Postwar

352

It is estimated that inflation in post-Communist Ukraine reached an annual rate of 5,371 percent in 1993.

353

But Romania is perhaps unique. In the Bucharest mayoral elections of 1998 the Romanian Workers’ Party blanketed the city with posters of Nicolae Ceausescu. ‘They shot me’, the posters read. ‘Do you live any better? Remember all I did for the Romanian people’.

354

And even on occasion with unreconstructed Fascists, nostalgic for the better days of World War Two— notably in Croatia.

355

Though not, perhaps, across the self-serving moves of certain prominent writers—who would have risked little by declining their services: e.g. Christa Wolf, whose much-vaunted literary ambivalence appears somehow less admirable in the light of later revelations of her cooperation with the Stasi.

356

By way of comparison, the Gestapo in 1941 had a staff of fewer than 15,000 to police the whole of greater Germany.

357

From the Czech lustrace, meaning ‘bringing to light’, though the translation carries purgative connotations as well.

358

I am indebted to Dr Jacques Rupnik for the reference.

359

Julius Caesar’s Gallia Belgica lay athwart the line that was to separate Gallo- Roman territories from the Franks and mark the boundary thenceforth demarcating Latinate, French-dominated Europe from the Germanic north.

360

The main newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, have almost no readers outside the French- and Dutch-speaking communities respectively. As a result, neither takes much trouble to report news from the other half of the country. When someone speaks Dutch on Walloon television (and vice-versa) subtitles are provided. Even the automatic information boards on interregional trains switch back and forth between Dutch and French (or to both, in the case of Brussels) as they cross the regional frontiers. It is only partly a jest to say that English is now the common language of Belgium.

361

The more historically disposed perhaps called to mind the passage in the Memorial de Sainte- Helene by the Comte de Las Cases, where the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte envisages a future ‘association europeenne’ with ‘one code, one court, one currency’.

362

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, just in time to be (somewhat reluctantly) committed to NATO’s engagement in Kosovo. Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia were admitted in 2004.

363

The economic recession of the early Nineties also helped, contributing to a widespread view in Sweden especially that the country’s exporters could not survive without unrestricted access to the European market.

364

See Chapter 21. The pain was real enough. East European countries lost between 30 and 40 percent of their national income in the years after 1989. The first to recover its 1989 level was Poland, in 1997; others took until 2000 or beyond.