ABSTRACT
Forty years after the Yalta conference, Europe is still divided. The division runs along many lines and borders — national, economic, ideological, and political. There is neither a politically united Western Europe nor a unified communist Europe. Formulating policy seemed easier in the heyday of the Cold War when perceptions were molded by what seemed a clear confrontation of the two camps: East and West, bad and good, slavery and freedom. The fact that in spite, or even because, of such diametrically opposing views all parties continue a sometimes precarious dialogue is perhaps characteristic of East-West relations. These relations clearly have a number of features which are absent in contacts among other states or groups of states. Eastern Europe has become heterogeneous again; or perhaps more precisely: its traditional heterogeneity is resurfacing, albeit in different forms and under very different circumstances.
