ABSTRACT
The chronologies comprising the preceding sections II and III of this book have underlined two basic realities running through the history of central and eastern Europe. The first is the extent to which, for all their distinctive national characteristics, the countries concerned have a common history in the twentieth century of grappling with the challenges of an initially impoverished, poorly educated and underemployed peasantry, weak state structures and social division. They all faced in turn the loss of faith in liberal democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, fascism and Nazism, the devastating impact of the Second World War and finally the assumption of power by Communist regimes (except in Austria), involving some 40 years of cold war. Since 1990, they have also all seen the attempt to create anew a liberal democratic and economic order, and to establish or renew a more western orientation focused on membership of both the European Union and NATO. Fascism, Communism and liberalism alike have held out a promise of modernisation and prosperity equal to, if not superior to, western European levels, but have only succeeded in education. All are currently faced with the problems of social division and discrepancy of wealth between individuals, regions, and town and country, which have the potential to destabilise the whole system. Modernity in the guise of the EU ethos of liberal competition is widely seen as a threat to values, both traditional and inherited from the Communist past. As Ferenc Gyurcsány, the Hungarian prime minister, is reported as saying elsewhere in this book: ‘[from Poland to the Balkans] the fundamental question has not been decided yet – of a progressive modernisation policy or the isolation of radical nationalism. This is the debate that we see happening in all of these countries. Their internal division lines are different. There is a deep, cultural and societal division’.
