| frontier with Western Europe, and there was everything to play for. Even though I was just a foreign tourist, I could feel the exhilaration in the air. Everybody was on a high and I suspect that the positive morale and the energy which was released will inspire Eastern Europe for a generation. When I say Eastern Europe I mean the Visegrad group of countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia) plus the Baltic States, Slovenia and, I hope, Croatia. In Romania, however, and much of the rest of the former Yugoslavia, authoritarianism and the worst kind of nationalism are withering the bright hopes. The mind-set of Communism lives on. Yugoslavia is the most tragic case, for it appeared to be the most open and liberal of the Communist states; and yet, since the fall of Communism, it has become a byword for barbarism. |
| I have written of the excitement of discovering the missing third of our continent. The Independent summed it up best in the headline of a classic editorial written at the end of 1989: 'The world has no edge any more.' East of the Iron Curtain lay lands of which we knew less than Japan or India, blank spaces on the map like Central Africa in a Victorian atlas. |
| I deliberately did not write that Eastern Europe was more alien than those countries; far from being alien, its cities are as European as London or Paris. I felt completely at home there. The lifestyle and architecture are our own. Indeed it was the architecture, that least transportable of the arts, which was the foremost discovery for an English visitor: the Gothic of Prague, the baroque of Vilnius - examples could multiply into a list. Yet to our great-grandparents these were familiar places, where any traveller might comfortably go. Anthony Trollope, surely the most English of novelists, set one of his novels, Nina Balatka, in Prague after going there on holiday. |
| So much of our own history is there. The balance of power, which was the lodestar of British foreign policy for centuries, depended on Eastern Europe in its equation. The Second World War was begun to protect Poland; the irony is that it ended with an occupied Poland. So much of our thought is there too. Eastern Europe was home to Kepler and Copernicus, who changed our understanding of the world on the foundations of Galileo's work; |
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