Eastern Europe: the Illusion and the Reality - Essay Example

Eastern Europe: The Illusion and the Reality 2006 Introduction In 1946, Winston Churchill declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent". It was a gallant yet difficult time. The world was in disorder after the end of World War II. Churchill was no longer the UK's prime minister. Still, US President Harry Truman toured 1,000 miles to Fulton, Missouri, to listen to Churchill’s speech at the event of his getting an honorary degree at Westminster College. "Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia - all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere", he said. Stalin was infuriated at the reference of Iron Curtain. He branded Churchill a "warmonger" and prohibited the speech to be published in the Soviet Union. Yet the speech became one of those “vintage” Churchill - serious, fluent and mercilessly truthful--one of his most spectacularly unbeaten allegorical statements. It was an excuse for America, by now the world's superpower, to admit the abrasive reality about Stalin - that on his commands the Russians were in the course of enforcing one-party rule by communist governments in all the countries under their armed rule. America had long been unwilling to admit this. But, by the next year, President Truman had decided over a strategy of restraining Soviet power. In 1948, any lingering hesitations were done away with the communist invasion in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Cordon when the Russians attempted but not succeeded to starve West Berlin into giving in (Horsley, Churchill speech). The mental barrier Larry Wolff, in his book, Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) finds the coinage “iron curtain”, separating Europe in two, (“into Western Europe and Eastern Europe”) standing as a decisive, “structural boundary, in the mind and on the map… of Europe with its many countries and cultures” that was “mentally marked with Churchill's iron curtain, an ideological bisection of the continent during the Cold War”. Wolff cites from Churchill’s speech saying that “a shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory". To Wolff, the shadow “too was cast upon the map, darkening the lands behind the iron curtain”. In the shadow, Wolff contemplates, one could imagine loosely anything was sad or distasteful, disturbing or frightening, and still it was also likely not to look too directly, allowed even to turn around or ahead of--for who could look through an iron shutter and distinguish the forms enclosed in shadow? (Page 1, Introduction Wolff, 1994) The farsighted Fulton speech For Wolff, Churchill’s speech was prophetic. In the introduction of Inventing Eastern Europe, he says that Churchill recognized the lands at the back of the iron curtain as "these Eastern States of Europe", a mass of lands belonging to many countries in what Churchill found to be under “the Soviet sphere," of "totalitarian control.", the point of exception in this area, according to Churchill was " Athens alone--Greece with its immortal glories..". Churchill admitted, "The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast". Conversely, there was also the rationale to acknowledge, endorse and even implement the more and more perceptible parting. "In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety," said Churchill who was concerned about political penetration, about ideological pollution. Wolff considers Churchill’s speech actually added to the “crystallization” of ideological areas in Europe, speeding up the toughening of lines. In his memoirs, reminds Wolff, Churchill explained that he was not just an utterly naive witness of what took place in the Eastern states of Europe, that he had been keen to play a role in defining the line. Even before the Fulton speech, he met Joseph Stalin in Moscow in 1944, suggesting sharing postwar power in the same Eastern states. For a period of more than 40 years, both East and West lived under the continuous danger of destructive nuclear war. The time of utmost risk may have been the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Soviet Red Army employed its tanks to suppress uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviet hold on its satellites was deteriorated by Poland's Solidarity upheaval in 1980-81. But hardly anyone foretold how the Iron Curtain would finally be tattered down - by a series of uprisings by people culminating in to the oust of communist rules across eastern Europe in 1989, subsequently the termination of the Soviet Union (Horsley, Churchill speech). Political revolts brought democratic elections, an opportunity to market capitalism, the withdrawal of controls on voyages, the pulling out of Soviet troops and finally in 1991 the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact that was confronting its corresponding concordat of NATO in Western Europe, which since the 1950s had classified the continent into challenging alliances busy in the Cold War. The radical fall down of communism in Eastern Europe and the finish of the Cold War made pointless the typical terms that implied the brusque division of Europe into contrasting halves: Churchill's “iron curtain”, “the Soviet sphere”, the menacing “shadow”, etc. All of a sudden, the partition of Europe seemed