Forget the peace dividend. If we want to follow our ideals and protect human rights, we must spend far, far more on defence and aid
At a conference in Berlin last weekend, I saw close up the wretchedness of the Russian political class, faced with the west's intrusion into the Slavic world through Kosovo, and heard the new voice found by the German government. For the first time this is composed of politicians of the postwar era, no longer constrained to be pacifist, free to carry their consciences on the wings of the Luftwaffe.
The conference, organised by the East-West Institute to help the German government think through its policies towards eastern Europe in the next century, took place under the sponsorship of Daimler Chrysler in its soaring new building on the Potsdamer Platz. The few Russian liberals who answered the invitation - after Kosovo had prompted an official withdrawal from Nato engagements - were dwarfed by the sheer puissance of the capitalism that played host in the city whose eastern part their country had so recently dominated. They attended the conference uncomfortably, spikily, thawing and freezing by turns, caught between their own former pro-western attitudes and the outrage they had left back home, and also carried with them.
They said they had been tricked. Russia's weakness, the shame of being represented in the world by a president who lurches on to the stage at long intervals to fire a prime minister, or warn of a third world war, the poverty of their official life (especially when contrasted with the enveloping luxury of the conference hospitality), the descent from Soviet pride to failed capitalism - all this has taken a psychological toll on those who sought to embed democracy, civil society and the market in Russia, and left them with a public stance of shrill displeasure, a litany of victimhood.
They had been tricked with a promise of a rule-driven universe. Vladimir Averchev, whom I had known for almost a decade as one who claimed western values as universal and his own, was insistent that the west had played his country false. The west had said that communism's suppression of nations and peoples would be replaced by an order composed of states and institutions committed to laws and to transparent procedures. Yet now he learnt that this was baloney. America ruled. Yevgeny Kozhokin, who heads the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, said that he believed not one word of the propaganda that this was a war waged for humanitarian reasons. This war reflected a US president anxious to show himself in command after a period of weakness, a US determined to demonstrate to an uppity Europe that it was still boss, a military- industrial complex bursting to try out its new kit. And Professor Yevgeny Yasin, grand old man of radical economic reform in Russia, looked weary and miserable. He said the liberal bloc would do even worse than expected at the Duma elections this year.
Yet they found no sympathy. The keynote address to the conference was given by Wolfgang Ischinger, state secretary at the German foreign ministry. Ischinger, like most German diplomats, worries about the consequences of implosion to his east. But Kosovo is not, for him, an issue on which to compromise.
Russia, he said, had walked away from its responsibility when Nato tried to ensure that Slobodan Milosevic would stay out of Kosovo. "When vital western interests, when common interests were at stake last summer and autumn in trying to come to terms with the situation in Kosovo, Russia gave us the cold shoulder. One could call that Russian unilateralism."
He passionately rejected the Russians' claim that Europe was the lapdog of the US: "It is a cheap shot and it is not right." Equally passionately, he quoted from a speech by George Robertson, the UK Defence Secretary: Europe could not allow genocide at its centre, "our consciences as Europeans, our consciences as Germans, do not permit it".
In these exchanges, it became clear that a new mindset has gripped the German ruling class. When Ischinger talked of "German conscience" (which was not in the printed version of his speech), he revealed the strength that sustained the Social Democratic government in its first real passage of arms. Germany has been freed from half a century of pacific expiation. The Luftwaffe flies over Serbia in militant opposition to a fascist dictator. Germany, under Gerhard Schroder, has come to postwar maturity through finding a just war.
It has also become clear that it is, indeed, "not right" that the Europeans are a tail being wagged by an American hound. Incredibly, and this was confirmed in later talks with British officials, Germany is if anything more gung-ho than the US. The three European countries with the largest militaries - Britain, France and Germany - wanted to pursue the war before the US did. This is not just a humanitarian war; it is a European war. The Russians who came to Berlin to look for the familiar wedge between Europeans and Americans found the Europeans more adamantine, more impatient with their complaints, than the Americans are.
