Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

But the lament for their lost European identity had acquired special significance for Eastern Europeans in recent years with the emergence in the West of something new: an institutional entity—a ‘European Community’, a ‘European Union’—built around self-consciously ‘European’ values with which East Europeans could all too readily identify: individual rights, civic obligations, the freedom of expression and movement. Talk of ‘Europe’ became less abstract and therefore, among other things, more interesting to young people. No longer just a lament for the lost culture of old Prague or Budapest, it now represented a concrete and attainable set of political goals. The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.