Foreword

In the summer of 1999, the international community is faced with numerous challenges. Although SAIS Review cannot provide all of the solutions, we hope to begin important dialogues and useful debates for the policy community. The goal of SAIS Review has been to combine academic and policy relevant perspectives. This issue achieves just that as we look back over the past decade to explore a crucial region of the world and an important set of events facing many countries around the globe. Thus the two main sections of the Summer/Fall issue of SAIS Review focus on retrospective themes: “Assessing a Decade: Eastern Europe and the FSU Ten Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall” and “Reckoning the Past.”

In December 1999, it will have been ten years since the Berlin Wall fell. Over the past decade, Central Europe has created new democracies and liberal economies. Ilya Prizel, assistant professor of Russian Area and East European studies at SAIS, highlights the religious and social differences between Byzantine and Central Europe. These differences explain why events of this decade transformed Central Europe, while perhaps pushing Eastern Europe further from the goal of democracy and market economy. Mark Kramer’s thorough and concise study of the economic situation in Eastern Europe and Russia also tackles this divergent record. Kramer, director of the Harvard Project on Cold War studies, documents how different approaches to economic reform explain the varying degrees of success. Lastly, Igor Lukes, professor of international relations at Boston University, argues that NATO expansion will benefit both the alliance and its new members in Central Europe. Democratic influences and security integration will bring long sought stability to the region.

The transition to democracy in many post-communist European countries over the past decade stands in sharp contrast to the experience in China. After the Tiananmen Square massacre ten years ago, the Chinese people acquiesced in deferring democratization in favor of economic change. Anne Thurston, a free-lance writer, provides a personal account of the political protests at Tiananmen and traces the influence of the massacre on Chinese society and the democracy movement today. With its personal perspective, this piece is groundbreaking for the Review. We hope to include more such articles in future issues to provide our readers with in-depth accounts of individual experiences in international affairs.

The idea that countries must come to terms with their often difficult and bloody pasts is not new. Yet in light of the proposed International Criminal Court and the Pinochet case, we felt that the issue of how countries examine, live with, and reconcile these situations is a global phenomenon worthy of further exploration. The section begins with a unique look at the Nuremberg Trials in light of the recent international tribunals established in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Jeremy Rabkin, associate professor of government at Cornell University, argues that perhaps Nuremberg was more flawed than we would like to remember, and less international in nature. Building on some of these ideas, Andrea Bianchi, associate professor of international law at the University of Parma and professorial lecturer at SAIS’s Bologna Center, provides an important and thorough examination of “crimes against humanity” through an historical and legal perspective. The section continues with a fascinating study on trans-national history by Daqing Yang, assistant professor of history at George Washington University. He looks particularly at the case of the Nanjing Atrocity and the efforts that must be made to reconcile this traumatic event in both China and Japan’s historical frameworks. Finally, Eugenio Bregolat, Spain’s ambassador to China, discusses the Spanish transition to democracy as a tool for understanding how other countries manage difficult political transitions.

With the situation in Kosovo and mediation efforts underway worldwide, Wendy Betts, a recent graduate from SAIS, has written an especially clear and relevant piece applying conflict mediation theories to the Nagorno Karabakh situation. Her article is pertinent today in light of international concern with the many ethnic conflicts taking place around the globe.

Working in the foreign service has changed greatly over the past fifty years. In particular, the end of the Cold War and the globalization of...