Eastern Europe: Is the Party Over?

Abstract

Absolute systems are strong as long as they are absolute. When they begin to reform, they are lost. Yet they cannot avoid reform, or they will explode.Milovan DjilasIt is easy to make a strong case for economic and political reforms in Eastern Europe. First, this is what Mikhail Gorbachev wants, and what a Soviet leader wants carries special weight in the bloc. Second, it is clear that socialist economics does not work, especially in Eastern Europe. It is not just that four of these states—Romania, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia—have suffered an actual decline in their standard of living since 1980; it is also that there has been a longterm decline throughout the region in capital and labor productivity. Finally, the political future of the region is mortgaged as well. Many of these parties, most notably in Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, can be termed mere shadows of their former Leninist selves. What is a communist party, after all, if it cannot manage the economy, agree on policies or control the public?If the pressures for reform are great, however, so are the pressures against reform, and for many of the same reasons. Faltering economies, divided parties, nervous privileged interests and angry, impatient publics are hardly the stuff out of which a reform coalition can be cobbled. This is the lesson of Poland from 1956 to the present (Bunce, 1989b). Second, even if such a coalition could somehow be constructed, there is no guarantee that reforms would solve the problems of socialism. Indeed, they could make matters worse.