Georgia on my mind

Mikheil Saakashvili, president of the Republic of Georgia, writing in the Washington Post today, sings a page from the George W. Bush hymnal:

Thankfully, the division of Europe created at Yalta, and the Iron Curtain that marked its boundary, are ghosts in our past. The generation of 1989 succeeded in the streets of Gdansk, Prague and Riga, and much of the territory Yalta allotted to a dictator is now part of the community of democratic nations.

Now it is our turn to contribute to the completion of a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. After recent discussions with presidents Traian Basescu of Romania and Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine, I believe that it is time for a new Yalta Conference, a voluntary association of new European democracies with three central goals.

[...]

Historically the Black Sea has stood at the confluence of the Russian, Ottoman and Persian empires. Now the Black Sea is a new frontier -- a frontier of freedom, with vibrant new democracies. The values that drove our peaceful revolutions -- accountable government, open society, the rule of law -- are not exclusively European values; they are universal. The winds of freedom that swept across the Black Sea to Ukraine now rush across the central Asian steppes and stir the cedars of Lebanon.

It is time to return to Yalta. This time we will not engage in a secret diplomacy in which our values are compromised and innocent peoples are enslaved. In this new association of democracies, our diplomacy will be open and our focus will be the possibilities of our future. And, we will begin to make Yalta a symbol of hope.

This effort to turn despair into hope by learning from rather than ignoring the past was signaled by George W. Bush's admission in Latvia that the United States had made mistakes at the Yalta Conference and since, by trying to trade freedom for security.

No one else seems to have said so, but I think this contrition is something that GWB learned from the late pope JPII. Catholics who follow church news may recall that John Paul II especially encouraged what he called "purification of memory" in connection with preparations for the year 2000. Predictably, Ian Paisley and whack-job Protestants of his ilk read the concept as "a Vatican euphemism for the whitewashing of history," but in fact the church, far from whitewashing history, embraces it. Then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger explained the term with typical insight and an assist from another cardinal:

The Christian world can never deny that the sins of individual sinners wound the entire Church, the cardinal observed. He recalled the words of Cardinal Consalvi, when he was informed that Napoleon wanted to destroy the Church. "He will never succeed," Cardinal Consalvi said; "We have not managed to do it ourselves!"

As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus noted in his own commentary on "purification of memory," public confession of past errors (not in doctrine, it should be noted) "is a sign not of the Church’s weakness but of her self–confidence."

George W. Bush would have watched some of this (the part not regarded as 'inside baseball' for Catholics) from the sidelines, not least because Fr. Neuhaus has friends in the current administration (if Time magazine is to be believed, Neuhaus himself is perhaps the go-to guy on so-called Catholic isssues for this White House). However it happened, I suspect George W. Bush learned a thing or two from John Paul II along the way.

If with GWB's encouragement Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga manage to work with their Ukrainian and Romanian counterparts in the way that Saakashvili clearly hopes, then their freestanding rebuttal to what Russian president Vladimir Putin called the "geopolitical tragedy" of the demise of the Soviet Union will have purified the memory of how Roosevelt and Churchill gave Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at the original Yalta conference.

Putin doesn't think Yalta was a mistake, but as the only head of state with his photo in KGB yearbooks, Putin is the odd man out here. He can call around to the alumni association in nostalgic moods, but he'd be wise to leave former client states alone while they embrace the work of freedom, and what looks to me like the secular equivalent of JPII's "purification of memory."

(Updated since the original post with additional links, including one to the fetching Ukrainian economist and prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko)