ABSTRACT
Eastern Europe is heading into a period of stress that could pose new questions for the alliances of East and West. But East European diversity, fostered partly by contacts with the West, poses a constant challenge to Soviet orthodoxy, demonstrating that different roads to socialism and different foreign policies are possible within the Soviet orbit. Trouble in Eastern Europe would have implications for the whole European security system. The West also has political interests in Eastern Europe. The structures imposed upon Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union and maintained by established domestic bureaucracies are less and less appropriate for dealing with the strains of modernization and the growth of more complex, educated societies. Since then, Soviet failure to create a viable and stable empire in Eastern Europe has become more manifest. Contingency plans for crises in Eastern Europe could be worked on continuously.
