Over the years, my good friend Jacques Rupnik has written commentaries in TNR about the decline of communism in Eastern Europe. Given the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 53rd anniversary of bloody Budapest, Rupnik, a professor at Science-Pol, has written a longish essay for Le Monde, some about the past, some also about the future. Alas, in French.
Point de vue
L'Europe de l'Est, vingt ans après, par Jacques Rupnik
LE MONDE | 09.11.09 | 14h05
Le 20e anniversaire de 1989 semble marqué par la "confusion des sentiments". Il révèle aussi un contraste entre ce qui était jusqu'alors deux parties séparées du Vieux Continent. A l'Ouest, on commémore surtout la chute du mur de Berlin, symbole par excellence de la fin de la guerre froide. A l'Est, on commémore d'abord l'effondrement du communisme et de l'empire soviétique, aboutissement d'un processus que jalonnent les crises de Budapest en 1956, de Prague en 1968 etla naissance de Solidarnosc en 1980-1981.
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COMMENTS (1)
Good general laydown of post-1989 major themes by Rupnik. He acknowledges the astonishment of the new Eastern European democracies that the current economic (but really also social and political) crisis has hit the great inspirers of democratization--the US and UK--the hardest. However, I don't think he conveys just how rapid the fall in our (US) influence in the region is likely to be. In retrospect, the twenty years between 1989 and 2009 may been seen as not unlike the period 1919-1939, a two-decade-long eye of the hurricane in the context of a hugely disruptive global transition. Rupnik doesn't really address the depth of the economic meltdown that is still unfurling in Eastern Europe ... view full comment
Good general laydown of post-1989 major themes by Rupnik. He acknowledges the astonishment of the new Eastern European democracies that the current economic (but really also social and political) crisis has hit the great inspirers of democratization--the US and UK--the hardest. However, I don't think he conveys just how rapid the fall in our (US) influence in the region is likely to be. In retrospect, the twenty years between 1989 and 2009 may been seen as not unlike the period 1919-1939, a two-decade-long eye of the hurricane in the context of a hugely disruptive global transition. Rupnik doesn't really address the depth of the economic meltdown that is still unfurling in Eastern Europe, the utter disillusion it is causing in Latvia, Hungary and elsewhere and the damaging consequences of trying to short-cut economic development with debt-fueled consumption. Nor does he discuss the nascent German-Russian economic condominium that will likely be at the center of European development over the next two decades. Still, the "three-trajectory" construct-- Central Europe, Balkans, former Soviet countries--is a useful division and likewise the concept of "Eurocompatible" nationalists in the Balkans being an acceptable solution to the national issue in that region. All in all, one of the most useful contributions MP has made to the Spine.