to have ended, wiped away, brought to an end, the halves out of the blue joined up as one continent (Introduction, Wolff, 1994). Wolff was in Poland, meeting with Polish professors to talk about the difficult and doubtful implication of Soviet glasnost for Eastern Europe (Introduction, Wolff, 1994). The shadow continues The revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe has mostly wiped off the five decade-old view, forcing a re-evaluation Europe as one. Those maps are to be re-adjusted and modified but their arrangements are severely rooted and strongly persuasive. In the 1990s Italian are agitatedly expelling Albanian refugees. Germans are welcoming tourists from Poland with brutal hostility and neo-Nazi protests, while tourists from Eastern Europe are being at random brought to a halt and investigated in Paris shops, under the misgiving of theft. Political heads, who once earnestly expected the concord of Europe, are avoiding to observe the blockade of Sarajevo, thinking possibly that it were taking place on some other continent. The iron curtain is no more there yet, between the illusion and the reality, falls its Chuchillian “shadow.” The shadow lingers, sine the notion of Eastern Europe stays, even without the iron curtain. This is not just because that the old hang-ups are dawdling to wipe out themselves but primarily since that idea of Eastern Europe is older much than the Cold War. Churchill's pompous image of the iron curtain also screened something that made his descriptions so commanding - the outlines of a history that created the notion of Eastern Europe long ago. The "iron curtain" flawlessly matches the much older history of Eastern part of Europe albeit abandoned, or censored, t an older era in the history of ideas that first separated the continent, making the dis-amalgamation of Western Europe and Eastern Europe (Pages 1-4, Introduction, Wolff, 1994). The case with Poland: Havel and afterwards While people all over the world generally applauded the seeming end of the Soviet controlled rule in Poland, it was substituted by a fusion of Communist control by cunning and completely crooked Communists who would not give up power. Evidently, "the fix is in" in Prague. One needs to listen to what Miami writer, Ross Hedvicek, a former Czech writes: "It is a mystery to me why, 15 years after the country's alleged switch to democracy, the Czech Republic cannot - or does not want to - produce quality people with a clean past to represent them abroad and fill the top positions of their government. Why are only ex-communists available? Is it accidental? …Or worse - intentional?" He writes: "The two main Czech political parties, CSSD and ODS, are heavily populated by ex-communists, who (after the fake Velvet Revolution) simply left their original Stalinist Communist Party and joined these two. The KSCM (non-apologetic Stalinist communists) is the third-strongest party in the country” (as cited in LeBoutillier, 2005). Elaborating further Hedvicek says that Former president Vaclav Havel gave life term to communist judges from pre-revolution Czechoslovakia (to be a communist was a precondition for the job, he asserted), making them feel fairly protected. Havel's successor, Czech president Vaclav Klaus, refuses to name around 36 new judges since they are too young to have a communist background! He finds the misuse of power in the Czech justice system is becoming unbridled. This all dates back to the imaginary ‘end' of Communism in Czechoslovakia - to the thrilling days of what was then branded as the Velvet Revolution, which witnessed the famed author Vaclav Havel rise to the presidency. Havel was then treated like the Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa for having risen against the Communists (LeBoutillier, 2005). The same voice of dissent against Havel is also heard from Václav Klaus, a tough guardian of freedom who admittingly says : “Fifteen years after the collapse of communism. I am afraid more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become – under different names, e.g. the welfare state or the soziale Marktwirtschaft – the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization.”(Cited from Czech President Warns, brusselsjournal.com) The President is obviously against market economy, which he brands as“Europeanism” and is for the “contemporary version of world-wide socialism” which to him means “environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism.” This might as well stem out from the typical East European aversion against the western sense of human rights that for a long time was driven th market, commmodities and sharply defined value standards. The East European thought even to the extent of building societies relied heavily on philosophical thoughts as illistrated glaringly in Vaclav Havel’s attachement to "values that underlie the European tradition" that are backed by "a metaphysically anchored sense of responsibility." A devoted follower of Masaryk, Husserl, and Patocka (Husserl’s Lebenswelt, lived though world that inspired Masaryk and Patocka to rebuild a sense of ethics in a Godless world shaped by totalitarian regime) Havel On June 8, 1995, in a beginning address at Harvard, Havel spoke on related themes. He said that the world has by now come in a single technological