23 Mini-Powers Spell Chaos If Superpowers Step Aside : Europe: The Wall mandated cohesive alliances. Without them, the thin scabs over unhealed territorial wounds will begin to itch.

In August, 1961, I was a college student visiting Berlin, a horrified witness to the building of “the wall.” To this day, I can recite some of the anti-American slogans that were on banners hung on walls throughout the Soviet sector of the city. I can still feel the fear and degradation of being subjected to a full body search by the East German border police as I left, and the deeper nakedness I felt when I saw my American passport disappear through a slot in the wall--to be microfilmed by a Soviet officer, as I later learned.

Now we watch Germans on both sides chipping away at the wall, and in the emotion of the moment there is a temptation to see this as the happy conclusion of their 29-year ordeal.

But before Western enthusiasm goes too far, it would be wise to reflect more carefully on the stunning changes in Eastern Europe. The wall has been breached, but the citizens of Berlin have not regained the freedom of movement they had before the morning of Aug. 13, 1961. Until the border between the Soviet sector and West Berlin was closed, the city was virtually unified. Yes, signs warned that one was leaving one sector and entering another. And yes, police of both sides often checked the identity papers of border-crossers. But it was not uncommon for Berliners to live in the Soviet sector and work in one of the Western precincts. Today, they are allowed to pass back and forth freely, but not to live freely. Berlin has not returned to the norm of July, 1961, let alone that of July, 1931.

We cheer the democratization of nations from Poland to Bulgaria and wish their peoples well. Nonetheless, the last 44 years of peace have been constructed on the seemingly firm foundation of two spheres of influence, each turned inward and tightly bound to its national patron, the United States or the Soviet Union. Europe has, in effect, functioned as a continent with only two significant states. What we are witnessing today is the re-Balkanization of a continent. When members of the Warsaw Pact take the Frank Sinatra doctrine seriously--to have it “My Way”--the socialist alliance will fragment. NATO will not remain cohesive in the face of a broken Warsaw Pact.

Without robust alliances, the thin scabs over unhealed territorial wounds will begin to itch. Irredentism, the desire to regain lost territory, suppressed for 40 years, will become a factor in European politics once more. Neither Hungary nor Romania can be quite content with the partition of Transylvania in 1938 and 1940. Are the lands of East Prussia, the heart of German nationalism, to be Polish forever? Could a neutral Austria pursue its claims to South Tirol, lost to Italy in the settlement of World War I? Nationalist movements in Yugoslavia threaten to sunder the country into its predecessors, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. Even the integrity of the Soviet Union has been called into question.

The European clock has been set back to an uncertain date by the events of October and November, 1989. Are we at 1910 before World War I, or at 1932 before the ascent of Hitler? The route forward will not repeat the events of the past, but the fragmentation of the two blocs may return diplomacy to a set of balance-of-power equations without superpower domination and with more players than at any time since 1918.

With the re-Balkanization of the continent, stability and security in Europe demand more than ever the dismantling of the armies that face each other from Norway to the Black Sea. However, the negotiations on conventional forces now going on in Vienna were essentially discussions between two blocs. American intentions were to set limitations on numbers of weapons and soldiers bloc-wide, leaving the political leaders of the blocs to apportion the cuts and the savings equitably within overall ceilings.

It is difficult to conceive of negotiating elimination of tanks and aircraft among 23 sovereign nations, each with its own interests, and now its individual security, to protect. Only the assumed solidity of the two alliances, and the common goals and fears shared within each, make possible President Bush’s goal of a treaty mandating the withdrawal of tanks and troops by both sides within six months to a year, and that assumption is no longer axiomatic.

Alliance cohesiveness was mandated by the wall between East and West, but the underpinnings of the postwar world are eroding in real time. The rusting of the Iron Curtain is an unmixed blessing. It is not an uncomplicated one.