Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

126 Iver B. Neumann
but also in the progress they have already made on the road to democracy, the
rule of law, and a market economy. 9
So, the three co-authors conclude, ‘Following the suggestion originally
made by the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Ji˘rí Dienstbier, some of the
aid to Russia and the other post-Soviet republics should be made in a
form which both enables and obliges them to spend it in east central
Europe.’ Moreover, all other EC concerns should be streamlined to the
overriding priority of catering to ‘Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia’:
‘All proposals for a deepening of the present EC of twelve through closer
integration must be workable by extension in a community of twenty’.
Finally, it is asserted that all good things may come together. Privileging
‘central Europe’ will turn it into ‘a magnet for south-east Europe, for the
Baltic states, the Ukraine, and, yes, for the European parts of Russia’,
and the broadening of the Communities it entails will ‘help in deepening’
the EC’s integration process as well. All this is presented by The New York
Review of Books under the title ‘Let the East Europeans In!’, which yet
again stresses that what is good for ‘central Europe’ is good for ‘eastern
Europe’ as well as for Europe.
Far from being a peripheral part of the discourse, these formulations
have already found their way into the rhetorical armoury of people like
the Polish minister of foreign affairs. In a tour d’horizon of the state
of European relations in spring 1992, Polish foreign minister Krzysztof
Skubiszewski held that
as a consequence of the end of the Cold War, contemporary security relations
on our continent have lost their simplicity and may be geographically described
as concentric circles progressing from the stable nucleus of the countries of the
European Communities, the western European Union and the North Atlantic
Alliance, to the most unstable peripheries ...The most important danger zone
in Europe, with regard to possible military conflicts, is the area extending between
Russia, the Ukraine, and Romania ...The association of the three countries
[i.e. Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland] with the European Community is relevant
to their security but also to that of the West: the hard core of Europe will
comprise a bigger territory. 10
The memory of Russia
How could the memory of central Europe come to dominate political
discourse so easily?One may of course treat this as a clear-cut case of
9 Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Mertes and Dominique Moïsi, ‘Let the East Europeans
In!’ The New York Review of Books, 24 October 1991, 19.
10 Krzysztof Skubiszewski, ‘The Challenge to Western Policy of Change in Eastern Europe’,
paper presented at the Conference on Britain and the Future of Eastern Europe and the
Former Soviet Union, All Souls College, Oxford, 10–12 April 1992.