Compared with traditional letters, what news does email bring? How Modern is the Modern Post? The new thing is that I can post to more than one at a time. Via the web, I can actually post to everybody, insofar as every potential reader can reach the web.

"Dear All ( Especially ex-Soviet Union/Eastern European Friends, Companieros), What do you all think of this analysis - 20 odd years on ??", the signature Merlin asked , quoting an editorial of Financial Times 2 January 2009.

I can partly agree with the editors of the FT, that "the legacy of 1989" is an inspiration for tough times. The Third Reich started a world war and ended militarily defeated; the Soviet Union did not start any world war and it ended practically without firing a shot. It is precisely the relatively non-violent way in which the Soviet Union ended which inspires me. The editors of the Financial Times feel the same, I believe, when they note that "for most of the 350m people of the former communist bloc, totalitarianism ended peacefully. There was no Communist revanchism, no descent into anarchy and no nuclear Armageddon."

However, instead of comparing how the two aforementioned, relatively short-lived Totalitarian Empires ended, they draw parallels to 1789, and to 1917, as if the destruction of the Berlin wall had marked the beginning of a social and political revolution.

"It is not the west as such that triumphed but the universal values that the west, for all its many shortcomings, upholds", they write. Have the last twenty years been a period of revolutionary progress towards a better future for mankind?

Nothing really important has changed, except that mankind has got an internet (Internet).

At the beginning of 2009, "the west" continues to uphold "the universal values" by preparing for nuclear Armageddon. To say so may seem unfair given that "eastern" countries or blocs (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?) are responding in the same way, that is, by building and/or installing doomsday arms. Or call them weapons of mass destruction to avoid religious overtones.

But it is not unfair to put the blame on both the west and the east, because these concepts should by now be politically outdated and obsolete: "We must learn to be loyal, not to 'East' or 'West', but to each other, and we must disregard the prohibitions and limitations imposed by any national state," to quote what E.P.Thompson and the other signatures of the END Appeal said already at the beginning of the 1980s (See Protest and Survive. Ed. by E.P.Thompson and Dan Smith. A Penguin Special 1980, p 225.)

The editors of Financial Times seek their inspiration in what they call "the overthrow of Communism". For many of us, however, the year 1989 marks the end of the Cold War over Europe, of which the Berlin Wall was a symbol. For the present writer, at least, the legacy of 1989 is to do with the greater possibility of European Nuclear Disarmament (END) and a development of Europe in the direction envisaged by Altiero Spinelli.

In this morning's email, I found the following reflections by Wayne Hall:

"I do not think that Europeans should have to consult the US government on the question of whether European governments have or do not have nuclear weapons. And as far as American nuclear weapons policy is concerned, that too is a subject that Americans should take responsibility for themselves. Particularly since it has long been the view of the American "right" that nuclear weapons decisions are questions with a bearing on national sovereignty, and that no outside party has a right to tell America what weapons it can and cannot have.

If that is a principle that has so much popular support in the US, then it should be asserted as a principle in Europe, and elsewhere, also. The Saintes Appeal represents an assertion of that principle of European political autonomy on nuclear issues."

During the holidays I have been reading some of Luigi Einaudi's articles from 1948 and earlier (See Footnote). Einaudi, who was President of the Republic 1948-1955, is one of the great European federalists. About the atomic bomb, he wrote:

"Il dilemma è: si vuole che il divieto agisca entro l'ambito della piena sovranità degli Stati rinunciatari (all'uso della bomba atomica) ovvero si riconosce che il divieto presuppone una rinuncia alla sovranità medesima? Questa è la cote alla quale fa d'uopo saggiare la serietà e la sincerità dei propositi di coloro i quali affermano di essere contrari all'uso della bomba atomica."

I cannot give a good English translation of the quotation, but here is a try: "The dilemma is: do you want the ban (of the use of the atomic bomb) acting within the  scope of full sovereignty of states , or it is recognized that the  prohibition presupposes a surrender of the sovereignty? This is the  touchstone of the seriousness and the sincerity of the goals of those who  claim to be opposed to use of the atomic bomb." (Grateful for corrections.)

The paradox that sovereignty is also needed to decide about nuclear disarmament can be solved if we recognize the sovereignty of the people versus that of the state. We, the peoples of Europe, can decide about European nuclear disarmament. States may not be capable of doing that decision because of the limitations to their sovereignty. The sovereign state, as Einaudi notes in another of his articles, is actually a myth.


Footnote:

The texts by Luigi Einaudi to which I refer are: La Società delle Nazioni è un ideale possibile? ; Chi vuole la pace? ; Il mito dello Stato sovrano, and Chi vuole la bomba atomica?  These articles are linked to the page of the ISTITUTO ITALIANO PER GLI STUDI FILOSOFICI.