Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ru… - Václav Havel

Political parties and tendencies always have differed, and always will differ, chiefly in the relative importance they give to economic and social phenomena, in how they approach them and how to explain them, and in their opinions on the best way to organize economic life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But that is as far as it goes. Right-wing dogmatism, with its sour-faced intolerance and fanatical faith in general precepts, bothers me as much as left-wing prejudices, illusions, and utopias….By the way, it is a great mistake to think that the marketplace and morality are mutually exclusive. Precisely the opposite is true; the marketplace can work only if it has its own morality-a morality generally enshrined in laws, regulations, traditions, experiences, customs-in the rules of the game, to put it simply. No game can be played without rules. (It is no coincidence that many ancient religious books come with a moral codex and something like a set of regulations for commerce.)

The particular importance of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution is not, however, that it took place in such a large and important country in the former Soviet empire or that it inspired many countries still burdened with postcommunism, but in something perhaps even more significant: that revolution gave a clear answer to a still open question: where does one of the major spheres of civilization in the world today (the so-called West) end, and where does the other sphere (the so-called East, or rather Euro-Asia) begin? I recall — and I mentioned this during my meeting with Yuschenko — that an important American politician once asked me where Ukraine belongs. My impression is that it belongs to what we call the West. But that’s not what I said; I said that this was a matter for Ukraine to decide for itself.

The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?