The Role of Subregional Cooperation in Post-Cold War Europe: Integration, Security, Democracy

Abstract

In 1989–90, the strategic geography of continental Europe lay open for change and free creation to a degree that was most unusual in the region’s history. In Central and Eastern Europe, the bonds of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON were dropping away, Soviet forces were gone or on their way out, and the level of strategic tension along what used to be the Central Front had fallen from one of the world’s highest to one of the lowest in human memory. For the new (or more properly, restored) democracies to the east of the old Iron Curtain, there was both internal motive and external opportunity to revel in national independence and explore the full uniqueness of national identity. Our familiarity, in hindsight, with the choices these states made should not blind us to the wider range of options which was theoretically available, and actually debated, at the time. Nor should it blur recognition of how remarkable, in some ways, their choices were.2