Word: moisi
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French analyst Dominique Moisi, co-founder of the Paris-based French Institute for International Relations, agreed. On recent visits to Moscow, he said, he was struck by gathering popular pessimism. Said Moisi: "The elite around Gorbachev sound like the aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution. Even among the most devout Gorbachev supporters hopes have been replaced by fears...
...Moisi countered by arguing that for the West, a measure of democracy in the Soviet Union was "a guarantee against the return of Soviet imperialism." He told Migranyan, "You are calling on the West to help you, but there will be linkage between the amount of help you will receive and the image you transmit of yourselves." Moisi's message: Democracy pays, even if it poses problems for Eastern Europe's reformers. Conceded Migranyan: "This is the key problem for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
Anyone who takes in the atmosphere along the perforated Berlin Wall today, declared Moisi, should be able to discern -- by the body language of the Volkspolizei on the Eastern side and the Berlin police on the Western side -- an extraordinary and palpable tug of togetherness. "The citizens of the German Democratic Republic really have a feeling of humiliation about being second-class citizens ((compared with their Western counterparts)), and that feeling can be ameliorated only by reunification." Opposing that process, suggested Moisi, would ultimately cause more problems than it would solve...
...There are those in Europe who fear that the events in Eastern Europe have compromised the dynamics of 1992," said Moisi, "but there are also those who believe in Europe with a capital E, which embraces those nations lost to Soviet power for two generations." He suggested that the people of Eastern Europe had achieved "a spiritual dimension, of those who had to fight for 40 years against oppression" -- an attitude from which the West could learn. Eastern Europe's transformation, he said, "is not a one-way street...
...Perhaps, Moisi suggested, Europe in some ways needs German reunification despite all the problems it would bring. He postulated that West Germany still suffers from an identity crisis, a "unidimensional" sense of itself as merely an industrial rather than a political power. The result, he said, was a kind of "German economic arrogance"; if, in the process of reunification, Germany could attain a "more diverse identity," that arrogance might fade. His advice to the West: "Nothing is more dangerous than to say to Germans today 'We fear you.' If we do that, we will create a Germany according to that...