The Soviet-East European Relationship in the Gorbachev Era: The Prospects for Adaptation by Aurel Braun

Author:Aurel Braun [Braun, Aurel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000305920
Google: EtqiDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 51869437
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

While dramatic changes ought never to be ruled out entirely, the prudent forecaster is well advised to focus on the likelihood of a protracted but inconclusive period of alternating cycles of reform and retrenchment, relaxation and reimposition of controls, with the basic pattern varying only in details in accordance with specific circumstances from one country to the next. This is what one astute Western journalist has described as “the regress of a would-be totalitarianism” and labelled “the Ottomanization rather than the Finlandization of the Soviet empire.”59

Reasoning by historical analogy is always treacherous. In this instance, one must beware of the enticement of treating Eastern Europe as if it were or else could become a kind of socialist millet system: one is also well advised against succumbing to the temptation of dismissing the Soviet Union as “the sick man” of Europe, if not of the planet. On the other hand, East Central Europe together with Southeast Europe (however we may wish to define each in terms of territory and/or culture) does constitute something of a contemporaneous “sick heart of Europe.”60 Much of the sickness grows out of the continued political dependency of proud peoples who have long been deprived of the opportunity for free national expression. It is precisely “this lack of independent national development,” a Hungarian scholar reminds us, that has “created a special role for cultural identity because the national culture, the native language, and the native histories of this region became the integrating force.”61 That being the case, the politics of cultural identity bids fair to constitute the epicenter of political life throughout Eastern Europe. And whether or not the idea of Central Europe has any real future, its contemporary exponents have already bequeathed it a rich legacy, destined to provoke renewed intellectual controversy and certain to be subject to repeated partisan challenge but, for all of that, a bequest of no small moral worth.

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