Leaders of nations slowly learn peril of nationalism

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): They are bringing out a designer version of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to mark the 150th anniversary of its first publication in 1848. "The book will be finely crafted and of exceptional beauty," burbled Emilia La Fuente Sanchez of Verso Books, "bound in high-quality cloth, with colored page ends, a ribbon page-marker, and a stunning jacket illustration by Komar and Melamid."

The last bit rings an odd note: Komar and Melamid are two post-modern artists who fled the Soviet Union in 1978. But re- publication was the least they could do for the old boy after the worst decade for Marxism since he came up with the idea -- and they even got Eric Hobsbawn, the English-speaking world's best- known Marxist historian (all right, its only famous Marxist historian) to write the introduction.

Hobsbawn is generous about the 'young Marx', reminding us that some of his bolder predictions about capitalist societies, like globalization ("a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country") and the decline of the family, have only come true in the past thirty years. But he makes little reference to 1989, the fatal year when all the 'Marxist' regimes of Europe began to fall, nor does he mention that Marx was not a major factor in that other year of pan-European revolution, 1848.

Very few people had read Marx's Manifesto when revolutions broke out all over Europe in 1848. The main influence on the radicals was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had written his own manifesto, 'What is Property', in 1840, and answered: "Property is theft."

That, rather than 'Workers of the world unite', was the phrase on the workers' lips as they rose in what was (in Paris at least) the first genuine working-class revolution. But what's important to us now is why 1848 failed so badly while 1989 (so far) has been a great success.

Lots of people in Russia, in Bosnia, and even in former East Germany think the revolutions of 1989 and their aftermath were not a happy turn of events, but big changes always produce casualties. The fact is that a miracle occurred: 350 million people living under totalitarian regimes that had been in power between 40 and 70 years freed themselves, for the most part non- violently, and at the same time carried out the last great act of decolonization.

Between 1989 and 1993, the number of independent countries in Europe (not counting mini-states like Liechtenstein and Vatican City) grew from 30 to 49. Only eight of the new states experienced serious fighting on their soil, and they were all relatively small countries (total population about 35 million) in the mountainous and ethnically tangled southern borderlands of the continent.

It hasn't been an easy decade, but by now around 300 million of those 350 million people live in more or less stable democratic societies (despite varying degrees of corruption and 'mafia' influence). Only about a third of them are seeing economic daylight yet, but that will come too in most places. Compared to the usual track record of revolutions, this is a fantastic success. Why?

The only year in European history -- indeed, in world history -- that compares with 1989 for international revolutionary fever is 1848. The uprising that broke out against the monarchy in Paris in February, 1848 was hardly a novelty: the French, having pioneered the whole idea of revolution sixty years before, had more or less fallen into the habit of revolt. But this time, it spread.

The key event was demonstrations in Vienna, capital of the Austrian empire, exactly 150 years ago this week (March 12-15). Austria, which then ruled much of central Europe and the northern Balkans, was the core of reaction in Europe, home to the statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich who had coordinated the suppression of every liberal stirring in the continent for the past thirty years. But when the students marched, he resigned in a day.

It was that sort of year: there were uprisings in Prague, Budapest, Berlin, Munich, Milan, Rome, the Netherlands, Denmark -- pretty well everywhere from Poland to Sicily. But in the end, it produced little real change.

It began as the 'Springtime of the Peoples'. As the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin put it: "I breathed through all my senses and all my pores the intoxication of the revolutionary atmosphere. It was a holiday without beginning and without end." But it actually ended in tears, and rather quickly. Everywhere, the forces of democracy and national liberation were divided and then defeated piecemeal by the servants of tyranny and empire.

Even in France, the conservative rural areas voted in a government that massacred the Paris workers in the 'June Days', and by the end of the year had chosen a descendant of Napoleon to be presidency. (He made himself emperor in a coup four years later)

What went wrong? Partly, it was just inexperience: there was not much history of revolution in the world then, and so fewer examples of how things can go wrong. But the bigger problem was nationalism: you tend to forget the democratic rights of others when your main goal is to set your own national group up as a going concern. Hungary's independence was destroyed, for example, when its own oppressed subject peoples joined with Austrian and Russian imperial forces to bring it back under Vienna's rule.

And the difference in 1989? An extra century and a half of experience, which taught most democrats in Communist-ruled Europe that they must not get sidetracked into nationalist disputes even before the main battle for freedom is won.

It is unfashionable to say this in a world still transfixed by Balkan horrors (most recently in Kosovo), but the leaders of big countries like Russia, Ukraine, Poland and reunited Germany have been almost saintly in their refusal to get trapped in sterile quarrels over issues like borders and the treatment of minorities. Slowly, painfully, but eventually, we do learn.