The Russians cannot understand it. They have not had the luxury of developing a humanitarian militancy. For them, war is what you wage if you have a strategic reason and preferably if you are powerful and your opponent is weak - or if you have no choice. During the Berlin conference, one participant mentioned in passing that, had Russia's war against its province of Chechnya occurred after the affair in Kosovo, then the attitude of the Nato allies would have been very different. The Russians were down his throat in a minute. Here was confirmation of their worst fears. Nato had declared the end of the sovereign state: from now on, all borders were open when Nato forces declared them so.
The Russians are just one example, albeit a hugely important one, of the many consequences that will flow from the war in Kosovo. The western imperative to do something against a murderous regime took a long time to issue forth in action; for most of that time western states were goaded by their own media for the limpness of their response. Now they have committed themselves, not only to a battle that must escalate if it is to be won, but to a new world - because they are destroying the basis for so much of the old.
First, there is the matter of international law. This action is not sanctioned by the UN Security Council; Russia and China, both permanent members, are opposed. It has thus devolved upon Nato, which has no specific casus belli with Yugoslavia, save its moral outrage. The only international legal basis that lawyers can find - and it is one that will be used when the arguments are deployed on right and wrong - is the UN consensus that the Kurdish areas of Iraq be declared safe (and protected) havens after the 1991 Gulf war. Kosovo, it is argued, would be a similar case; a safe haven being protected by Nato forces.
This is the largest Russian complaint: one that will have resonance everywhere among states that have internal problems and are dealing with them oppressively. Russia thinks of its ham-fisted failure to smash the Chechen revolt; India thinks of its actions against independence fighters in Kashmir, where Robin Cook caused outrage during his trip to India when he proposed international mediation. China has Tibet, where Chinese rulers see a province being raised to civilisation, but where human rights organisations see the brutal suppression of a people, a religion and a culture. Indonesia has East Timor, where it continues to put down insurgency with indiscriminate force. All of these are large countries, all of them, especially China, the objects of anxious western wooing and the apples of exporters' eyes. How far will the new humanitarian dispensation apply to them?
Second, if this is a Europeans' war it is still being fought very largely with US resources. Not all the armed forces of Europe put together have anything like the reach and capability of the American military. All have been cutting back on their defence expenditure, as their treasuries gratefully culled the peace dividend. Italy spends just 1.5 per cent of its GNP on its military, which includes the carabinieri.
The clear logic of the crisis in Kosovo - and the clear logic of the direction of European thought towards a separate European defence capability - is towards a reversal of this military budget-slashing, and a renewed growth in arms-spending. Indeed, Tony Blair and President Chirac implicitly acted on this, before the Kosovan war, when they signed the defence pact between their two countries at St Malo last year, thus creating the base for a future European army.
Finally, the exit strategy is bound, increasingly, to be a staying-put strategy. Troops will be needed to secure Kosovo if Nato is to fulfil its leaders' professed aim of returning all the ethnic Albanians to their homes. Macedonia may also need a long-term commitment of Nato troops to ensure future stability; so may Albania, the most fragile of states. These three protectorates-in-the-making will drain budgets for years to come.
The Germans are keen on something else, now being discussed around Europe. It is for a kind of Marshall Plan for the Balkans; the commitment of large expenditure to repair and modernise infrastructure in the worst-affected states, and the proposal of accession to the European Union in time (quite a long time). Only in this way, runs the argument, can democratic leaderships flourish in the region; the alternative is to condemn these states to hopelessness and war.
It is another high ideal: the Balkan air is full of them, even as its ground is soaked with blood. This is a war of high ideals, untouched by personal memories of war. It is none the worse for that; we should always remember that the alternative to action was acquiescence in genocide.
But if the new world is to have such people as the Kosovars in it, secure in their own lands, it must be brave, capable of large thoughts and actions to give substance to the ideals. It can, now, only be constructed by the commitment of armies and by the spending of our money on people other than ourselves.
Are our baby-boomer, tax-cutting politicians ready for that? Are we?
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