Vive (not so fast) libre!

G&M Monday, July 24, 2000

It is 33 years next week since General Charles de Gaulle came to Canada and uttered the phrase "Vive le Québec libre!" Whether it is worth celebrating depends on your point of view. But it is certainly worth a reflection.

For that cry echoed beyond the borders of Canada. It echoed, for sure, in my corner of the world, Scotland, where a moribund Scottish National Party received an infusion of vigour in the late 1960s and, suddenly -- as it seemed, out of nowhere -- won a by-election in 1968, its first in decades.

It echoed in Spain, in the Basque country and in Catalonia, where their chafing against central rule contributed to the internal rot in Franco's authoritarian rule. It echoed in Central Europe, where the Prague Spring, which declared that socialism should have a human face, was also about its having a Czech accent -- a nuance correctly interpreted as a threat in Moscow, which stamped on the face and stilled the voice.

It echoed, much more faintly, in that Soviet Empire, where some brave nationalists held up banners in the Baltic states, in Ukraine and in Georgia. They were promptly sent to jail, or to psychiatric wards on the assumption that they should be classified as insane for acting as though they were in a free country.

It was not so much that the General had started a trend; but that, for his own nationalist reasons, he laid claim to a spirit of revolt. All over the world, it seemed, national groups crushed by empires or submerged in nations indifferent to their needs, traditions and language were yearning to breathe free.

In the last third of the century just past, that spirit has surged until it became, or was interpreted as being, the spirit of the age. Freedom of the nations from the prison of the Soviet bloc was the abiding theme of the last dozen years of the 20th century. It was a movement interpreted in the West, more or less without dissent, as an unalloyed liberation. We now know it was not that.

Last week, in Moscow, I was speaking to a former KGB general, a Georgian, who had done well for himself. He had left the Foreign Intelligence Service two years ago, and become a banker. Suddenly, in the midst of amiable teasing, his face went sour, and he said: The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster. Like a well-trained Western liberal, I said: Well, it was for the KGB. No, he said, we mostly survived okay. It was for the people.

And for now, he is right. The three tiny Baltic countries apart, every state of the former Soviet Union is poorer than it was in the 1980s. Their most able people leave, and they are usually governed by leaders who rob them, or cannot stop others from robbing them. The former Soviet Union is, for much of its vast mass and for the larger part of its masses, a desolate and hopeless place; it cannot be reconstructed, yet its legacy cannot be overcome. Vive la Russie libre! Except there is not much vive about it.

The spirit that blew over the world in the late '60s was a wayward one. Speaking in the name of an early 19th-century romantic impulse, it "dynamized" the closed world of Eastern Europe. There, it has worked both good and ill. The marshalling of Central and Southern Europe into one camp living under differing degrees of authoritarianism was intolerable. Yet when they ceased to tolerate it, only some of these new nations found that their liberty released new energies, as against old feuds or present inadequacies. It would be a brave man who would argue to most Poles that they were worse off now than two decades ago; but you would not need much courage to do it in Bucharest or Belgrade or Tirana.

In the rich and peaceful West, by contrast, the spirit of the resurgent nation has fit well enough into our culture to be accepted. Politics is increasingly an endless process of mediation between rival demands, including, in some countries, between rival nationalisms. The demands of nationalists are no longer confronted but assuaged -- a process with no apparent end.

It is not just in Canada where no final decision seems to have been made -- or even seems available -- on the separatist challenge. The same process is going on in Spain; in the United Kingdom; and in Belgium, where the state's French and Flemish parts are held together by the slimmest of threads -- but are still held together. Something of the same process has been going on for the past two weeks between Israel and the Palestinians: two peoples bitterly opposed, now reluctantly yoked together in a negotiation that seems to have no conclusion.

These endless mediations are exhausting for the main participants and are constantly presented by the media as trembling on the edge of a disaster. But they have taken on a life of their own. They are producing a state of affairs where the nation in question ceases to be one thing or another. Quebec becomes neither fully part of Canada nor independent; Catalonia remains part of Spain, but Spain's writ only partly runs in Catalonia; Northern Ireland exists on a constant round of talks that involve Britain, Ireland and the United States and that call on the mediating skills of a former Finnish president, a former African National Congress leader, and a former Canadian general. Nothing is ever finally settled. But the number of victims of the nationalist cause goes down.

Vive le Québec libre! We should have learned one thing this past third of a century: that freedom does not come in a glad rush, to the accompaniment of the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth. "Alle manner werden bruder" (all men will be brothers), the best-known line, has been belted out from the Berlin Wall to the Baltics this past 15 years. Rousing, but beguiling.

All men don't. They sometimes become better citizens, sometimes better killers. More often, after the nationalist surge has ebbed, they find themselves living lives more distrustful than before, bewildered by the loss of order, seeking a new framework for a meaningful life in new countries that cannot provide it. Things may improve, of course. But, for the moment, the KGB general, cynical to a fault, has an edge over the Western liberals.