America Abroad: End of Empire -- For Good

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There was more bad news from Europe last week. In what used to be Yugoslavia, the breakaway states of Croatia and Bosnia formed a military alliance against Serbia, a move that is likely to escalate the fighting in the Balkans. The country that used to call itself Czechoslovakia has already split up its name: it's now the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. That last word will soon be plural, for both Czechs and Slovaks agreed on Saturday to create separate states by the end of September. In what used to be the U.S.S.R., old feuds flared anew in the Caucasus.

These convulsions are the natural consequence of imperial disintegration. Sooner or later, empires have always fallen apart, and the result has always been ugly. Typically, the demise of the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th century triggered the 30 Years' War.

The Enlightenment promulgated liberal principles of governance that could, at least in theory, be applied everywhere. The American and French revolutions were mounted in the name of equality and the brotherhood of man, ideals that were anathema to rulers and attractive to the vast majority of their subjects. Empire's days, or at least its decades, were numbered.

In the wake of World War I, four imperial monarchies -- Germany, Austria- Hungary, Turkey and Russia -- collapsed. Two figures emerged on the world stage almost simultaneously, each a professed egalitarian and internationalist, each claiming to have a vision for the new world order. One was Woodrow Wilson, the other Vladimir Lenin. The 20th century can be seen as a struggle between their legacies.

. An earnest though imperfect attempt to embody the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, the postwar settlement created several new countries that were true nation-states. The Poles got back Poland, and the Hungarians got Hungary.

The peacemakers acknowledged that in some cases a state might be better off if it included several nationalities. That is how the Czechs and Slovaks came to share a single republic while the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were united in what eventually became Yugoslavia, the land of the south Slavs.

Given a better break by history and its accomplice geography, those two countries might be cohesive and thriving today. But Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia fell victim to communism. For them, Wilson's legacy was at midcentury supplanted by Lenin's.

Lenin had been determined to keep in check all popular stirrings, especially nationalistic ones. His successor, Joseph Stalin, perfected a system that was autocratic in the extreme and prone to territorial expansion. With the Nazis in retreat, there was a huge vacuum to be filled by the Red Army in Eastern Europe.

The plot of the 20th century had taken a perverse twist: the two World Wars had finished off the imperial ventures of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Ottomans, Romanovs, Nazis and Japanese -- and accelerated the withdrawal of the British, French and Dutch as well. However, those two conflagrations had also created the conditions in which the Soviet Union was able to foist on the world yet another empire.

Josip Broz Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, earning himself favor in the eyes of the West. But he was no democrat, particularly when it came to suppressing nationalism in its more assertive and divisive forms.