Word: v-e
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Forty years after V-E day, the world's greatest battleground is a Continent revived and prosperous, free from war for those four decades. It is also a Continent dramatically divided, slightly uncertain of its future, and sometimes sadly aware that it has yielded its place at the center of the world to the U.S. and the Soviet Union...
...hand and the old Continent on the other, mainly in such fields as microprocessors, information technologies and bioengineering. Linked to that imbalance is a lingering worry over slow growth and high unemployment. Another reason for the sense of drift is demographic. The 60% of Europeans born since V-E day tend to dwell less on the horrors of World War II than on a U.S.-Soviet rivalry that bristles with nuclear weapons, many of them based on European soil. In Western Europe, some of that sentiment has flowed into the pacifist and antinuclear movement that brought thousands of people into...
...other side of the Iron Curtain, today a gash of electrified fences and minefields, the challenge that began on V-E day has had very different dimensions. For the nations of Eastern Europe, the prospect of a new, democratic postwar era vanished with Stalin's unkept pledge to hold free elections in the "liberated" territories. By 1949, Communist regimes had consolidated power by force or subterfuge in eight countries. During the past 40 years, only two nations have been able to escape the Soviet orbit: Yugoslavia in 1948 and Albania...
...chilly superpower climate of the '80s, and no one knows the disappointments of the times better than Chancellor Kohl, 55. Only 15 years old when the war ended, Kohl has described himself as "the first Chancellor of the postwar generation," meaning the 60% of West Germans who on V-E day were either children or not yet born. Kohl came to office determined to play a role abroad commensurate with his country's flourishing democracy, strong support for NATO, and eminence as the non-Communist world's third-largest economic power. Internally, he intended to put a new gloss...
...pertinent question for the 40th anniversary of V-E day is how the Continent will shrug off its discomforts and limitations, and reignite the promise that was so stunningly fulfilled, at least in Western Europe, during the immediate postwar years. Part of the answer will depend, as it has all along, on the guardian superpowers. Even so, there are signs that a more realistic view of Western Europe and its prospects is gaining strength and currency, based on the pragmatic recognition that the constituent nation-states of the region will survive--and can thrive--for some time to come...