Volume 44, Number 9 · May 29, 1997
New Germany, Old NATO
By Tony Judt
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft
by Philip Zelikow, by Condoleezza Rice
Harvard University Press, 493 pp., $18.95 (paper)
American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider's Account of US Policy in Europe, 1989-1992
by Robert L. Hutchings
Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 456 pp., $39.95
Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany
by Charles S. Maier
Princeton University Press, 440 pp., $29.95
Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe
by Juan J. Linz, by Alfred Stepan
Johns Hopkins University Press, 479 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The Dawn of Peace in Europe
by Michael Mandelbaum
Twentieth Century Fund, 207 pp., $19.95
In January 1992 the then prime minister of Hungary, Mr. Jozsef Antall, bemoaned to a Hungarian audience the West's lack of appreciation for Central Europeans' heroic role in the downfall of communism: 'This unrequited love must end because we stuck to our posts, we fought our own fights without firing one shot and we won the third world war for them.'[1] Whatever his shortcomings as a historian, the late Mr. Antall had inadvertently identified an enduring confusion surrounding the events of 1989 and after. In the course of less than two years the cold war came to an end, a string of authoritarian regimes in Central Europe collapsed, the Soviet empire imploded, and communism, as an ideology of government, disappeared.
Review, 6477 words
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