Hungarian Review November 2014 [antikvár]

John O'Sullivan One hundred years ago a war began that swept away imperial institutions and national powers that had appeared to be permanent, irremovable and deeply rooted structures of European life. To take the most dramatic example, the Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov dynasties — with all their aristocratic associations and bureaucratic stability — were defeated in war and soon afterwards more or less evaporated. In 1917 the totalitarian bacillus was introduced into European political life when Imperial Germany sent Lenin in a sealed train to Saint Petersburg where he exploited the revolutionary chaos of post-Czarist Russia to establish Soviet power. That power expanded to cover the Eastern half of Europe in the next twenty years and divided it from the West. It too looked irremovable; certainly most Western governments treated it as so. Then, in 1989, Soviet power unexpectedly imploded and in the ensuing two years all its European satrapies collapsed before a wave of popular resistance initiated by Hungary's decision to open its borders allowing East German holiday-makers to flee to the West. Within a relatively short time, however, a new European political status quo had been estabhshed. The nations of Central and Eastern Europe had transformed themselves into market democracies. NATO and the European Union had expanded to include them in an Atlantic zone of security and prosperity. Post-Soviet Russia had seemingly accepted this new balance of power. The Kremlin sought fiill membership of the Western market system. It even had a partnership agreement with NATO. Once again there was an irremovable structure of international power — more stable on this occasion than before, it seemed, because no one wanted to remove it. But is this post-1989 status quo about to suffer the same erosion and eventual collapse that brought down the pre-19l4 and post-1947 European orders? That question runs ominously through this issue of Hungarian Review. It is raised, first, by György Schöpflin in relation to the political future of the European Union following the recent elections for the European Parliament. As he points out, the increase in the number of MPs elected for Eurosceptic parties has created a dilemma for Europe's conservative and socialist blocs: "if the potential blocking veto by the Eurosceptics is to be evaded, then the largest Euro-friendly parties must come to terms with one another". EDITORIAL NOTE 3