Then and now

Having recently been looking back at some of the pages I used to maintain - still haven't taken a few of them down, for various reasons - at the old site (you won't find anything on the index page, it's blank), I'm struck to some extent by the way the content and style of the East-West debate has changed in what - 10 years? In 1994 the (largely unrealistic) hopes that had been fostered in some (mainly business-oriented) sections of public opinion in Western Europe and the US by the changes that took place in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, were still quite fresh and vigorous, and in Internet discussions of the issues related to what was actually going on behind the scenes in Russian government the emphasis for those with anything approaching the "knowledge" tended to be on pricking the bubbles of misplaced optimism that popped up all over the place - from CompuServe's Global Crises Forum all the way to soc.culture.baltics.

As usual, Eastern Europe was caught between a rock and a hard place - this time between a Russian Federation that seemed to have relinquished little of the old Soviet yearnings for Lebensraum to the West, and a United States which, under the Clinton administration, seemed to lean over backwards to accommodate some of the least attractive impulses of a Russian state for which foreign policy, in Europe at any rate, mostly meant verbal and psychological intimidation of its neighbours. The equation was further complicated by the aspirations of East European states to membership of NATO and the EU, and as the decade progressed, there was a growing sense that Russia's new, superficial and "Potemkin Village" brand of Western-style democracy was undergoing a radical rethink within the Kremlin. Events in the Balkans, and especially the US intervention of Kosovo, diverted attention from this process in the Western media, and when September 11, 2001 finally came along, Russia was both retrenching into a much more routine and familiar authoritarian style of government under President Putin and declaring its support for the "War on Terror" - this latter cynically based on the mendacious proposition that the butchery in Chechnya committed by Russian Federal forces was somehow a contribution to the fight against Osama Bin Laden and the Islamists.

But Eastern Europe began to see its wishes fulfilled, with membership of NATO and the EU now within grasp - Russia's hostility notwithstanding. And now we have a situation where East Europeans have become, simply, Europeans, subject to the same suspicion from many quarters in the US that is directed at the "old" Europe of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. Quite what this will lead to in the end is anyone's guess: to judge from the opinions expressed by many Americans now, Europe in their view is "finished", "Islamized" - it has become Eurabia, and is no longer a reliable partner in security-related projects. Meanwhile, in Britain, East European immigrants to the UK are looked on with the same suspicion that is accorded to Muslim immigrants. This is a bizarre, almost surrealistic scenario, and one that no one could have predicted even 5 years ago.

Somehow, suddenly, it's as if America's view of the world has been obscured and distorted by the events of September 11. Whereas once it had a clear view of what was right and wrong on the international stage, it now seems unable to find an anchor in the outside world which can help to give it stability and bearings. The United Nations seems to be dominated by Arab states and the non-aligned countries, Russia is turning from the misguided but friendly "partner in peace" into a rather hostile, authoritarian dictatorship in the hands of a president whose aims and intentions are inscrutable and hard to read, China threatens Taiwan, North Korea remains a threat comparable to that of Saddam's Iraq, post-Saddam Iraq itself is unstable and threatens to unbalance the whole Middle East equation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows no sign of abating...

These are dangerous times. Reading La Forza della Ragione, my favourite book of the last two weeks, I was impressed by the long section in which the author traces the common ancestry of Italian fascism, German National Socialism, and Soviet Communism - and shows the relation of all three to the present threat posed by militant Islam. Perhaps Americans above all need to read Fallaci's book and reflect on some of its sobering conclusions: that the old distinctions between Right and Left are largely meaningless today, that the whole world - not Europe alone - is currently afflicted by a sickness that may very well destroy it if some radical rethinking of the roots and fundamental concepts of democracy is not done, that American military power on its own will be unable to prevent the collapse of Western ideals and civilization in the face of a threat that stems largely from the West's inability to maintain its own cohesion.

Eastern Europe could teach the United States - and the rest of the Western world - a few lessons about how to survive the present international crisis. Let's hope it gets a chance to do that.