he had served as chancellor for sixteen years, longer than anyone else in postwar Germany. The September 1998 elections swept Kohl and his Christian Democratic coalition out of power, replacing them with the Social Democratic Party of Gerhard Schröder. The Social Democrats now had 298 seats in the 669-seat Bundestag, compared with 245 for Kohl's coalition. To get the majority he needed, Schröder formed a coalition with the environmentalist Green Party, which had won 47 seats. This Red-Green coalition, as critics called it, allowed the Green Party to enter a national government for the first time. The new government called for tax and immigration reform, a reorganization of the military, and promised to close nuclear power plants, but Schröder said his top priority would be to reduce the high unemployment.

Antall was ill for much of 1993, and died in December of that year; Péter Boross, another leader of the MDF, succeeded him. Another change of leaders occurred in May 1994, when new elections allowed the Hungarian Socialist Party (formerly the Communist Party) to regain the majority of seats in parliament. The party named Gyula Horn, a member of the pre-1990 government, as its choice for prime minister. Then the party formed a coalition with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, which had taken second place in the elections; this provided the two-thirds majority needed to pass certain legislation. However, they didn't control everything; in June 1995 the National Assembly reelected Göncz for a second five-year term as president.

Hungary became the first Eastern European nation to join the Council of Europe (1990), and it quickly signed declarations of cooperation with the Poles, Czechs, Russians and Ukrainians. The tough part for the Hungarians was getting along with neighboring Romania and Czechoslovakia (Slovakia from 1993 onwards), because of the treatment of Hungarian minorities in those countries. This standoff ended in mid-1994 when Horn offered to drop Hungary's pre-1919 claims on Slovak and Romanian territory, in return for a guarantee of safety for ethnic Hungarians living in those countries. Normalization of relations followed, with Hungary signing a treaty of friendship with Slovakia in 1995 and Romania in 1996. Horn also ratified the Council of Europe's Convention on the Protection of National Minorities; which declared that all ethnic minorities had the right to their own language and religion, and issued an official apology for Hungary's role in the deaths of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Later parliament set up a $23.5 million fund, as a pension for Holocaust survivors.

In the May 1998 parliamentary elections, the Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Party defeated the Hungarian Socialist Party, and Fidesz leader Viktor Orban took over as prime minister, forming a center-right coalition with the Independent Smallholders' Party and the Hungarian Democratic Forum.

Lech Walesa was unclear about how to define political powers between the president, prime minister, and the Sejm (parliament); this confusion showed in Poland's transitional "Little Constitution," adopted in 1992. Post-Communist Poland thus suffered from a confused, unstable, and conflict-ridden political process. Because the election process gave proportional representation to every party on the ballot, the Sejm contained more than a dozen parties, and Poland has seen several short-lived parliamentary coalitions.

The September 1993 elections simplified the party system by excluding all but the six parties who succeeded in gaining at least 5 percent of the vote (8 percent for coalitions). The parties which had taken on the ideas of the old Communist Party, like the Social Democracy of the Polish Republic (SdRP) and the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), attracted voters dissatisfied with the poor state of the economy and society; between them they gained a large majority. Waldemar Pawlak, the PSL leader, became prime minister, but soon Walesa accused his government of trying to slow the reform process. In early 1995, Walesa threatened to dissolve parliament if the Pawlak government was not replaced. Because he was planning to run for reelection, Walesa nominated a likely opponent, Aleksander Kwasniewski, for the position of prime minister; Kwasniewski was a former Communist and the founder and leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). Walesa was overruled by parliament and Józef Oleksy, another SLD member and former Communist, got the nomination. Since Pawlak had lost a vote of confidence in the meantime, Olesky replaced him, becoming Poland's seventh prime minister since the collapse of Communism.

By now Walesa had discredited himself through his personal failings and political mistakes, so in the presidential elections of November 1995, Kwasniewski unseated him. Kwasniewski pledged to continue the process of economic reform and to seek full membership for Poland in the European Union and NATO. In a move intended to help heal the political rifts resulting from the election, Kwasniewski resigned from the SLD later that month.

In January 1996 Prime Minister Oleksy resigned, due to a formal investigation into allegations that he had been spying for Russia for more than a decade. Oleksy had once served in the Communist Party's Central Committee, and though he admitted to having a long friendship with a Russian intelligence agent stationed in Warsaw, he denied the espionage charges. Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, also of the SLD, took his place. In April the military prosecutor investigating the charges against Oleksy decided to drop the case, due to insufficient evidence of criminal activity.

In 1997 a special parliamentary commission, dominated by former Communists, completed the task of drafting a new constitution. Both the Sejm and the voters gave it their approval. A combination of seven competing versions, the 243-article charter delineates the powers of the presidency, guarantees basic civil rights, ensures civilian control over the armed forces, and commits the country to a market economy and private ownership of enterprise.

