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bound to lead them away from most of the gods worshipped only yes–
terday, away from scientific claims and utopian extremism to the
revisionism of a century ago. These revisionists of 1900 have long been
discredited among the neophiliacs and considered intellectually unexcit–
ing. But, in retrospect, they are infinitely more relevant for those who
have embraced the cause of political freedom and social justice.
SHLOMO AVINERI
Reflections on Eastern Europe
The
dramatic developments in Central and Eastern Europe are of such
far-reaching consequences that it is basicalJy premature to assess their his–
torical significance in a wider context. Beyond the obvious and immedi–
ate changes wrought by
perestroika
in the Soviet Union, and the disinte–
gration of the communist regimes in the Warsaw Pact countries, we may
yet lack the perspective necessary for such an historical evaluation. After
all, anyone who would have attempted to sum up the French Revolu–
tion in 1790-91 - before the trial and execution of the King, before the
Jacobin terror and before Napoleon - would have come to very differ–
ent conclusions from what eventually became the conventional wisdom
about the events started by the decision to convene the Estates-General.
However, it has to be admitted that Edmund Burke managed as early as
1790 to assess rightly some of the dangerous potentialities inherent in
some aspects of the revolutionary ideology.
Yet while bearing this caveat in mind, it is still possible to come
to
some conclusions about the nature of the regimes that have collapsed and
about the historical processes involved in their demise. The first, and
perhaps the most obvious conclusion, has to do with our assessment of
totalitarianism. Jeane Kirkpatrick stirred more than one hornet's nest in
her distinction between what she called "authoritarian" and
"totalitarian" regimes. While the theoretical distinction was used by her
merely as an ideological justification for United States support of right–
wing authoritarian governments, mainly in Latin America, the argument
she proposed did raise some serious questions, but what has recently
happened in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe has totally
invalidated her argument. The crux of this argument, it should be
recalled, was that while authoritarian regimes, for all their hideousness,
have internal mechanisms of change, totalitarian regimes, by their very
nature, are wholly lacking in such mechanisms. Hence Western
