Stabilization and Reconstruction:
The Lesson of History for the Future Challenges

Prof. Dr. AntonGiulio de'Robertis

Institute for International Legal Studies, CNR

Rome, Center for High Defense Studies, 25th September 2006

 

Stability looks to be a basic concern of the today's international community and in fact one of the main arguments supporting the ongoing NATO enlargement of these days is its contribution to the improvement of stability for the areas involved in the process. 
On the other side in this historical moment the international system is getting out of a structural change that has entailed its basic reconstruction. 
It has moved from the static confrontation of two blocs headed respectively by one superpower of continental size. A confrontation that, due to its deep political dimension, succeeded in freezing all the grievances due to the imbalances in the distribution of territories and populations inherited from the peace settlements followed to the first world war as well to the second one.
 
The end of the Cold War and of its political militancy allowed a sort of revival of the resentments of the peoples and the countries which had to comply with the decisions of the Versailles conference of 1919 as well as with the border, between democracy and communism, created by the line where the Anglo-Saxons' Army met with the Soviet Forces in Europe in the '45. 
So in the North the gains made in the forties by the Soviet Union were annihilated by the push of the national vindications of independence of Lithuanians, Latvians and Esthonians, a push that strongly strengthened the derive toward the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A dissolution, singularly in the historical experience, occurred without a widespread eruption of violence. The opposite arrived in the south, where the socialist rule introduced by Tito had been able to soft all the old grievances of the Croats and Slovenes, against the way the late Yugoslavia was created, by the substantial annexation of their country by the Serbia, supported by the winning France. 
The disappearance of Tito, the split of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, changed fundamentally the balances on which the Balkan system had reposed in the second post- war period. 
As a matter of fact the dissolved Soviet Union, stated the end of the influence of Moscow on the region; at the same time Germany, just reunified according to the principle of self determination, supported the implementation of this principle all around Europe in full accordance with Austria, where the memory of the St. Germain and Trianon, had not faded at all.
 
I am recalling all these circumstances not in order to mention facts already very well known, but to warn that even if history do not repeat itself, it makes a lot of rimes. If we want stability we need to avoid the repetition of mistakes made in the past and to be aware that the sources of the instability of the European system of the nineties were in the hardness of the terms of peace imposed to the countries and the peoples of the central empires in the 1919-1920, by a substantial violation to their harm of the principles accepted by all the parties at the end of the war and by the consequential creation in the defeated countries of a sense of betrayal, of carrying an unjust treatment, needing a to be readdressed.
 
NATO is now openly engaged in a process of stabilization with its conditional inclusion of  new members in the Alliance. In doing so it is necessary not to forget the lessons of the past and the paradigmatic value of the history of the late XIX century with the French foreign policy obsessed by the aspiration to the révanche against the Germany and the humiliating mutilation of Alsace and Lorain and with Bismarck obsessed because of that by his "cochemar des coalitions". 
In a moment when the Atlantic Alliance is attempting to spread stability and democracy in all the international system we must keep in mind the need to be coherent with our stated goals, that is to respect and strive for the full implementation of the rights of peoples in all areas and in all situations avoiding double standards, which would allow the sense of betrayal of the peoples damaged by the faulted application of the right criterion to their case with the consequential implantation of the seeds of révanche and of the consequential instability.

 

 
 
 

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