Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume X, Eastern Europe

62. Telegram From the Department of State to the Embassies in Hungary, Romania, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Poland¹

355003.

Washington, October 31, 1988, 2051Z

SUBJECT

• Eastern European Overview: DAS Simons Presentation to Berlin COM Conference.

1. Secret—Entire text.

2. Summary: On October 19, at the conclusion of the EEY Chiefs of Mission conference in Berlin, EUR DAS Simons gave an overview of Eastern Europe and the U.S. policy approach toward the region. It built on his presentation to the 1987 COM conference in Oslo² and took into account post contributions to the invitation to the dance exercise.³ The text follows in slightly modified form. Post comments would be very welcome. The dance should go on. End summary.

3. Begin text:

The Deputy Secretary has given you the real overview of where we and the East Europeans have come since he took up his mandate over two years ago, and of the prospects for the period ahead.

I will confine myself to the more limited task of defining the main trends emerging in the area and affecting our policy since we met in Oslo, and the invitation to the dance was issued.

I wish to pose the question of whether those trends confirm or not that our policy approach is a sensible one, that it is promising as an approach that permits us to deal with change in a way that advances U.S. interests, that it is worth continuing.

The devil is of course in the details—the actual stuff of developments in and relations with each of these diverse countries—but it is still worth looking at how it fits together over a significant period, and the ten months since Oslo is not insignificant.

The External Environment

I believe the impulse to change in EE is in the first instance and most importantly internal, and should be treated as such for policy reasons, but clearly the external environment is an essential bounding and shaping variable.

Let me touch on four elements.

The main macro-element—the information revolution—has not stopped. It will not stop. Every EE regime is faced with the threat of economic and then political marginalization unless the economy is reshaped to perform in a world where things are less and less important and knowledge more and more, in sheer economic terms.

The challenge has not become radically more urgent in economic terms these last ten months—the West has not drawn away from Eastern Europe much faster than it was already—but it has been underlined in political terms by the EC’s commitment to the single market by 1992. The challenge to us pales in comparison to the challenge to Eastern Europe: the writing on the wall is clearer than ever.

The second element is the Soviet Union. To some extent the pace of change in Eastern Europe is determined not only by the pace but also by the prospect of change in Gorbachev’s USSR. Especially in the more conservative countries—Romania is now almost sui generis, but in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR—there has been a lot of watchful waiting, and probably some fond hoping that the Soviet reform impulse would lose momentum.

Gorbachev has in fact had a mixed year, but on balance the reform impulse has been sustained, and ratified once again by the changes of two weeks ago. Reformers in Eastern Europe have at least a new lease on life, perhaps—we shall see—even a second wind.

The third element is the international environment—the shape of East-West relations overall. Here there has been major and also sustained progress. This makes it harder than ever for EE conservatives to argue the capitalist or imperialist threat, the need for discipline and vigilance, etc. The fact that this progress is associated in Europe with Gorbachev may mean problems in West-West relations, but specifically with regard to Eastern Europe, so long as Gorbachev remains in charge improvements in East-West relations for which he is held responsible bring only benefits: they are a second whammy for Eastern European conservatives.

The fourth element is U.S. politics, which relates both to the overall East-West environment and to each country’s relations with us. Even if reform continues in the Soviet Union, East European conservatives could argue for caution and delay because of the U.S. election if the U.S. approach to either the Soviet Union or to Eastern Europe proved controversial in the campaign. This has not happened: we have given them no excuse for a wait-and-see attitude any more than the Soviets have.

Thus, the trends in every significant aspect of Eastern Europe’s external environment have provided at least no argument against continued reform, and some additional arguments for it.

The Return of Politics

In this benign environment, the most striking feature of the past ten months—to me at least—has been what I would call the rise of politics to the surface of political life in country after country.

In country after country, the political landscape has been reconfigured almost out of recognition.

Perhaps I am overimpressed by personal experience, since I have spent the last three weeks in succession in Soviet Georgia, in Moscow and in Yugoslavia, at the extremes of the system, so to speak, and watched local versions of the self-same phenomenon taking place.

In Georgia, I watched what could have been a people-to-people Mazola party—the 4th U.S.-Soviet Chautauqua conference⁴—suddenly go beyond that, and serve as the vehicle for the public expression of political demands—in this case Georgian national demands in environmental and human rights form. And the central authorities took notice, partly because we were there, and took action.

In Moscow, I was there for the special party plenum at which the personnel track of reform was suddenly activated to help move the political track forward and get the economic track moving again eventually.

