Back to the Future or Forward to the Past?
Raymond Pearson on history repeating itself and other lessons from the upheavals in Eastern Europe.
At the height of the annus mirabilis which transformed Eastern Europe over 1989, the Japanese-American historian Francis Fukuyama, hailed 'the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism', a global rout of communism which amounts to the ideological 'End of History'. Over the year following this exultant, controversial, and most of all sanguine celebration of the 'triumph of the West', a spectrum of opinions between the extremes of optimism and pessimism regarding the future of Eastern Europe has become established. Both broad optimistic and pessimistic camps are agreed upon the power of the past, the crucial importance of perceptions of recent history in fashioning the future of contemporary Eastern Europe. Each camp draws present-minded conclusions about progress (or restoration) from the twentieth-century record, juxtaposing the inter-war period of independent Eastern Europe with the post-war era of Soviet domination. But while alike in contrasting the inter-war and post-war experiences, the optimistic and pessimistic camps find contradictory lessons for the future from their characterisations of the living past.
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