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had always been there. There is also another, more negative, genre of this
art of archaeology: it digs out everything and demolishes those
gravestones and walls that bear symbols unfriendly to itself.
We now know what people in Eastern Europe want. They are no
longer forced to be afraid of military or police actions, at least not im–
mediately. This is a big relief, and as a result all kinds of underground
national tendencies are being expressed. The political structure of Europe
did manage to survive the dissolution of the old regimes, at least until the
last two years, during which the Soviet Union collapsed. In this period
of change, the acceptable criteria for stability seemed to be the provision
of rearranged housing, the sanctification of political and international
borders, and a kind of refrigeration of the status quo . This is probably
still the highest priority among the politicians who care about stability;
they would consider the moving of national borders to be extremely
dangerous gestures.
Because the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have fallen apart, the sense
that you can't touch borders, that they are a kind of sacred cow, has
become very questionable. Inevitably, there are people who now say, "If
they have the right of self-determination, why shouldn't we have it too?"
Size cannot really be definitively given as a reason for denial. The
Slovenians wanted to become independent, and they were criticized:
"You are too small a nation; you can't really be autonomous; you will
be too dependent; you can't stand on your own ." "Look at Luxem–
bourg," the Slovenians answered. When the Serbs in Croatia saw that
the Croatians could be independent, they wanted their own territories
to be independent as well. And if the Moldavians have an independent
statehood, why should a Russian who lives there not also want an inde–
pendent statehood? Now these problems have become a mess.
The national state did not appear as such a strong historical force in
the nineteenth century, because it was not possible to create clear-cut
national states. The ethnic mixture of the territories - big, intermingled
islands of very different national groups - made it almost impossible to
draw clear ethnic border lines. There were some attempts to do so, and
even from America came some experiments. There are some anecdotes
about this, not very happy ones. For instance, when President Roosevelt
went to Yalta, he brought a sketch, prepared by the American State
Department, proposing where certain national borders should be drawn,
which the Hungarians had found acceptable. But when Roosevelt got to
Yalta, he was sleepy, and he forgot to take the sketch out of his luggage.
So its proposed border lines were not followed, and as a result millions
of people remained, as a minority, in a situation they didn't like.
Now, many nations are full of resentments. There are those that
wou ld like to become independent, to have a national state. They say
