JEFFREY HERF
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find yourself living with capitalism, your own precapitalist or noncapitalist
traditions will be very important in addressing the political dilemmas that
even the best functioning capitalism cannot resolve.
Peace and Freedom in Europe
I would now like
to
turn to questions of international politics, in
particular to the impact of the
asylll1netlY
of democracy and dictatorship, and
the impact of this asymmetry on relations between states. There is an argu–
ment, which I assume you have heard , according to which the postwar order
has been the best of all possible worlds. The postwar order, in this view,
"solved" the German question . Betore 1945 , Germany was too strong, es–
pecially in regard to the many weak governments to her East. If the United
States had left Europe after 1945, or if a neutral, reunified Germany had
emerged, there would have been a power vacuum in Central Europe which
would have been filled by the Soviet Union. The division of Germany into
two Germanies prevented the emergence of a Germany that was too strong
or too weak.
While the division of Germany upset the Germans, it calmed the
nerves of the neighbors that German armies had invaded in 1941 and
1939. Unfortunately, this elegant solution to the German question was pur–
chased at the price of freedom in Eastern Europe. Like the Congress of Vi–
enna in 1815, the postwar order has preserved peace at the price of the
nonsatisfaction of the desires of the small powers of Eastern Europe. But
peace is more than Europe could claim in the first half of the century. A free
Eastern Europe, it was said, would reopen the German question and bring us
back once again to cycles of instability and war. Who knew what the ethnic
and national conflicts of Eastern Europe would produce? Just as the United
States "pacified" Western Europe to such an extent that the French and
West Germans became friends, so the Soviet Union united Eastern Europe
in antagonism to itself. What, such analysts ask, would happen if the big bul–
lies left town? Would the local citizens open up old quarrels that could draw
the great powers into a fight? So, while Western politicians express delight
about freedom in Eastern Europe, some also quietly wonder how it can grow
without destabilizing the postwar peace.
Such perspectives are in line with the balance of power tradition: peace
requires satisfaction of the great powers, if necessary at the expense of the
small powers. In times of great political change, geopolitics reminds us that
states are "cold monsters" of international politics, but it does so too often
without appreciating the importance of the nature of regimes in question. As
Raymond Aron put it in his very important work,
Peace and War: A Theory
of International Relations,
the essential point about Athens and Sparta was
