But the giving will not all be one-way. In his We The People,19 Timothy Garton Ash makes the point that Eastern Europeans are not like mendicants arriving at our door bearing only chronicles of wasted time. Underneath their threadbare cloaks there are hidden treasures:
Examples of great moral courage and intellectual integrity; comradeship, deep friendship, family life, time and space for serious conversation, music, literature, not disturbed by the perpetual noise of our media-driven and obsessively telecommunicative world; Christian witness in its original and purest form; more broadly, qualities of relations between men and women of very different backgrounds, and once bitterly opposed faiths - an ethos of solidarity.
In a West starved of such virtues, treasures indeed. The fear is that as the euphoria fades Eastern Europe will simply revert to type. Britons used to an 'orderly' political system have been bemused at the proliferation of political parties - fifty-three in Hungary alone - although only twenty-eight contested the March 1990 elections. There are, incidentally, eleven parties represented in our own House of Commons and how many more - from the Greens to the British Communist Party - contest but do not get elected? I guess that an observer noting the presence of a Monster Raving Looney Party candidate in British parliamentary elections might also fear for the worst about our own Mother of Parliaments. There is also the fear that nationalism and severe racial tension, which can be set alight by hapless economic circumstances, will lead to massive destabilisation. Living in a country which daily dreads the news from Northern Ireland, we must show some modesty in diagnosing remedies for these ailments. Do not underestimate anti-semitic organisations such as Russia's Pamyat. The word means 'memory' and this fascist group is dedicated to keeping alive old hatreds. Anti- semitism and pogroms - the massacre of Jews - are nothing new in Russia. Organisations like Pamyat are what a nation gets when it is lied to for seventy years. I was in Moscow when, in January 1990, a meeting of Aprel (reformist writers) at the Soviet Writers Union was broken up. It was the most serious antisemitic demonstration in Moscow since Gorbachev came to power. But in France and Britain, too, we have seen, throughout 1990, appalling acts of desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Anti-semitism and xenophobia are evils which must be countered wherever they surface.