In October 1997 the conservative Solidarity Electoral Alliance (AWS) and the pro-business Freedom Union (UW) formed a coalition government after winning a combined majority of seats in parliamentary elections. Kwasniewski appointed Jerzy Buzek, a former Solidarity activist in the 1980s and an AWS legislator, as prime minister. A liberal reformer, Buzek pledged to accelerate the privatization of state-owned industries and to decentralize government power. One consequence of this was that in March 1999, Poland became the first non-western nation to join NATO.

A new democratic constitution for Romania was adopted by popular referendum, in December 1991. Presidential and legislative elections were held in September 1992 with a runoff presidential contest in October. Iliescu was reelected president, while the Democratic National Salvation Front (DNSF), a party that emerged from the breakup of the NSF, won the largest representation in the legislature; Iliescu appointed economist Nicolae Vacaroiu to be the next prime minister. In 1993 the DNSF merged with several smaller parties and changed its name to the Party of Social Democracy of Romania (PSDR).

Romania experienced significant ethnic turmoil at the same time. Attacks against Gypsies resulted in an exodus of refugees to Germany, until the German government sent 43,000 of them back in 1992. Relations with Hungary were strained as a result of clashes between ethnic Hungarians and Romanian nationalists in Transylvania. In 1994 Romania hosted an international conference on the status of ethnic minorities in Central Europe, but disagreements over the rights of ethnic minorities continued to be a problem. In June 1995 a law was passed that denied ethnic minorities the right to higher education in their native language in many subjects; ethnic Hungarians protested against the legislation. In September 1996 the leaders of Romania and Hungary signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation that guaranteed the rights of ethnic minority groups.

The November 1996 elections marked Romania's first peaceful transfer of power. The PSDR-led coalition lost its majority in parliament; two coalitions of opposition parties, the Democratic Convention of Romania (DCR) and the Social Democratic Union (SDU), joined to form Romania's first anticommunist coalition government. It was a similar story in the presidential race. The DCR's presidential candidate, reform-minded academic Emil Constantinescu, defeated Iliescu and named a popular DCR politician, Bucharest mayor Victor Ciorbea, as the new prime minister.

The new government promised a comprehensive plan of economic reform, because the previous seven years had seen poor progress toward a free-market economy. It also pursued a highly publicized and rigorous campaign against crime and corruption, and lifted a ban on visits into the country by King Michael, the ex-monarch who had been deposed fifty years earlier. Despite all this, and a successful foreign policy that mended disputes with Hungary and Ukraine, Ciorbea found it tough going; inflation soared, state-owned companies and utilities with bloated payrolls were not streamlined, and a promised sale of the state banks never occurred. The SDU defected from Ciorbea's coalition in parliament in January 1998, and in March Ciorbea was forced to resign. Radu Vasile, another DCR member, took his place, and the SDU rejoined the ruling coalition. Upon taking office, Vasile promised to move ahead with privatization, by closing more than 150 unprofitable factories and mines. This caused 10,000 striking coal miners to march on Bucharest, protesting the mine closures and demanding a major wage increase (January 1999). After five days of this, the government deployed army and special police forces to disperse the miners, but Vasile agreed to increase wages and reopen some mines anyway.

The Yugoslav War: The Slovenian and Croatian Phases

The revolutions of 1989 persuaded Yugoslavia to allow opposition parties. In 1990, the republics held their first multiparty elections in almost 50 years; the Communist Party lost everywhere except in Serbia and Montenegro. A center-right coalition won in Slovenia and began work on a new constitution, which claimed the right to secede from the rest of Yugoslavia. Since Slovenia had been part of Austria before World War I, its nationalist movement favored the creation of a progressive, Western-style regime; the others, however, followed more traditional agendas, often at the cost of suppressing democracy and human rights. Two of the newly elected nationalists, President Alia Izetbegovic of Bosnia and President Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia, took a moderate course, hoping to keep Yugoslavia united as a decentralized confederation. Croatia elected Franjo Tudjman, the leader of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

Like Tito, Tudjman was a Partisan who had fought the Axis in the last war. At first he was a fervent Communist, rising through the ranks, until he became Yugoslavia's general in charge of party discipline. Then in 1961, he left the military and the party, to immerse himself in Croat history. Soon he was a dissident professor, and he did time in prison in the early 1970s for opposing Tito's dictatorship. His writings accused the communists of human rights violations, but he also defended the wartime Ustasha, claiming that it didn't really kill that many Jews and Serbs. Once in power, he set up a one-party state that bore a disturbing resemblance to the fascist regime he had once opposed; the new Croatia used a checkered flag and a monetary unit called the kuna, just like the Ustasha, while Tudjman took to wearing Mussolini-style uniforms. However, this got little attention, because Tudjman was a lesser evil than what Serbian nationalism produced.

