ABSTRACT
Four historical processes make the continued acceptance of the division of Europe unwise, not merely for the West but also for the Soviet Union. First, the coming to maturity and responsibility of the generation in Eastern Europe born after World War II, to whom the present arrangements make little sense, is likely to render Stalin’s empire a source of increasing insecurity rather than security for the Soviet peoples. Second, powerful decelerating economic forces at work in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have slowed these countries’ aggregate annual growth rate to something like 1.3 percent. Third, the economic forces at work in the West as well as in the East dictate efforts of the highest seriousness to reduce defense spending. Fourth, there is a new generation in the West that finds irrational the perhaps inevitable but second-rate solution devised by the statesmen of 1945 to 1948.
