A Touch of Minsk Gets Unity Rolling : Ex-Soviets: The new configuration craftily gets around the appearance of Russian domination.

It looks as if December, 1991, will go down as a truly historic month in the history of the unification of Europe. The summit at Maastricht is moving Western Europe toward an increasingly federal system, while the creation of a commonwealth of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus seems to have begun the reconstruction of the Soviet Union on a much more centralized federal basis than Western Europe.

Soviet events should not be discussed with certainty until the details are filled in. However, a well-connected Kazakh intellectual visiting Duke University over the weekend was quite emphatic in his insistence that Boris Yeltsin’s so-called independent economic policy had been coordinated in advance with the presidents of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, that agreement had been reached on the institutional relations among the republics and that even such details as the scenarios for the timing of Western investment in Kazakhstan were in place.

It never made any sense to think that the Soviet republics were obtaining the sovereignty of the European nations of 1939 when, at the same time, Western Europe was giving up sovereignty and moving toward a federal system. The republics had to have a common market even more complete than Western Europe’s because socialism had bound their economies together; and the West would never finance the breakup of Soviet strategic forces and the creation of a great nuclear power in Ukraine. Also, with a Ukraine fearful of Boris Yeltsin still producing Soviet rockets and tanks, the continued existence of a unified Soviet army was the only realistic option.

The problem always was how to change an involuntary unitary state to a loose federal one, with individual republics taking responsibility for the pain of economic reform. This was largely a challenge of psychology: How could people and officials be persuaded that the situation had changed fundamentally--how could they be made to give voluntary allegiance to a new federal system when they could not believe in their hearts that the change was real?

The negotiation of a new union treaty was an attempted solution. The effort foundered, at least on the surface, because a union treaty being pushed by the Soviet president seemed like a reimposition of the old centralized system under different labels. If, instead, Russia pushed the union treaty, it would seem that Russia, with fully half of the new unit’s population, was trying to impose its rule on the others.

What scenario would solve this problem? First, a fight between Russia and the center was needed to convince the others that the center was not manipulative. Then the Russian leader had to be so threatening that real independence would seem like the path to Russian invasion. Presidents had to be elected in the republics before the start of the new fiscal year, Jan. 1, so that persons of real authority could institute economic reforms.

A truly brilliant part of the solution would be the transfer of the capital from Moscow to a city like Minsk. Moscow and the Kremlin have not only been places, but symbols. The capital of a weak but very pro-Russian republic, hundreds of miles closer to Western Europe than Moscow, would have all the right symbolism. But, if the capital were to be moved to Minsk, then the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the coordinating agencies of the common market and so forth would also have to be moved far from Yeltsin’s direct control.

Analysts of the Soviet Union have been very resistant to the notion of political planning, strategy, manipulation, spin-control, or the like, over the last six years. Let us say, therefore, that accidentally things seem to be working out as if they had been orchestrated.

Of course, we will have to see the other republics join in--perhaps even the Baltic states on an associate basis. We will have to see the security ministries move to Minsk. We will have to see who gets the job of commonwealth chairman before we seriously speculate on how much Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been in charge of a process and how much he let it get out of his control.

But before we conclude that Gorbachev lost because he didn’t have the power to take tough decisions on balancing the budget, we should ask how unhappy President Bush is that he doesn’t have to deal with California’s budget. Were Presidents Reagan and Bush defeated or victorious when they cut federal taxation and forced budgetary decision-making on the states?

The crucial point, however, is that with which we began. This is not 1939. Soon it will be hard to distinguish the independence of Italy and France from the autonomy of Quebec. It is impossible to believe that Estonia and Ukraine will have the sovereignty of 1939.

The Europeans from Vladivostok to Vancouver (in the words of Secretary of State James A. Baker III) are coming together voluntarily. First will come the super-regions and then the community as a whole. Soon we will be talking about how the Europeans from Vancouver to New York fit in the process.