While the other nationalities felt they had been stifled by too much Serb control over everything, the Serbs felt that Yugoslavia's federal government had put them at a disadvantage, especially in the two autonomous regions of Serbia. In 1986 Slobodan Milosevic, the head of a large, state-run gas company, became head of the Serbian Communist Party. The first thing he did was counter the federal government's plan for economic liberalization, with a model for slower reform. Then in 1987, on the anniversary of the 1389 battle of Kosovo, he went to that fateful site, the "Field of the Blackbirds," and made a patriotic, pro-Serbian speech, declaring that: "Nobody, either now or in the future, has the right to beat you." Thus, Milosevic took the tool of nationalism from the non-Communist opposition, and made it his own. In 1989 he was elected president of the Serbian republic. With massive popular support, and mass rallies that resembled mob scenes, he coerced the party apparatus in Montenegro and Voyvodina to install his allies as leaders, and then all but extinguished autonomy in both regions. During the revolutions that ended the Cold War, he renamed the communists, calling them the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). One year later the SPS won a large majority in Serbia's elections, and Milosevic used the media and a heavy-handed police force, to ensure that no one could effectively oppose him. All this persuaded the Slovenes and Croats that it would be dangerous to remain part of a Yugoslav state dominated by Milosevic, so the country began to break up.⁽¹⁵⁾

In May 1991, it was Croatia's second turn to have one of its own become the Yugoslav president, under Tito's scheme of rotation. The Croats selected Stipe Mesic, a moderate noncommunist, but this time the Serb leaders refused to let him take office. That act killed the last chance for a peaceful solution, and in June both Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. Germany was the first to recognize them; other Western nations followed later.

The Slovenian part of the war only lasted ten days. Yugoslav (meaning mostly Serbian) army units were blockaded in their barracks, too powerful for the Slovenes to attack, but unable to move because they had run out of gasoline. In the end a negotiated settlement allowed the Serbs to leave. Milosevic let Slovenia go because it was the farthest republic from Belgrade, and because it contained almost no Serbs in it. It would be a different story in Croatia and Bosnia, though, which were respectively 12 percent and 31 percent Serbian; these minorities encouraged Belgrade to fight to keep as much land as possible.

As early as mid-1990, the Croatian Serbs began calling for autonomy. They argued that if Croatia could leave Yugoslavia, they could leave Croatia. In March 1991, the Serbs proclaimed an autonomous republic in central Croatia, which they named Krajina. When the fighting started, Serbian guerrillas arose in every Croatian district or village with a Serb majority, and they invaded non-Serb districts and villages. Milosevic immediately recognized the Krajina secession movement, and sent in what remained of the federal government's army.

Krajina nearly split Croatia in two; for much of the war a single bridge was the last remaining connection between eastern and western Croatia. Meanwhile Serbian army units attacked on the wings, to capture the cities of Vukovar and Dubrovnik. At Vukovar in the east, artillery fire drove away the Croats; this was a major defeat for Tudjman. It was here that the Serbs first used two strategies that would become their trademark everywhere: the mass expulsion of local populations, often by terror, followed by the settlement of Serbs in their place ("ethnic cleansing"); and a reliance on heavy weapons to attack urban areas, because of a shortage of infantry. The offensive on Dubrovnik failed to capture that Adriatic port, but succeeded in reducing its charming medieval buildings to rubble.

The Yugoslav War: The Bosnian Phase

Greece took an instant disliking for the new state, because the nearest Greek province was also named Macedonia. Moreover, the Macedonians chose a red flag with a twelve-pointed star on it, the same star that was Alexander the Great's family emblem. The Greeks made it clear that the only thing modern Macedonia had in common with ancient Macedonia was the name, and ordered modern Macedonia to change both the flag and the name. Cut off from the sea by a Greek economic boycott, the Macedonians had to back down. Today they call their country the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (F.Y.R.O.M.). One result of this was that Greece backed Serbia in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars; they probably would have done so anyway, since both were Orthodox Christians, and thus felt a common kinship. So did the Orthodox Russians; after the Soviet Union fell apart, Russia had no trouble renewing the traditional friendship between Russians and Serbs.

All eyes now turned to Bosnia. The most ethnically mixed republic, Bosnia contained Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians (Slavic Moslems) in every community. Before 1991, it had been a model of how different groups could live together in harmony; its capital, Sarajevo, was the host for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Now this mixture ensured that any breakaway from Belgrade would be especially messy, and another part of Sarajevo's heritage--as the city where World War I began--came forward.⁽¹⁶⁾

None of Bosnia's three groups wanted to be part of a state ruled by the others. As the Moslems grew interested in independence, the Serbs and Croats began forming their own states within the state. The Bosnian Serbs set up their own parliament, and voted almost unanimously in November 1991 to "remain in a common Yugoslav state" with the rest of "Greater Serbia," while the Croat Defense Council (HVO) proclaimed the Croat Community of Herzeg-Bosna, with the support of the Croatian government and army.

