Word: europeanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet threat recedes, NATO could serve to keep the West Germans, if not down, at least tethered to the West. The organization's purpose would become more political: preventing the Continent from reverting to the spasmodic shifts in national alliances that sparked centuries of wars. The twelve-nation European Community is likewise poised to play a leading role in belaying the nations that are breaking loose from the Soviet orbit...
...called "Sir Sangfroid"; an irritable trader who throws a phone at his clerk every time he passes; and a bond trader who thrives on global catastrophe. Minutes after the Chernobyl disaster, this fellow advises, "Buy potatoes." Lewis suddenly understands: "Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies . . . placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes...
...debris must be cleared away and planners must construct something new, has not been addressed. No one -- not Mikhail Gorbachev, not George Bush, not any of the bloc's reform-minded leaders -- has presented a blueprint for the future of the Continent as a whole. Will Gorbachev's "common European house" mean political as well as economic integration with the West? Will the Warsaw Pact remain intact? Will the two Germanys reunify? "Before you start taking an old structure down," says Karel Doudera, a Czech expert on German affairs, "it is not a bad idea to have in hand...
Shevardnadze spoke approvingly last week of the political upheavals in Eastern Europe, maintaining that each country has "absolute freedom of choice." But what if ethnic or nationalist rivalries erupt? Suppose Soviet and East European notions of reform become incompatible? What if, for instance, Hungary or Poland should choose to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact? "We keep thinking that Hungary, Poland and East Germany have hit the threshold of Soviet forbearance," says David Ratford, a Soviet and East European expert in the British Foreign Office. "We are at a loss to explain how the threshold has been moved time and time...
Moreover, the reformers must work with ingredients that have grown stale. Every East European nation faces to some extent a similar litany of consumer complaints: food and fuel shortages, inadequate salaries that are declining in purchasing power, massive budget deficits. It presumes a lot to think that East Europeans will sit quietly through the price hikes, plant closings, job layoffs and other austerity measures ahead. "It's a race against time," says Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute for International Relations. "Can the democratization of politics beat the Third-Worldization of their economies...