And in Yugoslavia—which I know is different—after years of stalemate in the political system when it focused on economic reform, I witnessed a sudden upheaval of politics—towns, including Belgrade, full of demonstrators, two local governments ejected, and a heady mixture of elation, dire foreboding and real uncertainty about how far politics will go.

It can be argued that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are not Eastern Europe, that everything is special there, that order reigns in Prague and Sofia and East Berlin, not to speak of Bucharest—so that Poland and Hungary are sui generis.

That was in fact the rebuttal to my Oslo presentation from many quarters, including most eloquently from London, and of course it is a point well taken. Of course every country is special: we treat them that way because it is true, as well as to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I am struck nevertheless by what I see as mounting evidence—over these past ten months—not only that these regimes are struggling with the same structural problem—the exhaustion of the Stalinist system in terms of the goals they themselves have set—but that one after another they are being forced toward one or another admittedly highly individual version of the same solution: political change in order to make economic reform work.

All give lip service to the proposition that there must be—or in the Romanian and also Bulgarian cases has already been—both political and economic reform—because that is the Soviet line.

All would prefer to some degree—usually vast, but it runs the spectrum—to restrict reform to the economic sphere.

But all are recognizing, to various degrees, that this is simply not possible, in practical terms.

Poland and Hungary are trying to work the problem. Whatever else the roundtable discussions in Warsaw scheduled to begin next week mean, they signify the exhaustion of small-step political reform—the consultative council, the ombudsman—as a practical approach to capturing the broad support that economic reform requires, and acceptance of the risk of direct talks with Solidarity. And in Hungary we see continued wrestling with how to permit broad diversity of opinion under a one-party system—with strong family resemblances to the wrestling underway in Slovenia next door—and initial wrestling—not very successful, and at some cost—with the Transylvanian issue, a political issue par excellence.

Others are of course trying to evade the problem. It seems to me that the East Germans, the Bulgarians and the Czechoslovaks have—very tentatively—embarked on traditional piecemeal liberalization steps, mainly in the cultural sphere, but extending into politics, like allowing the 20th anniversary demonstration in Prague. The purpose of these steps is to defuse political demands in order to deny that they are taking place, to maintain the facade of business-as-usual and keep the focus of politics on the economy.

And Zhivkov, of course, with his peculiar problem of how to jump over his own shadow, has carefully decapitated the potential spokesmen for politics in the most traditional political way, by purging.

Similarly, but more drastically, Ceausescu has resorted to proven methods—reshuffling at the top, elimination of the Brasov strike leaders down below—to preempt any move in any direction.

It is of course impossible to predict what will happen in any country. Working with the problem may fail in Poland and Hungary; piecemeal steps to permit denial of the problem, or reinforcement of old structures to prevent it from arising, may succeed.

But the most significant trend, for me, remains the general resurgence of politics, after decades, rather than the variety of the responses to it.

Implications for U.S. Policy

I had no hand in the paper we submitted in NATO for the Political Committee’s discussion on Eastern Europe (State 315253),⁵ but it seems to me a very clear and concise statement of our policy approach, and I was happy to note that it picked up some of the elements of my Oslo presentation.

One of these was the concept that what we want from East Europeans is mainly political reform and improved human rights performance, as steps to alleviate the consequences of the division of Europe and steps that lead in the direction of its eventual elimination, whereas what the East European regimes want from us is mainly more economic relations and political recognition.

The corollary of this concept is that there exists in relations with each country the potential for a basic tradeoff of these elements, and the practical corollary of that is that our task should be to define that tradeoff for relations with each country in the most effective possible way taking into account local circumstances, sensitivities, capabilities, all the diversities of a diverse area.

A number of criticisms ran as themes through the responses to the invitation to the dance, and they were interrelated.

The first was that the tradeoff concept might have some practical promise in our relations with Poland and Hungary, but not elsewhere: the other countries were different, but had the common characteristic that the prospects for political reform were too bleak to make the tradeoff concept realistic.

The second was that I had exaggerated U.S. leverage, so that the approach ran the risk of fostering illusions, and thereby—or even directly—provoking turbulence, backlash and therefore suffering and retrogression, rather than progress in terms of U.S. national interests.

The corollary of these criticisms was that we should do what little we could, but expect little, and basically beaver away at our traditional programs—cultural, scientific, technological, people-to-people contacts and cooperation, political dialogue, trade facilitation—and see how far we get.

I recognize the force of the criticisms, and the popularity of the corollary, the more so since they are of course very widespread among our West European allies, and to a very large extent among East European governments, too.

I think it is natural for West Europeans to paint the U.S. as a bull in a China shop bent on provoking turbulence in Eastern Europe, in contrast to sager and more experienced statesmen like themselves, and I expect them to cite RFE’s 1956 broadcasts to Hungary again and again and again.

