ABSTRACT
In the Potsdam-Yalta world, small nation states that had been the fulfilment of nineteenth-century dreams disappeared into the imperial security calculations of Soviet power. In East Europe, ecological collapse is quite close in the denuded forests of northern Czechoslovakia and southern Poland, in the blackened crumbling buildings of Cracow, the acid rain from the chimneys of Nowa Huta. The consequence is that East Germany will need to be dependent on West German electricity. The Eastern Europeans will feel that they are being made to pay the price for a world problem, suffering for the ecological sins of the communists and the ecological obsessions of the capitalists. The national and democratic revolutions will come into conflict with an international ecological movement, which in its high-mindedness threatens to become a new imperialism demanding the sacrifice to its cause of every other value.
