The Vienna Lecture at the Library, held Sept. 10 in the Mumford Room, provided Heinz Fischer, president of the Austrian Parliament, an opportunity to share his views on "Developments in Central and Eastern Europe from an Austrian Perspective."
As Dr. Fischer sees it, the practice of diplomacy is a Sisyphean task, for which "there is no end point. There is not even a point at which the tasks set for a decade or generation may be regarded as fulfilled.
"As a rule," he continued, "for every problem solved, a new one emerges."
The event drew many foreign policy specialists, including Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee; Helmut Tuerk, Austrian ambassador to the United States; Swanee Hunt, U.S. ambassador to Austria; and a dozen other ambassadors. Dr. Billington, who had invited Dr. Fischer, introduced the speaker and reminded the audience that the lecture was in honor of the millennium of Austria, a nation that has "witnessed dramatic changes in its immediate neighborhood: Germany's unification in 1990, the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and tragic events in the former Yugoslavia."
The Librarian also thanked Margrit B. Krewson, the Library's German/Dutch area specialist, for coordinating the event.
Dr. Fischer explained the current situation of the former East Bloc nations by looking to the past, especially to the fact that even during Soviet dominance, "enormous national, economic and other contrasts among the individual member states of the Warsaw pact continued to exist and even grew with time."
Although, according to Dr. Fischer, "a large part, perhaps even the majority," of those living in the formerly communist nations favored "certain" policies of their governments, "it was the arrogance of power" that led to the East bloc's demise.
At the same time, he said, "the communist state parties witnessed an incredible loss of ideological conviction … [because of] the increasing incompetence" of the regimes.
These factors "contributed to the fact that the Eastern European sphere of communist influence collapsed like a house of cards."
The speaker then offered his assessments for the future of several of the formerly communist states:
"The process of political and economic normalization may be regarded as very advanced in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia."
Dr. Fischer's prognosis for Slovakia, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania is that "they will proceed acceptably in the process of Europeanization. In the medium to long term, they stand a good chance of becoming integral parts of a new Europe."
Russia, however, is a unique case. "In the foreseeable future, there will be no democracy according to Western standards. … Rather, the country will be characterized by a political system sui generis, and it will state its own security- policy interests."
Obviously, "the wounds struck in the former Yugoslavia will take a long time to heal.
"Austria and the entire European Union are facing the difficult decision of how to react to these developments. … I think the extension of the European Union is as difficult an issue as it is a necessary one."
Dr. Fischer concluded on a sanguine note: "If I compare the years between 1918 and 1928 to those between 1945 and 1955, and those between 1989 and, possibly, 1999, I truly believe that the mistakes made in the latter decade were still the least grave … and there is a good chance that the area of economically functioning, firmly established democracies, which practice market economy and respect human rights, will be larger at the end of this century than ever before in European history."
