East-Central Europe: The Morning After

Charles Gati

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990/91

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Summary:  Although the intoxication of the revolutions of 1989 has been followed by painful realizations of the pervasive legacy of the communist period (attitudes, bureaucracy), the West should remain optimistic that long-term objectives for economic revitalization can be achieved.

Charles Gati is Professor of Political Science at Union College and author of The Bloc That Failed, Hungary and the Soviet Bloc, and other works.

Eastern Europe is now east-central Europe. The political earthquake that occurred in 1989 has shifted the region's six former Soviet allies away from the East and closer to the West. All are now independent and all now embrace the concept of free enterprise. The countries often identified as central European-Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and what was East Germany-have already adopted democratic institutions. Farther to the south, in the Balkans-in Bulgaria and especially in Romania-democracy has yet to be won.1

Like most things hyphenated, east-central Europe is absorbed in an ardent and arduous search for a new identity. The euphoria of 1989 has given way to the painful awakening of the morning after. The magnificent display of common purpose and the simple clarity of last year's peaceful revolutions-us versus them, the people united against the communist proprietors of power-have been replaced by confusion, division and disappointment.

There is confusion because the struggle is no longer only between "us" and "them," but among us. Wherever the communists submitted to the popular will and lost, new divisions have come to impede the work of some of the freely elected, noncommunist governments. In Poland, the impressive unity of Solidarity is gone. With pressure for Slovak autonomy rapidly growing, Czechoslovakia has already been renamed the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. In Hungary, there is an intense struggle under way between those concerned foremost with the fate of millions of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries, especially in Romania, and those whose main priority is the shaping of a political and economic order that Europe will welcome. Only in the Balkans do old dividing lines remain largely intact. Election results in both Bulgaria and Romania reveal a puzzling divergence between city-dwellers, who voted against the communists, and the rural population, who returned them to power.

Confusion and division have sparked disappointment as well. Anxious and impatient, many people ask: Was not the new democratic order supposed to be economically advantageous, politically harmonious and morally uplifting? Must the transition be as slow and as painful as it is? Will it be better only for the next generation, or even for the generation after that? Why does the West appear to be losing interest now that a democratic east-central Europe-already independent and mostly free-is within reach?

Is this pessimism warranted? Is the region failing to deliver on the promise of 1989? On balance, I think not.

In the new east-central Europe of 1990, competitive and in most cases free elections have been held, parliamentary institutions created, and freedom of religion and the press established. The very slow pace of economic change, except in Poland and what was East Germany, reflects anxiety about the short-term effects of the market economy-unemployment, inflation, declining living standards-rather than outright opposition to the long-term direction that must be followed. Thus, with Romania and Bulgaria lagging behind, the region's brief experience with pluralism has been, on the whole, propitious.

True, the persistence of political discord at the top, together with nationalist and ethnic animosity and ...

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