and promising, after the twentieth century's dark history of mass bloodshed is that they took place with very little loss of life. The abortive democratic revolution in China cost, probably, a few thousand lives (out of a billion or more Chinese). The fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania cost a few hundred. The Balkan war, in what used to be Yugoslavia, has of this writing probably cost a thousand or so.
But the fall of the main body of the Soviet empire in Europe was virtually bloodless. Likewise, the collapse of Communism within the former Soviet Union itself. The failed rightist, antireform Soviet coup in August of 1991 claimed the lives of precisely three known martyrs. Seldom on the history of human events can so much of the world have been so transformed with so little blood spilled. (We can only hope that this happy record will be continued.)
For Americans, the world transformation of 1989 92 is primarily equated to the fall of Communism outside of China and a few minor holdouts such as Cuba. This is understandable. For forty years, the specter of Communism hung over American foreign policy and domestic politics alike. About a hundred thousand young Americans died in anti communist wars in Asia. Joe McCarthy was a transient phenomenon, but the Republican domination of the Presidency since 1953 was based very substantially on the argument that Democrats were as a group "soft on Communism." The national debt of the United States today roughly equates to military spending, directed almost exclusively against Communists, during the Cold War era.
Yet, scarcely noticed by most Americans, a transformation has been taking place in Western Europe in these years that will probably match, perhaps exceed, the transformation in Eastern Europe due to the fall of Communism. This transformation is the economic integration of Western Europe, which is formally due to be completed in this year, 1992 and the less defi...