ABSTRACT
Western policies must attempt to balance the requirement to promote constructive change inside Eastern Europe with the greater interest in maintaining regional security. The need to give priority to security over change arises not because of a callous disregard for the moral necessity to promote policies in Eastern Europe which advance human rights and democratic freedoms. Rather, it is because previous experience has shown that the Soviet Union and local regimes cannot be ‘forced’ by the West to provide such rights and freedoms. Western policies vis-à-vis the countries of Eastern Europe must accept these imperatives categorically; for without such recognition, both the Soviet Union and East European elites would work against and frustrate Western policies. Western policy formulation must recognize the uniquely defensive orientation of East European and Soviet policies. Western values have resisted and now supplanted the East’s concentrated effort to inculcate communist ideology.
