A Call for Sacrifice

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Four years after the fall of communism, it can be said without much exaggeration that this momentous historical event has caused the democratic West some major headaches. For all we know, many a Western politician may occasionally wonder, in the privacy of his mind, whether it might not have been a mistake to support the struggles for self-liberation within the Soviet bloc (even though that support was mainly verbal and moral) and whether the West should not have done more to prolong the existence of communism. After all, the world used to be so simple: there was a single adversary who was more or less understandable, who was directed from a single center, and whose sole aim in its final years (not counting some predictable exceptions) was to maintain the status quo. At the same time, the existence of this adversary drew the West together as well, because faced with this global and clearly defined danger, it could always somehow agree on a common approach.

All that has vanished. The world has suddenly become unusually complex and far less intelligible. The old order has collapsed, but no one has yet created a new one. Meanwhile, the "postcommunist world" is constantly springing new surprises on the West: nations hitherto unheard of are awakening and want countries of their own. Highly improbable people from God knows where are winning elections. It is not even clear whether the very people who four years ago so astonishingly roused themselves from their torpor and overthrew communism do not actually miss that system today.

The unwitting nostalgia in the West for the old order may be discerned even in such superficial matters as how they refer to our countries. From the Czech Republic to Kazakhstan we are, and will no doubt remain for some time, "postcommunist countries" and "former members of the former Warsaw Pact." I am guilty of having used these expressions myself, but I must admit an increasing aversion to them. After all, we did not go through the trouble of getting rid of communism only to have it remain, even with a prefix, forever sewn to our coats. Nor did we go through the trouble of liquidating the Warsaw Pact only to bear forever the stigma of our former membership in it. (Not long ago I observed, somewhat undiplomatically, that we do not refer to the United States as a "former British colony.")