Must Eastern Europe follow the Latin American way?

Abstract

Almost a decade after the wave of transformations from authoritarian to democratic regimes started in Latin America, Eastern European countries, one after another, entered the path leading towards democracy. The end of 1989 and the first part of 1990 saw unheard of numbers of free elections in ten Latin American and all East European countries (with the exception of Poland, where freedom of the first election was limited). Moreover, all the newly elected rulers won office on a promise to liberalise their economies. However, many commentators and scholars fear the impact on populations of painful structural reform policies and predict that new democracies in both regions either will not stay democratic for long or will not carry out a full package of economic reforms. They predict that half-hearted efforts at stabilisation will be followed by overwhelming political resistance which will provoke a reversal of economic policies. Each failure will reduce the credibility of successive reform attempts, the ultimate consequence being not merely economic disarray but an almost total loss of faith in democratic political institutions.