JEFFREY HERF
233
In view of the increased size of the Soviet military threat and
the limits of what the United States will be able to do in Europe , the
preservation of West European sovereignty in the 1980s will depend
above all on Europe's political and moral climate.
If
liberal and
left-wing opinion in Great Britain and West Germany does not come
to understand this reality, the charge of self-Finlandization will
prove correct. But this understanding does not arrive easily or
quickly, and it cannot be imported or imposed. Neither is it
something that American foreign-policy experts can export . Like the
reorientation of French thinking about the Soviet Union in the last
decade, it will have to be the result of debate and discussion within
Europe . Americans have been learning that more and more of the
outside world is beyond their control. Now Western Europe is
learning that much of its fate is in its own hands.
Political analysts and journalists have discussed the issue of
neutralism in Western Europe. Since
Fran~ois
Mitterand's
remarkable speech to the West German parliament in January
warning of the dangers of the military imbalance and pleading for
Western unity in the face of the Soviets , neutralism in general and
the question of German identity in particular will move to the center
of debate . The spectacle of France's Socialist president supporting
the NATO double decision in the face of dour and silent German
SPD parliamentarians and jubilant Christian Democrats and Free
Democrats makes clear, if more evidence were needed, that the
debate over nuclear weapons in Europe raises questions that
transcend the categories of Left and Right. Since Soviet missiles are
already pointed at West European cities, why have the disarmament
movements not demonstrated at Russian embassies? Why, outside
France , must it be the conservative political parties who raise
skeptical objections to Andropov's latest shot in the propaganda
war? Why have there been very large and enthusiastic demonstra–
tions in West Germany against American policy in Central America
(which is awful), against the construction of an airport runway in
Frankfurt, and of course against the NATO decision, but only a
puny and conservative demonstration in Munich denouncing the
suppression of Solidarity in Poland? The answer is not that there is
growing enthusiasm for the Soviet Union in Europe, but that the
clear distinction between free and totalitarian societies has become
an embarrassment for the generations that have come of age
politically since the 1960s. After the Great Refusal of the 1960s, the
1980s are witnessing the Great Equation, that is, the view that the
