There were two large multinational empires in Europe in the sec-
ond half of the 1980s. In the first, the Soviet Union governed
thanks to the communist parties and the military conquest of 1945.
In Berlin in 1953 and Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968 and
inside the Soviet Union during minor episodes (in Georgia, for
example) it had not hesitated to forcefully suppress any attempt at
national independence. It had to accept the national-communism
of Tito, Hoxha, Ceausescu, and in some ways, of Jaruzelski. The
Soviet Union had alternated imperiousness -- the persecution of
Titoism; Stalin's purges in the satellite countries between the end
of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s; and the Brezhnev doc-
trine on their limited sovereignty in the 1970s -- with moments of
apparent tolerance for the plurality of the "roads to socialism."
But it had never surrendered the option of imposing the rule of
imperial uniformity as much as possible. It was not the Soviet
Union's will that this rule be implemented badly and sloppily,
particularly in the field of economic integration between the coun-
tries of the "socialist camp": this was due to the incurable ineffi-
ciency of its economy.

The Western empire, on the other hand, was a flexible and
pragmatic commonwealth in which the United States was con-
strained to accept a high rate of disobedience. In 1956 America

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