civilization. He praised the scientific attainment that made such a civilization achievable but -- in the spirit of Masaryk, Husserl, and Patocka -- sounded anxious. Actually, to offset this single technological civilization, a opposing pressure is taking place, an experience that Havel found, as the revival of an "archetypal spirituality" that is "the foundation of most religions and cultures" -- "respect for what transcends us, whether we mean the mystery of Being or a moral order that stands above us." (Capp, Interpreting Havel). In this address he warned to dissociate the audience from “egoistical anthropocentrism”, the habit of “seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us”. “We must discover, he asserted, “ a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality”. Adding further: “Our respect for other people, for other nations, and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of Being, where it is judged”( Havel, Commencement Address, Harvard Univ., 1995). His intention was to invite the Harvard graduates to accept responsibility for creating "a new order for the world." In another address on May 15, 1996, in Aachen (The Hope for Europe), he made an aggressive review of Europe's control, both disparaging and helpful, on civilization, and foresees the role that the area might implement today. The difference is derived from his understanding of Husserl’s ideas on moral ambivalence in ma modern world. Havel recognizes "the starting point" with "a discussion about Europe as a place of shared values" when it comes to talk about "European spiritual and intellectual identity or -- if you like -- European soul." Havel expects that post-Cold War Europe "might establish itself on democratic principles as a whole entity for the first time in its history" (The Hope for Europe as cited in Capp, Interpreting Havel). Havel says that the only significant job for the Europe of the millennium is to revitalize its best saintly and intellectual heritage and thus assist to create a new global model of coexistence. Like the illustrious Russian Nobel writer and rebel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Havel has many a times underscore the moral revitalization of the individual to transform the social order” For Havel and most of his likes in the Eastern Europe, the “basic historical experience” that, finally, can be truly triumphant and politically evocative “must first and foremost-that is, before it has taken any political form at all” be an appropriate and sufficient reply to the basic “moral dilemmas of the time”, or an manifestation of admiration for the “imperatives of the moral order” bestowed to “us by our culture. It is a very clear understanding that the only kind of politics that truly makes sense is one that is guided by conscience. " (Havel in 1999, as cited in kirjasto.sci.fi) Borders as a mental construct The entire question of borders in Europe today is seen more from mental concepts rather than of geographical divides marked in maps—mental builds that shape up identities. As a result, borders are looked as flowing units formed by cultures, identities, histories and societies they search to define. This method gives an enormously helpful scaffold for questions of insertion and segregation concerning the repeated making and re-making of modern Europe. In The Fluid Borders of Europe, through a succession of case-studies, such examples of addition and omission have been In so doing the authors intend to depict that ideas of who have been closely related to the identities that have made Europe’s professed borders. These issues are mirrored in characteristics of European history, societies and culture. Culture is considered to imply here, in Cristina Chimisso’s definition, “the totality of symbols and artifacts produced by human beings…. Modes of thinking, feeling and behaving, …. Values, customs, traditions and norms’ (Chimisso, 2003, p 14, Pittaway , Introduction). Conclusion Larry Wolff, in his Inventing Eastern Europe, definitely points out with philosophical perspectives a new concept of Eastern Europe, not narrowed by political superficialities and grand rhetoric. As he rationally deduces in the conclusion that Eastern Europe “were not in themselves invented or fictitious; those lands and the people who lived in them were always quite real”(Page 356-357), the reader understands that much of the metaphors pertaining to the mysteries on the other side of the “iron curtain” are political lies. Works Cited Horsley, William, Churchill’s speech, A Lesson for the Present, retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4776444.stm Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, 1994. LeBoutillier, John, Communists Still Run Eastern Europe, Part II- Czech Republic, retrieved from http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/5/10/190148.shtml Capp, Walter H, Interpreting Vaclav Havel, retrieved from http://www.crosscurrents.org/capps.htm Havel, Vaclav, Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1995 Havel, The Hope for Europe, The New York Review, June 29, 1996, 38, 40-41. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vhavel.htm Pittaway, Mark, Introduction, The Fluid Borders of Europe, Chimisso, C. Exploring European Identities, Milton Keynes, The Open University, 2003 Read More