ABSTRACT

In the great upheavals of 1989 two major ideas stood out: a return ofthe formerly communist countries to “Europe”; and a return to “civil society”. Both turned out to be quite problematical concepts when applied in practice. They were interdependent, in that European values were supposed to be about tolerance, reconciliation, civility, and more particularly about the rule of law, the restoration of property rights, and representative government. But were these concepts European, “western”, or universal? Between 1914 and 1956 Europe and its values had been anything but civilized. In December 1989 at the superpower summit at sea off the coast of Malta, which definitively ended the Cold War, when US Secretary of State James Baker talked about Germany and “western values”, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union asked why democracy and the market were “western” and whether they were not values which “belonged to the whole of humanity”?1