ABSTRACT
Thus far in this discussion we have seen that the dominant Western response to the collapse of communism, conceived as a modernist system, has been typically modernist. The West assumed, quite incorrectly, that the communist utopia would be replaced by the modernist utopia of capitalism and perhaps by the postmodern utopia of tolerance. Instead of criticizing the evils of communism, and yanking communism out by its roots, the West embarked on a veritable orgy of Nazi-hunting, as if the 1990s were really the late 1940s, and Nazism, not communism, the real threat to world security. The postcommunist foreign policies of Britain, France, and the USA-the three primary countries in which Enlightenment narratives took root-were characterized by nostalgia for the former Soviet Union and by what might be called Yugonostalgia. Gorbachev was supported by the West until it had no choice but to back Boris Yeltsin, And for all its protests against Slobodan Miloševic, the West took steps to make sure that Miloševic would win against the Croats and Muslims. As a result, the West alienated the Islamic world, and caused formerly communist nations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to wonder why they ever admired the West. What is the basis for this affinity between so-called postmodernism and communism conceived as a modernist system?
