Europe must avoid being held prisoner by its history - Richard C. Holbrooke, Asst. Sec. for European and Canadian Affairs, May 29, 1995 - Transcript

US Department of State Dispatch, June 26, 1995

The people of Central and Eastern Europe now have a real opportunity to create a lasting peace. But to do so, they must be prepared for one final act of liberation--this time from the unresolved legacies of their own tragic, violent, and angry past.

For untold generations, the nations of Central Europe have been extinguished and reborn, its peoples pushed across frontiers. The personal memories alone of those here today call forth the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943; the Warsaw rising in August 1994, Budapest in 1956, and Prague in 1968. Too often, hopes born in the delirium of liberation--whether in 1848, 1918, 1945, or 1956--have been dashed by the continent's cruel realities.

A typical 80-year old resident of Galicia, for example, has lived under Austrian, Polish, German, Soviet, and now, Ukrainian rule without ever leaving home. She has seen the two worst wars in history and the Cold War begin in her neighborhood. Walking down the streets of her hometown of L'viv--or Lvov, or Lwow, or Lemberg--she can see the past everywhere: in the marble steps of the Habsburgs, in the German names engraved on public fixtures, in the baroque church of the old Polish commonwealth, in the cracked windows of the synagogue or the courtyard of the Armenian church, and in buildings dedicated to Hungarian merchants or adorned with Yiddish or Cyrillic inscriptions.

For the peoples of this region, the words Versailles, Trianon, Munich, Yalta, or Potsdam are not just names on the map; they are living legacies of conflicting historical resentments, ambitions, and, most dangerous, unresolved territorial or tribal quarrels--quarrels that allowed the false ideologies of fascism and communism to prosper, and that now threaten progress toward integrating Central Europe into an undivided Europe.

Even as democracy and free markets sweep the continent, armed conflict and political instability are more pervasive and severe than at any time during the past half century. They are concentrated in Southeastern Europe, extending to the region beyond our NATO allies, Greece and Turkey. I submit to you that this vast region--including its neighbors in the Transcaucasus, and Syria, Iraq, and Iran--has become the most explosive region on earth. Ottomans and Habsburgs, czars and commissars have left behind them unresolved legacies that continue to roil the entire area. Some, such as Bosnia, Croatia, Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Chechnya, have already exploded. Others continue to fester, such as tensions over Cyprus or those between Athens and Tirana, Athens and Skopje, Bratislava and Budapest, Budapest and Bucharest, Bucharest and Kiev, Kiev and Moscow, even Rome and Ljubljana.

These forces, if not contained, risk holding the new Europe hostage to its own history. In a sense, the city casting its shadow over the continent as this century ends is the same one as when it began: Sarajevo. Bosnia is a brutal reminder of the power of ethnic and nationalist hatreds, how dangerous this power is to the peace not just of a particular part of Europe, but to Europe as a whole, and how important it is to defuse ethnic grievances before they explode.