In March 1992, the Bosnian government held a plebiscite on independence, and the voters split along ethnic lines. 97 percent of Croat and Moslem voters chose to secede, while most Serbs boycotted the referendum. Within days of the voting, Bosnia declared its independence, and the Serbs responded by declaring their own republic, Republika Srpska, with its capital at the southeastern town of Pale. In April Bosnian Serb militias began grabbing as much territory as possible, with the intention of returning it to Serbia. Since most of Bosnia's farmers were Serbs, they captured the countryside quickly, isolating Bosnia's cities in the process. Self-proclaimed "Chetnik" gangs that included criminals in their ranks, backed by Yugoslav army units, used terror tactics to drive Moslems from their villages to the larger cities, while other Serb units seized roads and began a siege of Sarajevo.

It was in Bosnia that the Serbs practiced "ethnic cleansing" on a large scale. Not only did they purge the land of its non-Serbian inhabitants, but they also raped captured women, threw Moslem men into concentration camps, and indulged in mass executions. We now know that all factions in the war committed atrocities, but the Serbs were the worst offenders. Nor did the Serb atrocities embarrass their leaders, Premier Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic.⁽¹⁷⁾ At this stage, the terror worked; by the end of the summer, 70 percent of Bosnia was in Serbian hands. Sensing that the Moslem-run state in Sarajevo would not last, Croatian forces joined Herzeg-Bosna to Croatia, and they also began to attack and seize Moslem districts.

Peace talks began in Geneva, Switzerland, before the end of 1992. Most outsiders sympathized with the Bosnian Moslem underdogs, so the first peace proposal, which allowed the Serbs to keep 50 to 52 percent of their gains, was rejected by the Sarajevo government. Pressure from Yugoslavia played a role in the talks: Milosevic wanted to end the crisis, end the sanctions imposed on his country by the United Nations, and curb an inflation rate which soon reached 2 million percent per year. As it turned out, however, he had little ability to control Karadzic, so the war continued.

When they weren't both busy fighting the Serbs, the Croats and Moslems fought each other in the west. In May 1993 the Croats launched an offensive to capture Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina and the largest city that wasn't threatened by the Serbs. Mostar held out, and the Bosnian government's almost nonexistent army built itself up to a point where it could hold its own against the HVO. Both the Croats and the Moslems also carried out bloody massacres and "ethnic cleansing" of their own in contested territories. At the same time the United Nations set up an International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands. This group, the first war crimes court since the one at Nuremberg, eventually indicted more than 50 men, including Karadzic and Mladic, for crimes against humanity. US pressure put an end to the Moslem-Croat war, forcing the two factions to agree to a joint federation in March 1994. At this point Tudjman showed a streak of pragmatism that the Serbs lacked, by dropping his claim to the Croat-populated districts of Bosnia. This allowed Tudjman to look respectable in Western eyes; the United States even allowed retired U.S. military officers to train the Croatian military, despite an arms embargo on all sides.

On the main front, the UN increased food aid to the Moslems. It also tried to impose cease-fires, but none of them lasted for long. Then the UN declared six Bosnian cities to be "safe zones," where the Serbs could not attack Bosnian refugees: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Zepa, Srebrenica and Gorazde. The Serbs simply ignored the declaration, captured Goradze, and continued to shell the other safe zones. International condemnation forced them to lay off of Sarajevo, after they got the blame for a February 1994 explosion that killed 68 civilians in a market place, but elsewhere the war went in their favor. In May 1994 some of the NATO countries launched air strikes against Serbian positions, and the Serbs took UN peacekeepers hostage, showing that the UN was powerless in this situation. By early 1995 the part of Bosnia under Serbian control had reached 80 percent.

Because the UN had failed, the Croats and NATO decided to take matters into their own hands. They got their chance quickly, because the poor Western response to date had made the Bosnian Serbs bolder. July 1995 saw them defy the UN again, by overrunning two more "safe areas," Srebrenica and Zepa; up to 8,000 Moslems were massacred here, under the direct supervision of General Mladic. Then in August, the Serbs attacked Bihac from both Bosnia and Krajina. For Croatia this was the last straw, and all available forces from Croatia, the HVO, and the Bosnian government joined together to launch an anti-Serb counterattack. Within a few days, they destroyed Krajina, reconquered western Bosnia, and forced 130,000 Serbian refugees to flee. Tudjman finished this arguably justified invasion with a vicious exclamation point; his troops burned 70 percent of the Serbian houses, confiscated Serb property, and allowed gangs of Croat thugs to murder the few elderly Serbs left behind. NATO joined in with a massive wave of air strikes against the Bosnian Serb infrastructure. Milosevic failed to intervene, so the Bosnian Serbs found themselves alone and vulnerable.

