ABSTRACT
The collapse of communism in East Central Europe and its unprecedented transition to political and economic freedom carries with it hopes and dangers of great magnitude. Defense of national freedom exacted a heavy price. The concept of East Central Europe is new. Indeed a distinction between a European West and East was nonexistent for a long time. In antiquity the southern Mediterranean world contrasted with the north: civilization with barbarism. The Byzantine Greek Orthodox heritage determined the evolution of one part of the continent; the Roman-Germanic, whether Catholic or Protestant civilization, marked the other. Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland did belong to the Western civilization. Christianity and all that it stood for had come to them from Rome, or to put it differently, the Western impact was the dominant and the lasting one. Certain periods excepted the socio-economic inequality between the core and the periphery was accompanied by feelings of cultural superiority on the part of the West.
