ABSTRACT
This article reviews the unique congressional role in foreign policy and assistance programs to East and Central Europe. It puts forth the thesis that policy leadership in these areas from 1989 to 1991 largely emanated from the Congress, not the executive branch. It further reviews the role of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee and the foreign assistance policy of this region and raises questions concerning the assistance programs and their future direction.
How one assesses the status of intraregional cooperation in East-Central Europe depends on whether such cooperation is seen as an end in itself, or only as one means toward the larger goal in integration into European political, economic, and security structures. Viewed from the former perspective, the record of the four years since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact is rather meager and, with the fading of Visegrad’s luster, the outlook is not promising. Viewed from the latter perspective, however, the central weakness in intraregional relations is that the primary goal of most of these countries nas not been integration or cooperation within the region, but escape from a narrow regional identity with a lot of negative historical baggage.
After examining the various obstacles to cooperation in East-Central Europe, including the divisive legacies of both the pre-com-munist and communist periods, this paper looks at several intra-and inter-regional initiatives (most important, the Visegrad group and the Central European Initiative), as well as the implications of shifts in Russian policy toward the republics of the former Soviet Union and its former Warsaw Pact allies. It concludes that interregional initiatives are more likely to be successful because they bring the East-Central European states into cooperation with states outside the region (in particular states belonging to the European Union and NATO), and because the latter are more likely to have the resources necessary to carry out proposed projects. It also concludes that Russia’s recent attempts to reassert its dominance in the former Soviet space, and especially in Ukraine, leaves the countries of East-Central Europe little choice but to press their case for full membership in West European/North Atlantic structures.
