Central Europe Looks Longingly at U.S. Military Might Headed to Bosnia

On this Christmas Day, as U.S. forces are deploying through Hungary and into Bosnia, many Americans are naturally thinking ahead to the time, a year from now, when the troops will be coming home.

But not Gyorgy Keleti. He has other ideas. He is hoping that at least some Americans will stick around for many Christmases to come. The more, the better.

Keleti, a pleasant, thoughtful man, happens to be Hungary’s minister of defense. It is his job to protect the security and independence of a country long subject to the depredations of larger neighbors such as the former Soviet Union, whose tanks were called in to crush the Hungarian rebellion of 1956.

In a recent interview, Keleti said he wants American military advisors to remain in Hungary after the Bosnia mission is completed. He is eager for what he calls a “higher level” of military cooperation between the United States and Hungary.

Keleti also would be happy to have the United States leave behind, for his country’s benefit, some of the high-tech military equipment it has been installing at Taszar--the air base in southern Hungary, once used by Soviet forces, that has been turned into one of the main transit points for the American deployment to Bosnia.

Hungary serves as a case study illustrating the deeper forces at work behind the American and NATO operations in Bosnia.

On the surface, this is a short-term mission to enforce and keep the peace. That is the way it is being presented to the American people. And it is certainly a valid, if somewhat superficial, portrait of the U.S. deployment.

*

Yet for countries such as Hungary the Bosnia mission will have longer-term consequences as well. It is a test that will help determine the future of Central Europe and the extent to which these countries will be able to forge future relationships with the United States and its Western allies.

If the Bosnia mission is a success, then America will probably play an important role in the region for years to come. If it is a failure--if, for example, the United States suddenly decides to run home hastily from Bosnia, as it did from Somalia two years ago--then Hungary and its neighbors will realize that a security relationship with America won’t count for much. And the future of Central Europe will be up for grabs.

At the moment, Central Europe is in flux. Militarily, these former Soviet allies in the Warsaw Pact now hope for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but they haven’t yet been admitted.

Economically, Hungary has just finished junking communism but doesn’t yet see the benefits of capitalism. Hungary’s predicament was perfectly captured by two news stories that appeared on the same day here earlier this month.

One reported that workers are finally about to remove communist-era symbols from the Chain Bridge, one of Budapest’s main landmarks. The other said a recent poll showed that 51% of Hungarians now believe that life was better under communism, which the country abandoned in 1989.

While under communism, Hungarian President Arpad Goncz said last month, “people suffered from a lack of freedom; today many are worried about their livelihoods and the lack of equality.”

Not surprisingly, Russia doesn’t want countries such as Hungary to become NATO members closely aligned with the West.

Russia is now playing for time. Its hope seems to be that over the next few years, isolationist sentiments will increasingly come to dominate U.S. foreign policy, making Americans ever more wary of overseas commitments. And secondly, Russia appears to believe that, over time, the countries of Central Europe will become increasingly disenchanted with the West.

Vitaly I. Churkin, the senior Russian diplomat who now serves as ambassador to Belgium, said a few weeks ago that he did not think Americans fully understood the political changes now sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. As an example, he cited the recent election of Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Communist, to be the new president of Poland, replacing the anti-Communist hero Lech Walesa.

Yet Keleti, the Hungarian defense minister, thinks the Russians are building up false dreams about the direction of Central Europe. All the countries of the region, including Poland under its new president, want to join the NATO alliance, he notes.

Indeed, there is now a fierce, although subterranean, competition among some of the nations of Central Europe--including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland--to see who can win membership in NATO first. That’s why all these countries are sending some of their own troops to take part in the multinational Bosnian peacekeeping mission.

During the past few months, top Hungarian defense officials have been cozying up to the Pentagon brass in ways that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago. As the United States prepared for the deployment to Bosnia, Defense Secretary William J. Perry was on the phone frequently with Keleti. Perry visited Hungary in early September, and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, followed a few weeks later.

*

For America, these budding new ties to Central Europe bring not only opportunities but dangers. Even in Hungary, which is among the most stable and prosperous nations in the region, one can detect strains of the nationalist fervor that has elsewhere led to civil wars and the breakup of nations.

One of the rising political stars in Hungary today is Jozsef Torgyan, the head of the Smallholders Party, which has a strong base in rural areas and among the lower and middle classes. Torgyan is a populist who rails against both Hungary’s old communist system and what he calls the “robber economy” that replaced it.

But Torgyan’s principal appeal is one of nationalism. In an interview, he returned repeatedly to the subject of Hungarians living in neighboring countries, including Romania and Slovakia. His main grievance, it appears, is the Trianon peace treaty signed after World War I that forced Hungary to give up about 70% of its land.

“There are territories which were Hungarian for 1,000 years,” Torgyan thundered. “It was incorrect that those territories were taken away from Hungary.”

Torgyan recently toured the United States, visiting Hungarian American communities in Chicago, Cleveland and New York. He visited New York Gov. George Pataki, who is of Hungarian descent. Torgyan now talks of a “worldwide” Hungarian movement, which it appears he wants to lead.

What is the force driving such rampant nationalism? The British historian E.J. Hobsbawm suggests one explanation:

“In post-communist societies,” he wrote three years ago, “ethnic or national identity is above all a device for defining the community of the innocent and identifying the guilty who are responsible for ‘our’ predicament; especially once communist regimes are no longer there to function as scapegoats.”

Torgyan insists that he has no desire to redraw Hungary’s borders or to enlarge the country. Yet he makes clear that he thinks the government in Budapest should take stronger action on behalf of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries, making sure that they have the right to speak Hungarian.

Such nationalist sentiments have given Torgyan’s party a boost in the polls, suggesting that the Smallholders will do extremely well in Hungary’s next elections in 1998. However, Torgyan’s pan-Hungarian appeals also serve as a warning to the United States.

*

The Bosnia mission is gradually bringing America into a much closer political involvement with Central Europe than it has ever had. The emerging ties could be of great value, for countries such as Hungary, for the rest of Europe and for the United States itself.

But these new relationships will only work if the United States makes clear that it wants to stay as far away as it can from the region’s ethnic and territorial disputes. The American troops have gone to Bosnia to help end one murderous conflict. One’s enough.