Crimea: flashpoint towards another war?

I’ve been taken to task by a friend for not backing the obvious will of the people in Crimea, for reintegration with mother Russia. That will was expressed in the referendum held there on Sunday 16 March. The result, we’re told, was a 97% vote in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation.

It seems likely to me that there really is a majority in favour of joining Russia in Crimea, which is 58% ethnically Russian. And I’m in favour of determining this kind of question by the will of the people: if it looks as though a majority of the Scots, for instance, want independence from the United Kingdom, I’d be strongly in favour of their being able to leave, though personally, as an Englishman, I’d dread their going: we’d be stuck with Tory governments for years or possibly decades.

In addition, Kruschev’s cavalier decision in 1954 to hand the region to Ukraine, without logic or reason and certainly without consulting the population, was high-handed and ill-advised. It makes sense to correct that abusive action now.

However, only a year ago, polls showed just 41% of Crimean voters favouring reintegration. And 24% of the population is Ukrainian, while 12% are Tatars, descendants of the original inhabitants, known to be strongly opposed to joining Russia. It seems highly unlikely that many of those groups voted ‘Yes’ on Sunday.

Indeed, even among the Russians, it seems unlikely that the proportion in favour of leaving Ukraine has grown quite so much in just a year, despite local misgivings when the Kiev government of Viktor Yanukovych, ethnically Russian strongman, elected legally though behaving abusively, was brought down.

So the chances that the vote really was 97% in favour strikes me as utterly unbelievable. Especially as no observers were allowed to supervise the voting or the counts. And as we all know, it isn’t the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes.

Besides that, with the Russian Navy still using the peninsula as its Black Sea headquarters, and with its soldiers in the streets – pretending to be local self-defence militias – it’s not clear to me that the referendum in any way represented an exercise in democracy. More of a simulation of democracy under the barrels of a gun. Indeed, the only concession to democracy seems to have been the Kremlin’s willingness to allow that 3% voted against; in Soviet days, majorities generally exceeded 99%.

Guardian picture of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory:
'democratic' muscle for the 16 March referendum

If that’s progress, it only shows how far today’s Russia still has to go.

Even more sadly, however, Putin’s behaviour doesn’t just recall the excesses of the Soviet Union. It recalls an earlier and even more disastrous spell in our recent history. As does the weakness of the Western response to Russia’s behaviour.

In 1936, long before Germany had rearmed, Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, demilitarised by Treaty since the end of the First World War. The democracies protested but took no action.

In the spring of 1938, he annexed Austria to the Reich. The democracies protested but took no action.

In the autumn of 1938, he occupied the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia. The democracies had protested, but instead of taking action, had agreed to allow him to take over those areas. The agreement was the now infamous ‘peace in our time’ document.

In the spring of 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. The democracies protested even more loudly but again did nothing else.

Finally, in September 1939, he invaded Poland and the democracies at last reacted. This was the start of the bloodiest conflict in history, the Second World War (well, the European bit: it had been raging in the Far East for several years already).

The question remains, would that have been avoided had France and Britain, even maybe the United States, reacted powerfully to the occupation of the Rhineland?

Putin has in effect annexed Crimea. Now he’s talking about the calls of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine for reunification with the motherland, just as Hitler had justified his actions in Czechoslovakia in the name of the rights of the Sudeten German-speakers.

We’ve probably left it too late to do anything about Crimea. But if we do nothing about Eastern Ukraine, will we just slip further down the same slippery slope that took us to war in the thirties? And might a more powerful response stop that? Say, economic sanctions that bite, even if they cause us pain too, perhaps even the stationing of token troops in Ukraine, so that it’s clear that an invasion would bring Russia into conflict with far more than merely the Ukrainian army?

After all, surely we’ve learned from the Second World War, that the pain that awaits us at the bottom of slippery slopes may sadly be a lot worse than taking effective action now.

Anschluss: Nazi crushing of a victim or willing meeting of accomplices?

75 years ago today German troops marched across the border into Austria, and were greeted with delirious joy by a large proportion of the population there.

A German soldier during the Anschluss
Note the air of devastation on the faces of the Austrian civilian population

This was the 1938 Anschluss or union of Austria with the Nazi Third Reich. Someone who wasn’t cheering was a late friend of mine, Bob, who had the misfortune of belonging to the Vienna Jewish community. Within months, he and his friends and relatives were out of work. They spent their days on their doorsteps, chatting and wondering how they were going to keep body and soul together.

‘I’m always amused about the talk today about household debts. We had no debts. You have to be rich to have debts. If you have no money, nobody will lend you any.’

Like a great many Viennese Jews, his family would queue daily at various embassies asking for visas that would get them out. He told me about the sheer arrogance of the staff at the British Consulate, who would treat them contemptuously, knocking papers out of their hands if the staff felt they hadn’t been completed correctly, and giving priority to those who had the money to bribe them.

Eventually, Bob and one of his sisters got out to Britain. They were the only members of his family to survive the war: the others were all Holocaust victims.

It took years to screw up the courage to go back to Vienna, and when he did he wasn’t impressed: ‘you can still cut the anti-Semitism with a knife’, he told me.

Eventually, he took the plunge and travelled to Germany itself, the heart of the darkness that had blighted his life. He went to Bonn.

‘I couldn’t believe it. What a great country!’

He tried to get back every year.

So – what was the difference between the two countries?

Some years ago I read David Art’s The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria which traced the way each country had addressed it Nazi past. It took a while for Germany to decide it had to face up to what had happened, but since the 60s they have made sustained efforts to analyse and understand. One of the best Holocaust films I’ve seen was a German TV reconstruction of the Wannsee conference, where the third Reich formallyl adopted the final solution, the extermination of the Jews. Reconstructed from minutes and eye-witness accounts, it lasted exactly 100 minutes, just as the conference did: an hour and two-thirds to decide to exterminate 12 million people (yes, they only achieve 50% success).

When a neo-Nazi movement, the Republikaner, emerged in Germany in the 80s and 90s, all the mainstream parties unanimously combatted them: the right made no attempt to work with them or adopt their programme; the left wing made no attempt to exploit the possible splits in the right-wing vote. The result? The Republikaner got nowhere and an electorate which realised they were never going to deliver stopped voting for them.

Austria maintained the fiction that, far from being a willing accomplice of Nazi Germany, it had been its first victim. This comfortable illusion prevented their having to face up to any moral dilemmas. As a result, their neo-Nazis, the Austrian Freedom Party, became a major force, rising to the point where it became the junior party in a governing coalition.

At root, the problem was that Austria preferred to concentrate on the military invasion that took place in the Anschluss, which made Austrians victims, rather than the warmth of the welcome they gave the German forces, which would have made them accomplices.

So on the anniversary of the Anschluss of 1938, there’s a moral for us all: if we want to deal with the contamination that bigotry and intolerance represent, we have to face up to it, and isolate it and prevent its getting anywhere near power.

Whether it’s the Tea Party in the States, UKIP in Britain or the Front National in France, that’s a lesson that all of us who are committed to democracy need to learn and actively apply.

On this anniversary of that grim event, I’ll raise a glass this evening to the memory of Bob. I know he would have agreed fervently with the need to learn that lesson.