by CKR
George Bush gave a peculiar speech in Latvia yesterday. The NYT ignored most of the peculiarities, while the WaPo seems to have had some misgivings.
But the peculiarities were right up front in the blogosphere. Praktike and Sean Paul picked up on the strangest parts of the speech.
For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.
Sean Paul jumped out of his chair on this one, so I can stay seated. It’s long been standard rhetoric in certain parts of the Republican party to equate any attempts at negotiation with Munich. Equating Yalta with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is new. A paragraph or two earlier, Bush said
The Baltic states had no role in starting World War II. The battle came here because of a secret pact between dictators.
He was referring to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the alliance between Hitler and Stalin at the beginning of WWII which carried a secret protocol that divided Central Europe between the two. This is a particularly charged reference in the Baltics, where the movement for independence from the Soviet Union began with the demand that the Soviet Union admit to the secret protocol and repudiate it.
It appears that what Bush was saying was that at Yalta, Roosevelt appeased Stalin (Munich) and made an agreement with a dictator (implying Roosevelt was also a dictator?) to divide Europe. He doesn't recognize that the “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability” was more like recognizing a done deal. The Russian army had occupied Central Europe to Berlin and beyond. The American people had no stomach for another war to roll back that occupation.
However, a few paragraphs later,
The United States refused to recognize your occupation by an empire. The flags of free Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania -- illegal at home -- flew proudly over diplomatic missions in the United States.
But the revisionism of this paragraph is the most striking:
The end of World War II raised unavoidable questions for my country: Had we fought and sacrificed only to achieve the permanent division of Europe into armed camps? Or did the cause of freedom and the rights of nations require more of us? Eventually, America and our strong allies made a decision: We would not be content with the liberation of half of Europe -- and we would not forget our friends behind an Iron Curtain. We defended the freedom of Greece and Turkey, and airlifted supplies to Berlin, and broadcast the message of liberty by radio. We spoke up for dissenters, and challenged an empire to tear down a hated wall. Eventually, communism began to collapse under external pressure, and under the weight of its own contradictions. And we set the vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace -- so dictators could no longer rise up and feed ancient grievances, and conflict would not be repeated again and again.
The first question that was raised after WWII was how to rebuild Europe and to keep Communist influence from spreading. Indigenous Communist parties could feed on the difficulties facing Europeans. The continent was devastated, most of its industrial capacity destroyed, its farmland torn up. Likewise, Japan was occupied and was being reconstructed. After resistance from people with similar ideological biases to current Republicans, the Marshall Plan began to rebuild Europe in 1947. One might question whether Bush and his neocons share “the vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace.”
Something new, he does acknowledge that “the weight of its own contradictions” may have had something to do with the collapse of Communism.
Also in a positive note, Bush turns to a real problem in Latvia and Estonia:
The promise of democracy is fulfilled by minority rights, and equal justice under the rule of law, and an inclusive society in which every person belongs. A country that divides into factions and dwells on old grievances cannot move forward, and risks sliding back into tyranny. A country that unites all its people behind common ideals will multiply in strength and confidence. The successful democracies of the 21st century will not be defined by blood and soil. Successful democracies will be defined by a broader ideal of citizenship -- based on shared principles, shared responsibilities, and respect for all…Latvia is facing the challenges that come with ethnic diversity, and it's addressing these challenges in a uniformly peaceful way. Whatever the historical causes, yours is now a multi-ethnic society -- as I have seen on my visit. No wrongs of the past should ever be allowed to divide you, or to slow your remarkable progress. While keeping your Latvian identity and language, you have a responsibility to reach out to all who share the future of Latvia. A welcoming and tolerant spirit will assure the unity and strength of your country. Minorities here have a responsibility as well -- to be citizens who seek the good of the country in which they live. As inclusive, peaceful societies, all of the Baltic nations can be models to every nation that follows the path of freedom and democracy.
He’s talking about the Russian minority, about 40% in Latvia and about a third in Estonia. The Soviet Union encouraged migration of ethnic Russians to the republics to help ensure that the republics remained within the Union. Many of the migrants worked in defense industries. They retained their Russian language (as conquerors do) and remained within their own communities. Ethnic Estonians and Latvians resented the migrants greatly. At independence, language and other laws discriminated against the migrants and their families, many of whom had lived in Estonia and Latvia all their lives. The Russian position since independence has been that Russian should be an official language of these countries and that citizenship requirements for the ethnic Russians should be greatly simplified.
Bush’s comments are a middle road in this controversy, which Russia has not let go, even though the human right concerns were resolved as a requirement for Estonia and Latvia to join the EU.
He then went on to extol “freedom” and “democratic values” for other former Soviet republics and lectured Russia on the value of democratic neighbors, sentiments that most likely will be taken with Russia as threats of encroachment by the US in their “near abroad.”
I found these next words just bizarre. I won’t even try to analyze them. I have no idea what “Freedom is not tired” could mean. Perhaps it is just a lapse on the part of the speechwriters as they reached for a transition to talking about the Middle East, one more time, more of the same.
For all the problems that remain, it is a miracle of history that this young century finds us speaking about the consolidation of freedom throughout Europe. And the stunning democratic gains of the last several decades are only the beginning. Freedom is not tired. The ideal of human dignity is not weary.
Some thanks to the Baltic states for sending military to Afghanistan and Iraq, and an acknowledgement of Latvia’s one death, although Estonia’s two were not mentioned.
I tend to agree with Sean Paul and one of his commenters, that the bizarreness of the speech results from its being aimed at Bush’s base at home rather than the Baltics or the world. Perhaps at the supporters of his policies in the Baltics, as well, although it was a minority that supported the war in Iraq, however the US media spin that.
There were echoes in the speech, too, of a response to a statement by Vladimir Putin in his address on the condition of Russia, that the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century was the breakup of the Soviet Union.” This statement has occasioned a lot of media comment, although I think that the commentary, and perhaps President Bush’s speechwriters, have missed the point. The only way that Putin’s statement makes sense is as a statement to the Russian people, particularly the pensioners who have recently had many of what were considered their rights under the Soviet Union revoked.
Neither president can afford to assume he is speaking only to his constitutents. Every presidential speech is to the world. It’s time they both realized that.
Update: Armchair Generalist comments.