By September 15, the siege of Sarajevo had ended, and all sides agreed to talk peace. The final treaty, signed at Dayton, Ohio in November 1995, divided Bosnia into two equal parts: half for the Croats and Moslems, and half for the Serbs.⁽¹⁸⁾ It also called for new elections in 1996, and for a peacekeeping force of 60,000 NATO troops. At the time of this writing, the peace seems to be a lasting one, so the final casualty count for the war is 250,000 killed, and 2.3 million refugees (out of a prewar population of 4.4 million). The treaty ordered that all refugees be permitted to return to their original homes, but about 820,000 were unable to go because they lived in areas now dominated by another group. The leaders of each ethnic group still oppose one another, and there is little free movement or commerce across the borders of what may still someday become three nations.⁽¹⁹⁾

The Yugoslav War: The Albanian Phase

Rugova favored a negotiated, peaceful solution, but many Albanians were tired of waiting for that. In 1996 they formed an armed guerrilla force, called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA launched several attacks against the Serbian police, prompting another backlash from Belgrade in March 1998, with Yugoslav army units joining the police to fight the ethnic Albanian separatists. A new round of "ethnic cleansing" began, with hundreds of Albanians killed and more than 200,000 driven from their homes. The two sides fought until October, when Milosevic, under the threat of new air strikes from NATO, agreed to withdraw some troops from Kosovo. However, instead of honoring the agreement, Milosevic strengthened his forces, and then resumed the fighting, with a major offensive against ethnic Albanian villages in December.

Why did Milosevic fight so hard to keep a breakaway province where only one resident in ten was a Serb? The answer was that Kosovo had a holy reputation in Serbian eyes, due to the 1389 battle which began nearly five centuries of Turkish rule. Few cultures place such importance on their worst defeat, but the Serbs commemorated it in poetry and art, keeping the battle's memory fresh for every generation. Today's Serbs can no more imagine parting with Kosovo than Jews can imagine themselves abandoning Jerusalem. During World War I, John Reed, the American correspondent who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, wrote this about the Serbs: "Every peasant soldier knows what he is fighting for. When he was a baby, his mother greeted him 'Hail little avenger of Kosovo!'"

Modern historians usually present a blurred picture of the battle of Kosovo, arguing that it wasn't simply Serb vs. Turk; some Serbs probably fought with the Turks, while the Bosnians and Albanians fought on the side of the Serbs, because those two groups had not yet converted to Islam. However, a story featuring many shades of grey doesn't work well for propaganda purposes, so Slobodan Milosevic used a black and white version, which cast the Albanians as treacherous allies of the Turks.

Kosovo also provided a defining moment for NATO. Ever since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, that military alliance had looked for a reason to exist; few modern organizations willingly liquidate themselves when they are no longer needed. It found one in the former Yugoslavia. Although NATO has three non-European members (the United States, Canada and Turkey), from this point on NATO would act as the armed forces of the European Union.

The Yugoslav government and Kosovar Albanians sent representatives to France in early 1999, trying to negotiate a settlement. However, the resulting agreement called for a NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo, so Belgrade refused to sign it. On March 24, NATO forces began launching air strikes against Yugoslavia, bombing military targets, roads, bridges, oil production facilities, and anything else that might even remotely contribute to Yugoslavia's crackdown in Kosovo. Serbian-led assaults on ethnic Albanians intensified, with Serbian police, soldiers and paramilitary units razing villages and forcing residents to flee; a tidal wave of refugees crossed the border into Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. In May the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia produced an indictment of Milosevic and four other senior Yugoslav officials, for committing war crimes in Kosovo.

The NATO campaign was a complete success; it destroyed Yugoslavia's infrastructure, and did not lose any planes or men. After ten weeks of bombing, Milosevic agreed to an international peace plan for Kosovo. A diplomatic envoy from Russia negotiated for the Serbs, and Yugoslav military leaders approved the agreement on June 9. Officially Kosovo would remain part of Yugoslavia, but Yugoslav troops would have to get out. A 50,000-member international peacekeeping force supervised their withdrawal, and watched the return of Kosovar refugees, who numbered about 780,000 (1/3 of Kosovo's prewar population) by the time the peace agreement was reached.

In Croatia, Franjo Tudjman died of stomach cancer in December 1999. Like Milosevic, Tudjman was guilty of ruthless nationalism; he had used murder, war, exile, and legalized terrorism to empty Croatia and part of Bosnia of non-Croats. The difference was that Tudjman was smart enough to pull back before he got in trouble, limiting his brutality just enough to get away with it. Thus, to the West, he was a cultured brute, while Milosevic was just a brute. For several weeks, he was reportedly brain-dead, but the Croatian Democratic Union kept him alive for as long as possible, as part of a campaign strategy. Parliamentary elections were coming up in January, and by timing his death close to election day, the HDZ hoped to gain a large block of sympathy votes. Tudjman himself probably would have approved of the HDZ using his body in such a cold, calculating way, but it wasn't enough to beat the opposition. Stipe Mesic, the man who should have been president of Yugoslavia in 1991, became Croatia's president for the turn of the century.

