The West Must Not Betray the Hopes of 1989

It is fashionable these days to mock the tremendous optimism that swept across Europe five years ago in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems absurd to have hoped that the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe would usher in a golden age of peace, unity and prosperity for the continent.


Now, when we look across the former Communist lands, it seems that we see little except war, aggressive nationalism, industrial desolation, gangsterism and fraud masquerading as the entrepreneurial spirit, and the torn fabric of societies uncertain of what unites them and which direction they should be taking.


Moreover, we are witnessing what appears, on the surface, to be a resurgence in power of those very same Communists whose mismanagement and repressive methods ruined their countries and who now apply a reassuring social democratic label to their parties. They are back in government in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania; they have restored their fortunes in eastern Germany. In places such as Romania, Bulgaria and several former Yugoslav republics they seem never really to have left the scene


As far as concerns the international status of the East European states, it seems they have slipped back into the kind of insecure limbo that beset them in the two decades before World War II. Western countries have not guaranteed their independence and have even held back from naming a specific date by which the most reformist states -- such as the Czech Republic and Poland -- could enter the European Union. There is a strong suspicion in eastern Europe that the West is afraid to do anything that might provoke the Russian giant into its bad old ways.


All these arguments contain a degree of validity, but I think the overall picture is better than the pessimists allow. With the major exception of the Yugoslav wars, extreme nationalism and ethnic tensions have generally not flared into serious conflict. The Czech-Slovak divorce was peaceful, Poland has handled its German minority problem sensibly, the issue of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria has quieted down, and even the Hungarian-Romanian and Greek-Albanian disputes have not boiled over.


The East European economies present a mixed picture of achievement and failure. But it was never realistic to expect that in a mere five years the creaking command economies of the region could be turned into sleek, efficient models of capitalism. This was even less likely to happen, given that the 1989 revolutions coincided with the start of a prolonged recession in the West.


This still leaves the biggest question of all: the degree to which the East European countries are likely to be fully integrated into the open, prosperous Western world. There is still a real chance that this can happen, but if it is not taken the 1989 revolutions will look more and more like those of 1848 -- briefly triumphant, then betrayed.


Ironically, in 1848 it was the forces of reaction, the conservative empires of central and eastern Europe, that crushed the revolutions, whereas this time it could well be the liberal democratic West that seals the fate of the hopes of 1989. Fine words cannot disguise the fact that the West has failed to launch a grand plan for eastern Europe and, when all is said and done, is taking a very narrow view of what constitutes Western security. It is a lack of vision for which the West may pay dearly one day.