Eastern Europe: Ideology, Culture, And the Self‪.‬

BOHDAN KORDAN is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Studies, St Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. His most recent publication is Other Anxieties: Ukraine, Russia, and the West (Kashtan Press, 1994). Without question, the 1989 revolution in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union are defining moments in world history, capping as they do the great struggle between the various competing ideologies of the twentieth-century: fascism, communism, liberalism. But for liberal ideologues, the result was more than just that. As proletarians from Riga to Sofia pulled down statues of Lenin and Marx, Western liberals were unqualifying in their verdict: liberalism had emerged triumphant, and the end of history, to borrow Fukuyama's words, was near.