European History and Communism

  In his essay, The Grand Illusion, Tony Judt offers some sobering criticisms of the possibility of integrating the former Eastern European Communist Bloc to the rest of Europe and the European Union. How do you think that his critical stance reflects the historical reality of how Philipp Ther describes how those same countries tried to integrate with the European Union in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Do you think that the Judt has been proven wrong?