East-Central Europe: The Morning After

Abstract

E m -* astern Europe is now east-central Europe. The political earthquake that occurred in 1989 has shifted the region's six former Soviet allies away from the East and closer to the West. All are now independent and all now embrace the concept of free enterprise. The countries often identified as central European?Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and what was East Germany?have already adopted democratic institutions. Farther to the south, in the Balkans?in Bulgaria and espe cially in Romania?democracy has yet to be won.1 Like most things hyphenated, east-central Europe is ab sorbed in an ardent and arduous search for a new identity. The euphoria of 1989 has given way to the painful awakening of the morning after. The magnificent display of common purpose and the simple clarity of last year's peaceful revolutions?us versus them, the people united against the communist proprietors of power?have been replaced by confusion, division and disappointment. There is confusion because the struggle is no longer only between "us" and "them," but among us. Wherever the com munists submitted to the popular will and lost, new divisions have come to impede the work of some of the freely elected, noncommunist governments. In Poland, the impressive unity of Solidarity is gone. With pressure for Slovak autonomy rapidly growing, Czechoslovakia has already been renamed the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. In Hungary, there is an intense struggle under way between those concerned fore most with the fate of millions of ethnic Hungarians in neigh boring countries, especially in Romania, and those whose main priority is the shaping of a political and economic order that Europe will welcome. Only in the Balkans do old dividing lines remain largely intact. Election results in both Bulgaria and