People at work turn up in their performance gear – the suit and the briefcase. But who are they performing to? Actors know the difference between the cast and the audience. You don’t wear your costume to rehearse, since no one’s watching except your colleagues and the director, and they are not going to judge you. You work with them, and they are there to help you to be brilliant.. IN KOSOVO, our troops try to end a war. Meanwhile, the European elections meet with a giant yawn across the whole of the EU This is the simultaneous theatre of Europe in our time. But what is the deeper historical lesson? One lesson, I believe, is that the leaders of Western Europe set the wrong priorities 10 years ago.

Instead of seizing the opportunities, and preparing to confront the dangers, that would arise from the end of Communism in half of Europe, they set about trying to perfect the internal arrangements of an already well-functioning, peaceful and prosperous community of states in Western Europe. We were like people who for 40 years had lived in a large, ramshackle house, divided down the middle by a concrete wall. In the western half we had rebuilt, mended the roof, knocked several rooms together, redecorated and installed new plumbing and electric wiring, while the eastern half fell into dangerous decay Then the wall came down. What did we do? We decided that what the whole house needed was a superb, computer-controlled air-conditioning system in the western half. While we prepared to install it, the eastern half of the house began to fall apart and even to catch fire. We fiddled in Maastricht, while Sarajevo began to burn.
Now, of course I cannot prove the causal connection that I’m suggesting. You can never prove “what would have happened if…” But make a thought experiment.

Suppose that, after the wall came down, the leaders of the European Community had concentrated their efforts on responding to the challenge in the east. They launched something like a Marshall Plan for the transformation of the post-Communist economies. They supported the build-up of civil society, political parties and independent media – including, for example, the amazing piece of peaceful Albanian self-organisation led by Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo in the early Nineties. They began the specific reforms of the EC’s decision-making and budgets that would obviously be necessary for a rapid enlargement; slimmed down the CAP; changed the way commissioners were appointed; streamlined decision-making in the Council of Ministers, and so on.They moved towards a closer coordination of foreign and security policies, appointing, early in 1990, a single EC foreign policy representative. Recognising that post-Communist nationalisms could lead to armed conflict, they used the post-Cold War restructuring of armed forces to build up a substantial rapid reaction force, having full compatibility of equipment and joint training with each other and with Nato. A common army, rather than a common currency.Needless to say, when Milosevic’s forces besieged the Croatian city of Vukovar two months before the planned Maastricht EC summit of December 1991, they took decisive action to stop him – with the approval of President Gorbachev, and a UN mandate. The Maastricht meeting was devoted to what to do about former Yugoslavia, European foreign and defence policy and preparations for eastward enlargement.I am far from suggesting that this would have solved everything.

The problem of how to turn poor, undemocratic multi-ethnic states into stable, democratic ones, without bloodshed or a tyranny of the ethnic majority, would have remained intractable. But if West European leaders and officials had devoted to these matters even half the vast amount of time and energy that they expended on Maastricht and momentary union, we should surely be in a better position today. Who can seriously doubt it? And Kosovo gives the lie to those who suggest that none of these difficulties could really have been foreseen. In my new book about Europe in the Nineties, History of the Present, I have compiled a detailed chronology linking the essays and reportage, and one of the very first entries reads “January- February 1990, Albanians in Kosovo protest against their province being stripped of its autonomy by Slobodan Milosevic”. The Kosovo crisis was already there.And talking of time scales and priorities, would it really have done so much harm to have worked for another 10 years to achieve a solid convergence between the economies in the single market, before deciding whether to complete it with a single currency?So why did our West European leaders chose this course? Naturally, the project was already to hand – the Delors report on economic and monetary union was presented in April 1989 – and there was a certain momentum behind it in the counsels of the EC. But the decisive impulse came from one particular aspect of the end of the Cold War.