This article has been adapted from a speech delivered by IFWEA President, Dan Gallin on 16 May 1999 at the WEA (England and Scotland) Learning for Life Conference in Portsmouth, England.

There is a great and dangerous challenge which has arisen in the past ten years. The collapse of the old regimes and that of the Soviet bloc - regimes socialist only in name, actually the opposite - left atomised societies. Independent civil society institutions had been eradicated by terror - for four decades in Eastern and Central Europe, and seven decades in the former Soviet Union.

Transnational capital, accompanied by the missionaries of free market fundamentalism, has entered these countries meeting little resistance, in alliance with the old nomenklatura recycled as a new, bandit capitalist ruling class. It contributes to growing inequality, mass poverty and insecurity.

Destabilised and frightened people are searching for identity and security in extreme forms of nationalism and religion. They are an easy prey for ruthless manipulators of power.

The absence of a robust and independent civil society, all these decades, made it impossible to openly discuss and put into place the multiple and complex arrangements by which people of different cultures, different social classes, men and women, majorities and minorities, can freely co-exist and co-operate as equals in democratic society.

As we meet, Europe is again at war. There are, in fact, two wars: the war the Milosevic regime in Belgrade has been waging against the peoples of Yugoslavia for the last eight years, by methods of systematically organised mass murder and terror. And then there is the war waged against this regime by 19 countries in Europe and North America, to put a stop to this terror.

At issue is the question whether in Europe we will permit the establishment and consolidation of states based on ethnic identity rather than citizenship: states steeped in the dark mystique of totalitarian nationalism, bristling with hostility and contempt against anyone different from themselves, with a political culture of exclusion and violence.

That kind of state, that kind of ideology, is a mortal threat to everything we stand for: we, the democratic citizens of a democratic Europe but, most particularly, we the international labour movement.

We know it cannot be contained by peaceful means, but must be stopped in its tracks, as it should have been eight years ago. It cannot even be contained in Yugoslavia, where the tragedy has not yet run its course as long as Milosevic and his criminal clique remain in power. Even worse: a rotten deal that would allow this regime to survive will give great encouragement to similar forces all over Eastern Europe, and may lead to new and worse wars.

So the aims of this war have to be the removal of the Milosevic regime by whatever means necessary. We cannot speak of war lightly. We know that every war opens the gates of hell. We know that there is no such thing as a clean war. However just a war may be, it always involves the suffering and deaths of innocents. We also know however that there are worse things than war: the triumph of evil and the impunity of crime. That is why we must face the horror and stay the course.

We must also look beyond this war. Having understood that it reflects a catastrophic failure of civil society and knowing that there will be no peace without democracy, we have our task clearly before us: do everything we can to contribute to democratic reconstruction in Eastern Europe.

The workers’ education movement, as a part of the labour movement, has special responsibilities. In Eastern and Central Europe, trade unions are the only democratically organised institutions in civil society that carry political weight. They are the only ones who have some sense of defending the state and of sharing a common, overarching interest across national borders.

But, to varying degrees, the movement has lost its ideological and political bearings. The traditional values of the labour movement - as well as the vocabulary and the symbols - are discredited in the former communist countries by their association with Stalinism. Significant parts of the trade union movement have accepted the ideology of neo-liberal capitalism because so-called "socialism" as they experienced it and understood it, is not an acceptable option. How could it be?

But to accept this situation is very dangerous. It is, in the first place, dangerous to themselves. The disconnection with the unions’ pre-war history means a rupture in identity. The hijacking earlier this year of the Romanian miners’ movement by fascist politicians is an extreme case of confusion, but it is by no means the only one, and no doubt not the last one.

Without a strong sense of political identity and legitimacy, in the context of a deep economic and social crisis, the labour movement risks losing its way and being pushed to the margins of society.

It is also a dangerous situation for the labour movement elsewhere. In the former communist countries there are millions of workers, in large part already organised into unions, that need to be integrated into the international labour movement as a matter of urgency. That is not happening except at a formal level, despite the efforts of some committed individuals and organisations. That is where the IFWEA can and must play a role.

An essential part of the integration effort has to be political: the rehabilitation of democratic socialist politics. Despite all the difficulties, this work must be done and the political space recovered. There is no other political identity practically imaginable that would enable the labour movement in Central and Eastern Europe to defend its members’ interests, consolidate democracy in society at large and build solid bridges to the labour movement of other regions.