When in 1946, Konrad Adenauer stated that “Asia stands on the Elbe”, he just rephrased, consciously or unconsciously, the nineteenth-century joke of his Austrian colleague, chancellor Metternich, who used to say that the very place where Asia began was just behind the fence of his Viennese garden. For both of them, “Asia” was just another word for something hostile, barbarous and threatening the very existence of their (Western) civilization. For Metternich, implicitly, all the space east of Vienna was culturally inferior and suspicious. As many Westerners of the time, he believed that “the frontiers of civilization did not extend beyond the territorial aspirations of the more timorous Carolingian monarchs” [Judt 1990: 24].
But Adenauer hardly shared this view; in any case, he knew that there was East Germany east of the Elbe and that East Germans did not differ too much from their western compatriots, at least at that time. What he meant by “Asia standing on the Elbe” was a certain political reality brought as far as his own country by the Soviet troops and imposed on Eastern Europeans by brutal force, blackmail and political trickery. “Asia” meant for him not just another civilization—however inferior and alien it might be, as in Metternich’s view—but rather a lack of civilization, an ‘anti-civilization’ which threatened the most fundamental values of the Western world.
The Western perception of Eastern Europe, after 1946, had consisted of various combinations of both feelings, ‘Adenauer’s’ and ‘Metternich’s’. On the one hand, the Westerners recognized that to the east of the Elbe and Metternich’s garden there was also Europe, even though poorer and despised. They knew that this Europe did not accept its ‘Asian’ status voluntarily and that she tried desperately to get rid of it—by all possible means. But, on the other hand, they felt that something was wrong with this part of Europe, since she allowed herself to be swallowed up and since she had been victimized so often and heavily throughout her history. Probably, some Westerners mused, she was guilty herself; she was predisposed and, in fact, doomed to be victimized permanently because she was not European enough, she was not ‘like us’, lucky and happy, she was inferior. As under-Europe, or semi-Europe, she had equal chances to grow up to true Europeanness or to dissolve into entropic Asiaticness. She had lost the first chance that was gifted her after WWI, and now she must pay for it. There was nobody to blame except herself.
A guilty conscience is extremely inventive. Metternich’s approach provided Westerners with a good rationale for their behind-the-fence status; it perfectly reconciled them with Munich and Yalta, with “non-interference” in Soviet “internal affairs”—whether it was the destruction of Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian independence in the early 1920s, or the invasion of Budapest and Prague in the 1950s and 1960s. This approach was reflected in Lloyd George’s remark on trading even with cannibals, as well as in Roosevelt’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with Russia in 1933, exactly when five to six million Ukrainians were being starved to death by Kremlin cannibals willing to trade.
This approach was expressed quintessentially in the following statement of the British Foreign Office: “The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia (sic), similar to that which had appeared in the press … We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced” [Carynnyk et al. 1988: 397]
But there is still another side of the problem. Eastern Europe is not as remote a territory as Chechnya, or Georgia, or Armenia, or Kurdistan. Its appearance had been troublesome, its complete disappearance may have been disastrous. The common enemy, threatening from the East, had united Western and Eastern Europeans much more than any common cultural heritage; “Asia”, the powerful ‘other’, to a large extent determined the common identity of the Westerners and the Easterners. Even though the Westerners knew that the ‘true’ Europe began somewhere at the Elbe and Vienna, they saw clearly that “Asia” was coming and that the not-so-true Europe, under these circumstances, should be preserved as a more preferable neighbor. Yes, after Yalta it had been ceded to Stalin, but it still could be maintained somehow as, at least, a not-so-true “Asia.”
Hence, the predominant Western attitude towards the Easterners had always been ambivalent if not ambiguous. On the one hand, many of them believed that the Easterners, to a different degree, deserved their destiny (any people, actually, have the government they deserve!); but on the other hand, many Westerners felt that the Easterners who resisted “Asia’s” advance, did deserve (to a different degree) their sympathy and support. And indeed, the Easterners had enjoyed this support—to the extent described above by the statement of the British Foreign Office: not to irritate the Soviet government and not to deteriorate the relations with them. In other words, not to mar trade with the cannibals completely.
Of course, there have always been some intellectuals in the West who perceived Eastern Europe without an Orientalizing gaze and primordialistic bias. For some of them, Central Europe has become the “idealized Europe of [their] cultural nostalgia.” They demonstrated at Soviet embassies and organized various committees to defend eastern dissidents with unpronounceable names; they signed petitions and published articles; they visited East European capitals and smuggled subversive literature; sometimes they became more native than the natives themselves; they were involved, engaged, and enchanted. Many of them enthusiastically believed that “this part of the Continent was once a near-paradise of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity and compatibility, producing untold cultural and intellectual riches” [Judt 1990: 48], and that despite totalitarianism, or even because of it (in response to its pressure), Eastern Europe was a country of “wonderful spiritual tension” [Zagajewski 1987: 36]. This view, however plausible it might be, never spread beyond the narrow circle of specialists on the area and members of the East European diaspora.
In general, the ambiguous Western attitude toward Eastern Europe has been largely determined by geopolitics, i.e., by cold calculations and the age-old principle “charity begins at home.” It may seem reasonable and hardly blameworthy. What was reprehensible, from the Easterners’ point of view, and ultimately detrimental for the very idea of liberal democracy and for the West as its standard-bearer, was the perceived cynicism of Western politics and its penchant for double standards, both at home and elsewhere. The Easterners could not take in the Weberian notion of morality in politics as arguably determined not by motives, however nice, but by the ultimate (and achievable) results. They felt like abandoned lovers, seduced by lofty ideas and passionate words but left in the cold, with a crude “Asia” on the one side, and a restrained Realpolitik on the other.
Not so seldom, this disappointment resulted in zealous anti-Westernism, nationalism, xenophobia, isolationism, and autarky. Indeed, the question whether the Western civilization is superior to any other civilization, is not so simple, as we know nowadays from the bountiful postcolonial writing. Whatever we think on the issue, we cannot dismiss the sheer fact that Eastern Europe is a part of Europe and, moreover, a part of the modern world. And modernity, whether we like it or not, is unavoidable and inescapable, insofar as humankind has entered it. We may regret, and complain, and condemn it, but there is no way back. It is like the biblical Fall, the lost innocence, the bygone childhood. We may dislike our adult life but it is the only life to live. We may find the Western political system sometimes arrogant, sometimes hypocritical, but all other systems are worse, and all the attempts to install them, to alter modernity with some kind of pre-modern or anti-modern utopia proves funny at best, or bloody and exhausting at worst—as we could observe in too many places in the world.
Our attitude to the West should be neither extolling nor disparaging. The West represents rather relative than absolute goodness. For East Europeans, who have been sandwiched between the West and Russia, it merely means that the West is a lesser, much lesser, evil. Such a measured, ambivalent attitude might be perhaps a good response to the Western ambiguity vis-à-vis the East. There are no permanent friends in international relations but there are permanent interests. The East Europeans’ primary interest has been to survive, the Western Europeans’
