Several years ago, we Central Europeans started to undertake various programs in the post-Soviet and Western Balkan countries, teaching them democracy and market economics and, in a well-meaning manner, persuading them to follow the paths of transformation that had brought us, as we believed, nothing but material fulfillment, self-satisfaction and a sense of mission. Being so besotted with our post-1989 success, we thought that history had forgotten about us, that we had somehow escaped the guillotine that had been hanging over us for so many centuries.
We were wrong, though. Georgia should have opened our eyes. But in 2008, Central European countries were more divided than ever before. Heady from our recent accessions to the European Union, we were marking the last days of our welfare states with the music that we believed would never stop. At that very moment, we were not able to speak with one voice on Russian aggression in Georgia, and pretended that South Caucasus was somewhere on another planet—in a different universe, even—somewhere that had not been blessed by a post–Cold War awakening (and what a shame we thought that was). But, quite symbolically, neither was there any common position in the region on such issues as the U.S. missile-defense system. We thought we could play with the big boys all by ourselves.
Source: nationalinterest.org
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