Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 19, 1990                   TAG: 9006190388
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BULGARIA VOTES THE NEW, COMPLICATED EUROPE

In that time, before the advent of the Cold War, Europe did not fall neatly into two categories, Eastern and Western.

Russia was in Eastern Europe. But before falling under Soviet domination in the wake of World War II, much of what has come to be called Eastern Europe was Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe. And to the south of Central Europe lay the Balkans, with a different history, a different culture and different traditions of government.

Now, as the Soviet empire contracts (and, perhaps, dissolves), signs are plentiful of a re-emergence of the old distinctions. Four and more decades of communist rule in "Eastern Europe," it now seems clear, merely papered over those distinctions.

The latest evidence came this past weekend from Bulgaria, a Balkan nation. There, in the runoff of the first free elections in 58 years, the people have shrugged off the yoke of communism and have chosen as their new leaders . . . the communists.

True, the communist majority in the new Parliament will not be overwhelming - 211 seats of 400. True, the communists had reconstituted themselves into a Socialist Party, led by reformers credited for ousting dictator Todor Zhivkov.

Still, the election results in Bulgaria stand in sharp contrast to those in Mitteleuropa. In Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, even reform-minded communists have been routed in free elections.

The Bulgarian results are more akin to those in Romania, another Balkan nation where many leaders of the winning party - though technically non-communist - were associated at one time or another with the old regime.

A third Balkan nation, mysterious Albania, remains tightly communist: no revolution, velvet or otherwise, there. A fourth, Yugoslavia, has problems unlike those of any other European nation - except for the Soviet Union itself. Yugoslavia is a federation of ethnicity-based republics, a federation that may well be on the verge of falling apart.

Even when communism was entrenched in the band of states that buffer the Soviet Union from the Baltics to the Adriatic, there were differences among them. The northern part, the once and future Mitteleuropa, was relatively more prosperous and relatively freer than the southern part, the once and future Balkans.

But only as a general proposition. Poland in the north had become - and is - an economic basket case; internal controls in Yugoslavia to the south were more relaxed than in East Germany to the north.

And only as a relative proposition. The big gaps weren't within the old "Eastern Europe" of communist domination, but between it and "Western Europe" - between poverty in the East and free-market prosperity in the West, between one-party regimes in the East and parliamentary democracies in the West.

The imprint of 45 years of communism shouldn't be dismissed too lightly. The damage wrought by communism on the economies and physical environments of the Soviet Union's former satellites is manifest, and there doubtless are also subtler scars on the psyches of the millions who were forced for years to breathe communism's stultifying air.

(In this regard, the Poles - despite the extremity of their economic ills - may be better off than most. In Solidarity and the Catholic Church there was ventilation for workers as well as dissident intellectuals.)

Still, those 45 years came on top of centuries of history. Not even communism can obliterate history, a fact fast growing evident as a post-Cold War Europe develops.

For Americans, all this poses a challenge. However many its terrors, the Cold War at least had the virtue of making it simple to think about Europe. No longer. Europe is getting complicated.

There's no cause, of course, to get nostalgic for the Cold War. There's plenty of cause, however, for Americans to try to understand the new Europe, and to try to act wisely in light of such understanding. Otherwise, old terrors might simply be replaced by new ones.