Central Europe in the New World Disorder
Central Europe in the New World Disorder

Summary/Abstract: Today it is apparent that the over-optimistic words of President G. H. W. Bush delivered exactly eleven years before the attack on the World Trade Center, announcing a New World Order, recalling the unfulfilled promises of the Atlantic Charter of 1941, were expressions of an illusion. Writing in the very first issue of this journal in November 2010 I enumerated some of the signs of disillusionment and even had the temerity to offer a few remedies. Today the political scene and the perspectives are very different. Apart from the menacing war capabilities of China and the immediate threat posed by the “Islamic State”, the European dream is shattered by Euro-scepticism born out of the financial crisis of 2008, and Putin’s Russia has reasserted itself as an imperialistic great power threatening its large “near abroad” area. In Central Europe, and particularly in Hungary, where enthusiasm towards the West was very strong during the Cold War, faith in capitalism has almost evaporated, as the gap in the standard of living and in the quality of life between the western and eastern half of Europe has hardly narrowed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The phrases of the old Marxist political economy textbooks about the vices of capitalism are dusted off to be wielded by the rightist media in Hungary, and by a re-born (though still small) New Left in the West, particularly in Greece. This disillusionment has opened up a chance for Russia, unimaginable even two years ago, to be seen as an attractive partner, even as an alternative for an exclusively Western political and economic orientation. Energy dependence plays a big role in that, but secularist opposition to Christianity in the West (like the replacement of wishing “merry Christmas” by “season’s greetings” or “happy holidays”) also provokes such feelings.

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