TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071089/07108900.027

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 38

EASTERN EUROPE

A Freer, but Messier, Order In Poland and Hungary, George Bush

will confront Communism in flux


By Walter Isaacson/BUDAPEST


    In the waning years of the 20th century, the greatest
challenge posed by Communism will not be containing its spread
but coping with its decline. From the bloodshed in Beijing to
the political paralysis in Poland, efforts to shed hard-line
systems are provoking agonal gasps that are at turns cheering
and frightening.

    When he begins his tour of Poland and Hungary this weekend,
President George Bush will seek to certify a new era emerging
from these convulsions. For Poland and Hungary are where the
cold war began 42 years ago. And when historians write about the
implosion of Communism in the late 1980s, they will note that
it likewise began when those two satellites meandered from the
Soviet orbit.

    Back in 1947, as it became clear that Poland's Peasant
Party would beat the Communists, Stalin's army cut off its
phones and eventually sent the party's chieftain, Stanislaw
Mikolajczyk, fleeing to the West. In Hungary that year, after
the anti-Communist Smallholders Party won power, the Soviet army
arrested its leader and forced a confession of subversion.

    This time in Poland, the opposition movement Solidarity was
able to reduce the Communist Party to the role of a supplicant,
and may end up forcing the country's ruler, General Wojciech
Jaruzelski, out of power. In Hungary, the Smallholders Party is
back, feuding with itself and with the dozen or so other
parties expected to take part in free elections scheduled for
next year.

    In both countries, Bush will find the disjuncture between
economic and political progress that has, in very different
ways, plagued Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost-led revolution as
well as Deng Xiaoping's marketplace-led revolt. Poland combines
robust political competition with a downtrodden economy almost
too far gone for reform. Hungary combines an explosion of
private enterprise with a less vigorous attitude toward
democracy. The message the U.S. and its West European allies can
bring to both places is the truth that lies at the heart of
democratic capitalism: economic and political freedoms work best
in tandem.

    The political reforms in Poland have the most dramatic
flair of any in the Communist world, in part because they are
being won under the inspiring banner of Solidarity. Roughhewn
shipyard workers such as Lech Walesa and Bogdan Lis survived
seven years of repression, forced the government into half-free
elections, then humiliated it.

    Walesa and his allies are discovering the cruelty of the
ironic punishment that the Greek goddess Nemesis reserved for
her cheekiest victims: granting their very desires.
Solidarity's success at the polls exposes the fact that for all
its popularity, it has no program or philosophy. Its leaders are
dancing desperately to avoid being forced to share power with
the Communists. It is as if the penalty one pays for losing an
election in Poland is having to be in power.

    Partly because of opposition from Solidarity, General
Jaruzelski, the Communist Party leader who declared martial law
in 1981, made a startling announcement last Friday that he would
not be a candidate in this week's election by Parliament for
the powerful new office of President. Instead, with
Solidarity's approval, the party is expected to nominate General
Czeslaw Kiszczak, 63, the Interior Minister who won the
confidence of the union as the government's main negotiator
during the round-table talks that led to the democratic reforms.
Moscow has invited Walesa to come for a visit to discuss the
political situation.

    After more than 40 years of Communism, Poland is an
economic cripple. Inflation is running close to 100% a year, the
zloty is not considered real money, and all important
transactions are done in dollars. The wait for an apartment is
20 years, an almost inconceivable reality that dominates the
personal planning of most Poles. The country's underlying
problem is that it invested in all the wrong industries. The
state has squandered foreign loans and subsidized shipyards,
steel mills and coal mines. In an age when information and high
technology are the driving force of economic growth, Poland is
saddled with a string-and-can phone system and a work force that
spends much of its time moonlighting as middlemen for goods and
services that no one is producing.