And I think it is natural for East European governments to tell us they do not respond to pressure and that our goal should be normal relations, particularly in the economic field. It is natural for them to extend their natural desire to define politics purely as economics to relations with us.

But it seems to me one thing to understand these arguments, and another to accept them as a basis for U.S. policy.

I think that to sustain a coherent and flexible U.S. policy, it must be based on a broader concept and a higher goal than getting people together and helping people. In other words, we cannot sustain political support for the kinds of things we have traditionally tried to do in Eastern Europe unless we see and describe such steps as part of a larger effort to encourage change in these countries which points toward alleviation and elimination of the division of Europe. Otherwise they will be seen as unreciprocated concessions to illegitimate and tyrannical regimes which drain away vital American body fluids.

But that is a Washington-type point, so let me turn to my main problems with these criticisms, which is that they misread some of the points I was trying to make.

The first has to do with the definition of activism.

Our policy approach is active not mainly because it is designed to provoke change in Eastern Europe, but mainly because it seeks actively to define concrete programs offering the East Europeans the basic tradeoff in a format most likely to be feasible for them.

The essential approach remains that we are willing to develop better and more constructive relations with each country at whatever pace that country feels it can stand, based on clearly defined American interests on our side. We owe it to them to tell them where we stand, and to equip ourselves to deliver if they are willing to engage. But the choice is theirs: we are neither running after them, nor pressuring them. It is up to them.

My second quibble has to do with the extent of our leverage.

To be sure it is leverage at the margin; we have little, and must husband and exert it prudently. But it seems to me even more imprudent for American interests—and the coherence and sustainability of American policy—to underestimate rather than to overestimate it.

A year ago and again this year, when the Vice President and then the Deputy Secretary told Jaruzelski that we did not believe economic reform would work without political consensus, and that while it was up to them to figure out how to achieve it, if they asked us we would suggest talking officially to Solidarity, it probably looked to some as if the Reagan administration was just talking for the record.

At the low end of the scale, it may have looked the same way—a mini-version of the zero option—when the Deputy Secretary held off a decision to introduce closed zones for Bulgarian diplomats in the U.S. while the Bulgarians considered reducing theirs.

Next week the Polish regime is scheduled to sit down with Walesa to discuss relegalization of Solidarity, and the Bulgarians have reduced their closed zones by about 3/4.

It may seem chimerical to tell Ceausescu that he has hatcheted economic relations without reducing our human rights concerns, and that MFN will not be restored without major movements on human rights, which he considers political.

But strange things are happening. The record of the past ten months—the return to politics, in positive or negative terms, throughout the area—increases rather than decreases my confidence that we are on the right track.

The basic tradeoff we are offering seems to me, on the evidence, more realistic than ever, rather than merely comfortable as an expression of American idealism and American politics.

To be sure, we must continue to be prudent, cautious, patient; we must continue to tailor our challenge programs to the specifics of diversity.

Most of all, we must be careful not to promise more than we can deliver, and this will be a challenge to any successor administration. By the trend, we should be approaching a time when we can realistically ask for more—as politics in the area becomes politicized or de-economized, it moves onto our turf, into the realm of values, political reform and human rights where we are strongest and most interested. But in return we will also be asked for more in the economic realm, in a time of prolonged budgetary stringency. We will be challenged to put our money where our policy is. And to the extent we do not measure up, we will erode the credibility of a policy approach which promotes substantial U.S. interests recognized and supported for over four decades on a bipartisan basis.

I think we should welcome that challenge rather than shy away from it. I have modest confidence in the Americans as well as the East Europeans. I think it is realistic to believe the U.S. can muster the resources required to encourage movement toward goals we have pursued over four decades, when those would become, after four decades, realistic to an unprecedented degree. At the very least it is well worth working for.

Shultz

1. Source: Department of State, Records from Ambassador Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Lot 03 D 256, Chron October 1988. Secret; Exdis. Sent for information to all NATO capitals, Helsinki, Stockholm, Dublin, Bern, Vienna, Valletta, and Nicosia as well as the U.S. missions/delegations to the EC, OECD, CSCE, MBFR, and the Vatican. Drafted by George Krol (EUR/EEY); cleared by Timothy Deal (EUR/EEY) and Eunice Reddick (S/S–O); approved by Simons.
2. See Document 51.
3. See Document 52.
4. See Felicity Barringer, “No-Show Steals Shoe at a U.S.-Soviet Parley,” New York Times, September 20, 1988, p. A6.
5. Telegram 315253 to USNATO, September 27, transmitted a paper on Western aims and approaches toward Eastern Europe. (Department of State, Central Foreign Policy File, D880861–0858).