The uses and abuses of history

Christopher Clark, the distinguished author of a
bestselling account of the outbreak of the First World War, has come up with an
ingenious explanation of why the Russians are currently behaving so badly: they
are suffering from ‘false memory
syndrome.’ In a piece which Mr Clark wrote with Kristina Spohr in the Guardian on 25 May, he
picks on the way Mr Putin has justified his annexation of Crimea when the Russian President claims that the West ‘has lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs… This
has happened with NATO’s expansion to the east.’

But, says Mr
Clark, the Russians never asked for any guarantees that NATO would not enlarge,
and none were given. Putin’s wayward handling of history matters, he contends,
because it calls into question the European settlement, which emerged after the
dramatic reunification of Germany in the autumn of 1990. 

Putin is indeed rewriting history to
encourage and exploit Russians’ sense of
humiliation and so fuel his current adventurous and aggressive policies. But Mr
Clark’s own account omits important facts, evades difficult issues of
interpretation, and leaves unanalysed the practical and political pressures
that surrounded the German negotiations and the events that followed. 

Mr Clark is quite right that the Western side gave no
written guarantees about NATO enlargement during the reunification
negotiations. No responsible Russians have claimed otherwise. But he fails to
ask why it was that no one raised the issue. 

The great prize for the West was the reunification of Germany and its inclusion in NATO.

The great prize for the West was the reunification of
Germany and its inclusion in NATO. But when the negotiations began in early
1990, it was not at all clear that Gorbachev would or could agree to either.
His negotiating position was weak. Even if he realised that he would in the end
have to concede, he also feared that domestic opposition to a deal might become
overwhelming. The Western negotiators were acutely aware of that, and were
anxious to nail the deal down before things fell apart in Moscow.

For either side explicitly to have raised NATO
enlargement in that context could have derailed the negotiations entirely. So
both sides had a motive for keeping their mouths shut: the West because they
might have lost the prize, Gorbachev because he might have made his domestic
position impossible. The fears were justified. Anger over Germany was one
reason for the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. And it remains one reason
why many Russians now regard him as a traitor.  

The underlying emotions bubbled to the surface on the
morning of the signature of the reunification treaty in Moscow in September
1990. The British were still arguing about the language governing the
deployment of NATO troops to East Germany. The Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze threatened to boycott the signature ceremony, and Genscher, his
German opposite number, had a fit. It was indeed a very fraught moment, but it
was successfully papered over. 

But the story does not stop there. Vaclav Havel, the
Czech President, then called for Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary to enter
NATO. In the spring of 1991, the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary
privately assured Soviet ministers that there was no such intention. Manfred
Woerner, NATO’s secretary general, added publicly that enlargement would damage
relations with the Soviet Union.

One can argue that Woerner was not expressing a
settled NATO policy, or that what British ministers told the Russians in
private didn’t matter, or that oral assurances have no force, or that what was
said in 1991 was overtaken by events and became irrelevant. But it is not
surprising that Russians took seriously these statements by apparently
responsible Western officials, or that they now believe they were misled. Mr
Clark does not tackle these matters. 

It is not surprising that Russians now believe they were misled.

In early 1991 the West had not yet thought seriously
about enlarging NATO. Western spokesmen were not being deliberately misleading,
though there is little doubt that they would not have wanted to tie their
hands, and that they would have rebuffed any Russian request for something in
writing. But then their intentions changed.

The East Europeans wanted
guarantees against a Russia that, they believed, would one day resume its
menacing behaviour. NATO gave those guarantees in a fit of wishful thinking,
apparently in the belief that Russian objections could be ignored because Russia
would be flat on its back for the foreseeable future. Western politicians
nevertheless tried to soothe Russian feelings with a one-sided ‘partnership’
with NATO, and assurances that enlargement would bring stability to Europe and
thus benefit Russia too. The Russians failed to believe it. NATO is now left
scurrying around to make its guarantees to the East Europeans look credible
against a Russia that is indeed resurgent. 

All these things are an essential and documented part
of the story. They need to be brought into the historical narrative. It is a
mystery why good historians ignore them.

Mr Clark argues more grandly that
Putin’s behaviour is all of a piece with what he sees as the Russians’ unique ‘tendency to misremember past debacles as
humiliations’, going back at least as far as their misjudged
attempts to recover from the defeat they suffered at the hands of the Japanese
in 1905. But there is nothing
particularly unusual in this Russian behaviour. Historical memory and myth
significantly affect the behaviour of other countries too: think only of France
after the humiliation of 1871 or Germany after 1918. 

Whether we choose to recognise it or not, many,
perhaps a majority, of Russians nevertheless did feel humiliated by the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the loss of international prestige, the political
and economic chaos of the 1990s, and the brush with famine. Putin has plenty of
promising raw material to work with. To ignore or downplay these things also
distorts the historical record. And it makes it harder to understand what is
going on in Russia today, and to devise appropriate policies to deal with it.