The legacy of division: East and West after 1989
When the Cold War came
to a sudden end thirty years ago, the two halves of the continent declared in
unison their intention to overcome the legacy of the division. Eastern
Europeans appeared eager to ritually condemn, if not to critically examine,
their recent past and were especially keen on asserting and proving their
‘Europeanness.’ Westerners, too, hoped to see the countries of the former
Eastern bloc transformed and potentially absorbed into an enlarged and ever
deeper project of political integration. Mutual ignorance and deep-seated
misperceptions seemed a temporary hindrance on the path towards the unification
of the continent.
After 1989, the
conviction became common that the Cold War had been an anomaly. The Iron Curtain
may have enforced a perception of stark differences between the two halves of
the continent, and may even have turned such differences into a fact for more
than a generation, but the distinction between East and West was said to be
little more than a symbolic construct. It was repeatedly asserted that the
boundary separating the two halves of the continent was fluid, negotiable, and
subject to deconstruc-tion. Yet the integration projects launched during the
early postwar decades, which despite being restricted to one side of the Iron
Curtain made increasing claims to represent Europe as a whole, drew on
long-standing traditions in western European thought that marginalized and even
excluded the experiences of the continent’s eastern half.
And it was similarly
overlooked that structural differences between various macro-regions of Europe
had a history stretching back much further than the Cold War.... read more:
