The Next 25 Years (Well, Make It Ten)
This title is taken from an article published in January 1976 by William Rees-Mogg, then Editor in Chief of The Times, the famous London daily, under the same title: “The Next 25 Years.” I saved it in my files in order to check in 2001 how accurate the journalist’s predictions would prove to be. As we know, prediction is a job at which we historians are notoriously deficient: The only future they can imagine, someone once said, is the past. An anniversary of the founding of The Day seems like a perfect occasion to appeal to its readers and writers to try their hand in the art of predicting.
The Day is a perfect forum for such exercises since on its pages issues of more than one day’s — or even one year’s — topicality are addressed, and where, in addition to politics and economics, one finds serious treatment of the arts, culture in general, religion, and history.
So let us go a quarter of a century back, and see what the future was like then. Among other things, Mr. Rees-Mogg predicted that “The European Community” — now we know it as the European Union — will be larger and “more Mediterranean in character,” because it will include Spain, Portugal and Greece. He was right: these three have in fact become members of this particular version of Europe. More cautiously he thought there was a “a possibility” that the Community might include also an independent Scotland (not so, but less improbable in 2001 than it was in 1976). But the central theme of the article was the future of the Soviet Union and its likely impact on Western Europe: “The most important is the future of the Soviet Union. ...the danger to the unity of Western Europe is probably greater if we have to face Soviet decline, desirable as that would be in many ways... Despite appearances, the Soviet Union is a weak super power....”
Rees-Mogg listed several reasons to support his assessment that the Soviet Union — which he termed “the world’s last empire in the century in which all the other empires have been destroyed” — was facing very difficult times ahead. Its ideology was bankrupt, it was politically overextended and overcommitted, while its bureaucracy was “non-productive.” But if the Soviet Union declines, Rees-Mogg continued, there will be “a great withdrawal of Soviet power from Eastern Europe.” And when this happens the political geography of united Europe would change profoundly: while the European Community represented in 1976 the political pattern of the Europe of the Napoleonic era, with the Soviet withdrawal, “we should resume the pattern of Europe of the era of Bismarck.... When central and eastern Europe is added, the natural centre of European power is Berlin.”
Well, that is exactly what we are now witnessing — the emergence of Berlin as Europe’s political central place. To have predicted this when the academic experts and political leaders as well viewed Soviet withdrawal from central Europe and the unification of Germany as fantasy, should encourage the braver among us today to try our hand at predicting if not 2025 then perhaps just 2011 or 2015 (As we set about this task we may forgive Rees-Mogg his failure to foresee that ten years before the new century the USSR itself would break up into fifteen independent states, and thus indirectly make it possible for countries like Poland and Hungary to consider membership in the European Union after first joining NATO).
The collapse of he Soviet Bloc in East Central Europe, and the rise of independent Ukraine, the Baltic states, and other post- Soviet nations is comparable to the transformation of the European map in 1918-1919. Then, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the dominant opinion in Germany refused to accept any Poland, but especially the Poland that extended to the Baltic and included parts of Silesia, as a legitimate member of the international community. For those Germans Poland was a Saisonsstaat, a country for just one “season.” (Similar views were held about Czechoslovakia.) It is not unfair to say that in the 1920s some influential people in Moscow also regarded the Polish state as a nuisance, for them it was a barrier separating the land of socialism from the future revolutionary Soviet Germany. As we know, there are very influential people in today’s Russia for whom an independent Ukraine, any kind of Ukraine, whether with or without the Crimea, with or without the Donbas, is an aberration, an anomaly that needs to be corrected. They refuse to accept the geopolitical rearrangement that took place in Europe in 1989- 1991 in exactly the same way that after 1919 their German counterparts rejected the “Diktat” of Versailles. In 1930 or even 1932, it was possible to be dismissive of the ravings of Hitler and his comrades. How many people imagined, let alone predicted, then what Europe would look like in just ten or twelve years hence, say in 1940 or 1942?
This is not a prediction but a warning. And in closing, I want to link this theme to a matter that makes only a fleeting appearance in the Rees-Mogg article. When listing Soviet problems, he remarked: “The Soviet Union also has China at its back.” Before Rees-Mogg, in 1959, General Charles de Gaulle identified China as the Soviet Union’s future problem; he thought that in comparison with it, the Cold War between the Soviets and the West was of a minor significance. Now, as we read about Chinese immigration into Russia’s far eastern and even Siberian regions, and about Russian westward migrations from those areas, we may risk identifying the Moscow- Beijing axis as something to keep an eye on as we look toward 2011. Who will be in Vladivostok then?
From China we can easily move to the Islamic factor. Reports from Central Asia and from the Caucasus do not let us forget this. Is there any reason to think that ten years from now these topics will disappear from television screens and newspaper pages. If present trends continue China and Central Asia might seem to be a distant places on the political map of someone whose major concern is the future of Ukraine. But to ignore them would be a mistake. The great power whose future problems with China and current problems with “Islam” we just mentioned happens to be Ukraine’s most important neighbor. We know that influential people in it want to bring Ukraine “back” into a single state. If they succeed they expect to be able to add Ukrainians who will in their turn reinforce the declining number of Russians, all of whom will needed to guard Russia’s Chinese border and to fight for its imperial interests in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.
Let us hope that this scenario will not come to pass and that Russia will follow today’s democratic Germany’s acceptance of Poland in its post-1945 borders, and that it will also establish relations with its neighbors in Asia on the principles of equality.
By 2011, and for sure by 2025, we should know which course Russia will have chosen.