Milosevic was the last communist leader in Europe to fall from power, and Kosovo ended the game for "the Butcher of the Balkans." He had promised to save the Serbian nation, and had lost more than half of pre-1991 Yugoslavia instead. After losing Kosovo, his own people didn't want him anymore. Even Montenegro, the only former Yugoslav republic that stayed with Serbia, talked about seceding if Milosevic remained in charge. The elections of September 2000 pitted him against an 18-party coalition, led by a soft-spoken, 56-year-old law professor named Vojislav Kostunica. After the voting, Kostunica's party declared that he had beaten Milosevic by a 55-35 margin. However, Yugoslavia's State Election Commission, stacked with Milosevic appointees, announced that Kostunica did come out ahead, but the margin was 48-40, so it ordered a runoff election, because a winning presidential candidate needed to have more than 50 per cent of the vote. Before the second election could take place, however, crowds of Kostunica supporters and Milosevic haters stormed the Parliament building and the state-controlled television station, demanding that Milosevic step down. One day later, Milosevic conceded defeat, and Kostunica began the work of rebuilding an isolated, impoverished, and now badly bomb-damaged country.

Milosevic remained free at first; the ICTY wanted him to stand trial, but Kostunica refused to hand him over to that tribunal, because he expected a foreign court to be biased against Serbs. Still, others in Belgrade, including the new prime minister, believed that Milosevic was guilty as charged and must leave, in order to end international pressure and rehabilitate Yugoslavia's reputation. In April 2001, a group of Serbian officials arrested Milosevic on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power, and announced that they would prosecute him in a Serbian court. Two months later, defying both a court order and Kostunica's wishes, those same officials acted suddenly; they placed Milosevic in a helicopter and sent him to the American camp in Bosnia, where he was then flown by jet to the Hague. Western leaders praised the transfer and pledged more than $1 billion in economic aid to Yugoslavia.

As for Kosovo, it remains in a state of political limbo. It looks like the blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers are here to stay, because, as in Bosnia, everyone knows they are the only thing preventing another ethnic bloodbath. Indeed, they seemed surprised at the viciousness of the former Albanian victims, who have taken advantage of the situation to harass the Serbs who once oppressed them. In early 2001 the KLA started making trouble in Macedonia, where the population is one-fourth Albanian, so we can't say that the sad story of the Balkans is over--at least not just yet.

Demographics, 1914-2000

The most obvious reason for the slump is two world wars, each killing tens of millions of people. In the long run, however, declining fertility is more important. The main causes for this are no longer famines and epidemics, but economics. Before the twentieth century, most cultures encouraged large families, because that meant extra hands to work the farm and more helpers to look after the parents in old age. In addition, infant mortality was commonplace, so many parents must have expected to lose some children before they grew up. All this changed with the rise of modern urban life. The crowding of apartment houses made large families less desirable, the cost of child-rearing rose geometrically, and the need for more education compelled adults to marry later in life than they used to. Thus, families grew smaller in developed countries, even while life expectancy was going up. In much of postwar Europe, not enough families have two or more children, so the population of nations like France, Germany, Austria and Italy would have declined if it wasn't for the immigration factor.

The trickle of newcomers to Europe, mostly from former European colonies like India, became one of history's great human floods after World War II: Algerians moving to France; Turks to Germany; Iranians and Iraqis to Sweden; Pakistanis, Nigerians, and Jamaicans to the United Kingdom; Indonesians to the Netherlands; Moroccans to Belgium. Most came to find work, while others (e.g., the Tibetan community in Switzerland) were part of the so-called "silent invasion" of refugees seeking political asylum, mainly from conflict-ridden developing nations. Today Europe is home to millions of non-Europeans who are classified as immigrants, guest workers, or asylum seekers. Germany, with six million foreigners listed on its books, is Europe's leading host, followed by France (nearly four million), Italy and Switzerland (each with one million).

In most nations of Western Europe, where the electronic revolution continues to shrink the labor pool, these people fill an important niche, providing unskilled labor for a low wage and boosting productivity. Yet the immigrants, many of them Moslems, often live as strangers in their adopted land and are easy scapegoats for critics who protest the cost of social services, crime, loss of jobs to immigrants, or the impact of foreign things on their culture.⁽²⁰⁾ All this is testing Europe's openness to newcomers. One unfortunate response has been the rise of hate groups, especially neo-Nazi ones. This has also led to much soul-searching in the European Union, because its work to eliminate border controls could, theoretically, allow immigrants to move unhindered from one member nation to another.

