ABSTRACT
In one long revolutionary wave, the East European regimes of ‘really existing socialism’ have been swept away in the past two years. Communism as a living political movement no longer exists, and anticommunism is therefore no longer an essential element of bourgeois ideology in the West. Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and most of their former allies in the Third World (Angola, Ethiopia, Vietnam), are swiftly being reintegrated into the world economy, their social structures overturned to accommodate their insertion into the global capitalist class structure. In these formerly socialist countries, neoliberalism has become the predominant ideology legitimating the privatization of the state-controlled economy and the substitution of the market for the social provision of basic welfare. For Europe as a whole this has set in motion processes of economic and political liberalization and mass migration on a scale unprecedented in the past century. The need for a ‘New European Architecture’ (Holman 1992) determines the shape of European politics to come.
