From Sarajevo to Sarajevo

From Gdansk on the Baltic to Dubrovnik on the Adriatic, from Prague in the heart of the old continent to Sofia near Europe’s eastern periphery, freedom has come to east?central Europe: freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Throughout the region elected governments are in place.

Unfortunately, if understandably, what attracts more attention is the ugly underside of the transition to democracy: war, political fragmentation and economic despair. Instead of dialogue and debate, there is demagoguery. Instead of consensus, there is contention and confrontation. Instead of new governments adopting a forgive?but?do?not?forget policy toward the communist past in order to deal with the tasks ahead, mysterious sources leak politically inspired, doctored lists of former agents, informers and collaborators. Especially in countries where the communist regimes were relatively mild, as in Poland and in Hungary, there are even signs of nostalgia now for the authoritarian order of recent years.

The main questions remain as they have been since 1989: Will the fragile democracies of east?central Europe take hold and last? Will they become stable enough to join the west European political and economic order? The war tearing Yugoslavia apart now overshadows these questions and exacerbates the problems of transition to democracy. The related but more pressing questions today are the war’s international repercussions and implications: Does it portend the beginning of the Balkanization of Europe, east and possibly west? If so, do American and west European interests call for more timely and active Western engagement aimed not only at preventing the proliferation of small wars but moderating the region’s growing instability as well?

The horrors of Sarajevo 1992 bear scant resemblance to the events that followed Sarajevo 1914, but the collapse of communism has rekindled ancient political feuds as antagonistic and passionate as ever. They spring from the suddenly freed stresses and strains of the communist era itself, from the memory of destruction and dislocations during and after World War II and from real and perceived injustices imposed by the post?World War I territorial settlements. Countering if not canceling the region’s democratic impulse, these passions—the enduring historical legacy of the twentieth century—delimit the pace and define the substance of postcommunist transformation.

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