Germany has a wide-open door to immigrants because many of them are ethnic Germans. As part of Stalin's policy to reorganize eastern Europe, he deported the Germans living in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, some eight million of them. He also got rid of the three million "Baltic" and "Volga" Germans living in Russia, descendants of the Teutonic Knights who had enjoyed considerable economic and political power under the tsars. The citizens of East and West Germany were not thrilled to meet their long-lost cousins; some of them came from as far away as Kazakhstan, and native Germans complained that the only thing German about them was that they might have a German shepherd for a pet!

Population-wise, the biggest gainers in modern Europe are the two Moslem nations of the post-communist Balkans: Albania and Bosnia. This is a bit of a surprise, because Islam was suppressed while communism was in charge; in effect, the Albanians and the Bosnians have rediscovered Islam since 1990. The Albanians are already showing a 3% growth rate, and the Bosnians are even more fertile, with a whopping 4.6% rate for 1999, as if they are trying to make up for the casualties they suffered in their recent war.

The biggest demographic losers are the rest of the former communist countries. All of the Soviet Union's European republics are losing people, now that their citizens are no longer forced to spend their lives in one place. Russia lost 700,000 in 1999, for example, and Ukraine lost 400,000. Those who leave are not only fleeing the economic implosion of post-communist eastern Europe, but also ecological disasters like Chernobyl. The Soviet Union encouraged population growth by awarding medals of heroism to the mothers of ten or more children, so these declines show how far the Russians have fallen in recent years. Ex-satellite states such as Poland and Hungary aren't doing much better; their communities will also shrink until there are definite signs that life is improving.

Europe Today

In one area of the new technology Europeans are ahead of the United States: wireless telephones. Before the 1990s ended, the cell phone companies of Europe agreed on standard frequencies that all of them can use anywhere. This didn't happen in America, so Americans were faced with using phones that became useless if they switched their service to another company. As a result, more Europeans than Americans are using cell phones and related devices as the twenty-first century begins.

You may have noticed that post-1945 Europe is a lot more stable than the rest of the world has been. Though we weren't paying attention during the Cold War years, Europe has enjoyed the longest time of peace since the Pax Romana (see Chapter 4). Except for Yugoslavia, all recent changes on the European map have occurred peacefully: the reunification of Germany in 1990, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Communism kept a lid on ethnic disputes in the east for 45 years, but in western Europe the stability is even more profound; except for a slight adjustment of the border between Germany and the Low Countries (1960), there have been no changes since 1919. Moreover, the will to build empires has been burned out of nearly everybody. Politicians who talk about expansion/domination are dismissed as extremists, and nobody seriously expects a future war between former enemies such as France, Germany and Britain. One could say that just as the Thirty Years War put an end to killing in the name of religion, so the two world wars of the twentieth century ended the urge to kill for politics.

Nationalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that Europe would see permanent peace when each ethnic group had a single country to live in. Today's European map is very close to achieving that goal. In countries with more than one ethnic group, like Switzerland and Belgium, a common heritage of joining together against foreigners is often enough to keep them united. The Balkans, Northern Ireland and the Basque-inhabited part of Spain seem to be the only areas where people dislike the current political situation enough to want to fight about it.

Whatever happens next, it appears that a major age in world history has ended during our lifetime, and we are in the first years of a new one. The past era began with Europe exploring, colonizing and conquering the rest of the world. Now Europe's former colonies are free, and Europe itself is wondering if it can play a role in today's world, either united or divided, without coming under domination from some outside power, especially the United States. We have called the period from 1450 to 2000 the modern era (I called it that in previous chapters of this work), but someday our descendants may apply the same name to their own time, so perhaps another name, like the Western era, is more appropriate.

One of the most famous sentences in literature is the opening line from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The same can be said about the twentieth century. In rising standards of living it has been the best of times; today's appliances, transportation, medicine, and education give the ordinary person a more productive, more comfortable lifestyle than even the god-kings of ancient times enjoyed. However, modern technology has also made it possible to commit atrocities and oppression on a worldwide scale; when it came to killing people, the twentieth-century champions of fascism and communism made past tyrants--even Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun--look like beginners. For that reason, I have considered calling the past hundred years "the Extreme Century." And the trends which made the twentieth century that way are still with us. Because communications, transportation, and our pace of life run faster than ever, and our population is still growing, I wouldn't be surprised if the next century is even more "extreme."

In 1992, a writer named Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. In it he predicted that because the Cold War is over, history as we know it has ended, and nothing interesting will happen after this, since civilized people no longer use war to resolve their differences. He made that claim too hastily; Yugoslavia went to pieces shortly after that, giving us some history of the old-fashioned kind and bringing the term Balkanization back into our political vocabulary. Consequently, this series of history papers may be finished, now that we have arrived at the present, but the author believes that we are going to see much more history, for better or for worse, before the story of humanity is over. To those who view life as a bad roller coaster ride, and say "Stop this world and let me off now!" my answer is that you should stay. The most exciting part of the ride is probably ahead.