    Hungary also struggles under a large foreign debt. But with
an economic exuberance that matches Poland's political
exhilaration, Budapest is making progress toward recovery.
Western visitors who evince any interest in investing in Hungary
are likely to find officials knocking at their hotel doors with
lists of state enterprises for sale. Hungary now permits its
citizens to start large-scale private businesses and hire up to
500 workers. A fledgling stock market has 147 listings. Within
three years, half of Hungary's economy is expected to be in
private hands. Consumer goods are expensive, but, unlike in
Poland, they are plentiful. Hungarians proudly use the phrase
"like an American movie" to describe their store shelves and
dinner tables.

    Reforms in Hungary were begun slowly in the early 1960s,
with care taken not to aggravate the Soviet sensibilities that
caused tanks to roll in 1956. Today the barbed wire of the Iron
Curtain separating Hungary from Austria has been snipped into
souvenirs, Russian is no longer required in school, the Karl
Marx University of Economics in Budapest has stopped preaching
Marxist economics, and there is open discussion about
withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact.

    Hungary has no parallel to Solidarity's opposition, and
what does exist is dominated by intellectuals. Instead, the push
toward democracy is being led from within the Communist Party
by members of its reform wing, most prominently by Politburo
member Imre Pozsgay. At a meeting of the party's Central
Committee last weekend, Pozsgay was nominated to become the
country's new state President as soon as constitutional changes
imbue that office with real power. The party's other leading
reformer, Rezso Nyers, was tapped as party chairman. The moves
diluted the power of General Secretary Karoly Grosz, who until
a few months ago was himself considered a reformer.

    As Poland and Hungary succeed in charting a more
independent course, Czechoslovakia may ultimately follow -- once
it outgrows the generation of leaders whose power stems from the
crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Reforms in the other
three Soviet satellites may take longer. East Germany,
moderately prosperous, puts a premium on order and caution.
Rumania, historically prone to repressive regimes, has been
impoverished by Nicolae Ceausescu's brutal combination of
despotism and nepotism dubbed "socialism in one family."
Bulgaria likewise remains an unrepentant police state.

    The East bloc was always an unnatural construct: a
collection of diverse nations and peoples consigned by fate to
live with the occupying tanks of an increasingly insecure
empire. To the extent that this subjugation is dissipating, the
cold war is ending. Yet such progress will also bring challenges
in a world no longer anchored by the stability of a superpower
rivalry. The waning of Communist dominance in Eastern Europe may
create a better world, but not necessarily a simpler one.

    Nemesis may be at work again, granting the West's wish for
a rollback of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. And so as
Bush gives two cheers for the changes in Poland and Hungary, the
West would do well to pay heed to the difficulties and problems
such an evolution could bring. Among them:

    Democracy can be messy. Eastern Europe has only limited
experience with multiparty systems, and there are no signs so
far that Poland or Hungary will evolve toward a Western-style,
genteel competition between moderate right and left. Instead,
nationalism, anti-Semitism, neo-Stalinism and other philosophies
ripe for demagoguery may come to the fore.

    Nationalist passions have been the bane of Central Europe
for centuries, sometimes spilling over to engulf the Continent
in wars. The division of Europe into two blocs served to subdue
the more parochial animosities. But as the Iron Curtain lifts,
hatreds may be rekindled. Hungary's border with Rumania has been
closed even as the one with Austria has opened. A dispute over
Rumania's ethnic Hungarians has caused some Hungarians to ask
seriously whether they could defeat Rumania's disciplined army.

    An end to the division of Europe could create pressure for
a reunited Germany. The history of European wars (and world
wars) has been partly the story of nationalist rivalries and
partly the story of German expansionism. As the cold war ends,
Germany -- formally reunited or not -- will dominate middle
Europe economically, politically and culturally.

    In time, there could be a backlash against capitalism. The
excesses inherent in even a successful capitalist system will
create resentments, and may give birth to the sort of extremist
parties emerging in Western Europe.

    Democratic passions are not likely to resolve deep-seated
economic problems. Solidarity's base of support, for example,
is among workers in the shipyards, steel mills and coal mines.
Solidarity is not likely to close down unproductive industries,
or to impose the wage restraints and price rises the country
needs.

    Without a Warsaw Pact threat, NATO may gradually dissolve.
Likewise, the denuclearization of Europe could become nearly
total. Appealing as this may sound, it could endanger the armed
balance that has kept the peace since 1945. The cold war was
also a cold peace: now in its 45th year, the era that historian
John Lewis Gaddis calls the "long peace" is surpassing the
stable stretches imposed by Metternich and then Bismarck in the
19th century. One reason is that nuclear weapons made localized
wars and territorial disputes too dangerous to allow. They also
made a direct confrontation between East and West or a Soviet
invasion of Central Europe unthinkable.

    Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union declared that
socialism was irreversible, which translated into a decree that
its Warsaw Pact neighbors not be allowed to free themselves of
Communist clutches. Hence the tanks of 1956 and 1968. Now comes
the Gorbachev Doctrine, as articulated in his 1988 U.N. speech:
"Freedom of choice is a universal principle that . . . applies
both to the capitalist and the socialist system."

    Does this mean that the Soviets will let Poland and Hungary
drift as far as they want? Even Gorbachev might not know the
answer to that question. What seems likely now is that Moscow
may tolerate Poland's political pluralism and Hungary's
economic experimentation, but it will be tempted to intervene
if either seemed about to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and
expel Soviet troops.

    A primary goal of the West must be to avoid such a
crackdown. Thus the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have a common
interest: defining the Soviet Union's proper security concerns
and ensuring that they are respected. That is the notion behind
Henry Kissinger's proposal that critics have dubbed Yalta II.
If the Soviets felt assured that the U.S. would not exploit the
changes militarily, they could be expected to allow the reforms
more leeway. Bush has indicated support for this approach; in
a speech in West Germany in late May, he said he wanted to "let
the Soviets know that our goal is not to undermine their
legitimate security interests."

    Bush -- and the West as a whole -- should go farther.
Poland and Hungary are striving toward a societal ideal based
on more than economic and democratic reforms. The components:
a legal structure that guarantees individual rights and the
existence of independent institutions -- such as churches, trade
unions, newspapers, political organizations, professional
associations, private businesses -- that prevent the state from
exerting a dominating influence in everyday life. Mark Palmer,
America's energetic Ambassador to Hungary, argues persuasively
that the U.S. should follow Western Europe's example in shoring
up this evolution by creating a web of social, political,
business and economic links to the people of Eastern Europe.

    During the postwar "Pax Americana," Washington's world role
largely involved resisting Communism through a network of
military alliances. That period is passing, being replaced by
what has been dubbed a "Fax Americana." America's influence will
derive, in part, from its role as an exemplar of ideas and a
purveyor of information. Ronald Reagan, in a speech in London
last month, talked about how "electronic beams blow through the
Iron Curtain as if it were lace." In Bratislava, Czechoslovak
students sometimes drop by the city's new hotel, equipped for
international television reception, where the maids let them
watch the music-video shows. Recently, the students have been
tuning in to reports from China instead. George Orwell
prophesied that advances in information technology would lead
to Big Brother's total control. It is more likely that, as
Reagan said, the "Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought
down by the David of the microchip."

    Understanding the challenges that will arise from the
fracturing of the Soviet bloc will help the U.S. avoid the
unseemly tendency to gloat. But it should not obscure the
epochal nature of the change occurring. Poland and Hungary are
abandoning the basic tenets that Lenin distorted after Marx and
that Stalin distorted after Lenin: a rigidly centralized
economy, a one-party political system and a suppression of
personal freedoms. People are electing their representatives for
the first time. They are reading independent newspapers and
starting their own businesses. They are even tearing down the
fences that have kept the world in an armed standoff for almost
two generations. With help from the rest of the world, these
freedoms could be savored long after the problems they may cause
are relegated to a historical footnote.