TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT1791> <title> July 10, 1989: Eastern Europe:A Freer, Messier, Order </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 July 10, 1989 You Bet Your Life:Pete Rose </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> WORLD, Page 38 EASTERN EUROPE A Freer, but Messier, Order In Poland and Hungary, George Bush will confront Communism in flux </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>