1. Soviet Bloc members beyond Europe eventually included Mongolia, China (until 1960), Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.

2. Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 497.

3. David Rees, The Age of Containment (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), p. 23.

4. The Germans have a reputation for building excellent automobiles, like the Volkswagen, Audi and Mercedes, but that didn't apply to East Germany. The official East German car, the Trabant, became a symbol of communist inefficiency and bad ideas; many consider it the worst car ever made, even worse than the Yugo. For a start, it had a two-cylinder, 25 HP engine; the Germans tried to build a stronger one, but Moscow, in the name of socialist brotherhood, insisted on having a monopoly on strong motors. When Time Magazine did a story on the Trabant, it compared its performance with a riding lawnmower, since that was the only western vehicle with the same kind of horsepower. East Germans claimed a Trabant would get stuck if it ran over a piece of gum, and told jokes like: "How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill it up!" The little cars did play a heroic role in 1989, each carrying as many as seven passengers across the border when the barriers between East and West came down. After unification, demand for the Trabant disappeared, now that West German cars were available in the East. The last Trabants were built in 1991.

5. After independence, Portugal took part in the negotiations to end the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, and was also a leader in the movement to end Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. In 1999 Portugal returned Macao to China.
In July 1996 Portugal and six former colonies--Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé & Príncipe--created the Commonwealth of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP). The CPLP seeks to preserve the Portuguese language, coordinate diplomatic efforts, and improve cooperation among its members.

6. The modern term for the Low Countries, taken from the first syllable in each country's name: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

7. Even the colors on the Irish flag represent political and religious division: green for the Catholics, orange for the Protestants, and white to keep them apart!

8. The Scots remember the days when their kingdom was not united with England. In early 1997 London placated the nationalists by allowing Scotland a plebiscite on the issue of creating a Scottish parliament. The Scots voted "Yes," and later in the same year Wales voted somewhat reluctantly to do the same. Apparently the Welsh have been under English rule for so long that they have to remind themselves that they, and not the English, are the true descendants of King Arthur (see Chapters 5 and 6).

9. They sold it in pieces to souvenir-hunters, and entrepreneurial East Germans did the same with the Berlin Wall when it was torn down.

10. Europeans joke that Heaven is the kind of place where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is run by the Swiss. On the other hand, Hell is the kind of place where the police are German, the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is run by the Italians!

11. Norway considered joining the Common Market, but Norwegian voters voted against the proposal every time it came up. In 2001 the Swiss also voted no; they're not ready to give up their famous neutrality just yet.

12. Some people still remember the silly headline on a London newspaper that read "Fog in Channel--Continent Isolated."

13. One EU regulation literally "cut the cheese," by banning the manufacture and marketing of feta cheese by any country besides Greece (Denmark, France and Germany had been exporting more of this traditional Greek product than the Greeks themselves).

14. During 1989 alone, more than 300,000 Bulgarian Turks crossed the border into Turkey to escape persecution.

15. Milosevic's father was an Orthodox priest, while his mother was a communist activist; both of them later committed suicide. Some observers have suggested that Milosevic was mentally unbalanced because of them.

16. In the 1980s, Catholic pilgrims reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary weeping in Medugorje, a Bosnian village. This may have been a warning of what was to come.

17. Bosnian Serb propaganda often talked in Crusader terms, calling the Moslems "Turks" and declaring that the Serbs were Europe's defense against Islam (see footnote #20). On the other side, Moslem veterans from as far away as Afghanistan came to the Balkans, to fight for the independence of Bosnia, and later Kosovo.
The author remembers an off-beat news story in 1994, where two Serbian entrepreneurs introduced a new cologne in a bottle shaped like a hand grenade, which they named "Serb." When a reporter asked them if they were giving their people a bad name, they replied that nothing could give the Serbs a worse name than they had already!

18. Because the new boundary ran close to Pale on three sides, Republika Srpska moved its capital to Banja Luka in the northwest. Pale remained a power base for Karadzic's supporters, though.

19. Although the Yugoslav war is a European problem, the United States has played a major role. US planes led the air strikes that ended the war in Bosnia, and American soldiers formed part of the peacekeeping coalition. President Clinton promised that the Americans would be home in 18 months, but because fighting is likely to resume once the peacekeepers leave, they are still stationed in Tuzla as the twenty-first century begins.

20. When all is said and done, the immigrants may have the last laugh on the culture matter. Mosques have been built in the heart of Christendom to accommodate the religious needs of Moslems, while at the same time church attendance has declined to single-digit figures, leading some theologians to declare Europe a post-Christian society. In southern France the schools are now half-Moslem in the makeup of their student bodies, because an Algerian family with twelve kids is not all that unusual. It never fails to amuse the author that where the best armies of Islam (Moors at the Battle of Tours, Turks at the gates of Vienna) failed to convert western and central Europe, unarmed poor to middle-class immigrants may be succeeding.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball